FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

I've had to read about the Eastern Front of WWII quite a lot recently. It's a sad, grim subject so naturally I wrote a sad, grim little story about it. This may have a continuation or it may not, I'm not sure yet.

*WARNING: * The main character is a cub who is taken advantage of during the course of this story.

Karina had been working as a courier ever since the war had come to her city. She delivered papers and small packages, anything that would not burden her too greatly. Some units and installations made use of her more often than others, for there were places that the rubble blocked radio signals, and others where the soldiers had no radios at all. Telephone wires were often cut by shelling and sometimes people were more reliable than electric signals.

The little cat seemed purpose built for her work, skinny and small, so thin she hovered right on the edge of gauntness, her waif's frame covered with a soft layer of white and brown dappled fur.

Karina thought she was nine but wasn't sure. Time had become fluid since the war had come, a fuzzy mess of sneaking, running, hunger and fear, with only furtively snatched moments of dreamless sleep to punctuate her days and nights.

She was dressed in a soldier's padded jacket, patched and patched and patched again, the sleeves longer than her arms. It hung down almost to her knees. Despite this the cold always seemed to slip through the seams. Karina had painted over them with boot black once, but that had not helped.

There had once been a time when the city was not a ruined, dangerous place, she knew that much, but her recollections on the subject were gossamer thin and fragile. There had been sunshine and smooth roads, green parks and ponds.

She was with someone in those memories. Her mother? An older brother?

She couldn't remember.

When Karina awoke she was curled in the mouth of a broken pipe, a metal grating to her back, knees tucked up against her chest. Her toes felt slightly numb in her boots and prickled when she flexed them. She thought she would need to patch them again soon.

She was below ground level, in a cracked open ravine that spanned a few blocks in the center of the city, somewhere close to the edge of no man's land. She'd stopped to rest for a bit and...

While she didn't think she was late, Karina still peered up at the sky, gauging the light through the clouds. They were thicker than usual. Perhaps it would snow. The packet of papers she'd been sent to deliver were heavy against her chest, where she'd tucked them under her jacket. She touched them just to make sure they were truly present, then slid down from the pipe and kept going, headed west, further into the city.

It was morning, she thought, probably an hour or so after dawn. It had been growing gray when she'd stopped to rest. There was warmth trickling from the pipe she'd rested against, not much, but enough to ensure that she wouldn't freeze while she was stopped. The cold was settling over her now, prickling through her fur. Karina sniffled and wiped her little pink nose with the back of one paw.

There were shells and guns now, still slow in the morning frost but beginning to intensify. Some were coming from the other side of the river, her ears twitched and tracked the trajectory of their shells and rockets. She heard the swishing hiss-hiss-hiss of a Katyusha, then the whistle of its barrage. Other guns cracked and thumped in heavy response from their places in the west.

She was moving closer to enemy lines now and had to stop every so often, pressed flat against one wall of the ravine or the other, eyes tightly shut as the ground shivered beneath her feet. Close impacts were few but she was still careful. Shrapnel could carry a long, long distance. The tip of her left ear had been neatly nicked away by a shell splinter in the first week of the war's arrival. It was as though the war had playfully reached out and caressed her with one red hot hand, reminding her of its existence.

She had wailed then, and wept dreadfully and at length. Karina did not think she would make a sound now if something like that happened again.

A rocket guttered out overhead and crashed down into the rubble some distance from her. She ducked and waited until the last of the reverberations of its misfire had faded. Dust trickled down onto her, making her ears twitch.

Karina could hear other people, their movements amplified by the narrowness of the ravine. She stopped next to a block of concrete with rusted metal rods sticking crookedly from it and listened to orders being given in her language from somewhere up ahead. There were machine guns and grenade blasts. She turned and found a place where she could exit the ravine and pass through a basement.

She'd been here before, enough that she didn't pause to check the place for valuables. Someone had drawn a cross on the wall in blue paint. Once there had been a body there, shrunken and desiccated by the cold. Now it was gone but for a dark stained imprint on the stone where it had once sat.

Karina always avoided people when they were fighting. They were not likely to give her food if she appeared to them while they were patrolling or hunting or shooting.

For a time she thought about going back down into the ravine. It was probably unoccupied, she knew that nobody ever went down there because it was low ground and thus not useful for finding and killing the enemy, but she did not want to pass so close to an active gun battle. Above ground was not so safe, but she would be able to move faster. Just so long as she kept her eyes open for the mines and trip-wires, unexploded shells and traps. There were things that could kill her scattered all around, she knew that.

Yet she saw nothing.

Her thoughts turned to food as she fell back upon a familiar path, leaving the obstacle behind. Karina thought about food more than almost anything else, especially when it was very cold and her thoughts ran in only one or two directions at a time, the chill immobilizing everything else.

She was very hungry now, so much that she felt almost numb, her stomach shriveled and shrunken.

She scavenged and searched as she went, yet the bodies she found had already been looted and there was nothing left on them but their coats and sometimes their boots if they had been torn or shot through too many times.

Once she had found a fine, fuzzy ushanka, but when she had turned it over it had been full of frozen blood and slivers of bone. Karina had tried to chip the mess away but it had been so stuck to the hat's lining that she had given up and tossed it away.

At one point she found a smeary trail of blood leading behind a building but did not investigate. It was not good to be curious.

The sun had risen further by the time Karina made it to where she was supposed to go, crawling beneath a loop of barbed wire and into a narrow foxhole manned by a handful of soldiers. One had a machine gun and he was rubbing the frost from its barrel. He ruffled the fur between her ears and said something fond.

Karina had met these men before and found them kind. They were from somewhere far away and spoke with accents so thick she could barely understand them. One, a wolf, gave over a piece of bread and smiled when Karina stuffed it into her mouth without hesitation.

She was patted and cuddled like a pet, the machine gunner striking up a quiet little song that dipped into watchful little silences each time there came the whistle of an incoming shell. But they always landed far away and Karina lingered for a little bit, time enough to let the soldiers finish their song.

When she left the wolf gave her another piece of bread and she ate it as she moved carefully to the entrance of a bunker dug into the side of a rise, the splintered remnants of a road laying over top of it.

The soldier guarding the door refused to look at her. He seemed troubled by her very presence.

After a bit Karina was let inside, a bespectacled mink taking her by the wrist. The bunker was warm enough that she couldn't see her breath when she exhaled, and she couldn't help but be relieved by this, her pace slowing just a bit. The mink, rather than tugging her along, glanced back and slowed down as well as he took her to the very rearmost room.

She'd seen him before, she thought. He was a commissar with a red star on his cap, the lenses of his glasses speckled with dust, fur so dark it was nearly black. He seemed immune to winter coloration.

The rearmost room contained a table thickly stacked with papers, a small handful of officers making calls and moving little markers back and forth on a large central map. Each marker, a carved block of colored wood, made a distinct scraping noise as it grated over a skin of coarse dust fallen from the ceiling. The lights shivered in place each time a shell landed.

Karina handed her papers over to the mink and he took them away, disappearing into a side room and leaving her alone. With nothing else to do, Karina found a narrow space between two boxes of files and sat down with a sigh, trying not to think about how hungry she was.

She was given food in exchange for errands like the one she'd just completed, though sometimes it wasn't much. It depended on how the war was going, she thought, but there was no real way to tell. The fighting never really shifted, it just kept going and going and going...

After a while the mink came back and nudged her with one foot, stirring Karina to her feet. He had a little square loaf of bread with him but made no move to give it to her. Instead he checked behind him, scanning quickly over the central table, where the officers were still very busy. Nobody was paying any attention to him.

"Follow me." He said, and stepped quickly into another side room, twitching aside a heavy velvet curtain that had been hung up to serve as a makeshift door.

The room was crowded with boxes and supplies, paper and rolled up maps clustered into one corner, a few unmarked crates crowding the others. Karina looked around, feeling slightly uneasy. Was he going to give her more papers to deliver?

If so...why hadn't he just gone to fetch them by himself and left her outside?

The mink adjusted his glasses, looking slightly nervous, and make a vague gesture at her.

"Take off your jacket." He said.

Karina hesitated, a sick sort of heaviness settling in her chest, squeezing her heart. Yet she knew she couldn't run away or even openly refuse. She wouldn't be fed if she did that.

She undid her jacket slowly, fingers still stunned by cold, and shrugged it off, baring her body. Karina was skinny, chest flat and fur fading entirely to white along her front, mussed where her jacket rubbed against it. She tensed as the mink took her by the shoulders, grip firm, and sat her down on one of the crates in the corner, her back to the wall. It was slightly chilly without her jacket on, but at least the mink wasn't asking her to remove her pants.

Once she was sat down the mink dropped to his knees and leaned in, paws stroking over her little body. He found her tiny pink nipples, just barely visible through her fur, and pinched them until they were stiff and smarting. Karina stayed silent, paws knotted together in her lap, every muscle in her body tensed. Still she let the mink grope her, gaze turned away. He kissed her neck and nipped gently at her throat, sharp teeth grazing through her fur. One paw fell away and she heard him undoing his pants. When the mink stood back up his cock was out, hard and pink, its pointed tip wet with pre.

Karina hunched her shoulders slightly but made no attempt to resist, instead remaining perfectly still, like a porcelain doll that had to be posed in order to take on any semblance of life.

The mink didn't seem to notice, gently opening her mouth before sliding his length in, one paw framing the back of Karina's head. She gagged as the head of his cock filled her throat and squeezed her eyes shut, tears sliding down her cheeks. She could taste him now, his pre bitter and salty, with an iron tang that was almost like blood but not quite.

Karina shifted in place, her tail twitching unhappily, yet she let the mink use her. He pumped his hips, gripping the sides of her head as he fucked her mouth. Grunts and little gasps leaked from his mouth and Karina could feel his balls jerking against her chin each time he hilted himself in her throat.

Still, it could have been worse, she supposed. She told herself that over and over again. She'd had people do this to her before, so at least she knew what was coming. Having her mouth fucked didn't hurt in any lasting way. Her throat would be sore and she'd need something to wash her mouth out with, but...

But she'd be able to walk alright, and she'd get her bread. That was all that mattered.

At that moment the mink took a shuffling step forward and groaned, cock jerking in Karina's throat. Gasping, he made a last few short thrusts and came with a grunt, a few quick pulses of salty seed splashing the back of her mouth. She swallowed before she could choke on his load, then felt ashamed for having done so. He withdrew a moment later, cock still dripping, wet with saliva and a few pale smears of cum. The mink was panting, fur puffed up in a few places.

Karina ducked her head and wiped her mouth even as she scraped her tongue against her teeth, trying to purge the mink's taste from her mouth.

The mink, still breathing hard, stroked Karina's ears and handed over the bread. Karina hugged it to her chest, feeling vague and somehow blurry in her own self.

"That was good. I hope I see you again." The mink said, offering her a smile.

Karina said nothing, just stared at the floor.

The mink looked faintly annoyed for a moment, then did up his pants and smoothed down his fur.

"Put on your jacket." He ordered her.

Karina did so and shuffled out of the room, looking at nobody. The men in the bunker were ignoring her again, which meant that they had no work for her.

Karina dreaded the empty hours, for they meant that she often had nowhere to go and nothing to do. Staying still was dangerous when it was so cold out. For a moment she thought about going back to the pipe, then remembered the soldiers.

She wiped her mouth again, feeling somehow certain that everyone knew what she'd just been made to do, then hunched her shoulders and hurried to the entrance of the bunker.

She'd see the soldiers. They'd be kind to her. Maybe she could get some more bread too. Though Karina didn't especially want to be touched or even talked to, perhaps not ever again, she did want more food than she currently had.

...But that was always true.

Even as she cleared the mouth of the bunker she heard the incoming wail of rockets, not the light high shriek of Katyushas but the deeper guttering crackle of enemy ordinance.

Karina hurried to the side and huddled down behind a pile of concrete blocks, then there was silence for a pair of seconds, the noise of rocket engines stopping with a suddenness that seemed to erase all of the sound in the world.

Then the ground came up to meet her muzzle and she was bounced in place, clutching her bread tight to her chest as a flat thunderclap of sound cracked against her eardrums, so hard that her mouth opened in a silent yelp of pain. All of the bad things were now forgotten, completely immaterial in the face of the sudden piercing pall of terror that loosened her limbs and unmoored her thoughts. If her bladder had been any fuller then Karina was sure she'd have wet herself.

She could smell cordite and burning fuel, a stinging hail of concrete bits falling over her in a hard rain.

Karina slowly worked her way to her knees, the world unsteady and somehow springy beneath her, ears ringing. The world was pale with dust and the guard who'd stood by the entrance to the bunker was lying on his face, a bright veil of crimson expanding around him.

Karina checked her bread again and tucked it under her coat to save it from the dust. Ahead of her the topography of the world had shifted, lumps and hills where none had previously been, dips and ravines where the street had collapsed into dry sewer tunnels. The foxhole and its cluster of barbed wire were gone, erased entirely.

And through the dust, the noise stretched by distance, she could hear the squealing gnash of tanks being put into gear. The enemy was close.

Karina shuffled away, not towards the ravine but elsewhere. She didn't want to be anywhere close to the fighting that was about to break out. Eventually she found a low place where a shell hole had blown into the sub-levels of a half shredded factory. There were boilers and water heaters in one of the exposed basements and Karina found a broken heater to hide inside of, pulling the door shut after her, making sure she could still open it if she needed to run. She ate her bread and drank her canteen dry, listening to the rumbling staccato crack of artillery thundering away nearby. Then she curled into a tiny, trembly little ball and silently began to weep.