Filaria - Brent Hayward [56]
On the move, the gang was one entity: bright, lithe, well-defined. Their gait was fluid, their grace animal. Muscles, hard and harsh. Adorned with charms — dangling, draped, or pierced through their skin — a quiet tune of jangling rose and ebbed about the vehicle as it trundled on, woven into the louder calls and murmured talk. Phister recalled another quiet tune. Mostly he watched Cynthia. He felt like he was levitating. By all rights, he knew he should remain cautious about what had happened, try to figure out what she wanted with him, yet his mind simply raced in circles looking for something to say that would not sound asinine to her ears.
The boy behind Phister started to rock, causing the car to rock, and now he called to his friends a guttural phrase that Phister did not understand; the friends laughed until McCreedy barked, “Fucking stop that!”
The boy stopped.
Yet soon another, and another of the troupe clambered onto the car, causing the suspension to sag under their combined weight. McCreedy grumbled. A girl who had been kneeling on the trunk jumped off and landed, both hands clapping down on the shoulders of a dark-skinned boy with long braided hair, while the others remained perched, grinning, and Phister began to wonder if, somehow, more spells were being cast upon him or if the original spell the rod had put him under lingered. In the moments since visiting that strange place and occupying that cool, clean mind, a power not his own seemed to be building in his limbs. He felt it lurking, growing, like a buzz. And images from another life flickered in and out of the periphery.
He shook his head to clear it. Maybe he had gone too long without food or water.
His fingers tingled.
Running suddenly in front on the car, a lean boy with a milky cast to his eyes and a bandage over his left calf leapt up and pulled tangled vines down from the ceiling tiles. The lights up there were mostly covered by the thick growth; lighting itself in the hall was green and diffuse. When Phister and McCreedy had rolled out of the pod and saw that they had not arrived at the basement, as they had been hoping, but instead on some overgrown new level — just before they’d seen Cynthia and her gang — Young Phister had plucked and tried to eat one of the vine’s bitter leaves. He had quickly spit it out.
Walking next to Phister, so he could see her profile and the alluring motion of her limbs, Cynthia talked in low tones with another girl, one Phister had not yet met. Short, plump, with heavy arms. Her cheeks shook with each step. He was unable to hear what the two were saying yet he was sure the conversation concerned him and his reaction to the strange rod. Clearly, as he’d first thought, Cynthia had been taken aback by the episode. The hunter, as she called the device, had done something to him she had never seen it do before. Which made him think either she’d just acquired it, or had been misinformed, or misunderstood its function.
But Phister was having a hard time focusing on the implications of this. McCreedy wasn’t much help. Watching the shape of Cynthia’s breasts moving under her vest, Phister found his mind wandering. Did people up here, on these levels, have hair elsewhere on their body, aside from their head? Did they have hidden sets of teeth?
He closed his eyes. Leaning forward over his shoulder, one of the two boys who remained on the car — a boy about the same age as himself, with stiff, wiry hair growing on his chin and reeking of stale sweat — said, “I know who you guys remind me of. I just thought