Periphery, page 10
Laura was his insurance policy if John decided to take full credit for everything. She had come up with the idea of mailing herself letters describing each week’s discoveries and depositing the sealed envelopes in a safety deposit box at her bank. Hopefully, the postmark date and the bank’s deposit records would be enough to convince anyone he had been in on the discoveries from the very beginning. He wanted to believe it wouldn’t come to that, but now that he was going off to grad school…
“It’s just.” William tapped his notebook against the tabletop. “I can’t help wondering if leaving when we’re making so much progress is a good idea.”
Dr. Tate removed his floppy-brimmed sunhat and mopped his face with a handkerchief. “What are you saying? You don’t want to go to graduate school?”
“More like a postponement. I could always start next year, after we go public.”
“Will, it’s three weeks before the start of the semester. You think you can just call them and say you want to push everything back a year? It doesn’t work that way.”
William said nothing for nearly a minute. Off to the right, a fidelax clung to the trunk of a sprawling live oak, pulsing in that unnerving way they did before a strike. He watched as it slowly pivoted around its central stalk. He could almost have reached out and grabbed it, it was so close. Another squirrel was about to bite it. Or a bird. Or a lizard. A monster had to eat, didn’t it? Thing was, the eyes appeared to be staring back at him. He shifted slightly to the left and could have sword the orbs drifted to follow his motion.
“You’re serious about this?” Tate had been writing something in his notebook. Now he looked up with a puzzled frown.
“I can’t imagine learning more in a classroom than I am out here with you. I mean,” he slid his own notebook back and forth between his hands. “This is revolutionary work we’re doing. It’s going to change everything. I don’t want to walk away from that.”
Something flittered at the corner of William’s eye, Dr. Tate fanning himself with his hat, maybe, but he kept his gaze on his own slowly drumming fingers. What did John expect, that he would just march off like a good grad student and put all this on the backburner? Would Darwin have done that? Would Linnaeus? Mendel?
“You won’t be walking away, Will. We’ll be in constant contact. And don’t forget, there’ll be more research to do in North Carolina. We have no idea how widespread this ecosystem is. Is it just a local phenomenon? Regional? Global? You’ll be our eyes and ears up there.” The fanning slowed, then stopped altogether. John tossed the hat on the table and William felt a slight puff of air as it settled next to his arm. “Or is this about something else?”
So here we are, he thought. He hadn’t realized until the moment was upon him how much he wanted this confrontation, how much he needed to voice his concerns. He would be addressing Dr. Tate as an equal for the first time, and it gave him a giddy sense of self-worth. He was about to cross a line that would fundamentally change everything between them and it felt right. Overdue, even. But as he squared his shoulders and began to turn, something whipped his cheek hard enough to send him careening off the bench and crashing to the ground.
Little Billy woke with a start. For a long, confounding moment he had no idea where he was. Somewhere inside, obviously, and that was odd. He hadn’t slept with a roof over his head for two, maybe three weeks now. But this wasn’t a homeless shelter. He glanced around the dreary room. A motel then. Not a very good one.
Think, damn it. Think! He had been dreaming about the day everything came crashing down, but that was years ago. Now he was … here. But where was here?
Cement-block walls stained yellow from years of cigarette smoke. No help. Battered, Seventies-era furniture. Nothing. A faded print above the bed of mountains nearly lost in a gray haze of accumulated dust. Zip. Then his eyes fell to the trash, filled with empty liquor bottles and everything came back with a hot jolt.
This was Andrew’s place. Andrew Tate. Son of John Tate. John had called him back to Tampa last month because the shit was about to hit the fan. The bilantu were getting more and more aggressive as they sensed the approach of their old masters. The xalantracoils were pulsing back to life. And Andrew had been wounded by a squim. He was…
Little Billy glanced at the bed and jerked to his feet with a breathy “oh.” Just sour sheets and flat pillows. No Andrew.
Turning on his heel, he went to the window and yanked back the blinds. It was dark now, the parking lot bathed in the amber glow of sodium-vapor streetlights. Andrew’s car was still where Little Billy had parked it, one of the few in the lot.
He let the blinds fall back and checked his watch: ten forty-five. He’d been asleep for nearly three hours. Could Andrew have left the motel without waking him? It didn’t seem likely, and yet here he was, alone in a room silent except for the buzzing ceiling lamp, the soft thump of an occasional insect striking the door and the faint drip of water.
Little Billy crossed to the bathroom. The drip swelled to the steady hiss of the shower. He eased into the dark room and after a moment of patting blindly at the wall found the light switch. Andrew was lying fully clothed in the tub. When the overhead fluorescents pinged to life, he threw an arm over his eyes and groaned.
“You scared the shit out of me. Thought you might have wandered away while I was dozing.”
Andrew slowly eased his hand away from the top of his face and squinted at Little Billy through the stream of water. He appeared to be locked in some sort of internal debate, his head ticking ever-so-slightly back and forth. After several seconds, he wiped the water from his eyes with a trembling palm. “Are you real?”
Little Billy offered what he hoped was a reassuring smile and eased down on the closed lid of the toilet. “Real as you.”
“Should that relieve me?” He tilted his head and blinked though water-beaded lids. “You seem real. What about Anna?”
“You saw your little girl here tonight?”
Andrew sniffed wetly. “She seemed real, too. But she couldn’t have been. Her arm and neck. They looked like they did the day she was burned, skin hanging in tatters. Her arm.” He covered his face again, this time with both hands. “God, it was swollen. I thought it would split down the middle.”
Little Billy reached over and turned off the water. “Your daughter wasn’t real.” He held out the booze-smelling towel and waited until Andrew took it. “You were hallucinating. From the squim toxin. The wounds on the back of your legs.”
“I heard this before.” He rubbed his face and draped the towel over his head. “Thought I was dreaming.”
“No. You still have about six hours until the effects wear off. At least, that’s the way it was for me.”
“You mean she could come back?”
Little Billy hunched, rested his elbows on his knees and stared at the grimy black and white tiles between his feet. “What’s the line from that movie everyone used to quote? ‘I see dead people?’ When I was in the grip of this shit, I saw dead people all night long.”
“Anna’s not dead.”
Little Billy was encouraged by the anger in Andrew’s reply. It suggested he was, for the most part, in the here and now. But for how long?
“Sorry. Bad choice of words. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
The silence stretched out for nearly thirty seconds, each man lost in his own dark memories, or so Little Billy assumed. He rubbed his cheek, feeling the raised flesh of the scar beneath his beard. Had the fidelax struck two inches higher it would have taken out his eye. His body was a canvas of battle scars mapping out two decades of life on the border of the bilantu’s awareness, a threshold he never crossed without paying a toll.
John Tate had his share of scars as well. But neither of them had ever paid a price as high as Laura and her family. Even as he and John had been cowering in the park’s men’s room, waiting for dark and the retreat of the bilantu, his fiancée and her family were being cut down. He had imagined the scene over and over, adjusting the details until it fell into some sort of mental slot and solidified into a memory as real as any other.
She had shown them how to see the bilantu, just as he had shown her. Must have. The four of them would have been in the backyard, her dad at the grill, her brother kicking a hacky sack under the big magnolia. Mom would have been reading under the pergola, a glass of sweating lemonade in one hand. And Laura in the porch swing, bored and playful, deciding this lazy afternoon was the perfect time to share her secret. It would be fun.
And her family would keep the secret once she explained how important discretion was until Dr. Tate went public with the big announcement. She couldn’t wait to see the look on their faces when she casually pointed out the quintaloch crouched against the fence, the polyglanite wrapped around the flagpole. They would stand amazed as she showed them all the incredible creatures sharing their own backyard. So many. Look. Look! They’re just as curious about us. They’re coming to investigate.
“It was my fault.”
Little Billy shook himself out of Laura’s yard.
“Sorry?”
“Anna’s injuries. My fault. I was supposed to be watching her. Instead, I let her pull a pot of boiling water down on herself.”
Little Billy inhaled slowly and leaned back until his shoulders touched the toilet’s tank. “Accidents happen. You can’t watch kids every second.”
Andrew snorted in contempt. “I was drunk. Passed out on the couch. I’d put the water on to make her some macaroni and cheese for lunch and forgot all about it.”
“At least she’s alive. And she seemed happy enough in the park.” Little Billy tilted his head back and contemplated the ceiling tiles. “It could have been worse. Much worse.”
“You know I actually blamed my father for a long time. Blamed him for my drinking. If he hadn’t filled my head with his monster stories.” Andrew rubbed his forehead and dragged his fingers down the side of his face. “Kept warning me they were out there. Kept telling me to stay vigilant. Stay vigilant, but don’t go looking for them; don’t stare too long at the tree line, or a telephone pole with odd shadings, or a puddle rippling on a still day.
"What kind of shit is that to feed a twelve-year-old? There are monsters out there, son, and the best way to avoid them is to pretend they don’t exist. Thanks, Dad. And by the way, you’re clearly out of your fucking mind.”
Little Billy brought his hands together between his knees. “He was afraid total ignorance would be worse. Lots of people go missing every year, just disappear off the face of the earth. We think many of them may have learned how to see what’s really around them. And then they can’t stop seeing. They look and look and look and sooner or later, the bilantu look back.”
“Well, it didn’t work for me. His warning. Or it did.” Andrew settled deeper in the tub, the shower curtain crinkling around him. “I don’t know. After twenty years of thinking he was a nut case, I started seeing things myself. Out of the corner of my eye. Something would move. It’d turn. Nothing. Something in front of me would change, somehow, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it was. It kept getting worse. If I never drank I might have worried I had a tumor growing in my head, making me hallucinate.
"But I’ve been drinking since high school. Never thought I had a problem. Guess I did, though, because my first thought was the booze. The booze fucking with my vision. So, what did I do? Swear off alcohol? Turn over a new leaf? Hell no. I started drinking more.”
Andrew waved his hand through the air in front of his face as if shooing away an insect.
“Yeah, I know. But it seemed to work. At least at first. A few extra nips helped me ignore all the things I was almost seeing. A little later, drinking stopped me from worrying that I was losing my mind. And after that…” Andrew slapped his sodden thigh. “After that, it just helped me. To relax after a shift. Forget the things I saw at work. Helped me see my wife like I used to see her, when we were first dating and she was the most beautiful damn thing in the world.”
An image of Laura as he had last seen her flashed before him, and Little Billy flinched. He needed the picture in his wallet to remember her as she had been in life, but how she had appeared in death was seared across the inner lining of his eyelids.
“If my old man hadn’t filled my head with monsters, maybe I never would have started drinking in the first place. If I’d never started drinking, I never would have fallen asleep on the couch and left the water boiling on the front burner. If Anna hadn’t been burned, my wife would still think I’m a good father. A good husband.”
Andrew pulled the towel off his head and tossed it against the opposite wall.
“A good man. And if she still though all those things, she wouldn’t have turned to my former partner for help getting through to me. He wouldn’t have felt obligated to confront me about the drinking, threaten to go to the chief if I didn’t get help because, let’s face it, a drunk EMT is a threat to everyone around him, not just his family.”
Andrew closed his eyes and rattled off the rest in a rapid, sing-song lilt, his hand swaying from side-to-side, revealing each new step of his decline with a magician’s flourish. “I wouldn’t have gone off the deep end and accused him of fucking Grace, or at least wanting to. I wouldn’t have made such a scene half the station gathered around to watch. I wouldn’t have taken a swing at a man who, five minutes earlier I considered my best friend. I wouldn’t have been put on probation and moved to a new station. And I wouldn’t have moved out of the house so I could hole up here and drink and feel sorry for myself.”
Andrew opened bloodshot eyes to regard Little Billy. “And it all started with my father. You see the logic in that, right?”
A cold, merciless smile yanked Little Billy’s mouth up and to the left, pulling his scarred cheek taut. For a moment, he thought he might leap across the bathroom and clamp his hands around Andrew’s throat screaming, “I lost everything; your father lost everything,” over and over, each word punctuated with the dull thump of Andrew’s head striking the lip of the tub. Instead, he squeezed his hands until the cords of his forearms ached, and waited for the red wave to pass. When it had, he plucked up the towel and tossed it back into Andrew’s face.
“This thing isn’t over. You may want to hold on to that until morning.” Andrew pulled the towel off his head and gave Little Billy an unfocused frown. He was sliding back into delirium. Alread, his breathing had shallowed and quickened. Little Billy hadn’t realized how quickly the turns came. Lucid one moment. Ranting the next. So like the schizophrenics he had met on the streets, the broken outcasts living on the fringe, there but not there. The bilantu weren’t the only things the modern mind had learned to un-see.
“Whyareyouhere?” Andrew slurred. The trembling had returned in his hands. His dilated eyes studied Little Billy steadily, but who was he seeing? His scarred daughter? His wounded wife? Or maybe his father, the man who had filled his head with all those bad thoughts and then stayed away so his son would have at least a chance of surviving into adulthood? Little Billy slid off the toilet lid and knelt next to the tub, leaning in close, forcing Andrew to retreat against the shower curtain.
“I’m here, Andy, because your dad asked me to come. You and me, we have a mission.”
“Mission.” Andrew repeated, his chin sinking toward his chest.
“Mission,” Little Billy agreed.
Andrew’s eyes fluttered.
“Your dad hoped destroying one of the xalantracoils would break the circuit, keep them from opening the door.” Little Billy couldn’t help breaking into a broad, vicious grin as he brought his lips to the other man’s ear. “Now,” he whispered, “we’re going to finish what he started.”
Part 2: Detonation
Seven
The meeting was already in progress when Andrew slipped into the common room the next morning with his duffel bag slung over one shoulder. Fifteen minutes late for B shift, he’d hoped to make a quiet entrance through the bay, dart into the locker room, gulp a few migraine-strength Excedrin and lay low until the worst of the nausea and headache passed. Instead, he nearly plowed into his station captain presiding in front of a semi-circle of firefighters. Hamilton stopped mid-sentence and gave Andrew a terse nod.
“Good of you to join us, Andy.”
He felt the rake of a dozen set of eyes on him and mumbled an apology as he edged around the gathered squad and settled in the back of the room. Sid Langston made a show of slowly turning to regard Andrew with uncloaked contempt before turning back to Hamilton. Gary touched his shoulder and mouthed, “You okay?”
Andrew waved him off.
“So basically,” the captain resumed after a few calculating seconds, “we’re in a wait-and-see situation. As of now, the DOF guys feel they have things under control. A thousand acres may sound like a lot to us, but from what I’ve been told it’s no big deal when it comes to wildfires. If the winds pick up and shift our way, however.” Hamilton surveyed his audience. “Things could go south fast, and I mean that literally. We’re talking Lutz. We’re talking New Tampa. With the tree canopy we have in this city, we’re even talking downtown in a worst-case scenario.”
Andrew resisted the urge to give his head a clarifying shake. He’d heard nothing about a local wildfire during his days off, not that he had been paying much attention.
Now he was standing in the back of the room, feeling as if he was tardy for class on the day of a pop quiz. From behind his sunglasses and without turning his head, he surveyed the firefighters to either side of him. Clare Humbert was on the left, listing to Hamilton with her hands clasped behind her back, her legs slightly apart in the “at ease” pose typical of so many of the station’s ex-military.
To his right was Gary, eyes on the floor, head tilted as if the captain’s words were spiraling into his brain via a funnel in his left ear.
