The Unkillables (28 page)

She nearly fell off the thing’s back as she changed her grip—now both hands were curved tightly underneath its jaw. She planted the soles of her feet on its back and pushed with them, pulling the head toward her. The unkillable’s back arched weirdly and she heard its bones snapping, but the head stayed on, as aggressive as ever.

She remembered how she had torn the head off one of these things before and told herself she could do it again. But that had been an eternity ago, she’d been vastly stronger then. Now she was more likely to tear herself apart than she was the unkillable.

One last supreme effort. She strained back. There were tearing noises, but they sounded strange and she couldn’t be sure they were real. Everything was dark. She was falling backwards, but she still had something in her hands—she didn’t know if she was falling in the outside world, or falling only in her spirit ... or maybe it was both....

Sorry, Hoof....

***

T
he Jaw saw Chert leap at the once-tiny man in his shell; the Jaw even heard him scream his mother’s name. One of those magic stone vines knocked him aside. Chert went flying, and by the eerie cold light the Jaw saw him land hard on a rock outcropping.

The Jaw was no coward, but he could see he was going to need a weapon. He ran back to where he’d dropped Gash-Eye’s pointed stick and retrieved it. Veela was on her hands and knees, and getting to her feet. She was all right. He didn’t even have time to be happy about that before spinning around to run back the way he’d come.

As he was running back he saw his mother in the white glare, feet planted upon the zombie’s back as she ripped its head off with her bare hands. The sight made him slow down. Then his mother went flying backwards with the head in her hands—she’d been pushing off with her feet, and once the head was detached there was nothing supporting her anymore. She landed with a loud slapping crash on her back, the head rolling out of her hand. The Jaw picked up his pace again.

His first thought was to tend to Gash-Eye, but as he was racing to her side he nearly stepped on the still-chattering head. He stopped and stared down furiously at the repugnant thing. Even in death, or what should have been death, it would have bitten him on the foot and turned him into yet another thing like it. The Jaw raised the stick overhead and drove it into the zombie’s skull. It passed through with a popping sound. The Jaw stabbed it again and again, twisting and shaking the stick until finally the head stirred no more.

Then he hurried to Gash-Eye’s side and knelt beside her. “Gash-Eye!” he said. “Gash-Eye. Mother.”

She didn’t answer. Her chest wasn’t moving.

The Jaw put his hand under her nose to feel for breath; he put his ear on her naked chest to listen for her heart.

He sat up, tilted back his head, and howled.

***

S
till dazed, Veela was hurrying to the scene of the carnage when she heard an awful noise. That was the Jaw, she realized. He was kneeling over his mother. She must be dead.

It looked like the zombie was more or less dead, too—at least, its severed head lay motionless on the floor, while its twitching body dangled from Dak’s sentacles. The body would live on a few hours, but without a mouth to bite with and thus pass on the zombie plague, it should be only minimally dangerous. The worst it might do was kill somebody.

She saw that Chert was lying at a distance from the others, in an odd position. She couldn’t tell whether he was still alive or not.

On her way to the Jaw and his mother, she picked up the heaviest stone she could manage. Grunting, she carried it over to the head. It was badly mangled and seemed pretty plainly dead. Nevertheless, Veela dropped the rock on top of it, dancing out of the way of its splatter as best she could.

She went to the Jaw, and could tell by the same signs as he that the woman was dead. She put a light hand on his shoulder, but didn’t say anything.

Only then did she turn to Dak. Time to find out why he’d allowed his experiment to go awry, and why he wasn’t doing anything now.

Something was clearly wrong. For one thing, it wasn’t merely that Dak was doing nothing—his armored frame was completely immobile, and the sentacles were frozen in mid-writhe.

For another, he seemed to be struggling, and even sweating uncharacteristically, she saw as she cautiously edged closer. His visor was completely clear, there were no readings being displayed on the other side of the transparent panel. He looked at her through it as she approached.

“Okay,” she said. “What the fuck, Dak?”

“The math was wrong!” he said. “The equations said there was power to spare, but there wasn’t! When I relayed that burst to strengthen the sentacles, more power than necessary must have been expelled. I must have shorted out the frame, or used up all its available power. But I can’t be sure, because I can’t turn the computer on to check!”

“Dak. Was the math wrong, or were you wrong about the math?”

“All right, I was wrong. Does that satisfy you, to know that I can be wrong as well? But now what are we going to do?!”

Already Veela regretted having been snarky with him, as the full weight of his plight sank in. “Shit, Dak,” she said. “How are we going to get you out of that thing?” Never, never, never would they be able to carry it out of the caves, much less cut him out of it even if they did.

Dak said, “You’re going to have to go back to the ship. There’s still a few portable power packs. Bring one back to replace the one I’ve used.”

“Wait. Did that thing use up a whole power pack today?!”

“There’s still plenty of power in the ship itself! It has vast reserves, compared to those portable packs! Anyway, I’ll use much less power when I walk out, because I won’t need to have the sentacles on as high an alert, now that we’ve killed the zombie.”

We? “Excuse me, Dak, but I am not walking all the way back to the ship and back down into these dark dangerous caves so that you can stroll out in that armored frame. If I get the power pack for you, it’ll only be so that we can turn that thing on, order it to open up, get you out, then remove the power pack and abandon this fucking energy-suck.”

For a second it looked like he was going to have the gall to argue. But he said, “All right. Fine. Agreed.”

But Veela had thought of something obvious. Dak had already proven himself treacherous, to a homicidal degree. Right now, he was helpless. But if they plugged in a new power pack, he would once again become the single most powerful creature on the planet, at least till the new pack wore down, and they would have only his word that he would obediently get out of the frame and turn it off.

But what was the alternative? To leave him here to die of thirst, encased in this tight shell, in the dark once the frame’s emergency lights went out in a couple of hours?

She supposed that absent-minded klutziness of his wasn’t completely an act, after all. Certainly, he would not have intentionally trapped himself in that thing, just to fool her.

“I just wish I could trust you, Dak,” she said.

He stared at her, seeming honestly aggrieved and confused. “What do you mean?” he said. “Of course you can trust me!”

Meanwhile, Chert waited till the Jaw’s howling for Gash-Eye subsided. Then, feeling his time was short, he said in a weak voice, “Jaw. My son. Come here.”

The Jaw heard. He looked across the short distance at his father.

“Come here, my son.”

The Jaw relented. As he grew closer, he saw that his father’s ribs were plainly broken. Blood trickled from his mouth, and each breath and especially each word was clearly painful. The Jaw knelt beside him to hear what he would say.

With effort, Chert put his hand on the Jaw’s arm. “I should have made them give you a proper name,” he said.

The Jaw didn’t say anything.

“I was wrong about everything,” Chert said. He patted the Jaw’s arm. “I was wrong about everything.” He died.

The Jaw stared down at Chert. His father was dead. The Jaw’s breathing came faster and faster. His hand tightened on his mother’s sharpened stick.

He stood and turned. “Little man!” he shouted.

The little man was still in his shell. He and Veela were talking about something. They both turned to look when he shouted.

The Jaw walked towards them, with the stick. “Little man, my father owes you a death!”

Veela put herself in front of him. “Wait!...” she said, but he shoved her aside.

He raised the pointed stick. Only now did the little man comprehend, and his eyes widened in terror. The Jaw didn’t care—he didn’t feel satisfaction, or anything else. He didn’t care what the little man felt.

“This is for my father!” he said, and thrust the pointed stick through the opening in the frame and through the little man’s throat. He twisted it and listened as the little man’s life gurgled and whistled out, then yanked it free again.

Behind him, Veela had given a little cry of shock. Now he turned to face her, defiantly.

She blinked at him a while. Gradually her body relaxed. So maybe it had not been the most civilized solution, she said to herself. But it had probably been the most sensible. Besides, stuff like that happened not infrequently in this world—best to get used to it.

And, of course, it was nothing compared to the horrors she and Dak had brought. So who was she to get high and mighty?

T
hey went back to the ship, Veela, the Jaw, and Quarry. It was parked on the top of the hill, above the cave mouth. They didn’t use the ship much—not even the interior lights were left on—Veela figured that if they continued to conserve power this way, the ship might remain functional for a few hundred years. That lifespan would quickly shorten if they took it for a bunch of joyrides.

Usually, only the bare minimum of power needed to operate the code lock was used. Veela taught the Jaw how to tap in the code to open the main hatch. She taught Quarry, too, after debating with herself whether or not the girl was too young to have free access to the ship’s interior—there were too many dangerous things roaming this Earth for Veela to deny her such an impregnable shelter. Veela still had no idea that, by her reckoning, the Jaw was only just turning sixteen.

It was almost a week since they’d burned the remains of all the zombie corpses they could find in the caves, and left Dak eternally trapped there in his strange artifact. And left Gash-Eye and Chert, too; at first the Jaw had insisted they take them out, but he couldn’t carry them both on his own, and Veela and Quarry could barely help.

Veela had persuaded the Jaw that if they didn’t get Quarry out of the caves as soon as possible, she would probably die of a fever. Even so, the Jaw had insisted on digging his parents a shallow grave in a patch of gravel he’d found, barely enough to cover the corpses. They’d been buried together, for the sake of speed and efficiency. Veela had learned enough about their horrific relationship to wonder how they would have felt about that.

Veela stood outside the ship looking out over the little valley. In the distance she could see the white perimeter wall. Eventually they would fly to the other side of it—one quick trip wouldn’t dent the reserves too badly.

It was a gorgeous world. A hard and dangerous one, though—Veela planned to introduce agriculture, as well as a few other amenities that would probably blow the Jaw’s and Quarry’s minds, but she was under no illusions that she was going to get the kind of lifespan she’d always been taught to expect. Then again, it didn’t look like she was going to be killed by a zombie, either.

Why wasn’t she more freaked out, she wondered? Not so much about the move to a new time—in many ways she preferred this Earth to her old one, and she supposed she liked the Jaw as well as she had liked anyone she’d left behind. More, she wondered why it didn’t bother her more that the entire universe was doomed to come to an end the very instant she and Dak jumped back in time. She didn’t think it was mere selfishness, a matter of her not caring about a catastrophe so far removed from her in the future, one that wouldn’t affect her personally—it wasn’t entirely that, anyway. Even if she personally wouldn’t have to experience it, she didn’t like the idea of all Creation coming to a premature end.

And it wasn’t that she didn’t believe Dak, even though it did hearten her somewhat that he’d screwed up his math at the end there, and hence must not have been infallible. Even with that, the question still remained: why was there no record of anybody besides themselves traveling back from the future, if there was any more future to travel back from?

Maybe it was partly that she’d grown up thinking of the world as being close to destruction. All her life, since well before the zombie plague, it had been the common consensus that humans were on the verge of making themselves extinct. Maybe living with that notion so long had been good practice for this.

But also, regardless of what her reason told her, she obviously didn’t believe in the inevitability of destiny, not deep-down. Otherwise, never would she have busted her hump trying to wipe out those zombies before they triggered a paleolithic apocalypse; she would have rested secure in the knowledge that the problem would take care of itself, since civilization had to arise so as to one day destroy itself and the universe in her home time.

(For the first time, the uncomfortable idea occurred to her that perhaps the only way to preserve the universe from destruction by herself and Dak would, in fact, have been to let the zombies nip humanity in the bud here and now, and that by preventing that she had set the stage for the catastrophe her escape would one day trigger.)

Anyway—not only had she grown up accustomed to the idea of imminent human extinction, but now, for the first time in her life, she felt like there was something she could do to try to make a difference. Dak had been certain that his equations proved there was no escape, but Veela was teaching Quarry math now as well, and had taught the Jaw all the basics of arithmetic. Tomorrow she would move him on to algebra, and she was also teaching them both to speak and read her language, meaning that soon they could rummage through the ship’s library. The memory banks wouldn’t last forever, but they could use some power to run off copies of the most important few thousand volumes on nigh-indestructible plastic pages, making books that would survive fires and floods and last millennia. Hopefully she would manage to give physics a forty-five-thousand-year head start, and let her far-distant descendants worry about temporal paradoxes and all that shit.