Rick, meanwhile, went from problem child to full-blown disaster inside of a year. He was the real first contact, not her or Rodney or Billy Pederson. She often wondered if what he experienced that night was worse than what happened to anyone else.
“Anyway,” she continued, “I touched the ship, but I obviously don’t know anything more about what’s going on now than you do, so you’re going to have to come up with another idea.”
“No, you’re wrong, this is a big deal. It means the ship tried to communicate. Maybe it’s still trying. We just don’t understand what it’s saying. What can you tell me about the pictures it showed you?”
“Hardly anything. I don’t remember much, it was… it was a lot of information and it came at me too fast.”
“I wonder, if we hypnotized you, maybe we can get more.”
Annie laughed.
“And that is exactly why I didn’t tell anyone. I don’t want somebody poking around in my head looking for the alien. Plus I’m not one of those people who can be hypnotized.”
“That’s really why you didn’t tell anyone?”
“Well, no. Nobody would have believed me, either. Like half the town came forward with stories once Billy went global and it was clear there was money to be had. If you and I had this conversation three years ago you would have been like, sure little girl, whatever you say.”
“You’re probably right. What did it feel like?”
“What did what feel like? The pictures in my head?”
“No, the side of the ship. You wouldn’t believe how much back-and-forth I’ve read debating that one question.”
“Oh. Well I guess it was sorta weird. I had so many other things going on I didn’t give it a lot of thought. It was slick, though, like it was wet only it wasn’t wet. Warm, too, but not, like, frying pan hot, which I’d have expected. It was probably stupid of me to touch it at all, since it was clearly metal and had just been surrounded by fire in the upper atmosphere, but it wasn’t giving off heat like it should have.”
“Some kind of low-friction material with low heat retention.”
“Maybe, yeah. I think it was absorbing the heat. Like in fuel cells or something. Dobbs thinks the whole thing is a big solar power collector. So what difference does it make if it was trying to communicate?”
“I don’t know yet, I have to think about it. But it’s more than we ever knew before about the ship. I wish we’d known this three years ago.”
“Sorry.”
“The zombies, too.”
“I’m not following.”
“Like I said, it could still be trying to communicate. The reports I’ve gotten indicate a few of them have been speaking. Really basic, but maybe we shouldn’t treat the zombies as threats, but as crude efforts at contact.”
“Great. You go look for one to talk to, but leave me out of it.”
Ed’s phone, resting on the edge of the table, thrummed with a new text. He checked the screen.
“It’s from Pete. Looks like they’re going to move Beth to Saint Mary’s.”
“Oh no!”
“I’m sure it’s just a precaution.”
“When are they moving her?”
“She doesn’t say. You want me to ask?”
“Yeah, can we head back, I want to see her before she goes.”
Ed checked his watch, surprised. “Wow, it’s past nine.”
“Crap, I was supposed to call Carol. She’s out by now. She’d want to know about Beth, too.”
“Maybe I should just take you back to Violet’s. We can drive to the hospital to visit her tomorrow, if you want.”
“What, are you worried about my bedtime?”
“I feel like I’m supposed to be. I’m pretty sure I’m violating some sort of labor laws.”
Annie got up. “I’m not on the clock. C’mon, it’ll take the ambulance another hour to get to the clinic, we can beat it there.”
BOBBY AND LU-LU Weld were in the clinic lobby with Sheriff Pete when Annie and Ed came in. The place was otherwise empty, as Sorrow Falls was not known for having a long list of unexpected emergency situations on Tuesday nights. This was just as well as the clinic’s waiting area was too small to provide any privacy. The Welds were having a quiet conversation with Pete that ended as soon as they saw Annie, whom they both hugged extensively and at length.
Annie liked the Welds a lot. They had a habit of adopting everyone who worked for them (even their unofficial under-the-table employees, like Annie) as if they were part of the Weld clan itself.
Bobby shook hands with Ed.
“Pete here says you and Annie here saved Elizabeth from this man. Thank you so much.”
“Thank you, sir, but I think Pete may be giving us more credit than we deserve. Beth did all her own rescuing. We didn’t get there until after she chased him off. You should be proud, she’s got a lot of spirit.”
“That she does. And so does this one.” He rubbed the top of Annie’s head affectionately. The Welds were basically parents straight from the 1950’s.
“How is she doing?” Annie asked.
“They sedated her,” Lu-Lu said. Her real name was Lucy, but Annie didn’t know a single person who called her that. “We wanted to take her home, but the doctor thinks she could use a more monitored overnight, just in case, so we’re just waiting on the ambulance.”
Ed locked eyes with Pete and gave her a little nod, the universal signal for can I talk to you? Annie wasn’t sure who was updating whom, but if she could guess, Ed was about to ask Pete for help in locating a zombie for a “take us to your leader” kind of conversation. Hopefully not involving brain eating.
“Excuse me, for just a minute,” Ed said. “It was a pleasure meeting you both.”
“The pleasure’s ours,” Bobby said. Ed and Pete stepped out the front door.
“Can I go see her?” Annie asked. “Before the ambulance gets here?”
“Sure, sweetie,” Lu-Lu said, “but she is lights-out right now. I’m sure she won’t even know you’re there.”
“Go on in,” Bobby said. “It’s the first door on the left.”
ANNIE HAD BEEN PAST the lobby of the clinic only once, meaning she was actually less familiar with it than she was with the emergency room at Harbridge Memorial, despite the clinic’s relative proximity to her on any given day.
There were three small private rooms with examination tables and cots. The rest of the space was pretty open, with a long counter for a nurse or a local volunteer. The area beyond the desk was an unknown. She imagined there were offices for doctors, X-ray machines, and so on. Down at the far end of the corridor was a set of double-doors. An ambulance dock, probably. When Ed parked behind the clinic she saw one there.
A woman was standing behind the counter, sorting through paperwork in front of a lit computer screen. She looked up at Annie and smiled. They had a silent conversation whereby Annie asked to enter Beth’s room and the nurse/doctor/random woman doing paperwork gave her permission.
Annie’s one trip past the lobby was as a patient, the previous summer. She’d made the mistake of over-stuffing Bart with dishes, and was in too much of a rush to notice exactly what she was doing. The way the Hobart dishwasher worked was that a tray of dishes was slid in on a rack, and a handle was pulled to lower two side panels to seal a chimney-shaped compartment. Once the sides were completely shut, the machine automatically began the thirty-second wash cycle. If the tray was over-full, sometimes a piece of silver or a precariously balanced cup would interfere with the inside hinge of the sliding panel. The correct way to fix this was to pull the tray back out and either rearrange the things on it or remove some of those things and try again. The incorrect way was to reach into the machine and try to shove whatever was getting in the way out of the way.