Periphery, page 34
Little Billy did not stop.
Jason’s body was a smear of gore from which an arm and leg protruded like the exposed limbs of someone frozen in a slab of bloody ice. The hand was clutching what looked like a small yellow walkie-talkie. Little Billy pried the fingers open. The light from the xalantracoil was a nova off to his left, and as he retrieved the detonator, a shadow fell over him.
He jumped forward. The impact pulped the live oak’s trunk and sent a concussive wave blasting through his chest like the bass notes from a gargantuan speaker. He rose from the muck and made the gap in the fence in a dozen unbalanced strides, expecting to be yanked backward or pounded flat at any moment. Was that howl in response to his actions, or had another firefighter hit the mark? This time he managed not to trip over a hose and came to a gasping, gulping halt in front of Katie. She grabbed him by the collar of his jacket and for an instant he wasn’t sure if she was going to kiss or slap him. She pulled him forward. Her mouth was over his, her tongue pushing past his lips with an urgency he was more than willing to accommodate.
“That was fucking amazing,” she sang when they came up for air. “You almost died like six times.”
“Well, I…”
She pushed him away and slapped him hard across the face. “Don’t ever do that again!”
“Yes, ma’am.” His cheek was hot, but his elation was like nothing he’d experienced before, even during the first, heady days of his and Laura’s relationship when every new glimpse of flesh had elicited a jolt of delighted gratitude.
“Now what? Just push the button?”
Little Billy raised the detonator, his thumb hovering over the obvious choice for the trigger, a large red button beneath a dial pad.
“Let’s see.”
A ghastly notion occurred in the same instant his thumb pressed down: what if the explosive charges no longer existed in this world? What if they had been teleported a universe away and now lay buried beneath an alien crust?
The idea was apparently confirmed in the next instant. No explosion. He turned to Katie, stricken, but she pointed to the side of the detonator, drawing his attention to a discrete slide switch he hadn’t noticed before.
“Safety?”
He slid the switch down and a small light at the top right corner of the detonator blinked on. Katie crouched down and plugged her ears with her fingers.
“We should warn everyone first,” Little Billy sang.
“No time.”
Little Billy hunkered next to her, raised the device above his head and hit the button a second time.
The explosion was strong enough to hurl the closest firefighters off their feet, rock the pumpers on their axels and shatter windshields. The ground around the xalanthracoil rose up in solid brown curtain that continued to expand in a conical wall as dirt and vegetation and headstones and fencing and hopefully ten million tiny pieces of vetro offalate rose a hundred yards or more into the air. Despite the upheaval, an odd stillness engulfed the street as debris spiraled in graceful trajectories to distant locations. It took a moment for Little Billy to realize the impression of calm was due to the world falling silent.
Katie was sprawled on her back. Little Billy rolled to her and saw her eyes were open and blinking. He thought he yelled, “Are you alright?” If felt as if he had, but he did not hear the words and Katie did not react. He waved his hand in front of her face and her eyes found his. He pointed to his ears. She shook her head. Something pinged him on the top of the head and he raised an arm, shielding her body with his as debris began to pelt down around them, splashing into the wet street and bouncing off the vehicles. The cascade lasted longer than Little Billy would have thought possible. As he waited to find out if he would be brained by something large enough to kill him or survive relatively intact, his hearing began to return the way sounds will creep back as water drains from a swimmer’s ear.
The first words he heard were Katie’s. “Did we do it?” She’d been repeating them for some time.
Little Billy shook the dirt from his hair and stood, pulling Katie with him. Around them, firefighters and police officers were regaining their feet as the unmanned hoses whipped and snaked in the ruined street.
“I still hear them,” he sang, pointing to his temple.
A moment later a blanched appendage groped through the thinning dust cloud. Then another. The light of the xalantracoil emerged through the murk, dimly at first, a headlight approaching on a foggy stretch of highway. It brightened steadily in the clearing air until it shone forth in blinding triumph. But the crater around it! Little Billy had no idea how many metric tons of earth the blast had excavated, but it must have been a dozen or more. How could the thing still be standing?
“Hoses, hoses!” Someone was singing. “You.” Sid yanked Little Billy forward. “Help me get ahold of this thing.”
Little Billy wanted to ask what was the point? All they could do now was delay the inevitable. But he followed the firefighter to the thrashing hose and fell on it and wormed his way toward the nozzle, the canvass bucking and twisting under him as if it were a living thing. Sid put the nozzle in a headlock and the flow of water suddenly stopped.
The rest of the firefighters were quickly re-establishing their position, closing rank, filling gaps. Little Billy thought of ants beginning the rebuilding immediately after a sneakered foot smashes their mound flat. They would remain until the end, resist until the end. They would die at their assigned positions and they would die singing. It was as good a way to go as any.
“Think I could man a hose?” Katie asked.
Little Billy blinked at her. “I don’t know. It would take some strength.”
Katie pointed to a female firefighter down the line. “She’s doing it.”
“The two of you could, if you worked together,” Sid answered. He swept his hose back and forth across the vetro offalate now emerging en masse from the thinning dust cloud. Little Billy noticed they were no longer steaming. Apparently, the firefighters had doused them enough to significantly lower their temperatures. Were they moving a little slower than before, or was that wishful thinking?
“These hoses are supposed to be manned by two people anyway,” Sid continued. “Just keep the line straight and the nozzle dialed down to a tight jet. Hold on tight, like you see me doing, feet spread wide. When you’re ready, pull back on the bale and let her rip.”
“Bale?” Katie asked.
“Handle. Forward to close, backward to open. If you see a firefighter go down, take their place.”
Before Little Billy could ask any follow-up questions, his shirt pocket began to vibrate. Retreating further behind the engines, he pulled his phone from his pocket, saw who was calling and touched the screen. For the next two minutes, he stood singing out increasingly perplexed questions as Katie circled him in a decaying orbit, ever closer, ever faster. Finally, he ended the call and looked around as if searching for a familiar face in a crowd of strangers.
“What, what?” Katie demanded.
Little Billy ran back to Sid. “I need to find someone in charge! Someone with connections to the top.”
“Hamilton’s around here somewhere. You remember what he looks like? Work your way south.”
“What’s going on? That was Andrew, right? What’s he need us to do?”
Following the curve of the breach and scanning the face of every firefighter he passed, Little Billy spread his arms as if to embrace everything before him.
“Find a helicopter.”
“What?”
“If we don’t get a helicopter to the water tower, everyone there is going to die.”
Twenty-five
“Well?”
Andrew slipped the phone back into his pocket and turned south, trying to decipher what he was seeing. The smoke haze made it difficult to distinguish anything other than the boldest details, but it appeared the rim of the breach was steaming the way lava steams when it reaches the ocean. There was activity there, flashing lights muted to a watercolor glaze of alternating tints, ephemeral compared to the unwavering burn of the xalantracoils shining like a ring of fallen stars.
“He’s on it.”
“Does the fire department even have a helicopter?” Grace’s eyes were glassy, her lips bloodless. The only color in her face was the maroon crescents beneath her eyes.
“No. But the TPD does. The Coast Guard does. Every television station in the city does.”
“Andy.” Her voice broke and Anna reached up from her mother’s side to pat her shoulder.
“Don’t cry, Mommy.”
“Not me, my brave one.”
In the room below, another metallic bang sounded. Andrew had to assume the hatch was still holding, but each new blow rang a little differently than the last, the tone becoming looser somehow, more a clang than a thump. Occasionally, something would roar or scream or warble, but these were not the sounds that had prompted Andrew to call Little Billy. It was the grinding, the incessant crunch of stone against stone, or, more likely, tooth against concrete.
He could no longer ignore what his ears were insisting. Grace had been right. Something down there was eating its way through the walls of the tower and it was only a matter of time before the whole thing came crashing down.
Dr. Cho put a gentle arm around Grace. “I can give you a mild sedative, if you want.” They were all huddled together in the center of the roof. They had no choice. The circular platform was only twenty feet in diameter and enclosed by nothing more than a low, decorative crenellation of weathered concrete. Although she had tried to be surreptitious about it, Andrew knew Dr. Cho had noticed the bandages on his wife’s arms, and he suspected she also understood the implications of those wounds.
Grace shook her head. “No, I’m fine.” When the doctor said nothing, she looked Cho in the eye and repeated: “I. Am. Fine.”
“Am I going to ride in a helicopter?” Anna sang.
“That’s the plan,” Andrew replied, looking both adults in the eye until each gave a tiny nod. What they had just agreed to Andrew would never be certain, only that it was a wordless contract of defiance rather than deception.
“When will it get here?”
“Soon, honey. Real soon.”
Andrew cocked his head, his eyes narrowing in puzzlement.
“What?” Grace asked.
He shook his head. “Nothing. Thought I heard something for a second. Just my imagination.”
“Something bad, Daddy?”
Andrew cupped his daughter’s cheek. “Not bad. Something familiar. A little piece of a song. That’s all.”
“A happy song?”
Andrew nodded, although the momentary snippet he’d apparently imagined had plucked a cord of melancholy, nostalgia mixed with regret, fondness with loss. He wanted to poke his head through the opening to see what his father was up to. Something was certainly going on below. Even through his song, he could sense a growing desperation in the vetro offalate’s call, a rapacious gnawing to get in. But he could not look. His earlier realization had returned, the one forgotten when he and Grace had sung to one another the things unsung for too long. If they were all about to die for the sake of some unfathomable deception, he preferred not to know.
“Something’s coming,” Cho sang, and Andrew’s heart bolted into a gallop. “Can you smell it?”
He raised his nose to the air—as did Grace and Anna—and inhaled deeply. He’d been smelling the arid tang of the wildfire for so long it no longer registered. To the north, the rising sun blushed the grayish clouds of smoke as they piled into towering heaps, their tops smeared across the heavens by high-altitude currents like a thumb over a charcoal sketch.
The angry sky felt like an accusation. With no one fighting the blaze, how many homes had been lost? How many neighborhoods decimated? He imagined the flames marching unchallenged to the Gulf, leaping highways, consuming the tinder-dry urban canopy until there was nothing left to burn. But then a slight puff of breeze from offshore drifted over them and he smelled it, an aroma so long absent he at first assumed it was an olfactory illusion.
“Rain!” Anna cried. “I smell rain!”
Andrew scanned south toward the bay. He couldn’t make out thunderheads. The haze was too thick. But now that he was scrutinizing the horizon in that direction, he noticed a bruise that had not been there before, a pale blue stain that might have been empty sky or the first hues of an approaching storm.
“I thought I heard thunder earlier,” Grace sang, shielding her eyes with a hand.
“Oh, no,” Cho whispered. The spoken words were a peal of alarm that caused Andrew, Grace and Anna to start in unison.
“What?” Andrew was already motioning Grace and Anna to the floor. Down! Down!
The doctor pointed, and a moment later he saw them: drifting shapes a hundred yards to the southeast, approaching in a leisurely flotilla of lethal pincushions.
“So many.” Cho pulled the gun from the small of her back and flicked off the safety.
“What is it?” Grace demanded, looking about frantically and pulling Anna to her so tightly his daughter protested she was being squished.
“Don’t look!” Andrew sang, pulling the .45 revolver from his belt and checking to make sure there was a round in every chamber. “Just keep your heads down and your eyes closed.”
“Is it them?” She appeared to engulf Anna, arms and legs in constant motion as if she were attempting to spread herself thin enough to cover her child in a living cloak. “Your father’s monsters?”
“Just keep your eyes closed until I tell you it’s safe. No matter what you hear, keep your eyes closed.”
“Daddy, I’m scared.” Anna’s voice was muffled in the folds of her mother’s shirt.
“It’s going to be okay. You’re going to hear some loud pops, but don’t open your eyes. I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”
The ancient lie, repeated from parent to child since the dawn of language. Andrew positioned himself between his family and approaching death and his gaze fell for a moment to the park far below.
Not just an aerial assault. The ground was alive with bilantu: quintaloch, squim, others he couldn’t remember the names of. They leaped and scampered and slithered and rolled toward the tower to join whatever was already down there.
His throat closed and he licked dry lips with a dry tongue. God, he could use a drink right now. He remembered Katie’s hand reaching out to take the water bottle with Comanche’s knife at her throat, the way the water had gushed from the open top when she gripped the plastic. That was what he wanted, a cold bottle of water. The realization sparked a crackle of elation that raced down his spine. When was the last time craving a drink prompted thoughts of bottled water? It meant nothing, of course, other than perhaps mild dehydration, but it felt like a victory, maybe the last he would ever claim.
“Fill your pockets with ammo,” he advised Dr. Cho. “We don’t want to be groping around when it comes time to reload.”
As they filled their pockets he caught the faint melody once again. He felt the tower vibrating at an ever-increasing frequency through the soles of his feet. The banging at the hatch below was now an incessant pounding. To the south, the breach was an enormous black, frothing mouth and fifty yards to the southeast the votasin were riding a rain-scented breeze toward their prey.
Andrew lifted the revolver, rested his firing hand in the palm of the other and carefully sighted the barrel at the nearest target. He remembered a line of advice from a movie: squeeze the trigger, don’t pull it. But not yet. They were still too far away. He and the good doctor would need to make every shot count.
As his finger tightened on the trigger Andrew heard the first faint rumbled of thunder, and for reasons he would never fully understand thought, Christmas in July.
“How long?” Little Billy asked. He was facing Hamilton, but his eyes were on the cell tower behind the captain. What had been a suspicion a few minutes ago was now a certainty. The structure was slowly pitching forward into the breach. Some sort of attractive phenomena maybe, the metal tower responding to the tug of geomagnetic forces emanating from the vetro’s world?
“Should only be a few minutes,” the captain said, re-holstering his radio. “Chopper was already in the air. Only thing left still fighting the fire.” He saw Little Billy’s gaze, turned to the cell tower, and snorted. “Perfect.”
“You need to get everyone out of the way,” Katie advised, sweeping her hand back and forth through the air.
Hamilton’s face hardened. “Or what? People will die?”
He understood the man’s bitterness. During his frantic search for the captain, he and Katie had witnessed half-a-dozen deaths, men and women disintegrating under the whip of massive flagellum, disemboweled, dismembered, decapitated. Firefighters crushed under hurled projectiles, smeared across the pavement, yanked into hell.
For creatures of such technological supremacy, capable of reaching across entire universes to slaughter their livestock, they fought like schoolyard bullies, swinging at anything within reach. Maybe that’s the way they liked it, the satisfaction of getting whatever substituted for their hands nice and dirty. And yet, if their intention was to terrify their opposition into flight, the vetro offalate had miscalculated. Hamilton wasn’t afraid. He was furious.
The captain sighed and rubbed his eyes. “You’re right, of course.” The radio was in his hand again. “Maybe it’ll take out some of those fuckers when it falls.”
“They’re moving slower.” Little Billy offered. “Have you noticed?”
“Unless a squadron of F-22s is minutes from lighting this place up, I don’t see it making much of a difference.”
Little Billy drifted away as the captain began singing into his radio. The morning’s adrenaline was evaporating once again, leaving a residue of fuzzy numbness behind. Dispatching the helicopter felt like the final act in a Herculean list of chores, and with its completion, his usefulness was at an end.
He watched the wall of vetro as they swayed and thrashed against the water jets. They were little more than images projected onto an enormous screen. He felt nothing. Maybe he was slipping into shock. Firefighters sang and screamed around him. Police officers reloaded. Fifty yards away, a sheriff’s department cruiser lay upended, its hood hanging open and dripping fluids like a lolling tongue. Little Billy wondered if its deputy was still alive and found he didn’t care. All he wanted was to curl up in a ball and go to sleep. The ground seemed to tilt and he reached for Katie’s hand to steady himself.
Jason’s body was a smear of gore from which an arm and leg protruded like the exposed limbs of someone frozen in a slab of bloody ice. The hand was clutching what looked like a small yellow walkie-talkie. Little Billy pried the fingers open. The light from the xalantracoil was a nova off to his left, and as he retrieved the detonator, a shadow fell over him.
He jumped forward. The impact pulped the live oak’s trunk and sent a concussive wave blasting through his chest like the bass notes from a gargantuan speaker. He rose from the muck and made the gap in the fence in a dozen unbalanced strides, expecting to be yanked backward or pounded flat at any moment. Was that howl in response to his actions, or had another firefighter hit the mark? This time he managed not to trip over a hose and came to a gasping, gulping halt in front of Katie. She grabbed him by the collar of his jacket and for an instant he wasn’t sure if she was going to kiss or slap him. She pulled him forward. Her mouth was over his, her tongue pushing past his lips with an urgency he was more than willing to accommodate.
“That was fucking amazing,” she sang when they came up for air. “You almost died like six times.”
“Well, I…”
She pushed him away and slapped him hard across the face. “Don’t ever do that again!”
“Yes, ma’am.” His cheek was hot, but his elation was like nothing he’d experienced before, even during the first, heady days of his and Laura’s relationship when every new glimpse of flesh had elicited a jolt of delighted gratitude.
“Now what? Just push the button?”
Little Billy raised the detonator, his thumb hovering over the obvious choice for the trigger, a large red button beneath a dial pad.
“Let’s see.”
A ghastly notion occurred in the same instant his thumb pressed down: what if the explosive charges no longer existed in this world? What if they had been teleported a universe away and now lay buried beneath an alien crust?
The idea was apparently confirmed in the next instant. No explosion. He turned to Katie, stricken, but she pointed to the side of the detonator, drawing his attention to a discrete slide switch he hadn’t noticed before.
“Safety?”
He slid the switch down and a small light at the top right corner of the detonator blinked on. Katie crouched down and plugged her ears with her fingers.
“We should warn everyone first,” Little Billy sang.
“No time.”
Little Billy hunkered next to her, raised the device above his head and hit the button a second time.
The explosion was strong enough to hurl the closest firefighters off their feet, rock the pumpers on their axels and shatter windshields. The ground around the xalanthracoil rose up in solid brown curtain that continued to expand in a conical wall as dirt and vegetation and headstones and fencing and hopefully ten million tiny pieces of vetro offalate rose a hundred yards or more into the air. Despite the upheaval, an odd stillness engulfed the street as debris spiraled in graceful trajectories to distant locations. It took a moment for Little Billy to realize the impression of calm was due to the world falling silent.
Katie was sprawled on her back. Little Billy rolled to her and saw her eyes were open and blinking. He thought he yelled, “Are you alright?” If felt as if he had, but he did not hear the words and Katie did not react. He waved his hand in front of her face and her eyes found his. He pointed to his ears. She shook her head. Something pinged him on the top of the head and he raised an arm, shielding her body with his as debris began to pelt down around them, splashing into the wet street and bouncing off the vehicles. The cascade lasted longer than Little Billy would have thought possible. As he waited to find out if he would be brained by something large enough to kill him or survive relatively intact, his hearing began to return the way sounds will creep back as water drains from a swimmer’s ear.
The first words he heard were Katie’s. “Did we do it?” She’d been repeating them for some time.
Little Billy shook the dirt from his hair and stood, pulling Katie with him. Around them, firefighters and police officers were regaining their feet as the unmanned hoses whipped and snaked in the ruined street.
“I still hear them,” he sang, pointing to his temple.
A moment later a blanched appendage groped through the thinning dust cloud. Then another. The light of the xalantracoil emerged through the murk, dimly at first, a headlight approaching on a foggy stretch of highway. It brightened steadily in the clearing air until it shone forth in blinding triumph. But the crater around it! Little Billy had no idea how many metric tons of earth the blast had excavated, but it must have been a dozen or more. How could the thing still be standing?
“Hoses, hoses!” Someone was singing. “You.” Sid yanked Little Billy forward. “Help me get ahold of this thing.”
Little Billy wanted to ask what was the point? All they could do now was delay the inevitable. But he followed the firefighter to the thrashing hose and fell on it and wormed his way toward the nozzle, the canvass bucking and twisting under him as if it were a living thing. Sid put the nozzle in a headlock and the flow of water suddenly stopped.
The rest of the firefighters were quickly re-establishing their position, closing rank, filling gaps. Little Billy thought of ants beginning the rebuilding immediately after a sneakered foot smashes their mound flat. They would remain until the end, resist until the end. They would die at their assigned positions and they would die singing. It was as good a way to go as any.
“Think I could man a hose?” Katie asked.
Little Billy blinked at her. “I don’t know. It would take some strength.”
Katie pointed to a female firefighter down the line. “She’s doing it.”
“The two of you could, if you worked together,” Sid answered. He swept his hose back and forth across the vetro offalate now emerging en masse from the thinning dust cloud. Little Billy noticed they were no longer steaming. Apparently, the firefighters had doused them enough to significantly lower their temperatures. Were they moving a little slower than before, or was that wishful thinking?
“These hoses are supposed to be manned by two people anyway,” Sid continued. “Just keep the line straight and the nozzle dialed down to a tight jet. Hold on tight, like you see me doing, feet spread wide. When you’re ready, pull back on the bale and let her rip.”
“Bale?” Katie asked.
“Handle. Forward to close, backward to open. If you see a firefighter go down, take their place.”
Before Little Billy could ask any follow-up questions, his shirt pocket began to vibrate. Retreating further behind the engines, he pulled his phone from his pocket, saw who was calling and touched the screen. For the next two minutes, he stood singing out increasingly perplexed questions as Katie circled him in a decaying orbit, ever closer, ever faster. Finally, he ended the call and looked around as if searching for a familiar face in a crowd of strangers.
“What, what?” Katie demanded.
Little Billy ran back to Sid. “I need to find someone in charge! Someone with connections to the top.”
“Hamilton’s around here somewhere. You remember what he looks like? Work your way south.”
“What’s going on? That was Andrew, right? What’s he need us to do?”
Following the curve of the breach and scanning the face of every firefighter he passed, Little Billy spread his arms as if to embrace everything before him.
“Find a helicopter.”
“What?”
“If we don’t get a helicopter to the water tower, everyone there is going to die.”
Twenty-five
“Well?”
Andrew slipped the phone back into his pocket and turned south, trying to decipher what he was seeing. The smoke haze made it difficult to distinguish anything other than the boldest details, but it appeared the rim of the breach was steaming the way lava steams when it reaches the ocean. There was activity there, flashing lights muted to a watercolor glaze of alternating tints, ephemeral compared to the unwavering burn of the xalantracoils shining like a ring of fallen stars.
“He’s on it.”
“Does the fire department even have a helicopter?” Grace’s eyes were glassy, her lips bloodless. The only color in her face was the maroon crescents beneath her eyes.
“No. But the TPD does. The Coast Guard does. Every television station in the city does.”
“Andy.” Her voice broke and Anna reached up from her mother’s side to pat her shoulder.
“Don’t cry, Mommy.”
“Not me, my brave one.”
In the room below, another metallic bang sounded. Andrew had to assume the hatch was still holding, but each new blow rang a little differently than the last, the tone becoming looser somehow, more a clang than a thump. Occasionally, something would roar or scream or warble, but these were not the sounds that had prompted Andrew to call Little Billy. It was the grinding, the incessant crunch of stone against stone, or, more likely, tooth against concrete.
He could no longer ignore what his ears were insisting. Grace had been right. Something down there was eating its way through the walls of the tower and it was only a matter of time before the whole thing came crashing down.
Dr. Cho put a gentle arm around Grace. “I can give you a mild sedative, if you want.” They were all huddled together in the center of the roof. They had no choice. The circular platform was only twenty feet in diameter and enclosed by nothing more than a low, decorative crenellation of weathered concrete. Although she had tried to be surreptitious about it, Andrew knew Dr. Cho had noticed the bandages on his wife’s arms, and he suspected she also understood the implications of those wounds.
Grace shook her head. “No, I’m fine.” When the doctor said nothing, she looked Cho in the eye and repeated: “I. Am. Fine.”
“Am I going to ride in a helicopter?” Anna sang.
“That’s the plan,” Andrew replied, looking both adults in the eye until each gave a tiny nod. What they had just agreed to Andrew would never be certain, only that it was a wordless contract of defiance rather than deception.
“When will it get here?”
“Soon, honey. Real soon.”
Andrew cocked his head, his eyes narrowing in puzzlement.
“What?” Grace asked.
He shook his head. “Nothing. Thought I heard something for a second. Just my imagination.”
“Something bad, Daddy?”
Andrew cupped his daughter’s cheek. “Not bad. Something familiar. A little piece of a song. That’s all.”
“A happy song?”
Andrew nodded, although the momentary snippet he’d apparently imagined had plucked a cord of melancholy, nostalgia mixed with regret, fondness with loss. He wanted to poke his head through the opening to see what his father was up to. Something was certainly going on below. Even through his song, he could sense a growing desperation in the vetro offalate’s call, a rapacious gnawing to get in. But he could not look. His earlier realization had returned, the one forgotten when he and Grace had sung to one another the things unsung for too long. If they were all about to die for the sake of some unfathomable deception, he preferred not to know.
“Something’s coming,” Cho sang, and Andrew’s heart bolted into a gallop. “Can you smell it?”
He raised his nose to the air—as did Grace and Anna—and inhaled deeply. He’d been smelling the arid tang of the wildfire for so long it no longer registered. To the north, the rising sun blushed the grayish clouds of smoke as they piled into towering heaps, their tops smeared across the heavens by high-altitude currents like a thumb over a charcoal sketch.
The angry sky felt like an accusation. With no one fighting the blaze, how many homes had been lost? How many neighborhoods decimated? He imagined the flames marching unchallenged to the Gulf, leaping highways, consuming the tinder-dry urban canopy until there was nothing left to burn. But then a slight puff of breeze from offshore drifted over them and he smelled it, an aroma so long absent he at first assumed it was an olfactory illusion.
“Rain!” Anna cried. “I smell rain!”
Andrew scanned south toward the bay. He couldn’t make out thunderheads. The haze was too thick. But now that he was scrutinizing the horizon in that direction, he noticed a bruise that had not been there before, a pale blue stain that might have been empty sky or the first hues of an approaching storm.
“I thought I heard thunder earlier,” Grace sang, shielding her eyes with a hand.
“Oh, no,” Cho whispered. The spoken words were a peal of alarm that caused Andrew, Grace and Anna to start in unison.
“What?” Andrew was already motioning Grace and Anna to the floor. Down! Down!
The doctor pointed, and a moment later he saw them: drifting shapes a hundred yards to the southeast, approaching in a leisurely flotilla of lethal pincushions.
“So many.” Cho pulled the gun from the small of her back and flicked off the safety.
“What is it?” Grace demanded, looking about frantically and pulling Anna to her so tightly his daughter protested she was being squished.
“Don’t look!” Andrew sang, pulling the .45 revolver from his belt and checking to make sure there was a round in every chamber. “Just keep your heads down and your eyes closed.”
“Is it them?” She appeared to engulf Anna, arms and legs in constant motion as if she were attempting to spread herself thin enough to cover her child in a living cloak. “Your father’s monsters?”
“Just keep your eyes closed until I tell you it’s safe. No matter what you hear, keep your eyes closed.”
“Daddy, I’m scared.” Anna’s voice was muffled in the folds of her mother’s shirt.
“It’s going to be okay. You’re going to hear some loud pops, but don’t open your eyes. I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”
The ancient lie, repeated from parent to child since the dawn of language. Andrew positioned himself between his family and approaching death and his gaze fell for a moment to the park far below.
Not just an aerial assault. The ground was alive with bilantu: quintaloch, squim, others he couldn’t remember the names of. They leaped and scampered and slithered and rolled toward the tower to join whatever was already down there.
His throat closed and he licked dry lips with a dry tongue. God, he could use a drink right now. He remembered Katie’s hand reaching out to take the water bottle with Comanche’s knife at her throat, the way the water had gushed from the open top when she gripped the plastic. That was what he wanted, a cold bottle of water. The realization sparked a crackle of elation that raced down his spine. When was the last time craving a drink prompted thoughts of bottled water? It meant nothing, of course, other than perhaps mild dehydration, but it felt like a victory, maybe the last he would ever claim.
“Fill your pockets with ammo,” he advised Dr. Cho. “We don’t want to be groping around when it comes time to reload.”
As they filled their pockets he caught the faint melody once again. He felt the tower vibrating at an ever-increasing frequency through the soles of his feet. The banging at the hatch below was now an incessant pounding. To the south, the breach was an enormous black, frothing mouth and fifty yards to the southeast the votasin were riding a rain-scented breeze toward their prey.
Andrew lifted the revolver, rested his firing hand in the palm of the other and carefully sighted the barrel at the nearest target. He remembered a line of advice from a movie: squeeze the trigger, don’t pull it. But not yet. They were still too far away. He and the good doctor would need to make every shot count.
As his finger tightened on the trigger Andrew heard the first faint rumbled of thunder, and for reasons he would never fully understand thought, Christmas in July.
“How long?” Little Billy asked. He was facing Hamilton, but his eyes were on the cell tower behind the captain. What had been a suspicion a few minutes ago was now a certainty. The structure was slowly pitching forward into the breach. Some sort of attractive phenomena maybe, the metal tower responding to the tug of geomagnetic forces emanating from the vetro’s world?
“Should only be a few minutes,” the captain said, re-holstering his radio. “Chopper was already in the air. Only thing left still fighting the fire.” He saw Little Billy’s gaze, turned to the cell tower, and snorted. “Perfect.”
“You need to get everyone out of the way,” Katie advised, sweeping her hand back and forth through the air.
Hamilton’s face hardened. “Or what? People will die?”
He understood the man’s bitterness. During his frantic search for the captain, he and Katie had witnessed half-a-dozen deaths, men and women disintegrating under the whip of massive flagellum, disemboweled, dismembered, decapitated. Firefighters crushed under hurled projectiles, smeared across the pavement, yanked into hell.
For creatures of such technological supremacy, capable of reaching across entire universes to slaughter their livestock, they fought like schoolyard bullies, swinging at anything within reach. Maybe that’s the way they liked it, the satisfaction of getting whatever substituted for their hands nice and dirty. And yet, if their intention was to terrify their opposition into flight, the vetro offalate had miscalculated. Hamilton wasn’t afraid. He was furious.
The captain sighed and rubbed his eyes. “You’re right, of course.” The radio was in his hand again. “Maybe it’ll take out some of those fuckers when it falls.”
“They’re moving slower.” Little Billy offered. “Have you noticed?”
“Unless a squadron of F-22s is minutes from lighting this place up, I don’t see it making much of a difference.”
Little Billy drifted away as the captain began singing into his radio. The morning’s adrenaline was evaporating once again, leaving a residue of fuzzy numbness behind. Dispatching the helicopter felt like the final act in a Herculean list of chores, and with its completion, his usefulness was at an end.
He watched the wall of vetro as they swayed and thrashed against the water jets. They were little more than images projected onto an enormous screen. He felt nothing. Maybe he was slipping into shock. Firefighters sang and screamed around him. Police officers reloaded. Fifty yards away, a sheriff’s department cruiser lay upended, its hood hanging open and dripping fluids like a lolling tongue. Little Billy wondered if its deputy was still alive and found he didn’t care. All he wanted was to curl up in a ball and go to sleep. The ground seemed to tilt and he reached for Katie’s hand to steady himself.
