Filaria - Brent Hayward [99]
He blinked.
Moisture, cold on his skin.
And stitches of pain, down his left side, but he was standing, staring incredulously into the near distance, where a handful people also stood, facing away from him.
The numerous wounded were laid out in rows and rows at their feet.
The apparition among them was a giant sloth.
It took a moment to register the creature as such; never before had Mereziah seen one of these beasts walking upright: it was massive, easily as tall as five men standing on one another’s shoulders. Rocking slowly from side to side, the beast shambled toward him on giant, incurved claws. Gravity was unkind to the sloth but fires below had been crueler still: in places, the shaggy, matted coat smouldered and on the huge humped shoulder a patch of meat sizzled. Trails of smoke tried to tether the beast to the background yet it came on, relentless, blindly moaning.
Behind the creature, tented by a structure that once must have been tinted festive colours but was currently grim and damaged, a hole yawned so large it could only be the opening of a lift shaft.
Able-bodied rescuers tried to drag victims out of the creature’s path; others attempted to distract the beast by waving, shouting, tossing clods of mud, wanting the sloth to veer away from the defenseless, but these objects bounced off of the scorched flanks as if they were nothing. The injured people alert enough and able to had begun to drag themselves away. The sloth swung its head toward Mereziah, as if seeing him there, and cried out an otherworldly roar.
“Stop,” Mereziah shouted, stepping forward. His legs trembled. Did the beast know he was responsible for its painful burns, for the ruination of its home? “Stop!”
Waving one arm, croaking out calls, Mereziah hobbled. He strove to attract those huge claws, possibly lead the beast back toward the hole — from which now came a belch of black smoke, jetting straight upwards, and another sloth, emerging, claws hooking onto the edge as it came, moving slowly.
Notions of sacrifice and redemption blinded Mereziah as he stepped among the wounded. Some looked up with glazed eyes. A few reached out: a blackened child with weeping burns, making a thin, consistent whining sound; a young woman with a bandaged torso; a chubby man in a singed white suit who managed to touch Mereziah’s leg —
Mereziah had no time to spare. He pulled free, his voice stronger than it had been in years, rising above the trumpeted pain of fellow man and tortured beast. He could not let his eyes waver from the rheumy gaze of the nearing sloth. Yet stepping among these wounded, how could he ignore the horrific nature of the injuries? People were bleeding their lives out into the mud, most so injured that they no longer seemed to have once been human. That sickening stench of burned flesh again, eroding his resolve. People were dying because of what he’d done. They would never return to life, nor cease to die, regardless of his attempts.
Surely, he might save a few? Wouldn’t that make a difference?
“Here!” he shouted, trying to keep his momentum. “Over here!”
Someone dressed in a brown uniform, with the same incomprehension in his eyes that Steven had, tried to stop Mereziah from getting any closer to the giant sloth; Mereziah wheeled. “That beast and I are from the same place! We must both go back!”
Uncertain, the man released Mereziah.
The sloth was perhaps a dozen metres or so from the nearest row of wounded, who had been arranged on coats and blankets by rescuers, filthy with mud and rain.
The second beast was fully emerged from the shaft, following its companion. Massive claws lifted, came down, slid slowly forward over wet grass and ichors.
A sudden whiff of wet, singed fur, as nauseating as the stench streaming up from Mereziah’s own comrades, and the equally foul breath of the sloth, looming over him, cascaded like an ill and roaring wind.
Sounds of a body being stepped on were not what Mereziah had expected; the human form gave up its shape with veritable silence, not much different in tone than the sound those huge