Periphery, page 33
They stepped out onto the balcony with the flat, gray-green sprawl of suburban Tampa stretched out before them. The downtown towers were blue-gray and nearly invisible through a milky haze of smoke.
Andrew edged toward the crenelated wall. “I can’t see much through this soup.” He leaned over the lip of the wall and peered down.
“Well?” John asked, shuddering through a wave of vicarious vertigo.
“Overhang’s blocking most of the view. There’s a cloud of dust down there.”
“Like something from a construction site?”
Andrew rejoined John at the balcony entrance. “More like a deconstruction site. You think once you crank up your machine, whatever’s happening down there will stop?”
John kept his eyes on the horizon as if scanning for a swarm of approaching votasin.
“I don’t think so,” he sang after a pause. He’d discovered something during the previous hour: everything was less dire when set to music. Hard to take “we’re all going to die” seriously when crooned to “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” And so, he sang his son as much of the fairytale as he dared.
“The harmonizer won’t have any effect on whatever’s down there. It’s designed to interfere with the coils, not the bilantu.”
Motion behind them.
“What are you looking for?” Grace asked. She blinked into the brightening morning as if emerging from hibernation.
“Just trying to see what’s causing the commotion,” Andrew assured her.
“It’s getting worse. Feels like something trying to drill its way inside.”
“This place was built to last.” John patted the concrete. “Walls are a foot thick. At least.”
“I don’t care if they’re eight feet thick. Please, Dad,” she placed a hand on his forearm. “Your granddaughter’s in there and she’s terrified. If there’s something you can do, do it now before it’s too late.”
A barrage of gunfire erupted from somewhere below. The volley lasted ten, maybe twelve seconds as the three stood transfixed. Booker called out a warning to watch your left, watch your left. There was a pause, more shots followed by a declaration from Hector: “They’re pouring in too fast.” Three pops. Inhuman shrieks. “No, no, no, NO!” A final shot. And then Booker, in a baritone that seemed to reverberate through the shuddering walls as if the tower itself was singing, began a slow, swelling rendition of “Amazing Grace.”
“Oh, god,” Grace sobbed. Andrew wrapped his arms around her and she buried her head in his chest. Booker managed to declare that he once was lost before the singing abruptly stopped.
“Dad.” Andrew pleaded.
John motioned them back inside, and as Andrew lifted his head from Grace’s shoulder his face slackened. John turned to follow his son’s gaze out over the balcony.
All for nothing, then. It had all been for nothing. Two miles to the south, a dome of white had materialized like a featureless moon rising over a black sea. Reaching a thousand or more feet into the air, it dwarfed the surrounding topographical features. For the half-dozen seconds it took John’s sputtering mind to process what he was seeing, the dome remained opaque. When his thoughts coalesced around a single, idiotic assessment—it’s big—the bubble burst, revealing a blasted landscape of shattered, obsidian slabs, twisted spires that may or may not have been constructed and fissures pulsing with crematorial light. Scattered throughout were spherical knots of monstrous tendrils spewing black offal from puckered orifices.
“So that’s what hell looks like,” Grace sang with a lilt of detached curiosity, as if she had just discovered the inner workings of a carburetor.
“Inside, inside.” John tried to block their view with his body. “For god’s sake, don’t look at it.”
“Why?” She countered. “It’s our future.”
“Not if I can help it.”
One final lie; one last gift. The only thing he could offer those who remained was the chance to die with hope. It was a pathetic alternative to real salvation and an unforgivable deception, but John, for one, had had his fill of seeing the true nature of things. Let the others take their last breaths believing deliverance was still possible. Such endings were preferable to any alternative, weren’t they?
“You all need to get to the roof,” John sang as they gathered in the center of the observation room. “It won’t be safe down here after I turn it on.”
“You want us to go up there?” Emily asked, eyeing the ladder with skepticism.
“No choice.” He shuffled to the duffel bags. “Take whatever guns are left with you.” He guided Andrew to the far side of the room. “Can Grace or Anna see the bilantu?” he asked in a low voice.
“I don’t think so.”
“Thank god for that, at least. It’ll be up to you and Emily to keep watch. She’s been seeing them for a while.”
“Maybe I should stay here with you. Whatever’s downstairs will be knocking soon.”
“No. Go up. The concrete and rebar superstructure will help shield out the effects.” He draped an arm over his son’s shoulder and gently pivoted him until he was once more facing Grace and Anna. “Your family needs you. Be with them now.”
An insect buzz arose. It was coming from the iron window gratings, the ladder, the hatch, from every piece of metal in the room.
“Daddy?” Anna pressed her hands against her ears. “Is the building coming down?”
Above her head, the adults entered into a spontaneous conspiracy.
“Don’t worry.” Andrew settled a hand on her head. “I’ll never let anything bad happen to you. Remember at the park? The dragon was chasing us, but it didn’t get us. I scared it away.”
“But what if the building does fall? What will you do?”
He knelt at her feet. “I’ll just call my magic carpet and fly us all away before it does.”
Anna offered her father a small, conciliatory smile, one that made it clear she wasn’t buying a word of it, and gave her father a fierce hug. “I believe you,” she sang, and the deception was complete.
A tremendous bang dimpled the hatch, provoking a chorus of startled screams.
“Daddy!” Anna cried again.
“Go, now!” John brayed. The trapdoor had withstood the initial blow, but the metal plate had risen several inches in the center. Below them, something yammered a cascade of syllables that would have been meaningless a few days ago, but which now held the resonance of a familiar greeting. “WE ARE HERE.”
Emily retrieved the .45 from a bag and a box of ammunition for both the .45 and .38. She gave the .45 to Andrew and once again tucked the .38 into the small of her back.
“Ladies first.” Andrew touched the ladder. Emily tested its strength with two bobs on the lowest rung and began a quick ascent, her medical bag clutched between her teeth. John would have preferred having only one person at a time on the structure, but a second blow raised a new dimple in the hatch twice as large as the first. More chittering. John was beginning to suspect it was their version of laughter, a lunatic’s mad chortle.
Anna went next, followed closely by Grace. When it came Andrew’s turn, he faced John with an understanding neither man needed to voice. John extended his hand.
“Andy.”
“Dad,” he took a step closer, one arm raised, then hesitated. “I don’t what to hurt you,” he sang with a rueful laugh.
“Never.” John pulled his son to him and they embraced. “I’m so damn proud of you. Always have been. You’re a better man than I ever was.”
“Bullshit.”
“I wish to god things could have been different. I did what I thought I had to, to keep you and your mother safe. Maybe I had it all wrong.”
“No, Dad. You had it exactly right.”
“I’m just sorry as hell I locked you out of my life.”
“Don’t keep telling me you’re sorry.” They pulled away.
“Then say it.” The thing below pounded against the hatch.
“There’s nothing to forgive.”
John waited. The beast beneath them croaked, “WE ENGULF.”
Andrew raised eyes to the ceiling, his head swaying, Adam’s apple rising and falling like the needle on a seismograph. When he dropped his gaze, the face confronting him was that of a twelve-year-old who had just raced from the house to stand at the drivers-side window of his father car as he backed out of the driveway for the final time.
“I forgive you, Dad.” The words were a slur of syllables strung on the most rudimentary of melodies. “Okay? I forgive you.”
When John thought he could manage his own words, he pointed to the ladder.
“Now go.”
Andrew took the rungs. “See you soon.”
“You bet.”
In a moment, his son was gone. The last thing he saw of Andrew was his feet disappearing through the hole in the ceiling. Once he was alone, John slid the guitar case across the floor with a series of small kicks until it came to rest against the far wall, out of sight of anyone casually scrutinizing the room through the opening above.
Another blow buckled the metal hatch upward by nearly a foot and opened a seam between the plate and frame.
“WE DIGEST.”
“We’ve been through this all before. Come up with some new material, for Christ’s sake.”
The creature roared from a dozen or more mouths, two of which were once human. The trapdoor was beginning to resemble a Jiffy Pop pan halfway through its cooking cycle. Did they still make those stovetop relics? He and Lindsay and Andrew would cozy up on the couch with a Jiffy Pop steaming on the end table, filling the living room with a popcorn bouquet strong enough to fog the nearest window. On the TV, a Saturday afternoon monster movie, some camp classic from the ’50s or ’60s with minimal production values and a soundtrack like squealing tires.
John sank to the floor, pulled the guitar case close, opened the bicycle locks, removed the cables around the neck and base.
In December, the popcorn would compliment an evening marathon of Christmas specials, reindeer and snowmen and Grinches with expandable hearts. The big tree glowing in a corner, but John had always preferred the small aluminum one he and Andrew assembled for his son’s bedroom dresser. It would turn slowly while chiming “Silent Night,” and the stars it would project across the walls and ceiling would go round and round and John would watch as the lights moved across his son’s face until the boy waved him off with a groggy, “you can go now.”
John unclasped the buckles and eased the lid back. The tower swayed. He removed what was inside and carefully arranged the pieces before him. The seam along the hatch frame opened enough to allow a trio of cable-like flagellum to whip out. They swept the floor clean of debris but could not reach him.
“YOUR FINAL THOUGHTS WILL BE DELECTABLE.”
John blew the disintegrating trapdoor a kiss and began the assembly.
The first ones through tripped over each other in their eagerness to advance, tangling into a snarl that reminded Little Billy of a monstrous disemboweling, a glistening heap of intestines spewed from a gaping wound. The pileup lasted only a moment—the knot was already unraveling—but it was enough for Little Billy to pull Katie to her feet and begin the dash toward the cemetery gates. Jason was a few feet behind, swallowing air in wheezing gulps as the vetro offalate righted themselves. Behind the horde, a blast-crater landscape smoldered.
Hand-in-hand, Little Billy and Katie approached the cemetery entrance as a dozen jets of water arch over their heads and smashed into the living wall. Little Billy didn’t turn to see the result, but a tremendous hissing erupted, as if a thousand pressure valves were releasing in unison. A foghorn howl followed, rising from the subsonic to crest in a prolonged moan that settled in the inner lining of his skull.
Something crashed down in front of them, destroying the gate and blocking their exit. Little Billy angled away, weaving through gravestones, his vision a bright tunnel surrounded by swirling black dots. A shape unfurling on their left, big but not massive. It struck a forty-foot segment of fencing and knocked it flat. A way out! But they would have to skirt whatever the hell it was.
No matter, no matter. Katie was still at his side. They stumbled on amid the crack and crash of falling tree limbs, the rending of roots as entire trees were toppled. A new barrier on the right, this one of branches. Don’t stop. The flailing thing that had destroyed the fence retracted as if on a reel. Almost out now, feet clattering over metal, the ground shuddering, under assault, the pavement an obstacle course of shattered concrete, and above their heads, the spray of the fire hoses throwing rainbows into the morning air.
They reached the line of firefighters at a dead sprint and ducked under the water jets. Little Billy tripped over a hose, careened through the gap between two pumpers and rolled to a stop somewhere behind the line. Katie was next to him, her hands on his shoulder.
“Are you alright?”
“Hell no.” He struggled to his bloodied knees. “Are you?”
“I pissed my pants.” Incredibly, she broke into a smile. “New number one, baby. ‘I pissed my pants at the end of the world and I did it with style.’” She held out her hand. “Upsy-daisy. You’re getting soaked.”
The street was awash in runoff from the fire hoses. His legs and shoes were sodden. As he regained his feet a realization struck and he slapped his pockets as if he’d been the one carrying the remote detonator. “Where’s Jason?”
“If you mean the guy who was running with you, he didn’t make it.”
Little Billy turned to find Sid Langston on his right, hose in hand, his face beneath his helmet a contorted mixture of revulsion and resolve.
“What happened?”
“What happened? Damn things fell on top of him.” Sid’s singing was like beer bottles breaking when a bar fight turns lethal. “Don’t think they were even trying to smash him. Wrong place. Wrong time.”
“Where?”
Sid nodded to the south. “What’s left of him is next to the downed tree.”
Little Billy faced the vetro offalate for the first time and managed a two-word hymn: “Dear god,” before his mind shrank back in loathing. Even so, the biologist in him couldn’t help a tittering, mad-scientist analysis of the creatures massed before them.
There was a horrible, parasitic elegance about the vetro offalate, a simplicity of design that made it clear theirs was a form derived after countless eons of evolutionary pruning. Sleek as leeches, smooth as tapeworms, with a muscular central trunk and appendages that budded and grew rather than unfolded or extended, they reared up thirty, forty feet into the air and swayed with an odd coordination, like a forest of pale kelp waving in a current. As with the bilantu, the vetro’s epidermis was translucent, revealing inner organs that moved independently, spinning, revolving, pulsating, a collection of interior beings laboring in an emulgent stew.
Or were those the creatures’ most recent meals?
Little Billy suppressed a gag.
Repulsive as these aspects were, it was their eyes, their horrid, oversized, pustule eyes that drew a rasping inhalation of absolute repugnance. Dead eyes. Atrophied and filmed with what might have been cataracts, but obviously retaining some functionality, the bowling-ball sized pupils rolled to the inner corners of the lidless orbs, imparting a cross-eyed quality to their inhuman stare. Little Billy was quite certain to gaze into those ulcerated eyes was to invite madness.
“Don’t look them in the eye!” he cried, too shaken to shape his warning into a melody. “It’s the abyss!”
“Way ahead of you,” Katie answered, managing something between a song and a scream.
Little Billy lowered his gaze and with eyes slotted nearly shut surveyed the scene once more. The vetro’s bodies were steaming as the water jets struck them. This was the source of the incessant hissing. Steam rose in vast white plumes, clouds of billowing vapor mercifully obscuring much of the creatures’ bulk. Christ, they really had climbed from the pits of hell. He had no idea how they moved, whether their central trunks were supported by legs or pseudopodia or some other unfathomable mechanism of mobility. The steam concealed it all.
Little Billy was amazed at the power of the jets blasting from the hoses. Battering ram columns of water, they struck their targets with enough force to buckle and contort the vetro’s translucent flesh, creating momentary trenches as the water swept from one individual to the next. He became aware of the perpetual crack of gunfire as officers emptied their service revolvers into the beasts, but he couldn’t imagine their tiny bullets inflicting much damage. The hoses, however, were having some effect. They might not be pushing the horde back, but at least they were delaying their advance. For now.
An inhuman bellow of outrage suddenly erupted, prompting Little Billy to clamp hands over ears.
“Aim for the eyes!” Sid yelled. “I just put one out.”
“The eyes! The eyes!” The chant was taken up by others and new bellows arouse, accompanied by the sickening wet, viscous pop of imploding orbs.
Little Billy listened. When he heard the next splat, he darted forward as if it were the crack of a starter’s pistol. He was across the street and through the broken fence in seconds, hopefully before Katie had a chance to react or follow. Water fell like rain all around, turning the ground to sandy mud, soaking through his shirt, dripping down his face.
He did not stop. Something whistled past his right ear. Shapes twisted through the disintegrating tree line, rending limbs as thick as oil drums from their trunks.
He did not stop. The head of a stone angle flew past and crashed into the fence.
