Filaria - Brent Hayward [81]
“An elevator?”
“That’s what we like to call lift pods around here. Nostalgia suites, you see. Part of the whole package. The jargon. You’ll get used to it.”
“Thanks for the tip.” Tran so started walking.
“Sir?”
“Yes?”
“Welcome to the team.”
“Thanks . . . And sorry about the bell.”
“Sir, you’re going the wrong way! Elevators are to your right!”
Tran so, out in the hall, had started to trot. “I know,” he shouted, over his shoulder, “but there’s something I have to do first.”
4. THE ANCESTORS
PHISTER, L15
A steady trickle of people emerged from the smoke and slow-moving dust billows that rolled forward over the tiling. Dazed, they advanced, trancelike, towards the car. With his filthy shirt pulled up over his nose, Phister drove slowly around these refugees, in wide curves, drifting from one side of the hall to the other to avoid hitting them. Some limped, some left a trail of blood, some were so grievously wounded they should not even have been able to walk. Several sat with their backs to the wall, sleeping perhaps, too exhausted to continue. Maybe dead. Regardless of their state, all ignored him.
The air held a hint of acridity, even inhaled through the soiled fabric of his shirt. Smoke, naturally, but there was also a reek of underlying chemicals, a tangy bite at the back of his sinuses. This noxious brew was further compounded by the growing odour emanating from McCreedy’s corpse, stiffening in the passenger’s seat, where Phister had finally been able to wedge it. The old man’s body turned greyer, curling further in on itself with each passing minute. McCreedy’s cheeks were hollowed, his eyes yellow, glazed.
There was grit under the tires, grit on the walls, grit thick, hanging in the air. Unseen filtering machines hummed laboriously, sucking and blowing with little effect.
Under their patina of dust, the oncoming people were darker skinned than he, and generally taller. With black, almond-shaped eyes. And hair, of course: dark and straight. Teeth, too. Streaked and bloody and dusty, but teeth nonetheless. It was starting to seem that everyone had teeth and hair except for him and McCreedy.
Who were these people? Shades? They had continued to coalesce long after he was sure there could not possibly be more, materializing by the hundreds: families, pairs, stragglers. A father carried his child, draped limply in his arms. The child’s eyes were open but unseeing. For that matter, so were the dad’s. An elderly man, naked — as most were — had been splashed with blood or paint across his chest, streaked with white powder over his face.
Like all the others, he drifted quietly by.
Ghosts, Phister thought. These people are ghosts.
On this one, a horrid abdominal gash let slip a grey loop of intestine. Phister stared at the exposed innards in dismay as, stoic, the wounded man lifted red-rimmed eyes to peer beyond, down the hallway.
Phister almost attempted, for maybe the tenth time, a stab at communication, but that dusty dangling gizzard made useless words fail in his dry throat.
There were bizarre animals, too — the likes of which he could never have imagined (except in the recesses of his moss-fever dreams) that scurried, crawled, slithered, or swooped overhead, emerging, like their human counterparts, from the roiling smoke and dust. The beasts, however, met his eyes warily, and gave the car clearance.
They too were going in the opposite direction.
In the first desperate encounter with this unnerving parade — breathing fast, adrenaline coursing — Phister had shouted at the people to stop, to help him, help his friend. That was before he realized these hordes needed more help than he did, and that McCreedy was beyond all help.
But did these people not understand him? Could they not even see him?
Only when he heard one finally cough did he cease entertaining the uneasy idea that they all might be dead, himself included, and that he was in a new world, a necropolis, propelled there by his