Periphery, page 28
“Whiter than you.”
Booker smiled. “We don’t turn anyone away, even your sorry, blasphemous Hispanic ass.” Pulling a bottle of water from one of the duffel bags, he took a long swig. John watched his Adam’s apple bob and wondered what it would be like to drop by Booker’s church to testify and sing boisterous hymns and listen raptly as a charismatic preacher put Satan in his place, to be wrapped warmly in a community of shared fervor and goodwill. Nice, probably, like a flannel hug on a cold winter’s night. “So, we doing this or what?”
John’s modest feeling of renewed purpose lasted to the fifth-level catwalk. The painkillers got him that far. But as he stood waiting for Booker and Hector to finish bringing up the supplies, his legs began quivering uncontrollably. Sweat stung his eyes and the mosquito netting around his face made him claustrophobic. It irritated the back of his neck where he had tucked it under his collar, and the air beneath the gauze seemed to be steadily thickening to a vapor too hot and caustic to breathe. John ripped the cap off and flung the netting away with a gasp.
“I’ll take my chances with the bugs.”
Emily took his pulse from a clammy wrist and shook her head. “You’re on the verge of passing out.”
“You can tell that from my pulse?”
“I can tell that from your white face, glassy eyes and shaking legs. Take a few sips of water. You two,” she said, indicating Hector and Booker, “take everything up to the observation deck. No more of this floor-by-floor crap. Once that’s done, come back and we’ll figure out how to get John to the top.”
He made the final ascent perched on Hector’s shoulders, helping as best he could by lifting rung by agonizing rung. His pain became a purple current pulsing with every laborious step. Six levels up. Seven. Finally, his head emerged through a trapdoor into an open space dimly illuminated by the glow of the floodlights below. A circle of large, barred windows gave the observation deck a startlingly open feel after the confines of the lower levels. A breeze washed over him, warm and humid and carrying the scent of the approaching wildfire. Compared to the mausoleum atmosphere below, it was an alpine kiss.
“Easy, easy, easy.” Emily helped him into the room and eased him to the floor of the deck. “Stretch out for a spell.” A bag was positioned beneath his head.
“Don’t let me fall asleep.”
“Never.”
But she must have, for when he turned his head after blinking up at the ceiling for what felt like no more than a minute or two, he found Booker, Hector and Emily standing with their backs to him, staring out one of the windows. All the supplies had been unpacked and arranged neatly along a wall of the deck, along with one of the rifles. The other two rifles, John saw, were slung over the men’s shoulders. He couldn’t tell if they were also carrying the pistols.
“Nice view?” John asked.
“Very,” Emily said without turning. “You can see all the way across the bay to St. Petersburg from here.”
“See the fire, too,” Hector added.
“How bad?” John tried to sit up, groaned, fell back and brought his knees up, trying to find a position that would ease the strain on his ribs. He was a turtle on its back. A turtle skewered through the chest with a molten wire.
“The glow stretches for miles. Thing is, there’s been a lot of fire engines going down the interstate into town. You’d think they’d be headed in the opposite direction, toward the fire, not away from it.”
“How long have I been out?”
“Not long.” Emily returned to kneel at his side. “Twenty minutes, maybe. I don’t want to say you swooned, 'cause that’s what little girls do. But you swooned. Pure and simple.”
“There’s that bedside manner again. Can you help me up?”
Emily whistled. “Stargazing's over for now, gentlemen. Do either of you have a wallet?”
Both assured her they did.
“Let me see.”
Hector’s “wallet” was actually a credit card holder. Emily made a face and told him to put it back. Booker’s, on the other hand, was an overstuffed billfold thick as a filet mignon.
“That’ll do.” She held out her hand and after a moment’s hesitation, Booker passed it to her.
“I’m going to get that back, right?”
“If you’re good. Here,” she gave the wallet to John.
“What I’m I supposed to do with that?”
“Bite it.”
“That bad?”
“Probably.”
“Do it fast,” John said, slipping the wallet between his teeth, tasting the sweat-salted leather and having just enough time to wonder if maybe he should ask for something a little stronger than codeine-laced ibuprofen before Booker and Hector hoisted him to his feet in a single motion. When Emily handed the wallet back to its owner, the imprint of John’s bicuspids was deep enough to take a mold from.
“Tell him about the car,” Hector said once he was certain John could stand on his own.
“Car?”
“A car pulled into the parking lot about fifteen minutes ago,” Emily said, riffling through her medical bag. “It’s been down there ever since.”
“Anybody get out?”
“Not yet.” She removed a blister pack containing two large, red tables. Horse pills. “No arguments. Take them.”
He didn’t argue. Booker drifted back to the windows, and while John gulped water and swallowed painkillers, the correctional officer moved from opening to opening. “Uh-huh. Here comes another one.”
The other three approached and Booker pointed. A car was creeping down the path from the park entrance, its headlights throwing twin cones of illumination across the ground in front of it. From this height, the vehicle was an unidentifiable block of motion, no bigger than a postage stamp. After a moment, it disappeared below the rim of the crenelated balcony outside the windows. There was a way out there—John saw a rusted door off to the right—but the thought of standing at the edge and peering over caused a stomach-dropping jolt of vertigo.
“Maybe it’s just a carload of teenagers,” Booker said doubtfully.
“Maybe.” Hector tried the balcony door. The knob turned, but the hinges were fused with rust. He threw his weight against it, widening the opening only a few inches each time. “Worry about that later.”
He returned to the others, reached behind his back and pulled one of the pistols from his waistband. “Doc.” He held the weapon out grip-first. “For you.”
“I’ve never fired a gun in my life.”
“It ain’t brain surgery. Use your non-shooting hand as a platform, aim and squeeze, gently. But leave the safety on for now. No use taking chances.”
He nodded at Booker and the guard produced the second gun. “Same deal, professor. Hopefully, we won’t have to use them.”
Kids, John told himself. Just a few kids smoking weed in the empty parking lot. Probably hear music from a radio soon, faint laughter. Nothing to be alarmed about. No one knew they were here.
As the minutes passed, however, the relative calm became the weighted hush that fills an examination room after the doctor enters with the test results. John thought he heard a car door open and shut. He heard the wail of distant sirens, nearly constant now. A plane overhead. The smell of burning seemed to seep up from his own flesh as he sweated out his pain and the big red pills starting snuffing out the burning places in his chest.
“Maybe we should think about…” Hector began. Emily’s phone cut him short. No one spoke, but the four gathered in a tight circle as if preparing to link hands once more in prayer. Each face reflected some mixture of anxiety, dread and resolve. I guess we’re all psychic now, John thought grimly. Nothing good will come of this.
“Here we go,” Hector said.
John nodded. “Answer it.”
Emily unclipped the phone and read the display. Her glace was all John needed to confirm what he already knew. It was Andrew.
“Hello?” she said cautiously. Three heartbeats later she handed the cell to John. He put it to his ear.
“Andrew.”
“Dad.” His son swallowed. “Dad, I know you’re up there. We need you to come down, okay. We’re right outside the door. We have to talk.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“It’s important.” John heard a muffled exchange between Andrew and another male voice. “Bring the device with you.”
“Andrew, what’s going on?”
“You need to surrender. If you don’t, they’re going to shoot Grace and Anna. Jesus Christ, Dad. They’re going to kill my family.”
Little Billy watched the dozer’s treads claw trenches into the dirt. The roar of the diesel seemed an exclamation of pure frustration. After a moment, the operator—a DOF firefighter named Sam—eased the vehicle back, allowing the cable to go slack, then plowed forward once again. Little Billy imagined a metallic twang as the dozer reached the end of its tether and jerked to a stop, the cable behind oscillating in a blur.
Just like all the others. The xalantracoil remained fixed in place, a curving finger of stone awaiting the dawn. Christ, how far down did they go? Miles? Sam and the other firefighters on the demolition crew had scoffed when Little Billy pointed out the first coil. That, they asked, suddenly jovial with relief. That broken property marker? We can probably dig it out with a shovel. It’s already leaning.
Their confidence evaporated even before the dozer was unloaded from the flatbed. As Little Billy and the others watched Sam ease the machine down the ramp, one of the Hillsborough County firefighters had sauntered over to what he perceived to be a crumbling concrete pylon and given the thing a dismissive pat. When he regained consciousness, all he could do was thrash and scream. “They’re coming,” he reassured the rest. “Oh god, they’re coming.”
They were one less now, the stricken firefighter having been transported to St. Joe’s under heavy sedation. The crew went about their prep work quietly, speaking only when they had to and then only in the hushed, expectant tones of relatives summoned suddenly to a hospital room to pay their last respects.
Occasionally, one of the undulating bubbles of otherspace would float overhead and the men and women would pause to watch, transfixed. In the darkness, the orbs glowed with infernal light. It wasn’t night over there. Little Billy was beginning to suspect it might never be night on the vetro offalate’s homeworld. Too many suns, the sky a constellation of ancient, swollen stars on the verge of extinction. No wonder the bastards wanted out. They knew their time was almost up.
Sam gave a final tug, black smoke billowing from the dozer’s exhaust pipe like the plume from an underwater thermal vent. Little Billy thought the coil shifted every-so-slightly, maybe a degree or two from its original position, but he couldn’t be sure. After another ten seconds of the treads deepening their grooves, Sam eased off and cut the engine.
In the relative silence, the sounds of the evacuation efforts sprang up around them once more, megaphones and vehicle-mounted bullhorns calling their warnings out into the night: Attention, attention, a mandatory evacuation has been ordered. Under penalty of incarceration, all residents of this neighborhood are required to evacuate the area within the next thirty minutes. This is not a request. Attention, attention…
Leading a slow parade of flashing patrol cars, the point vehicles would pause at each intersection as officers dashed across lawns and up stoops to pound on every door. Terrance Jackson, a Tampa firefighter in Little Billy’s crew who had introduced himself as one of Andrew’s station-mates, told him thirty evacuation squads were canvassing every neighborhood within the xalantracoil circle, telling anyone who demanded an explanation that the wildfire had jumped the I-75 firebreak and was now an imminent threat. It was an audacious lie, one that made little sense considering how far south the evacuation zone was from the actual conflagration.
Still, Little Billy supposed they had to tell residents something, and the flood of firefighting equipment pouring into the area likely convinced many the situation was indeed dire. At least that’s what the heavy traffic heading out of the target zone suggested. Then there were the chittering voices building steadily to a roar. They had to be contributing to the exodus. Who wouldn’t run from that muttering madness?
But all those doors to knock on. All those people! How could they hope to alert everyone in the—Little Billy checked his watch—in the six hours left before sunup? And what about Andrew? Half-a-dozen times he had found himself dialing his number and each time something inside him seized up and he aborted the call. He’d never met Andrew’s wife, but he remembered the sweet little girl from the park, the one with the burned arm. He desperately wanted to know she was safe, that they were all safe, but he couldn’t face the alternative.
Three hours since Andrew’s departure, and with each passing minute Little Billy became more convinced something terrible had happened. Images of Laura’s backyard—strewn with a confetti of bloody remains—kept flashing in a nightmare marquee across the black sky, leaving him sick with dread. But he had a job to do here, the most important job of his life. He couldn’t let Andrew’s fate, whatever it might be, distract him from that.
“I would have bet a month’s salary that at least one of these fuckers would snap off.” Sam slammed the back heel of his boot into the dusty soil as if punishing the ground for its stubborn refusal to release the coil. The other firefighters gathered around in a loose semi-circle, their heads bowed in weariness or defeat. “The tensile strength of these things must be off the charts. I don’t want to be a Negative Nelly here, but I’m beginning to wonder if we’re going to be any more successful with explosives.”
Little Billy had been wondering the same. Their attempt at the cemetery the other night had failed, but he had fallen back on his ignorance of high explosives to nurture a frail sense of naïve optimism about their chances tonight. It was all a matter of scale. Bigger. Deeper. The xalantracoils weren’t indestructible. The vetro offalate weren’t omnipotent. Everything had its limits. He’d learned that much over the years.
“Is that you talking,” Little Billy asked, “or the voices in your head?”
The other man examined his shoes. “Hard to say, but we need to finish this fast. I don’t know how much longer I can hold out. They get any louder, I won’t be able to hear my own thoughts anymore.”
From the other firefighters, rumbles of agreement.
“I’m all for fast,” Little Billy massaged his temples in a futile effort to ease the vetro’s clamp around his head. Six hours to dawn.
God.
A walkie-talkie crackled to life and Terrance answered. “Status report,” a voice on the other end asked.
“Just finished trying to yank down the last one. No go. No go with any of them. How 'bout with you guys?”
“Same. It’s like trying to uproot a sequoia with sewing thread. We’re moving on to phase two.” A second voice erupted from the background. The connection broke for a moment and as they waited Terrace gave Little Billy a small smile.
“I think someone wants to talk to you.”
“Demo team one.”
“We’re here.”
“Terrance, can you hand the walkie-talkie to your spotter there. Someone here wants… needs… to talk to him.”
Terrance handed him the radio.
“Will?”
The firefighter pointed out the push-to-talk button and Little Billy pressed it. “I’m here, Katie.” He paused a heartbeat, then added “over,” feeling like a boy playing soldier. He released the button a half-second too late and caught Katie’s response mid-sentence.
“…telling me they’re only going to bump up the charges in stages, using a little more if the last blast is unsuccessful. Hello? Goddamn it. OVER.”
“That’s the plan. You heard Chief Rodriguez.”
“He’s a dumbass. What?” she asked someone on her end. “Is he going to fire me? Will, we’ve just wasted three hours yanking on these things. Let’s just pack all the explosives we’ve got around the one in front of us and blow the fucker sky high.”
Making sure his finger was off the call button, Little Billy turned to Sam. “You said fast. That would be fast. All or nothing.”
Sam ran his hand up the back of his head and back down his neck. “Yeah, but I also want to do it right.”
Terrance cleared his throat. “There’s a couple of things to remember. First, we have our orders. I can radio in and ask if we can change things up, but I already know they’ll say no.
"Second, say we say ‘fuck it’ and use everything we got on this one here and when the smoke clears it’s still standing. All we’ve managed to do is knock out every window in the neighborhood, take down four or five utility poles, cut the electricity for everyone trying to get the hell out of dodge, scatter live wires all over the road and maybe blow a hole through the water main for good measure. No water main, no water pressure for the guys setting up their perimeter of fire hoses. And no explosives left for any other target.
"I say we stick to the plan. Start big here. Big, not massive. Keep the surrounding infrastructure intact. Assess the results. Move on to the next if we have to and go a little bigger there.”
“Hello? Anybody still on the other end of this thing or am I talking to myself? Over. Over. OVER, WILL!”
Terrance could have simply dismissed his question, reminding him he was a civilian who held no authority over the rest of the crew. Instead, he had given him a thoughtful response, and for that Little Billy was grateful. He pressed the talk button.
“Katie, I hear you. We all hear you.” He gave Terrance a nod. “But our role in this is over. Now we need to step back, let these guys do their job and not interfere.”
The silence on the other end stretched out for seven or eight seconds. Little Billy could picture the other demolition team leader trying to wrest the walkie-talkie away from Katie and the ensuing tussle. He was just about to hand his own radio back to Terrance when she responded.
“How much longer do you think they’ll be able to do their jobs, Will? I don’t know about you, but my head is clogged with vetro snot.”
