“Okay. Draw the knife down along its stomach,” says Tango, pointing to the small carcass that the girl hovers over. Its head lays at an awkward angle, as its broken neck no longer holds it in place correctly.
“Like this?” asks Pen, pressing the sharpened rock down along its stomach.
“Harder. Bears have thick skin,” says the man. Pen presses down harder. The stone moves, piercing through the animal’s fur as it sinks into its chest. “Now keep it steady and pull down tight.”
Pen wrenches her arms down, holding onto the stone knife with both hands. Blood streams out of the body, painting her fingers red. Tango looks down to the side as the girl works, staring at the larger corpse. “Watch your grip. Blood is slippery.” They had found the crystal. The mother’s carcass lies on top of it. Tango supposes it must have been a very comfortable place to die. Though the irony is that the crystal is probably what killed it to begin with. There aren’t many visible wounds on the body, no bites or stabs. But there are tufts of missing fur where he can see some clear skin burns. Radiation.
Pen yelps and his head snaps back around. The girl is sitting on her bottom, the area all around her is painted in red. She looks back up at him, her face covered in blood. “I slipped.”
“Are you okay?”
Pen looks over herself and then nods back up at him. “We’ll get you cleaned up in a minute,” says Tango. “We need to get the organs out first, so the meat doesn’t go bad right away.” The girl looks at him and then back to the mangled bear cub, before sitting upright and pressing the stone knife back into it, holding its neck down against the ground with one hand to keep it still while she pulls the crude blade down towards herself.
“You should cut the other way actually. If you cut towards yourself, you might slip and get hurt,” explains Tango. Pen looks back up at him and then at the knife in her hands. Thinking for a second, she grabs the cub and turns it around. The girl grabs its back leg and presses her knee down onto its spine as she continues the incision, now pushing the blade away from herself. The broken bones from its back crunch around a little as she puts her weight onto the fragments. Tango isn’t sure if he should be horrified or not at the sight.
“I did it!” says Pen, looking back up at him proudly a moment later. She smiles which feels like an unusual sight for him, but the image is odd enough as her face, arms and body are soaked with crusting blood.
“Good job.” Tango points to the cut. “Reach in and pull everything out.”
“Everything?”
“Everything, I’ll point some things out and you can put them in the box.” Pen looks down at the metal ready-meal box that she had emptied out and took outside with her. It’s surprisingly warm here in this cave, but that’s probably because of the crystal. Her eyes shine in delight. This is turning out to be a great day. They finally found an actual crystal. She gets to eat actual meat and she’s doing a good job too. This might be the best day of her life. Smiling brightly, she sets the sharpened rock down and reaches inside of the carcass, grabbing hold of everything wet and gooey that she can and she pulls it all out.
“Ugh…” says Tango, watching as she does so entirely unfazed. The girl holds up the bear’s entrails, holding them towards him. The man shakes his head. “Not those.” Pen frowns and sets them down onto the side, reaching in again with the knife to sever them from the body. This process goes on for a while as she removes all of the organs. Several of them that Tango identifies as the heart and the kidneys and liver, they keep in the box. It looks rather grisly, but the organs are where all the nutrients are. Muscle meat is fine. But the malnourished creature needs richer food as far as he sees it. So he does his best not to comment, not wanting to instill his sense of disgust into her even if he knows it's a little silly.
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Once all of the selected organs had been removed, Pen sets to work cutting the fur off of the body. It’s a hard process, made harder by the fact that Tango has no idea what he’s instructing her to do. He’s never skinned an animal before. He’s just going by memory of old field manuals he might have read once sometime out of idle boredom. So for the sake of simplicity, he instructs her to cut around the legs, leaving the fur there. But cutting through it proved to be the most difficult task for her, given that both her hands and the stone are absolutely slick with blood.
Somehow though, after an hour, they manage to peel the last of it off, leaving only the small carcass with visible strands of sinew and fat and red meat all clearly visible. Tango nods to her and goes and gets water from the river, filling it up into the metal container. “Stay here, I’ll be right back,” says the man and Pen eyes him cautiously as he gets up, carrying her box, carrying her meat. Was he trying to steal it? Is he going to leave her here? In this cave? She stabs the knife into the carcass, cutting off as much of the meat and the fat as she can just in case she needs to run after him so that he doesn’t get away.
Tango returns a minute later, holding the metal box. Water sloshes around inside of it together with the floating organs. “Put as much as you can in here. Break some of the bones and add them too. The marrow is good for you.” Pen nods, not quite understanding, but doing as told. Soon, the box is entirely full of meat, bones and sloshing water.
Tango tells her to stand back and the girl does so, standing by the nearby wall, but still watching him carefully. He gives her the box, which causes her paranoia to lessen, but she doesn’t take her eyes off of him as she watches him grab the giant mother bear. The large bot hoists the creature into the air as if it were nothing and he carries it outside.
Pen fidgets, staring at him as he leaves, but then her eyes wander back to the giant crystal and she gets her idea. Smiling, she runs over to the large shard. She beams as she sees her own reflection on its surface. Heat radiates off of it and she sets the heavy box down on top of it.
“That won’t get hot enough like that,” says Tango as he returns.
“It will!”
“It won’t.”
“The one inside you got hot,” she argues.
“Yeah, this one isn’t inside me though,” says Tango, which is true. But she isn’t really sure how that’s relevant to begin with.
“Stand back, I’ll just destabilize it a bit.”
“Stable? Bears don’t live in stables. We’re in a cave,” says the girl, crossing her arms and smearing blood over her body. Tango sighs and holds a hand above the crystal, just barely touching its surface. Pen isn’t sure what it is that he’s doing, but his hand starts to shake and the shaking starts to make the crystal vibrate as well. “Are you cold?” asks the girl, surprised that he can feel the winter at all, let alone in here.
The light in the crystal changes as it shakes, the pulsating glow becoming more and more intense and Pen feels a wave of heat wash over her body which steps back instinctively, to shield itself from the sudden sensation. “Ah! Stop! You’re gonna break it!” yells Pen, rushing back forward a step. Another wave of heat shoots out, sending her back. She lifts her arms, covering her face as the wave of heat washes over her. The crystal shines brightly and Tango lifts his hand up, blocking her path with his other.
“Careful, it’s hot.”
“What did you do?”
“I dest- uh… I mean, crystals get hot when you shake them, right?”
“Yeah?”
Tango nods down at the small, bloody ghoul standing before him. “I shook it a lot.”
Pen blinks, staring at him for a moment before looking over at the crystal. “Oh.”
The metal box sits atop it, the water inside quickly becomes hot and soon it starts to boil. Tango tells her to wash the blood off of herself in the river outside and then to quickly come back.
“I’m not going to do that! You’re going to steal it!”
“Have I ever stolen anything?”
“Not that I’ve seen…” grumbles Pen.
“See?”
Pen narrows her eyes. “Maybe you’re just really good at stealing.”
“You can’t eat if you’re covered in raw blood. It’s dangerous. Who knows what kind of weird things these bears had.”
Pen argues as much as she can, but Tango refuses to relent and eventually she gives up. He offers to go outside with her to watch out while she jumps into the icy river for a second, if only to make sure that she doesn’t drown. But her vehement protests and cries of him being a weirdo eventually dissuaded him. He stares out at the steaming metal box before himself, as he listens to the splashing of water and a loud, sharp yelp that is quickly turned silent.
He turns his head around, waiting. Is she okay? Maybe he really should go look. It’s wildly irresponsible letting her go out there on her own to jump into a half-frozen river. What if there’s an undercurrent? What if there is another bear? Or a bot? The man turns around, but then stops as he hears the loud splashing seconds later, as the girl surfaces, coughing and spluttering. A few seconds later, he hears her running back into the cave, the sound of her chattering teeth is almost as loud as that of her wet feet which strike against the cave floor with wet splats.
“D-don’t look!” she yells and Tango turns away, not looking.
Pen flops down close to the crystal, holding her hands out towards it.
“Did you get all the blood off?” asks Tango.
“I- I d-did!” shivers the girl. Taking a moment to breathe deeply as she smells the air. Her face, flush and red shifts into a calmer form as she lifts her nose. “It smells really good,” she says delightedly. Tango isn’t sure if he can believe that. It’s an old ready-meal box filled with river water and bear organs. It probably smells exactly like that. But that doesn’t seem to bother her as she moves closer and closer towards it, listening to the bubbling coming from inside. “Is it ready?”
“Not yet,” says Tango. “We should boil it a little longer, just to be sure.” Pen frowns, but flops down onto the stones as she stares at it with wide, hungry eyes, her ears twitching just the slightest, as they react to every pop and splash coming from the box.