The Unkillables

by Boyett, J.

  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.

  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?

  Three

  Chert 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 wen
t 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.