Periphery, page 16
Littering the floor in a profusion of convoluted shapes were a dozen or more bilantu, their carapaces already softening and sagging in death. In another hour, all that would remain of them would be a thick, translucent slime, a glaze of decomposing viscera that would disappear completely when it dried.
And at the center of the chaos, lying in an expanding pool of blood, were the remains of a man as broken as the rest of the room, his limbs angled unnaturally, his head punched through by at least two bullets, leaking a wet scramble of gray matter.
John saw a gleaming finger of clavicle poking through the guard’s collar, a shard of humerus through his sleeve. Both femurs had erupted from the flesh. Brutrelli, and it was Brutrelli, still recognizable despite the damage, had been reduced to a shatter-boned mush, a crash test dummy sprawled amidst the twisted heap of a failed tolerance trial.
“He demolished himself breaking through the door.” John’s own bones felt as though they were being ground together. “They used him like a scaffolding.”
The room began to fill with officers. They crept forward with drawn guns and eyes darting, skittish as feral cats. John considered raising his hands to show he wasn’t a threat, then decided against it, fearing even that gesture might trigger a sudden round of nervous gunfire.
“He was wearing those things,” the nearest guard said. His face was so livid the pallor appeared to have been powered on with a makeup sponge. “Like a suit of armor. We didn’t even know a person was under all that until they started dropping off him. Christ, it was like something out of a nightmare.”
Along a far wall: a twitch of motion. Someone hollered and pointed. A volley of renewed gunfire reduced the carcass to smaller and smaller pieces.
John decided he would remain perfectly still until told to move.
“But was he the driver or the vehicle?” Emily asked. She glanced down at the crutch she was still holding as if noticing it for the first time. “Who was controlling who?”
“We won’t be getting any answers from him, that’s for sure.” At some point, Hector had re-holstered his gun. He flexed his left arm experimentally, fingering open the bloody tear in his sleeve. “But I’m guessing those things alone wouldn’t be able to take shots at people.”
The alarm cut off and a thick silence filled the infirmary. Like Emily, John still gripped a crutch. Slowly, he lowered the tip to the floor, but as his fingers began to relax from the shaft a new shout drew fire to a bilantu already decomposed to the consistency of skinned-over pudding. When the bullets hit they raised mud-pot eruptions in the flattening puddle.
John remained perfectly still.
The lead officer’s walkie-talkie crackled. With a dreamy sort of indifference, he reached down and plucked it off his belt. The voice on the other end, a supervisor demanding updates, only partially roused the guard out of his stupor, answering each barked question with hesitant monosyllables. One down. Safe. Here. No. No. No. No clue. After a final, shrill demand for specifics, he simply returned the walkie-talkie to its clip and flicked it off.
“Dick,” he offered to no one in particular.
During the exchange, the strength had drained from John’s legs. He would have sagged to the floor if not for the support of the crutch. He lifted a head that felt like a bag of drying cement and found Emily’s eyes. She nodded, but he had no idea what unspoken question she was responding to.
“Can I go back to my cell now?” he asked. Sleep, his mind chanted. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep.
The guard stared at him as if he hadn’t understood the question.
“Doctor’s orders,” Emily said. When the man still did nothing she added, “Now!” barking the word. The command did what the walkie-talkie exchange hadn’t, snapping him back to some semblance of professional focus.
“Right. Hograms, Swydorsky, escort this one back to his cell.”
As they stepped out of the room and into the hall, someone shouted, “Right corner!” and the echo of gunfire accompanied them all the way to the steps and up to the next floor landing, where a new phalanx of rifle-toting officers squeezed past in a rush to join the fray.
Eleven
“Fossils!”
“What about them?” Little Billy paused to mop the sweat from his face, wishing they had thought to buy a good pair of gloves this afternoon. After only twenty minutes of twisting, his palms had begun to blister. He’d pulled his windbreaker from his pack and wrapped the sleeves around the handles in an effort to pad the grip, but it provided only marginal protection.
“Why aren’t there any? If these bilantu have been here for millions and millions of years, why haven’t scientist discovered their fossils by now?”
“Because fossils need physical remains to form: bones, cartilage, teeth, that sort of thing. After death, the bilantu just sort of melt away, liquefy to goop that evaporates completely in about twelve hours. A puddle of jelly isn’t going to leave a fossil.”
In the dim illumination from distant streetlights, Katie was a vague outcropping in the near darkness. If it weren’t for the glowing tip of her cigarette arcing periodically to her lips where it flared, faded, and returned to her knee, she might have been mistaken as just another gravestone, a marble angel sitting cross-legged in some forgotten family plot.
“I just don’t get it. Why do they play this, ‘don’t look at me’ game? It makes no sense.”
Little Billy slowly pulled the auger up with a laborious, hand-over-hand effort. The soil was so dry the shaft continually filled with falling debris each time he removed the drill to clear dirt from the blades. But he was making progress. Slow progress. After forty-five minutes, he’d managed to dig out a twenty-foot hole next to the xalantracoil. The coil did not pulse or glow. Like the bilantu, it slept at night, although its ability to disguise its appearance continued. To Katie, it still looked like a grave marker.
“I have a theory about that.”
Katie’s cigarette hissed faintly as she took a drag. “Do tell.”
“You’re not going to like it.”
“Shocking.”
Little Billy wormed his fingers through the packed soil until they touched the auger’s metal shaft. Taking care not to cut his palm on the blade edge, he began prying dirt clots free.
“There seems to be a correlation between intelligence and the ability to perceive the bilantu. The less intelligent the animal, the more likely it can see them. Cats can see them. Most dogs. Nearly all birds. Rodents. Squirrels. Most definitely squirrels. But I’ve seen elephants parading down main street as part of a circus promotion. They walked right past a cluster of squim without a flicker of awareness. And believe me, elephants are incredibly perceptive. They should have seen them. They didn’t.”
Little Billy tapped his temple.
“Too smart. John says pigs can’t see them, either. How he figured that one out I have no idea. And most of the smarter dog breeds, the standard poodles, the shepherds. Invisible to them.”
“Glad to know my brother was smarter than a squirrel.” Katie’s voice wavered. “Ha!”
The exhalation descended into a series of quite hitches, and before he quite realized he had dropped the auger, Little Billy was at her side, his arm across her quivering shoulders. He said nothing, allowing her to regain her composure in her own time, but as she sagged deeper into his embrace he was acutely aware of his sweat and stink, the dirt caked on his hands. His filth.
But she didn’t pull away, even after the hitching had stopped and she’d grown still. His own stillness deepened to something almost excruciating, the breathless immobility of an ornithologist (the word came back to him with a mental “pop”) whose subject suddenly lands on the rim of his binoculars.
“So,” she said after some minutes, easing her head off his chest. “Your theory.”
Little Billy undraped his arm from her shoulder and stood, thankful the darkness would likely mask anything Katie might otherwise have read in his expression. “Intelligence seems to correspond to an inability to see the bilantu, a sort of blindness that protects.” He made his way back to the hole and resumed digging. “As long as a species can’t see them, they’re not viewed as prey. You’d think it would be the opposite, right? Something that can’t see them coming should be their easiest targets, sitting ducks.”
“Absolutely.” Katie rose, took a last drag on her cigarette and carefully rubbed the butt out on a nearby gravestone. A ping of disapproval tugged Little Billy’s lips to one side. Show a little respect, young lady. But it died quickly, snuffed by a decidedly stronger desire to not view her as a child. She was a woman, after all. What had she told him, twenty-three, twenty-four? Definitely, a woman, although one young enough to be his daughter. Technically. If he had started having kids as a teen. A young teen.
Little Billy fell silent as he did the math.
“Sitting ducks,” Katie prompted after a moment.
“Right. Instead, they prey on species that can see them. Harder targets. Much harder. The squirrels around here have developed some incredible defensive strategies. What John and I witnessed was amazing. They have a permanent bunker mentality. And their breeding practices, holy crap.”
He knew he was getting off topic but was helpless to stop himself. The old excitement had taken hold, relentless and deeply satisfying, the urge to explain, to share their discoveries. His discoveries. “To maintain their numbers in the face of such aggressive predation, they’ve become incredibly prolific. They’re like naked mole rats. They have colonies and queens. Queens, for Christ sake! That doesn’t happen overnight. They must have adapted over eons.”
Little Billy had stopped auguring during his sudden burst of enthusiasm. He sighed and began twisting once again, but before he had completed three turns Katie placed a hand on his forearm.
“You’ve been doing all the work since we got here. Let me take over for a spell.”
“I’m fine.”
“I insist.” When he shook his head, she squinted up at him. “Oh, I get it. This is man’s work, is it? Wouldn’t want the little lady breaking a nail.”
Her tone was mildly playful, but Little Billy detected an undercurrent of real annoyance. With a flourish, he presented the augur poking upright from the hole. Katie re-wrapped the windbreaker’s sleeves around the handles and began twisting.
“Anyway, the question is: why do the bilantu protect intelligent species until the moment of discovery? What benefit could there possibly be in such a strategy?”
“Maybe they know if we discovered them, we’d wipe them out.”
“Would we? We haven’t wiped out rats or cockroaches or tapeworms. Haven’t even tried. If everyone knew about the bilantu, we’d probably just accept them as one of the many creatures out there with the potential to harm us.”
“So what then?” Sweat already sheened her face and arms, but her motions were fast and forceful. She was making quicker progress than he had been. Little Billy would need to add another shaft extension to the auger soon.
“I think, maybe, their instinct, their biological imperative, is to give intelligence a chance to ripen for as long as possible.”
Katie blew a damp strand of hair from her face with a huff. “Ripen? You make it sound like they’re waiting until we’re juicy enough to harvest.”
“For their masters to harvest, the vetro offalate.”
“Squeeze our big brains out of our heads and slurp them up through a straw?” She lowered her voice in imitation of a cartoon ghoul. “We want to suck your braaaaiiinnnsss.”
“Not our brains. Our intelligence. Our self-awareness. Our…” His fingers fluttered about his temples. “Essence.”
Katie’s motions were mechanical, tireless, and despite a shudder of revulsion, uninterrupted. “Like leeches, then? Drinking our superior I.Q.s? Please tell me that’s not what you’re suggesting.”
Only it was, and the clearer the vetro’s thoughts became, the more he was convinced of this. Over the previous twenty-four hours, images had flitted through his mind, murky at first, then gradually clearing as if multiple layers of sheer curtains were being pulled aside one by one: sinuous machines that gleamed like flayed muscle as their collectors telescoped toward victims immobilized on slabs of blackened stone. Bulbous terminals that puckered and swelled while the sentience was guzzled from deflating consciousnesses.
“It’s just a theory.”
“Oh, my god. You are such a lousy liar. Theory my ass. You’ve seen something. A vision? A premonition? Whatever you want to call it.”
“Flashes. Just flashes. I could be misinterpreting them.”
“Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Backtrack. Decide you have to soften things, spare me the worst. You know what? This actually makes me feel better. If having our consciousness sucked dry by cosmic leeches is what we’re in for, I’m glad Bobby isn’t here to face it. And I’ll make damn sure my parents won’t be here either, even if it means smothering them in their sleep with a pillow.”
“We can’t let that happen,” Little Billy said, breaking the momentary silence.
“No. That’s why we’re-whoa!”
Katie had been pushing with all her weight as she worked the auger. Now the tool plunged, meeting no resistance until the handles hit the ground. Katie fell with it, striking the protruding T-bar with an ‘umph’ that left her rocking in pain.
“Jesus!” Little Bill leaped to her. “Are you alright?” An idiotic question. Of course, she wasn’t alright. Her face was a quickly evolving montage of hurt, annoyance, embarrassment and feigned recovery. He realized he was rubbing his hand between her shoulder blades in a “there-there” gesture of fatherly concern a moment before she waved him away.
“I’m fine,” she wheezed. She pressed a palm against her chest. “Just got the wind knocked out of me.” Katie drew a ragged breath and blew it out slowly. “What the hell happened?”
“Looks like you hit a void of some kind, an empty space.”
She clamped a hand over her mouth. “Oh my god, Will. Did I just drill into somebody’s coffin?”
“Thirty feet down? No. More like you hit a cavity of some type. A cavern. A… a bubble. I read we’re in the middle of the longest drought on record. Not surprising there’d be some subsidence. Water table’s probably lower than it’s been in who knows how long.”
“Will, what exactly is your plan? I want to know. You come out here, dig a hole in the middle of the night next to a grave marker, and somehow this is going to prevent the end of the world. It’s time you shared the big picture.” She gave him a cock-headed look of appraisal. “Provided there is a big picture.”
Continued secrecy was pointless now. The previous eight hours had been a non-stop Q and A. He’d already told her so much, more even than he’d shared with Andrew. At first, his answers were sketchy summaries of how he and Dr. Tate had met, their unlikely discovery of the bilantu, the xalanthracoils, the vetro offalate. But as the stifling afternoon slid toward a sticky evening, he had begun to speak of other things. Fears and regrets.
Loss.
Haltingly, he told her about Laura. Highboy, too. He probably shouldn’t have run on as he had; she was already dealing with her own loss. Why heap his sorrows on her fresh wounds?
Still, what was done was done. And wasn’t holding back this last bit of information a little like slamming the lid on hope after all the other evils had escaped into the world?
“Okay, the big picture.”
She said nothing as he explained what the xalantracoils were and what they could do. She remained silent as he confided his expectations, slim as they were, that somehow either he or Andrew would be able to obtain explosives to lower into the hole they had just dug and blow the coil out of the ground, or at least wound it enough to keep from activating when the time came.
She kept quiet when he recounted his and John’s attempt, six years earlier, to yank down a coil using a steel cable attached to the hitch of a rented F-350, how the truck had jerked when it reached the end of its tether, bucking and straining like a mad dog, tires spinning, engine roaring, John behind the wheel trying to coax every last bit of torque out of the screaming V-8 while the coil stood unaffected, moving not an inch under the assault.
Eventually, Little Billy found her continued silence more disturbing than comforting. She had seemingly accepted so much already. It was hard, after all, to deny what your own eyes, your newly opened eyes, revealed about the previously unknown world. But maybe this was more than she could believe. Gateways to other universes? Cosmic convergences? Crazy schemes involving explosives? Katie had reached her limit.
Little Billy wound down, his last sentence trailing off rather than concluding. In silence, he reached for his pack and rummaged through it until he found his water bottle. He drank half and wiped his lips dry before realizing he should have offered Katie a drink first. Damn. Damn, damn, damn! He held the bottle out to her.
After another moment, she stood and brushed the dirt from her shorts, then clapped her hands in a “that’s that” display.
“Well, then.” She turned and strode to the xalanthracoil. “Let’s get this over with.” She raised her palm to the black stone.
“Katie, don’t!”
She turned to him with a rueful smile. “Sorry, Will. I have to. Whatever’s coming for us, it’s already marked me. Like it’s marked you and Andrew and his father. Like it marked my brother. What’s the expression, in for a penny? Besides, I’m not going to let the guys have all the fun.”
For an instant, Little Billy considered rushing over and wrestling her away from the coil. Don’t be a fool! They’ll tear your mind to shreds. But something held him back. It wasn’t hard to define. He wanted her on his side, not as a sympathetic observer but as an equal, a partner like Andrew and John. A member of the team. God help him, Little Billy wanted this woman, whom he had known less than a day, at his side when the endgame began, however it might play out. Besides, once you learned how to see the bilantu, you couldn’t unlearn it, could you? As she had said, in for a penny.
