Read The Unkillables for Free Online Page A

Seeing that his son wouldn’t be dissuaded, Chert crept along after him.
    They were already almost upon the new mysterious thing when they saw a flash of bright white tramping through the trees. Both Chert and the Jaw froze again. There were such things as white birds and animals, but this was a sort of white they’d never seen before, a glittery, shiny white. Chert was infuriated to see yet another alien intrusion into his world.
    From the way the thing moved it was soon plain that it was a human, or some spirit disguised as a human. Chert wondered if it were sick, it seemed so clumsy and confused—not clumsy and oblivious, the way the undead had been, when there were no brains nearby for them to eat.
    Chert was about to signal to the boy that they should slink away, hopefully without being noticed by the new thing, when the Jaw suddenly stood and thrust the intervening branches aside, roaring a challenge into the woman’s face.
    For it was a woman, albeit a tall one, taller than them. They could tell from the shape of her body underneath the strange white hides she wore. And by her pale face, seen through a sheet of dull ice, transparent and impossibly solid here in the spring sunshine. Surrounding the rest of her head was some sort of hollow white stone, different from the stone that floated but also impossibly smooth and regular. Through the ice she gaped at them in terror.
    Chert didn’t care if she was terrified. He’d had enough monsters, of any variety. Grabbing a stone from the ground, he sprang up and past the Jaw and with a hunting cry slammed the stone into her face hard enough to smash the ice.
    Except it didn’t smash. Though the woman went flying onto her back, the ice wasn’t even cracked. Chert was certain the round white stone that covered her head would bear no marks, either. With wonder, he realized that it was a sort of protective garb. But how long must it take to hollow out a round stone? And wouldn’t it make your neck tired?
    She tried to scramble away, blinking at them in a panic as she thrashed back through the underbrush. They blinked too, at the gleaming reflection of the sunlight from where it hit her white hide from between the tree leaves. She was making noises, babbling something in an unknown tongue.
    To hell with the stone on her head—if she could be scared, she could be killed. It would feel good to kill something, after their earlier futile battle with the undead. Still holding the stone, Chert stepped forward, preparing to find out if the white hide she wore also had magical protective properties.
    The Jaw stopped him with a hand to his chest. “Listen!” he said, staring at the woman, face strained in concentration. “Listen to what she’s saying!”
    Exasperated, Chert wanted to say that she was talking in no language he understood, then get back to the business of beating her to death with the rock and his feet. But he paused, willing to briefly humor the Jaw. He even listened closely, certain though he was that it would do no good, and after a moment was surprised to realize that he could understand a few words.
    “Me friend is,” she was saying. She spoke, not the tongue of the People, but that of the other band which habitually passed through a swath of territory over the range of hills, that the People called the Overhills. The People had had dealings enough with them that most had learned their language’s basics. Chert was far from fluent, but even he could tell how it was being butchered by this new monster. “Me is,” she said again, followed by a string of words they couldn’t understand. Then, “Me is fight no-die.”
    That was easy enough to understand. “What are the no-dies?” demanded Chert. “Where do they come from?”
    The monster just blinked at them. She shook her head and said, “No is understanding, not. Hard is the language.”
    The effort of translating from her travesty of a tongue he only knew imperfectly in the first place was