by Boyett, J.
Something came crashing through the vegetation—without turning around, Chert knew it was the Jaw. He considered trying to stop the boy, but fighting each other would dangerously distract them from the no-die. It was simply bad luck that he’d woken so soon.
The Jaw barreled past his father to the tree. He grabbed the zombie’s arm and pulled it off Veela; he bent it back around the tree, screaming in rage and exertion. There were popping and cracking noises as the zombie’s arm and shoulder snapped in multiple places. The creature howled, but Chert was sure it was in frustration at having its meal torn from its grasp, not out of pain. Veela pounded its head with renewed ferocity, and its skull and face got more and more deformed and misshapen. Finally the Jaw pulled her away from the zombie and snatched both stones from her. As the zombie clawed at him, he slammed both rocks together so that they met in the center of the zombie’s brain. The soft, rotted insides of its head sprayed everywhere.
Veela shouted something, reverting in her panic to her own language; then she said, in the People’s tongue, “No swallow! No swallow!”
The warning was unnecessary. The Jaw was already wiping and scrubbing with his forearms at the places on his face where the zombie’s head-matter had splattered onto him. Veela gathered handfuls of dry leaves and handed them to him, and he scraped them across his face over and over, eyes still squeezed shut.
As the Jaw finished cleaning himself as best he could, Veela glared at Chert. He met her gaze. It looked like she was about to say something to him, but decided not to bother.
Once he was relatively clean, the Jaw marched over to his father, fists bunched. “You were going to stand and watch her die.”
Although Chert maintained the appearance of lounging against the tree, his muscles tensed in readiness. “Yes. I was. If she can’t defend herself, she can’t travel with us.”
“Since when does a mighty hunter stand back and let a woman do her own fighting?”
“Ah, but she’s no ordinary woman. Right? I thought she was a powerful sorceress.”
Chert kept his tone relaxed and disdainful. But it was to mask the weary sadness he felt at the prospect of yet more physical combat with his son.
Veela shouted, “Stop your fight! Find zombies. No-dies, we fight!” She was tearing around in the bushes, for no reason Chert could discern. “Where it came from? Must fight them!”
“We can’t keep fighting these things!” shouted Chert. “One, maybe two, perhaps we’ll get lucky and survive. But if we run into more than that we’re dead. We have to get across the white air-biting thing!”
“No! Never! Never until all no-dies die!”
“We’ll die, if there are many more of those things in here with us!”
“Yes! We die! If need is, we die, to fight the no-dies! To kill the zombies!”
“You see?” snarled Chert to the Jaw. “I was only trying to grant her wish.”
The Jaw had been distracted by Veela’s rant—now he turned on his father again. Veela ran over and grabbed his arm. “Damn your fight!” she said. “Damn your fight! Is nothing! Help with other fight!”
“What do you know of our fight?” said Chert.
“Your fight, for always. Always, this fight will happen, of father of son, again and again, for all of human time. But only if we kill the no-dies.”
“Perhaps we ought to let your zombies wipe us out, then, since we’re only good for squabbling.”
Veela paused, looked at him. His bitter joke did not amuse her. She held up the strange nut and said, “Like Dak, you sound sometimes.”
She managed to gall him anew every time she opened her mouth. He had not forgotten his vow to stomp that little man to paste.
By tugging on his arm, Veela managed to pull the Jaw away from his father and their incipient brawl. “Must find where zombie came from,” she kept repeating.
The Jaw’s nerves were so frayed that even he was short with Veela. “What do you mean, where it came from? It could have been wandering through the woods for days! Years, for all I know!”
But Veela remembered what Dak had said about the caves. The zombies had gone in, but come straight back out—he’d been oh so sure of that. And since the ship’s sensors wouldn’t penetrate the planet surface, he wouldn’t be much help even if he did eventually deign to answer her hail. “Search holes,” she said, pointing at the ground. “Search holes.”
The Jaw stared at the ground. “What holes am I supposed to be searching?” he asked.
Veela stopped and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to remember the prepositions she’d picked up. She’d like to see Dak learn a whole fucking language in just a few days! Chert, too. “Search in holes,” she tried. The Jaw continued to just look at her. “Search on holes.” The Jaw looked more bewildered than ever. “Search for holes!” she finally shouted. “Search for holes!”
The Jaw was still confused, but at least he understood well enough that he started scanning the ground for holes.
Veela waved at Chert. “You, also!” she said. “No each other fight, now. Now is to fight zombies.”
Chert merely looked at her and remained aloof.
Veela returned to scanning the ground. As she did so she kept talking in her own language into the communicator: “Dak—Dak, come in, Dak. Dak, you’ve got to come in.”
There was no answer, which sent her beyond worry. Something had to be wrong—surely not even Dak could be so irresponsible as to leave the communicator off? Even if he was asleep, surely not even he would neglect to program an alarm to go off if she were hailing him. Although who knew.... That son of a bitch had driven the zombies underground. That would leave them in much more long-term danger than when the undead had roamed the planet surface—that unmapped cave complex might easily head to other cave mouths well beyond the perimeter wall. Dak’s amazing plan might turn out to have totally fucked all of human history. She’d be willing to bet he’d been so convinced of the flawlessness of his own operation, that he’d hypnotized himself into actually seeing the zombies come right back out again, regardless of reality.
She realized that the Jaw was trying almost timidly to get her attention, so she quit hailing Dak for a moment. “What?” she said, trying not to be curt.
“Are we looking for a hole because you think the zombie came out of one?” he asked uncertainly.
“Yes.”
“So the purpose is to track the zombie back to where it came from?”
“Yes!” Jesus, what was it with these guys?! Did they have no clue what was going on at all?!
“Well,” the Jaw suggested humbly, “maybe we should follow the trail that the zombie made? If it came out of a hole, the trail must lead back there.”
Veela blushed. “You can follow its trail?”
The Jaw gaped at her. “Of course.” A blind person could follow the trails left by those clumsy, shuffling, undead things.
It was Veela’s turn to feel humbled. She touched the Jaw’s arm gratefully and tilted her head down. “Yes,” she said, “thank you. Please, follow it.”
The Jaw led the way, backtracking along the trail—no matter how long he’d wondered why she didn’t follow it back to the zombie’s lair, it might never have occurred to him that the reason was she couldn’t see it. Chert fell in behind them. “You see?” he called to his son. “She’s stupid.”
Seeing the way the Jaw’s shoulders tensed at his father’s voice, Veela was afraid they were going to get into it again. But he let it go. Veela felt stupid enough not to take offense. Following the Jaw now, she realized that the trail was, in fact, dramatic enough that she should have been able to see it herself, after all the lessons of the last couple days.
Trailing behind them both, Chert kept his grim eyes on Veela’s back. The woman was going to get his son and himself killed. As soon as the Jaw was distracted, Chert was going to get rid of her.
As predicted, the trail led back to a fissure in the earth. It was a great stone lurching up out of the soil like a whale
frozen in time as it broke the surface of a dirt sea, with a dark light-gobbling crevice wide enough for a human or zombie to wriggle through. “Goddammit,” she muttered, and raised the communicator to her mouth again. “Dak? Dak, goddammit, you have to answer me!”
The Jaw watched her worriedly. He had no idea what was going on or what it had to do with the little man, but he could tell something was terribly wrong.
“Dak!” she cried, so angry she was near tears. “The zombies are underground, Dak! They’re in the fucking caves! It’s going to take work and technology to even try to clean them out, so I need you to respond to me!”
She had walked a few paces away, out of a sense that it didn’t look good for her and Dak to fight openly in front of the natives; meanwhile the Jaw was running his hands over the stone fissure from which the zombie must have come. She was watching him, and was just about to tell him to be careful, in case another zombie sprang out of the hole. The Jaw turned to look over his shoulder at her, did a double-take, and shouted a warning. Veela had barely registered it or had time to feel any fear, when there was a massive blow to the back of her head. She was unconscious before her face hit the dirt.
Twelve
The remnants of the People lived under the guidance of Gash-Eye on the stony shore of the subterranean lake, even deeper down than when Spear and Stick had still been with them. One fire spluttered and smoked beside the stale water. They weren’t permitted more than one, because no one knew when they would be able to go outside again to gather more wood.
Gash-Eye sat trying to get a grasp of this new world they’d entered. There was that chamber where she’d thrown Tooth into the fire, and this one by the lake. In both the floor was relatively dry, not too slick, only a few stalactites dotting the rooms. Connecting these chambers was a sort of passageway—not a straightforward tunnel, but a winding corridor with branchings off. Some of those branches were tight fissures, but others were sizable doorways one could easily wander into, without realizing one was leaving the main artery. The People and Gash-Eye found the terrain there treacherous, but that was only because they’d had so little experience inside caves—they’d actually gotten very lucky.
When hunting, Gash-Eye had nearly been tricked by one of these branchings. That had rattled her. It would be easy to get lost forever here.
Soon no one could say how long they’d been underground. These were people who’d spent their entire lives outside, entering caves only to escape rain or snow, or to hide from animals or other people, and never straying far from the mouth. Their new environment would have been trying, even excruciating for almost any human from any society throughout history, but for them it proved physically and mentally debilitating.
Gash-Eye watched them deteriorate. Though she didn’t harbor an excessive amount of love for the People, their sufferings were too great for her to gloat. Especially since she shared in their sufferings. More importantly, so did Quarry.
On the one hand, Gash-Eye felt guilty because part of the reason Quarry was stuck down here was Gash-Eye’s fraudulent prophesying. On the other, last time they’d gone outside the world really had been full of unkillable monsters and red fire streaming down from the heavens, so, fraudulent or not, she’d apparently been right.
Regardless, she could feel a dangerous shift taking place in the People. Just after their most recent escape they had been grateful and anxious to please her. But their fear and dependence had mixed to form something new. From feeling that they were dependent on Gash-Eye, it was not such a long emotional leap to feel she was responsible for them, and from that to feel she was responsible for everything. Shortly after Spear’s disastrous attempt to lead the People from the cave, when they had asked when they might go outside again, they had asked appealingly, beseechingly. Now there was the hint of a demand to the question, as if they were asking not for information but for permission. Then, when she’d brought them food, they’d been fawning. Now, they accepted it almost sullenly, as if it were her fault they weren’t still living off steamingly fresh game.
Sometimes she resented the fact that so much of their gratitude had worn off after only a few days underground. Other moments she thought it was understandable, considering how many weeks they’d been down here. Her time sense was as garbled as anyone’s.
Now she was hunting, far from the fire, just around the curve leading from the chamber into the tunnel, at the very edge of her vision’s range. Quarry was with her—Gash-Eye had done her best to leave the girl near the fire, but more and more Quarry insisted on accompanying her everywhere. Since the disastrous attempt to leave the cave, the girl seemed to feel that her only hope of safety lay with the Big-Brow. Out here the girl was blind—they had rounded the corner of a tunnel leading away from the grand chamber at the shore of the lake, and they were standing completely still, listening for prey. Quarry, wrapped in the bearskin she’d inherited from her mother, held onto the thinner skin Gash-Eye wore, to avoid being separated. Quarry’s bearskin should have kept her warm, but both of them nevertheless shivered in the cold underground air. By the faint glimmerings of the fire that managed to round the corner, Gash-Eye could only just make out the child’s form beside her.
“Gash-Eye?” whispered Quarry. Unlike all the People, who tried to flatter her despite their fear and hatred, Quarry had not adopted the strange new name “Petal-Drift.” It seemed to never occur to her to use it.
“Sh,” said Gash-Eye, and caressed the child to take the edge off her reproach. Moments ago she’d heard something scrape along the rock floor, further up the tunnel. Hopefully it was an animal, more food, and she didn’t want to warn it off by making any noise.
And if it turned out to be a wandering unkillable, she didn’t want to make any noise that might attract it.
Quarry obediently fell silent. But a moment later she coughed; a huge volley of chest-rattling bursts whose echoes rolled through the caves.
Gash-Eye sighed. That had practically been loud enough for the unkillables up on the surface to hear. Then she looked down at Quarry’s dark form with concern, feeling guilty for her annoyance. There was no point asking if the girl was all right. The cold and the damp had invaded her lungs, like they had everyone else’s. Gash-Eye reached down and pulled the bearskin tighter around the girl’s shoulders.
“Gash-Eye?”
“What is it?” whispered Gash-Eye gently.
“Have you seen yet when we will be able to leave?” From Quarry, the question had none of the accusatory quality the rest of the People gave it. There was only a toneless despair.
Gash-Eye would have loved to be able to confide her fraud to Quarry, and Quarry alone. That she didn’t was not because she didn’t trust the girl, nor because she thought Quarry would find fault with the ploy. She just didn’t want to burden her with the secret.
“No,” Gash-Eye said, “not yet,” and caressed the girl again. Quarry was trembling and feverish—only slightly, but it would get worse.
Quarry nodded in quiet acceptance. Then she whispered, “I know you can’t help it, Gash-Eye. I know you can’t make the spirits show you anything, and I know you didn’t bring the unkillables. But you should be careful. Because some of the People, if they don’t get to leave the caves soon, they’re going to blame you.”
“I know.”
“I think they’re awful. I think they’re ugly. If it weren’t for you we’d all be dead. You ought to have left us all and let us die, after the way we always treated you. But all that, I think it only makes them hate you more now. I don’t know why, but I think it does.”
For a moment Gash-Eye only looked at her, the girl-shaped shadow in the darkness. Then she pulled her in close: “I’ll never leave you,” she whispered.
Quarry hugged her back, but Gash-Eye could feel how slack her muscles were, and her voice was distant as she said, “Soon, I think my eyes won’t work anymore, even if we do ever go back outside.”
That scraping noise reappeared, closer this time, and G
ash-Eye put her hand over Quarry’s mouth, then removed it once she was sure the girl had the idea. Whatever was making the noise, now that it was close Gash-Eye realized it was bigger than a rodent. Maybe it was Spear. Or an unkillable. If it were an unkillable, at least she wouldn’t have to worry about any of the People siding with it against her.
Gash-Eye became aware of dark splotches moving towards them along the wall she was facing. Heart hammering, she gently put her hand over Quarry’s mouth again and slowly, slowly stepped backwards, willing the girl to follow, and to remain absolutely silent as she did so. They crept till Gash-Eye felt the rock wall at her back, and then they stood still. Gash-Eye held her breath.
The splotches took form. There were five of them, definitely human-shaped. At first she was afraid they were more unkillables, because of their strange twitchings and hunched postures. But they didn’t have the absent shuffle of the unkillables, that could explode into action when prey was near. These were merely humans who had been broken by days spent in terror and total darkness. As they groped their way along the opposite wall, Gash-Eye felt almost sure she could make out Spear’s features. They all wheezed slightly as they breathed—the damp cold air must have been even harder on them than on the rest of the People, since they’d been without wood to make a fire.
Once Spear and his friends passed Gash-Eye and Quarry, they were able to see the glimmers of the fire. Gash-Eye heard their gasps and whimpers of desperate excitement, then Spear shushed them and began hissing his plan. The People were unlikely to hear the approachers, huddled around the fire as they were—for one thing they were too far away, for another the fire’s crackling and the echo of its crackling would mask the intruders’ noise. After some quick whispered instructions, Spear led his men around the corner.