The Unkillables (7 page)

And maybe he even had some more direct power, some form of magic, for example. There were times when Chert distinctly felt that she’d asked the little man for something, and he’d refused, and she’d been helplessly frustrated by his refusal.

One such time was after the Jaw had pressed her for the secret of the strong tight fire. She’d avoided giving him a straight answer, but soon afterward had consulted the miniature man in the nut. They’d had what sounded like an argument, and afterward Veela had looked unhappy, though her body language was strange and hard to read. The Jaw had asked again for the strong tight fire, and this time she said, “Waiting is being needed.” Impressively, she was able to say this in the People’s tongue already, even though they’d only met her this morning.

Chert said to the Jaw, “That tiny man inside the nut won’t let her give us the fire.” Veela cocked her ear at the two of them, frustrated not to be able to understand what they said.

The Jaw turned to Chert with contempt. “What do you mean? How could that tiny man possibly stop her from doing anything?”

“I have no idea. I’ve given up trying to understand things. But I’m telling you, that’s what he said.”

The Jaw remained dubious, but was too uncertain to argue.

“What are the no-dies?” the Jaw kept asking.

Veela said a word in her own language that neither of them understood. After much pantomiming and retching noises, she communicated to them its meaning: “Disease?” said the Jaw.

Veela repeated the word twice to memorize it, and said, “No-dies, disease. Type of disease. Bite of a no-die grants you disease. Must kill no-die. All things of world will be no-die.”

That last bit didn’t quite make sense, though it did sound ominous. They went back and forth a while, rehashing the sentence, Veela repeating the phrase with variations, till by chance they taught her the word “or.” Then she said, “Must kill no-dies, or all things of world will be no-die.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Chert. “No disease spreads to every person of the world. There are no spirits that hungry.”

“No-die spirit, hungry,” insisted Veela. “Very, very hungry.”

“Where does the spirit come from?” asked Chert. “Why have we never heard of it before?”

Veela pretended not to know. Being civilized, she was better at lying than anyone Chert and the Jaw had ever met, so they believed in her ignorance.

“In any case,” said Chert, “you can’t kill a spirit. If men could kill spirits, they would have long since killed all the disease spirits and no one would ever get sick. What we must do is learn the proper rites to appease this no-die spirit, so that it will look for its prey elsewhere.”

Their next project was to teach Veela what the word “appease” meant. Once she’d learned it, and grasped the sense of what Chert had said, she grew excited, shaking her head and waving her arms and saying, “No, no, no! No appease! Kill all no-die spirit. Or world is be no-die people, no-die wolf, no-die squirrel, no-die bird....”

“She means all people and all animals everywhere will become undead,” said the Jaw.

“No spirit could ever be that hungry!” repeated Chert, exasperated. “How could a spirit be big enough to eat the world?! For that, it would have to be as big as the world. If it was as big as the world, it would fill all of it, and have no one place to call its home. And who ever heard of a spirit without a home? Where would it take its sacrifice?”

“But what if this particular spirit
is
that hungry?”

“Then there’s no use worrying about it, because you can’t kill a spirit.”

The Jaw fell silent. He was unhappy, but Chert’s points were unanswerable.

But Veela wouldn’t let it go. “Must help kill no-die,” she said. “Must help. Stranger here, us. Have weapons. Need help, but.”

“‘Us’?” said the Jaw. “There are more of you?”

She looked blankly at the Jaw. From the way her eyes then went to the stone nut, Chert understood that she was wondering why they were surprised, when she’d assumed they knew she meant the little man in the nut. She must believe the little trapped man had some powerful magic indeed, if she thought he could help destroy those hordes of undead. “Must help,” she repeated.

“Why use us? Why not use the flying stone, with its strong tight fire?” asked Chert.

Veela got the gist of what he said, though she seemed confused by the phrase “flying stone.” She said, “Weapon, tired becomes.”

So the spirit that guided or inhabited the strong tight fire was too fickle to explode all the undead heads at once, but required multiple sacrifices and exhortations. Or else it really did grow tired. That would be even more worrisome, especially if Veela proved correct about the nature of the spirit of the undead sickness—how could a spirit that quickly and easily grew tired fight an infinitely gluttonous and infinitely larger one?

“But why do you need
us
?” demanded the Jaw. “What can we do, compared to you? You’re the one with the strong tight fire.”

Veela struggled to respond. It was a linguistic struggle but also a diplomatic one, since she didn’t want to come out and say that she lacked faith in her partner Dak’s ability to monitor the zombies as well as he claimed he could. For example, she knew the ship’s rinky-dink sensors couldn’t penetrate the planet surface to see what might be going on in the cave networks. On top of that, she and Dak were clearly prone to error, since they’d let a zombie mouse stow away on their ship, coming all the way back with them through time. And that mouse had apparently bitten a member of Population Group B (the people Chert and the Jaw knew as Overhills), after she’d already chosen their language as the one to start studying. The plague had wiped that whole group out in an hour. And while zapping them all in the heads with lasers, Dak had failed to notice that a band of Neanderthals had come across a stray zombie. They’d beheaded it and started using its head as a fucking lamp, till one of them got himself bitten. A lot of people had died because Dak had been preoccupied—not that the perimeter wall he was busy with wasn’t important. There were plenty of drones on the ship—if they could access them Veela was certain they could locate and destroy every zombie on the planet, but they were locked up in a special hold and Dak couldn’t decipher the lock, so he was stuck using only the ship’s on-board laser.

“Need friends, know land,” she said, wishing she knew the word for “environment.” Although these people probably didn’t have a concept of “environment” that matched well with hers—the closest might be something like “world.” She said, “Need friends, know land. Need friends, know tongues.” Even though all the other people in this immediate area were apparently dead or zombified, Veela wanted to be able to communicate with those outside the perimeter in case some zombies had escaped, regardless of how impossible Dak claimed that would be.

Also, she wanted to be able to communicate with people beyond the perimeter because hopefully they would survive all this, and would one day go out and interact with those folks. It wasn’t as if she and Dak could go back where they’d come from. And remembering the Jaw’s scream and Chert’s blow from the rock, she decided she’d prefer not to be alone next time she had to go through the getting-to-know-you process.

“If we can’t use the strong tight fire,” pressed Chert, “how can we fight the no-dies?”

“Need help, talk to other people. Explain no-dies, other people.”

“And what if we run across no-dies before running across other people who need explaining?”

“Head.” After some pantomiming, they guessed she was trying to indicate the word “remove.” They taught it to her, and she said, “Remove head. After, no-die body die. No-die body live not with head, short time. After, no-die body die.”

Chert grew angry. “You want us to walk up to those things and take their heads off with axes? Instead of trying to persuade the spirit of the strong tight fire to fight harder? How powerful do you think we are?”

Veela was desperate. She was nearly crying. “Need help. Need help.”

“Then ask for it from the powerful spirit of the strong tight fire. Ask for it from your magic man in his little nut. My son and I are not even medicine men. If we try to fight these things with only our stones and our arms, we’ll die.”

“But I want to fight them, Father,” said the Jaw.

Chert was drawn up short for a speechless moment. Never before had the Jaw called him “Father” like that. Of course he knew it was an attempt to soften him and make him more amenable to Veela’s pleas. Understanding the ploy didn’t make it entirely ineffective. Nevertheless, Chert said to the Jaw, “I tell you that if we fight those things in that way we will be killed, or else become like them. I’m sorry, my son. But the truth is a stone that cannot be broken.”

“Need help,” Veela kept repeating. She actually was crying now. At first Chert thought something was wrong with her; then he realized she was trying to hold back her tears, which struck him as an odd thing to do. “Need help. Or whole world no-die will be. Whole world no-die.”

“We should agree,” insisted the Jaw. “Even if we don’t end up destroying all the undead, at least we might learn more about the strong tight fire. That may prove valuable, yes?”

Very well—they could agree, and maybe glean some knowledge from this monster, who might be nothing but a very strange woman, after all. Anyway, Chert could tell he wasn’t going to be able to pry the Jaw away just yet. It was not only the lust for vengeance that held him, Chert sensed, but another kind of lust, too. Well, if it did turn out this Veela was simply a woman, they would be able to take her with them by force, no matter how desperately she wanted to stay near this cursed ground and commit suicide by throwing rocks at those undead. Best to wait, though, till they had been better able to gauge her powers.

Veela was greatly relieved when they told her they’d stay with her and lend their strength to the fight against the undead, so much so that Chert wondered if she had an exaggerated notion of their prowess. Privately, she herself felt that the benefit they brought was mainly psychological. It felt good to have any allies in this impossible fight, in this alien time. And hopefully she really would be able to learn something of value from them.

In fact, it was not long before exactly that happened, although she was not to appreciate the significance of the datum for quite some time.

***

I
t was while they were tramping along again through the forest, before nightfall. The woman followed Chert and the Jaw. She hadn’t wanted to move at all, but Chert had insisted that they put some distance between them and the site of the no-die attack. Chert wondered if she had any idea where she was at all—she just seemed so stupid.

They passed a patch of purple-capped Mushrooms of the Inner Eye, and the Jaw pointed them out to Chert. “I want to eat one,” he said.

“We don’t have time,” said Chert.

“The journey is never long, for those who are left behind.” (Time passed differently when one traveled through the underworld, and the voyager could sometimes feel that many days had gone by.) “And I want to see if my mother is there below.”

Chert tried to keep his shoulders from sagging. “Why?” he asked. “What good will that do?”

“I just want to see if she’s there.”

“Whether you see her or not, it won’t mean anything. You aren’t a shaman. You don’t know how to ask the spirits which visions are true and which are not. And there’s no shaman here for us to tell what we saw.”

“I want to see.”

Veela watched the scene with obvious incomprehension. She began moving toward the patch of Mushrooms of the Inner Eye.

Chert thought she was going to try to eat one. He stopped arguing with the Jaw long enough to grab her arm, prompting her to squeal in fright. The childish, dangerously noisy reaction did not exactly augment Chert’s respect for the woman. “Those are for the People, only,” he snarled.

Veela bowed her head repeatedly and shrunk in her shoulders, trying to indicate submission. She hadn’t intended to eat the mushroom—she’d been interested in the patch because she’d guessed that this fungus had some kind of ritual significance for her new buddies.

Chert turned back to the Jaw. Between his son’s stubbornness and the monster woman’s nosiness, he had trouble keeping his temper. “Without the shaman to guide you, you will understand nothing of what you see,” he said, forcing his voice to remain calm. “And you will create danger for me and the woman. We will have to guard you while your spirit voyages out from its body. Even if it only takes a short time, that will not be safe for us.”

That turned out to be the right argument; the notion that he would be a burden was an affront to the Jaw’s pride, if nothing else. With a frown he turned his back on the mushroom patch and walked away.

Chert followed his son. While their backs were turned, Veela reached for one of the mushrooms.

But Chert spun around and grabbed her arm, held his face close to hers, and growled. Veela again put on her cowed, submissive face, which wasn’t hard to do. Okay, so the guy definitely did not want her eating that shroom—she could take a hint. Meanwhile she made a mental note of just how much sharper than hers his senses were. Pretty impressive, how he’d known what she was up to while she was still behind him.

He kept a sharp eye on her after that, till they were well away from the mushroom patch. For now, Veela only tried to discreetly memorize the distinctive purple design on the cap of the fungus. It might be interesting to analyze whatever it was these guys were tripping on, even if it was probably nothing more than a garden-variety psychedelic.

E
ventually dusk was presaged in the sky. Veela indicated they all should go to sleep. The Jaw offered to stand the first watch. At first Veela didn’t understand what he meant; once they’d explained it, she shook her head and held up the nut. Chert and the Jaw figured out she was saying the little man in the nut would stand guard.

“How will
he
be able to keep watch?” demanded Chert, pointing scornfully at the nut. “Even if you let him out, he must be smaller than a bug. It would take him a day and a night to walk a circuit around our sleeping bodies.”