Stone Age - Prologue

 Table Of Contents | Next

The world he’d left behind had ended with sirens and static, the last radio voices burning out like matches in rain. The world he opened his eyes to now was quiet—so quiet it rang—and white as if some god had swept the board clean and started again. Snow braided the pines into pale pillars. Wind spoke in the old tongue of mountains. No concrete. No steel. No cities stitched with light. Just a horizon of silence and the thin, iron taste of cold.

He lay there a while, listening to his own breath. It steamed, drifted, blurred. He counted the rise and fall, waiting for the heaviness that meant panic or the lightness that meant relief. Neither came. Calm had been his shield in the apocalypse and he wore it now like another layer of skin.

He flexed his fingers. They obeyed. He flexed his will, and a seam in the air answered.

His storage opened with the familiar hush of pressure equalizing. A black mouth, windowless and depthless, holding all the scraps he’d filched from a dying age: collapsible shelter, water filters, medical kits, sealed rations, an old military blanket that smelled faintly of machine oil, a roll of duct tape that had saved his life more times than luck. The space was obedient, mercifully intact.

He exhaled. “Still here,” he told it, though the storage had no ears and he had stopped expecting answers.

The sky above him was the color of hammered pewter. Snow fell without hurry, grains like ground bone. He pushed himself to his feet, inventorying the world with the same detached care he gave to supplies: trees, conifers mostly; elevation, high; animal sign, yes—shallow tracks that broadened into pads, then narrowed to hooves; scent, sharp musk, iron…fresh.

Not human.

He had never thought himself normal anyway, not after the end. The survivors hadn’t been gentle with the word “monster,” and he had made peace with wearing it. The shape of the tracks told him this place agreed: claw, paw, hoof, talon, but no human boot, no woven sandal. The cold closed on him like a hand.

He should build shelter. He should find water that wasn’t frozen solid. He should—

A sound, muffled by the snow but unmistakable, broke the clean line of thought: a low, raw-edged snarl that pitched to silence and then returned, thinner.

Wounded.

He closed the seam of his storage and began to move.

He didn’t hurry, not visibly. He was not a man who had ever looked hurried in his life. But his steps were efficient, economical, precision laid over caution. He tracked the sound through a drifted gully to a stand of pines bent under their own white weight, where the snow was stained near-black with blood.

The cat lay there like a piece of night that had fallen and cracked. Panther, his mind supplied from a bestiary remembered from childhood: sleek, heavy, built for silence and sudden violence. The left foreleg was mangled where a trap had kissed bone. Barbs of pale ice stuck to its whiskers. Its eyes, yellow as lanterns behind fogged glass, flashed at him with hate enough to burn a man down to ash.

He crouched outside the sweep of its paws. “Hello,” he said, because the apocalypse had not stripped him of courtesy. “I’m going to help you.”

The panther’s lips peeled back. Frost split on its gums. It tried to rise, failed, and then made the decision to die fighting if die it must. The snarl shook the snow from the pine boughs above them. White sifted onto his hair and coat. He didn’t blink.

“Or,” he said, adjusting the tinny calm of his voice, “you can bleed out in ten minutes. Your choice.”

He opened the seam of his storage just enough to slip a hand inside and brought out a folded thermal blanket, dull silver, the kind that made refugees look like meteors. The panther’s head lifted, and its nostrils flared. It smelled cold fire, disinfectant, synthetics—scents no forest had words for. Its pupils pinholed.

The man—he had stopped using his name around the time names became debts—spread the blanket wide. The panther’s gaze tracked the motion. He did not reach for it. He set the blanket near the animal, so the wind would carry the heat toward wounded skin. He retrieved a narrow kit, snapped the latches open, and laid out tools on clean snow: scissors, gauze, a tube of antibiotic gel, a tourniquet, a syringe that would make the next minutes easier for both of them.

“You’ll need to sleep,” he said, softly. “You won’t like it.”

The cat’s ears flattened. It struck like a thrown knife, even lame, even lost, snow exploding under its chest. He was ready. He didn’t move back. He moved sideways into its line, an ugly, efficient step learned under a gray sky when running had not been an option. He caught the shoulder where the muscles bunched, let the animal’s weight drive past him, turned, and planted the needle in the meat of the haunch.

They froze together, breath steaming. A moment stretched like wire.

The panther twisted, tried to shear him open, found only coat, empty air, and the gentle inevitability of the drug. The snarl slurred. Its head sagged. The man held on until the tremor passed and the great body went heavy as riverstone.

“Right,” he murmured into the white. “That’s step one.”

He worked in silence. The trap had been gnawed at by frost and blood. Iron teeth patterned the leg in crescents. He braced, set the tourniquet, and levered the jaws apart with a crowbar he shouldn’t have wasted the space to keep and yet had. The metal screamed. Snow leapt. The trap clanged open. He slid it away, breath steady.

The leg would scar. It might never be what it had been, not perfectly. He irrigated the wound with saline warmed beneath his coat, packed it with gel, wrapped it—clean, tight, measured—until white bandage hid the ruin. He checked the cat’s breathing. The chest rose and fell with lumbering patience.

Overhead, the sky thickened. The wind changed, freighted with heavier snow. He considered the distance to the nearest defensible copse and the distance to the pack of anything that would smell blood and prefer it warm.

He made his decision. He always had, even when better men had hesitated and died.

The collapsible shelter unfurled from storage in a shiver of fabric. He skinned the clearing of snow with a plastic board, kicked down to frozen dirt, staked lines into earth that grudgingly accepted. The heater purred to life with a red eye. The blanket went over the panther first, then a second beneath for insulation, then—because cold would do no one favors—his own coat, shrugged off and draped without ceremony.

“You owe me,” he told the sleeping beast conversationally, as if the debt were a thing as old and simple as fire.

The wind pressed its palm to the tent. Night fell fast and not at all gentle. He sat with his back to the cat and his face to the seam of the door, listening. The forest creaked and spoke in old wood. Somewhere, far and then nearer, something called and something else answered. Snow wrote its quiet alphabet, letter after letter, until the whole clearing was a text.

He poured water into a tin mug and let a block of ration stew dissolve into something like soup. He did not drink. He watched the steam and thought about a future he had not planned for, in a world that was not the one he’d earned.

When the cat woke, it would wake hungry and proud, and pride was an animal he knew. He had carried it like a blade for years. He did not sharpen his smile. He had never been particularly talkative. He had always been patient.

The heater hummed. The panther slept. The man kept watch through the winter’s first, long silence.

He did not know yet that he had found, under the white weight of a new world, the other half of a story that would refuse to let either of them end.

 Table Of Contents | Next