Nightmare Journey Read online

  Someone overhead shouted. A door burst open, and automatic weaponry chattered loudly. The soldiers had entered Jask's room. When they found him gone, they would sweep through the hotel in short order, shooting ahead of themselves, frantic men with frantic solutions. To them, he was an esper, a man who could never be permitted to live in peace. He was no longer a sacred vessel of Pure genes, but tainted, unfit, touched by mutation.

  “How can you get us free?” Jask wan ted to know. “They're everywhere in the hotel.”

  The bear laughed. “Release me, and I'll show you.”

  “Tell me your plan first.”

  “And have you use it and leave me here?”

  Jask was shocked by the suggestion. “I am a Pure. I have my scruples, my dignity.”

  “Sure. Right.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  The bruin said no more.

  It was Jask's turn to be angry. “Are you honestly suggesting that a Pure cannot be trusted?”

  The bruin was quiet.

  “Pures,” Jask informed him hotly, “are the ultimate of human evolution, untainted by impure genes, the sacred vessels of the primary creation, Nature's most excellent design. It is therefore clear that a Pure would not attempt to deceive you—''

  “Bullshit,” the bruin said. His gravelly voice was perfect for invectives.

  For a time they were stalemated. Spiders crawled in the dark corners of the stone room, and mice scampered along the floor searching for chinks in the mortar. Overhead, the Pure soldiers cried out to one another as they searched the inn.

  “You would kill me and leave by yourself,” Jask protested.

  The creature's simmering anger metamorphosed into something else altogether; bitterness and distaste. “I'm no killer. Leastwise not by preference. If you want to die here because you are too goddamned good and pure to help me, that's your affair.”

  Jask heard footsteps on the stairs from the second floor, more shrill commands, the General's imperial voice thundering like a call to judgment. A table in the common room crashed out of the way of the soldiers, eliciting a cry of anguish from Belmondo.

  “What can I do?” Jask asked.

  Perhaps even death was worse than putting himself in the hands of a quasi-man. If the General and the soldiers were correct. Jask had already been denied salvation and everlasting life-after-death. A little bit of consorting with the beasts could hardly make his situation any more dire than it already was. Having lost immortality, his mortal life had far more value than before, was worth the breaking of a few taboos.

  “I'm chained,” the bruin said. “The key to these manacles is on the shelf behind you, near those jars of pears.”

  Jask found it: a big metal skeleton key corroded and pitted with age. He returned to the bruin, his spine cold, his hands trembling. Even with Belmondo, a comparably mild mutant, he had kept his distance, the distance prescribed by holy writ. In the kitchen, last night, he had prepared his own meal, preferring not to have the innkeeper place fingers to his food. Now, with the musky odor of the animal-man all about him, his mind teetered on the brink of total revulsion.

  He wanted to run.

  Only: he had nowhere to go.

  A man left without a course of action is a man who will discard his dearest morals to find or create a new path.

  In a moment he freed the manacled right wrist. At the same spot on the left wrist, however, he encountered only a slickness without the restraining band. The slickness was blood.

  “I broke that manacle,” the bruin said. “But I couldn't manage the rest of it.”

  “Who chained you here?” Jask asked.

  “Later,” the bear-man said.

  Jask wiped his bloodied hands on his slacks, knelt and freed one of the chained feet. He found the other unencumbered and rose quickly so that he would not be kicked in the face and then trampled by the beast's heavy feet.

  The mutant chuckled.

  “You read minds better than I do,” Jask said. “You're reading mine right now, without any trouble, and I can't really feel you doing it.”

  “True enough, though that isn't what amuses me. You forgot that if I had wanted to kill you just then, I could have broken your neck with one blow while you were getting up fast to avoid my feet.”

  Jask shuddered but said nothing. He would not permit himself to be terrified by a quasi-man.

  The bruin chuckled again, then said, “If we're going to get through the next couple of days together — and I think it might be that long until we can safely split up — you're going to have to develop some cunning — a quality most of you Pures sadly lack.”

  “What makes you think we have to stay together once we leave here?” Jask asked. He had slowly begun to accept the fact he was not going to be killed immediately.

  The bruin shook his head. “A real lack of cunning,” he said sadly, much as he may have commented on another man's status as a cripple. “You don't, for a minute, think they'll stop looking for you when they find you gone from the inn, do you?”

  “Well—”

  “They'll spread the search and pick up your trail. You'll never make it on your own. Your chance is with me. Now come along.”

  “Wait.”

  “We have little time for argument,” the bruin said.

  “Why would you want to help me? What do you care whether they catch me once we've left here?”

  The bear-man hesitated a moment, then said, “Maybe I just want to get some gratification from having a Pure who's dependent on me. Maybe I would enjoy lording it over one of your kind. Satisfy you?”

  “For the moment, I guess.”

  The mutant shuffled across the cellar floor, his padded feet hissing on the stone. Behind a row of old clothes trunks he peered down a Stygian well set in the basement floor. “A storm drain,” he said.

  Jask could barely make it out, a blacker spot on the dark floor. Apparently his eyes had not adjusted to the gloom as well as the bruin's eyes had. He said, “You first.” His paranoia told him not to trust the hairy stranger, even though there was nothing else for him to do but trust.

  In a moment the quasi-man had lowered himself into the sewer and disappeared. Jask heard a faint splash of water, nothing else.

  He waited, reluctant to commit himself to such a comradeship as this, even if it were only temporary. After all, he was a Pure, even if he had fallen from grace. His blood flowed in a straight stream down the centuries from forgotten ancestors, a proud line of Pures.

  A burst of gunfire tore the cellar door into thousands of charred pieces that rained down from the top of the stairs.

  That made up his mind for him.

  He followed the telepathic mutant, the double outcast, into the stinking depths of the public tunnel, wondering how long and in what condition he would survive…

  3

  The General held the broken manacle in the light of the hand torch. He could see where the iron had cracked like plastic before the chain links had been able to separate. Whatever had broken free was not a thing to be taken lightly. He dropped the iron, brushed his hands together briskly.

  “Lieutenant!” he commanded.

  A Pure, robed in blue-white, hurried to him, carrying a small case from which wound a flexible steel cord that terminated in a ring of brassy metal. He activated the device for his superior. The air hummed with the resonances set up inside the compact machine.

  The General passed his hands through the brass circle, withdrew them, effectively sterilizing the flesh that had touched non-Pure artifacts.

  The lieutenant switched off the machine and retreated to stand at a respectful distance. His own lineage could be traced back a dozen or more generations to a straggler named Bomark, who had come to the fortress on the white cliff and was given shelter after the proper testing of his genes. Perhaps one of his descendants, two or three centuries from now, could hope to become the General of the enclave.

  “What was it like?” the General asked B
elmondo.

  The innkeeper said, “A great, bearlike man, Your Excellency.” He used the word “man” to irritate, though he knew the General's tolerance could swiftly give way to anger — and that anger could be deadly. “A child of the Wombs, if you ask me.”

  “But you were not asked.” The General's tone made Belmondo cringe and realize, suddenly, that he could not afford any more rebellion, no matter how low-keyed it might be. “You were asked only for a description,” the General said, “not for your uneducated suppositions.”

  Belmondo nodded penitently.

  The General was pleased with the tainted man's reaction. Now that he had been elected to the highest position in his enclave, a post that carried with it a lifetime term, he did not care especially to impress the living. What he wanted most, now, was to impress future generations, to become a moment of history far above those others who had served as the enclave's General before him. It was not altogether vanity that made this his motivation. If human history judged him favorably and named him as a great General, he could be almost certain that his descendants would supply at least one or two future Generals and that his family line would always know plenty and respect. Belmondo's obeisance was a sign that this entire affair would shortly be stabilized and finished with and that his own reputation would thereby be increased.

  He crossed to the storm drain and stared into the inkiness, aware that danger might very well lay only inches away, in those impenetrable shadows — but equally aware that bravery was expected of him. “This?” he asked Belmondo, indicating the drain.

  “For the rain waters,” the innkeeper explained. “When there is a storm, or when the river rises, the cellars gather water; they are imperfectly made. The sewer bleeds off the excess.”

  The General smiled and clasped both hands behind his back, pausing to deliver a few theological observations. “A human town, a Pure enclave, fashioned by the hands of untainted men, is never plagued by such problems.”

  Belmondo said nothing.

  “We see here,” the General added, turning to his soldiers and sweeping them with his forceful gaze, “another indication of the supremacy of the Pure strain. From a distance this village appears clean and quite efficient. Closer, one sees it is filthy and somewhat deteriorated, though one still feels it offers adequate shelter for the animals who built and live in it. Inside, at the core, however, one discovers that it is painfully flawed, as flawed as were the hands and minds and genes of the tainted creatures who constructed it.” The General was a wise man with complicated philosophy in every sphere but religion. Religiously, he was terribly naive. But then so were all his kind.

  Belmondo said, partly in defense of his people, partly because he felt he was expected to play the devil's advocate, “But the village is very old, and all things fall apart in time.”

  “Not all things,” the General said. “The enclave is countless centuries older than this place. It dates back to a time just after the Last War, perhaps twenty-five thousand years. Yet it is in as excellent a condition as the day it was finished.”

  “But,” Belmondo said, “it was constructed with forgotten machines, with the tools of the prewar men.”

  “Exactly,” the General said, pleased with himself. “That is just my point, you see. It was built by Pures, built to last.”

  “Yet,” Belmondo said, rolling his huge eyes, his black tongue flicking nervously at his lips, “the machines that built the enclave, and the others like it, have all decayed and been lost. If they survived, our own village could have been built with them, could have been made to last. I'd say it is not so much the fact that we were tainted that led to our constructing an imperfect town — but that we simply lacked the knowledge that man once had, the same knowledge even you, Your Excellency, now have no access to.”

  The General stared at him for a long moment, his eyes hard as bits of ice, his lips parted to show the sharp edges of perfect, white teeth. When he spoke, the good-natured, philosophic tone had vanished, and his voice was gruff and mean again. “You begin to bore me and to insult,” he said. “I expect the former, from a tainted creature, but never the latter.”

  Belmondo was quiet, though he longed to speak.

  The General returned his gaze to the open drain. “The sewer continues beneath the entire town?”

  “Yes,” Belmondo said.

  “And where does it empty?”

  “That is not known, Your Excellency.”

  The big Pure turned and stared hard at the tainted, his fierce eyes the brightest points in that dank chamber.

  Soldiers shifted, waiting for the worst.

  Belmondo said, hastily, fearfully, “That is the truth!”

  “I find it difficult to believe. Convince me.”

  Belmondo said, “The town was built some thousand years ago. Many generations have passed through it, lived and died in it. And the public records were burned during one of the Pirate sweeps through these parts — a hundred or more years ago. Since then, the knowledge of the subterranean system has been lost. We know the drains work, and that is all we wish to know, for we suspect that beasts of various sorts live in them.”

  The General reluctantly accepted that. Pures held the tainted in such low regard that they always underestimated the mutated folk. This misjudgment was the sole reason the tainted had survived at all. If the Pures could have seen through a true perspective instead of through the colored prism of religion and theocratic distortion, they would have hastily exterminated all who carried impure genes. This time, however, Belmondo told the truth. Rebellion still flared in him, but he was intelligent enough to understand that he would not survive the morning if he allowed it to surface once more in the General's august presence. A devil's advocate was appreciated only when his arguments could easily be cast in doubt and swiftly discredited altogether.

  “If there are beasts below this floor, in the sewers, then they have little chance of escaping, anyway,” the General said.

  “Except for their — power,” Belmondo said.

  The General grunted, thought on it a moment more, then dispatched four armed men into the storm drain, two teams to cover either direction the fugitives might have gone. The other soldiers went outside at his heels, prepared to take up other positions throughout the village in order instantly to apprehend the espers, wherever they might appear.

  To this end the Pures had the complete cooperation of the tainted, a rare event indeed.

  The fog was gradually lifting. A large, red sun burned down on the strange landscape, a single frightful eye anxious for the spectacle of battle.

  4

  The huge storm drains that lay beneath the tainted community, made of stone and mortar and slimed with thick coats of moss and fungus, were the apotheosis of everything that a Pure most feared: unrelieved darkness on all sides, stench, dampness, the unknown, the presence of things whose genetic backgrounds were radically damaged and unclean. In the enclave on the white cliff — or, indeed, in any enclave scattered across the continent — the walls, ceilings and floors were all of the same, smooth alabaster substance, hard as any material known to man, serf-cleaning and unflawed. Too, everywhere in an enclave, except where one slept, there was light, an abundance of light which played an unconsciously symbolic role in the minds of the Pures, who endured it and reveled in it. An enclave was almost painfully clean — unlike these underground passageways — kept spotless by its self-repairing maintenance systems; no unpleasant odors permeated the corridors or rooms of a Pure dwelling. Everything in an enclave was known, too, familiar and safe, with more of a history than most of the Pure families could claim for themselves. And, of course, no enclave harbored genetically damaged beasts, species of a blasphemous nature; those were quickly dispatched with when, rarely, they became known. Here, perverted life crawled beneath the moss, fed off the fungus, clung to the ceiling, skittered silently away from them as they advanced — and the bruin, the worst of all the tainteds here, was leading him deeper into this p
lace of shadows.

  Jask was certain that each step would be his last, that at any moment, he would no longer have the nerve to advance. He would either freeze where he was, his muscles knotted, nerve ends frayed apart — or he would turn and bolt, try to regain the cellar of the inn and, there, throw himself on the mercy of the General and of his own kind. Yet, step by step, he did go on, his whole body stiff with tension, his heart thudding like a mallet against a block of wood. He wondered where he got the strength to take each additional step.

  From fear.

  What? Jask was startled by the thought pressing at him.

  From fear, the bruin repeated. There's no use wishing the fear would be gone, because it's the fear that keeps you going.

  “Let's talk aloud,” Jask said.

  “Your reason?”

  Jask said nothing. He did not want to use telepathy because, in employing it, he was making an admission of his own status as a tainted, something he had accepted intellectually but had not learned to deal with on an emotional level.

  “Aloud, then,” the bruin said, apparently having properly read the confusion of thoughts that even Jask was unable to sort out yet.

  “How can you see where you're going?” Jask asked. His feet slipped on a wet patch of cobblestones even as he spoke. He reached out, flailing for a handhold, felt his fingers touch a slimy growth on the tunnel wall, jerked back, slipped again and fell. His face struck a puddle of dank water, the odor of which served to propel him swiftly to his feet; he brushed ineffectually at his cheeks and nose with one cold hand.

  “I suppose that it's simply that my eyes are so much better than yours,” the bruin said. The creature had not paused to wait for Jask to wipe his face and recover his dignity; the sounds of his heavy footsteps grew increasingly distant as Jask sputtered to rid his mouth of the foul taste of sewerage.

  The Pure, terrified of being left behind, alone, hurried forward without regard for the treacherous floor, his hands held out before him like a blind man seeking obstacles. He collided with the bruin, jerked away from the feel of matted fur, breathing heavily and falling into step once again. He thought that he heard the creature chuckle, but he could not be sure, because he was making so much noise himself.