Writer's Block: Gratitude

 

Here's another story from my horror/sci-fi collection I'm working on. This one's about a caveman and how much it would suck to live in the Pleistocene.

...

Cro moved through the dense underbrush, his breath coming out in great puffs, as he struggled to control the pain emitting from his right arm. During the chase, he had rushed past a thorn tree too closely, and now a three-inch barb was deeply embedded in his right biceps. The snow was heavy and his furs weighed him down, and huddled as he was in the thicket, spear in hand, there wasn’t much he could do at the moment to alleviate his discomfort. The giant deer paced a few feet ahead, its massive antlers preventing it from retreating further into the woods. Meat. That singular word reverberated in his head. For days he had eaten nothing more substantial than pine nuts, and his stomach felt as though it were in the process of consuming itself. He was focused now, and not even the sharp pangs that sent tremors down his arm could distract him from the source of sustenance that stood before him, only waiting to be killed. Where were Kia and Cumo? They should be at his left and right respectively, but he saw no trace of his brothers in his peripheral vision. He would have to do this himself.

 
With a cry, Cro rushed the giant deer. Upon seeing him, the beast lowered its head, but Cro dodged to the left and thrust forward his spear. It lodged into the deer’s left shoulder, causing the creature to rear up and lash out with its hooves. One caught Cro right in the face, crushing his nose, but he kept his focus and pulled the spear out and thrust again. This time, he managed to jab it through the beast’s heart, and the gigantic ruminant collapsed, its rich blood staining the snow.
Cro stumbled toward the slain animal, the pain in his right arm now forgotten. Gingerly, he raised a hand and touched his face. The resulting sensation nearly caused him to collapse. Wheezing blood, he fell to his knees before the deer, and pulled out his knife. There was no time to lick his wounds—he had to harvest the flesh before the smell of blood summoned scavengers.

“Brother!” said a voice.

Cro looked up from his work and saw Kia and Cumo, the latter of which had his arm thrown around former.

“What happened?” he asked.

“He has broken his foot,” explained Kia. “He fell into a hole hidden in the snow as we chased the deer.”

Cro swallowed the frustration that threatened to bubble up. Complications were expected, and nothing ever went according to plan, and it was not useful to explode and curse the gods and the lot that they had given man.

“Come, we have much work to do,” he said to his brothers. “We will not be able to carry as much meat back, but it will have to do.”

It took them an hour, but they managed to fashion a gurney out of the bones and hide of the deer, and they lay their brother upon it, who cradled his in arms as much meat as he could hold, wrapped as it was in the left-over skin of the beast. The sun was falling fast, and as Cro picked up his end of the gurney, he felt his arm spasm and tremble. The pain was almost too much, but he bore it, and soon he and Kia trudged through the snow, a slow procession traversing the icy wilderness. They had only traveled this way for about a half hour when Cro’s grip failed and his end of the gurney fell, causing Cumo to cry out. They stood for a moment, all three men panting in the snow, and as the sun began to lower behind the hills, Cro’s eyes met those of Kia’s. His brother nodded. Without a word, Kia bent down and took the meat from Cumo and began walking again.

“You would leave me as well, brother?” asked Cumo as Cro lingered.

“I can carry you no longer,” he said.

“It seems that we are born to die, often in the cruelest way possible,” said Cumo. “I have known little pleasure in my brief years. What I do, I do simply to survive, and it is only now, at the end, that I have found the time to ponder my purpose in all of this.”

“I will remember you, brother,” said Cro.

Up ahead, a sudden scream was cut short by the roar of a tiger. Cro clutched his spear, and Cumo struggled to his feet. They could see only a dim outline, but in the gathering darkness, the silhouette of tiger was clear, and they could even hear the crunch of Kia’s bones as the predator consumed his flesh.

“The meat,” said Cro quietly.

Grief was a luxury, an emotion experienced on a quiet day alone, with nothing else to distract the mind.

“We cannot kill the tiger, not with my broken foot and your injured arm,” said Cumo.

“We will starve otherwise,” replied Cro.

“Such was my fate a minute ago,” said Cumo. “That, or an end similar to Kia’s.”

Cro turned to his right and examined a thicket nearby. Removing his flint and pyrite stones and some tender, he rushed over to a dried bush and cut off two branches. Arranging the kindling over a fallen tree, he struck the stones together, raining down sparks onto the wood. Though his tender flickered, the bush branches would only smolder and not catch.

“You are attracting the attention of the tiger,” said his brother, who had hobbled over.

“Take this spear,” he said as he continued his work.

“What is the point, brother? We are dead.”

“Neither of us are yet,” replied Cro.

“I do this only out of my love for you,” said Cumo.

The shadow of the tiger loomed ahead of them, massive shoulders taut, the heavy head lolling about. A guttural bellow rose from the belly of the beast, and Cro paused only to see it pounce on Cumo, who had wandered toward it unarmed. The giant paws and forelimbs held him down, and in one smooth motion the tiger plunged its sabers into his brother’s neck. Cro clutched his spear, but fled, rushing into the thicket. He didn’t hear the tiger coming after him, but nevertheless, he scrambled up the truck of the nearest tree, and high above the ground, he spent the night, shivering in the cold that did little to numb his pain.
In the morning he climbed down the tree, his arm stiff, nose throbbing, nostrils clogged with clotted blood. There was no trace of Cumo other than the red-tinted snow, but his other brother’s carcass was being picked clean by the crows and a lone wolf, who stared unperturbed at Cro with a muzzle stained and caked with gore. In the snow, the tiger’s tracks led back into the forest where he had spent the night, so Cro decided he had to put as much distance between the woods and himself as possible. He considered bringing his brother’s body back, but the wolf appeared unafraid, and he doubted he could fend it off with his spear, considering his injuries, therefore Kia was abandoned and he continued on, alone.

He had walked an hour before he came to a familiar stream, and from its icy waters he bent down and took a drink. It flowed through the valley over smooth stones, and a memory from his childhood surfaced suddenly, much to his surprise. He and his father had fished here, catching giant pink salmon as they made their run, and he had derived much enjoyment from the ease of their labors, which must have shone on his face, for his father had looked at him and smiled. It was the only time he remembered an expression of joy on the man’s face. The salmon for some reason did not come this way anymore, and after this disaster, he wondered if was time to move to an easier place, if such an environment existed.

As he drank, he noticed a current of red flowing past. He turned his head to look upstream and saw the tiger, bent down and lapping at the water, reddened muzzle glistening. The beast had likely seen him, but having gorged last night on his kin, it had no interest in further meat at the moment, and so they could share a drink in the stream, predator and prey. Cro’s hands began to tremble with rage. He would never see his brothers again—never speak with them, never hunt with them, never walk the wilderness with them—and this tiger was the reason for that. His spear lay next to him, ready. It was a solid instrument, constructed of spruce, its point sharpened enough to pierce any tough hide. Yet the creature was healthy and strong; he could see the taut muscles moving beneath its coat, and he was tired and starving, with a right arm that ached and a crushed nose that whistled slightly as he struggled to breathe through it. He had the desire, the pure emotion, the seething rage—yet he lacked the means to express himself, and years of harsh conditioning by the world had taught him that you couldn’t always win against nature; the spirit of the tiger was stronger than that of one man, which was why the tiger had to be hunted with your fellows and not by yourself, no matter how much you yearned for its death. Eventually the tiger turned from the stream and sauntered back toward the forest, perhaps heading to wherever it had stashed Cumo, and Cro watched it leave until he could see it no longer, and only then did he rise from his crouch by the stream and continue across it, heading toward the cave where his family awaited him.

It was nearly nightfall when he arrived at the cave. The flickering light of the fire sent him strength, and despite his weariness and injuries, he made the climb up the rocky hillside without too much trouble. He saw his mate sitting by the fire, staring into the depths of the flames, a smoked tuber lying beside her, and he came and sat down, mumbling a greeting.

“Where are your brothers?” she asked, after a moment of silence.

“The spirit of the tiger consumed them,” he replied.

“Where is the meat?” she asked.

“I come to you empty-handed.”

“Crey went out with me to gather tubers but he never came back,” she said. “I searched for him for hours but found no trace. He has been gone for a day now.”

As he stared into the flames, he felt sure that the shaman who had been banished from the tribe was to blame for all of the misfortune. It will be a harsh winter, for death will come for us and feast on our brothers and children, and unsatisfied, it will come for our wives and then us, and then it will make a feast of our bones, scattering them about the wilderness, and no one will know of our lives or tell tales of our passing, for there will be no one left. This will happen because we have not honored our ancestors; we have not respected the rituals, and no sacrifices have been made in the name of our forefathers, for we cling to this earth too much, and now they will abandon us so that we may know the error of our ways.

He had driven the shaman away himself, having grown tired of his insistence that a quarter of every meal be left in the wilderness for the ancestors. There wasn’t enough food to feed everyone, and surely the ancestors would know that they meant no disrespect. But he had been wrong; they had performed their cull, and now there was just his mate and their quiet babe, who had not made a sound since he had entered the cave.

“How is she?” he asked.

His mate look at him solemnly, and then he began to weep.

…

“What the hell is this?” said Jared, throwing the headset down.

“You didn’t like it?” asked Garrett.

“Fuck no. Who wants to play a VR game where you watch your family get eaten by a saber-toothed tiger?” asked Jared. “That’s some stupid shit right there. I should’ve been able to kill that thing but the game wouldn’t let me.”

“But you felt like him, right?” asked Garrett. “You felt his pain, his frustration, and his fear? I thought it was incredible.”

“This is the kind of shit they put out there and try to call art. I don’t want to feel anything when I play a video game. I want to forget about how boring life is. Why the hell did they call it Gratitude? Am I supposed to be thankful for that shit?” asked Jared.

“It think the developers wanted you to think about how far we’ve come and how terrible most of human existence was,” explained Garrett.

“Well fuck that with a capital F,” said Jared. “Let’s go play Titty Masher 69.” 

“Alright,” replied Garrett.

Both boys ventured further into the arcade without giving Cro another thought.