Filaria by Brent Hayward Page A

Mereziah’s nose. Mereziah stared past the whorls into those tiny, dark eyes. Somehow, he saw familiarity there, pulling him in, and he swallowed hard, managing to finally look away.
    “Uh,” he said, feeling a little dizzy, holding onto the netting while his stomach lurched. “From, from where have you descended? Have other attendants helped you get this far down?”
    Shockingly, sudden tears filled Mereziah’s eyes. His vision blurred. He swayed, wiping the tears away, astonished, hoping his brother would not wake up at this moment and climb up here to find him crying like a baby. What he had seen in those eyes was entropy and decay. Inevitable that all things come to pass. He had seen his own demise. He had seen the end of the world.
    “Did you come for me?” he asked weakly. “Fool that I am, I thought your descending pod might arrive with news of a more pleasant nature. I even imagined a, well, a companion. One other than yourself.” A quiet sob racked his long frame. “You see, when we were young men, my brother always talked about women. Women coming from up above. It’s embarrassing to admit, but for a second . . .” He tried to smile but it would not come.
    “Life, to me, seems to have been some sort of bad joke. I didn’t have many experiences as a youth and I told myself there was always time and opportunity. Adventure, travel, maybe even a family, all that anyone might dream of, without asking too much, even for a man in my position. But I’m one hundred years old today and nobody cares and the world has gone to shit.”
    The man inside the pod seemed to be listening.
    “My parents have been at the bottom of this shaft, waiting for me, for over eighty years. The Red Plague killed them. When my brother and I were still children. Do you know what the Red Plague is? There’s not much of it around now. At least, I don’t hear much about it these days. But maybe that’s because we see less and less people down here — maybe it killed more than I suspect. Did it ever reach the level you’re from?”
    The passenger’s fingers described delicate motions on the steamed window.
    “It’s a terrible disease. Horrible,” Mereziah whispered. “My father’s and my mother’s insides turned slowly to liquid and drained right out of them. They coughed up blood for months. They shat out blood, if you’ll excuse me saying so. In the end they shat out little bits and pieces of themselves. And, shortly before they died, chunks. They shat their guts out. During it all, as they went crazy and their minds fell apart, they said the most awful things to each other, and to me, and to my little brother. They accused us, well, let’s say that if someone you’re close to contracts this ailment, it’s a blessed relief when they draw their last breath and finally plummet down, out of sight.”
    Mereziah had not mentioned his parent’s death in decades, not to anybody, not even Merezath, and as these words left his constricted throat he felt a sense of unburdening building inside him, as if he might actually be able to float away from the wall and rise up, possibly even to the top of the world. In shaky tones, he continued, expecting rapture now, epiphanies, redemption.
    “My, my brother and I were too young to be left alone, but we knew the meaning of duty — we had been well trained, if nothing else — and even though traffic has never been heavy here at our station, we attended every pod that ever stopped. And we sent them on their way. Most of them. Some we had to refuse and send back up, or down, as the case may be: underage passengers without a parent, or those who appeared infirm or unable to make a lucid choice of their own — ”
    Mereziah broke off; this passenger’s mental state was obviously similar to the ones he had begun to describe and he did not want to upset the man inside the pod, should he — by some means unapparent as of yet — understand what Mereziah was saying and consequently become