The Unkillables (16 page)

To explain all this even as well as she had, Veela had had to sing, since “sing” was a word they’d not yet taught each other. As she sang, the Jaw had gazed at her with such stupid adoring awe that Chert had felt he might throw up.

“Why are the no-dies such a dark black when they’re hungry?” asked the Jaw. “And why do they glow bright green when they eat a brain?”

Once Veela had deciphered the question, she knew its answer was going to be a doozy. How to explain that the zombie venom kickstarted the production of the cthuloid fluid, which transformed the blood into a black ichor that stained its way through every vein and capillary, till finally it had soaked through the entirety of the victim’s flesh? And then further explain that the ingestion of cerebral fluid set off a whole symphony of metabolic reactions in the zombie, the most visible of which was the brief and spectacular activation of the cthuloid fluid’s phosphorescent quality? “Magic,” she finally settled for, with a shrug.

Chert and, mainly, the Jaw taught Veela how to make a knife, and a spear. They taught her the most basic rudiments of tracking, the kind of things they were used to teaching toddlers only beginning to walk, not full-grown adults. She caught on pretty quickly. That only bewildered Chert even more. He’d assumed she was simply an idiot, albeit a very unusual sort of idiot. Now it turned out that her problem was that she had never learned the most basic lessons of being human. It was as if a full-grown woman had never gotten around to learning how to walk, out of laziness.

Two days after she’d made her first spear, she killed her first animal. At first she danced around, inordinately pleased with herself for having killed a mere rabbit. Then she picked the thing up, holding it at a distance and making a displeased face at it, a sure way to offend its spirit. The Jaw, who had been beaming at her throughout the kill, actually had to tell her to thank the rabbit’s spirit before they skinned it.

Chert was disgusted. It would be one thing if her particular rites of thanksgiving had been different from the People’s. But not thinking to thank the animal at all betrayed a lack of decency.

In the middle of the Jaw showing her how to skin the rabbit, Veela excused herself. She insisted on hiding in the bushes to urinate. The Jaw was content to accept this as simply another of her eccentricities; Chert was convinced she was concealing something sinister under that white garb.

While she was gone Chert approached the Jaw. He was happily dressing the monster woman’s kill for her: a bitter reminder to Chert that slave blood ran in his son’s veins. He said, “We’re supposed to be teaching her in exchange for something. When is she going to start giving us something in return?”

The Jaw stared at Chert in unfeigned shock. “She’s giving us the math,” he said.

“Math” was what she called her prattlings and scratchings. Chert regarded his son sullenly and without speaking, then walked away from him.

Meanwhile, as Veela was urinating she noticed that she’d happened to pick a spot near a patch of those purple shrooms that Chert had been so gung-ho to keep her away from. She picked one, and with four taps on the communicator—two shorts, a long, then two more shorts—she caused a tiny needle to pop out, then stuck that needle into the shroom. The needle would sample and decode the mushroom’s DNA, and send the genome up to Dak. He should be able to model how the fungus was likely to interact with human biochemistry. And then they would have at least a clue as to what the exact flavor of the experience was, when her new buddies were tripping balls. That might be interesting, maybe.

***

V
eela and the Jaw talked all the time, he trying to learn the math and she trying to learn the language. But he wanted to learn about her, as well. “Why are you here, alone?” he asked. “Alone with no band, except the little man in the nut? With no weapon you can control, yourself?”

Veela hung on his words, translating them. Once she’d processed his question, bitter humiliation spread through her face like a stain, prompted by the memories his questions evoked.

Not humiliation at her decision to stay on the planet surface—she felt no shame over that, although it would not be quite true to say she hadn’t regretted it a few times, and she still couldn’t believe she’d done it.

She replayed the moment in her head—Dak had brought the ship down for a landing, by night so they wouldn’t be seen, in a deserted forest spot at the center of what was now the walled perimeter. At dawn, they’d stepped out, with no protection but their white therma-fix jumpsuits and their sturdy helmets, and Veela’s rudimentary grasp of the basics of Group B’s language. And two laser-blasters, the only two that weren’t locked  away in that hold. They’d walked around the side of the ship, to open a side-hold and get a pack’s worth of perma-meals ... and that fucking zombie mouse had streaked out, hissing and slithering as it zipped under the carpet of dead leaves and disappeared.

Veela had given a yelping shriek and leaped into the arms of Dak, her unlikely hero. He had extricated himself from her embrace, and blithely said, “Ah, well, that’s unfortunate. We shall have to go back up, now. If the undead are going to be loose here in prehistory, there’s no time to lose in building a perimeter wall to contain them. Eradicating the infected will be the second priority.”

Eradicating the infected,
Veela had repeated to herself, as Dak combed through the hold with his instruments, making sure there were no more stowaways from the future. Everything he had just said was absolutely correct; now that they had committed this fuck-up (how had a mouse ever snuck into the hold in the first place, much less a zombie mouse?!), their number-one priority had to be nipping an apocalypse in the bud. Both morally and in terms of their own survival, that was the only thing that made sense.

But there were people down here. Unsuspecting humans. As Dak was finishing up his sensor sweep of the hold and heading back to the main hatch, she’d heard herself say, “I’m staying down here.”

The slightly immature pleasure of seeing Dak at a loss almost made up for the crippling terror of what she was about to do. “What?”

“The people,” she said. “I speak some of one of the three linguistic group’s lingo, and someone has to warn them what’s coming. Has to tell them how dangerous these things are, has to explain that their only vulnerable point is the brain. Stuff like that.”

He was still staring at her. “They’re primitives,” he said. “They’ll rape and eat you.”

“Only if they’re primitives and also dickheads.”

He spent a little more time trying to dissuade her, but she was raring to go try to catch up with the Overhill group before any of its members became infected. Also before her nerve failed. She was almost touched by how upset Dak seemed at the prospect of her heading into danger alone, although maybe he was just pissed that she was taking one of their only two hand-held laser blasters. For a second she thought he might refuse to hand it over.

When they’d parted, Veela had said, “All right, I’m going to go find Group B. They’re north, right?” She pointed.

“Yes, they are to the north, but you’re pointing west, for goodness’ sake. Once again, I must protest this reckless and tactically useless notion of yours.”

Once she had it clear which direction north was, she’d marched off that way, trying to quell the fearful tremblings in her belly, unable even to look up over her shoulder at the ship as it hummed smoothly and safely into the sky.... And then how had she lost that blaster? What use had she, the brave and intrepid rescuer, made of fully half their available hand-held weaponry? With her belly bubbling in fear the way it was, she hadn’t gone many yards before she’d realized she was going to have to take a shit. And then she’d realized, appalled, that she had no idea how to go about it. Never before in her whole life had she even once relieved herself in an environment not engineered and built for that explicit purpose. She’d looked around at the forest: what, was she just supposed to go out here? In daylight, on the ground? In some irrational but powerful way it was simply unthinkable, even aside from the possibility of a lurking zombie mouse. She tried to recall a scene from some adventure vid or some historical novel where a character in the wild had taken a dump, so she could remember how they’d managed. She couldn’t think of any such scene, though.

Nearby was the sound of running water. She’d walked to it and found a pretty brisk stream with what she supposed was a fairly strong current, not that she’d ever before seen a stream that wasn’t man-made. The running water had made the set-up feel sort of like plumbing. After a nervous look around, Veela had opened the back flap of her jumpsuit and copped a squat, poking her bottom out over the water—just in time, too. There were a few towelettes stored in the lining of her jumpsuit that she’d used to clean herself, wondering all the while what she was going to do when
those
ran out.... Did people here in prehistory just use leaves? How many centuries did that go on?

She’d managed to walk a pretty long way before she even noticed that her blaster holster was empty, and remembered that, before sticking her butt out over that stream, she hadn’t thought to fasten the holster. Horrified, she’d run back to the spot. But the quick little stream’s current had been strong enough to whisk the light plastic-and-synthcrystal weapon away already.

Now, with the Jaw, she replied to his question: “To explain, is difficult.” And when it looked like he was going to press the issue, she distracted him with multiplication drills.

V
eela was learning the People’s tongue fast—she spent all her time practicing, which was another way of saying she was forever babbling. Chert was going to go insane listening to her. Whenever he tried to steer her to some interesting topic, she started talking about her math again. And then the Jaw would hang on her every word.

The Jaw grew more pathetic with each passing moment. She’d let him take that protective head-protecting stone of hers, called a “helmet,” since it fascinated him so much. The Jaw had torn loose a strip of the hide he wore and tied it to the helmet, so that now it hung from his garment, getting in the way. It was as if he was so fascinated that he wanted some fetish of hers always at hand, in addition to her actual presence. Chert hated the sight of that bizarre stone, hanging off his son and bobbing clumsily as they walked.

Two days after the red flashings, his second full day of getting an earful of the math, Chert raised his hand to the Jaw’s chest, to halt their progress.

The Jaw stopped. It was plain from his face that he expected nothing good from whatever his father was going to say. Veela kept walking, till she noticed that they’d stopped.

“Who are you to hold this female for yourself?” said Chert.

The Jaw didn’t respond, except to tighten his mouth and the muscles around his eyes.

“Am I not the older?” said Chert. “Am I not the father? I have the right to use the captured woman, too.”

“She’s not our captive, Father.”

The Jaw had gotten into the habit of calling Chert “Father” when he wanted to soften him. But Chert could see there was no affection behind the title, certainly not this time, and the trick only made him more resentful.

“Are we her captives, then?”

“No, Father. Maybe we’re....” The Jaw trailed off. He had been going to say “equals,” but knew the mockery he’d face if he suggested to Chert that they be equals with a female, even one as extraordinary as Veela. In truth, the notion struck the Jaw himself as bizarre, when he tried to articulate it.

Chert waited for him to finish. When the Jaw didn’t say anything, Chert said, “She’s not a member of our band. She’s not of the People. Thus, either she is our captive or we are hers. And I will be no woman’s captive. So: she is ours. If she is our captive, we have three choices: kill her; free her; or use her. You don’t want to kill her. As for releasing her, I doubt we could persuade her to go, and even if we did she’s so ignorant that she would soon die in the forest. So we only have one choice left.”

Veela’s listening comprehension had advanced far enough that she could make out the vague drift of Chert’s words. For now, she merely moved her eyes uneasily from one man to the other, waiting to see how they would decide it between them before taking any action herself.

The Jaw’s face looked like it was about to explode. Barely able to move his tight-gripped teeth enough to get the words out, he said, “Say you’re right, Father. Say she is our captive. There’s plenty of use to be gotten out of her, going on as we are. She is our link to the strong tight fire and the flying stone. And you don’t understand the math, but I do, and I tell you it’s good.”

“Don’t remind me of how she’s fogged your mind with that math magic, you’ll only convince me that the best thing is to kill her after all.”

The Jaw took a step closer to him. “I say again that you’ll not kill her, Chert. Or touch her at all.”

Chert wondered if he would have hated his own father, as the Jaw was coming to hate him, as Spear had once hated his. Probably not—not enough to kill him, at least. Anyway, he would never know. Chert’s father had been mauled to death by a bear, back when he and the other hunters still towered twice Chert’s height.

He tried to keep the note of pleading from his voice. “Son. If you want to keep her for your own use, if you ask me for that, I will renounce my right to her. I have no desire for this female, anyway. Only, make use of her yourself, at least. I can’t stand to see you debase yourself like this. This is not the use to be made of the life I gave you.”

“The life you gave me?” the Jaw repeated. “And what was the purpose of that life, I ask you? Was I not destined to be a slave? To be used? Was it not my sole purpose to be killed by the People whenever they saw fit to punish my mother for some trifle?”

Chert raised his hand to the Jaw’s elbow. Incredibly, his eyes had grown wet. “But I wouldn’t let them, my son,” he said. “Do remember that.”

“How will we ever know if your resolve would have held?”