Periphery, page 31
Andrew nodded and picked his phone off the floor as Hector positioned himself at the ladder, ready to assist the others in their ascent. Andrew held up an index finger.
“One thing first.” He touched the shattered screen, saw the number pad spring up, and exhaled in relief. “Need to spread the word about Anna’s discovery.”
Andrew unlocked the phone and began dialing, praying to the melody of “Oh Come All Ye Faithful,” that he wasn’t too late.
The effect was decompressive. Little Billy’s skull seemed to creak in relief as the relentless inward pressure dissipated. He worked his jaw as he sang, ears popping, the outside world rushing back in with an oceanic whoosh that drowned out the last of the vetro’s howl. He pulled the phone from his ear and stared at the screen as if it were a talisman ablaze with St. Elmo’s fire. At first, all he could do was repeat the commercial jingle over and over, marveling at how spacious his mind felt without intruders, how orderly his unscrambled thoughts. How keen.
It had taken a supreme act of concentration to answer his buzzing phone. Like some of the firefighters around them, he and Katie were on their hands and knees by then, crawling the last hundred yards to the final xalantracoil. Little Billy’s sense of balance was so decimated, when he lifted an arm to retrieve the cell he toppled onto his back in a slow roll, unable to do anything more than stare up at the spinning, lurching sky as Andrew’s instructions slowly sank in.
“Florida orange juice, a glassful of sunshine.”
The world stopped spinning.
“Florida orange juice, a glassful of sunshine.”
The voices fizzled to a distant murmur.
“Florida orange juice, a glassful of sunshine.”
Little Billy regained his feet.
“Florida orange juice, a glassful of sunshine,” he sang to Katie, who was peering up at him through sweat-tangled hair. He made a rolling motion with his hand, trying to convey that she should join him in song.
“You don’t have to keep repeating the lyrics,” Andrew told him through the phone. “Say whatever you need to say. Just use the melody. Any melody. As long as you sing.”
Katie caught on immediately. Before he could relay Andrew’s message, she was already croaking out an unfamiliar song about someone wearing sneakers instead of high-heels. With each word her voice strengthened, and by the time she reached the chorus, Katie was also back on her feet.
The cemetery was scattered with a dozen stricken firefighters doggedly struggling toward their goal. Those still on their feet stood with bowed heads and slack jaws, shuffling past gravestones in a zombie-like procession toward the southwest corner, where the xalanthracoil stood at the center of the crater left after the previous detonation. Behind them at the gates, the auger truck and hazardous materials vehicle idled, their drivers no longer capable of operating the rigs.
“You guys still with me?” Andrew asked.
Little Bill brought the phone back to his ear. “Here and singing.”
“The coils?”
“Intact for now, but we still have one to go. Gonna give it all we got. Go big or go home, right?” He gave Katie a wink. She flipped him off with a smile.
“What about the perimeter defenses?”
Little Billy turned toward the street. A fire engine was parked at the nearest intersection, a chartreuse Hillsborough County vehicle with a crew of six or seven. Unlike the demolition teams, the firefighters manning the engine were in full gear, helmets, coats, boots. They were moving with a little more life than those closer to the coil. Maybe the vetro’s call wasn’t as intense back there. They had already run a yellow hose from a nearby hydrant to the engine and were unfurling three additional lines from the vehicle. Although their preparations continued, they worked without urgency, often pausing with hands on knees to pant and gulp before shuddering back into motion.
Throughout the night, Little Billy had passed fifty or more fire engines as his demolition crew worked its way from coil to coil, pumpers mostly, from three counties, dozens of municipalities and the Department of Forestry. He’d seen hoses run to hydrants, water tankers, ponds, the river, even swimming pools. His thoughts had been too muddled at the time to appreciate the monumental efforts required to establish these defenses or to evaluate their potential effectiveness. The circle of xalanthracoils was nearly two miles across, requiring each truck to be separated by a gap of fifty yards, sometimes more. If the vetro came pouring across the breach, the defenders might be spread too thin to contain them for long. And then there was the question of water pressure. The drought had probably…
“Will, you still there?”
“Still here, Andy. Perimeter defenses are ongoing, although they’ve slowed down a bit due to the vetro’s mindfuck. Once I pass on the tip about singing they should be able to finish quickly. If we need them, they’ll be ready.”
“And the military?”
“No clue.”
Katie stood on tiptoe and sang into the phone, “What about you? Are you safe? Is your family safe?” She shot Little Billy a look of exasperation, as if this should have been his first question. He tilted the cell so she could hear Andy’s response.
“We’re safe and inside the water tower. Long story. I’m about to go up and see Dad. Sounds like we’re going to need his backup.”
A cold lump lodged in Little Billy’s throat. As the vetro’s call had intensified, all thoughts of John’s alleged device had been squeezed into the dark creases of his brain. Now they welled up again, black and oozing.
“We’re not finished yet,” he sang, trying to outrun his apprehension. “You’ll be able to hear the boom all the way up there.”
“I’ll be listening.”
Little Billy looked to the east and a small, unsung ‘oh’ of dismay slipped from his lips. The sky behind them had begun to pale. He could make out the edges of black treetops silhouetted against an indigo ribbon already snuffing out the faintest stars. Three irregular shapes floated off to his right, casting their own campfire glow and bobbing like flotsam in a ship’s wake. A fourth appeared, rising through the camphors and live oaks and sable palms as if percolating up from a methane chamber at the bottom of a pond. He scrutinized the coil, expecting to see the first glint of pulsing inner light seeping from its latticework of intricate fissures. It was still dark, but for how much longer?
“Good luck. Call me once it’s done.” Andrew hesitated an instant before adding: “If you still can.”
And on that note, Little Billy thought, re-examining the coil as he pocketed his phone. Was that a shimmer along its upper edge, or just the wink of reflected light? The sky was already brighter. He could imagine himself standing here mesmerized until dawn broke, watching the xalantracoil power up as his world faded and a new world emerged around him. There was something darkly seductive about having a front-row seat to it all. There! A shimmer. Now gone. Now back. Not his imagination this time. Subtle but definitely cyclical. Fascinating, actually. Almost beautiful.
“Hey!” Katie yanked him around and gave him a hard push toward Jason, the DOF demolition chief poised in midstride as if suspended in amber. “Don’t stop singing. We have work to do.”
Florida orange juice, a glassful of sunshine. Little Billy shuddered. The music in his head had only paused for a moment, but it was long enough to get swept into some sort of debilitating glamour the coil had begun broadcasting. How many defensive systems did these things have?
He grabbed Jason by the shoulders and bellowed, “Florida orange juice, a glassful of sunshine,” into his confounded face.
“Oh, for the love of Christ.” Katie yanked him back. “I’ll handle this. Get your own head straight, then do the same for the drivers back at the gate. We’ll need them first. And don’t stop singing.”
Little Billy gave her a thumbs-up and trotted off. As long as he didn’t look at the xalantracoil again he should be fine. In the meantime, he would sing, sing, sing as the demolition team prepped the last charge, and when the smoke cleared amid a rain of debris, the coil would be gone, the circuit broken, the future restored. There was still time, still time for us, my dear, to save the world. Lyrics worth remembering.
At the cemetery gates, Little Billy looked east, intending to gauge how quickly night was fading. The indigo band had expanded to a wide swath, swallowing more stars and revealing the presence of a few distant cumulous flickering with heat lighting.
That, however, was not what gave him pause. It was the bubbles. There were more of them, six now, and they were larger than before. More energetic. The biggest began to convulse and heave. A seam developed near the middle and cleaved it in half and now there were seven. Disconcerting as this was, it was how they were moving that jolted Little Billy back into motion and sent him scurrying to the nearest driver. The bubbles were no longer drifting haphazardly. They were all moving in the same direction, north, north-west around the circle’s inner curve, following the counterclockwise rotation typical of all developing hurricanes.
Twenty-three
Gary Wyatt was going to kill the beast. The vetro offalate probably wouldn’t like it. The creature was, presumably, one of their agents. At least that’s what it claimed in a rare moment of lucidity. But Gary understood something his psychopathic companion apparently did not: they’d been dismissed. Their task had been relatively straightforward: stop John Tate from using his… his what? The vetro didn’t know and so Gary didn’t know. Not that it mattered. What mattered was that both man and man-beast had failed their gods and were now, at best, nothing more than bystanders at the grand and dark parade.
Something was coming. The beast had been telling the truth when it informed those inside the tower they were in for a surprise. Gary wasn’t sure how it would happen, but he was certain the tower before him would soon topple, killing everyone inside. He hated the thought of Andrew and the woman and the little girl dying, but they had brought it on themselves. Why couldn’t the old man have simply given the vetro what they wanted? Were they all so blind? The human race was sick. It was dying from the cancer of pettiness and cruelty and spite and hatred. Tumors, all. And how were tumors destroyed? Radiation. Chemo. If that didn’t work, they had to be cut from the living flesh. It hurt. Hurt like hell. But it was necessary for the healing to begin.
The vetro offalate weren’t indifferent. They cared. They cared so much they had sent a beast-man to keep him company. Gary watched the lunatic out of the corner of his eye and absentmindedly fretted the bite on his neck. Bitch had turned into a fucking banshee at the end, all gnashing teeth and clawing nails. Had to admire her grit, he supposed, willing to fight for her man like that. Good thing she’d gotten inside without drawing his compatriot’s attention. At least her death would be quick. That wouldn’t have been the case had the beast scooped her up.
“Ollie, ollie in free,” it bellowed happily toward the tower. “The king is in his counting house, counting all his money. I see London, I see France. Gurty’ll lith ulm il tacka. Gesundheit, motherfucker. Turn your head next time.”
How could it still be on its feet? Its left knee was a swollen purple knot about twice the size of a softball speckled with bright scarlet hemorrhages, the calf a discolored mass streaked with tendrils of yellow and brown descending steadily toward the ankle, a sure sign of a deepening infection.
The pain must be excruciating, and yet it paced about with only the slightest limp, sometimes laughing, sometimes howling, the gun in its right hand, its dick in the left. The thing had already ejaculated three times. Its erection never softened. Was that the vetro’s doing? Were they pumping their snarling attack dog full of endorphins and hormones, keeping it primed for the kill? Or was its behavior simply the product of madness?
Gary Wyatt pulled his mother’s .22 from his pocket, flipped the safety back. He’d shot one man already. Granted, he hadn’t exactly been himself at the time. The vetro had reached their will into the fibers of his muscles and manipulated him like a sock puppet, but he had welcomed their invasion, happy to relinquish the responsibility of collusion and conscious thought. Now that they had tossed him aside, he would shoot the beast. The vetro no longer had a need for it. Something new was on the way, something far better suited to the job. It was close, moving faster and faster as the sky brightened, swarming up from the south. The tower would fall, and this beast’s usefulness was at an end.
Gary approached. He didn’t want to miss. Why would the vetro enlist such a creature into their service? Maybe if it hadn’t interfered, hadn’t bulldozed its way into the fight, Gary would have managed to get inside the tower and destroy John Tate’s device on his own. No need to swing a club when a scalpel would do. The beast wasn’t even a club. It was a boulder crashing down a hillside, mindless and uncontrollable.
Look at it, standing there stroking itself, once again oblivious to everything other than its next gush of semen. A wave of nausea and revulsion rolled up from his belly and crashed against the back of his throat. Killing it would be an act of mercy for both the lunatic and the rest of humanity.
Gary positioned himself behind the brute. Just keep jerking away, he thought as he raised the gun and centered the muzzle at the back of the skull where the parietal and occipital plates fused. Its death would be instantaneous. Good riddance, beast-man.
When he pulled the trigger, something plowed into the back of Gary’s legs, toppling him to the ground. He twisted as he fell, landed on his left shoulder and rolled onto his stomach. Something skittered across his back, needles of pain digging into his flesh. He grunted, more in outrage than agony, and contracted into a fetal position. A weight on his hip, clambering up and over. Something landed in the dirt next to him and moved on, its multitude of legs rising and falling in a rolling procession that reminded Gary of tank treads. When it reached the tower wall, it clawed itself upright and began sweeping its angled head back and forth across the concrete. An identical creature joined it a moment later and began doing the same. He heard a grinding noise, like two large stones being rubbed together.
Within seconds they were everywhere, hundreds of creatures marching to the tower in a gray tide of armored backs and clicking appendages, the dust they raised blanketing the ground in a brown fog.
Their mouths were like nothing he had ever seen, wrecking ball spheres of boney studs continually spinning inside oral sockets. A whirring hum began to swell, locus-like and hungry. No, not hungry. Famished. They were here to eat, and eat they would. The entire base of the tower was a solid, living mass that continued to creep upward as new arrivals perched upon the heads and shoulders of the vanguard. The grinding became a deafening cacophony, a feeding frenzy. The vetro offalate had sent these creatures to devour the tower like termites devouring a block of wood. He wondered what it sounded like from inside.
“Glooorrriousssssss.”
Gary nearly screamed. The thing shambling toward him through the swarm of tower-eaters had to be a hallucination. The last thing he’d seen before his fall was a flap of the beast’s skull unhinging like an access hatch, revealing a cavity and the gray folds beneath. The bullet had to have gone straight through its brain. And yet here it was, approaching with arms outstretched, a maniac grin stretched across its shattered face as if the two of them were long-lost brothers about to embrace.
The beast had grown large while Gary had been watching the tower’s destruction. It was no longer just a man. It had become festooned with creatures clinging to it in barnacle-like profusion. They covered its chest, its arms and legs, its neck and blasted skull. Only the face remained exposed. The man-beast had been reborn as an amalgamation of nightmare organisms. Sinuous and semi-translucent, they fit together in a Frankenstein mismatch of glistening protuberances and interlocking appendages.
Run, for the love of god!
Gary couldn’t run. His legs were useless bags of meat, boneless and numb.
Shoot it then! You still have the gun.
Gary shot it. Something squealed and fell from the chest and was replaced by another. It was almost upon him. Screaming now, Gary emptied the gun into the advancing shape. In the final seconds before it bent to engulf him, Gary understood two things. He had been wrong to assume the vetro offalate had cast them aside. Their fate wasn’t to be dismissed. It was to be repurposed. The second realization drove a lance of anguish through the contracting remains of his consciousness: his mother wasn’t going to be cured after all. What was left of her mind would be siphoned off, stored in a dark place and sipped at leisure long after her physical body had rotted where it fell. That knowledge was his reward for failure.
The creature crouched, wrapped its arms almost gently around the prostrate man at its feet and lifted Gary into a merging embrace.
“Gloorrioousss,” said one of the creature’s heads.
“Yessssssssss,” agreed the other.
They felt it first, a vibration that seemed to resonate from everywhere as if the tower were a tuning fork struck against a tabletop.
“That can’t be good,” Hector sang in his off-key falsetto. Andrew wasn’t sure how much more he could take of his caterwauling. He knew the officer didn’t intend to be annoying. He was locked into his vocal delivery as firmly as a regional accent, but Andrew found himself eying Hector’s windpipe with increasingly dark intentions.
“Feels like machinery,” Booker sang. He was huddled against a wall, eyes glazed in pain. “Like the pumps just kicked on.”
“Pumps haven’t worked in this place for seventy-five years,” Hector countered. “That’s coming from outside.”
“Go have a look,” John nodded toward the crenelated balcony encircling the observation room. “And be careful. Some of the bilantu are airborne. It’s getting light, they’ll be active again soon.”
Hector gave a brisk salute and shoulder his way outside through the rusted balcony door.
