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Chapter 9

One moment, the central precinct had been bustling but peaceful, all quite typical for a Tuesday night. All the usual pimps, hookers, druggies, and drunk-tank regulars marched to the strange dissonant cadence of life in a police station, by the lead of their uniformed dance-partners. The next moment, a concrete and steel pylon, torn straight from the ground outside, came smashing through the tall glass front doors with all the subtlety of a tornado.

Staring, surprised officers looked up from their desks and duty posts, just in time to see the swarming horrors come pouring out of the darkness outside, clawed and fanged tentacles whistling and shrieking about and latching on to anything alive that was within reach.

In moments, the receiving area was bathed in gore and viscera, as the thirty-some attackers shredded their way through guest, officer, and suspect alike, before staccato bursts of sidearm-fire began responding to the sudden and vicious blitz of an assault. With terrifying speed and resilience, the monstrosities ignored police-standard 9mm bullets, and rushed toward the station's beating heart - The dispatch center.

Halfway across town, a be-tentacled black-skinned furless horror walked into a supermarket, still wearing the torn remains of its former self's clothing. It strode with calm menace to the bread aisle, daintily grabbed two loafs of white bread with two of its tendrils as store patrons stared in shock, then proceeded to delicately reach out with a muscular tentacle and bite an approaching security guard's throat out. As the guard fell down gurgling out his lifeblood, the creature tore open its bread bags and began dipping loaves into the spurting carnage for seasoning.

Another pair of smaller monsters, no less festooned with teeth and tendrils, leapt off a freeway overpass onto the roof of a bus stopped at a light below. Lashing at it with their tentacles, they began ripping open the top with can-opener like motions, while laughing in a warbling shriek sound that sent night-time commuters into panicked flight. Two others, who had cleverly stayed hidden beneath a busted street lamp's shadow, made sure they didn't get far as they bottlenecked trying to squeeze out of the vehicle.

Amidst the chaos, four black-robed males sat on the lip of a fountain in the city center, beneath the newly-decapitated statue of some former government official of years long past, laughing to themselves as they watched fire begin lighting up the horizon here and there, as their minions lit off gas stations or hijacked fuel trucks.

Brother Raymond Till stretched out a scaled paw, which glowed a pale pink as he pointed it toward a pedestrian that rushed from her car toward the cover of a coffee shop. The female mutt's pawsteps slowed suddenly from a frightened sprint to a tired jog, then to a drunken stagger, as blood began to pour from her ears and eyes, fly through the air, and slide up into the aging lizard's sleeve. He drank her dry, until her heart stopped and she crumpled like a poleaxed marionette in the middle of the street. The old creature gave a dry, hoarse cough, and closed his paw, letting the now-carmine red glow fade.

"Brother Bleeder," said Josephus Vanderslite in a questioning tone, "The three of us would love to know just what exactly your group of followers is up to."

The lizard smirked, showing off the ridged, barbed shelf of teeth that comprised much of his warped jaw.

"Why, Brother Whisper, that would be telling...And you know how I love to see a mystery through, hm?"

The other two chortled, amused and curious now just what the most cunning of their group was up to.

"Now, gentle Brothers, I must go...And see to my little secret task, hm?"

Dr. Theorem frowned, and looked over at the great bronze door again, wondering just what Tokamak was up to that had kept him so long. He and Bobby had sat and reminisced for an hour or so now, the wizardly lynx judged, yet the alien superhero hadn't made the two minute journey to join them.

"Bobby, something isn't right."

"I'll say. This whole thing's wrong."

"No. I mean Tokamak hasn't come in yet."

The cheetah blinked, and turned his spotty head slowly toward the ominous bronze door. Theo could see him tense, knew immediately that his old comrade's adrenaline and PTSD were gearing up for a tag-team meltdown. This was at the core of why Shockwave had no choice but to retire; any uncertainty that could even conceivably involve danger to his friends sent him into a tailspin of morbid horror, flashbacks and hyperventilating panic.

Theo had to pre-empt it, which meant there was no time to use his crystal ball or scrying bowl to look in on the house. Still spry despite his advancing years, Dr. Theorem rose smoothly to his footpaws and strode to the bronze door, rapping on it once, twice, and a third time in an ancient cadence he'd nearly starved to death trying to find during his first accidental trip into the pocket realm.

He cursed himself inwardly for having brought up his concern verbally, and blamed it on the pipe smoke and relaxation. With one paw, he pushed the heavy door as if it were weightless, having activated it with the specific cadence of tappings. As it swung open, thick, acrid smoke billowed through, and a cacophony of shrieking, hissing voices, cackling and warbling to one another in a fashion that sent his tail to puffing.

Those noises were so close to what he had heard, on his sojourn into Eve Hightower's mind, that he knew at once what they were.

"Shockwave, we're under attack! Come with me, now!"

Despite the shaking of his paws, Bobby Shore was up and at his side near-instantly, so many years of training and experience as a superhero putting him onto autopilot while his mind struggled with the emotional hurricane battering at his defenses. Theo grabbed him by the arm, hard, and shook the cheetah sharply.

"Robert! Wake up!"

Bobby was shaking, hard, the sudden surprise danger having jangled his delicate nerves far worse than any planned combat could. His shoulders were hunched in, eyes staring, but twitching side to side as if expecting a threat to come out of the very walls. The cat gave no response to Theo's words.

Dr. Theorem uttered a grunted curse, and stepped through the doorway without Bobby, clapping his paws together in the symbol that set the bronze door behind him to swinging shut of its own accord. He'd simply have to handle this himself, and hope Bobby's mental demons were less dangerous than the very physical ones he was about to confront.

Then he pulled that scrap of black metal from his pocket, along with a notepad and pen, uncapping it with his teeth before jotting down a swift note. Sticking it to the metal, he uttered an incantation, and let what amounted to a mystical compass slide sideways into the ether, to teleport itself to where fate needed it most.

That done, he straightened up, incanted a quick wind spell to keep the smoke away, and began the careful walk through his smoke-filled home. As he did, the old wizard closed his eyes and extended his senses, seeking information on what was happening.

First, he smelled the smoke. Acrid, stinking of burnt plastic and smoking insulation, told him the building was well and truly on fire somewhere below him. Secondly, he felt the floor beneath his feet giving shudders every few seconds, of a kind he knew meant Tokamak was doing battle, hurling energy blasts that created sympathetic harmonics on the pipes and wiring within the house, ringing them like bells for those who had the senses to notice. Hearing told him that magic was afoot; for the sort of blasts Tokamak used were many things, but subtle not one of them. Smell he wasted no time on, as he knew it would only give him the smell of smoke and death.

He whispered a quiet prayer to the Silent Masters that none of his students or housecleaning staff had been in the building when the attack came. Then he moved forward, walking with careful speed down a familiar hallway made alien by smoke and the distant sounds of battle.

Doctor Theorem reached the stairway down, and saw that smoke was billowing up from below. His paw had just touched the banister when a little crunching sound, so soft he'd almost missed it, gave him all the warning he would get. The old lynx whirled, paw coming up as a black shape dropped toward him from the smoke-obscured ceiling, barking out a word of power that reversed the falling monstrosity's momentum and sent it hurtling upwards again to crash into the ceiling with a resounding thud and shriek of bilious outrage.

He followed the kinetic thrust with his other paw, jabbing it out towards the unseen creature obscured by the smoke, and unleashed a bolt of crackling electricity that zipped off after it and silenced the shriek with a series of frying sounds. Then he turned to the stairs and ran down them, grimacing at the protesting aches in his ankles and knees.

From below, he could hear the sounds of battle now, the cacophonic screeches of mutated monstrosities, the sizzle-SHRACK of Tokamak's energy blasts, the groaning crackle of flame, yet no sound of sirens. He prayed the only reason he wasn't hearing screams was that students weren't being attacked.

Bursting through the archway at the base of his stairs, Dr. Theorem brought up both paws, marshalling mystic power through the use of finger-signs that called to long-built reserves of energy. Just as he expected, from the blazing remains of his kitchen, fang-tentacled monsters surged, from a portal that belched flame and vile foes from a mystic doorway in the shape of a great bleeding eye.

Anger swirled through him in a hot wave, at the temerity of it. As the Archmagister, such portals to the Outer Dimensions were his duty to seal, so creating one in his own home was tantamount to a declaration of war against not only himself but the entire world community of those who understood the fragility of the Earth dimension. Even a small rent in the fabric of reality such as this one could allow through all sorts of calamity.

In this case, calamity came in the form of swarming lesser demon-infested monstrosities, warbling in a maddening cacophony of hate and insanity as they came. To his mystically-infused eyes, the oncoming chthonic beasts looked like a mixture of furs and black gloppy oil, strung out into tentacles like the tendrils of oil spreading out on water. Greasy and horrible, they rushed toward him without pause, tendrils held low and growing spines before his eyes as they came.

Sucking in a deep breath of searing-hot air, Dr. Theorem threw out his paws, arthritic fingers dancing in complex shapes that called upon his vast reserves of mystical energy. Having surpassed what his body could easily store, he reached out through the magical world-weave and grabbed on to the receptacles he had filled and stored, hidden all over the city as objects of every day use.

All over the city, mystical receptacles that had for years absorbed the cast-off bits of energy left behind by everyday life began to empty, flowing their power stores through ancient lines of power in the ground, across vast spaces in an instant, and opened themselves up to Dr. Theorem's titanic will.

His symbols were completed in instants, and sent out a lancing surge of power, a dozen spells woven together in an instant hurtling forward in a skirling, swirling frieze of magical power that expanded upward and outward as it flew. The first creature it struck simply ceased to be, one of the myriad spells causing its atoms to fly away from each other in all directions. The next immolated, caught in a web of mystic flame. A third was torn inside-out through its own mouth, and left as a pile of gore that splattered across the good Doctor's kitchen. Each creature struck died in horrific fashion, rent asunder, blown apart, seared to a crisp, as the complex meta-rune structure expended itself a piece at a time before striking the portal itself. Theo prayed he could close it in time, not even knowing what realm of the many Hells it opened into, and how near it's demonic masters might be.

He knew he was up against a planned assault, not just a demonic breach, when his spell struck a series of illusion-concealed wards, glowing white as the sun before the two cancelled one another out in a thunderclap that blasted the glass out of his kitchen windows and sent Theo sliding back on the balls of his footpaws, arms crossed in front of his face. Nonetheless, his massive store of arcane power was far from depleted, and he raised a paw to begin weaving a more suitable assault on the portal now that the demons were gone.

Before he could start, he noticed a wet warmth on his lip, and brought his left paw to it, raising fingers in front of his eyes. Blood dripped from their tips, wet and coppery. As his eyes widened with sudden, dreaded recognition, his vision began to pink around the edges, then redden as his eyes hemorrhaged and started to bleed.

Cursing under his breath for being so foolish, having walked straight into a trap, Theo staggered back toward the back kitchen door, whirling his fingers in the attempt to get off a spell.

Then his lungs seized, and he gasped, gurgly and wet, tasting a surge of hot metal in the back of his throat. His muscles seized, and he jerked forward, bent at the waist, a paw going to his throat as air refused to pull in through his maw against the tide of blood pushing out from his lungs. Only then did the mirage that had hidden Brother Blood fade and disappear.

The lizard was smirking, a white flash of reptilian jaw-teeth glinting beneath the shadow of his long cowl hood. He had a hand thrust forward, claw-tipped fingers curled in like the legs of a dead spider, and Theo felt as if the vicious bloody villain had them wrapped in a squeezing vice around his heart and lungs. He knew, seeing the growing marble of blood in the creature's palm, that his sensation was not far from the truth. If he didn't find a way to break through the blood filling his lungs, the Bleeder would kill him, quickly, painfully, and ignominiously.

"Doctor Theorem!" the creature cackled, as it advanced on him, and as Theo staggered backwards down the hall, clutching his chest with one paw and knocking down wall hangings with the other as he struggled not to fall, knowing if he did so he would not rise again. Down the hall, behind Bleeder, Theo saw the portal shivering, warping, wobbling and stretching, as if something truly massive on the other side were trying to force a sphinctered muscle open.

"If I had known how easy this would be, I would have done this years ago!"

Theo tried to force out a retort, a warning to the villain, but found his lungs were burning, full like balloons ready to burst, and all that would come when he tried to push out words was a flow of salty hot iron taste and a spittly spray of blood. His back fetched up against the hallway's end wall, knocking a soot-blackened portrait loose to crash down uncared for and unnoticed behind him.

Bleeder came on, the ball of red in his paw growing larger and deeper in color as more and more lifeblood poured from Theo's ears, eyes, and nostrils, mouth and other places, sliding through his fur and into his clothes like snakes trying to wriggle out of his body.

"You...Behind..." Theo choked out, spitting gurgling breaths filled with blood that zipped into the air, suspended by Bleeder's haemokinetic power. His head swam, dizzyingly full of the sound of buzzing bees. From the portal, Theo saw with heart-jerking knowledge of the catastrophe to come, an oh-so-familiar face of shadow and blackness.

"Behind me? Are you serious?" the lizard guffawed, as he approached, striding until he was a mere few feet from Theo's crumpling form. "What do you think I am?"

"A...Very great...Fool," Theo forced out, in a sorrowful sigh of hard-won breath. Then he shoved his paw forward, the spell that he'd needed so much extra time to cast without his voice causing his fingers to glow in a stark white light that made Bleeder's eyes shoot wide with recognition.

The knowledge could not save him. He shrieked, and threw his arms up, in a vain attempt to shield himself from the attack. Blood fountained from his paw, as the ball of Theo's life he'd stolen lost its containment and exploded, showering them both in the good doctor's stolen vitae.

Theo had sworn, long ago, not to kill, except in defense of all things living. Despite all the massive, world-shaking power at his fingertips, all the reality-warping knowledge his mind had apprehended, and just how small he knew life to be, he treasured it above all else whether in himself, his friends, or his enemies.

His outthrust paw met no resistance, passing straight through Bleeder's desperate defense as if the lizard had lost all corporeality. It plunged into his chest, through scales and bone and meat, all of them jangling back up Dr. Theorem's senses as if he were truly forcing his palm through that meaty, gristly heap of matter.

Then he grabbed the blackened, filth-crusted glimmer that was Bleeder's fetid soul, shoving his arm through the lizard's chest to the elbow, wrapping his energy-wreathed paw around it in a claw not at all unlike the one Bleeder had been using to steal Theo's life force. Then he wrenched backward with all of his strength, pulling against the resistance of flesh and bone and the villain's soul trying to resist with all its might.

The lights in Bleeder's eyes simply went out, snuffed like a candle in a hurricane, as the panting lynx fell to his knees, gagging on blood and bile. The vicious lizard's purple and black, stain-encrusted soul had ceased to resist the moment it was free, torn loose of its mortal coil and unable to act. Bleeder's corpse crumpled at the knees like a poleaxed puppet, all muscle tension gone in an instant, and thumped to the floor, lifeless as a bag of corn husks.

Through the tunnel-vision of blood loss and anoxia, Theo saw something move in the smoky, burning hell that was once his beloved kitchen. Forcing his eyes upward, as he knelt shaking on the floor, he saw a visage that turned his blood to ice in his veins. The portal had opened, and that which had stepped through spoke, in a voice that was chillingly familiar.

Hello again, Archmagister. I told you we would meet again.

The Lord of Shadows blurred with speed as it charged Dr. Theorem, Earth's greatest magical defense.

Overwhelmed, disoriented in the flooding cacophony of burning sensation, and lost in a labyrinth of shattered thought, Jeff screamed.

The sound felt like it started in his toes, curling them up like the limbs of a dead spider, a crushing, clenching pain as if every muscle in his body were cramping up at once so hard his skeleton should have shattered like a wine glass in a garbage crusher. He knew the pain was chemical, a powerful neuro-stimulant that made his nervous system believe he was being torn apart bit by bit while also being on fire. The knowledge did him no good, as the pain climbed his body, wracking every inch of his flesh with an agony beyond his ability to describe except in fractal colors and shrieking.

Gyro, the cyborg red panda, had calmly explained just exactly what the drug would do to him. The drug would hyperstimulate his pain response, so that any touch felt as if he were being scalded and skinned at the same time, sending his body into a spasm that would register as waves of horrific pain.

The torturer had been so calm, Jeff had wondered if he had any emotions at all behind the chill synthesized metallic-toned voice that issued from his mostly-metal maw. Now, Jeff could care less to know more about his tormentor, as his mind simply had no space for anything but endless pain and a deep-buried instinct to find some other focus with which to survive.

Sometime after the pain had begun, and screaming had filled his ears to the exclusion of all else, the jaguar felt something novel cut its way through the searing agony. Something touched the back of his head, between his rounded ears, a gentle contact that made him shiver with hope that his world of suffering was about to be changed. This touch, unlike those that had come for the last many many hours, somehow failed to wrack his nerves with endless agony. The voice jangled on tired, aching nerves in his ears, though less than other sounds had before.

In his flayed state, his emotions hanging from shrieking threads like flensed flesh, he felt incredible gratitude to the rumbling bass voice, welling up in the form of grateful tears and choked sobbing.

"There. You see I am not so bad. Gyro, turn down the dosage again."

The paw that rested against the back of Jeff's head slowly slid around to the side, cradling his cheek with a gentleness that helped him fight the pain that still wracked him, though at a deadening intensity that nonetheless left his muscles sore with clenching, his bones aching as if they'd been hollowed out with tiny chisels and filled with saltwater.

That he was being touched, and there was now a way for him to arc current somewhere other than the Faraday Cage that restrained his power utterly failed to cross his mind. He was just too relieved that the pain was finally dying away at least a little, to question why someone was gently massaging his face, cupping a palm over his lips, tracing fingers gently over quivering eyelids he was too exhausted to open.

"If you tell me your name, I can have the pain stay away a while," the tooth-rattlingly deep voice offered, gentle as a spring wind. Jeff vaguely recalled having been told this same thing before, sometime before the pain began, and again sometime in its midst. Too exhausted, too wrecked by agony and drug-induced hallucination, he could no longer remember why he'd resisted giving what the voice had requested. Luckily he didn't have to exert the monumental effort, just yet, of remembering how to form sounds other than cries of suffering.

"Your resilience is admirable. Rest a little while, and be ready to tell me your name when I return."

Jeff's lips were shivering too much to speak, but he managed a soft, high-pitched whimper of thanks. The paw gave his face another gentle stroke, slipped up to tweak his ear pleasantly, and then moved off as the cat slipped into unconsciousness.

Maric watched with his habitually dispassionate powder-blue fox eyes through a closed circuit television monitor, as Obliterator's enormous and deadly form moved away from their captive. Ensconced in a black iron box suspended from the floor by a latticework of conductive iron struts that were starting to steam with heat, the Faraday Cage served to prevent their prisoner from frying everyone in the building.

All the same, Maric blew out a soft breath of relief. When Obliterator had reached inside the Faraday Cage, he'd risked acting as a conductor for this unknown new meta's insane level of power. The fox had been watching Gyro, as the red panda's spidery metal-and-flesh fingers danced over keyboards nested amidst a bank of status monitors and dials.

Gyro spoke first, in his usual flat, uninflected tone.

"Are you in pain, Maric?"

The fox shook his head carefully, from his spot on the only bed anywhere in sight. He was hooked up, by wires, to a number of monitoring devices himself. The parallel between his own status and how their prisoner was attached to similar monitoring did get a bit of a shudder out of him, and made one of the machines next to Maric's head beep softly.

"I'm fine, Gyro, thank you."

The red panda simply nodded, and continued his work with unabated cadence, as Maric watched their long-time boss walk off screen, leaving the naked, unconscious and rather soiled jaguar to sleep.

"I'm no scientist, but did those dials show what I think they showed?"

The tap-tapping of keys never slowed down, as the Black Angels' cybernetic second-in-command considered an answer before giving it, as he often did.

"The subject has not yet displayed that there is a limit to his abilities. I am certain there is one, of course. But yes, he did overpower the dial. So far, I estimate that he has emitted enough electricity in four hours to power six city blocks for more than a day. A pity we do not have capacitor batteries large enough to harness him as a power source. Yet."

The fox's long silence prompted an unusual response from Gyro. While he wasn't one to normally take subtle cues, or at least not respond to them, it seemed to Maric that since returning from the Null Zone, the normally utterly asocial red panda was starting to seek at least a modicum of friendship.

"It bothers you."

"Hm?"

"That I am so clinical, and detached. Your silence seems...Disapproving."

"Disapproving? A little, I admit. I'll fight, even kill if necessary, for money. Torture, though...I have to admit, I don't like it in the least."

"Have you ever been..." The cybernetic voice trailed off, buzzing a bit as it did from electronic feedback. The normally lightning-quick calculating mind seemed stumped a moment, while searching for words. Maric decided not to torment his socially-inept team mate with further silence.

"Yes. Spotter and I met in a prison camp in Colombia, about six years back. You would have already been in the Null Zone, right?"

"Correct."

When Gyro failed to comment on his time there, Maric continued, his voice level and steady as he described, and simultaneously watched as the black jaguar seemed to have settled into an exhausted, limp-limbed unconscious sleep.

"I'd been hired to eliminate a FARC cell leader. Got him, but with no one to watch my back, they managed to pin me down. I'm still surprised they didn't kill me on the spot. Apparently ransoming meta-powered like us can net a lot of profit, and they were less mad about their dead leader than they were excited about making a buck."

Gyro's half-metal half-flesh face simply nodded, never looking up from the ever-changing consoles that monitored everything from the building's security cameras to the biosigns coming from the basement dungeon where Daimon and the priest were being kept locked up for their own good.

"By the time Obliterator hired Spotter to spring me, they had started getting creative. My pain tolerance for physical beatings was too high for their tastes, so they jury-rigged a shock baton with some old car batteries and wiring."

"I see. How...Inefficient."

Maric cracked a slight smirk, on one corner of his snow-white face.

"If you were trying to be sympathetic, you might have said 'How terrible.'"

"Ah. My mistake. Please continue."

The silvery arctic fox plucked at his clean white bedsheet, one of the few concessions to comfort in their very utilitarian environs. The 'hospital bed' itself was really not much more than a cot with an adjustable back and some underside modifications.

"They were training this new guy, some spotty yellow jag from another FARC base deeper in the jungle. He was a pretty smart cookie, and vicious as hell. Heh. I found out a few weeks after she got me out of there that the first time Spotter saw me I was ejaculating all over the place because the bastard had stuffed an electrode into my rectum."

"Ah. A tactic of painful humiliation."

Maric was pretty sure he didn't like the pensive look on Gyro's normally rather unexpressive face, as the red panda took a moment to gaze at the monitor without bothering to slow down his typing. Nevertheless, he maintained his carefully neutral demeanor.

"Yes. Which is why I'm not particularly happy that we're torturing our prisoner. We need to know who he works for and what his name is, I agree, but the risks of this approach are...Well, from my perspective, unacceptable."

"Reasonably stated. I disagree with your risk assessment, but your argument is reasonably stated."

"Thank you, I guess."

Officer Cassy Vale drove like the devil itself was chewing on her frizzed-out tiger tail, ignoring the blood streaming from a cut under her right eye, while Sergeant Gary Mulhenny kept one arm clamped against the torn-open gash in his side and tried with paws shaking from adrenaline and blood loss to reload his service pistol. In the last half hour of total chaos and white-knuckled driving, they'd made no progress whatsoever in getting closer to Central or losing their pursuers, though Mulhenny was fairly sure the one he'd shot eight times in the eyes and forehead was dead or at least down for the count as they hadn't seen that one since it had slid off the top of their vehicle some time ago.

Unfortunately, it'd taken a nice chunk out of him in return, tearing his side open from armpit to floating rib in a ragged tear near where one of its tentacles had latched on and nearly torn his arm off. Gasping with blood loss and trying not to faint, he raised his left paw and fired two more shots through their shattered windshield. The tentacled horror trying to head them off had crouched to spring, but his shots took it in the chest and bowled it over backwards just in time for Cass to snarl in furious terror and stamp the pedal to the floor before running it over.

The thing made disconcertingly wet crunch-thud noises on its way under the police car's specialized undercarriage, and for a heart-stopping moment the cruiser seemed to lose traction with the road. Mulhenny's mind spun with the image of this monstrosity grabbing onto their whirling axel and lifting the car over his head like a toy. Then the cruiser's four wheel drive kicked in, one wheel on the ground being enough to keep their slide going and take control back into all-wheels on the road as the shredded remains bounced down the road behind them.

"That worked!" Cassy yelled out in a throat-clenched squeak of terror and victory. Time seemed to freeze for a moment, then, as Mulhenny's eyes focused in on a black shape the size of a truck bursting out of a store front just ahead and to their left. He knew there was no way they could avoid it. With molasses-like slowness, he opened his maw, tried to yell a warning, even knowing there was no way Cass could react in time.

The creature hit them, hard as an avalanche, causing the curtain airbags to deploy with a hiss-WHUMP of air. Cass spat blood, in a floating trail, her stripey head snapping sideways into the bag as their car folded inward, the impact powerful enough to warp its frame and send them spinning across the road. Mulhenny's head snapped back too, then, into his headrest, then forward, seat belt jerking taut across his body and blood spitting from his muzzle as the second hit made him bite through the tip of his tongue.

Dazed, his head hung down, neck against the shoulder strap of his belt. Everything seemed to be swimming, and his vision was blackened around the edges like an old photograph, as he tried to raise his head and found his eyes were crossing, blurring his world into double-vision.

He felt wet all over his side now, and looked down to see that the impact had torn the jagged gash even wider. His blood was pouring out, soaking his nice blue uniform in a way that made him muzzily angry, that someone would dare soil his proudly-worn blues. Then his door was torn away, simply there one moment and gone the next, before a tentacle burrowed its way through the opening, wrapped around him, tiny mouths all up its underside licking and nipping at his clothes as it jerked him against his seat belt hard enough to make the damaged buckle give way.

Yanked free, he hung in the air, limp and ragged, dripping blood down for the tentacle's slurping, manifold maws to consume with sickening relish. The grizzled veteran cop sighed, knowing there was just nothing more he could do. His paws had gone numb, and his pistol was lying in the gutter, ten feet and more from fingers that couldn't possibly pull the trigger anyway. He glanced back toward the squad care's wrecked remains, wistful for one last glance at his daughter's special gift to him, hoping the monster would have its fill with him and forget all about young Cassy. Then a jerk of the tendril started bringing him down, toward the grinning, furless, black-skinned and rot-stinking face that he was sure would be the last thing he ever saw.

"Hey, ass-face!" chirped a high-pitched, loud and brusque female voice.

Mulhenny blinked, sure he'd started hallucinating right up until the eight foot tall tentacle-wielding monstrosity turned its head to look.

Standing behind it, a young, all-black furred Arabian filly in cut-off blue jean shorts and a collared pink shirt covered in Hello Kitty logos, was giving one hell of a glare as she hefted a massive, blackened, antique railroad sledge in one paw as if it were a bag of feathers. She couldn't have been more than five foot two, and a hundred pounds soaking wet.

"Look at me when I'm kicking your ass, motherfucker!"

Then she grabbed the hammer in both paws, spread her feet into a wide, splayed stance, wound the massive sledge back over her head, and spun it all the way around in a 270-degree arc that whooshed with the force of cut wind. For the briefest moment, Mulhenny thought he heard a train's steam whistle blow, a hard, angry blast of vented pressure and power.

The hammer hit his foe with a thunderous, wrenching, sickening crash-thump, like a cow being hit by a full-speed cargo train. Its face registered shock, and pain, as its body folded in around the sledge's massive iron head, its spine making a symphony of crunches as it shattered under the force of the hit. Then it flew across the block, tossed like a scrap of tissue in gale-force winds, so surprised by the incredible hammer-blow that it dropped Mulhenny from a nerveless tentacle as it hurtled across the street and slammed into the brickwork of an old store front.

The monster's black, viscous blood exploded out of it from the impact, so hard that it's highest apex was fifteen feet off the street, a compass-rose like spike of gore pointing straight toward the sky in counterpoint to the gooey splatter below. The tentacled monstrosity stayed there for a few seconds, stuck to the brick wall like a bug on a windshield, before sliding down to the ground in a crumpled heap of shattered bone and pulverized flesh.

"Yeah! Full points!" she yelled, and threw her arms up in the air with a cheer and a laugh.

Mulhenny managed to get an arm under him, fingers bloody from the broken glass he'd landed in, then slid down to the ground. Crunching boot-steps took the girl to him, and he watched blearily as she dropped the hammer head-first to the pavement, which cracked under it. Head swimming with blood-loss and whiplash, the old basset could swear he heard a train again, chugging and clattering along with all the determination and graceful power of the great steam engines of years gone by.

The young filly knelt down in the glass next to his head, ignoring the stuff as it broke against her un-protected skin. Her paw, when it landed on his back, felt far harder and heavier than regular flesh ought to be.

"Hey, don't die on me, you old porker! How many more of these fuckers were chasing you?"

His voice felt far-away, like someone else was using it at the end of a long tunnel. Maybe the same tunnel he was looking through, he thought, the one with a bright glimmer of train-light at the end.

"Watch...Yer mouth...Missy..."

Maybe she was taken by surprise, or maybe the pause was just because he was starting to pass out. Then she laughed, a bellowing nicker of rolling, roiling amusement.

"I like you, bacon! Don't worry. Ol' Iron Horse has got your back."

Before he blacked out entirely, Mulhenny felt her steely fingers dig into his side, sending pain spiking up through the throbbing wound.

"First I'm gonna seal you back up, though. You look like shit."

The hiss of living steam heralded the opening of her maw, from which glowing angry cherry-red light issued. She reached up into her muzzle, and drew out a burning coal. The cauterizing of his flesh a moment later carried him straight into the nice comfortable black.

"Ooh, hospital pudding!"

John grabbed one of the little paper cups off the hospital cafeteria's buffet line, and downed it like a truly awful-tasting shot while drumming his fingers on the arm of the wheel chair they'd made him use. Largely, he ate the stuff because what he really wanted wasn't gloppy hospital fare in his rumbling gut, but the vexed, annoyed, cross look on the matronly and bulbous serval nurse's face as she glared at him from the other side of the service counter.

The gown-clad wolf gave her a winning grin in response, and licked his chops theatrically.

"Yum. Just like ma used t'make."

In answer, she slopped another dollop of food-goo onto the plate he'd given her a few seconds before, grudgingly accepting his previously denied request.

"Thanks, sweetheart!" he chirped, before nabbing his plate back and moving down the line before she could do something mean with it. Like accidentally throw it on him.

Just before he was about to leave the service line, to sit down and have his intensely bland dinner, he saw Mack push open the cafeteria door and start looking around, gazing down on the sea of heads of furs shorter than him.

John abandoned his tray on the first table he found, finding his appetite suddenly missing. The troubled look on his young compatriot's face made the wolf's stomach clench up, and he wanted to know just what the hell could pull the big lion away from his girlfriend's bedside.

Wordlessly, the lion jerked his chin toward the door, and John took the signal, walking past the big lion and out into a hallway mostly empty except for a few fellow patients sitting on chairs down the way.

"What's wrong, Mack? Is Eve okay?"

"She woke up yesterday for about ten minutes...And today for about twenty, but she's...Look...John, I'm not here about that."

"If you're worried about me, I'm fine. Just worried about Jeff. Like climbing-the-walls worried."

Silence went on for a few seconds between them, as the two furs leaned up against a shiny-painted white hospital wall. Mack could see tension in John Silverstone's shoulders, as the wolf feigned nonchalance despite his statement. Just his way, the lion knew, of handling fear and misery.

"How bad off are you?"

John raised a paw to his head, and rubbed at a bit of swollen bruise along his scalp.

"Concussion, but I'm a former pro boxer, remember? Concussions and I are old, old friends."

Mack struggled for a moment, trying to figure out how to convince John to go along with what Kolter was proposing. When his anxiety started to build high enough that the big lion was rubbing his paws together like a small child caught stealing cookies, John barked out a rough, hard laugh.

"Seriously, dude. If you're planning to go on a rescue mission alone, you're dreaming. Let me get my shit. Meet back here in five, and you better have a plan to get us outta here."