Nightmare journey

breakfast they walked no fewer than thirty and usually more than forty kilometers a day, no matter if the sky were clear or if they were pelted with cold rain. In the late afternoon or early evening they stopped and set up their camp, ate a dinner of fresh game and fruit. Then, together, they did their exercises- Tedesco, so that he might get back into shape after his ordeal in the jewel sea, and Jask, so that he could add muscle to his slowly thickening biceps and chest. They took turns at watch, slept a bit less than they would have liked to, and began the next day as they had begun the one before it.
    In the rich forest through which they traveled there was an abundance of life unlike the beautiful but barren landscape of the jewel sea. At first they encountered only small animals that were too frightened of them to pose any serious threat. They killed what looked edible and went on, undisturbed, waiting for the moment when they would finally come across a formidable beast, as they knew they eventually must.
    Among the trees lay the ruins of ancient metropolises, grown over with crawling vines, nests now for rats and rabbits and squirrels, all but unrecognizable as the works of man.
    They passed many curious artifacts that had survived the centuries intact, or nearly so, but they investigated very few of them, lest they stir some antagonistic force they were not equipped to deal with.
    On the third day after they left the meadow they came across a

    column of yellow metal that gleamed as if it were new, despite its antiquity. It was ten meters in diameter and soared sixty meters into the air, unhampered by the crush of trees and vines that proliferated elsewhere. Indeed, where the vines and undergrowth had edged too close, they were blackened, as if a flame had been touched to them. Around the pillar, etched in perfect block letters, was this wisdom: JESUS SAVES, TRUST IN HIM… JESUS SAVES, TRUST IN HIM… The legend wound around and around the magnificent column, repeated perhaps a thousand times.
    “Who was Jesus?” Jask asked.
    Tedesco looked up at the shiny tube with its cryptic message and said, “He was a god.”
    “When?”
    “Before the Last War.”
    “What happened to him?”
    Tedesco smiled. “Died, I guess. Killed as all gods are.”
    “Gods can't be killed,” Jask said.
    Tedesco smiled even more openly and said, “I'd agree to that.”
    “Of course.”
    “Because,” Tedesco added, “they were not alive in the first place, just figments of the imagination.”
    Jask refused to let himself be dragged into that, by now, familiar argument. He approached the recessed door in the base of the yellow column and said,' 'Can't we have a look inside?”
    “I wouldn't recommend it,” the bruin grunted.
    “We have our rifles.”
    “And we may not get a chance to use them. Death is always swift, otherwise it isn't death but injury.”
    “When we began this trip,” Jask said, “I was the coward, afraid of every new experience. Now it seems-”
    “I'm not susceptible to that kind of psychological game-playing,” Tedesco said. “If you want to go in there, by all means go. I'll wait out here and have an apple. We can afford a rest break, but for no more than ten minutes.”
    “I'll be back by then,” Jask assured him. He touched the ornate handle of the golden door and jumped, startled, as it swung in without any effort on his part.
    He stepped into a tiny foyer from which a series of roughened metal steps led downward.
    “The church was underground,” Jask said.
    “Umph,” Tedesco said, leaning against the door jamb and chewing a mouthful of apple. “Probably built it during one of the wars; didn't want it blown to smithereens during a ceremony.”
    “Didn't they trust in their god?” Jask asked.
    “As much as most men,'' the bruin said. He spat out a seed as large as a strawberry. “In theory they knew he protected them. In reality it was every man for himself.”
    Jask stepped onto the first stair, listened to the sound of his footstep echoing scratchily down the winding well.
    Nothing responded to his intrusion.
    On both sides yellow metal light standards were bolted to the smooth walls at intervals of ten feet. Half of these no longer functioned, but the other half provided sufficient illumination to show him the way. As he progressed, the lights behind him went out and new lights sprang up ahead, so that there was always a pocket of impenetrable darkness close at his back and another not too terribly far ahead.
    Three hundred