Filaria - Brent Hayward [1]
So they stopped.
Reversing, a long, smooth arc, brought the wall on Phister’s side closer. Rubber tires crunched lightly over dusty flags.
“There,” Phister said, pointing again. “See?”
Square, black, showing signs of polish through the grey clinging growth and marked down one side with copper script: clearly an outlet. Overgrown, unused for centuries, perhaps, or never, but for all appearances the same as others mounted in more familiar locations, back home.
The car was near exhausted. It had another hour or two left, at most. Phister suspected that old man McCreedy would have kept on driving until the vehicle ran out of juice, then got out and walked, then crawled, claiming until they both collapsed dead that he knew all the while where they were headed, home was just up ahead.
“We’ll reach a junction soon,” he said, as the car idled. “I remember. I was here as a kid. We take a left and come out at an air skirt, down a back hall for a few klicks and emerge in the secondary pipe room. Then home.” Gesturing with a slow sweep of his hand, meant to reassure, but Phister imagined the two of them lost forever. He pictured his own grisly corpse.
In the tiled gutter on the other side of the hall a small creature scurried. Young Phister kept his keen eyes peeled. Some of the older folks said that, like Reena. Keep them eagle eyes peeled, she’d say. You was born with good peepers. He wished Reena were here with them now. She would know what to do.
McCreedy motioned with his chin but Young Phister was already climbing down to unravel the plug from its stand. Winding the cord around his forearm and fumbling with the plughead against the cool power plate, he felt like a child again, helpless against lurking monsters, waiting in shadows to slash out and take him down, bloody, at the knees. He looked both ways before starting to scrape lichen and the deposits of time from the contacts with a gnawed thumbnail. How far did the world extend anyhow? Hallways and more of these deserted hallways, changing subtly, going on forever?
A mist of sorts lingered over the flags and a dank smell tainted the air, one he had not perceived seated in the car. Light was a little more yellow than he had grown up under, a flickering, sickly glow. Perhaps conduits had broken in the vicinity, long ago. Humidity was cloying and had damaged the ceiling.
“. . . charging . . .”
The car’s whisper startled Phister. The outlet was live, at least. Contact had been made between the plug and the plate. Not many outlets enabled the car to talk —
Phister looked up. He thought he had heard something else, aside from the vehicle’s weak voice. Something out there. He took a deep breath.
He tried to stop conjuring threats to his life but as a kid those monsters had filled his cold-sweat dreams. Now, as a man of sixteen, they were hard to shake.
He saw no source of the sound.
He did not hear it again.
The car, meanwhile, had reached sufficient power to address them: “Sirs,” it began, as it always did, when it had these opportunities, “my need of a tune-up and overhaul is dire. I implore you to seek the nearest member of MMG. You are — if I may be so bold — grossly abusing a vehicle belonging to the Department of Public Works.
“Are you ill-trained staff? Rogue guests? My i.d. reader seems to have been disabled. Renegades? Or perhaps there’s a problem with your comprehension? Complaints have been logged with my supervisor. I assure you, as soon as network links are restored, you will hear about this. If you are staff, your departmental budget will be charged. You will be suspended, pending a hearing. And if you turn out to be guests, you’ll be apprehended, incarcerated, and quite possibly evicted . . .
“Do your parents know where you are?”
With a ghost of a grin Young Phister glanced at McCreedy, but the taciturn expression on the older man’s face — staring forward, jaw thrust from under