Twenty-two such text blasts were sent in a span of two seconds, which was enough to get all of those twelve scientists logged into the drive by 10:20 P.M. EST.
Exactly one minute later, all contact with Sorrow Falls was severed.
There were really only two pinch points in the communications channeclass="underline" either the cable to the base was severed—which would have required an explosive, or an axe and a good deal of dedication—or the wireless tether between the army base and the drive was interrupted.
Dr. Louisa Sark, the first of the twelve, administrator of the cloud drive and one of only three members on the team who did not have a Nobel Prize, followed protocol. First, she reached out to the tech room at the Sorrow Falls base. The phone rang, but nobody picked up. Second—and this wasn’t strictly protocol—she called the cell phone of one of the base’s technicians with whom she was friendly. The call couldn’t be completed. This, she decided, was a strong indication that the connection between the base and the drive was the problem. It also convinced her something serious was happening in Sorrow Falls.
The third call was to the Pentagon.
Dr. Sark had misgivings about this part, but in addition to being an astrophysicist, she was an employee of the government, and one of her responsibilities was to report information regarding their extraterrestrial visitor to the military. Most of the time, the reports she filed were unspectacular, but she was perfectly aware of the consequences of a spectacular report, because she knew exactly what the Pentagon’s contingency plans looked like. She’d consulted on them.
She knew that by making the third phone call, there was a very good chance she was sentencing the entire town of Sorrow Falls to death.
At 11:03 P.M. EST, two fighter jets and a bomber were scrambled from Hanscom Air Force Base. At the same time, a contingent of army soldiers were dispatched from Fort Devens, and the police departments of Oakdale, Mount Hermon, Harbridge and Brattleboro, plus the Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire state police, were all put on alert. Everyone had the same orders: find out what the hell was happening in Sorrow Falls.
At 11:17 P.M. EST, a Massachusetts state trooper named Gellman tried to approach the town from the south, across the bridge connecting the bottom of Main with Oakdale. He failed to get his car more than halfway across the bridge before it stalled, and refused to restart.
Trooper Gellman encountered a Sorrow Falls resident named Rodney Delindo, who claimed to have been trying to get home across the same bridge for the past fifteen minutes, unsuccessfully. Mr. Delindo reported that there was a force preventing him from crossing on foot, and that same force appeared to be disabling autos.
Gellman could see cars attempting to cross from Sorrow Falls into Oakdale. Army men stood at their sentry point post and appeared to be barking orders at the cars, and then firing shots above their heads, but he could hear neither the orders nor the gunshots. Mr. Delindo reported that in the few minutes he’d been standing on the bridge he had seen persons wandering on the Main Street side in a manner he described as ‘zombie-like’.
At 11:22 P.M. EST, the report submitted orally by Gellman became the first confirmation that Sorrow Falls had been compromised in some unknown way. It was also the first report of zombies, but most considered that portion little more than poetic hyperbole.
Similar reports came in from other parts of the surrounding area.
The points at which the inbound roads became impassible were not perfectly in sync with the town property lines: some points were well outside the town line, and a few were over a hundred feet inside of it. At roughly 11:45 P.M. EST, an intrepid individual in the war room at the Pentagon—for this was where the next decision logically had to be made—mapped the points and connected them. The line he drew formed a circle.
At the center of that circle was the spaceship.
The president was awoken at 11:56 P.M. EST, briefed from 11:59 until 12:17, and then presented with the considered opinion of his Army Chief of Staff.
At 12:23 A.M. EST, for the first time in history, the President of the United States ordered the military bombing of a domestic target.
There was already a bomber in the sky above Sorrow Falls. At 12:27, the order came through, the crew of four said a quiet prayer for the population beneath them, and then they released two thermobaric bombs.
Thermobaric explosives were the obvious choice, for being by far the most destructive non-nuclear option available. According to everyone’s understanding of physics, one of these bombs would destroy the spaceship and everything else in a three-mile radius. Two such devices were frankly considered overkill.
As it turned out, the spaceship disagreed with the planetary consensus regarding the laws of physics as they pertained to explosive blasts and shock waves.
The bombs never reached the surface. It was the considered opinion of all who watched this happen that the devices did in fact explode, but the devastation that should have followed an airborne detonation failed to happen as well.
There was a bright flash, but that was all. What should have followed—even with an airborne detonation—was a concussive wave, and that wave should have taken out the bomber and both fighter jets, everyone in Sorrow Falls, and a whole lot of the people in the surrounding towns.
None of that happened. Instead, something above the town swallowed all the energy from the bombs.
It was, in its own way, the most terrifying show of force anyone had ever seen. It led to possibly a much more important question: if that was the ship’s defense, what did its offense look like?
THERE WERE ONLY about five or six legitimately famous people left in Sorrow Falls. For the most part, the people lucky enough to be involved in some verifiable way with the events surrounding the arrival of the spaceship had cashed out and moved to a wealthier zip code. Billy Pederson was one of the few who hadn’t.
From everything Ed knew about Billy, he considered staying put something to be boastful about, and mentioned it in all interviews. A cynic or a professional analyst (Ed was both) would say Billy wanted to remain in the public eye and knew enough about his own brand to appreciate that without a constant, direct association with the ship and the town, he was distinctively un-famous.
In a way, this approach worked, because people still put him on television now and then. He had a handsome face and an easy-going style in front of the camera that made him perfect for anything from a fifteen second spot to a two-minute piece. Any longer than that and his appeal ran aground, which was why his efforts to turn himself into—in order—an actor, a television commentator and a reality TV star all failed.
Still, most everybody knew who Billy Pederson was and could identify him easily. Ed was able to do this even when encountering Billy in the dark behind the Yarn Palace while hitting him in the head with a baseball bat.
Ed actually planned to speak to Billy while in Sorrow Falls. It was going to be for appearances, mainly, because Ed was thinking it would be easy to fool people into thinking he was a journalist, and a real journalist would of course speak to Billy Pederson. But their free times never quite lined up, and once it was clear nobody really believed Ed was writing a magazine article, he stopped trying so hard to make the appointment. None of that factored into the moment when he clubbed Billy with a stick, but it did lead to Ed feeling a little bit worse for having done it, for reasons he couldn’t fully explain.