“To put a stop to all this, same as you.”
“Well that’s heroic, but you’re just a little girl. Now sit back and belt yourself in, I’m gonna get us through those gates.”
She leaned back, and buckled in, and hoped the car didn’t end up damaged enough so it couldn’t drive back out again, because they were going to be cornered otherwise.
With a loud yahoo that made Dill sound entirely too cliché, he reached the edge of the dirt in front of the gates and stomped on the gas. The Humvee reared up like a horse about to execute a monstrous leap, then rocketed forward.
The fence was never all that imposing. From the time it went up, it was clear the functional intent was to formalize the line behind which someone in an army uniform would shoot. It was never meant to repel an assault from a motorized vehicle. Conversely, the low-to-the-ground military Humvee was built to do exactly what it did to the fence.
They blew right through the gates. It did a little damage to the Humvee, but it was the kind of damage that only seemed important in a world without zombies. By the time they ground to a halt, they were fifteen feet inside the circumference.
“Now what?” Dill asked. “Have to admit, I didn’t think this far ahead. Should we shoot it or something?”
“I’ve thought this far ahead. You and Doug should turn around and get out of here.”
“I already said…”
“Then stay here. But the whole army base is on its way so you won’t have a lot of time to escape.”
She hopped out of the car and started toward the ship. She could hear lovesick Dougie shouting from the back seat, and Dill shouting from the front. Undead and unconscious men in fatigues were amassing at the hole they just made in the fence, and behind them an entire town was being driven in the same direction.
Enough was enough.
“HEY,” she shouted. “ANYBODY INSIDE? I AM HER.”
One of the ‘eyeball’ holes in the ship lit up—a half a million people on the Internet who had been arguing over the function of this particular recess for the past three years would have been thrilled to see it serve a function—and directed a light at her face.
She squinted, and waved, which seemed like the polite thing to do. Then came a hiss: beneath the eyeball the side of the ship was opening. It wasn’t a welcoming sort of opening, not in the way a ladder or a staircase might be considered an offer to enter: the side of the hull split, and two pieces flapped apart like a set of double-doors. A faint bluish light shone from inside.
It was impossible to tell what was inside the ship with all the light, but what was clear already was that nobody was going to be emerging from inside. There was no E.T. casting a shadow.
Annie looked back. The army soldiers had all stopped moving. Dougie was shouting something at her, but she couldn’t understand what he was saying. It didn’t matter, anyway. There was only one direction to go.
She walked toward the light, and climbed inside the spaceship.
22
ANNIE’S IDEA OF ALIENS
The best way to describe what happened—upon the discovery that Annie had run off—was coordinated panic.
Sam had to be restrained, which was a challenge as there was nobody there physically capable of really restraining him. Ed estimated a half an hour passed from when Annie left the kitchen to when he discovered her absence, which was easily enough time to collect her bike, loop around the camper, and pedal down the road to a point beyond where it was safe to be without an adequate zombie defense, such as a large RV. Sam wanted to chase her down on foot, if need be.
Meanwhile, Dobbs had a million questions for Violet, but he was asking them so rapidly she didn’t have time to answer, and didn’t appear to have much of an inclination to either. She was too busy blaming herself for Annie having run off, which in Ed’s opinion was probably a bit justified. Oona, who was struggling with the question of whether or not shooting Violet constituted an intelligent choice, may have also been a distraction.
They were a team of capable individuals, one of whom was an apparently immortal alien being wearing the body of a young girl. They needed to decide what the matter at hand was, and come up with a plan to fix it.
“Violet,” Ed said, “can the technology keeping this house invisible travel?”
She looked at him without speaking, as she ran through the implications of the question. In their conversation, he’d become used to the sense of wrongness she gave off when not actively trying to behave like a sixteen year old. There was maturity in there that was not unlike the sort of imitative adultness Annie exhibited, except in Violet it was more extreme, and decidedly unnatural. It was what Ed felt meeting a vampire would be like.
Provided vampires were real, of course.
“It can,” she said. “But it also can’t. The act of travel would make it visible, like a bubble in water. We would be detected by the absence we would create.”
“My GPS puts me in another spot,” Dobbs said, “so why wouldn’t that keep working if we move?”
“The reason it works is this place hasn’t existed in any physical or electronic survey of the land since the country was born. You’d have driven past if Ed wasn’t navigating, and Ed would never have found it if Annie hadn’t showed him. But everything south of us has existed for some time.” She looked at Ed. “He would notice.”
“He who?” Oona asked. She was going between helping Laura keep Sam from bolting down the road and fingering the handle of a revolver tucked into her waistband.
“We can explain later,” Ed said. “Violet, what happens if a zombie wanders down the road?”
“Nothing, because that’s impossible.”
“Fine, pretend it isn’t impossible, what would happen?”
“The commands from the host would stop making sense. It would be similar to receiving driving directions from a GPS that thought you were in a different place, only a zombie wouldn’t have the presence of mind to recognize incorrect instructions. But it would only be temporary. The host would recognize the anomaly and we’d be detected.”
“Good enough. Dobbs, if we get near the ship, can you pick the signal up again?”
“I dunno, probably. I think their equipment can. Oona would know… it’s her stuff.”
“We can do it, but why?” she asked.
“Later. Violet? If it’s mobile, we need it. Oona, Laura does this thing have enough gas left to get us across town?”
“Yeah, barely,” Oona said.
Laura pointed to Violet’s family car. “We can drain that tank, maybe. It’s not a diesel rig.”
“Good idea.”
“So we’re going to get Annie now?” Sam asked.
“We’re going to the ship,” Ed said. “That’s where she’s going.”
“Why they hell would she be going there?”
“There’s no place else to go.”
“And if she’s not there?”
“One thing at a time, Sam.”
THE LIGHT FADED to a soft blue that was just sufficient to allow Annie to differentiate between when her eyes were open and when they were closed. It came from no particular location and illuminated no details on the ship’s interior. There was something that could be construed as a video screen in front of her, except it wasn’t made of glass and had a depth to it that was absent in a standard television set. That she even thought of it as a screen suggested this information was coming from a font of experience that didn’t belong to her.
It felt a little like being on the inside of a chicken egg. And, like a chicken egg, it was fully enclosed.
“Hello?” Her voice came back with a metallic echo. “I’m going to need air.”