The Unkillables

by Boyett, J.

  Gash-Eye eased into the big chamber, bringing Quarry along. Her plan was to leave Quarry here by the entrance, with her face to the wall. She didn’t want the girl seeing what she was about to do to Oak—she was going to try to be quiet, partly for the sake of stealth, but also because she didn’t want Quarry hearing too much. Of course, the terrorized, maddened women were bound to start screaming.

  Gash-Eye wasn’t sure what she ought to do about the women. One might decide her loyalties lay more with Spear than with the Big-Brow slave, even despite all that had happened, and she could decide to stick a vengeful knife in Gash-Eye’s back. At the very least, guiding them would complicate the task of getting out of here (for Gash-Eye had decided that, whatever the risks, Quarry’s health depended on getting free of these caves). And now that they knew there were unkillables wandering through the caverns, it was hard not to see the girls as potential unkillables themselves, if they should happen to be bitten. Unkillables that Gash-Eye would only have to deal with later.

  There was a commotion behind them, running feet slapping stone. Damn! Gash-Eye ushered Quarry down the wall, away from the entrance. Oak looked up in their direction as he heard the approaching noise, but she didn’t think he’d seen them. His captives looked up a moment after he did.

  Spear came running in. Gash-Eye couldn’t believe it. If she hadn’t had Quarry to worry about, she would have screamed in rage and flown at him, just to have it all over with one way or the other.

  Oak was on his feet with his weapon up by the time Spear got there; the girls huddled closer together, trying to make their clump smaller and lower to the ground. “It’s me!” shouted Spear.

  Oak blinked, still paranoid but looking less ready to attack. Spear was followed by Club. After a brief hesitation, Gash-Eye squeezed Quarry’s hand and began leading her back towards the passageway. As bad for the child as the dark might be, Gash-Eye didn’t think things would go well if she attacked all three of these men, instead of only Oak by himself. Not to mention that she still didn’t trust the girls.

  Spear was saying, “That Big-Brow led us right into a nest of unkillables!”

  “Where are the others?” asked Oak, with a shaky voice.

  “Dead,” said Spear.

  The girls set up a wail. “Where are they?!” said Oak, almost shrieking.

  “Left them in the room where they died,” said Club.

  “The unkillables are too stupid to get out,” said Spear. “We left the brainless corpses of our friends to block the entry.”

  “Too stupid to get out!” screamed Oak. “What do you mean, too stupid to get out! They got in there, didn’t they! Now they’re in here with us! We may as well have stayed outside if they’re going to—”

  Spear slapped him twice, hard. Club took this as permission to vent his own fury and terror—he punched Oak and, once he had fallen, kicked him in the ribs.

  Spear pulled Club off. “Stop it!” he shouted over the screams of the girls. He feinted a kick in their direction to silence them. “Now where’s that Big-Brow and her pet?”

  By this time Gash-Eye had led Quarry back down the passageway, to where it curved around the bend. She waited, dividing her attention between Spear and the rest around one corner, and the darkness around the other, from out of which an unkillable might come shambling.

  Club was staring at Spear in shock. Even Oak was shaking his head up at him from where he lay curled on the floor. Club said, “Spear, who cares about the Big-Brow? Much less about the little girl? It’s the unkillables we’ve got to worry about.”

  “It’s both.”

  “Spear, that’s—”

  “It’s both. The unkillables are demonic spirits. Fine. Let them run havoc as they’re meant to do, and let us try to survive. That’s the natural way. But that Gash-Eye is our slave. She’s thwarted me, and thwarted me, and thwarted me, and I say she dies before we leave here.”

  That was enough for Gash-Eye. While Oak and Club were still staring at Spear, she drew Quarry back deeper into the gloom. Once again she hoisted the girl up onto her back, and hurried back through the caves, groping along the walls, still moving at almost a run even after she’d lost the ambient light. She’d been in these caves so long, she felt like soon she’d have them memorized.

  Quarry’s hands started to slip from her naked shoulders. Gash-Eye came to a halt, grabbed the girl’s wrists. “What’s wrong?” she hissed.

  Sounding as if she were waking up, Quarry said, “What?”

  “Why were you letting go of me?”

  “I was? I’m sorry, Gash-Eye.”

  She had to get the girl out of these caves. Who knew what strange maladies and under-earth spirits they were inviting in by staying so long? Gash-Eye knew the girl was feverish, but she couldn’t tell by touch how hot she was because Gash-Eye was feverish, herself. Her throat was hot and thirsty all the time now, no matter how much cold sour water she scooped from the occasional puddle or pool into her mouth. “Hold tight to me,” she whispered. “Press your knees into my sides and hold tight.” She herself kept holding tightly to Quarry’s wrist with her free hand while feeling her way along the wall with the other as she hurried back the way she’d come.

  In the dark they ran by the corpse-sealed chamber with the trapped unkillables; they ran through the big chamber where she’d thrown Tooth into the fire; soon they were back in the narrow passageway that led to the mouth.

  As Gash-Eye had hoped, the cave-in had not completely sealed them off. The rocks didn’t go all the way to the ceiling—the gaps were too tight for her or even Quarry to squeeze through, but the stones were small enough that she should be able to dig free.

  Gash-Eye climbed to the top of the pile and put her face to one of the gaps. Outside it was nighttime, but moonlight seeped into the cave. Perhaps there were unkillables lurking out there in the deep shadows cast by the rocks, but now that was equally true of this side of the rubble barrier. The world outside sounded peaceful—Gash-Eye could even hear birds. She thought that if there had been a lot of unkillables crawling around out there, the birds would have stayed away.

  She started digging with her hands, pushing and pulling the rubble and pebbles through so that they cascaded noisily down both sides of the pile. She hoped she wouldn’t destabilize the pile so that it rolled out from under her, and turned to make sure Quarry wasn’t so close that she’d be crushed if that should happen. “Don’t worry,” she hissed. “I’ll have you out of here soon.”

  “Gash-Eye?” said Quarry.

  Quarry’s voice was too weak to be heard well over the noise of Gash-Eye’s digging, so she reluctantly stopped. Now that she’d begun making noise, she wanted to hurry and get through the task before the sounds attracted either Spear or an unkillable. “Yes?” she said, trying to keep the impatience from her voice. “Yes, Quarry, what is it?”

  It took the girl a long time to reply. Finally, she said, “Are we going to leave the caves?”

  “Yes. Don’t worry, we’re going to leave. I have to dig us out first, is all.”

  “But what about the unkillables, Gash-Eye?”

  “I think they’re all dead, Quarry. The red fire we saw coming from the sky was hunting them—I don’t see how even the unkillables could have survived that. I know I said it wasn’t safe to go outside, but that was because....” She trailed off, ashamed.

  Quarry said, “But what about the unkillables here in the cave?”

  “Well. We’re running away from them.” Gash-Eye wondered with a sinking feeling if Quarry’s fever was worse than she’d thought. “Pull that skin around you tighter, child.”

  “But what if the unkillables get out of the cave?”

  “Then they won’t find us, because we’re going to run. You don’t have to worry. I’m going to take you as far away as my legs will go.”

  “But what if they get out after we’ve gone, and attack different people? People from another band?”

  “Well ... but ... you mean, stranger
s? But if it’s strangers, then who cares? In that case, it’s not our problem, is it?... Besides, the unkillables really are stupid and clumsy. I think Spear may have been right—I think they really might remain trapped in that small room forever. Even if they do happen to get out, even if they do somehow manage to wander in the dark until they stumble upon the mouth of the cave here, I think that will be a long time from now. Many snows will fall and melt before ever that happens, and you and I may be long gone anyway.”

  Gash-Eye decided that if the girl still wanted to talk she was going to shush or at least ignore her. Nothing rivaled the importance of digging through this pile of rock.

  But for some reason, when Quarry began speaking again, Gash-Eye listened anyway.

  “I had a dream,” Quarry said. “Actually, I keep having it. Sometimes I have it when I’m asleep. Sometimes I have it when I’m awake. I think I was having it again, when you stopped me from slipping off your back.

  “In my dream it’s many winters from now, and you and I are both asleep and at peace somewhere far away in the ground. But the world is still alive. The winds blow and blow and blow. They blow so long that at last this hill, this hill our cave is in, it gets tired of standing and sinks down and melts away. And in my dream there are still unkillables here, sleeping in the dark. And when the hill melts away, after more winters than anyone has ever seen, the sunlight hits those sleeping unkillables, and they wake up, and remember they’re hungry.

  “And in my dream the unkillables leave this melted hill and they go forth, hungrier than ever. The forest is different, the people in it are different. But not so different. The unkillables come upon them, and bite them. For some, they eat their brains. But there are others whom they merely bite, whom they change into other unkillables. As we’ve seen them do.

  “And then—and this is the part of my dream that’s truly hard to explain, because I know that it could simply never be, though I see it clearly—and then, the new unkillables go forth and bite others, and though some have their brains eaten, others are changed into more unkillables, and so on, and so on. And they bite, and bite, and bite, until none are left unbitten.

  “I know that that could never be—I know it couldn’t, yet I believe it could, for I see it so clearly. All the world is transformed or dead. And though you and I are asleep in the earth, the earth we sleep in is no longer peaceful and alive. It is an earth I would not spend the ages in.

  “We have to destroy the unkillables, Gash-Eye. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, because I’m too weak to help much. And I’m sorry, because it’s not fair to ask you to help a world that’s been cruel to you. But I won’t leave this cave if it means leaving the unkillables for later people, unwarned people.”

  The girl finished talking. Gash-Eye, who was still naked and freezing herself, watched Quarry shivering feverishly in the scraps of moonlight that reached the cave interior. A complex mixture of emotions roiled within her, and she didn’t bother trying to sort them out. “The world hasn’t been only cruel to me,” she said. Then, “In your dream. How can you see all these things?”

  “You mean the things that are yet to come?”

  “No. I mean the other people. How can you see the connections to people you don’t even know, who won’t even be born till after we’re dead?”

  Quarry didn’t reply. But she turned her face up toward Gash-Eye. Gash-Eye didn’t think Quarry could make her out in this scant light, but it seemed her unseeing eyes were pointed straight at her. Gash-Eye remembered the strange way she herself had suddenly cared about those Big-Brows, that night before the catastrophe—how she’d felt a responsibility for them, despite their being strangers.

  “Let me dig us out and leave you outside, at least,” said Gash-Eye, with a heavy heart. “Then I’ll return and fight the unkillables.”

  “No,” said Quarry, shaking her head. “Maybe I can help somehow. Maybe not. Either way, I won’t leave you alone in the caves with the monsters, while I get to go outside. It wouldn’t be fair.”

  “Forget about fair. You’re a child. And you’re sick. You need the sun, don’t you?”

  Quarry started to cry. Gash-Eye climbed down from the rock pile to hold her, first using her foot to nudge the bundle with the animated head out of the way. “Yes,” Quarry said. “Yes, I do need it. But don’t you, too? I won’t leave, Gash-Eye. I won’t leave, till it’s done.”

  Gash-Eye held the girl close till her weeping had stopped. Surreptitiously, she wiped her own eyes. “All right,” she said. “We’ll have to kill them as quickly as we can, then.”

  Thirteen

  Chert stared at the Jaw. His head was still immobilized, and the strain of keeping his eyeballs turned toward his son was starting to hurt. He was watching to make sure the boy managed to retain his sanity. Truth be told, he was probably also concentrating on him as a way of maintaining his own.

  They were bound in a cave of cool stone that gleamed like ice or crystal. Embedded in the stone walls were winking, multicolored stars, mainly green, red, yellow, and blue. Chert couldn’t begin to make a tally of everything he saw, even without being able to budge his head. Never in his life had he seen so many made things.

  For he didn’t doubt the things here were made, by someone. Even the cave itself—why someone would want to make a cave, he could not imagine, but he was certain someone had fashioned the walls, floor, and ceiling; they were so outrageously regular and smooth. It must have taken a whole band of people years, merely to chisel and polish the walls. The People had gotten a lot of use out of Gash-Eye and her predecessors, but Chert was developing a dim glimmer of just how much use a stronger group might be able to squeeze out of slavery, on an impossibly grander scale.

  The things he and the Jaw were sitting on were made things, too. Naturally, he could not see his own, but he could see the Jaw’s—it was made up of four long, thin, white, cylindrical stones, attached to a flat stone that the rump rested on, and then another flat long cool stone that pressed against the sitter’s back. Chert would have guessed that the purpose of this last stone was to have something to attach the bindings to. But Dak and Veela sat on similar things, that also had the stone that pressed against the back, and they were not bound. Instead of having the four long thin stones for the structure to rest upon, their sitting-things were supported by one thick cylindrical stone, and the flat stones under their rumps were able to spin upon the cylindrical stone, so that Veela and Dak could turn as they sat. Chert didn’t know what the purpose was of being able to do that, but as an engineering feat it was fearsomely awe-inspiring.

  As for what his and the Jaw’s bindings and gags were made of, Chert had no idea. Some kind of hide, he supposed. They were blue.

  Seeing how at-home Veela was in this fabulous, unimaginable environment, Chert felt more afraid than he ever had before in his life. She seemed to have shrugged off his blow to the back of her head—Chert thought that had something to do with the strange object Dak had stuck her neck with when he’d kidnapped Chert and the Jaw—it had been a thing like a rigid ice-colored pine needle, and Veela had awoken at its touch.

  They were inside that floating stone, he understood. It had come down from the sky just as he was hitting Veela. It had come down so fast, like some great spirit had dropped it—but then it had somehow landed light as a feather. Then Dak had stepped out of it and pointed something at Chert and the Jaw and they’d fallen down, unable to move.

  Chert was glad he was gagged, because if he hadn’t been he might have pleaded with Veela, might have assured her that he would never, ever have threatened or challenged her if he had realized just how stupendous were the resources she had access to. He was glad he wasn’t able to say those things.

  Not that she was in charge. Dak clearly was the one deciding things, and though she seemed to be trying to get him to change his mind about something, she was having no success. They were speaking their own language, of which Chert and the Jaw knew nothing, except a few words like “math” and “
zombie.” Chert wondered what they were arguing over. He imagined she wanted to kill him, and Dak was resistant.

  Right at that moment, Dak was repeating, “I just think we should get rid of them.”

  “No, Dak!” Veela said yet again.

  But Chert had no idea those were the words coming from their mouths. He rolled his eyes towards the Jaw again. His son seemed to have calmed, though he still didn’t look at Chert. They wouldn’t kill the Jaw, too, would they? Ungrateful bitch! To leave the Jaw tied up that way after he’d been so loyal to her, after he’d defied his own father for her sake!

  He looked at Dak again. Although he, like Veela, was taller than an average human, Chert had no doubt that this was the little man Veela had been carrying inside the strange, indestructible nut: his voice was the same, and every once in a while in the midst of the babble he made out that Veela was calling him “Dak.”

  He was in some ways an ordinary person, albeit obviously no kin to the People with his curly hair and unbelievably pale skin. There was something almost extraordinarily bland about him. Chert found it difficult to guess his age—of course, never could he have guessed that the well-preserved, well-fed, well-rested Dak, with his lifetime of climate-controlled environments and preventative medical care, was older than him; but there was more to it than that, and people from Dak’s own time and place had been known to think there was something blurry about him.

  In addition to his blandness, Chert found the man almost offensively soft. His skin looked like it had never been touched by wind or sun; Chert kept staring at his hands, which looked more delicate than feathers; there was a certain looseness to his mouth and, though Chert had never seen the expression before, he instinctively recognized it as that of a man who had never suffered.

  Chert reminded himself that he’d sworn to kill this man. Focusing on that, on his anger and on the insult he’d suffered, helped stave off and redirect his fear.