The Unkillables (9 page)

First he wanted her to fill him in on everything from her exchange with the Cro-Magnon and the Neanderthal that she hadn’t had a chance to translate for him yesterday. He couldn’t understand the necessity of delay while she hastened to get away from the blackened corpse of the zombie deer, and then as she began to fill him in he was annoyed that she hadn’t gotten more information.

“I do have to learn their whole language, you know,” she said.

“But I was right about learning a Cro-Magnon language, wasn’t I?”

“It wasn’t the one those two speak.”

“But I was right about learning
a
Cro-Magnon language.”

This had been a bone of contention between them. There had been three human groups within the perimeter Dak had lain down: the Cro-Magnons Dak and Veela called Group B, who spoke the Overhill language; the so-called “People,” who were Group A; and Group C, the Neanderthals that Gash-Eye had spotted and warned off the night before last. One spy-bug drone apiece had been dropped among all three populations—those were all that Dak had had available, until he could access that locked hold where the others were kept. While they were still in orbit, Veela had run quick linguistic analyses on all of them and had determined the Neanderthal language would be the easiest to learn, because it was most similar to her and Dak’s language. Moreover, she figured that with their greater physical strength, the Neanderthals would have made formidable allies. Plus, everyone from Veela’s century who’d ever so much as read an article on paleogenetics knew that Neanderthals had had freakishly good eyesight. Having less faith than Dak in the infallibility of their sensors, she thought that might come in handy.

Dak had been surprisingly chauvinistic about the whole thing: “I don’t think you should be wasting time learning to speak like a
Neanderthal
, when there are more advanced humans nearby.”

“The Neanderthals are just as intelligent.”

“They went extinct, didn’t they?”

“We’re going to go extinct too, remember? In fact, the way things are going to turn out, the Neanderthals will have spent more time on the planet than we will.”

Dak finally brought her around by postulating that their thicker skulls would make it harder to actually get at their brains, meaning that if Veela happened to be near them instead of Cro-Magnons during a zombie attack, she was less likely to wind up surrounded by empty-headed corpses than by huge, zombified Neanderthals. And now that the Neanderthals had all been killed or zombified, she had to admit it was a good thing she’d gone along with him. Of course, she couldn’t help but once more point out, the Cro-Magnons whose language she’d begun learning had also all been either killed or zombified.

“Ah, yes, but at least that language was in the same family as the one we need,” said Dak.

She thought about those spy-bug drones that had collected linguistic data until their batteries had run down—now they lay inert somewhere on the forest floor, inconspicuous little brown permaplast pellets, indestructible and useless. Veela had been appalled at how quickly they’d run down. Never before had she been exposed to real power loss—even during the apocalypse in her own time, there had been plenty of raw electricity zapping around. But Dak said the solar conversion apparatus was under the aegis of stuff the ship’s computer had locked him out of, like that hold filled with weapons and drones. In Veela’s experience, even when a solar panel did break down, you could always just plug your whatsit into the nearest freeport. Obviously, there were none of those here, and they had to rely on a few dozen portable power packs, and whatever was left in the ship’s power core. Veela had no idea how much power that amounted to, and so just had to take Dak’s word for everything.

Veela wanted to hear about what Dak had been doing to contain the zombie crisis. Since she was the one down here on the planet surface, she felt a certain entitlement to know something about the conditions.

Dak confirmed that he’d thrown up a perimeter wall around the zombie contagion, using the cranes, lasers, robot arms, and other equipment that could be extended directly from the ship’s hull. “Are you certain you got it up in time?” asked Veela. “You’re sure no zombies got across first?”

“Reasonably sure.”

Great.

Dak told her that absolutely all humans within the perimeter had been killed or zombified, except her, the Cro-Magnon, and the Neanderthal, whose features, the computer had decided, were actually those of a half-Neanderthal. “It might explain why he was with the Cro-Magnon group, if he’s related to them,” said Dak.

The more they talked, the less impressed she got. Not to mention pissed off. She knew that zombification could sweep through a population like wildfire, but she still didn’t understand how Dak could have lapsed so badly in his monitoring as to let all those people die or be zombified.

“I told you, Veela,” he said more than once. “I couldn’t keep an eye on those populations and secure the perimeter, all at the same time.”

Veela didn’t see why not, but figured it would be counterproductive to keep saying so. Maybe setting up the perimeter wall was more involved than she thought. Anyway, Dak was probably upset about it, too, despite his almost cavalier tone—this was probably just how he dealt with negative emotion.

Still, it sure seemed to her that he’d done a bad job. It was hard to see how he could have done less to contain the plague even if he’d wanted it to spread.

There hadn’t been all that many humans in the area to begin with, so it followed that there weren’t all that many once-human zombies. That was a bit comforting. And the animals, so far, were doing a good job of keep away from the shuffling, smelly, uncoordinated undead hunters. A formerly human zombie was vastly less likely to hear an animal’s brainsong than a human’s, anyway. But the zombies did bite them sometimes, as Veela had seen with her deer. It was only a matter of time before every creature within the perimeter had either had its brain slurped out or been turned into a zombie. It would be impossible for anything trapped in there with them to survive.

They were lucky the things were vulnerable at all. A bodybuilder or a weightlifter—anyway, somebody a lot stronger than Veela—might be able to break through the skull and burst the transformed brain inside with their bare hands; the average full-grown man could probably do it with a rock. In order to immediately grow strong enough to bite through a healthy skull, the zombified jaw’s bones and muscles cannibalized mass and nutrients from the nearest available source, the rest of the head. As a result the zombie skull was comparable in strength to, say, a fairly thin wooden bowl.

“Pretty lucky,” Veela had remarked to Dak, days ago, back when they were still in transit back to Earth. “If the zombie venom strengthened the skull as much as it does the teeth, those fucking things would be invulnerable.”

“Yes,” Dak had said absently, as if tasting something unpleasant. “That’s a design flaw that the gengineers really should have fixed.” Veela had been simultaneously impressed and repulsed by the cold-blooded scientific remove from which he was able to view the matter.

Now, back in the forest, she said, “Um, so, listen ... about my being down here, with these zombies ... maybe you could come pick me up? Along with the two guys?”

“You want me to bring the two primitives aboard the ship?” He sounded startled. “After they just abandoned you to the deer?”

Veela could see how it might sound weird. But she said, “At least until we’re sure all the zombies have been destroyed. It’s not exactly safe for them down here, either.”

“Yes, of course, point taken.... Well, I’m not entirely sure how appropriate their presence would be aboard the ship, but at the moment the point is moot. While building the wall, I had no drones available, you know, and so had to use not only the extendible cranes but any controllable ship’s protuberance, meaning portions of the landing apparatus had to be pressed into service. Obviously, the apparatus wasn’t designed for such work, and it sustained a bit of damage. Meaning that, at the moment, I’m unable to land.”

Veela felt suddenly chilly. “You can’t land?” she repeated, in a small voice.

“No need to worry, the damage will be quite easy to repair, I’m sure, once I have a spare moment to figure it out. Right now I’m preoccupied with my plan to destroy the zombies.”

Well, Veela supposed, it was probably all right—after all, if the damage were irreparable, then Dak should have been the one freaking out. It wasn’t like the ship was going to float around up there indefinitely, and it wasn’t like there was an infinite supply of food aboard.

She dropped the subject, and asked, “How high is the perimeter wall?”

“Three and a half meters.”

Another shock. “Dak,” she said, after a silent moment. “I don’t think that’s going to be high enough.”

“Have you spotted some four-meter-tall zombies I should know about?”

Veela had a vision of a horde of zombies somehow figuring out there might be fresh brains on the other side of that wall, and climbing atop one another’s squirming bodies to get to them. Of course, there weren’t enough humanoid zombies in the area to create a horde, but it could just as easily be a horde composed of former squirrels, bears, deer, and so forth. She expressed this vision to Dak.

“Hm,” he said, after she’d explained. “That could be disastrous.... There’s an anti-intruder field around it to give nerve shocks, but I’m not certain that will be effective against the zombies.... Well, we’ll just have to be sure we annihilate all the zombies before that happens.”

“Can’t you go back and make the wall higher?”

“Veela, I keep explaining to you that our resources are limited. I agree with you that the zombies must be wiped out at all costs, but that’s exactly why I don’t think it makes sense to expend all our energy in containing them, if it leaves us with no way to destroy them afterward.”

Veela thought she’d like to be able to go up to the ship and have a gander at their resources, herself. If only she knew how to decipher the read-outs; it wasn’t her specialty. She said, “I don’t see how you can be so calm and collected, considering those things hitched a ride back in time with us, through our carelessness. Not to mention....”

But her throat closed up; she could not bring herself even to speak of the other thing they’d done.

Dak said, “I don’t see how feeling guilty will change things. We did what we could to survive, not to mention preserve the last two members of the human race. Maybe we did an imperfect job, but the circumstances were not exactly amenable to careful planning, if you recall. As for the other side-effect, certainly it is unfortunate....”

“Unfortunate?!”

“In any case, it isn’t our immediate concern—we and our descendants will have dozens of millennia to worry over it, assuming we can survive and destroy the present infestation. So let’s concentrate on the zombies at hand, shall we?”

He outlined his plan. She was dubious, but couldn’t think of anything better.

“Now,” said Dak, “there is a chance I won’t be able to round up all the zombies and one or two more strays may cross your path....”

“Yes, I was just thinking that.”

“To provide for such an eventuality, it’s best you start thinking how to defend yourself.”

“If the sensors show a zombie coming near me, can’t you just blast it with the laser?”

“We’ve just been through that. Besides, this is a dangerous world, and we’ll need to survive on it even if our equipment fails or malfunctions. Shouldn’t we get started figuring out how to do so?”

“Dak, I don’t guess there’s any chance of accessing that cache anytime soon?” asked Veela, hopelessly. That store of drones, blasters, and batteries would come in pretty handy right around now.

“I’ve told you,” said Dak, with an ostentatious air of patience. “The code-lock on that hold is very sophisticated. It will take the computer many, many trillions of iterations before it can decipher it. And we don’t have unlimited processing power.”

Veela didn’t see why the only other ship’s tasks she knew of, building the wall and tracking the zombies, should eat up so much processing power. But she supposed she wasn’t being fair. Now that Dak had hijacked a spaceship and propelled it forty-five millennia back in time, it seemed like he ought to be able to unlock a damn door. But the bottom line, of course, was that she didn’t know what she was talking about, and Dak did. And so he could set the rules, and she couldn’t argue.

And there was no point complaining about that. It wasn’t like it was Dak’s fault she’d never rigorously studied physics, higher math, or cryptography.

“I know your situation is dangerous,” said Dak. “But it wasn’t my idea to have you down there alone, if you recall. Nor is it my fault you have no weapon.”

“Yes,” snapped Veela, her mouth twisting with embarrassment.

“We haven’t many in the first place, you know, what with the hold being locked. So frankly the fact that you—”

“Yes, thank you! Once again, I’m sorry! Let’s not talk about it again, thanks!... You were talking about learning to defend ourselves. Where should we start?”

“You must learn how to make a spear.”

Veela suppressed a childish groan. Her whole life had conditioned her to say,
Isn’t that somebody else’s job? I’m a linguist.

She frowned at her surroundings. “How do I even start?” she said. “Just get a piece of wood or something?”

“For the shaft, you mean? Well, first you’ll need a blade with which to fashion the wood.”

“Oh, crap.” She remembered the weapons Chert and the Jaw had ditched. For a moment she hesitated, but she knew her mere horror at the corpse of the zombie deer in no way justified not going back for them. Dak asked her why she was turning around, and when she explained he was disgusted she’d left them behind in the first place.

“Yeah, well, I’m a little worried that you didn’t already know I’d dumped them. You talk about how you can see every little detail of what’s going on down here, but you sure do seem to miss a bunch, don’t you?”

Dak didn’t respond to that.