The Unkillables (4 page)

Chert realized that the Jaw was going to escape from him, or else delay them both so much that those things would notice them and come bounding down the hill. Soon there would be lots of them, too—it was plain to see how the evil black-web spirit and the green-glowing spirit were sweeping through and consuming the People. Chert spun the Jaw around by the shoulder and punched him as hard as he could in the face.

The Jaw tumbled onto his back, dazed eyes rolling in confusion. For good measure, Chert knelt and punched him once more. Now his son was more or less unconscious.

Chert hoisted the boy’s huge weight across his shoulders. He rose, screaming with effort. If he’d stopped to wonder whether he would succeed, he might have failed.

Once upright, he continued down the hill, moving fast. He didn’t turn around. If one of those corrupted things was pursuing them, he still wouldn’t be able to run any faster than he already was, not without abandoning the Jaw.

The Jaw was stirring. Chert hurried, trying to reach the forest and its hiding places before the boy was able to fight him.

As Chert crashed into the trees, a horrible scream from Gash-Eye came twisting down the hill after them. The Jaw began to struggle in earnest; still Chert was able to hold him firm across his shoulders. “Let me go!” said the Jaw. “My mother!”

“She’s dead,” said Chert, and believed it. Something must have been moments from killing her. What else could a scream like that mean?

C
hert dodged the Jaw again, letting the boy fall into the brush behind him. He turned to see his son rising to his feet, determined to attack once more. Chert’s stern face didn’t betray his worry. If this kept up, he’d have to try to incapacitate the boy again with another blow to the head, and he didn’t want to risk damaging him. More, he couldn’t deny, at least privately, the risk that the Jaw might actually manage to kill him.

“Stop this,” said Chert.

“You killed my mother,” said the Jaw.

Chert wanted to point out that the boy’s mother had been nothing but a Big-Brow slave and was more something shameful he should forget, than someone valuable he should avenge. But he was willing to bend so far as to set that aside. “I didn’t kill your mother,” he said instead. “I only stopped you from killing yourself.”

“You stopped me from saving her,” said the Jaw, and launched himself again.

Expertly Chert stepped aside, at the same time sticking his leg in the boy’s way and grabbing and tossing him along. The Jaw went flying. Chert was freakishly strong, about even with his half-breed son (he didn’t know it, but this strength came from a Big-Brow great-grandfather). Even so, he could feel age and the ravages of a hard life catching up with him, and he knew that the Jaw would be able to take him soon, if not today. That knowledge stirred in him the primeval rage between fathers and sons, and it was not entirely physical exertion that made him breathe hard as he fought down the urge to kill. “Stop this,” he repeated. “You have my blood. I don’t want to spill my own blood.”

“You spilled my mother’s.”

The sheer stupidity was enough to make Chert want to beat the boy to death. “How?” he shouted. “How did I do that?” He turned and began marching back in the direction from which he’d carried the Jaw. Over his shoulder, he called, “Come on then, damn you. Come back to that cursed eruption of demons, since your idiotic Big-Brow blood doesn’t have the sense to run from it.”

The Jaw was on his feet again. Uncertainly, he watched his father walk away, before following him.

By the time they were nearing the edge of the forest, the Jaw was only a few steps behind. Chert did not deign to turn and look at him or give any sign that he feared another attack. They backtracked along the obvious trail of smashed and broken plants Chert had made in his wild flight.

They reached the edge of the woods. Not even Chert could quite control his heartbeat as he cautiously parted the branches to look up the slope. The Jaw drew up alongside him.

One of the original Big-Brows was still up there—his bright green had faded, and Chert guessed he would soon be black again. It was the brain-eating that made them glow green, he’d gathered. They got faster when they were very close to a brain, and they got much much faster once they’d eaten it. The other Big-Brow was nowhere to be seen. The rest of the bodies shuffling around up there were Chert’s possessed brethren, formerly of the People, a couple of them green (one pale, one dark), the other four black. Chert knew others of the People had been turned, and he wondered with trepidation how close by they were, and listened for any person-sized creature shuffling through the underbrush.

Most of the creatures or demons or whatever they were had spears sticking from them, slowing them as their ends dragged along the ground, or else they had gaping black-oozing holes where spears had been jabbed into their flesh and had come out again. Most of the wounds seemed clearly mortal, and yet the dead walked. On some of them body parts dangled, limbs attached only by precarious strips of flesh. A woman named Thrush, or who had once been named Thrush, had had her right arm ripped off. They could see the black arm some distance away from her, pulling itself by its hand’s fingers along the grass.

“How could we have saved Gash-Eye from those things?” whispered Chert. “You’re mad if you think we could have. It’s a miracle we saved ourselves.”

The Jaw stubbornly refused to answer.

Chert knew that if the boy had had an argument against him, he would have voiced it, and that his silence amounted to tacit agreement. Still he craved to have it in words, so they could finish this conflict and get on with surviving. “What could we have done for her?” he insisted. “Show me a thing that can be killed, and I tell you I can kill it. But what would you have me do against creatures that grow stronger and stronger, the more they die?”

“You managed to rescue
me
,” said the Jaw accusingly.

In disgust, Chert turned back to the creatures. They exercised upon him a weird fascination that let him forget his stupid son. He knew that they should leave this area, that there was no way to be sure the creatures in their unfed state were as clumsy as Chert thought, that they might be able to sneak up on him and the Jaw after all. He told himself that he was studying them, so as to be better prepared should he ever need to fight them again. But it was the horrible mystery of the things that drew his mind to them.

What were they? How could anyone defeat them? He felt for them a revulsion and hatred he had never felt for anything before; certainly not for the animals he hunted and to whom he always offered ritual thanks. There were plenty of creatures that Chert
wanted
to see removed from the world, animals like the big-fanged tigers who had been known to kill his friends and kinsmen; but this was the first time Chert had ever seen anything that he knew in his gut
should
be wiped off the earth, destroyed utterly, completely removed from the universe of clean spirits.

But what could possibly do it? What power could defeat the unkillable, the undead? Chert could imagine nothing from this world that could be up for the challenge.

A strange humming vibrated his bones and something made all his hairs stand on end.

There swooped overhead a monstrous bird, so fast and alien that even the mighty Chert and the Jaw squealed in fright and jumped further back into the bushes. The Jaw nearly ran, but held his ground when he realized his father was going nowhere. Chert stared up at the huge thing. It was not a bird after all, he realized, though he had no inkling what it might be instead; it had no wings to flap but glided smoothly through the air, plainly guided with intention and control; it had no head, either, and now seemed less like an animal than a huge impossibly regular and smooth stone, blinking stars embedded in its surface. Also on its surface were strange markings; Chert could not imagine how men could have formed them, but they definitely looked like made things.

The huge magic stone came to a halt over the hill. It floated, stationary—not even birds could do that. Beside him Chert heard the Jaw whimpering, and felt his own mind starting to buckle.
It’s hovering like an insect,
he told himself.
Birds don’t hover, but insects do.
Somehow, being able to find some precedent for the thing in the world he already knew, no matter how big a stretch that precedent was, helped him stave off madness.

He tore his eyes away from it long enough to look down at the Jaw and grip his shoulder. “It’s just a thing,” he insisted. The Jaw’s eyes were wide, he was making barely audible gibbering noises. “It’s just a thing, like anything else,” he repeated.

Whatever Chert meant by those words, they seemed to work. The Jaw still looked terrified, but he managed to nod and silence himself.

They should have run. But Chert wanted to see what the floating stone would do.

With a blast of strange thunder, a line of red light instantaneously filled the space between the stone and the head of one of the living corpses, and the creature’s head exploded. After toppling, its body continued to crawl weakly along the grass on its belly.

“A spear of fire!” gasped the Jaw in amazement.

“You’re right, that’s exactly what it is!” said Chert, excited to have an explanation for the phenomenon, even one that made no sense. “That’s exactly what it is!” Smoke drifted up from the smoldering chunks of the corpse’s head. Again the red spear appeared, this time connecting the floating stone with the head of another corpse, with identical results. As they watched, the stone dealt the same treatment to each of the undead. Despite the fact that five of the corpses had been their brethren an hour earlier, both Chert and the Jaw felt their chests swell with desperate grateful joy once all the heads had exploded.

The huge stone continued to float overhead. Happy as Chert might be for what it had done so far, he watched it with trepidation. It was an impossibly powerful thing, of a nature and an origin Chert couldn’t begin to fathom. He would be relieved when it went on its way. Now that he knew there were such things in the world, both the undead and the impossible stone, Chert felt he would never be at ease again.

For a long time they watched the stone hover there and do nothing. Finally Chert’s reason began to reawaken. “We must go,” he said to the Jaw. “Boy, we must go. This is dangerous ground now.”

The Jaw blinked, as if he’d been in a trance. He nodded.

They turned their backs on the stone, and the hillside where their people had been destroyed, and took the first steps of their new, lonely wandering. It would be dangerous, to be only two hunters with no band, with nothing but the skins they wore. The Jaw, as a half-breed, was especially likely to be killed, whether they came across people like the People or Big-Brows. Every few paces they looked back to snatch patchy glimpses of the floating stone through the trees of the forest.

They moved swiftly. Before long, they had recovered themselves enough that they were not leaving obvious trails. Although in mourning for his People, Chert was a pragmatic man, and he was already looking to the future. Perhaps these mad spirits were only passing through, but in case they were planning to make a new home here he and the Jaw would move far away. They were strong hunters and would find a band willing to take them in. Grief was fine, and they would find a place for it, but for the most part life would be normal.

So far away was Chert in his own musings, that it was the Jaw who raised a hand to signal they should stop and crouched in the brush. Chert followed suit. There was some animal nearby, rattling through the vegetation. Chert tried not to show how shaken he was at not having heard the noise himself, first. He guessed the animal to be sick and disoriented, from the commotion it made. He doubted any human alone would be foolhardy enough to make so much noise, unless it were a child, and whatever this was sounded too big to be a child.

Of course, it might be one of those undead things.

The Jaw began to creep toward the sounds to investigate. Chert grabbed his shoulder to hold him back, but the Jaw shook off his hand. Seeing that his son wouldn’t be dissuaded, Chert crept along after him.

They were already almost upon the new mysterious thing when they saw a flash of bright white tramping through the trees. Both Chert and the Jaw froze again. There were such things as white birds and animals, but this was a sort of white they’d never seen before, a glittery, shiny white. Chert was infuriated to see yet another alien intrusion into his world.

From the way the thing moved it was soon plain that it was a human, or some spirit disguised as a human. Chert wondered if it were sick, it seemed so clumsy and confused—not clumsy and oblivious, the way the undead had been, when there were no brains nearby for them to eat.

Chert was about to signal to the boy that they should slink away, hopefully without being noticed by the new thing, when the Jaw suddenly stood and thrust the intervening branches aside, roaring a challenge into the woman’s face.

For it was a woman, albeit a tall one, taller than them. They could tell from the shape of her body underneath the strange white hides she wore. And by her pale face, seen through a sheet of dull ice, transparent and impossibly solid here in the spring sunshine. Surrounding the rest of her head was some sort of hollow white stone, different from the stone that floated but also impossibly smooth and regular. Through the ice she gaped at them in terror.

Chert didn’t care if she was terrified. He’d had enough monsters, of any variety. Grabbing a stone from the ground, he sprang up and past the Jaw and with a hunting cry slammed the stone into her face hard enough to smash the ice.

Except it didn’t smash. Though the woman went flying onto her back, the ice wasn’t even cracked. Chert was certain the round white stone that covered her head would bear no marks, either. With wonder, he realized that it was a sort of protective garb. But how long must it take to hollow out a round stone? And wouldn’t it make your neck tired?