Periphery, page 24
“Of course.”
“You have to admit,” she said as she turned into the parking lot, “it’s exactly what you asked for. It even has a moat, if you count the river.”
The Sulfur Springs water tower was a white finger of weathered concrete poking two hundred and twenty feet into the air. John knew a little about its history. During the ’20s land boom, a local developer had built a resort on the site. Hoping to make a dramatic statement, something worthy of postcards sent back to the frozen north by sunburned tourists, he’d commissioned this edifice to ostentation. Instead of a bulbous tank perched on metal legs, this water tower looked like a cross between a lighthouse and a castle turret. Most locals had no idea what it was or why it existed, only that it had been there for a long time and served no discernible purpose. The resort was long gone, victim of the ’30s real estate bust. Only this alabaster spike remained.
“We do good or what?” Hector asked as they stepped from the car.
“Can we get inside?”
“We can now,” Booker said, rocking on the balls of his feet.
John leaned back, taking in the grime-and-rust-streaked walls. Small windows staggered up the tower, starting ten feet from the base and ending well below the crenelated balcony ringing what would have been the lantern room in an actual lighthouse. The lower windows appeared boarded over. The upper ones, however, were open, black rectangles in the fading light. Hector and Booker might not consider a few unblocked openings twenty or more feet above the ground a vulnerability, but John knew better. Height was no obstacle for some of the bilantu.
“You did good.”
“Thing is,” Hector said, “we drove past it four or five times before slapping our heads. For something so big, it’s pretty much invisible. You get so used to it you sort of erase it from view. Weird, huh?”
“You’d be amazed what you can erase from view.”
“So, you going to tell us what this is all about now?”
John circled around to the back of Emily’s car and double-tapped the trunk with a fingertip. She popped it and John reached inside.
“I needed a secure place to use this.”
“You’re going to stop the monster apocalypse with a guitar?” Booker asked.
John eased the hard-shell case to the ground.
“It’s not a guitar, although it does produce harmonics of a sort. Interference patterns to be precise.”
The case was secured around the neck and base with two cable bicycle locks and padded on one side with folded bath towels. Slowly, with great apparent care, he ran his palm across the top, frowning in concentration. The others gathered around in a silent semicircle. Believe, he thought. Believe.
When his hand reached the center of the case he stopped, gazing unfocused into the middle distance. After a moment he removed his palm and lowered his ear to the case, growling in pain.
“Something wrong?” Hector whispered.
“Shush!”
He kept his ear against the surface, watching Booker’s feet until they began to shuffle.
“Try this.” Emily dangled a stethoscope in front of him and he glanced up at her with raised brows. “I always have a medical kit in my car. That’s how we doctors roll.”
He accepted the stethoscope with a nod, placed the bulbs in his ears and the drum on the case, shifting it here and there every few seconds before finally giving a satisfied grunt. John raised his hands. Emily and Hector eased him to his feet.
“Thing about padding, it’s hard to hear through.” He passed the stethoscope back to the doctor.
“We copasetic?” Booker asked.
“We are indeed copasetic.”
“And this harmonic thing will stop those bastards from kicking down the front door?”
“That’s the plan.” He hefted the case with a grunt. “Let’s get inside before we lose the light.”
With Booker and Hector leading the way, they crossed the grassy swath encircling the tower. The base, John noticed, was finned with a dozen ten-foot-tall buttresses capped with oyster shell friezes. Gaud almighty.
“Fifteen years ago, we never would have been able to get inside,” Hector explained as they walked. “The door was bricked over back in the ’70s I think. Too many teenagers sneaking in to smoke dope and have sex. Then the city bought it, declared it a historic landmark and decided to have a look inside, make sure it was still structurally sound. Took a whole afternoon of jack-hammering to break in.”
“And inside?”
“Shit. Lots and lots of shit. Pigeon droppings. Bat guano. Cockroach pellets. Basically, the whole place was a tower of petrified poop.”
“Thank god the city had the good sense to preserve this treasure.” Emily patted the curving wall.
They came to an open threshold blocked by what appeared to be a rusted metal plate. The plate had been pushed back a few inches, creating a seam on the left. A length of chain lay heaped on the ground in front of it.
“Good news is they cleaned up the inside and replaced the ladders to the catwalks.”
John pressed his hand against the plate. Despite the late afternoon warmth, the metal was cool and damp. He gave a push and it swung inward another two or three inches. The interior was a black crevasse smelling of wet stone, rotting vegetation and a sort of mineral musk that reminded him of his grandmother’s root cellar.
“And the bad news?”
“Why does there have to be any bad news?” Emily held her hand over her mouth, closed one eye and brought her head close to the opening. “I’m sure it’s delightful in there. Ah!”
She darted back, stamping her foot. John saw something dark fly off her thigh and scamper into the grass. Emily tracked it, took a step, brought her shoe down. There was a crackle.
“That would be the bad news,” Hector said, drawing out the first word so that it lengthened into a smug knell of warning.
“Lots?” John asked.
“Depends on your definition of ‘lots.’ More than a dozen, less than…” he stuck out his lower lip and wagged his head. “Let’s say one hundred million. Definitely less than a hundred million. I think.”
“You’ve been inside?”
“Just around the bottom.” Booker pushed his shoulder into the plate. With a squeal of rusted hinges and scraping concrete, it swung back another foot. “We stashed our supplies inside.” He reached in and removed first one, then two and eventually four duffel bags.
“You’ve been busy,” John said with genuine admiration. “Safe to assume these aren’t filled with beach balls and sunscreen.”
Hector knelt and unzipped the bag at his feet.
“Flashlight,” he said, producing a large, yellow and black model that resembled a handheld spotlight. “LED. Bright as shit. One for each of us. Batteries, of course. Lots of flares. Some glow sticks. Bug spray. Bottled water. Blanket. Gloves. Emergency med kit. Rope.”
“What are those for?” John asked, pointing to a tangle of thick rubber bands.
“These?” Hector plucked one up, held out his arm and wrapped the band around the cuff of his shirt sleeve until it was tight. “These are to keep the bugs from crawling up the inside of our sleeves.”
“This keeps getting better and better,” Emily sighed. “What about things dropping down on our heads?”
He raised his hands. “We had an hour to do this. They don’t sell beekeeper hats at Home Depot.” He pulled out a roll of mosquito netting. “We’ll have to make do with this. Figure we can cut squares, drape it over our heads and tuck it into our collars.”
“And then there’s these.” Booker reached inside the door and removed a bolt-action rifle. “Three of these and two semi-automatic pistols, a .38 and a .45. For anything bigger than a pigeon.”
John held out his hand and Booker handed him the rifle. Turning away toward the river, he sighted down the scope, getting a feel for the weapon’s weight and balance. “It’s light.”
“Careful now,” Booker said behind him. “There’s a round chambered.”
John handed it back and nudged the link of chain with his shoe. “Did you shoot off the lock to get in?”
“Course,” Hector said. “One shot from the hip. Bam!” He rolled his eyes and turned to Booker. “You believe this guy?”
“Bolt cutters,” Booker said. “Less dangerous. Lot quieter.”
“Don’t suppose you thought to buy a new lock while you were getting supplies? Otherwise, anyone will be able to walk in behind us.”
“Book, I’m beginning to think he thinks we’re idiots.” From the duffel bag, Hector removed an enormous padlock, still in its plastic packaging. “This is twice the size of the one we cut off.”
John surveyed the equipment and supplies spread out at his feet. “I hope you didn’t break the bank buying all this.”
Hector cocked his head. “I’m willing to spend a couple hundred bucks to prevent the monster apocalypse, doc. Long as you think this gizmo of yours will work, that’s good enough for me.”
“Me, too,” Booker added. An instant later his face crumpled. “Damn,” he said, clutching his forehead.
Something like a band tightened around John’s own head, pressed, relented, pressed again. Hector felt it as well. He and Booker were both massaging their temples, Booker with his left hand, Hector with his right. Dressed as they were in their uniforms, they looked like mirror negatives of each other, one pale face, one dark, both furrowed in pain.
Emily snorted and spat. “They’re trying to get inside my head,” she said. “Is this what you deal with all the time?”
“Don’t fight it. If you resist too much it might cause an aneurysm. Besides, it doesn’t matter now. They won’t be able to do much once we’re inside.”
“I hope you’re right,” Hector said, shaking his head. “I didn’t think Brutrelli could break through the infirmary door.” He ran his fingers thoughtfully over the metal plate serving as a door. “If they send twenty more like him…”
“It’ll hold.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
“We’ll have the high ground. And the guns.” John placed a hand on the other man’s shoulder and searched his face. “You don’t have to do this, you know. You’ve saved my life once already. None of you have to go in there. I can take it from here.”
“You can barely shuffle, professor,” Booker said, dipping to collect a duffel bag. “How you gonna get all the way to the top of this thing by yourself? Carrying that?” He pointed to the guitar case. “Enough talk. We doing this or what?”
John’s throat tightened. He was their prophet now; there was no other word for it. Their false prophet, leading the people who trusted him most to their possible (likely?) deaths in an act of monumental betrayal. That wasn’t the worst of it, though. Three lives, three sparks of faith, three sacrifices. Was it enough? Could the belief of three people draw the vetro’s focus from Andrew, who, if successful, would soon be mobilizing dozens, if not hundreds, to his own cause?
“Emily, I need to borrow your phone again.”
“Goddamn it,” she said with feigned annoyance. “You’re using up all my minutes.”
John dialed William Phipps number, rehearsing what he would say as the call connected and began to ring. “Believe,” he chanted under his breath. “Believe.”
In the hallway outside the conference room, Little Billy re-pocketed his phone with a frown and gazed blankly at the wall until Katie raised her hands.
“Well?”
“I have a message for Andrew.”
“From John? Why didn’t he call him directly?”
“Didn’t want to bother him while he’s in the middle of his… whatever it is he’s doing in there. Rallying the troops, I guess.”
“What’s the message?”
Little Billy looked through the door’s window into the room. Andrew was still at the front, apparently fielding questions from various officials. Two large sweat stains had spread under the armpits of his Tampa Fire Rescue shirt, but he didn’t appear to be fatigued or hesitant in his replies. If anything, his confidence had grown during the meeting as it became apparent the rank-and-file were already solidly in his camp. They didn’t need any more convincing. They’d seen enough.
Katie touched his arm. “What’s wrong?”
Little Billy had known John Tate for twenty-three years. During that time, he couldn’t remember a single instance of deception on the part of his former professor. All their phone conversations, the occasional meetings in motel rooms to compare notes and share discoveries, the Skype chats over public library computers, had been open, often urgent exchanges of information, two men pooling their hard-earned knowledge in an effort to understand first the bilantu offalate, then the xalantracoils and finally the malevolence lurking behind both, the vetro offalate.
And yet never once in those two decades had John mentioned a machine capable of disrupting the coils. “Didn’t want to get your hopes up,” was all he offered when Little Billy pointed this out. Now John wanted him to tell Andrew about it.
“John has some sort of device he’s been working on in secret, a last-ditch effort in case everything else fails. They’re about to set it up at the top of the Sulfur Springs water tower.”
“The what?”
“That lighthouse-looking thing you can see from the interstate.”
One of Katie’s eyebrows rose quizzically. “Do you believe him?”
Did he? Little Billy tried to recall any clues, however small, that would allow his opinion to snap with a satisfying click into one slot or another, belief/disbelief.
A memory surfaced: a face swimming into focus above him. John’s face. It was 2008. Maybe ’09. Little Billy was on a cot in a room that looked like a school gymnasium. He did not know how he had gotten there or where this place was. Presumably, somewhere in Jacksonville where he’d been conducting field research for most of the month.
He was on a cot and John was standing above him. But John was in Tampa, wasn’t he? How could he be here, dabbing the sweat from his face with a towel and assuring him everything would be all right?
The next thing he knew men were lifting him onto a gurney. The rocking ambulance made him nauseous. Then he was in a room with clean sheets and monitors and women in scrubs who took his temperature and blood pressure and replaced the bag on his IV drip.
Eventually, he recovered enough to ask what had happened and was told he was recovering from a very bad infection, one that had sent him into septic shock.
Then he remembered. The downpour had been cold and pelting as he ran down an alley between industrial buildings, searching for an overhang to shelter under. He’d found an open, ground-floor window in a warehouse of some sort and shimmied through.
The drop had been father than expected and he landed on a stack of crates, smashing through the top one. A hot bite across his thigh as something cut him. But how had he gotten to the cot in the gymnasium? Unknown. And how had John known where to find him? Apparently, Little Billy had called. His former professor made sure he was admitted to a hospital. But the cost?
Don’t worry about that shit, John said. Concentrate on getting better.
Little Billy still had no idea how the man had covered the bill. Did he believe him now? Irrelevant. The real question was whether or not he trusted him.
“If John wanted me to go in there and tell everyone giant pink elephants were stampeding to our rescue, I would.”
“Out of loyalty?”
“He wouldn’t have asked me to do this if it wasn’t important. That’s good enough for me.”
“Well, if it’s good enough for William Phipps.” Katie pantomimed pushing up her sleeves and straightening the brim of a hat. She motioned toward the door.
“After you.”
Andrew took a long gulp of water, trying to read Chief Rodriguez’s expression as he huddled with the others. He almost felt sorry for him. An hour ago, the biggest threat in his world was a wildfire, a formidable enemy to be sure, but familiar, understandable, combatable. Now he was grappling with an enemy of tooth and claw, intent and malice. It was a difficult transition to make, but it had to be done and done quickly.
Andrew checked his watch. Five after eight. At least it would be dark soon. In the darkness, the bilantu would sleep, if sleep was the right word. The xalantracoils would shut down, maybe for the last time. And the bubbles? Would those floating globs of other-space evaporate in the dark or would they simply drift silently through the trees until dawn?
“You’re sure about all these locations?” Sid Langston asked, inspecting the large, wall-mounted map of the city and the eighteen black dots forming a perfect circle just west of the downtown core.
“Every one is accurate down to the square foot,” Little Billy said.
Langston clicked his tongue. “One is practically in the parking lot of my mother’s townhouse. Probably parked within twenty feet of it a hundred times. Totally oblivious.”
“They’re designed to go unnoticed,” Andrew said. “That’s why Little… why William and I,” he raised his hand to an already protesting Katie, “and Katie are going out with the demolition crews. We know how to see them for what they really are.”
At the conference table, the voice of one of the DOF representatives rose momentarily above the rest.
“I don’t see how we have a choice.” One of his colleagues placed a hand on his forearm and he shook it off. “Mr. Tate,” he said over the heads of the others. “How big did you say these things are? The things I’m hearing in my head?”
Andrew turned to Little Billy, remembering the shadow that had engulfed him under the monstrous hemorrhage of a sun, the flailing appendages, the sonorous, nearly subsonic howl.
“Big,” he and Little Billy said in unison.
“Can you be any more specific?”
“Think mid-sized dinosaur,” Little Billy offered. “Maybe twice the mass of a hippo. But that’s just a guess.”
The DOF officer swept his hand out in a “there-you-go” gesture and continued his debate in a lower tone.
