The Unkillables

by Boyett, J.

  She wanted to lay down and cry. They’d been on the verge of escape, and had come back to kill the unkillables. They’d done that, and also defeated their other enemies. And now it turned out that struggle for survival had taken too much from them. They were going to die down here in the darkness, the dry fiery thirst of fever biting inside their throats.

  But she couldn’t give up yet—she still had the child with her. And who knew, maybe they would get lucky and choose the right direction. “Come on,” she said, gently taking hold of Quarry’s arm, “let’s find the wall—”

  There was a noise. They both shut up.

  A scuffling. A cracking. A crunching. Gash-Eye’s grip on Quarry tightened. By now she didn’t have to tell the girl to be quiet anymore. The sounds became very faint, they had a liquescent quality. Gash-Eye wondered if they were real or merely the games of those feverish trickster phantoms who are the heralds of delirium....

  A pale green glow began to dawn.

  Gash-Eye’s grip became so tight that Quarry couldn’t help but whimper. Gash-Eye made herself relax her hand.

  The green figure ahead of them was little more than a smear. She blinked and forced her bleary disused vision back into focus. The new unkillable was Hoof, who’d run away.

  By the ghastly light Gash-Eye thought she could see where the pit was, at least. The unkillable that had been Hoof was between them and it. Even with her Big-Brow vision, the outline of the depression was so faint and vague she couldn’t be certain it was there, especially with her feverish swimminess.

  Gash-Eye tugged silently on Quarry’s arm. The girl resisted only for a moment the repugnant thought of moving toward the unkillable, not away from it. They began to creep as noiselessly as possible across the stone floor.

  The unkillable had lucked upon a rat, it looked like. It hadn’t taken long to clean out its skull, and the thing was still sucking and licking at that broken bowl of bone, desperately hunting for another scrap of brain or drop of its juice. At last it flung the corpse away in frustration and bent over the floor, using its own body as a lamp to hunt for more food.

  This was a smart one, Gash-Eye thought. It looked like it was trying to search somewhat systematically, moving its body in ever widening circles. Of course, she didn’t see how that would be effective, since it seemed any prey could just scurry back into one of the unlit patches the unkillable had already searched, but she still thought it was a pretty good idea for an unkillable. She wondered if that cleverness was thanks to some residue of Hoof’s mind, but immediately choked the thought. It wouldn’t do to give the unkillables names or pretend they had anything in common with whoever they’d once been.

  Smart or not, the unkillable’s method made it more likely that it was going to find them. The two had been moving as cautiously as possible, sacrificing speed for silence. But the unkillable’s circles were bringing it closer and closer to the path they were going to have to follow to reach the pit. With a tug on Quarry’s arm Gash-Eye signaled her to move faster. They managed to time it so they crawled past the unkillable when it was on the far side of its circle. The thing had its eyes fixed on the floor, looking for prey closer to the ground. Even so, Gash-Eye was so sure the thing was going to see them, that even after they were past it she had trouble believing it had not killed them after all, and that this darkness they crawled through was not a dream of dead shades.

  The pit grew closer. She could even make out the sharpened stick, covered in its layer of dried gore. Behind them they heard the steady shuffle of the unkillable. Gash-Eye dared not look back—what with her fever she was afraid to take her concentration off the goal—but she listened for any change in its pace, for any sudden hurry, for any fast approach.

  They made it to the pit. They made it to the sharpened stick. Gash-Eye thought about lowering Quarry into the pit, where she might be better hidden. But she was afraid that if she died, and the unkillable realized Quarry was down there, the girl would be easy prey.

  But it was going to be all right, Gash-Eye thought. The unkillable was beginning to stray deeper into the caves, away from them. As long as they kept quiet, it should go away on its own. Gash-Eye looked in the other direction and by the unkillable’s fading, departing light, tried to memorize the terrain they’d have to cover, at least the next several paces.

  “But we have to kill it,” Quarry said.

  Furious, Gash-Eye grabbed her and clamped her hand over the girl’s mouth, holding her body so close and tight she couldn’t make noise by struggling.

  Her sibilant whisper had been quiet enough, but it was highlighted by the lack of any other noise. The unkillable jerked to attention, head twitching. But the strange echoes made the whisper’s origin impossible to pinpoint, as the sound bounced around the chamber. Gash-Eye stared at the unkillable, willing it to go the other way.

  And finally, it did. After a long, twitching uncertainty, the creature decided that the whisperer was somewhere in the opposite direction from Gash-Eye and Quarry, back at some wall her voice had bounced off of. Gash-Eye watched it shuffle away, the illumination dwindling as it got further and as its glow faded, its brain-hunger once more taking hold.

  Quarry was straining to break free. Gash-Eye could feel her mouth trying to speak against her palm. Gash-Eye wasn’t sure her strength would hold out, so weakened and fever-ravaged was she.

  The unkillable had gone far enough that it had rounded a corner and disappeared from view. Gash-Eye decided to risk hissing words into Quarry’s ear. Hearing herself speak, the words sounded harder than she’d intended, and she tried to make them gentler but couldn’t.

  She said, “I know you want to destroy that unkillable. I know you want to destroy them all. I know why; I remember your dream, and maybe I even believe it myself. But I don’t have the strength left to fight it, and neither do you. If it meant my death, I wouldn’t mind that—I’d give my life to destroy it—many’s the time my life’s nearly been taken for less. But if I die, there will be no one to take you out of the caves. And I won’t die, leaving you here to rot in darkness.” Quarry renewed her straining, but could do nothing against Gash-Eye’s bulk wrapped around her. Tears fell from Gash-Eye’s eyes. She said, “I know you think the world may come to an end if we let even one unkillable go free. And I know you may be right. I would rather lose the world, the whole world, I would rather let the whole world die, than know you were unsafe and yet do nothing. For me the only world that’s left is you.”

  Quarry continued to try to break free, till at last the struggle exhausted her. Still Gash-Eye was reluctant to release the girl.

  Eventually, she did. They both lay on their sides in the dark, still. Now that Quarry was docile, Gash-Eye concentrated on remembering that the way back out of the cave complex was behind her, behind her, behind her.

  “I’m going after the unkillable,” said Quarry, hopelessly, but seriously.

  “You’ll die. I won’t let you.”

  “Gash-Eye, I think you’re sick. I don’t think you’ll be able to stop me much longer.”

  “Maybe. But you’re about as sick as me.” Actually, she was probably a bit less sick, because she’d been clothed more than Gash-Eye had, but Gash-Eye barely thought of that and certainly didn’t resent it. “If I won’t be able to stop you, you certainly won’t be able to stop the unkillable.”

  Quarry answered in tears. “But we have to,” she said.

  Gash-Eye thought that if they stayed this way much longer, they would wind up dead just as surely as if she’d let Quarry call that unkillable over. Before she could rouse herself, a white light popped into existence far down the passageway.

  Quarry went rigid. Gash-Eye gripped her close again.

  If Quarry hadn’t reacted as well, Gash-Eye would have wondered if the light was real. It wasn’t an unkillable light. It was bright, white, and sudden. It looked to Gash-Eye more like a star than it did anything else. How had a star been shaken loose from the heavens, so that it was floating around he
re underground? Had the same force or spirit that had set loose the unkillables also shaken stars from the sky?

  Whether it was a star or something else, it was definitely heading their way. They had to hide until they figured out whether or not it was trying to kill them. Gash-Eye gave Quarry a light shove in the direction of the pit and hoped she understood. She did. The two of them each rolled to the edge of the pit, and Gash-Eye was about to lower Quarry in, when the light shone right on them, blinding her, and she heard a human exclamation in an unknown language.

  When the light glared into her eyes like that, she thought she was being attacked; it physically hurt, after all her time in the darkness with only dim glows and firelight to see by. Aside from sunbeams shining through tree branches, she never thought in terms of beams of light, exactly; she never thought of it as traveling in a straight line; she knew that she should not look directly into, say, the sun, but once she’d looked at the floating star painlessly she had never expected it to all of a sudden become so much stronger. It had never occurred to her that a light could get so much brighter or stronger, depending on the relative angle of its source.

  Gash-Eye didn’t quite yet understand that the light was a tool for searching things out, basically a more sophisticated version of the lamp she’d invented, using the unkillable’s severed head. However, she did realize that someone had just seen her and Quarry, and there was no longer any sense in hiding. She gripped the sharpened stick tightly.

  A female shouted something. From the sounds her mouth was able to form, and from the high pitch of her voice, Gash-Eye knew she wasn’t a Big-Brow, but the woman was speaking no language Gash-Eye had ever heard. Then she realized that wasn’t true—she was speaking the People’s tongue! Or trying to, anyhow.

  “No scared, be!” she repeated. “Friends, we are!”

  That was promising, but Gash-Eye still held tight to the pointed stick.

  There was some muttered conversation in what was definitely a foreign language, between the same female, and a male. Gash-Eye still couldn’t make out anything but that light, growing brighter as they approached. If the unkillable that had once been Hoof was still close, they could expect it to be attracted by the illumination and come wandering back. “Take care!” Gash-Eye cried. “There are unkillables about!”

  “What?” said the unseen woman, alert. “What say you? You say a word new for me. No-dies, you mean?”

  No-dies. Gash-Eye supposed that was one way a person who barely knew the People’s tongue might try to say “unkillables.” “Yes,” Gash-Eye called. “At least one no-die. It went off the other way, but you’re liable to draw it back with all this light and commotion.”

  The light stopped advancing while there was another heated, hissed exchange between the unseen man and unseen woman. While they were fighting about whatever they were fighting about, another voice spoke up, this one a man’s, and also speaking the People’s tongue. Wonderingly, the voice said, “Mother?”

  At first Gash-Eye didn’t understand at all, she only felt her disorientation grow more extreme.

  Again, she heard the Jaw’s voice say, “Mother?,” more insistently this time.

  Gash-Eye was certain this was another cruel trick of the encroaching delirium. It was only in part her fever that made her tremble as she said, “Is that the Jaw? Is that you, my son?”

  Still more light slammed without warning into her face—Quarry was so taken by surprise that she screamed. Five more stars even brighter than the first had appeared.

  Footsteps raced to her out of the blinding light; Gash-Eye’s vision was decaying fast now, but in a moment she saw the dark shape of the Jaw’s head bending over her, backlit by the blazing cluster of lost stars behind. “Mother,” the Jaw’s form said, in the Jaw’s voice.

  “You’ve come to trick me,” Gash-Eye said. “You’re a spirit of the fever, come to trick me with a vision of my dead son.”

  “I’m not dead yet, Mother. I’m not a spirit, either. Touch me and see.”

  She did touch him. Then at last the fever unleashed all its strength and clawed her down into a whirlpooling pit of delirium. As she felt all volition and responsibility slip away, and as she saw the Jaw’s face recede into the darkness, she felt a mixture of relief and regret.

  Sixteen

  Veela was furious that Dak refused to administer any drugs to the Neanderthal woman. “She’s going to die if we don’t help her. Maybe that little girl, too.”

  “I think the child will probably be fine. As for the Neanderthal, we’ve dressed her, at least, which should go a long way toward improving her condition. Why would anyone be so foolish as to spend days running around naked down here, anyway? It’s damp, and freezing.”

  “If we could just give her some aspirin.”

  “And when we run out of aspirin I suppose we can just pay a call at the aspirin factory? I can produce plenty of penicillin and other such simple remedies, but I haven’t had time to do so yet and I say we should conserve our limited supplies. I understand that you’re excited to interact with your first full-blooded Neanderthal specimen, but there are many thousands more like her in this era.”

  Veela pointed out the attachment obviously felt by the Jaw for his mother, and suggested that saving her might be a way to insure his aid. Dak considered this, but then decided that it made even better sense to tell the Jaw they would save his mother if and only if he cooperated fully in tracking down the loose zombie. Veela agreed to translate the message, to keep Dak happy, then simply didn’t. (Without ever admitting that the translator he’d slapped together was imperfect, Dak had quietly neglected to take it with them when they’d left the ship.)

  The reason Dak felt he could with impunity use the life of that physically powerful savage’s mother as a pawn, was because he was safely encased in an armored hydraulic frame. The lamps attached to the frame were the stars Gash-Eye had seen. Although Dak’s face and chest were exposed, he was guarded by sentacles, eleven robot arms that sprouted from the back of the frame, that could grab and divert any projectile, or anything else that might try to breach their set perimeter. They were easily capable of thwarting bullets, and would have no trouble fending off fists or spears, as Chert had quickly and painfully learned when he’d finally been freed from his bonds. (“Sentacle” was a portmanteau of “sentinel” and “tentacle”—not the happiest coining their inventor’s marketing department had ever come up with.)

  Keeping the sentacles on high alert was a huge energy-drain. One was supposed to wear the frame with its armor completed by a cuirass fitting over the face and chest, with readouts and a vidscreen on the interior—the sentacles were meant to be used if some part of the armor was missing or badly damaged, and for picking stuff up and moving it around, if need be. But Dak hadn’t been able to get any of the cuirasses running. He said none of them functioned—Veela supposed that might be true, but suspected Dak just didn’t know how they worked. It wasn’t like she did either, though.

  There were other armored frames in the ship. Veela had wanted to use four of them, or try to at least—she had a feeling that being hooked up to the exoskeletons might be such an alien experience, it would drive Chert and the Jaw insane.

  But Dak had rendered it a moot point. “Absolutely not,” he’d said. “Those frames use up a huge amount of our power stores. We have to limit their use to essential personnel only, I’m afraid.” So he was the only one wearing a frame.

  Now that they were here in the caves, he didn’t even want to waste power using the drones he’d finally recovered from storage to find the zombies. After the feverish girl told them that the zombie had run off in the direction of a subterranean lake, Dak thought they should all just hike out there and fan out with their fucking flashlights. But, as Veela vehemently pointed out, the idea was unworkable, even aside from the very high risk of someone getting killed or zombified. The four of them wouldn’t be able to cover enough ground, and their lights and the noise of their approach would alert
the zombie to their presence.

  “But we want the zombie to be alerted to our presence,” said Dak. “That way it’ll be attracted, and come to us, and we’ll be spared the trouble of hunting it.”

  “Wrong. What we want is for us to know where it is but it not to know where we are. See, if we do it the opposite way, it’s liable to eat my brain.”

  “All right,” Dak reluctantly agreed. “Particularly since your friends don’t seem to grasp the concept of ‘flashlight’.”

  That was true. Chert and the Jaw were fascinated by their flashlights, and seemed unable to help themselves from staring directly into the bulbs. But they were no good at using them the way they were intended. They were too amazed by the beams of light themselves to pay attention to what they illuminated.

  So Dak sent a pair of drones out, one in the direction of this lake, the other to zip through the cave complex, mapping it out for three days’ on-foot journey in every direction, doing infrared scans and trying to locate any zombies. The woman and child were bundled up in white thermablankets and attached to the back of Dak’s suit, all under the watchful eye of the Jaw. Gash-Eye lay on a stretcher-like platform that unfolded from the armored frame; Quarry was suspended above her by three rigidified sentacles. If they had to pass through any constricted areas the two females would be a problem, but for now it was fine.

  Veela watched the Jaw watch the sentacles attach his mother and the kid to the frame. Looking at his face, she felt without exaggeration that she could kill Dak for hoarding the medicine. She touched the Jaw’s arm—he didn’t acknowledge her, but he didn’t shake her off either. He’d told her the names of the newbies. The kid was called something like “Place From Which New Stone Can Be Plentifully Gathered,” except it sounded prettier in the People’s tongue. His Neanderthal mom’s name was something like “Torn Eye.” Presumably that had something to do with the scar on her face, even though whatever had happened to her didn’t seem to have injured her eye.