Periphery, page 13
Little Billy turned the corner.
Three days later, John had called to tell him he’d seen an obituary in the now-defunct Tampa Tribune: Samuel Phipps had passed away after a lengthy battle with cancer. Little Billy thanked him for the information and politely declined his offer to wire money for a bus ticket home. The thought of watching his father’s burial from some dark corner was too bleak. And when his mother died four years later, John hadn’t offered a bus ticket home, instead warning him to stay away, at least until he had a better idea of what was going on in Tampa.
“What do you mean?” By then, Little Billy had begun noticing subtle changes during their conversations. John was increasingly distracted, often trailing off in mid-sentence until Little Billy gently nudged him back on topic. At first, he worried John’s prolonged contact with the xalanthracoils might be causing some sort of dementia. As far as Little Billy was concerned, it had taken a huge amount of suicidal courage to find all eighteen pillars, knowing each new discovery changed awareness in ways they were only beginning to suspect, bringing thoughts, John’s thoughts, ever-more into alignment with the vetro’s. That shit had to take a toll.
“Things are changing here. I’ve been trying to convince myself it was just my imagination. How do you quantify something that’s only in your head? Hard to be objective. But I’m certain of it now. They’re closer.”
“The vetro offalate?” A pang of dread plucked at his throat as he pronounced the words. He usually avoided even thinking the name.
“Their minds are getting clearer by the day. I can almost hear words now. Sometimes I turn on music to drown them out; it’s that bad. And the xalanthracoils. William, I think they’re starting to wake up.”
“Christ.”
“There’s more.” John paused long enough for Little Billy to wonder if they’d lost the connection.
“John?”
“Will, I’ve done something I thought I’d never do. I’ve put people at risk. Homeless men. I’ve been giving them money and telling them to call me if they see any monsters.”
Little Billy transferred the phone to his other ear. It had been raining that day, and he was sharing a Dothan bus shelter with another vagrant, a man wrapped in plastic garbage bags against the weather, his head bowed in sleep, his bicycle—its basket filled with aluminum cans— propped against a nearby pole.
“Did you teach them how to see?”
“No. No, of course not. But I have a strong suspicion the bilantu are becoming more aggressive. I can’t verify that without more eyes.”
“And if they are?”
“Invasion.”
Little Billy turned the corner.
Of all the things he’d discovered during his long exile, the most unsettling was how ubiquitous (now there was a word he hadn’t used since college) the creatures were. The bilantu weren’t a local phenomenon. He had hoped each step north would take him farther and farther from their range, and at first, it appeared that would be the case. Their numbers began to drop significantly after fifty or sixty miles.
But while they became scarcer, they never disappeared entirely. Sooner or later he would see a quintaloch curled around a tree trunk, a malta fastened to the side of a building. In Valdosta, he’d seen a multi-jointed arm reach up from a pond to snatch a duck from shore. And what the fuck had that been?
There were no safe zones, no sanctuaries. They were everywhere. Cold, heat, rain, drought, nothing bothered them. Only the night offered relief.
“Diurnal,” Little Billy said aloud, rolling the word around in his mouth. Active during the day. That’s what the bilantu were. So much so he sometimes wondered if they might be solar powered.
It was one of the few comforting discoveries he’d made during his years of fieldwork. The night became his friend, his security blanket. Occasionally, when the weather permitted, he would make camp far enough from town to build a small fire without fear of attracting unwanted attention. The bugs didn’t bother him. The raccoons and opossums peeking at him with their gleaming eyes from just beyond the fire’s glow didn’t bother him. The mat of damp foliage slowly soaking through his pants and jacket didn’t bother him.
Even the occasional snap of branches as something large moved under cover of darkness didn’t bother him. All the real monsters were asleep, and Little Billy would lie with his head propped on his pack and stare at the stars pivoting slowly above him and almost never wonder if around one was a planet where creatures of vast and malevolent intelligence plotted their return to Earth.
Eventually, he would drift into a deep, untroubled sleep, the fear slumbering with the bilantu until the first light of dawn awakened it once again.
Little Billy turned the corner.
He had expected his return to Tampa to be an emotional roller coaster. At Laura’s grave, he stood waiting for the tears to come, but he was unable to connect her marker to the woman he had loved. It was just a stone. Laura was only real when she came to him in his dreams or in fevered, toxin-induced hallucinations. There was nothing left of her at the gravesite, and when he left he knew he would never come back.
It was the same at his parents’ graves. He had nothing to say to polished granite. Either they had forgiven him or they hadn’t. Excuses and apologies were lost on the dead. Maybe on the living as well.
Little Billy slowed. Across the street and four houses up, Mirabelle stood next to an SUV. He recognized her from her Facebook photos, a slight woman with bobbed black hair, sunglasses perched atop her head. She wore shorts and a pale blouse and was fanning herself with a stack of mail she had evidently retrieved from the mailbox.
A moment later, one of the rear doors of the SUV opened and a boy about ten emerged wearing a bathing suit, a large beach towel draped over his neck. A second, smaller boy followed, also dressing for the beach, and as Little Billy whispered their names-Caleb, Darren-he realized he had missed the obvious. He’d based his scheme on the assumption his sister would be picking her boys up from school. But it was mid-July, summer break. Was he that out of touch with the world of semester calendars?
His sister said something to the older boy, to Caleb. She reached inside the vehicle and removed a duffel bag. Little Billy strolled slowly down the sidewalk, not daring to stop, willing himself to be as inconspicuous as possible. He watched from the corner of his eye as Mirabelle locked the SUV and told her sons to move their trucks before their father ran over them again.
Happy. They were most certainly happy. But don’t stop. Don’t slow too much. Keep moving. Never stop moving because up on the left, in the yard of a yellow house with trim so white it seemed to glow, an apperix was inching across the front steps toward a tabby asleep in the shade. When his cell rang, both he and the cat started. The tabby darted under the porch as he read the incoming name and number. No one he recognized. But then, with the exception of John Tate, that would include pretty much everyone on the planet.
“Hello?”
“William Phipps?” a female voice asked. William Phipps? He pulled the phone from his ear and re-read the name. Kathleen Fife? Who the hell was Kathleen Fife?
“Yes.”
“Andrew Tate gave me your number. I’m sorry to bother you, but I need…” her voice wavered and she cleared her throat angrily. “Sorry. Last thing you want is a call from a hysterical stranger.” She took a watery breath and started again. “My name is Katie Fife. I was the woman taken hostage a few days ago. Maybe you saw me on the news?”
Little Billy shook his head, then silently cursed for making such a useless gesture. “Not on the news. But I read about you in the paper. You say Andy gave you my number?”
“Something killed my brother this morning. Something horrible. Mr. Tate said you know more about these monsters than he does. Please, Mr. Phipps. I need to talk to someone. I need…” Her voice broke. “I need to know what’s going on. I need to know how to keep the same thing from happening to my mom and dad. Can we meet?”
Little Billy stood on the curb watching his sister mount the front porch steps, Caleb and Darren trailing behind. Nothing interfered as she unlocked the front door. Nothing surrounded them as first one boy, then the other dashed inside. Nothing came slithering or flopping over the porch rail as she turned briefly to glance over her shoulder. And nothing came swooping down from the trees as she stepped into the house. She shut her door on nothing except the stranger loitering across the street.
“Mr. Phipps?”
“Call me Will.”
Little Billy turned his back on his sister’s tasteful and tidy house and began moving again.
Nine
There was a moment when Andrew thought the whole plan was going to shit. Everything was taking too long. Gary would be back soon and all he had managed to do was make a mess. It was the packaging. He hadn’t anticipated how intricate it would be. The box contained thirty sticks of Trenchrite bundled five each inside molded plastic sleeves. The plastic was thick and apparently seamless. The only way to open them was to cut through the material. All Andrew had was his set of car keys. He’d never be able to saw through the plastic in time.
In addition to the explosives, the box also contained a coiled length of detonation cord, thirty blasting caps and a small, handheld master control box about the size of a television remote, all encased in their own confounding packaging. He had been planning to pocket the detonation cord, blasting caps and control box and shove four or five sticks of Trenchrite beneath his belt, pressed tightly against the small of his back and covered with his shirt.
All that was out the window. He’d deliberately left the inventory sheet in the ambulance’s cab so he could ask Gary to retrieve it. The walk from the vehicle to this aisle of the warehouse had only taken two minutes, forty-seven seconds-Andrew had timed it-which meant he had approximately five-and-a-half minutes to do what needed to be done.
But the box of Trenchrite had been moved since the last time he’d seen it, and it had taken just over two minutes to find it again. Pulling the box off the shelf, opening it and sorting through the items inside had taken another forty-five seconds. Now he had two-and-a-half minutes left to come up with a new plan. Less if Gary was a fast walker.
Andrew’s impulse was to abandon the attempt at stealth altogether and simply wait for his partner’s return. If he explained the situation, told him how desperate things were, perhaps Gary would understand. Andrew knew others were seeing the creatures. Katie was proof of that. Gary might have had his own encounters.
It wasn’t all that outlandish. In fact, after hearing claims of hopping monsters and alien voices and Comanche’s desperate pleas, wasn’t it likely his partner would, at the very least, be wondering what the hell was going on? Wouldn’t he be trying to fit the pieces together?
Of course he would. Even now Gary might be puzzling over a way to broach the topic himself. What better time than now? Andrew repacked the opened Trenchrite box and carried it to the aisle where they had left the pushcart. All this sneaking around was ridiculous. Better to be honest and open.
The soundness in this line of reasoning lasted long enough for Andrew to start gathering some of the items he remembered from the inventory list. Inflatable splints. Check. Box of syringes. Check. It was too late to do anything now anyway. He could hear Gary’s footsteps approaching. Yes, better to be honest. Gary would understand.
Cervical collars. Check. He transferred the box of collars to the pushcart. It was a large box, four feet by four feet, and only half full. When he noticed this, something bright and hot flared in Andrew’s chest and without pausing to consider what he was doing, he upended the container, dumping the dozen or so collars to the floor.
Gary’s footsteps grew louder. Only seconds away now. Andrew slipped the smaller box of Trencherite into the larger box and began tossing the collars back in. Five, six, eight.
“What happened here?”
Andrew scooped up the remaining four collars and threw them in with a huff of exasperation.
“Overturned when I grabbed it. Collars went everywhere.”
Gary glanced in the box with mild curiosity. “You’re taking all of them?” He reached in and plucked one up.
Andrew held out his hand and Gary handed him the clipboard holding the inventory sheet. He pulled a pen from his shirt pocket, clicked it open, made a mark on the paper. “Yeah.”
His partner tossed the collar back in the box. “Expecting a rash of neck injuries, are you?”
“Never know,” he said, finally remembering to breathe. “The world’s a dangerous place.”
Gary pulled two boxes of tongue depressors off the top shelf. “No truer words were spoken.”
John Tate slammed his fist against the table hard enough to bounce the box of tissues to the floor.
“Not the reaction I was expecting.” Dr. Cho said, retrieving the tissues.
“You’ve no idea what you’ve done. None. I never should have mentioned the damn things. What the hell was I thinking?”
“If it’ll soothe your conscious, you were pumped full of antibiotics and sedatives at the time, one of which has been known to make people more, pliant shall we say, when it comes to their inhibitions.”
“What? Sodium pentothal? You gave me a dose of sodium pentothal?”
“That would be highly unethical, a breach of my Hippocratic Oath, and grounds for revoking my medical license.”
“Is that a denial?”
“Besides, you sent your own son out to touch one.”
John hissed as Cho removed the bandage across his calf with a sharp yank. “That was different,” he said, turning to the guard standing at the door, the one he was beginning to think of as “Hector”. “He was already in their crosshairs, thanks to me. I was trying to give him a chance to defend himself, an alarm bell in his head so he wouldn’t be taken by surprise.”
“And we don’t deserve the same chance to protect ourselves? Our families?” Hector asked. The guard had escorted him to the infirmary alone, a breach of protocol John assumed under normal circumstance would result in serious disciplinary action. It was a risk made moot, however, considering Hector was also wearing his gun. And that, John was almost certain, would result in immediate termination if discovered. Both the correctional officer and Cho were risking their careers with this meeting.
“By touching that thing, all you’ve done is made yourself a target. You weren’t that before.”
“It was my choice, John,” Cho said, probing the flesh around his wound with unkind fingers. “I needed to know you weren’t just spinning some elaborate fantasy. I wasn’t hearing the voices. I wasn’t seeing the monsters.”
“And now?”
Cho removed her gloves with a brisk snap, sending a small puff of talcum into the air. “And now I am.”
“Dr. Cho…”
“I told you before to call me Emily. Don’t make me tattoo it across your forehead.”
“Emily, why did you and Hector get involved with any of this? There’s no going back. Not anymore.”
“I can’t speak for Hector, but I got involved because I’d rather know the world for what it really is than continue living with blinders on. As a fellow scientist, you can understand that, right?”
“I can’t protect my wife and kids if I don’t know what I’m protecting them from,” Hector added.
“Wrong!” John’s vehemence surprised him into a moment of silence before he pressed on in a low, angry growl. “Wrong, both of you. Ignorance of these things is exactly what’s kept the human race from extinction. Our goddamn brains have evolved to not see them. Do you understand the implications? Not seeing them was an adaptation that ensured continued survival.
"Why? Who knows? There’s no terrestrial equivalent. If the brains of gazelles evolved in a way that caused them to perceptually erase lions from their awareness, they’d be extinct by now. But that’s how it is. And all those people who go missing every year? Thousands? Tens of thousands? I’m betting a lot of them somehow stumbled on a way to see the bilantu, either through drugs or changes in brain chemistry or maybe just by learning to see in a new way.”
“You mean like with those 3-D posters that were popular back in the day?” Hector said. “Cross your eyes and focus in some weird way and a space ship or tiger pops up out of the dots.”
John nodded, warming to the topic despite his effort to remain angry. “Yes, like that only far more complex.”
“I never was able to get that shit to work,” Hector said with a dismissive wave. “Never saw anything but dots.”
“Point is, once you see them you spend the rest of your life pretending not to. That or risk getting yourself and everyone close to you killed.”
“I understand your concerns,” Emily reassured him, quickly re-bandaging his calf. “But you need to stop living in the past. What happened to that family in the ’90s was terrible. Maybe they’d still be alive if your assistant had kept his mouth shut about the creatures. I don’t know. I don’t care.
"What I care about is what’s happening now. My partner’s an E.R. physician at Tampa General. Over the last week, she’s treated nearly a dozen people for injuries like nothing she’s ever seen before: crescent-shaped serrations the size of dinner plates, abdominal gashes deep enough to disembowel, seeping puckers left by god-knows-what kind of projectile. The victims are all telling similar stories.
"They started seeing monsters everywhere, and then they attacked. Let me show you something.” She stood, pulled her cell from her pocket and touched the screen. “I took this on my way in this morning.”
She handed him the phone and John saw a picture of the concrete slope beneath a highway overpass. Spray-painted across the surface were angular designs scrawled in overlapping patterns, filling every blank space with frenzied hieroglyphics inscribed with lunacy.
“And don’t tell me it’s gibberish,” Emily said. “I can read this, John. I can read it.”
