The Unkillables (25 page)

Now that the girl was calm, Gash-Eye said, “We must go. You’ll stay with me? You won’t run like that again?”

“Yes. I’ll stay with you, Gash-Eye. I was only angry about the....” She didn’t finish the sentence. “But I’ll stay. I love you. And besides, you’re the only other member of the People left.”

Never before had Gash-Eye been considered a member of the People, not even by Quarry. But now that all the rest were dead, she supposed she would have to do.

Gash-Eye kissed her on the top of her head, and said, “Come on, sweetling. We’re going to live. But first we have to get out of these caves. And you have to walk—I’m not strong enough to carry you.”

Gash-Eye heaved herself up, and Quarry obediently followed suit. As soon as she was standing, Gash-Eye’s head swam and for a panicked moment she thought she was actually falling. “On second thought,” she gasped, “let’s crawl.”

“Yes,” said Quarry. From her tone Gash-Eye guessed that she, too, was disoriented. There was no more excitement or immediate howling terror to distract them from the fever. If they didn’t get out of these caves soon, neither one of them would be much good to the other.

But once they were on all fours, Gash-Eye had to fend off a new bubble of horror expanding through her chest. There was absolutely no light here, and she had reached this spot at the end of a headlong flight in which she’d taken stock of nothing but Quarry’s screams in front of her; on top of that, the fever had addled her sense of direction. She didn’t know where the pit was, with the unkillable head at the bottom of it. She strained her eyes into the darkness, forcing herself to filter out the false colors popping in front of her eyes. She turned and looked the other way, over her shoulder. Nothing. Even if they’d run a fair ways she thought she should have been able to see the green unkillable glow seeping out of the pit, so they must have been gone long enough for the brain juice to wear off and the hungry head to fade once more to black.

Trying to speak casually, as if their lives didn’t depend on the girl’s answer, she said, “Quarry—do you remember which direction we ran from?”

Quarry thought. Finally, she said, “No.” She sounded more apologetic than frightened.

They would need some sort of light to navigate their way out, which meant they would need that head. Even then, they would have to be lucky. They could crawl until they reached the wall, then follow along it—but in which direction? Which way was the pit? Gash-Eye knew that on one side of the pit the wall curved around the bend into a narrow tunnel. If they kept feeling along the wall of that tunnel they would eventually get to the big chamber where the People had camped and built the fire she’d thrown Tooth into. But once they reached the wall, which direction should they crawl in order to reach the pit? Dizzy and disoriented as she was, they were just as likely to wind up crawling even deeper into the endless maze.

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 here 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.