The Unkillables (5 page)

She tried to scramble away, blinking at them in a panic as she thrashed back through the underbrush. They blinked too, at the gleaming reflection of the sunlight from where it hit her white hide from between the tree leaves. She was making noises, babbling something in an unknown tongue.

To hell with the stone on her head—if she could be scared, she could be killed. It would feel good to kill something, after their earlier futile battle with the undead. Still holding the stone, Chert stepped forward, preparing to find out if the white hide she wore also had magical protective properties.

The Jaw stopped him with a hand to his chest. “Listen!” he said, staring at the woman, face strained in concentration. “Listen to what she’s saying!”

Exasperated, Chert wanted to say that she was talking in no language he understood, then get back to the business of beating her to death with the rock and his feet. But he paused, willing to briefly humor the Jaw. He even listened closely, certain though he was that it would do no good, and after a moment was surprised to realize that he could understand a few words.

“Me friend is,” she was saying. She spoke, not the tongue of the People, but that of the other band which habitually passed through a swath of territory over the range of hills, that the People called the Overhills. The People had had dealings enough with them that most had learned their language’s basics. Chert was far from fluent, but even he could tell how it was being butchered by this new monster. “Me is,” she said again, followed by a string of words they couldn’t understand. Then, “Me is fight no-die.”

That was easy enough to understand. “What are the no-dies?” demanded Chert. “Where do they come from?”

The monster just blinked at them. She shook her head and said, “No is understanding, not. Hard is the language.”

The effort of translating from her travesty of a tongue he only knew imperfectly in the first place was exasperating to Chert. The Jaw was less put out. As the monster got back to her feet, eyeing them cautiously, he said, in the Overhill tongue, “How do you fight them?”

“Head destroy,” she said. “In the distance, to destroy from. Fire with. Small, tight, strong fire.”

The phrase “small, tight, strong fire” would have been meaningless, if they hadn’t seen the red lances emanating from the smooth floating stone. “But the bodies live on,” said Chert, in Overhill, thinking of the crawling arm and the corpse that had continued to drag itself along. “Even after the head is gone, the body lives.”

Her eyes clouded as she deciphered his speech; once she understood, she shook her head and said, “Not long times that it lives, after head.”

That was good news, if true. The Jaw spoke: “Give us the small tight strong fire.”

Chert reflected that it was his son who was asking the most important questions, not himself. He felt a mixture of pride, and anger at being bested.

The monster was nodding enthusiastically. But what she said was, “Is danger. Must learn. Is the time for to teach.”

The Jaw looked at Chert. The anger at his father seemed to have been forgotten in the midst of a newfound, dark enthusiasm. “That makes sense,” he said in the People’s tongue. “A new weapon should mean new skills.”

Chert nodded slowly. It would be good to have access to the fire weapon, in case they met more of the undead things; and it would be handy magic to have, when they were trying to persuade a strange band to take them in. But he wasn’t particularly happy with the notion of following this new monster someplace and spending months with her while she trained them.

Which was exactly what she seemed to have in mind. “Came,” she said, stepping back in the direction she’d come from and waving them to follow. “Came.” She was trying to tell them to come. “From this place, away is the safer.” Chert wasn’t sure he was going to obey, but the Jaw moved after her with no hesitation. Biting down on his irritation, Chert fell into step as well.

Out of habit, Chert and the Jaw moved so as not to leave too obvious a trail. But it was wasted effort, because the monster crashed so messily through the woods that it was almost as if they were following a bear, or a huge stumbling baby. Chert stared at her stone head-garb and her impossible hide, and thought about the hard unmelting ice protecting her face, and wondered how a creature so stupid could have come across such powerful tools.

He said to the Jaw, “Do you think it’s wise to follow this monster?”

“She looks human to me. She looks like one of you, only with the color of a Big-Brow.”

Chert’s mouth puckered in annoyance to hear his son refer to humans as “you,” thus perversely identifying himself with his Big-Brow blood. “Human or spirit or monster or witch, I see no reason why we should so casually follow her.”

The Jaw scowled at him. “What do you mean? We’re following so as to learn to use the strong tight fire. So we can kill those things that will not die.”

The monster peered at them over her shoulder, probably anxiously wondering what they were talking about in their foreign tongue. Chert pretended not to notice her curiosity. “I say we would be better served by getting far away from here. Why should we risk our lives trying to kill the undead?”

“Because they killed our People. Because they killed my mother. Are you a coward?”

Chert refrained from pointing out that by rights Gash-Eye should have been executed anyway. And falling prey to those monsters was a better fate than what Spear had planned for her. “We’re hunters,” he said. “What can we do with those things after we kill them? Eat them? I wouldn’t eat them.”

“No, we’re not going to eat them. We’re going to destroy them so they can never harm us again.”

“A better way to keep them from harming us would be to go far away. In all my rangings and wanderings, in all my life, I’ve never seen things like what we fought today. My days are more than half done, and I see no reason to expect I will ever see them again.”

The Jaw glared straight ahead. Although he kept walking, Chert guessed that his silence meant he had no ready answer.

The monster turned to look nervously over her shoulder again. In Overhill, she said, “If questions is existing, me is can be answerer.” Chert pretended not to have heard her; even the Jaw was too deep in sullen thought to acknowledge her offer.

Chert pressed, now while the boy was weakened by doubt. “Your heart is swollen and enflamed,” he said. “I know. I understand. You look through bloody water. But trust me. We should work to preserve while there is something to preserve.”

“What is there to preserve? Everyone’s dead.”

“You are my son and I am your father. There’s something to preserve. We should not be following this monster to new dangers. We should escape her, and find a band.”

The Jaw didn’t reply.

Chert said, “This monster who’s leading us is somehow linked to the undead creatures we couldn’t defeat today. I don’t know what the link is, and I don’t care about solving the mystery. I want no more of any of it.”

Still the Jaw said nothing. Then, just when Chert was on the verge of insisting they bolt, he spoke: “I want to see what she’s going to show us.”

From his tone, Chert understood it would be no good arguing any more right now. For a moment he considered running away by himself and leaving his stupid half-breed son to his fate; but he knew he wasn’t going to do that.

So for a little while they would follow this monster. It wouldn’t be the first foolish thing Chert had ever done. And he had to admit that he was not without curiosity as to the fire weapon; and was even curious as to the nature of these new monsters and magical artifacts that had invaded his world, though never finding out what they were would be a small price to pay for never seeing any of them again.

He would consent to follow the monster alongside the Jaw. But as soon as he could get his son away from her he would do it, even if it meant once more beating the Jaw senseless so that he could be carried. And if it meant killing the monster in the white skins, he wouldn’t think twice.

I
t was Quarry who had half-dragged Gash-Eye to safety in the cave—Gash-Eye hadn’t quite been dead weight, but she’d been so stunned she was hardly able to walk. If it hadn’t been for Quarry, those unkillable things would have gotten her—the rest of the People would have left her out on the hillside.

At first, most of the survivors had sat in the gloom of the cave and howled their grief, men, women, and children. But that didn’t last long before Spear and those hunters closest to him went among them, slapping the noisy ones into silence. When Spear saw Gash-Eye he slapped her too, though she hadn’t made a sound. She didn’t seem to notice.

But Quarry did. Even if she’d been a boy, she would have been too small and weak and young to challenge Spear. (She was small for her age, even though she had begun the bleeding three moon-cycles ago, and had already been initiated into eating the Mushroom of the Inner Eye.) But once Spear’s attention was elsewhere, she persuaded Gash-Eye to get up and move deeper back into the gloom, where she was less likely to be noticed. Then she let her slump once more in a daze upon the floor.

While Gash-Eye was still stunned, Quarry ventured to the front of the cave and overheard Spear saying to one of his friends, “At least those monsters got rid of the half-breed for us.” He meant only that, since the Jaw wasn’t here with them now, he must have died in the unkillables’ onslaught. But Quarry misunderstood, and thought Spear had seen the Jaw killed with his own eyes.

Quarry made her way back to Gash-Eye and tried to tend to her. When Gash-Eye came to herself she gasped, “The Jaw! We have to go back!”

Quarry squeezed her big hand. “No, Gash-Eye. He died.”

For a moment Quarry thought Gash-Eye was going to break her hand, her grip tightened so. The girl rode it out, betraying no discomfort.

“Are you sure?” choked Gash-Eye. “Did you see it? See it happen?”

Quarry had not. But she remembered the bitter satisfaction with which Spear had uttered the fact, as if even in the midst of such carnage he were able to find pleasure in the Jaw’s destruction. If Quarry left Gash-Eye with any doubt, Gash-Eye would go asking the other People about her son, and Spear would be inspired to give her a lush, sumptuous, cruel account of all his gory suffering. So Quarry said, “Yes. I saw. I’m so sorry, Gash-Eye. But he died quickly, and with no pain. And he died really—he wasn’t changed into one of those black-and-green things.”

Gash-Eye’s eyes squeezed shut and she slumped back again. If the muscles around her eyes hadn’t been so agonizingly tight, Quarry wouldn’t have thought she was conscious.

The People had started putting on the extra, heavier skins that had been left inside the cave mouth as winter had receded. A large supply of firewood had been left there, too. Even this little ways in, the cool unclean breeze coming up from the bowels of the earth lowered the temperature.

Quarry wore a fat, thick bearskin that had been a gift from her mother. Though her mother had been dead a year, and was no longer there to stick up for her, the People had let her keep the gift.

The hunters were trying to hold a council, despite the world having ended. “I am the oldest,” said Stick, “and I have never seen or heard of anything like what we have witnessed today. So I will not bother to ask whether anyone else has.”

There were a few tentative protests from those who pointed out that it was not so uncommon to see the dead walk the earth, but Spear cut short such objections with contempt: “Yes, many of us have seen wraiths, spirits rising up as steam from their new home under the ground. But who could compare that with the full-bodied horrors we faced today?”

“I agree with Spear,” said Stick. “I myself have seen spirits who have returned, many, many times. Sometimes in dreams, sometimes at twilight. But they always waited to return till after they had already died.” It was hard to see Stick’s expression in the dimness, but by his voice they could tell that he was re-seeing the dreadful sights of the day. “Besides, all those apparitions were the people I had known, albeit returned in a different form. But these things today ... these black and green monstrosities that the Big-Brows transformed our people to ... I don’t know why, but I feel that the blackened, newly unkillable friends who attacked us today were more dead than any ghost I ever saw, no matter how entrenched in those bodies they were.”

“Stick is right,” said another, Granite. “My brother would never have tried to kill us that way. Whatever demon inhabited his form after that Big-Brow bit him, it wasn’t my brother.”

“The Big-Brows,” said Spear, “the Big-Brows! Yes, let’s talk about the Big-Brows!”

Gash-Eye, who could see in this dimness far better than the others, saw Spear coming her way, squinting at the People as he went, looking for her. She could have escaped, but didn’t bother.

Spear found her. He grabbed her by the forearm and shook her. “Here’s the one that led them to us!”

“Why should you think that, Spear?” said Stick. He sounded disdainful of Spear’s stupid accusation, but Gash-Eye knew better than to expect that disdain to translate into aid if Spear decided to beat her to death. But, again, she didn’t care. She was supposed to be dead, anyway—that had been her plan.

Spear spun around to answer Stick’s question, but didn’t let go of Gash-Eye’s arm. “They were Big-Brows, weren’t they?!”

“I imagine they were Big-Brows who’d been changed into monsters, and who were just as much taken by surprise as we were.”

“They appeared after Gash-Eye sent a signal to that group of Big-Brows in the forest, didn’t they? None of us speak her Big-Brow tongue—who knows what she said? Whatever it was, didn’t it summon those monsters that nearly killed us all? Wasn’t the trick with the green light just a lure, to bring us in close?”

Muttered words bubbled up in the darkness. The shattered survivors of the People would be only too happy to blame Gash-Eye for the whole thing.
Fine,
she thought.
Let them tear me apart, and stop lollygagging.

“That’s crazy!” said Quarry. Spear jumped, not having noticed her there in the darkness. “There’s no reason to think Gash-Eye was any more responsible than any of us!”