The Unkillables Read Online Free PDF Page B

People, a couple of them green (one pale, one dark), the other four black. Chert knew others of the People had been turned, and he wondered with trepidation how close by they were, and listened for any person-sized creature shuffling through the underbrush.
    Most of the creatures or demons or whatever they were had spears sticking from them, slowing them as their ends dragged along the ground, or else they had gaping black-oozing holes where spears had been jabbed into their flesh and had come out again. Most of the wounds seemed clearly mortal, and yet the dead walked. On some of them body parts dangled, limbs attached only by precarious strips of flesh. A woman named Thrush, or who had once been named Thrush, had had her right arm ripped off. They could see the black arm some distance away from her, pulling itself by its hand’s fingers along the grass.
    “How could we have saved Gash-Eye from those things?” whispered Chert. “You’re mad if you think we could have. It’s a miracle we saved ourselves.”
    The Jaw stubbornly refused to answer.
    Chert knew that if the boy had had an argument against him, he would have voiced it, and that his silence amounted to tacit agreement. Still he craved to have it in words, so they could finish this conflict and get on with surviving. “What could we have done for her?” he insisted. “Show me a thing that can be killed, and I tell you I can kill it. But what would you have me do against creatures that grow stronger and stronger, the more they die?”
    “You managed to rescue me ,” said the Jaw accusingly.
    In disgust, Chert turned back to the creatures. They exercised upon him a weird fascination that let him forget his stupid son. He knew that they should leave this area, that there was no way to be sure the creatures in their unfed state were as clumsy as Chert thought, that they might be able to sneak up on him and the Jaw after all. He told himself that he was studying them, so as to be better prepared should he ever need to fight them again. But it was the horrible mystery of the things that drew his mind to them.
    What were they? How could anyone defeat them? He felt for them a revulsion and hatred he had never felt for anything before; certainly not for the animals he hunted and to whom he always offered ritual thanks. There were plenty of creatures that Chert wanted to see removed from the world, animals like the big-fanged tigers who had been known to kill his friends and kinsmen; but this was the first time Chert had ever seen anything that he knew in his gut should be wiped off the earth, destroyed utterly, completely removed from the universe of clean spirits.
    But what could possibly do it? What power could defeat the unkillable, the undead? Chert could imagine nothing from this world that could be up for the challenge.
    A strange humming vibrated his bones and something made all his hairs stand on end.
    There swooped overhead a monstrous bird, so fast and alien that even the mighty Chert and the Jaw squealed in fright and jumped further back into the bushes. The Jaw nearly ran, but held his ground when he realized his father was going nowhere. Chert stared up at the huge thing. It was not a bird after all, he realized, though he had no inkling what it might be instead; it had no wings to flap but glided smoothly through the air, plainly guided with intention and control; it had no head, either, and now seemed less like an animal than a huge impossibly regular and smooth stone, blinking stars embedded in its surface. Also on its surface were strange markings; Chert could not imagine how men could have formed them, but they definitely looked like made things.
    The huge magic stone came to a halt over the hill. It floated, stationary—not even birds could do that. Beside him Chert heard the Jaw whimpering, and felt his own mind starting to buckle. It’s hovering like an insect, he told himself. Birds don’t hover, but insects do. Somehow, being able to find