The Unkillables (19 page)

The men blinked stupidly at him.

“Where’s Thorn?! Where’s Thorn, damn you all?!”

“I haven’t seen him,” said Granite.

“Of course you haven’t
seen
him! No one’s seen anything in days! Now tell me where he is or I’ll do you all like I did these traitors!”

Oak started to cry. “It’s not our fault if he got lost!” shouted Boar.

Spear cuffed Boar, and when Boar tried to stand to hit him back Spear knocked him down. “We’re going back to find Thorn!” he commanded.

“What if one of the unkillables got him?” said Oak, the weeping rapist.

Spear kicked him again. “Don’t worry, you can stay here with the women since you like them so much. But let one of them escape and we’ll do you the way you tried to do Maple! The rest of you, we’re going back for Thorn. Hold hands and spread out! We’re going back the way we came and we’re not going to pass anything unnoticed.”

“But what if we run into unkillables, out there in the dark?”

“Then we’ll die! Better that than cowering here the way these scum were doing, kowtowing to their own slave!” Spear raised his voice: “Do you hear that, Big-Brow? I haven’t forgotten you! We know you’re out there, and soon we’ll be seeing to you and your adopted whelp!”

Granite spoke, his voice trembling: “Spear, maybe let’s wait. Maybe let’s stay in the light a little bit longer. Don’t you think it’s too soon to go right back out into the dark?”

“Thorn’s out there in the dark! Tell me, when it’s your turn to be lost, will
you
be so patient to be rescued? Now come on! Join hands!”

“Spear, we should bring the fire....”

“Then the unkillables will see us before we can see them! Or that Big-Brow bitch will. Trust me! Be brave, and we have a better chance to live.”

They joined hands and began to move out of the grand chamber, toward Gash-Eye and Quarry. Gash-Eye picked the child up and swung her around onto her back, and Quarry held her around the shoulders and pressed her knees into her flanks. “Don’t make a sound,” Gash-Eye hissed. She loped down the tunnel till they were too far from the fire for even her to see well enough to run safely, then she slowed to a walk, running her fingers along the stone wall.

She could hear Spear and the rest of them behind her. But they were falling behind—they couldn’t see at all, and it slowed them down even more to all hold hands. She was able to make better time. Maybe now was the moment she should risk taking the girl back up outside. Surely it would be better than being hunted down and tortured to death without ever again having seen the sun.

This passage was a fairly straightforward tunnel. That was why Gash-Eye usually liked to do her hunting here—now, though, she thought it would be a good idea if she could find some cranny or niche for herself and Quarry to hide in, till Spear and the others had passed by. As long as they didn’t wind up backed into a corner they couldn’t escape from.

Before long they were far away enough from the fire that Gash-Eye couldn’t see by its ambient light at all. She felt that graspy terror in her chest and the base of her throat, that Quarry and the rest of the people had grown even more familiar with. Yes, Gash-Eye told herself—she had to get the child outside, regardless of the risk.

Then again, perhaps some kinds of light were even worse than darkness.

Feeling along the wall, moving as fast as she dared, Gash-Eye became aware of something like a hint of light ahead, a dream of light. She thought it was a hallucination, her sight-hungry spirit conjuring things to see. But, as she felt along, she became aware that she was approaching a turn, and that what she had seen had been the faint reflection of a pale greenish light, reflecting off the wall from around the corner. As she crept around the corner she saw that this light shone through a narrow fissure she’d never noticed before. The fissure led into a chamber in which there was an unkillable, glowing green as it held the head of Thorn’s corpse up to its mouth and chomped at the brain through the shattered skull. Thorn’s feet still stuck out the over the threshold of the fissure. Elsewhere in the chamber were two other unkillables, glowing more dimly as they fed on the sorts of lizards and rodents Gash-Eye had been catching for the People. A fourth unkillable, still black, shuffled desperately along the chamber wall, searching for food.

Gash-Eye felt Quarry’s breathing change at the sight of the monsters. If only the girl could keep silent, they might survive.

But up ahead, further along the tunnel they’d been traveling along, the one that led back to the cave mouth, she heard a shuffling sound. There was another unkillable somewhere up there, she was sure, one she couldn’t see at all. Better to slip past ones she could make out, perhaps.

Or they could turn and run back the way they’d come—but, again, they were bound to receive a more unpleasant death at the hands of Spear than at the hands of the unkillables. It might even be possible to let the unkillables take care of Spear for them. Maybe all she had to do was get the creatures between herself and Spear.

She edged into the room with the unkillables, hoping Quarry wouldn’t panic. The girl did breathe harder and grip Gash-Eye’s skins even more tightly, but that was all.

A scenario presented itself in Gash-Eye’s mind: these unkillables had been wandering hungrily through the cave for days; they only glowed when they ate, it seemed, and Gash-Eye had spotted no sign of any greenish light during her hunting expeditions. Perhaps this clump of them had wandered hours or days ago into this chamber, by chance; Thorn had gotten separated from his friends and for some reason entered the chamber, maybe because he heard the unkillables moving and mistook them for Spear and the others; one of the unkillables had attacked Thorn’s brain; the other two had caught their cave-dwelling rodents and lizards thanks to the illumination created by the first unkillable’s feeding; and any other food had been scared off by the light and noise before the unlucky fourth unkillable could catch it.

Any other food, that is, except herself and Quarry. The green unkillable still glowed enough for Gash-Eye to see, but just barely. Her hope was that the unkillables’ eyesight would be even worse than the People’s, allowing her to slip by unnoticed. She had only intuitive reasons to think so: something about the quality of their clumsiness, as if they had no clear notion of their surroundings; a vague sense that dead things ought not to see as well as live ones.

But basically, Gash-Eye saw no choice but to act as if the unkillables in that chamber couldn’t see her. She wouldn’t wait here for Spear, and she believed there was another unkillable ahead in the narrow passageway, one she couldn’t see at all. Even if the unkillables did spot them, they would either grant a quick death, or else turn them into things that would wreak some much-deserved mayhem on Spear and the others.

The green one’s glow was very dim. Her plan was to get on the other side of them, then hope that after the unkillables all went dark Spear would run into them before he got to her. This way there was at least a chance of getting rid of him. Hopefully, once they were past these unkillables, Gash-Eye would luck upon some other path to the surface.

She stepped over Thorn and fought the urge to hurry through the chamber, concentrating on moving noiselessly instead. On the other hand, she wanted to be out of the room before Spear got there. Hopefully, with their weaker vision, Spear and the rest wouldn’t be able to see the reflection of the green against the rock wall (the rodent-fed unkillables had already faded back to black), and would just come crashing in. If that happened, and the unkillables noticed and attacked them, there would be lots of thrashing and confusion. One of the unkillables might bump into Gash-Eye and Quarry—or, for that matter, one of Spear and his men might—or else one of the glowing unkillables might move close enough to her that she might be spotted.

As she came all the way around to the other side of the chamber, though, so that she’d done nearly half a circuit, ropes of sick dread began knotting themselves together in her belly. There was no other egress, as far as she could tell. The unkillables had fumbled their way in here, in the dark, but then had been too stupid to find their way back out of the dead-end room. Gash-Eye wondered how long they would have wasted away there, if Thorn had not gotten separated and, disoriented, wandered straight into one—maybe they would have stumbled back upon the entrance eventually, but Gash-Eye had a sudden feeling that even if they’d gotten too hungry to keep shuffling around, they could have sat down and waited forever, more or less inert, but ready to be hungry again even if they had to wait till the cave cracked open at the end of the world.

There was nothing to be done now—it was too late to attempt to creep back the way they’d come, she could already hear the approach of Spear and the others. They were noisier than Gash-Eye had been, and the heads of the unkillables all began to twitch—especially that of the now very faintly glowing one, as if with sustenance came not only greater physical strength, but greater strength of the senses.

Quarry was still hanging off Gash-Eye’s back. Gash-Eye tried to position herself so that her body completely shielded the girl from the unkillables. She reached up and held the child’s hands.

The men were trying to move quietly, but their self-control had decayed over the last days spent underground, and they were making enough noise that they would have scared off a boar, if they’d been hunting one. The unkillables heard their progress.

Gash-Eye knew Spear would be unable to see the now almost invisible glow, and so would not wander through the fissure. She risked saying the word, “Spear,” when she heard him just beyond the fissure.

The unkillables’ heads all twitched in her direction and they rose. If Spear had kept walking and not entered, Gash-Eye and Quarry would have been dead.

Following her voice, the men burst into the chamber, pitch-dark to them. Granite was first in the room, and he had enough time to scream before the unkillable who’d eaten Thorn’s brain pounced and took his skull in his jaws, and shook it like a dog. By the time Granite’s skull was open, his neck had already snapped.

Spear, Boar, Club, and Granite leaped to their right as the other unkillables leaped at them—one bit Boar on the shoulder, who tore himself away—he screamed, and collapsed to the floor in the throes of the seizure. Another chomped Boar’s head before his brain could die, and immediately lit up green. Seeing the fight had moved briefly away from the entrance of the chamber, Gash-Eye made a break for it.

She collided with Spear, who had just jumped out of range of an unkillable’s snapping jaws. In the glow he looked at her, shocked, as if he’d forgotten she’d been what he was hunting: “You!”

She backhanded him in the neck and kicked him in the knee, then shoved past him. She swung Quarry off her back, getting ready to push her through the fissure they’d entered from, before following herself. As Gash-Eye shoved her through the crack in the wall, Quarry broke her silence for the first time since Spear’s appearance, with a scream. Gash-Eye looked back to see a green unkillable lunging for her with its snapping teeth. She stepped out of range and into the fissure just in time. Not smart enough to turn its body sideways as Gash-Eye had, and thus make itself thin enough to get through the passage, the unkillable thrust its head through but was blocked by its shoulders.

Inspiration struck Gash-Eye. She grabbed the thing with both hands under its jaws. Its frenzy grew even greater as it snapped its teeth, but it couldn’t reach her hands and it couldn’t move its head forward any closer. She put her feet on the rock wall and, still holding the thing by the hand, she pulled its head right off, flying backwards. Quarry screamed again. The severed head continued to bite crazily in Gash-Eye’s hands—she was careful to hold it at a safe distance. It didn’t bleed much, only a slow-oozing gunk. It continued to glow green as it stared at her and snapped its jaws. Gash-Eye wondered if the thing could still see. She recognized it—the head had once belonged to a hunter named Fox.

Its body blocked the escape route. Neither Spear nor the unkillables could get through the fissure and at Gash-Eye or Quarry, for the moment; nor could Spear get away from the unkillables.

Gash-Eye adjusted her grip on the unkillable’s head so that she was holding it by the hair and out in front, its snapping visage facing away from her. Now that she only needed one hand to hold the head, she drew Quarry to her again. By the light of her undead lamp, she saw that the girl was silently weeping.

“Shh,” she said, “shh,” and stroked her hair and kissed her gently on the temple. There was time for nothing else. From the corpse-blocked fissure still came screams and the sounds of Spear, Granite, and Club fighting. “Come on,” she hissed, tugging on the girl’s hand, “Spear may manage to move that unkillable’s body out of the way before the others kill him, and then they will all be able to come after us.” To try to cheer the girl, Gash-Eye nodded at the wildly animated, savage head. “We’ve got a light now, at least,” she said. “We can carry it with us. All we have to do is every once in a while feed it a bit of brain to keep it glowing, the way those Big-Brows were doing in the forest.”

They raced back the way they’d come. Gash-Eye wanted to kill Oak before he realized his friends weren’t coming back. It would take time for Gash-Eye to dig through the cave-in back to the mouth, assuming she could manage it at all, and she couldn’t risk having Oak attack her from behind. They could move much faster now that they had the light of the unkillable head to see by.

When they were nearing the camp, Gash-Eye stopped. “We have to hide the light before we get too close,” she whispered to Quarry. She started to take off the skins she wore, then paused. They weren’t especially thick, and she had no reason to expect the unkillable to stop snapping its teeth anytime soon. Even if an unkillable bite muffled by the skins didn’t transform her, it could do injury if there wasn’t enough cushioning.

Gash-Eye looked reluctantly at Quarry’s thick bearskin. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I think we have to use your skins to wrap this head in.”