The Unkillables (10 page)

For the first time it really occurred to her that maybe she shouldn’t piss Dak off. Because, after all, he was up there with the ship and she was down here among the zombies and the cavemen, with nothing but a couple of derelict spears and a pretty sturdy helmet, which she’d attached to the clip on her belt because she was tired of wearing it. The sudden doubt in her partner made her shiver in the warm sun.

At first she’d believed she and Dak would become friends, probably even lovers—she’d figured they wouldn’t have much choice. They’d been strangers when he’d rescued her from one of the last pressurized rooms at Luna University—he’d told her he only had life support for one more, and that a linguist most suited the needs of his plan. She’d been relieved that anyone thought a linguist might be valuable enough to rescue, now that the apocalypse was here. It wasn’t like she had any family she could urge him to save. What few friends she’d had had already been killed or zombified, either on Earth or the Moon.

Dak had set a course from the Moon all the way out to the Cantor-Gould Collider, nearly ten percent of the way to Mars. The little ship he’d commandeered hadn’t been built for a journey like that, and it took weeks. During the trip they monitored the increasingly grim and sporadic radio traffic from Earth and the Moon, till it became clear that there were no more pressurized environments on the Moon at all, that Earth was a swarming hive of zombies, maybe a billion of them zombified humans and billions more made up of zombified members of every species of land-going vertebrate. Shit, probably something had managed to bite and zombify a fish and now the seas were full of them too, giant blue whales sending their green glow up to the surface of the water as they scoured their realm for brains, screaming a hungry whalesong. Humanity existed only as pockets of survivors in ships like theirs, watching their life support rations dwindle.

They’d reached the Collider, hanging there lonely in interplanetary space, its crew having abandoned it in their rush to get home and, Veela supposed, die with their families. Once they’d arrived it hadn’t taken Dak long to set up the Collider according to his mad scheme. Veela hadn’t been competent to help. She’d had zero faith that the plan would work, zero faith that the solar system’s largest particle accelerator could generate an effect that would send them back in time.

Lo and behold, it
had
worked—though the energy drain nearly killed them and it took them even more weeks to limp back to this Earth. During the long quiet trip Dak had done some more math, and had one day announced, almost casually, the effect he believed their escape to have had.

Veela had still not been able to respond to it. It wasn’t as if she didn’t believe Dak—she wasn’t competent to check his equations, but she had no reason not to believe it. She supposed she was in shock.

Anyway, in the almost three months it had taken to crawl back to Earth from the Collider—or, rather, from the point where the Collider would someday be, or might someday be—she’d had time to process the catastrophe somewhat. Everyone she’d ever known had died (or would die, rather), along with her whole civilization—there was a lot of grieving to be done, and she’d gotten started on it.

On the other hand, she’d been very lonely for many years, first on the Earth and then on the Moon, so it wasn’t like she had close friends to miss. And then there was the excitement, danger, and fear of this new great adventure to distract her. When she’d left her own time, humanity had been for all practical purposes extinct, plus there was the far graver catastrophe that she and Dak had initiated. But now there were forty-five thousand years before that happened.

And then they’d landed and it turned out there had been a god damned zombie mouse in one of the holds—not the one that was locked but an exterior hold. It had come scuttling out the moment they’d popped the hold’s hatch, small, black, hissing. At that moment it would have been easy enough to kill, but Veela had frozen with terror, snapping out of it only in time to see the zombie mouse go skittering under the cover of dry leaves. Then it was like it had never been there. Until the other undead had started showing up.

Now it was all happening again. Or, rather, for the first time.

Veela reached the campsite and fetched the spears, but wouldn’t pause to closely examine them till she was once more far from the zombie deer, much to Dak’s annoyance. She sat on a rock in the shade and hefted one of the spears, looking it over. “Doesn’t seem too complicated.”

“It will take more practice than you probably think.”

“I guess I just find some rocks and chip at one till it’s sharp, right? And shaped like a spearhead? And then I can use that to shape a long piece of wood. That should be easy to find, I’m in a forest. And then I’ll tie the spearhead to the piece of wood.” As she spoke, she tried to gauge how long each step was going to take. She had no clue, but she suspected a while.

“What are you going to attach the spearhead with?”

“Um. It looks like this one’s attached with animal hide.” Pretty firmly attached, too. Veela admired, and was intimidated by, the complicated knot. “I guess I would have to complete the spear before I could kill and skin an animal.” That prospect didn’t exactly make her queasy, not after everything she’d lived through, but she did wonder how she was going to learn to properly skin something, unless she found those two guys again and they taught her. Not to mention that the skins must have been treated somehow to turn them into binding material, otherwise they would have just rotted. “So I’ll use some vines to tie this first one.”

“Where will you find the vines?”

“I don’t know, I’m in a forest, there must be vines around! Anyway, there must have been a first caveman to ever make a spear, and
he
didn’t have any animal skins to work with, or know how to do it. We’ll figure it out.”

“Actually, I already did figure it out—that is, I called it up from the databanks. There are plenty of anthropology books featuring reconstructions of the process.”

He had been asking his questions not out of curiosity, or because he was thinking aloud, but as a pompous, time-wasting Socratic game. Veela smoldered with resentment. “All right,” she said. “That’s good.”

“There’s a bed of chert only about eighty meters from you, north-northwest.”

Of course, Dak said “chert” in their own language, so Veela had no idea it was the same word as Chert’s name, translated. Besides, even in her own language, she didn’t know the word: “What’s ‘chert’?”

“A type of stone. That weapon you’re holding has a chert spearhead.”

“Okay. And is north-northwest to my left, or my right?”

Dak guided Veela to the bed of chert. Naturally, no vegetation grew from the stone, and she peered around fearfully before leaving the cover of the trees. Veela put her helmet on and lowered the visor in preparation for chipping at the stone, thinking there might be flying rock chips.

“All right,” said Dak. “Now, find a boulder, one you can pick up and rest in your lap....”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Veela, please. Obviously I don’t mean a boulder in the vulgar sense, that of a rock weighing a ton or so. I’m using the proper, geological sense. Find an egg-shaped or slightly elongated boulder weighing about five pounds. Place this boulder upon your leg, and, using a stone that is smaller but harder than the boulder, strike the wider end off at a right angle to the longest axis. Don’t give in to the temptation to use an anvil stone at this early stage, for that tends to create an opposing force on the opposite side, resulting in an unpredictable fracture of the boulder. Now, keep striking until you wind up with a nicely flattened end, that is to say a striking platform—it should form a right angle with the sides of the boulder. All quite obvious, when you think about it. Now, here comes the most crucial part....”

Two hours later, Veela had two bleeding, dusty, bruised hands, one serviceable spearhead, and no more clear idea than before of how to secure it to a wooden shaft. “You’re going to need to do better than that,” said Dak, disapprovingly.

“So I’ll practice,” she said. “Anyway, what about you? How good are you at this? Have you been floating around up there, knocking pieces of chert together?”

“Oh, I’m sure once I get to the planet surface I’ll get the hang of it soon enough.”

Veela trudged to a relatively flat stone and lay on it on her back, face basking in the sun. “Let me know if there are any zombies or humans or big animals approaching, please, Dak.”

“Of course.”

She tried to let some of the tension melt in the sun and ooze out of her like butter, with limited success. “We need allies,” she muttered. “We need friends.”

“Perhaps you should go after your two renegades,” advised Dak. “I can tell you where they’re headed and you can meet them at the wall. Perhaps by the time you catch them I’ll have finished setting the trap at the hill; perhaps it’ll even be sprung.”

“I don’t know,” she said, hoping to hide her yearning behind a casual tone. “They didn’t seem too eager to hang around with me.”

“Well. They retreated in the face of that marauding zombie deer, not from you, per se. Hardly chivalrous, but I wouldn’t take it personally. Besides, whether they know it or not, they do need us if they ever want to get beyond the perimeter wall. So you’ll be doing them a favor, if you go hunting for them.”

That was true. Veela continued to brood on that runaway pair. The younger one she missed (she was thinking of him as being roughly her age, early thirties—it had not occurred to her that that hardened, weathered hulk of a man, with his eyes that were sometimes innocent and sometimes world-weary, almost deadly, could be only fifteen). The older one gave her the creeps. Also, he’d been the one to run off and leave her for the zombie deer. Then again, he had clearly done it for the not completely unlaudable purpose of saving the Jaw (she was pretty sure his name included their version of a definite article, though she had no clue why). “Do you suppose they could be father and son?”

Veela couldn’t be sure without seeing his face, but she thought she heard a smirk in his voice. “I highly doubt that’s the nature of the bond between them. You’re looking at the situation through anachronistic prejudices. People in this time period don’t form that kind of kinship bond—they don’t even understand the father’s role in conception.”

“How do you know?”

“I told you, I’ve been perusing our anthology books.”

“Yeah, well, I’m the one actually down here on the surface.”

“And which of us is the one who knows how to make a spearhead?”

Veela kept her mouth shut, despite being tempted to retort that while she might not yet know how to make a spear perfectly, she did know how to sit in a comfortable spaceship and read instructions on how to do it to someone else. During their long trek back from the Cantor-Gould Collider, she’d come to feel there was something so cold about Dak—it wasn’t that he’d been unfriendly—in fact, part of what had unnerved Veela was that he’d been almost cheerful, as if it was a shame about the extinction of the human race but the bright side was that he got to commandeer the Collider for an experiment that he would never have been able to get approval for otherwise. He’d shown no sexual interest in her—in fact, he’d shown little more than a merely polite interest. And recently she suspected that not even that was real. Given how unperturbed he seemed to feel at the death of all humanity, as long as he’d escaped—and the death of a lot more than that—how could she expect him to care about her, personally?

She got up to leave the chert bed and head back into the forest, in the direction Dak said Chert and the Jaw had gone. “Anyway,” she said, “I should be able to bring them around to helping us, once I learn the language well enough to explain the ultimate stakes.”

“Er, I wouldn’t count on them actually believing you about those ultimate stakes.”

“I’ll have to win their trust, obviously.”

“Might be more involved than that. I doubt their primitive minds will be able to grasp what you’re talking about at all.”

“They’re just as intelligent as we are!”

“But hardly the beneficiaries of rigorous post-graduate educations. I’m sorry, dear, but all I’m saying is that these are primitive people, so it might make more sense to establish a bond in some primitive way.”

“For instance?”

“Well, Veela, I think surely you know that I’m referring to a sexual bond.”

“Ah.”

“Don’t be touchy, I’m merely being pragmatic. Besides, I thought I sensed in you a certain affection for the pair.”

“Do you have a recommendation as to which of them I should pick?”

“Well, on the one hand, the younger might be the more valuable of the two, since he may be physically stronger.”

“I don’t know about that.” Veela was thinking of the way Chert had picked the Jaw up and run off with him like he weighed nothing. Also of how she’d thought her head might snap off, when he’d hit her in the visor with that rock.

“True. And I was about to say that the older one might be more valuable, anyway, because of his greater knowledge and experience. Although, given the average human life-span in this era, his best years may already be behind him.”

“Gee, maybe I ought to stay on the safe side and fuck them both.”

“I detect your unhelpful sarcasm, but as a matter of fact that could be ideal, if the sexual mores of their particular culture allow it. My fear is that sharing you would prove divisive, leaving the group as a whole more vulnerable than ever. One of them could kill the other for your sake, and then there would be one less ally. Worse, sharing your body might so cheapen you that they wouldn’t see the point in risking their lives on behalf of such a low-value female.”

“Have no fear, Dak, because I was only kidding.”

“You really must stop taking offense. We’re in a desperate situation, and if we’re going to survive we have to take an honest tally of all our available resources.”

“I prefer not to think of what I’m carrying around between my legs as a ‘resource.’”

“Regardless of your enlightened, civilized preferences, we’re going to have to get used to living in a brutal, unforgiving world. Both of us will. I’m sure there are going to be adjustments I’ll find painful, as well.”