“Yes… yes sir, it’s just…”
“Conserve ammo, shoot to wound if possible, and hold position!”
The line went dead.
Sam stared at the phone for a few seconds, not sure if he was ready to believe what he’d just heard. There were the orders, which were alarming enough, but that wasn’t all.
On the other end of the line, in the background, he could swear he heard screaming.
DILL FELT the earthquake and knew.
His new duty assignment was base perimeter, a job that had him guarding a bunch of men with guns in a town of hick farmers, which was about the dumbest job on the base next to latrine duty, which thank God they hired someone to do because no thanks.
Anyway it was a plebe job, and he hated everyone sharing it with him and thought everyone probably blamed him for Vogel for some reason even though he was the one getting choked to death in all that mess.
Unlike SS1 duty, perimeter guard at the base meant standing inside the fence and making sure nobody came at it from outside. This was—again—a base in a town in America and not the Green Zone in Iraq. He had to worry about the kid staring back at him from the farmhouse porch on one side, and that was it. There wasn’t anybody else nearby. And again, he was guarding a bunch of guys who had their own guns.
Then the ground thumped.
Dill was from a part of the country that didn’t do that. They had to worry about hurricanes every year, but you could see a hurricane coming. Earthquakes didn’t creep across the ocean, they just struck without warning, and that was a kind of uncertainty that made him deeply uncomfortable.
It felt unnatural, which was why he was ready to attribute it to the ship instead, and also why Corporal Wen laughed at him for doing it. Wen was from San Francisco.
“You never been through a quake before? Calm yourself.”
“That felt bad.”
“The bad ones last long enough so you think they’re not going to stop. That was a little thing.”
“Can you even get earthquakes in Massachusetts?”
“Sure can. You can get them anywhere. Now we do what everyone does after a quake: we wait for someone to tell us the Richter and brag about having felt it.”
Wen—who hadn’t fallen over—helped Dill to his feet.
“You can call home tomorrow,” he said, “and tell the family all about it. Come on, we should keep walking.”
“We have to make sure the fence is intact,” Dill said.
Wen laughed. “It wasn’t that bad! Oh my.”
They started walking, when Dill was hit with a wave of nausea and the odd notion that it would have been better for everyone if Hank Vogel had crushed his throat.
“Oh,” Wen said quietly. “Did you feel that?”
“That’s not normal for earthquakes, huh?”
Wen shot him a dirty look. “I think I want to call home now, not wait for morning.”
“Yeah, I feel the same way.”
He saw movement outside the fence.
“Hey, look,” Wen said.
It looked like someone was walking toward them from across the field. It was hard to tell for sure because the perimeter lighting didn’t extend more than a few yards on the other side and it was a dark, rainy night.
Dill stepped closer to the fence and squinted.
“There’s definitely someone out there. You got a light?”
“What’s over there?” he asked. “Where are they coming from?”
“They?”
“Your eyes are bad, I make at least three people.” He stepped to the edge of the fence. “HELLO?”
No response. Dill could see them now. At least three leading the way, and maybe five or six more trailing behind.
“No flashlight?” Dill asked.
“Never needed one. What’s over there? Do you know?”
Dill had been at the base for only two months longer than Wen, but he reviewed the layout only the day before, at around the same time he got his new orders. But in the map in his head, there was just a void in that direction. A field, and then… what is over there?
The group was closing in. When they got to the edge of the spotlights they would reach a point where Dill and Wen had the authority to shoot.
“Army property, y’all,” he said, his Cajun leaking out in times of stress. “Please disperse.”
He took his rifle off his shoulder.
“What are you doing?” Wen asked.
“Just for show.”
Wen followed suit. He looked about as nervous as Dill felt.
It wasn’t an earthquake, he thought. It was the first thing that came to mind when it happened, but he’d allowed himself to get talked out of it by his San Franciscan partner. Then there was that wave of emotion that followed. What the hell could that be, if they felt it at the same time?
It had to be the ship.
The trio leading the pack of what was clearly now a group of at least a dozen started to come into focus. They were… dirty, which was weird. A light cloud of dirt came into the light ahead of them, falling from their clothes.
“Oh no,” Dill said.
“What is it?”
“I just remembered what’s on the other side of the field.”
The first one to reach the light was in a dark suit and a tie, and half of his face was missing. His jaw swung left and right as he lumbered along in the muddy grass, connected to the rest of his face by visible tendons. The skin over his skull looked loose.
“What?”
“The cemetery.”
Wen saw.
“Pickles, is that a zombie?”
“Yeah. You wanna start shooting?”
“I think maybe, yes.”
That was when the shouting behind them got loud enough to notice. There were men and women running around the base for reasons that went beyond the very real concern that the base was under attack from the deceased population of Sorrow Falls.
Wen readied his rifle. “Now?” he asked.
Dill looked over his shoulder and saw the large, familiar figure of Hank Vogel walking slowly across the basketball court.
The sirens started going off.
“Yes,” he said. “Now.”
WHEN BETH STARTED SEIZING, Annie decided it was time to completely freak the hell out.
She was way overdue. Between the ship, the any-day-now-ness of her mother’s cancer, and the possibility of actual zombies, she already had way too much to cope with. Watching Beth, her de facto big sister, possibly dying right in front of her, was quite enough.
She wanted her mother, and she wanted her dad, and she wanted to go home and rewind to the day before the spaceship landed, when the most important question in her life was whether she’d hit puberty in time for Rodney to think of her as something more than a kid.
If she couldn’t have that, she wanted a fast-forward button instead, so she could skip ahead to the part where she was grown up and didn’t have to worry about an adult giving her permission to be alone. She could leave Sorrow Falls and go to college somewhere. Home-schooled Violet could come with her. They would live in Paris, and date men with accents, and never talk about this town again.
With no fast-forward or rewind or even a pause, she couldn’t do a whole lot for a while except cry on Ed’s shoulder in the lobby.
“It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right,” he said over and over. “Just take a breath, Beth is going to be okay.”
“The zombies,” Annie said. They were the first words she’d been able to put together between the sobs.
“Don’t worry about that either.”
He sat her down on one of the chairs and pulled back, as it was clear she no longer absolutely required his shoulder. “Look, Beth is going to be okay. We don’t know what happened yet. We also don’t know if any of this zombie stuff… you know what? Let’s stop calling them that. Zombies are made up, right? Until we see one, let’s just… we’ll skip it. Until we know what we’re really dealing with, we’ll skip it.”