Read Online Nightmare journey by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online Page A

black flesh of his face, shiny with sweat, gleamed at many points with salty emerald droplets. He led Jask into a large, jewel-walled, jewel-floored chamber that was fully forty meters in diameter, though the ceiling lay just a meter overhead. In the center of the room he shucked off his rucksack and let it fall. The whumpf of its impact on the glittering floor echoed in that place like the beat of distant wings.
    Jask dropped his own gray sack of supplies and sat down. His thin legs were too weak to support him much longer; if Tedesco had wished to go on even another hundred yards, the Pure would have been forced to stay behind. He was trembling all over, uncontrollably, like a man with the ague, though his symptoms represented only fear and exhaustion.
    Tedesco sat down, too, generating more winglike reverberations, which the two of them listened to for a time, until the silence was again complete and until they had recovered their breath.
    “We'll spend the night here,” the bruin said. He indicated the sea-colored walls and said, “Deep in the formation, where it's all greens and blues like this, the lights are the least bothersome at night.”
    “You've been here before?” Jask inquired, staring at the glassy walls around them. They had come through areas of yellow and orange, of red and violet and finally into these cool vaults.
    “Not in this particular room,'' Tedesco explained. “But I've explored several other branches of the structure. I've been fascinated by it since I was just a child.”
    Jask was intrigued by what was, to him, a twofold revelation: first, that anyone would find the Wildlands “fascinating” rather than terrifying; secondly, that Tedesco had ever been a child. He knew, of course, that the bruin had not sprung fully grown from his mother's loins. Still, to imagine Tedesco playing with toys and toddling around like a human child…
    Tedesco sighed, as if he had been listening in on Jask's thoughts and had to agree that childhood now seemed an impossibility, and he said, “When my esp powers began to bloom, I realized that my life might depend on my familiarity with the Wildlands. And now it seems that I was quite correct.”
    Jask looked at the two prewar rifles lying beside the mutant, cold and black and deadly, and he said, “How many of them did you kill?”
    “A couple,” Tedesco said vaguely.
    Jask looked down at his own hands folded in his lap, and he tried to sort out how he felt about these murders. If Tedesco had not returned the soldiers' fire, neither of them would have reached the entrance to the jeweled bacteria. Yet, Tedesco was a mutant, and his victims were Pures. It was clear where Jask's sympathies should lie.
    “Is it clear?” Tedesco asked quietly.
    Jask looked up, confused, unable to answer.
    The bruin turned to his rucksack and began to open various compartments. “Let's have something to eat,” he said, toneless and remote.
    They consumed three lengths of dried, salted meat (Jask could choke down only half a stick; Tedesco happily finished the rest), five pieces of fresh fruit (Jask being satisfied with two, Tedesco with three), half a loaf of hard brown bread (Jask spat out his first bite, disgusted by the texture and taste and aware, for the first time, that he was eating tainted food fit only for mutants; the bruin munched happily on the remainder), and a quantity of water from the long wooden flask in Tedesco's pack. They spoke only occasionally as they ate, reserving most of their comments for the food or for the shifting, rippling colors that glowed brilliantly in the walls.
    When they were done, Tedesco said, “I promised you a discussion.”
    Jask looked blank for a moment.
    “On the virtues of our individual notions of this world's history,” the mutant explained.
    “Mine is not a notion,” Jask said.
    “Oh?”
    “We'll see.”
    “Yes, we will,” Jask said, though he had already begun to wonder if the bruin's version-whatever it was-might not be more sound than his own.