The Unkillables

by Boyett, J.

  Veela looked at the Jaw’s face to see if he understood. She couldn’t tell whether he was close to it or not, but he was clearly trying.

  She continued writing the sequence, saying the numbers aloud as she went. “Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-four.” She had to move along the ash field to find room to write. Chert and the Jaw followed her.

  Chert was so annoyed that he wanted to stop her by force. But it seemed that the Jaw was seeing something in all this nonsense, and Chert felt uncharacteristically unsure of himself.

  Shortly after Veela got to the the thirties the Jaw realized with a gasp that this new string of marks, fronted by the mark for “three,” also mirrored the sequence of the original string. “Next is four!” he shouted, voice breaking. Veela looked at him. He’d spoken too excitedly for her to make out the words. The Jaw started to hurry back to the original string, then realized he didn’t have to go that far and stopped at the place where she’d written “twenty-four.” He pointed down at the second half of the mark, the “four,” and shouted, “Next is four!” He looked at Veela in appeal, waiting to hear if he’d gotten it right.

  “Yes!” she shouted. “Yes!” She wrote more quickly, hurrying to get through the thirties’ subset of the sequence so that she could get to the forties, to reward the Jaw.

  He walked beside her as she wrote. When she got to the forties, and he saw he’d been right, that he’d predicted the pattern, his body shook with emotion. He put his hand over his eyes. Voice hoarse, he said, “Next is five. Next is five.”

  Veela kept writing on into the fifties. Her voice was getting hoarse too, as she continued to name each number. She was exultantly shouting them now.

  Chert stared in astonishment at his son, who for some reason was actually crying over these scratchings in the dirt. “How long will you go on?” he demanded of Veela. “Where do these scratchings end?”

  She straightened and turned to face him. She said, “They end at the strong tight fire.”

  As she was about to finish the sixties, the Jaw took the stick from her and took over the sequence. Having never written before—having never conceived of the notion of writing until today—his scratchings were barely legible. But it was plain that he had grasped the principle of the sequence—he made his way into the seventies with no problem, then the eighties. Veela walked alongside him, saying the name of each number as he wrote it.

  Once he’d written “ninety-nine,” he looked up at her uncertainly. She took the stick from him and wrote a one and two zeros. “One hundred,” she said.

  “Is that the end?” he asked.

  “No end. Never end.”

  The Jaw breathed out softly. He gazed up at the dimming sky and seemed to no longer even notice the nearby wall.

  While there was still light Veela sat the Jaw down with her in a fresh patch of ash. Chert hung back—Veela wasn’t going to waste time begging him to pay attention when the Jaw was so enthusiastic.

  In the ash she wrote a ten, and below it she wrote an “x” beside a two. Under them both she drew a line, and below it she wrote a twenty. The Jaw stared, face scrunched in concentration.

  She held her two closed fists up, and flashed her ten fingers open twice in quick succession, saying, “Ten. Twenty.” She repeated the action, this time saying, “One. Two.” She repeated the whole thing several times, using both pairs.

  Then she pointed down at the newly written symbols. One the Jaw’s attention was there, she held her two closed fists beside the symbols. She opened her fingers. “Ten,” she said. Then she flashed her fingers closed and open twice. “One, two,” she said. “Two.” Then she pointed at the symbols written in ash, pointing at each relevant marking in turn. “Ten. Two times. Is twenty.”

  She repeated this many times. The Jaw, scowling in concentration, followed along with the symbols, watching her flashing fingers, muttered along after her. He would look up at her face, looking for help. She continued repeating the lesson, patiently.

  At last he gave that gasp of comprehension. He leaned far forward, supporting himself with his hands and bringing his face close to the markings.

  With his finger he crudely wrote, next to Veela’s markings, the symbols for “ten times three equals thirty.” Before he could even look up at her for approval, she screamed for joy and threw her arms around him.

  In a dim way, he grasped that this had something to do with why she had said zero was the most powerful number. It designated magnitude ... but of course the Jaw had no words for this.

  He was right, but Veela had also meant that the concept of zero served as a gateway from the idea of natural numbers to the idea of integers. But she would have been delighted enough with the Jaw’s insight.

  They called it a night after that. Just as well—Veela wanted to spend time planning the next lessons better. For instance, why had she gone straight to multiplication, without even pausing for addition and subtraction?... The Jaw seemed to have a knack for this stuff, considering that a couple hours ago he’d had no notion of a number as an entity existing independent of any contingent physical phenomena, as pure pattern. But knack or no knack, she should be able to keep him on his toes. Her mathematical background might be laughable compared to Dak’s, but she’d been good at it in college and was confident she could teach someone all the way up to calculus.

  Chert eyed her, where she lay resting in the ash. He suspected she’d played a trick on his son, and felt angry at her on the Jaw’s behalf; he speculated, a little sadly, that perhaps the Jaw’s Big-Brow blood made him gullible.

  The Jaw wandered, almost staggered, through the corridor of ash, head tilted back as he counted the stars. He felt he himself had been cracked open to reveal a beautiful terror within. All of a sudden there was an abstract pattern underpinning the world. The Jaw felt instinctively that it transcended himself, that it transcended all the spirits and people and animals and plants he had ever known. If the universe disappeared tomorrow, that eternal pattern would remain.

  He went to where Veela was resting and knelt beside her. “Thank you for showing me.”

  She smiled, and put her hand upon his arm. Earlier she’d feared that the attraction he obviously felt for her might manifest itself as rape. Now, looking at his grateful, humble, awed face, she knew she wouldn’t have to worry about that. As far as the Jaw was concerned, she called the shots from now on.

  Ten

  The monster-woman Veela really had driven Chert’s son crazy. Now that his frustration had faded and he’d calmed down, he was willing to concede that there was a strong enough possibility of her having some value after all, for them not to necessarily kill her outright. But something had to be done to break this hold that she had over the Jaw.

  Chert could understand being fascinated by a female, and if the Jaw would just take her, like a normal person, the fact that he had chosen this particular female would have been merely annoying. But he followed her around like he was still a mewling whelp and she a master hunter. He barely seemed to notice Chert anymore, he was so busy mooning over her and repeating her endless incantations over her scratchings in the dirt. She had definitely bewitched him. Since that first night, Chert had avoided even looking at her scratchings, for fear that this time he might not prove strong enough to withstand their magic.

  But he knew she wasn’t entirely bluffing—she really did understand things that he would have liked to understand. The night that she made the Jaw swoon over her scratchings in the dirt, there was a terrible commotion and red flashes that must have been the strong tight fire, back the way they’d come. Chert and the Jaw had tried not to show how frightened they were by it all—but Veela stood with her hands on her hips, grinning in the direction of the red flashes.

  When they asked her what was going on, she held her hands up with the palms facing each other. “No-dies,” she said, nodding to indicate the space between her palms. Then she pressed her hands together.

  So it was a trap. Chert wondered what spirit
s were undertaking it, and who had cajoled them into it. The strange unbreakable nut was still here with them, so it couldn’t have been the little man.

  Screams began to come from the hill, mixed in with the strange humming crash of the strong tight fire. Veela looked shocked, then somber. The Jaw looked at Chert. “Those are the People,” he said. “There were survivors.”

  “I suppose there were,” said Chert. He left his gaze forward. When the Jaw wouldn’t look away, Chert met his eyes and said, “What do you care? There was only one of them you gave a damn about. She wasn’t even of the People, and anyway I tell you she’s dead.”

  The Jaw left his hard glare upon him, breathing heavily. For a second Chert thought his son might try to kill him. Finally the Jaw stalked off instead.

  Chert watched the boy’s back as he went. It wasn’t fair. What had Chert done? His only sin had been to rescue the boy and nobody else. But when those undead had attacked, Chert had realized that there was no one else among the People he cared about very much. Was that such a terrible thing, to have saved only his son, when he’d barely been able to manage even that?

  He didn’t think it was so terrible. In fact, he was beginning to think that maybe he ought to be thanked.

  Veela, meanwhile, ignored the men’s exchange, lost in thoughts of her own. Eventually she went looking for the Jaw—despite his angry grief and her linguistic limitations, he gradually realized she wanted to know where he thought the screaming humans had appeared from. After much more back-and-forth, he managed to explain about the cave up on the hill, that the People had been trying to escape into during the first no-die attack.

  Dak hadn’t mentioned any cave.

  She couldn’t understand how there could have been human survivors in the caves, if there had been zombies there too. Humans needed light to navigate; zombies needed light, as well, except when it came to brains. The refugees in the caves wouldn’t have been able to see the zombies coming, whereas the zombies would have been drawn inexorably by their brainsong.... Veela supposed the humans must have had torches, and then been constantly on the move to keep one step ahead of the undead.

  She contacted Dak about it. Both of the guys were moping and sullen, so it was easy to get some privacy from them.

  “They’re all dead now,” Dak assured her. “It’s true that there did turn out to be a cave, with some humans hiding inside. But all who came out were killed or zombified, and the ship’s lasers destroyed the zombified ones.”

  “How can you be sure of that?”

  “Because, Veela, I had the ship’s computer keep track of the humans as they exited the cave, and they were all accounted for. There could be some still hiding inside, I suppose, but I doubt it.”

  Veela didn’t see why he was so certain. Besides, if humans had been able to slip into the cave complex in the first place, zombies might have done the same, and that could be a disaster of untold magnitude. If the zombies were in a vast enough cave system, with egresses potentially many miles away, then the perimeter wall wouldn’t mean shit.

  She had a hard time hiding her annoyance at the spot he’d picked for his trap. Even if the hilltop was the nearest forest clearing to the zombie epicenter, and thus the easiest place for the lasers to operate, luring them so close to the cave mouth had been reckless. She wondered if Dak had even known the cave was there. If not, it didn’t speak well of his ability to use the equipment with as much expertise as he claimed, especially considering his inability to open that hold filled with drones and weapons, and the fact that now he couldn’t even land the ship.

  And if for some reason he had known the cave was there, and had picked that site anyway ... well, that would be even stranger.

  ***

  The next morning Chert killed a rabbit, skinned it, built a small fire, and cooked it. The Jaw and Veela tore into it ravenously. Chert watched them.

  Veela paused in her eating. “You, no eat?” she asked Chert.

  He only shrugged in reply. He didn’t much feel like eating with the woman.

  As they were licking the bones clean, the Jaw said, “What now? Do you think the trap worked? Do you think all the zombies are destroyed?” Veela had taught them that new word, “zombies.”

  “My hope, is. Our hope, is.”

  Chert had given up trying to understand her explanations of the trap. Something about a gigantic pile of brains, and a big flying something that used the strong tight fire (presumably the stone he and the Jaw had seen the other day). Like everything she said, it made no sense. Even if it was all true, Chert wished that she would explain herself in such a way that a sane person could believe her.

  “How do the no-dies know the pile of brains is there?” the Jaw had asked. “They can smell it?”

  “No,” Veela had said, and then had launched into a long confused babble. The gist appeared to be that living brains “sang,” and the no-dies were drawn to the song. Human brains sang the loudest, but any brain was audible to them, and a huge pile of brains harvested from deer, bears, foxes, squirrels, lizards, and so on, she assured them, would blare at the no-dies throughout the forest, wherever they were within the wall.

  Chert pointed out that a pile of disembodied brains was hardly likely to be “living.” Veela gave a reply that made no sense—she seemed to be saying that she and the little man had some kind of juice that could keep an organ alive a few hours, in a halfway fashion, even outside of a body.

  To explain all this even as well as she had, Veela had had to sing, since “sing” was a word they’d not yet taught each other. As she sang, the Jaw had gazed at her with such stupid adoring awe that Chert had felt he might throw up.

  “Why are the no-dies such a dark black when they’re hungry?” asked the Jaw. “And why do they glow bright green when they eat a brain?”

  Once Veela had deciphered the question, she knew its answer was going to be a doozy. How to explain that the zombie venom kickstarted the production of the cthuloid fluid, which transformed the blood into a black ichor that stained its way through every vein and capillary, till finally it had soaked through the entirety of the victim’s flesh? And then further explain that the ingestion of cerebral fluid set off a whole symphony of metabolic reactions in the zombie, the most visible of which was the brief and spectacular activation of the cthuloid fluid’s phosphorescent quality? “Magic,” she finally settled for, with a shrug.

  Chert and, mainly, the Jaw taught Veela how to make a knife, and a spear. They taught her the most basic rudiments of tracking, the kind of things they were used to teaching toddlers only beginning to walk, not full-grown adults. She caught on pretty quickly. That only bewildered Chert even more. He’d assumed she was simply an idiot, albeit a very unusual sort of idiot. Now it turned out that her problem was that she had never learned the most basic lessons of being human. It was as if a full-grown woman had never gotten around to learning how to walk, out of laziness.

  Two days after she’d made her first spear, she killed her first animal. At first she danced around, inordinately pleased with herself for having killed a mere rabbit. Then she picked the thing up, holding it at a distance and making a displeased face at it, a sure way to offend its spirit. The Jaw, who had been beaming at her throughout the kill, actually had to tell her to thank the rabbit’s spirit before they skinned it.

  Chert was disgusted. It would be one thing if her particular rites of thanksgiving had been different from the People’s. But not thinking to thank the animal at all betrayed a lack of decency.

  In the middle of the Jaw showing her how to skin the rabbit, Veela excused herself. She insisted on hiding in the bushes to urinate. The Jaw was content to accept this as simply another of her eccentricities; Chert was convinced she was concealing something sinister under that white garb.

  While she was gone Chert approached the Jaw. He was happily dressing the monster woman’s kill for her: a bitter reminder to Chert that slave blood ran in his son’s veins. He said, “We’re supposed to be teach
ing her in exchange for something. When is she going to start giving us something in return?”

  The Jaw stared at Chert in unfeigned shock. “She’s giving us the math,” he said.

  “Math” was what she called her prattlings and scratchings. Chert regarded his son sullenly and without speaking, then walked away from him.

  Meanwhile, as Veela was urinating she noticed that she’d happened to pick a spot near a patch of those purple shrooms that Chert had been so gung-ho to keep her away from. She picked one, and with four taps on the communicator—two shorts, a long, then two more shorts—she caused a tiny needle to pop out, then stuck that needle into the shroom. The needle would sample and decode the mushroom’s DNA, and send the genome up to Dak. He should be able to model how the fungus was likely to interact with human biochemistry. And then they would have at least a clue as to what the exact flavor of the experience was, when her new buddies were tripping balls. That might be interesting, maybe.

  ***

  Veela and the Jaw talked all the time, he trying to learn the math and she trying to learn the language. But he wanted to learn about her, as well. “Why are you here, alone?” he asked. “Alone with no band, except the little man in the nut? With no weapon you can control, yourself?”

  Veela hung on his words, translating them. Once she’d processed his question, bitter humiliation spread through her face like a stain, prompted by the memories his questions evoked.

  Not humiliation at her decision to stay on the planet surface—she felt no shame over that, although it would not be quite true to say she hadn’t regretted it a few times, and she still couldn’t believe she’d done it.