Filaria - Brent Hayward [98]
Mereziah groaned, retching, wishing the mask or whatever it was over his mouth would suffocate him.
Steven’s hand still rubbed at his back. As those fingers pressed firmly against his spine, Mereziah finally understood what the man had implied in their brief, confused conversation: cognition filtered down through the miasma of self-pity and pain exactly like a distant light overhead was now doing, filtering down through the haze of smoke and rain and grey vapour. Suns, Steven had said. So now Mereziah understood. He said, “We are at the top of the world.”
“Yes.” Steven nodded. “We’re in a field, on the uppermost level.”
Since there was already moisture on Mereziah’s face, and his eyes had been watering for some time, it was hard for him to tell if more tears sprung from his ducts just then. The top of the world . . . How could this place — this muddy disaster — be the fabled upper reaches? Where were the fancy balls? Where were the green fields? Where were the children playing, laughing in the warm and welcoming light?
Both men, for a moment, were silent with their own disillusionments. Aside from the muted groans of the nearby wounded and the dripping of the dying rain, there was relative silence. Mereziah imagined that he might have shattered, with his own blatant disrespect for his position, with his bad decisions and addled capabilities, all bonds that held fragments of life, world, and reality together. Surely, it wasn’t possible that the upper level had always been like this: corrupt, smoky, filled with pain. That his lifelong dreams to reach here were a bitter joke, revealed to him just now, in his last days, after everything else had turned to shit.
Or did he bring this misery here?
“Was there,” Mereziah said carefully, “anybody else with me when you found me?”
“No, sir. There were no other people, I’m afraid. Are you searching for anyone in particular? A loved one?”
“I’m searching for someone, yes . . . These are fields?” He tried again, futilely, to sit up. “I’m in a field?”
“It used to be one, when this place first opened. We’re near the easternmost part of Grant Park. But everything’s changed . . . Listen to me, I tell you not to talk and then I ask you questions. Rest, sir, rest.” Steven’s hand remained on Mereziah’s shoulder. “Try not to breathe too deeply. You’ve been given menzatane. More help will be here soon . . . Now I have to attend other people. I have to go back down.”
“Look for a girl,” Mereziah implored, words rasping out of his dry throat. “Look for a young girl . . .”
“Your granddaughter?”
Mereziah winced. He lay back down. Shame had succeeded in crushing him flat. These fields, he thought, are consumed with fire and drowned in water. There are no parties. No fresh air. No laughter or open grass. Because I have brought a plague upon the world. I am pestilence. I have killed a dozen people. I have killed an innocent girl.
A loud and violent disturbance from the fog jolted him from his unpleasant reveries: agitated shouts, the tremendous sound of something large and fundamental shifting under him, trembling the very ground. He tried to get up onto one elbow; pain, spreading through him, was once again exquisite.
The man, Steven, was nowhere to be seen.
Moans coming out from the bank of mists now were certainly from a living creature, but not from any human. Peering in the direction, touched all over by goosebumps, Mereziah could not see the source. Had he heard this sound before? Was that a shadow, moving? Silhouettes of some huge bulk?
Now two men burst from the fog and smoke, running straight at him, in a panic, stumbling past on the slick ground and splashing him with mud and rain —
A massive shape, massive shadow, lumbering closer but still obscured within the grey confines. Again and again the ground shook. Mereziah, to his astonishment, actually got unsteadily to his feet — holding his left arm cradled; it remained useless.
Then all the smoke and mists and fog blanketing the landscape suddenly swirled upward into a vortex, torn away in an instant.