“Beth was a zombie.”
“No, Beth was sedated and zombies are reanimated dead people.”
Well okay.” Annie wiped her eyes and her nose, and decided she must look a mess. “Something that wasn’t Beth looked at me through Beth’s eyes and said are you her? and then you are. So basically, if you don’t want to call them zombies that’s fine. Call them dinglehoppers or something. Either way, I’m pretty sure I just started the dinglehopper apocalypse.”
“You’re overreacting.”
“I’m allowed.”
“Yes, you are. But I think we should go. The doctor is dealing with Beth. We can check on her in the morning. I don’t think we should be in the way.”
“I don’t want to leave her.”
“I insist. At least step outside for some air. I need to call the base.”
“What for?”
“Did you feel the ground shake?”
“No. Did we have an earthquake?”
Annie remembered a quake when she was nine. It felt like a truck drove past, and that was what she thought it was until everyone was talking about it like it was a big deal and then she decided it was a big deal too, except it really wasn’t.
“Must have been. Plus, there was... something else kind of weird. You were already upset, you probably didn’t notice.”
“What?”
Ed stopped and stared at her strangely for a couple of seconds.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing, I just realized something. Hey, let’s go outside.”
It was approaching 10:30 PM, which was just about the upper limit for Annie as far as being on Main was concerned. She was usually at least in the vicinity of her house by that time most nights, especially since the mall closed at 10.
The street seemed pretty deserted. It was still just as much of a Tuesday as it began the day as, so that was unsurprising.
Ed took out his cell phone and tried a call.
“Huh,” he said, after three tries. “I can’t get through.”
“We can try mine.”
He took her phone and punched in the number.
“Nope, that’s no good either.”
“Something wrong with the base? Try another number.”
They were standing on the front steps of the clinic, which was on the northern half of Main, on the side of the street that looked down at the river valley. On the far left was the city hall and on the far right the library. On the near right, across the street, was the diner. All the storefront lights were out. Main was lit by streetlamps—they were quaint-looking lights designed to look like 19th century gas lamps, even though the town never had such things—which gave it a sort of spooky feel in the late night mist.
Hang on.
It wasn’t as deserted as she thought. For starters, the army had begun manning all their checkpoints a couple of weeks earlier, and that appeared to be a twenty-four hour mandate, so there were men at the checkpoint booth two blocks past the diner on the right. The soldiers appeared to be in a state of agitation, which was to say even from a few blocks away Annie could tell they had their guns out.
For another, there were pedestrians.
They weren’t acting like pedestrians, which made it difficult to spot them at first. Pedestrians understood what sidewalks and streets were. These people were wandering in and out of the streetlight arcs in a way that implied they were unsure as to their destination.
Ed had a business card in his hand and was dialing the number from it.
“I’m trying Hollis,” he explained.
“Yes, he’ll want to know about the dinglehopper apocalypse too.”
“Stop that. And I can’t get through to him either. Here.” He handed back her phone. “Try your mother.”
“It’s a little late, I don’t want to wake her.”
“Then call someone else outside of Sorrow Falls. I’m going to call my apartment in Washington.”
Annie tried her dad’s number. He was either in Canada or on the road between there and Massachusetts, both of which qualified as being outside of the town.
The phone didn’t ring. It paused for a while and then told her it couldn’t make the connection.
“I have full bars,” she said.
“Me too, and I can’t get anyone.”
She opened up the phone’s web browser and hit a page cannot load message.
“No Internet either.”
“Hey.”
Ed wasn’t looking at his phone any more; he was looking at the street.
“Yeah, lot of people out tonight,” Annie said, but on looking at the road she appreciated immediately how inadequate that description was. There were a lot of people out, coming up the hill from the row houses and reaching Main in groups of five and six at every intersection in both directions. They were all walking in that same disorganized way, but they were beginning to develop a sort of general directionality. One or two might drift left for a while or right for a time, but if the entire slow-developing mob were to be reviewed as a unit, it might be said that they were collectively converging upon the clinic.
“Does it seem like they’re all coming this way?”
“A little bit, yes.”
Then sirens began going off.
“Okay,” Ed said. “Now we can start calling it a zombie apocalypse.”
18
THE SLEEPWALKING DEAD
It was Oona’s idea to start operating in shifts.
She suggested it right after Annie brought her friend Edgar over to pretend be a journalist and ask pointed questions about something that obviously happened recently. Whether that something was the ‘breathing’ they were picking up or not, self-evidently the government had an idea that the ship was manifesting a new risk. The low-key poke-around of the “government operative posing as reporter” was very nearly polite and respectful, as dishonest as it happened to be at its core, so Laura mostly didn’t mind, and Oona only minded because everything irritated her.
Working in shifts meant hardly spending any time together, because there were only two of them. With three or four, some overlap would have been acceptable, but Oona didn’t want to pair up with any of the other campers because she trusted nobody aside from herself and Laura.
There was still a little overlap. Information had to be exchanged and developments discussed and theories hatched. Also, there were certain gun-cleaning rituals, which needed to be maintained. They didn’t want to come out of this discovering they’d both been cleaning the same five guns for a month.
Laura had just begun her shift when the ground shook. It nearly rocked the trailer onto its side. It did knock Oona out of bed. Laura heard it from the roof.
“You okay, babe?” Laura asked. She was taken out of her lawn chair, and failed to fall over the side only because of the high wall. Their computer equipment—bolted to tables that were bolted to the roof—fared better.
Oona cursed for fifteen straight seconds, then climbed up the center ladder and poked her head out of the hatch.
“What in the name of baby Jesus was that?”
“Dunno. I think the ship stomped on the ground.”
Laura got to her feet (her left elbow, which broke her fall, was going to have a monster bruise in the morning she could tell already) and looked across the street at their Mount Doom.
“There’s a light,” she said.
“Lemme see.”
Oona scrambled up. She was still dressed for bed, which meant floral flannels that were so far removed from her end-of-the-world leather chic she looked like a different person.