Free Starblood by Dean Koontz Page A

blocking out the sunlight. Their lushness gave way to a bony toughness; their beauty rapidly withered into an ugliness that sparked some unspeakable horror in him. Their faces became long, wolflike, their eyes, sunken beneath shelves of bone. Their mouths split wide and were crammed with razor-edged teeth that glittered yellowly.
    He screamed, tried to rise up; they fell upon him, ripping and tearing…
    It was a night of ugly dreams interspersed with short stretches of sound, deep sleep in which his body attempted to recover from the spasms that shook it while awake—and during which his mind fought to gain a hold on sanity after the mad visions that fled through it in moments of wakefulness.
    Dark things chased him down long corridors, things that loped and gibbered, things that had blood-reddened eyes and howled eerily in the confines of the stone-walled hallways. Some of them flew, and some of them crawled along the walls like spiders, amber eyes flashing and hair-feathered limbs trembling in anticipation of the moment when they would leap upon him. In one of these nightmares, as he was running from a slavering, featureless creature that groaned like a man and yet very much unlike a man, one of his legs began to dissolve under him. In moments, he was hobbling on a single leg—when that disappeared and he crashed to the floor. He tried crawling, but both arms vanished. Helplessly immobile, the smell of the slimed floor in his nostrils, he listened to the faceless beast gibbering and chuckling insanely as it approached him at its leisure…
    He woke from that dream screaming louder than ever, his throat cracking and sore, trickling blood down to his stomach from dry, rasped membranes.
    He dreamed the same thing several times, always waking into another drug "reality" of a different nature just before the beast pounced. The dream following might be horrible in its own right, but it offered some degree of succor before he had to repeat that worst one again.
    Finally, only two hours before dawn, better than half a day since the delusions had begun in the grav-car on the way from the amusement park, the dreams ceased abruptly, leaving him dizzy, exhausted, and nauseated. With his senses at least partially restored, he found he floated above a bed, his servos swaying back and forth before him. He reached into the ball of the grav-plate system, shut it down, and dropped to the soft mattress where he found instant and protracted sleep of the same deep nature of the transitory moments of rest he had gotten throughout the ordeal. It never once became clear to him that his psi power had returned.
    Some five hours later he was awakened by something prodding his neck, something blunt and cold. For a moment, he was afraid to open his eye for fear that one of the creatures from the drug-delusions would be kneeling next to him, poking him with its snout, its teeth gleaming wickedly in a demonic smile. But the prodding grew harder and more insistent until he decided it would be worse not knowing what manner of creature this was than opening his eye and coming face-to-face with it. But his eye was gummed with sleep, and he had to blink it several times to be able to see clearly.
    "Good morning, sleeping beauty," a heavy voice said.
    He looked up into a heavily jowled face that bore the scars of a number of fights that had not been waged in friendly camaraderie. His eyes were small and squinting, and they were veiled with the dull sheen of dimwittedness. This man was not a drug-delusion, but he might be far more dangerous than a snouted demon if he were turned loose on anyone.
    "You've judged him correctly," a smooth, well-modulated voice said, a voice that spoke of education, of self-assurance that transcended mere ego.
    Timothy shifted his gaze to the right, behind the brute, and saw a tall, slender man in his mid-thirties: lots of dark hair combed over his ears, a square lantern-jawed face, impeccable clothes dark and sharply cut. In