The Unkillables (26 page)

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.

V
eela 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.

They went forth toward the lake, the strangest band ever in the planet’s history so far.

Only minutes after the drones had been released, zipping along at a hundred kilometers per hour, the control panel on the arm of Dak’s suit started beeping. He raised the forearm and tapped a few of its keys with the fingers of his other hand.

Veela put her hand on the laser-blaster in her hip holster. “Did they find the zombie? Was the girl right that it went to some lake?”

“Yes,” said Dak, distractedly. After another moment’s study of the readouts, he added, “It seems the water is an effective barrier. Since they don’t need to breathe, I was worried it might simply walk into the water and float. Or sink to the bottom, or swim, for all we know. Might have made reaching it more difficult.”

Well, shit. That was something it hadn’t even occurred to Veela to worry about. “I’m glad that’s not the case,” she said. “What about the other drone? Has it reported any sightings of any other zombies? Anything to suggest there’s more than just the one?” By now the lighting-fast drone with its sensor array should have been able to do as much exploration as twenty spelunkers over the course of a month.

Dak studied the readouts a moment longer. “No,” he finally said.

Veela was sure it was only her imagination, the effect of accumulating dislike, suspicion, and frustration. But she thought she heard disappointment in Dak’s voice.

***

C
hert trudged along. Never had he been so deep in a cave before, so far beyond all possibility of sunlight, but, numbed and despondent as he was, he had no will left even to feel uneasy. Not even the miraculous bauble Veela had so casually handed him, the miniature, portable sun that was cool to the touch, not even that could interest him after a while.

Since childhood he had been the strongest, smartest, and surest of his age. When this calamity had begun, it had not occurred to him that along with the end of the world had come the end of his competence. It had taken him all these days to understand that the gifts in which he had prided himself in that lost world would not transfer into this one. Gash-Eye had survived when he’d been sure she hadn’t—not that he would have cared about her for herself, but the Big-Brow slave had also managed to preserve Quarry, the only other remnant of the People. (Chert didn’t realize that she’d also killed a good many of them.) Veela, that woman he’d been so contemptuous of, had proven to be the mistress of powers far outstripping any magic he’d ever dared imagine; she couldn’t make a spear, but she was an adept doer of deeds and wielder of tools beyond the pale of dreams. To hear her and the Jaw talk, the key to it all was this “math.” To him, no matter how he concentrated, it still sounded like mere prattle; but now it was prattle that filled him, Chert the fearless, with fear.

He quickened his pace until he came alongside the Jaw, then put his hand on his son’s arm the way he’d seen the woman Veela do. Without looking at him the Jaw shook it off angrily.

Chert didn’t try to put it back. He even walked a half-pace behind the Jaw. With something like humility, he said, “I thought Gash-Eye was dead.”

The Jaw snorted. He tightened his grip on his mother’s pointed stick, which he’d taken. “The same way you thought Veela was with us, when the undead deer attacked.”

“No. That time, I simply wanted get you to safety.”

The Jaw shook his head. “I think nothing in my whole life makes me feel stupider than that I believed you.”

Chert looked at his son. The Jaw was ever so slightly taller than him. He hadn’t noticed till now, but it was true.

He said, “I was telling what I thought was the truth when I said your mother was dead. But if I’d known it was a lie, I would have said it anyway, to get you away from those undead, or no-dies, or zombies, or whatever they are. I would have sacrificed not only Gash-Eye but any other member of the People, to save you.”

“Ah. Thank you. And I suppose when you were betraying Veela and leaving her to be torn apart by no-dies, you were also doing me a favor.”

Chert’s face twisted with the effort of trying to find the right thing to say. “Do you want the woman? I won’t stand in the way. Even if I could, I wouldn’t press my claim to share her, that was only a.... She’s a powerful woman, and would be a great asset in the hunt, I’d be happy to have her with us.”

The Jaw blew air out his mouth in exasperation. He stopped, turned, and pushed his father away. Chert could have held his ground, but he allowed himself to be sent a few steps back anyhow. Veela stopped to see what was going on. A moment later Dak noticed everyone else had stopped and he did as well.

“You listen,” said the Jaw. “Veela says she doesn’t want you killed. I don’t know why—maybe she thinks you could be of some use. But know that it’s only by her pleasure that you and I are both still alive, because otherwise I would kill you or die trying. All my life I’ve been the most favored son among the People, when it interested you to make me so. All other times I was a slave as abject as my mother, nothing but a tool to seal in her torment. You shared with me just enough glory to teach me to feel shame, and so divided me from Gash-Eye; but either you couldn’t make me a real member of the band, or else you didn’t care to, so my pride served me nothing. Now the People are dead and I’m thankful. Before I kill this last no-die I’ll bless it for that one good deed its kind have done. And if you speak to me again, Chert, Quarry will be the only full-blooded member of the People left.”

The Jaw turned and stalked away. He even went past Dak, and Veela ran after him, shouting for him not to go too far alone.

Soon the little group started moving again. Chert noticed that Veela kept looking over her shoulder at him, as if to make sure he was still following them and hadn’t just stopped, or wandered off. Dimly, he wondered what he must look like for her to be so worried. He didn’t bother making eye contact with her, he simply trudged along, brooding; he couldn’t see any reason why he should ever leave this cave again.

His gaze drifted up to the back of the strange and unbelievable shell covering Dak, like the shell that protected an insect but infinitely harder. No matter what size he was, the little man always needed his protective coverings. Chert’s eyes narrowed. If there was one thing he could still be sure of, he reflected, it was that he’d sworn to kill that little man.

***

A
s they approached the lakeshore, Dak seemed amused as well as annoyed by Veela’s increasing nervousness. “I know exactly where the zombie is,” he told her, tapping the readouts on his arm panel, which nobody but him had seen, because the drones’ data was streaming back only to the hydraulic frame’s computer. “It’s remaining basically stationary. I’ll let you know when we’re closing in, there’s no danger.”

Veela thought that was an easy thing to say for a guy wearing a tank.

Dak’s sentacles grabbed two rocks in passing and began to juggle them. Veela stared. “Isn’t it a huge energy-drain to use those things like that?”

“I do have to practice, Veela. Should anything happen, I need to be certain I can manipulate these tools with complete control.” After a moment he had the sentacles quietly place the stones on the cave floor again. All the while they continued to walk.