“They’re not going to be up,” Annie said. “Not at this time of night.”
But when the headlights hit the porch, there they were: Violet, Susan and Todd, waiting there like this was the most normal thing in the world.
“Oh well, that’s not creepy at all,” Oona said.
She pulled over behind the family car, and Ed stepped out. Annie climbed over the passenger seat and out the same door.
“Evening,” Ed greeted.
“Hi,” Violet said neutrally.
“So I’m not sure how to put this, but… take me to your leader?”
20
A SUPER-INTELLIGENT SHADE OF THE COLOR BLUE
Ed’s head hurt.
The wound above his eye was still swollen, though not as bad as it had been about an hour earlier, before Annie applied ice, and he had three other cuts on his arms that required disinfectant and bandages, and they were all throbbing in time with his heart.
Over the course of the evening, he’d managed to: throw himself out of a car moving downhill backwards—that the door didn’t kill him was a miracle unto itself—onto a pile of rocks; club a woman over the head with a piece of rebar he found lying in a ditch behind the gas station; break the arm of a man who had been dead for at least twelve months; get nearly brained by a fence post when a zombie executed a surprisingly nimble maneuver and drove his face into it; and hit a celebrity with a bat.
Annie, thankfully, was mostly untouched and either unaware of how many times they’d almost gotten through Ed to get to her, or deliberately ignorant of it. If they survived this—his opinion on this possibility had only improved slightly in the past hour—she would be reliving a few things in therapy that she was currently pretending never happened.
He expected he would be doing the same.
“Ed, don’t be weird,” Annie said with a laugh at his somewhat unusual greeting. “Hi, I’m glad you’re all up, it’s been a crazy night.”
She didn’t understand yet.
Violet stepped off the porch. Her parents didn’t move, they just smiled a little.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” Violet said.
“Are we safe here?” Ed asked.
“Yes.”
Violet looked at Ed for a solid three or four seconds, in a creepy-mature sort of way even Annie could sense: she inhaled sharply, and he felt her body tense up through the hand he had on her shoulder. Violet knew exactly what Ed figured out, and didn’t see any point in denying it.
“They can’t find me here,” Violet said. “They won’t come to the house. It’s safe.”
“But it isn’t you they’re looking for.”
Violet looked at Annie, and back at Ed again. “No.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“You should all come inside. We have a lot to discuss.”
“Ed,” Annie muttered, as Violet and her family turned around and headed back into the house, “what the hell is going on?”
“I’m pretty sure your friend is an alien and her parents are zombies,” he said. “Sorry to break it to you like this.”
“Right. Well, I’m pretty sure now the day can’t get any weirder.”
THE FIRST INDICATION Ed had that something was amiss with Violet and her family probably should have been when he met Susan for the first time, but it wasn’t. He was able to look back on that conversation and see the signs, but she didn’t sound off any alarms in his head during the conversation itself. Instead, it came from the most mundane of tasks: property research.
After he dropped off Annie, he went back to the base to continue his research, when it occurred to him he should probably record the name and address of the people she was staying with in the documents he’d been given by the court. He was her legal guardian, after all; he didn’t want anyone asking where is she and have to cough up such an incomplete answer as she’s staying with her friend Violet up the road. He didn’t know their address, and Jones was a pretty common surname.
He thought about calling Annie and asking—he’d also neglected to ask Susan for her phone number—but decided not to bother her with something he could just look up.
That was when it started to get strange. An Internet search gave no indication that there was an address associated with the dirt road leading to the house, and the road itself wasn’t even identified on the maps. When he pulled up a satellite image of the area, the house wasn’t visible from above.
On Monday, after meting with Pete he went to city hall and pulled up property records to match the approximate GPS location of Violet’s home with historical ownership of the land in that area, and hit two problems. First, every electronic search for the coordinates he was inputting—a guess in the first place—ended up with a point on the map that was either too far north or too far west. Second, nobody claimed property ownership of those points either, for the past seventy years.
Records older than seventy years were archived in the library, so he went there next. The property archives of Sorrow Falls were perhaps more thorough and extensive than any he’d ever seen, but there was no private ownership of the land, and no maps which even recognized the space as existing, even though it clearly had to exist.
All it meant was the town owned it, and that was fine, except when he approached it from that angle, he also came up empty. There were no forestry records, hunting licenses, reports of fires, gypsy moth infestation summaries, soil sample surveys, leaf-peeping expeditions, bobcat spottings, wildlife conservation projects, or any other kind of indication, official or unofficial, that this part of town existed.
It was even possible to chart the missing territory mathematically. The total acreage of Sorrow Falls could be calculated as a whole, from border-to-border, or it could be calculated by adding up the total of the privately owned property with the total of the town-owned and state-owned property. The two sets of numbers should have been roughly equal. Instead, nearly twenty acres were missing from the second set.
It was deeply weird. He was still trying to put it together when he stopped by the diner for a late lunch. Beth waited on him, so he took the opportunity to ask her—in the most casual way he could—what she thought of Annie’s friend Violet.
Beth never heard of Violet. Ed thought that was a little surprising given how often Annie described them as best of friends, and how Beth was like a big sister. It made him want to ask more of Annie’s peers about Violet, but he didn’t know any of Annie’s peers.
Only then did he start to rethink his conversation with Susan, which was strange yet at the same time strangely familiar.
Susan answered questions with questions, offered generic sympathy, and repeated things said to her, and this went on right up until her daughter left the room. Ed had experienced that kind of interaction before, on a computer, with a computer.
Violet’s mother was a living, breathing, Turing test. She wasn’t a person; she was someone pretending to be a person.
THERE WERE no versions of the conversation that needed to happen next that played out well in Ed’s mind if it also involved notifying anyone from the camper about the aliens in their midst. Oona was angry and paranoid, Laura mostly followed her lead, Dobbs was terrified and paranoid, and Sam… Sam might have been okay, but he was over-protective of Annie, and Annie was going to be having a difficult time.
He explained to the others that they were safe for the moment and they were welcome to relax and stay in the camper or on the porch. Susan (or, whatever she should have been called) offered to bring out coffee, and apologized for being unprepared for guests at one in the morning.