“Agreed,” Annie said.
“Agreed,” Rick said. “C’mon.”
He waved them forward, and then they walked, slowly, in a matching pace, in the same order they’d walked through the woods: Rick, Rodney, Annie, left-to-right.
“Should we hold hands?” Rick asked. “Red rover, red rover, send E.T. on over.”
“Cut it out,” Rodney said.
They were ten feet out and standing on smoking earth, when Rick lost it.
It was subtle at first. Annie was preoccupied, because at around that same point she began thinking about her mother again, and she’d been trying very hard to bury those thoughts. The ship was probably the best distraction the universe could have shunted her way, and yet, ten feet from it, she was dwelling on the cancer again.
There was no telling what was going through Rick’s mind.
“Hey, guys?”
“What is it?” Rodney asked. His expression made it clear he was wrestling with his own issues in that moment.
“I just… I… are you seeing…?”
“You all right?” Annie asked.
“No. No.” Rick was trembling. “I gotta go. I gotta…”
Then he turned around and ran off into the woods as fast as he could.
Rodney looked at Annie and shrugged.
“Bathroom?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Leave him be. He’s probably not our best ambassador anyway.”
They continued forward another three paces.
Rodney made a sound somewhere between a gasp and a choke.
“Hey, you good?” Annie asked him.
“I think I have to check on something.”
“Right now?”
“Right now. It’s really important.”
“My mother’s dying.”
“What? What?”
“I said my mother is dying. Of cancer.”
“That’s terrible, Annie, that’s… I’m sorry, I have to go. I’ll wait for you at the car or I’ll come back or… I have to go.”
There were tears streaming down his face. Something awful had just happened to him, or he was remembering something awful, or something awful was about to happen and he had to go prevent it. Awful was definitely a part of what was upsetting him, one way or another.
“Okay, but…”
She didn’t get to finish the sentence. He spun around and ran hard for the tree line. In only a second, she was alone.
Annie looked at the ship.
“Well then. Just you and me now. So, hi, I’m Annie? If there’s anyone inside, come on out, let’s talk or something.”
She was maybe five paces away.
Clearly, the others encountered some sort of defense mechanism. That was the only thing that could possibly explain Rodney acting so strangely, because he would never have left her alone, here, in this moment, for any reason other than that he was compelled to somehow. (Rick, on the other hand, was behaving like Rick always behaved, and this was no surprise. She would never understand why anyone liked hanging out with him.)
“Okay, so I’m next, what do you have for me?” she asked the ship.
The ship didn’t answer in any direct way.
Maybe it targets the most likely threats first, she thought.
Another two steps forward, and she was thinking about her mother again. It was the same thoughts she’d been working through an hour earlier, only so very much worse.
I killed her, she thought. It was me. She’s dying because she’d rather do that than stay, because of me.
It was an absurd notion. She was positive it was completely true. It was followed by the idea that she still had time to fix it. She could go back, right now, and hug Carol and tell her she loved her and it was okay, and she didn’t have to have cancer.
She just had to deal with this spaceship first.
Two more steps.
Mom’s going to die tonight.
“I won’t even get to say goodbye,” she said aloud. She emitted something like a sob when she spoke, and realized she’d been crying this whole time, which was how she was before she saw the ship in the first place. She didn’t want to be back in that place, where cancer was taking away her idea of what the future was supposed to be. She didn’t want that. She didn’t want to cry.
It was the ship that was doing this to her.
“STOP IT!”
She took another step forward, now in reach of the hull, and just like that the grief went away.
“That wasn’t nice, Shippie,” she said, naming it on the spot. “I’m just a little girl. I shouldn’t have to deal with this.”
Silence.
She reached out and put her hand on the side of the ship.
It was warm, but not hot to the touch. Her understanding of physics, while somewhat entry-level, was sufficient to convince her there was no way this should have been possible, not for something that was in the upper atmosphere less than an hour ago.
“You absorbed the heat, didn’t you? That’s clever.” She took her hand back. “Is there anyone in there?”
Then the ship did respond. It wasn’t verbal, it was visual. More exactly, a series of images appeared in Annie’s head. Images from space—nebulae and neutron stars and patterns of light and gas she had no names for.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t speak this language.”
The images stopped.
It was waiting for her to respond in kind, but she didn’t know how.
“Use words.”
New images popped in her head: bolts of electricity, and rips in space, and impossible geometric patterns.
“No, I don’t understand.”
The images stopped again.
More silence. She could hear her own breathing, a few cicadas, and that was all.
Then the ship started to scream.
It was a high-pitched squeal, barely noticeable at first, but rapidly growing in volume, until Annie had to cover her ears.
“NO STOP IT HURTS!” she shouted, but this time the ship wasn’t listening to her. She told it to use words, and this was the word it was choosing: EEEEEEEEEEEE!
Annie didn’t remember running away from the ship. The sound was so painful it wasn’t likely a decision she made consciously at all. Her feet decided it on their own, more or less. And the sound stopped once she made it to the trees, so it was probably the right call.
Then she was alone in the woods with the greatest discovery in human history, uncertain as to how to proceed.
Call the sheriff, she thought. Call him and wait here.
But when she pulled out her phone she saw it was dead. Either the battery ran out or the ship killed it (it would turn out to be the latter, as the cell phone never worked again). She couldn’t tell anyone, and her ride was gone.
She decided to push through the woods in the direction of the car. Rodney would be waiting. Of course he would be.
17
LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHTMARE
“So nobody saw you?” Ed asked.
Her first reaction was that Ed thought she made up the story, but she could tell by the look on his face that wasn’t an issue.
“They never came back. I waited at the edge of the clearing for—I don’t know how long, a little while I guess. But when the ship didn’t do anything new and Rodney didn’t show up I headed to where we left the car. It was gone, though, so I just walked home from there. By the time I made it back it was something like four in the morning. Billy found the ship about an hour later. I think I was probably asleep.”
What she didn’t add was that Rodney couldn’t look her in the eye for nearly a year, and their friendship never entirely recovered. Given their age difference, it had a shelf life anyway, but it fell apart pretty fast. She thought he would probably always feel bad about abandoning her, but they’d never spoken one word about that night so it was hard to tell.