Jabberwock Jack Read Online Free PDF

brother and I, you know there are actual monsters down in the darkness, your anxiety and fear are real and justified. Anyone who doesn't feel fear in the darkness underground is either a psychopath or a fool. Oh, you can be heroic, you can do what you need to despite any fear you feel - it doesn't have to be paralyzing. But you still feel the fear. That's your instinct, that's your danger sense. Those who have cut themselves off, those who don't fear the dark - well, I don't want to be with them. They're going to get themselves or their friends killed. Respect the darkness.
    Despite pleasant conversation, I could tell the prolonged darkness was getting to Abby, even with her and Dane's cavalier attitude about the hazards. Darkness is doubt, it is danger, it is that creeping unease, that back of the brain fear. Down here, something crawls up into your head. Without even deciding to, you start thinking about the route back. How many lefts was it? Could I make those turns if I lost my flashlight? If I lost my LED? How long would it take to even get back up and see the sky again? Something catches in your lungs when you realize if there's a problem you're that far away from the surface, that not even a quick run in panicked fear would get you back up in a few minutes. You're an hour underground, an hour from any chance of the sun, any hour in darkness and danger. Even if you've never been claustrophobic, even if you're in a gigantic cavern or area, suddenly you feel enclosed, as if the darkness itself is a physical wall. There's nothing you can do but push past it. Entertain those feelings too long and you will suddenly bolt into a run, drowning in irrational fear. Running blindly underground, especially in the maze of New Avalon's tunnels, may get you lost for good. Or worse.
    After about an hour, we were near our destination. We couldn't go down the drainage grate my brother and I had gone down last time, as it had been raining pretty heavily in the weeks prior. The train tunnels were wetter, but not impassable. The drainage system was a mess. But we still found a route back to the chamber where the ghouls had worshipped the armor.
    As agreed, I stayed with Dane and Abby while Szandor scouted ahead with his night vision goggles. Last time we were here, we saw about fifty ghouls. That's not the sort of thing we wanted to go into blind. Luckily, as we had been told before last time, there was a side passage which overlooked the armor's chamber. Szandor crept up there and looked for danger. In a few minutes he returned to me.
    "There's good news and there's bad news," he said.
    The good news: no sign of ghouls whatsoever.
    The bad news: the armor was gone.
    The truth was that this wasn't really a surprise to any of us. We had hoped the armor would remain, but we had no reason to expect it. It had been some time since we saw it. We had even posted a picture on the internet. The ghouls could have moved it - they did seem to worship it. Minerva Technics could have taken it. Someone could have even somehow figured out where it was from our picture and hauled it away.
    We took Dane and Abby to the main room where the armor had been. I showed Dane where the armor was, on a elevated section of the chamber. Besides the lack of armor, there weren't any of those big pots where the ghouls burned things. There was no debris either. I couldn't see any fresh footprints, but it was really hard to tell in the light we had and neither my brother nor I are really trackers. Whoever had been here seemed to have cleaned the place very well. If there was any doubt, we might have wondered if we were in the wrong place. But this was definitely the right place.
    Dane was initially disappointed, but he was not defeated. He took out a pair of goggles that reminded me a lot of our night vision goggles and started scanning the area. Seriously, he said "scanning" - like he was on Star Trek or something. They're goggles, it's not scanning, it's just