When she reached the edge of the ravine and got to her feet, she realized with some measure of horror how mistaken she’d been.
Every single zombie from the edge of bridge road to the corner of Main was looking right at her.
“Oh,” she said. “Hello everyone.”
Someone came up behind and grabbed her arm. She screamed.
“It’s me, it’s me,” Ed said.
“Jesus Christ!” She slapped him in the chest. “I thought you were dead, don’t do that to me!”
“I’m sorry, I thought you saw me! I landed on the other side of the ravine. I waved.”
“You waved?”
“I didn’t want to shout.”
Annie pointed at the crowd. “Like that would have mattered.”
“Well I know that now. So, um… what’s our plan?”
“Learn to fly.”
“Any other ideas?”
“Why aren’t they moving?” she asked.
“I think they’re waiting for you to move. They have you cornered.”
“Not really.”
She nodded to their left.
The last building on the eastern side of Main was a gas station. South of the station, the land between the river and the road opened up to allow for the row house neighborhoods, but on the back side of the gas station itself was nothing but open space leading to the river. Directly behind the garage was a flat area wide enough for a person but not a car. There weren’t any zombies standing on that ground.
“Run behind the station, cut right to Main, steal a car, win the game. What do you think?” she asked.
“Sounds good to me. Except I’ve never stolen a car.”
“Neither have I.”
“I mean I don’t know how to hot wire one.”
“Ed… one thing at a time. We run on three. Ready?”
19
WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS
Things got worse the closer they got to Main. The zombies—both kinds—were more common, creating a real jam on the road. This was not at all helped by the people who were awake and still in full possession of their faculties. Those folks were basically freaking out all over the place.
Aside from their catchphrase, the zombies were mostly silent, and once they concluded the person in front of them wasn’t the person or thing they were looking for, they were content to leave them alone. The problem was with the living/awake, because they were seeing friends and family stumble around and act collectively weird, and that was a little terrifying. The impulse was to do the same thing Dobbs did when Art Shoeman first stumbled down the road: stop, grab, confront.
This was perceived as a threat. As lumbering and seemingly mindless and aimless as the horde was, when there was a threat, they acted in concert as well as any army Sam had ever seen or heard of. They were a formidable opponent, or would be if they mastered tools and moved a little faster.
Every minute or two Sam heard someone scream, shout, or beg for help, and knew he was hearing a citizen discover the consequence of threatening a zombie.
He also knew he couldn’t do anything about it.
“This is terrible,” Sam said, as the latest piercing cry turned into a strangled gurgle.
“End of the world, soldier,” Laura said.
They were still at their post at the head of the camper roof, looking for targets, but it had been a while since a shot was required. They’d reached some sort of unspoken mutual understanding with the zombies: the camper wouldn’t run them over if they didn’t get in the way. It meant they were essentially traveling at the same speed as a tired jogger, but at least they were moving.
“Where’s the rest of your boys?” Laura asked. “I thought the military was here for just this situation.”
“Yeah, I don’t know. My last communication with the base… it sounded like they were under attack. I have to wonder if anyone even made it out.”
“Under attack from whom?”
“Well, themselves. The ones who were sleeping. If I were the spaceship controlling these guys, I’d give the soldier zombies a different agenda, wouldn’t you? At least the ones on the base.”
“Take out the biggest threat in the area.”
“Exactly. But, you know, I’m just guessing. All radio communication is down. The sirens and the landlines are the only things working.”
“Internet’s down,” Dobbs said. “I think the ship is cutting us off from the rest of the world too, not just each other.” He looked up. “Like a dome over the town.”
“That happened early, I saw it,” Laura said. “Are you having any luck with the signal?”
Dobbs had been typing furiously for a while, to the eternal annoyance of Oona, who kept shouting expletives through the floor regarding ‘nerd-boy’ ruining her data.
“No. I think there’s a signal embedded in the audio you picked up, but the equipment may not have captured up all of it.”
“It’s pretty precise equipment.”
“Sure, but this signal was designed to be picked up by a different kind of receiver, and if you had recorded all of it I’m not sure I’d want to listen.”
“What kind of receiver?” Sam asked.
“A human brain.”
“Oh.”
“I do have an idea, though. We know the ship is using some kind of subsonic radio frequency to deliver instructions. Maybe it’s enough to know the brains of these people are susceptible to that kind of information packet.”
“I don’t understand,” Sam said.
“I do,” Laura said. “You want to go up the scale, see if anything resonates?”
“Worth a shot.”
Laura turned to Sam. “He’s going to try using sound as a weapon.”
“Because their brains are… never mind,” Sam said. “If it makes sense to you guys, go for it. Maybe you can use that, to make it louder.”
He pointed to the microphone array above the electronics table.
“That’s for receiving,” Dobbs said. “This isn’t like thrusters in Star Trek, we can’t just reverse them and turn a microphone into an amplifier.”
“I know that. But those microphones are embedded in a parabolic shell. You can use the shell to amplify the sound from those external speakers on the computer.”
“…Oh. Yes, good idea. We can do that.”
THE SEISMIC EVENT recorded at 10:17 P.M. EST was captured by most of the sensors sharing the field with the Sorrow Falls spaceship, and also by the usual USGS systems some distance from Massachusetts.
Given the epicenter was quickly identified as being Sorrow Falls itself, it was of no particular surprise to anyone when the USGS reported that this was not a true earthquake. The cause was not a tectonic plate shift, but a source of tremendous energy on the surface. It was likened to the effect of a large object striking the Earth’s crust from space, only without applying brakes first.
When the sensors in the field captured data relating to the quake, that data was conveyed along the ground cable leading from the field up to the base, where it was dumped to an extremely well guarded cloud drive. There was a tremendous amount of data in that drive, but very little information. In essence, if one of the sensors measured something about the ship, that measurement could be taken a million times, creating a million data points, but if it was the same measurement—if the numbers never changed—no new information was being obtained. The best that could be said about most of this data was that it could be proven, microscopically, that the ship wasn’t different in any appreciable way than it had been three years earlier.
This wasn’t true of every sensor, but it was pretty close to true.
The cloud drive capturing the input data was built with certain alarms. If any one of those millions of data points happened to diverge significantly, a program established to monitor the input would blast a text to a discrete number of people around the world. (That discrete number, at 10:17 P.M. EST, was twelve. No other people on the planet had access to the cloud drive data.)