Gene Doucette: The Spaceship Next Door

“I’m sorry, who is this?” Steve asked. “I thought…”

“Humor me, Steve,” the president said. “Go ahead and zoom.”

The world on the screen got bigger. The president had seen satellites zoom in for close-ups a hundred times and it never failed to disorient him. He always felt like he was falling.

“How long shall we do this, Ms. Collins?” he asked.

“Keep on going… okay, stop. See that light?”

In the dead center of the image was a bright light, but the focus was insufficient to identify the source.

“I do.”

“All right, try and get a closer look of that.”

“Mr. President?” the general on the phone asked.

“Go ahead.”

The image zoomed some more. It was—of course—a shot from directly overhead. He wished he could get side angles, but there was only so much a sub-orbital satellite could do. As it got closer, the light split into dozens of smaller lights. It was a parking lot shaped like a digital zero.

“Gentlemen, that is the Oakdale Mall. Your precise GPS coordinates are targeting the wrong town.”

“Steve?”

“Mr. President, I don’t know what to say… We’re comparing this to still images of the area… I think she’s right.”

“Are you doing this, Ms. Collins?”

“Me? No, not me personally.”

“Seems you’ve hacked the war room and the Pentagon in the past few minutes. It strikes me as a reasonable question.”

“Mr. President, who is this person? Is she not in the room with you?”

“According to her, she’s a sixteen year old calling us from Sorrow Falls. So Ms. Collins, the targeting package is off, we can adjust that.”

“It’ll miss in every direction. Right now, Sorrow Falls doesn’t exist according to any of your satellites. You’ll keep hitting the wrong town. But that’s only the first problem.”

“Did you say she’s sixteen?” Steve asked.

“Go on, tell me what the second problem is.”

“So you’re probably thinking, well, Annie, it’s a nuclear bomb. We can miss left or right and still take out the target.”

“That’s exactly what I’m thinking, yes.”

“The bomb won’t work on the ship. Now, it’s true the amount of energy coming out of one of those is too much for the shield to straight-up absorb like it did with the other things you dropped earlier, but whatever it can’t absorb it’ll just reflect outward. Basically, you hit it with a bomb and you’ll destroy New England. And the ship will still be here.”

“Miss, how could you possibly know this?” Steve asked.

“I’m in the ship, general. It’s a really super long story, and I don’t have time to tell you the whole thing right now. I’d like to call my mother, then I’m going to take down the shield, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t destroy the entire East Coast while I was doing that. Everything’ll be okay, guys, I promise. You can stand down. What would be great is if you guys can figure out how to feed about five thousand ex-zombies who are gonna wake up super hungry. No brains, just pizza or something.”

“I’m sorry,” the president said, “did you say zombies?”

THE INVISIBLE SHIELD over Sorrow Falls came down at oh-three-thirty, but the army didn’t realize this until oh-four-hundred, as the problem with invisible shields is that it’s difficult to tell when they aren’t there any more.

There were multiple entry points to the town, but only a few that could accommodate heavy artillery. After an aerial review—via helicopter, at a distance—of the bridges leading to Main, it was determined that the best route to take was from the west, down Spaceship Road. This plan also satisfied members of the Army Corps of Engineers involved in the planning and execution of the project that widened and paved Spaceship Road specifically for the purpose of supporting an invading force.

The reason the bridges were considered bad options was the traffic clogging them, and the assumption that there were people in those cars. In a worst-case scenario sort of situation, the army might still consider pushing the cars off one of the bridges or simply driving over them with tanks, but this was a less-than-ideal solution, for a number of reasons. One was that commuter bridges were more or less designed to prevent cars from simply tipping over the sides. Another was that as much as tanks were designed to climb over cars, that sort of thing could take forever, and leave a crushed obstacle in its wake, rendering the bridge even less passable for all the non-tank vehicles.

Spaceship Road also had a lot of cars on it, but there was no precipitous drop on either side, and not even a shoulder to bar cars from drifting off. This opened up a range of possibilities for clearing the road. The choice the army went with was to ask the occupants of the cars to kindly get the hell out of the way immediately.

It was an effective approach, involving the least amount of property damage, but it also took a terribly long time, because the line of cars was thirty deep, taking up both travel lanes, and everyone was facing outbound.

At oh-four-thirty, the general in charge of the invading force tasked Major Sharon Price with the responsibility of entering town ahead of the rest of the army in order to scout the terrain.

Major Price grabbed the nearest Jeep and a driver for that Jeep, took it off-road around the traffic jam, and became the first non-resident to enter Sorrow Falls since the ship self-activated.

She and her driver—a corporal named Wentz—headed straight for the spaceship, past what looked like an utterly ruined army base. A number of observations were reported up the chain-of-command immediately, including the discovery that everyone in the town was either dead on the side of the road or sleeping on the side of the road. This was not strictly an either/or, although it was interpreted as such by the higher-ups initially, which was why the first news reports that morning announced incorrectly that the entire town was dead.

Travel past the very edge of the town was slow, because not all of the people dead/sleeping were on the side of the road. Quite a few were in the middle of it. Since a couple were actively snoring, Price and Wentz agreed that the best recourse was to evade them as much as was possible, and try to figure out later why so many were napping on the median strip.

The only place Price discovered people both alive and conscious was around the ship. There, she met Corporals Corning and Louboutin, the only two unaffected army soldiers from the base, and a handful of civilians, all of whom later became famous in their own way for having survived the night.

None of them was Annie Collins.

When the military was ordered to the scene, it was with two mandates: secure the ship, and take Annie Collins into custody. Sharon Price had no idea who Ms. Collins was or why she might warrant such particular concern, but orders were orders.

By oh-five-fifteen, Price had notified the trailing force that the town of Sorrow Falls was no longer in immediate danger, and urged the general to exercise caution, as there were private citizens and army officers sleeping out in the open.

This point had to be repeated several times.

Price also declared the ship to be secured, or at least as secured as it had been the day before it came to life.

At oh-five-twenty-two, the side of the ship opened, and a sixteen-year old girl in muddy clothing emerged from a blue-tinted interior. Price and Wentz drew their weapons and ordered the survivors to step back. This order was roundly ignored.

The girl was Annie Collins, and Price finally understood her orders.

According to most accounts, the first thing Annie said—after the hugs she received from essentially everyone in the clearing that wasn’t Price or Wentz—was: