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3rd Place Winner of the "Enter the World of Filaria" Contest

The suns blazed down on the manicured lawn. Sweat down his neck, but he did not wipe it away. His suit itched, in that all-over way only a new suit could. He would not scratch at his collar. He could not. Representatives from all the important plantation-level families were here. They had made birds for the occasion, for God's sake.

The Director's introduction droned to a conclusion. ". . . give you the Exploration Society's field researcher of the year." Disinterested applause. A clammy handclasp. Then he was at the podium. He looked down at his notes on the subcultures developing on the reservoir level. Gave a nervous cough. He looked out at the audience.

They were naked. All of them. Red blotched mottled their bodies. Pus oozed from sores. They stank of shit and blood. He swallowed. Saliva caught in his throat, congealed there. He coughed again, trying to dislodge it.

A paroxysm of coughing wracked his body. When it finally subsided, he looked down at his hand. Blood dripped onto the floor. Eyes blinked in dim light. The lift. He was still trapped in the damn lift.

He tried to stand, to look out the small window. He could not get his legs to work. How long had it been since the attendant had appeared, asking if he required assistance? He still shivered at the way the scared, too-wide eyes had looked down at him. The way it had not met his eyes when it passed the damp, grey foodstuff through to him.

"Eat. Eat. Make you feel better."

His stomach churned. He had been so hungry. It had tasted surprisingly good, but he was miserable now. He did not know what exactly it had done to him.

He banged on the wall again, leaving a red stain. "Help! I'm trapped in the lift!"

A slit opened in the wall. He sat back in surprise. A bald head popped into the opening, looked right, then left. A face brightened in a black-gummed smile. "You're real, right? You're not just a dream?"

He could have laughed at the absurdity of her question. A girl, he realized. A young woman. Her eyes watered, her pink scalp and lack of teeth suggested some sort of environmental contamination. Yet there was a certain . . . charm about her. His loins in fact burned for her. He flushed and sat up straighter.

"So far as I know, I'm not a dream."

She launched herself at him, clung to him. The passage out of the lift closed. He did not care. "I was alone. They all left me." She weighed nothing against him. Covered his face with kisses. He kissed her back. She tasted of absinthe and rotten strawberries.

He wrapped his arms about her. Dirty fingers searched for ways into his clothing, touched his bare skin. She was fire, flames blazing down into his very bowels. He helped her remove the rest of his garments.

"It's good not to be alone."

She smiled and looked down at his waiting body. Her smile gave way to horror. She pulled away. He reached for her and she scrambled off him. He rose on trembling legs. She screamed and ran through the wall. Through the wall.

He stared at the red stain left behind. It was tacky and stank like shit.

Crazy. He was going crazy. People do not show up naked to an awards presentation, at least, not on plantation level. Girls do not disappear into lift walls. To prove his point, he walked forward, closing his eyes at the point he expected to bump his head.

He stepped through the lift wall into a chamber he had never seen before in all his travels. Glass cabinets lined the walls, each twice his height. Some were dark, a few broken, their twisted contents reeking on the floor. Those that remained intact made his jaw drop.

Each cabinet contained a body suspended in a milky liquid. Naked, eyes closed as if in sleep, wire umbilicals webbing the person into place.

A shiver ran up his spine as he walked among the cabinets. The faces were familiar to him, school chums whose names he had forgotten. Relatives he had not seen in a long time. He had played with that man as a child, made love to that woman with the long, black hair.

One of the dark cabinets. A cloudy mixture swirled within. His reflection stared back at him. Wild eyes. Red blotches over his naked body. Pus weeping from open sores.

It was a dream, like the audience and the girl. He forced himself to look away. The next cabinet hit him like a blow to the stomach. The hair. The face, the nose. Even the slight bow to the legs. Someone had grown a copy of him.

Or he was the copy.

No. He let out a cry, hammered at the glass with joined fists. How dare this . . . imposter float there smugly when he—the real he—was sick and about to die? Fury blazed in his veins.

A crack. He smiled. Focused his blows on the spot. His fists were bloody stumps. Finally the glass gave way. Fetid fluid flooded over him. The other he tumbled out, crashed into him, took him down to the floor. He coughed and sputtered. The fluid deluged him. The world went dark.

After the quarantine period, the attendant returned. He frowned. Someone had moved the lift pod in his absence. A quick check of the window showed the passenger had remained inside. Dead, in that very messy way symptomatic of the Red Plague. He was naked, lying in his own remains. Red stains on the walls and bloody fists showed how he had spent his final hours.

The attendant only hoped that the moss he had given the poor soul had eased his pain a little.

Donald Jacob Uitvlugt grew up in western Michigan and now lives in central Arkansas with his wife and dog. His speculative fiction has appeared in numerous print and online venues, including SpaceWestern.com, Renard's Menagerie, and the horror anthologies In Bad Dreams and Malpractice.