Filaria - Brent Hayward [44]
“Distress?” Laughter now, drifting down from above. “May you be of fuckin assistance?” The girl’s tone, verging on shrill, held elements of fear or maybe even desperation. She was clearly in trouble. Mereziah was sure of it, despite her bravado.
“I wanna see your face. Where are you? I wanna see that you’re not one of those fuckin soldiers.”
“I assure you,” Mereziah responded, climbing back up slowly toward the giant pod, “I am no threat. I am not a soldier. Why in the world would there be soldiers about? I am an attendant. Shine the light away from the window; it’s too bright; I can’t see.”
Rubbing at his watering eyes, he peered over the windowsill and into the pod. There she was. A girl, standing, scrawny in the beam of her own torch, hardly more than a child. Sickly? No. Merely dirty, skinny, and tired. (A striking face, however, under those smears and tear streaks.) One fist clenched tight on the haft of the torch, the other shielding large, wide-spaced eyes. Not as big as the eyes of a lift attendant, of course, but not as small as the eyes of a person who always lives in light. No hair on that blotched pate. No teeth, hiding in that grimace? Hard to tell, but it looked that way.
She was dressed in grubby pants, grubby shirt. Defiance personified. Wiry muscles down her limbs. A sight, he decided — as they sized each other up — of surprising beauty.
“Wow,” the girl finally whispered, breaking the spell, stepping back. “You’re so fuckin old.” The light beam wavered. “How old are you?”
“One hundred years,” Mereziah answered, unable to think of anything else to add. The question had stung him like a slap in his face. He said, “One hundred years old. Today.”
She was memorizing him, seeing his flaws, his very thoughts. He squirmed but her gaze lingered on him, exposed, out here, in harsh shadow and highlight. He felt her intelligence and insight burning into him.
“Your eyes are so huge,” she said.
“I live in darkness,” Mereziah said. “But I can see in the dark. What appears black to you looks dark grey to me.” An attendant’s joke, but the girl did not laugh. Neither did he.
“Can you help me, old man? Can you rescue me?”
“You do need rescuing?”
“Of course I need rescuing. Maybe I should be helping you?”
The smile, when it came, confirmed two things: one, that there were no teeth in that pretty mouth — only dark gums — and two, the girl had the capacity to radiate an intense allure he had never before experienced. Mereziah felt a rush of giddiness. My goodness, he thought, have I ever even seen a teenaged girl?
Movement from behind the captive. He squinted, said, “How many are in there? How many people with you?”
To his surprise, the girl laughed out loud at his question, but the laugh ended abruptly as she looked over her shoulder. At first he thought she was counting. Then he realized she was listening. He strained to listen as well but heard nothing.
“Is there one of those soldiers in there with you?” he asked quietly.
An image of the girl’s body, trapped by captors, entered Mereziah’s mind like a spectre of evil, of all the grievous injustices in the world, and crept slowly away, over the lobes of his brain, leaving unpleasantly lingering emotions.
I am going mad, he thought.
When the girl spoke again, it was also in softer tones: “I honestly can’t tell how many people are here with me, old man. Two dozen, maybe?” She shrugged. “They brought some others here, not long ago, and dropped them in. Once, they took a woman out. Then they brought her back. They asked her some questions, she said. Looked into her eyes with a machine . . . They didn’t hurt her. I don’t really know what they want with us. Some people in here are hurt.”
As if on queue, a moan of pain rose from the dark reaches of the pod, crackling out from the tiny speaker on the windowsill. And what looked like a man’s face emerged, furrowed and scared, grimacing, but this image receded before Mereziah was certain of what