The Unkillables (3 page)

“And what will you do about it?!” demanded Spear. “Stop us from killing her?! Stop us all?!”

“I cannot stop you all, though I could stop just you, Spear. I cannot stop you from killing her, that is. But I can stop you from buying my life with hers. If you tear out her eyes, if you kill her in the traditional way, or in any way, then I’ll kill myself, Chert.”

“Kill yourself!” said Chert.

“And I’ll try to take Spear down to darkness with me.”

“It is his big heavy brow that drags him down to the darkness under the earth!” jeered Spear.

Chert stepped forward and gripped the Jaw by his upper arm. The Jaw tried to shake him off, but Chert was strong. “Shut up with that nonsense,” he growled. “Kill yourself? You think I’ll let you do such a thing?”

“I’ll find a way, sooner or later, no matter how you try to stop me.”

“Obey your father, half-breed,” snarled Spear. “Only a human such as I has the right to defy his father. Not a creature such as you.” Then he shrugged, and, turning to the rest of the People, cried, “Let the half-breed do as he likes. Or let Chert dissuade him, if he can. But we’ve already decided what’s to be done with Gash-Eye. Nothing changes that.”

“Listen to him, my son!” Gash-Eye thought she caught the Jaw flinching with embarrassment at her mangled pronunciation of the People’s tongue, exaggerated in this moment of her distress; then lightning burst in her eyes as the back of Spear’s hand walloped her across the face.

“Quiet, animal!” he shouted. “We can settle this without you!”

The Jaw took a step forward, but Chert’s hand on his arm yanked him back. The frame he’d inherited from his mother would have made him the match of most of the People, but maybe not Chert. His father glared at him; then turned to Spear and stepped forward himself. “No one touches the Big-Brow, then.”

A scandalized, resentful murmur rippled through the crowd. “Are you insane?” said Spear. “Gash-Eye betrayed us. She warned the prey! She lost us the magic glowing ball! Her betrayal might have gotten any of us killed! Yet now you want her and the Jaw to both go unpunished?”

“The Big-Brows might have gotten the better of you, Spear, that’s true. But we other hunters had nothing to fear.”

All could see how Spear had trouble swallowing that jibe, and the bile it called up.

“Why are we talking about it? We kill her, surely!” That was Maple, who’d edged halfway between the ranks of the women and the men. Ever since she’d begun to leave childhood behind, it had excited Maple to persuade the handsome young hunters to beat Gash-Eye.

“I don’t see why,” said Hoof, who had always disdained to indulge Maple’s brutal whims. “Gash-Eye has led us to much game and the Jaw has brought us much meat. I will not dispute that her treachery deserves a beating, and perhaps even a marking or the loss of a toe or a finger. But death? Any of us would have done the same in her place.”

“Quiet, Hoof!” said Spear.

“Yes,” agreed Stick. “May your tongue be hereafter warded, Hoof, from speaking such evil as to say that one of the People might ever be in the place of a Gash-Eye or a Jaw.”

Stick continued: “Chert. None of us would disrespect you. No man would impede you from walking where you will. But in this Spear is right. The People must send Gash-Eye back to the darkness. Your son speaks hotly, he will not follow through.”

Chert looked at the Jaw and gauged the resolve in his face, then turned back to Stick. “No.”

“Gash-Eye tried to lead us into the darkness. Now the dark spirits below are alerted. They await the food they were promised. We must send them Gash-Eye in our stead, else they will rise up and claim us.”

“No. Find something else to send them.”

“To hell with this,” said Spear, and grabbed an axe from one of the nearby men. He raised it overhead, but before he could split Gash-Eye’s skull Chert was beside him, arresting Spear’s arm in his tight grip.

“I said no,” repeated Chert, grim but still calm.

“There’s a way things are done, damn you!”

For a reply, Chert tossed the man to the ground with one hand. Spear glared up at him, half-mad, baring his teeth, the axe still in his hand. The crowd tensed. Something bad was about to happen. The young men eyed each other, trying to see who would help Chert, who Spear, and how close the contest would be.

The band was minutes away from destroying itself, perhaps. The terror of that knowledge must have been what distracted them for so long from the invaders, till one of the small children cried, “Look!,” pointing down the hill.

They looked. Instantly the quarrel between Chert and Spear was all but forgotten, even by Chert and Spear themselves. “Big-Brows!” someone said; but he said it with a rising, uncertain intonation.

Shuffling up the slope were two Big-Brows. But they were like no Big-Brows anyone had ever seen. Their skins were pitch-black, not like the healthy brown of the People’s or the ruddy pink of most Big-Brows’, and they gleamed with a strange oiliness. Their gait was halting and stilted. Their eyes were distant and red, feverish-looking; they seemed oblivious to the fact that they were wandering into a hostile camp in which they’d be badly outnumbered.

“They’re sick,” said Stick, sounding worried.

Some of the younger hunters edged out to meet the Big-Brows, uneasy but wanting to prove their mettle.

“Don’t get near them, they’re sick,” Stick said.

The strange Big-Brows had nearly reached the People. One of the young men took another step toward them. Brandishing his spear, he said, “Have you come for death, weak giants?”

As if in reply the nearest Big-Brow grabbed the youth’s spear and yanked it toward himself. The youth didn’t think fast enough to let go of his weapon, and he tumbled toward the Big-Brow—moving fast all of a sudden, the Big-Brow grabbed him by the neck and pulled the youth’s head to his slick drooling mouth and bit it. He seemed to bite impossibly hard; Gash-Eye was sure she’d heard the boy’s skull crack.

Before any of the People could even start screaming, the other Big-Brow grabbed another youth, Pebble, by the arm. The panicking boy tried to jerk free, but shrieked as the Big-Brow clamped his jaws on his arm first.

Now there were screams. Hunters threw their spears into the Big-Brows. Many spears hit their targets, but then merely remained stuck in the invaders’ bodies. Neither Big-Brow seemed troubled by them.

The first youth still dangled from the Big-Brow’s mouth, neck clearly broken. Bits of skull broke loose and snapped up around the Big-Brow’s lips as his teeth sank deeper and deeper into the youth’s brain. The Big-Brow shook the lifeless body in his jaws.

Pebble’s arm remained trapped in the invader’s mouth. It didn’t seem like his wounds should be mortal, not yet. But he had gone into a wild seizure, foaming at the mouth, and if one looked closely one could see veins of black crawling up the skin of his arm, originating at the bite.

All this happened in only a moment, the time it took Chert to race forward and try to rescue Pebble. First Chert struck the Big-Brow in the temple. But the Big-Brow didn’t seem to notice, though the blow should have been enough to kill him; something about the oily squishiness of the Big-Brow’s flesh made Chert feel, not exactly scared, but queasy. There was a spongy give to the Big-Brow’s skull, as if it wasn’t made of bone. Instead of directly attacking the Big-Brow again, Chert grabbed the youth around the ribs and tried to yank him from his tormentor’s grip.

Chert was shocked when the now-blackened arm popped off easily, and he and the boy went sailing backwards, Chert landing hard on his back and then the boy landing on top of him, knocking the air out of his lungs. Chert forced himself to recover because the Big-Brow had let the mangled ruined arm drop from his maw and was coming for Chert again, his jaws nearly snapping on the hunter’s face before Chert could roll out of reach and spring to his feet. The Big-Brow sprinted after him, head jutting forward, jaws snapping spasmodically. Only a spear hurled right through his neck toppled the Big-Brow before he could catch his prey.

Chert tried to catch his breath. The Big-Brow had attacked leading with his teeth, not his arms, he noted. Like an animal.

Screams were to be expected at a time like this, so Chert hadn’t really been paying attention to them. Now he noticed that they had a certain quality—an extra edge of desperate terror—something more extreme and raggedy than the sad but familiar mourning of a boy fallen in the hunt or a fight.

Quickly he looked around to take stock of the situation. And found that he couldn’t. The scene was incomprehensible.

The first Big-Brow was bright green now—his naked body seemed to glow with a green light, bright even in the daytime. Tossed aside was the body of his victim, the whole crown of his skull missing; from here it looked like the skull had been emptied. The Big-Brow raised its arms and roared, spears sticking through its torso and drabs of brain hanging from its lips. It leaped forward with astonishing speed at a hunter who’d gotten too close. The man was able to jab his spear into the Big-Brow, but that did nothing. The green Big-Brow grabbed him and pulled the top of his head into his mouth. Again there was that horrible crunch as the Big-Brow chomped down onto the crown of the man’s skull. Panicking nerves jangled through the corpse and made it dance a floppy jig. This time Chert was sure he heard a slurping sound coming from the Big-Brow. As the monster sucked down its victim’s brain, its body shone an even brighter green in the daytime sun.

Someone screamed his name and Chert looked to see what they were warning him of: before him, the Big-Brow who’d just been downed was rising to his feet again, even though the spear that was still stuck halfway through his neck had nearly beheaded him. Chert started to back away, but something grabbed his ankle.

He looked down at Pebble, the one-armed corpse he’d failed to rescue. That one arm was stretched out, its hand firm around Chert’s ankle. The body was nearly completely black now; Chert could see the color change continuing swiftly. The arm pulled the rest of the body closer to Chert, along with that oily grinning head with its clattering, snapping jaws.

Chert stepped forward with his free foot and put it on Pebble’s corpse’s head while he tried to wrest the other foot loose. He was careful to keep his heel and toes and all parts of his foot free of the corpse’s gnashing, hungry teeth. The head tried to thrash beneath him and nearly knocked him off-balance; but this creature seemed weaker than its now-green brethren (instinctively, Chert was already classing this new Pebble with the Big-Brow invaders), and he was finally able to shake free. Something told him that if those jaws had made contact with his flesh, the body would have rediscovered its strength quickly enough, along with a newfound speed to match that of the feeding Big-Brows.

Stones were flying—some of the People were hurling them at the monsters. Chert was lucky not to get hit by one himself.

He looked for his son and saw him hoisting Gash-Eye up, draping her arm over his shoulder. The Jaw and the girl Quarry were helping her toward the cave. Gash-Eye was bleeding from the temple—one of those stones had hit her, and she seemed woozy and off-balance. Damn that Big-Brow bitch! Why couldn’t she retreat under her own power, instead of slowing down the Jaw that way?

Meanwhile the shining-green invader had another victim in its teeth—a woman; men were retreating, spears raised as they moved backwards, in their panic abandoning anyone outside their perimeter. The woman howled and shook just as Pebble’s corpse had done. The green Big-Brow had only been able to grab her by the arm. He was trying to drag her resisting body closer so he could reach her head, and had almost succeeded when a spear meant for him slammed into her and knocked her out of his grip. With an angry roar he flung himself at the line of young men. They stabbed at him desperately with their spears, and shrieking women ran from behind the line and struck the Big-Brow with their knives, but the Big-Brow seemed not to notice as he nabbed one of the hunters and hugged the boy to him, chomping loudly through the skull to get to the brain.

Chert raced around the flank of the hunters’ line—they were so keyed-up he felt that if he’d run straight at them, expecting them to part, they would have impaled him instead. The Jaw was still helping Gash-Eye to the cave. She seemed to be pleading with the Jaw about something, as he angrily dismissed whatever she was saying.

“Come on!” shouted Chert as he reached them; to Gash-Eye, he said, “Move on your own if you’re coming with us, damn you!”

It wasn’t like the screams had ever stopped. But they reached such a crescendo that all three of them turned to look behind. One-armed Pebble was completely black now, too, like the Big-Brows had been, and was eating the brain of his spasming sister Acorn. Others of their friends and families, the ones whose skulls hadn’t been emptied, were already covered in those expanding webs of black lines and were rampaging among their yet-unbitten former fellows.

In a panic the surviving hunters were running up the hill. Chert, Gash-Eye, and the Jaw were between them and the mouth of the cave. Pebble, green now that he’d eaten a brain, launched himself at the runners from behind, tackling some of them. They in turn fell into the Jaw and his parents, knocking them down and landing atop them. The green hunter (it no longer felt right to call it “Pebble”) snapped among the fallen until it had a man’s head firmly in its jaws. With its remaining arm it grabbed at the air, trying to get hold of one of the people scrambling away.

Chert rose, hauling the Jaw up with him. He started to drag the Jaw toward the cave again, but jumped back when the green arm swiped near him. He saw that the other Big-Brow, bright green still, as well as some of Chert’s former brethren, were running away from them and up the hill, pursuing the People to the cave. Looking down the slope, Chert saw nobody. He decided that away from those things was a good direction to run, and started pulling the Jaw after him.

“No!” the Jaw shouted, pulling back. “My mother!” But Chert was stronger, and forced his son to come with him.

Till they heard Gash-Eye howling something in her strange accent, even more incomprehensible now than ever, as if she were reverting to the language of her childhood. At that sound, the Jaw dug in his heels. “No!” he shouted again.