Nightmare Journey

by Dean R. Koontz

  They walked on.

  A few moments later, composed again, Jask said, “What you said about your eyes—”

  “Yes?”

  “That can't be right.”

  “Can't it?” the bruin asked. If he did not chuckle aloud, the humor was implicit in the tone of his voice. He said, “What was it that I said?”

  “That your eyes were much better than mine. But I'm a Pure, and you're a tainted, and no eyes can be more efficient than what Nature, in Her Great Plan, originally intended for the Chosen Species to—”

  “I was formed in an Artificial Womb, or at least my ancestors came directly from the altered genes of someone who was. That first bearlike ancestor of mine was made by genetic engineers, which means he was not only the exotic and decorative child his parents wanted and paid for, but had been improved by the engineers wherever possible.”

  Jask rejected that notion without commenting on it.

  “Aren't I stronger than you, little man?” the bruin asked.

  “That means nothing.”

  “If I'm stronger, what's to keep me from having better eyesight? Clearly, my muscles are better than yours. Why not my eyes as well?”

  “The very fact that you are gargantuanly muscled is evidence of your inferiority in comparison with Pure men. A true man can create machines to do the work his muscles once did. A true man can create weapons to destroy enemies a hundred times his size, weight and strength. Muscles are the sign of a throwback, indicating genetic damage.”

  “Muscles are worthless, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “But don't you wish you had them now?”

  Jask said nothing.

  “And don't you wish you had my eyesight — even if it is no better than yours? I seem to find my way well enough. And here, be careful now. We're making a turn into a side tunnel.”

  Jask felt his way around the twist in the stone and had to step up his pace to catch the bruin again, since the tainted man had not slowed down for him. He said, “A Pure must never place himself in a position—”

  “To hell with that,” the creature said, not nastily, just wearily. “I don't want to hear any more of your evangelism. You forget, anyway, that you're no longer a Pure, yourself.”

  Jask felt tears burning at the corners of his eyes and quietly cursed himself for his emotional weakness. He was relieved that the bruin could not see this final evidence of his moral decay, this ultimate, very unmanly weakness.

  They walked for another three minutes, without speaking, listening to the brackish water splash under their feet.

  Then the bruin thought to him: It's not unmanly.

  What do you mean?

  Tears, crying.

  Jask realized, bitterly, that with a telepath he had no real privacy unless the creature was gracious enough to grant it to him.

  Men cry, the bruin said. Men have always cried. If your holy Lady Nature gave you tear ducts, what else are they for?

  Keeping the eye clean.

  The bruin said, I hadn't realized the Pures practiced a machismo sort of—

  “Please cease speaking to me that way,” Jask said. “I won't have a tainted in my mind like that. It makes me ill.”

  The bruin did not respond, and the attitude he took seemed to mean he had been hurt by the rebuff.

  A moment later the creature stopped and said, “We'll be getting out of the drains now.”

  “How?” Jask asked.

  “Can't you see the entrance cover overhead?” the bear asked.

  The question had simply been meant to taunt Jask, to repay him a little for his brusque rejection of the quasi-man's sympathy. Still, he peered into the pitch darkness overhead, staring hard, desperate for a glimpse of the outline of a door. So far as he could tell, there was not even a ceiling above them, only unlimited, empty space.

  “Here,” the bruin grunted, gripping something heavy, straining upward, rattling a heavy stone slab out of place. A few seconds later he had lifted the shield out of the way and slid it onto the floor of the room above. Faint, gray light shone into the sewer entrance, doing little to dispel the darkness but enough to quiet some of Jask's fear. The air that came with the light was dry and warm, somewhat stale but infinitely preferable to the degrading stench of the drains.

  “What's this?” Jask asked.

  “A warehouse,” the bruin said.

  “Is it safe?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “You seem to know the drains well.”

  “I've scouted them,” the bear-man said. “Against just such a need as this.”

  He gripped the edges and muscled himself through the manhole, collapsed onto the floor above and swung out of sight.

  Jask jumped, gripped the edges of the trapdoor and strained for all his might, with little reward.

  “Here,” the bruin said. “I'll give you a hand.”

  “No,” Jask said between gritted teeth, sweat dripping into his eyes and gliding slickly across his pale face like beads of oil across a sheet of plastic. “Never mind. I will be fine. Just fine… on my own… thank you, anyway.”

  The bruin snorted sarcastically. “Is this meant to prove something?” he asked, looking down through the hole, framed by the stone edges, offering his huge, hair-matted paw with the claws drawn back into their sheaths.

  Jask grunted, grappled desperately for a second, felt his arms go limp, lost his grip and fell backwards, splashed into a viscous mess of water, mud and dark fungus. A heavy, bulbous spoor sac popped open before its time, casting out thousands of unformed, undried germ seeds like droplets of mucus. The odor, when it caught Jask square in the face, was like a rotting corpse.

  The bruin leaned closer, stretching his arm deeper, and he said, “Are you all right?”

  Jask rose out of the muck without speaking, without brushing himself off, and he jumped for the rim of the hole, grabbed it again, struggled with all his will.

  “Look,” the tainted creature said, “that posse we just barely avoided back there in the cellar of the inn is going to be close on our trail. They're sure to have put men down in the drains after us, and those men will have good, bright lights. Which means they'll be able to make very good time. If you don't swallow your stupid pride and take my hand, you'll get us both caught. You understand? You want that?”

  At last, weary, Jask took hold of the bruin's massive paw and was lifted out of the dark drain into a much more pleasant place: a large, windowless room where hundreds of crates and baskets were neatly piled in parallel rows.

  The bruin slid the flat stone slab into its niche, effectively sealing the drain exit. Even if the Pure soldiers followed the fugitives' trail, they would never be able to lift that heavy stone. For the moment, then, Jask and his tainted companion were safe.

  5

  Two-thirds of the way between the floor and the ceiling, a walkway protected by a wooden railing circled the main warehouse room and led to a loft at the front of the building, which served as offices for the establishment. From this loft the two espers could look out onto the main street of the town, through two dirty windows, observing but unobserved.

  The fog had all but dissipated, and the sun's golden fingers lay over everything.

  “There,” the bruin said. “Two of them.” He pointed west along the dusty street. “See them?”

  Jask could see them well enough: a pair of robed Pures waiting by a street entrance to the storm drains, their cloaks hanging in the still air, their skin so white they looked inhuman. Was Jask's own skin as pale as that? And why had he never noticed such things before?

  “And over there,'' the bruin said, pointing much closer to the warehouse.

  Two Pures loitered in a darkened doorway to a shuttered taproom, waiting anxiously for something to happen, their chalky faces almost brighter than their robes in the concealing fall of early morning shadows. They looked terribly tiny, frail and utterly ineffectual of themselves — but they carried two heavy rifles that appeared to be well-main
tained and capable of causing damage on a scale that only the prewar humans could have planned.

  “There, too,” the tainted creature said. He pointed eastward to where a single Pure soldier, armed with an even more deadly looking weapon, patrolled the flat roof of a boardinghouse. “They must be everywhere in town.”

  “The General did not spare any effort,” Jask agreed, remembering the length of the column of soldiers that had twisted its way down the white cliff from the fortress. “When a — a tainted creature is found among the Pures in an enclave, the community feels — betrayed, used. The proper disposal of the traitor then becomes a matter of vengeance as well as a religious necessity.”

  The bruin snorted and turned away from the grimy window. Head held low between his thick shoulders, he lumbered across the creaking loft floor and disappeared down a set of rickety, wooden stairs to the main warehouse level.

  Jask followed.

  Among the rows of carefully stored goods, the bruin located a crate that clearly had special significance for him. He grinned when he saw it, revealing a great many sharp teeth, and he said, “I'm still one step ahead of them.”

  “Of whom?” Jask asked.

  The mutant did not respond. The crate that drew his interest was stacked atop another exactly like it, in a row of fifty that matched. He reached up, put his thick arms around it, tilted it back against his chest, tottered backward and set it down in the middle of the aisle. Moving swiftly now, still grinning, though the grin appeared to be more of a rictus than evidence of genuine amusement, he slipped his wickedly sharpened claws beneath the plank lid and, straining upward, his muscles bunched mightily beneath his musty coat of fur, tore the crate wide open. He tossed the nail-studded lid aside as if it were a scrap of paper; it clattered loudly on the stone floor.

  Curious as to what the box could possibly contain that might have any bearing on their predicament, Jask stepped forward and peered into it. In the dim gray light that filtered weakly down from the loft windows he could see nothing more than a dark, formless lump.

  For a terrible, brief moment he thought the crate contained a dead man.

  The bruin reached into the box, wrestled with the contents, and lifted out an enormous rucksack that appeared to be packed tight with all manner of gear. He put it down on the floor between them and checked the many straps and buttons. “Seems okay.”

  “What's in it?” Jask asked.

  “Food, tools, maps, a book or two — just about everything you'd need to survive in the Wildlands.”

  “No one can survive in the Wildlands,” Jask said.

  The mutant did not deign to answer.

  “You knew that you might have to run for it?” the Pure asked, slightly perplexed by the manner in which the tainted being seemed capable of dealing with any eventuality.

  “Of course,” the bruin said. “Didn't you?”

  “No, I—”

  The tainted bear-man did not wait for Jask to finish his reply. “I knew, when the talent first came to me — gradually at first, then with more power — that I wouldn't always be able to conceal it.” He wiped a huge hand across his wrinkled, dark face, pushing at his blunt nose and snuffling as if to clear his head and think more soundly. “The talent becomes second nature to you. It would be just as easy — or difficult, rather — to hide the fact that you had two legs or eyes.'' Satisfied that the rucksack had gone unmolested, he stood up and stretched. “Besides, the power's like — a compulsion, a need. I tried to ignore it, because I knew it could ruin me, make me an outcast. But I learned it would never go away and that I couldn't suppress it. When it's not used, it sort of builds up, a heavy pressure inside — and then it manifests itself when you're not expecting it.”

  “I know,” Jask said, sadly. He looked at the rucksack again and said, “Why did you hide your provisions here, in a warehouse?”

  “It's my warehouse,” the bruin said. “Or — it was. I doubt they'll permit me to go on with my business.” He laughed sardonically. “If they hadn't come upon me by surprise, I. would have been gone six hours later.”

  “Where will you go, though?” Jask asked.

  “I've already said.”

  “No one can survive the Wildlands,” Jask said. “Nature isn't in charge there. She's been put out by the Ruiner.”

  “No theology, please,” the bruin said. “We have to pack your supplies, and quickly. I don't imagine it will take them long to break in here on the off chance that we—''

  “You expect me to go into the Wildlands?” Jask said, incredulous.

  The bruin rooted industriously through a few nearby baskets, found a small, gray cloth sack, emptied its contents onto the floor and handed it to Jask. “I'll choose the stuff that goes in it,” he said. “Come along, now.”

  Jask followed down the aisle and into another one, numbed but able to speak. He cleared his throat and said, “I am not going to go with you.”

  Casually the bear-man tore open another crate, which proved to be packed full of paper-wrapped lengths of dried, salted meat, the ends of the packages tied with larded string. He lifted out handfuls of this and put it in the sack Jask held. “This gets to be pretty damn boring as a regular diet, but at least it's nourishing.”

  “Look,” Jask said, “I can't possibly—”

  The bruin waddled off to another batch of containers, opened several baskets and poked around in them, came up with half a dozen pieces of fresh fruit, dropped those into the Pure's sack. “Now, let's see… a few tools… certainly a knife…”

  Jask dropped the sack.

  “What's this?” the mutant asked.

  “Forget it. I'm staying here.”

  “They'll have you in less than an hour.”

  “Nevertheless, I stay.”

  The bruin bent, picked up the sack and handed it to him again, saying, “You're coming along, so get used to the idea.”

  Jask dropped the sack again. He was shaking so badly that his teeth rattled in the still of the storage chamber. “No.”

  This time the tainted creature did not pick up the sack, but he picked up Jask instead, gripped him by the collar of his cloak and hoisted him off the floor, so that they were eye-to-eye. He peeled his black lips away from his teeth and grinned that Satanic grin of his. His dark tongue licked the points of all those white teeth, as if he were anticipating the first bite. When he spoke, his voice was like a carefully controlled peal of thunder, all the force of his big lungs behind it. “Either you come with me, little man, or you die here, now.”

  Jask sputtered but could not find any words. He had begun to think he should never have resisted the death sentence that had been passed on him the day before, in the enclave court.

  “I can't afford to leave you behind for those others to pick apart. You know I have a pack, well provisioned, and that I intend to set out across the Wildlands. When I reach the other side, I don't want to find that those Pure friends of yours have radioed others of their sort on the other shore. It would make the trek seem wasted.”

  “You'll never make it anyway,'' Jask said. “You'll die in the Wildlands. Therefore, everything else is academic.”

  The bruin's breath was not especially pleasant, and he let Jask have a strong whiff of it, square in the face. “One thing you've forgotten, though. It will take me the better part of the day to reach the Wildlands. If I leave you here, you'll have spilled everything long before then. I'll be caught before I enter the forbidden lands.”

  “I promise not to tell them,'' Jask said, swinging gently from the creature's clenched fist.

  The bruin spoke with undisguised anger and disgust, his eyes squinted beneath the heavy, bony brow. “You? Hell, you'll squeal like a pinned pig, tell them everything they want to know. You'll break in ten minutes, you puny little bigot.”

  Then he opened his hand and let go of the Pure.

  Jask fell in a heap at the tainted creature's broad, flat feet.

  “Get up, now.”

  Jask got up, hat
ing the big mutant but hating himself more. He rubbed his thin arms and wished that he did have a bit more muscle, enough to deal with the mutant.

  Five minutes later they had packed the sack and were ready to leave the warehouse.

  Jask said, “Where do you intend to go if you ever manage to get out of the Wildlands? No matter where you settle down, you'll be rediscovered. Your talent will flare up, unexpectedly. Or you'll use it too often to gain things you want and end up giving yourself away.”

  “I intend to find the Black Presence,” the bruin said. “And once I've done that, I'll have no need to live anywhere on this world.”

  For a moment Jask was speechless. When he could find his voice, he said, “Foolishness! There is no Black Presence. Do you sincerely believe in all those silly myths about other worlds, that man once traveled to the stars and is still being watched by an — an alien who's waiting to judge him?”

  “Why not?” the bruin asked. “It's history, not myth.”

  Jask grimaced, for he had realized that the bruin's world view was even more heretical, more unorthodox, then he had at first understood. “Then you must also believe that the Last War was fought between two different groups of men — instead of between man and the Ruiner, who had come to undo Lady Nature's work?”

  The bear-man laughed aloud. “My friend, the Ruiner you fear so much is only a myth. It is you who must relearn history, the true history of this sorry world.”

  “Heresy,” Jask said, apalled.

  “No, nothing of the sort. It is merely the truth,” the bruin said. “But all of this can wait until we're free of that pack of dogs baying at our heels. Let's go.”

  At the opposite end of the great chamber into which they had clambered from the sewer the bruin lifted away another stone slab, revealing a second drain. “It's only a different branch of the same system,'' he said. “This way, there's less likelihood of encountering those bastards hunting us.” He dropped his heavy rucksack through, went in after it, looked up at Jask, who stood trembling at the edge of the entrance. “I could be out of this hole and on top of you before you had a chance to run very far,” he growled.