FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

*Chapter 1 *

One Month Ago

It had been said that if a tree fell in a wood and no-one was around to hear it, then it wouldn't make a sound. At this present moment however, the likelihood of the only sizeable inhabitants of this particular forest hearing a falling tree would be incredibly slim, even if it were to fall directly beside them; the discordant triplet of highly strung, minute engines vibrating madly in-between the pairs of wheels underneath them ricocheted against their ears and resolutely blocked out all other feasible noises, but it was clear to anyone that these three were not flying through barely-trodden dirt paths carving their way through the foliage, guided only by their miniscule singular headlights, to simply admire the scenery; the wet nostrils at the ends of their muzzles were engulfed with a pungent petrol-oil premix as their paws clasped haphazardly around thin, rubber handlebars, guiding them bouncily along the trails as the knobbly tyres and back-breaking suspension keeping their machines on the twisty and narrow continued to work overtime. The segmented black-and-white fur of the leader rippled in the breeze as he lifted a striped-gloved fist off the left handlebar and knocked a stubborn thorn bush aside with ease, which gave way to a small, secluded clearing; a series of visible burns on the ground, circumvented by the remnants of a makeshift shelter, betraying this site's primary usage. Firmly modulating the rear brake-lever with the knee-high motocross boot encasing his right leg, he brought the bike to a stop in the clearing's centre, exhaling deeply to soften the rush of adrenaline coursing through his body before his large, floppy ears cushioned within the padding of his deep blue helmet caught onto the sound of a near identical, gritty four-stroke motor emerging from the foliage behind him.

"Nice one bro; you told me you'd never been here before! It sure didn't look that way from where I was!" shouted the second, near-identical Collie who had played a fifty-mile-per-hour game of piggy in the middle for the entirety of their five-mile trek into the forest; he'd barely been able to keep sight of the spherical, maroon reflector haphazardly strapped to the rear fairing of his brother's bike with peeling masking tape.

"Well, that's kinda' the thing, Cody; I haven't" he admitted with blushing cheeks and a small, nervous chuckle, "bear with me a sec." Switching the engine off to help him 'see' better, as so many drivers with radios in their cars replicated, he contorted his arms through the straps of the gargantuan, black backpack strapped to his body, before placing it on the narrow, thinly-padded seat at the point it met the bulge of the fuel tank and proceeding to rummage thoroughly within its labyrinth of cavernous pockets. Cody gently brought his identical bike alongside him and peered obtrusively into the black hole that his brother somehow knew his way around, but as the item he was searching for was finally retrieved, a comparatively high-pitched, buzzing two-stroke saxophone to their mechanical symphony emerged into the clearing and swung obtrusively in-front of them; its rider pinning the throttle, kicking the rear of the bike loose before slamming his mud-specked, white boot into the earth to keep the bike at a fixed, precise angle as it completed a full one-eighty rotation with dirt and extinguished embers flying from the back tyre encasing the spoked wheel, before finally coming to a dignified stop, gruffly flexing its muscles by way of its growling idle.

"Lost are we, little Tommy-boy? Maybe you should've left the navigation to someone who actually knows_where they're going." The brothers groaned in unison at the cocky, authoritative, thickly Germanic sneer that meandered its way across the muzzle of the third, and least welcomed member of their party; a lanky, though muscular German Shepherd who had a second, and in the brothers' eyes, all the more irritating reason to justify his jibe. In stark contrast to the Collies' pair of off-the-shelf, budget pit-bikes that were built to a standard that even a third-world sewer would scoff at, the Alsatian's legs proudly supported a 1977 Yamaha DT400; a bike that the Alsatian had _claimed to have nut-and-bolt restored himself just two weeks beforehand, and whose elegant fairings, coated in a gleaming, if slightly muddied Parakeet Yellow paintwork seemed more at home in a museum, but the Alsatian had been keen to hammer into the brothers' heads that, with his two-year age advantage over Tom, and double that for Cody, he was here solely to enact his position as responsible adult; certainly, his inaugural, all-too-brief conversation with Tom upon the Yamaha's grand entrance into the Easthampton Zoo car park a week prior hadn't exactly resulted in the two's personalities meshing together.

"Dietrich, we get it, alright? You got an 'A' in Geography, you're instantly a navigation God" Tom snapped, "you can tell us the capital of 'Cat-man-do', but-"

"Kathmandu!" Dietrich corrected him, not bothering to hide a bemused snigger, "and I think you'll find that's a city; it's the capital of a little mountain country called Nepal. It's basic knowledge" he chortled, momentarily diverting eye contact with the pair to adjust the Yamaha's choke, settling the idle to a gruff purr as the small lever on the side of the wax-shined, piano black frame was guided slowly downwards. With his comeback well and truly squashed into the ground, Tom bit his lower jowl and repaid the favour of, intentionally, diverting eye-contact as he attempted, with zero success, to decipher the complex folds that had enabled the gargantuan map to fit neatly into his backpack.

"Look, just give it here and I'll-" Dietrich began.

"O.K, you know what sausage-breath, if you know the way, stop acting all tough and show us the way, then!" Cody abruptly hissed, having been silent for the entire conversation; his brother, with the words he'd been dying to say for the past minute finally spoken, wasted no time in readily nodding his head.

"Or to put it a little more eloquently, you act like we're nothing but a hindrance to you, so how about you stop jive-talking and put your_amazing_ sense of direction to good use?" the Collie growled, flinging the crumpled map in Dietrich's general direction. With the map momentarily covering the top half of the Alsatian's body like a blanket, Dietrich's paws fumbled around its creased edges before he began to scour his eyes over the maze of poorly-marked trails, green globules of foliage and thin blue lines, muttering incomprehensibly under his condensing breath. As much as the brothers would have preferred to go alone, the Alsatian's presence had been their only foreseeable response to the stern lecture their Mother had repeated a suicide-inducing number of times upon begging her to let them take the bikes further afield; she had been quick to remind them that were only supposed to be toys to use around the garden and at local BMX tracks, but just before heading off to work after joining the fairly large crowd surrounding Dietrich's Yamaha in the car-park, Tom had convinced him, with some well-chosen, infiltrating words revolving around the fact that the DT400 had felt nothing but asphalt under its chunky tyres since its rebuild, to join them for a romp around the Oakwood Forest, to which both he, and with some difficulty, Tom's Parents, had reluctantly agreed.

"Right," the Alsatian snapped, "we're exactly three-and-a-quarter miles from the perimeter of the forest; if we head that way," he gesticulated broadly in a general direction in front of the Collies before skilfully folding the map back into the small rectangle it had started as, "then we can navigate the Huntsman's Trail and pick up a logging track that should take us to a small, gravel car-park. I'll happily lead the way from now on; that is, if you can keep up." The cocky smirk returned in full force as the Alsatian pierced his narrow eyes into the brothers'; his angled, raised right eyebrow sending a clear challenge their way. To his surprise, however, Cody nodded readily; the light blue stripe gracing the centre of his open-faced helmet glinting in the moonlight as he kicked the starter motor into action and burst the little engine into life.

"Oh trust me, we can keep up no problem." The Alsatian's right eyebrow climbed an invisible mountain on his face.

"On those pieces of junk? What are they, one-two-fives? Pfft, this is a four-hundred" he grinned, affectionately patting the Yamaha's fuel tank, "it's far too hot for you to handle; you won't even get the chance to _see_my dirt, let alone eat it."

"O.K then, smart-ass" Cody cut in, leaning forwards inquisitively and leaning his red, leather overall-covered elbows on the exposed metal handlebars, "if it's so fast, why were you almost a minute behind me when we got to this clearing?" It was as if someone had flicked a switch within the Alsatian; all traces of a smirk were wiped clean from Dietrich's muzzle, to be replaced with an attempt at a neutral, laid-back aurora, though one that had been shattered prior with the sudden upright jolt that had shook his body.

"Because...because I was hanging back to make sure you were-" with his eyes firmly shut, Cody vehemently shook his head with such force that his goggles almost detached themselves from his helmet.

"Nuh-uh, I got a few glances back on the way here, and lemme' tell ya, I think you'd be stumped by a friggin' rocking horse! Your balance was all over the place; hell at one point I swear you were gonna' tip over backwards! Long story short, you can't ride that thing for shit!" A faintly yellow tinge to the Alsatian's teeth was revealed as he bared them menacingly.

"And what would you_know about riding?! You're barely even a teenager; don't go lecturing _me on how I-"

"Guys, guys, look, this isn't helping anyone" Tom pleaded, desperate to salvage even a modicum of mutuality between the two others he'd only wanted to come for a fun ride with, "can we just leave this game of verbal fencing for later and carry on? Dietrich can lead the way, and Cody, you go in front of me this time, but please don't do anything stupid; Mom's already had her patience tested just by us being here, and I don't want to be the one to tell her that her younger son impaled himself on a log." The atmosphere in the clearing could've been smashed with a hammer, and so the older Collie breathed an internal sigh of relief as Dietrich stabbed the toe of his boot against the gear selector and spun the Yamaha around to face a small gap in the trees on the other side, intentionally spraying a layer of earth onto Cody's pit-bike in the process, before billowing a stream of oily smoke from the DT400's exhaust as it howled its way into the black void beyond its headlamp.

"Never invite this asshole again, alright? And for the love of God, stop bein' such a killjoy; what Mom ain't gonna' know won't hurt her" Cody snapped; the back tyre clawing at the ground as he set off in pursuit. Left momentarily alone in the clearing, Tom slowly shook his head with contempt, staring forlornly at the vegetation-speckled earth as he hastily shoved the map back into his rucksack; the last thing he wanted was to give his mother any reason to confiscate the bikes without a second thought.

"I swear; if Dietrich pushes him too far..." he muttered bitterly, flicking the ignition key before gently pressing his paw against the electric-start button, his pit-bike's one modern feature, and smoothly continuing the eventful journey.

?

Pillars of trees danced mere millimetres from his muzzle as Dietrich fixated his vision on the trail ahead; his pace broken only by a small raised hairpin in the mud that he effortlessly kicked the rear of the Yamaha sideways around.

"Woah, woah" he muttered under his breath as the rapidly spinning rubber began to snake in the mud, before being wrestled under control with a relaxation of the throttle. He brushed the slip-up aside with a disinterested shrug, before pinning the throttle along a gently sloping downhill section, watching with a satisfied grin as the tachometer needle squirmed against the redline. He flat-shifted into third gear before bobbing the bike left and right to avoid sadistically placed ruts and tree roots and even managing to raise the front wheel off the ground over a hidden bump. What amazed him most of all, however, was the fact he was even able to focus on the road ahead at all; his blood was near erupting at the no-bars battering his ego had taken from Cody, but he figured that actions spoke louder than words, after all. As the path smoothed, widened, and began to curve to the right upon the wall of trees beyond him incrementally receding into the dark forest, Dietrich risked a rapid look behind him, and chuckled cockily at his confirmed isolation.

"Little brat; oh, you can't ride a motorcycle, you, blah-blah; that should shut him up!" he grinned, but as he snapped back around to face where he was going, he suddenly found himself doing a double take; maybe it had just been the warped oral signals he was getting from the engine, but the Yamaha was unmistakeably beginning to splutter, with the exhaust emitting a considerably more strangled, mechanical tinge than the uniform 'put-put' that occurred normally on the overrun. With his body suddenly becoming considerably more rigid, his black, fingerless glove twisted the throttle a fraction tighter, but with no change to his forward momentum; the tachometer needle began to helplessly fall down the dial, accompanied hastily by the speedometer.

"What the..." Dietrich fiercely pinned the throttle to full, and was promptly met with one, final, defeated sputter before the engine cut out completely, leaving him a mere passenger as the bike gently wobbled to an undignified halt upon the topography levelling out. The toe of his left boot swiped at the side-stand before, with the bike now stabilised in situ, the Alsatian furiously jutted the kick-start lever out into place and hammered his right boot against it repeatedly; the futility of his action was only communicated to him when his leg muscles began to complain with a prevalent throb.

"Gottverdammtes stück scheiße!" he roared through gritted teeth, almost tearing the ignition barrel out of its casing as he throttled the key from its slot before swinging his thickly cladded legs over the seat and planting his boots firmly onto the soft, leaf-speckled earth. His bulbous hiking rucksack was thumped down onto the exposed foam of the faded, once-black leather seat, and Dietrich wasted no time in retrieving a diminutive, light blue torch that was clipped onto the netting of a side-pocket, before breathing an internal sigh of relief that he had indeed remembered to put a battery in it before setting off; it was often the little details that slipped his mind. The Yamaha's bold, black nameplate was illuminated by the pitiful stream of light as it arced around the ancient two-stroke's equally-dark engine block, carburettor and gearbox-casing; all arranged haphazardly like a broken jigsaw amongst the frame, but all without any immediate signs of leakage or damage. Spitting an incoherent growl under his breath at this further complication, Dietrich pondered the potential causes of his temporary inhabitancy of this small patch of land, and promptly clasped his paw against his helmet-less forehead; none of them were easy fixes, least of all something he could hope to achieve in the middle of a forest an hour before midnight.

"Just say it ran out of fuel..." he muttered to himself, fearing the inevitable, patronising laughter that the two Collies would waste no time in expressing when they would eventually join him. However, guiding his thought train into a nondescript station and allowing Cody and Tom to board had revealed one tiny detail; neither of them were anywhere to be seen. It had been at least five minutes since his bike had conked out, and though he'd slack-talked them back at the clearing, Dietrich knew full well how agile those little pit-bikes were, and they were only complemented by a pair of irritatingly skilled riders; he'd calculated that the Collies had been, at most, a minute behind him, but the screen of his digital watch forlornly told him otherwise. He knew they'd be unlikely to answer their phones whilst riding, but the hasty retrieval of his top-of-the-line smartphone from a zipped pocket on the mud-specked white motocross armour covering his torso revolved around the very likely possibility that, in his gritty determination to prove Cody wrong, he'd left them a little too far behind, forcing the Collies to stop and collect themselves. However, the two second glance at the screen his eyes undertook was all they needed to tell his brain something it should've realised in the first place; the signal bar on the top right remained resolutely blank.

"Shit..." he hissed under his breath as it condensed against the chilled night air, before preparing his lungs and yelling "Cody?! Tom?! Where are you?" The only sound that responded was the continual mass of squawks, tweets and growls of prey and predator enacting their vendettas against one another; the unmistakeable, backfire-speckled growl of the pair of four-stroke engines remained absent from his ears. With his heart rate creeping towards triple-digits, Dietrich turned to the one life-choice that had seen him scrape countless exams he would've resolutely failed otherwise and, unbeknownst to his therapists, been the source of his considerably lengthened fuse of late; shoving the phone back into his pocket, a quick fish in the corner of his padded, vented, matching trousers retrieved a flimsy, rectangular paper packet that the Alsatian wasted no time in pulling open with his shaking paws and curling them lovingly around a thin, brown, white-tipped straw; one of five lined uniformly in the packet. The dark brown tufts packet neatly into it still brought a warm, merciful smile to his face; he'd snuck heroin around in various ingenious ways over the past four years, but tonight hadn't called for such a plan; indeed, he didn't think he would've even needed it at all. The second half of the ingredients, a dent-peppered metal lighter, was retrieved from a very elaborately hidden pocket situated behind the straps of his backpack; a place that would normally be hidden by the users' body, but it was exposed for this brief moment. A barely audible _chink_ignited a single, solitary flame that became the second ineffective source of light in the otherwise empty void of the Autumnal forest, but both it and the torch were of immeasurable use to the Alsatian at this uncertain time.

"Aaah, that's good" he sighed contently, inhaling deeply and almost shuddering with contentment at the soothing, wafting warmth spreading from his mullet-topped head to his booted feet; his nicotine-infused breath wafted from his jowls like a miniature, horizontal locomotive as he momentarily relieved it of the spongy cigarette, before re-joining the two in a gentle, soothed motion. Gently leaning back against the bike's frame, the drug began to infiltrate his brain, massaging his worried conscience and soothingly telling it not to worry, and that the Collies would find their way to him soon enough. Indeed, Dietrich didn't really consider himself responsible for their safety; it was they who had wanted to come to this godforsaken forest in the first place, and if all else failed, they could just retrace their steps, he told himself repeatedly and with incrementally-increasing firmness. The worst he could expect from his parents when he returned would be a mere slap on the wrist; that was, if they had managed to find a sliver of free time in their gunnel-packed business lives to even return home. Time slipped into insignificance as the Alsatian's body became ever-more limp; completely at the mercy of the drug, he rested his left elbow against the handlebar and began to marvel at the rushing, free-flowing sensation tinging his body.

"Ja; that's...ugh...."_he slurred; his body having finally pulled the plug on his brain. Slowly, however, reality began to creep in to his seemingly endless beautiful fantasy world, before deciding to charge into it with a battering ram; a sharp jolt coursed through his body and, like a tsunami, his _true senses returned with an all-consuming force, carrying with them the debris of a sudden, churning feeling in his stomach. The distinguished, flowing shapes in front of his eyes collapsed and muddied into a swirling, swaying mess of conflicting greys and browns, with a stabbing headache suddenly compounding this agonising sickness.

"Aaargh!" Clamping his right paw to his forehead, Dietrich howled in head-splitting agony as the entire ground in front of him began to tilt, twist and invert this way and that, with the cigarette, becoming the sadistic authority of his torture, falling limply to the ground and promptly feeling the full force of the black, grooved rubber sole underneath his boot. He was momentarily distracted from the tidal wave of pain when his body mercifully felt the need to relieve one of its fluids in a rather different way; staggering into the foliage on the other side of the path, he found his immediate direction blocked by an obtrusive oak tree, with its grooved, chipped bark bearing an uncanny resemblance, at least to the dog's turbulent brain, to a set of brown, sweet-smelling prison bars.

"Wha- you want some? Just get the fuck out of my way!" he slurred; the leather outer-layer of his motocross armour creasing as he pulled his arm back to take a drunken swing in its general direction, however his steadily re-focusing vision caused his brain to abruptly apply the brakes. He blinked repeatedly in an attempt to straighten his mind, but his eyes refused to remove the bizarre sight staring neutrally back at him. With its message as clear as day, the words "Keep Out" had been carved with an unmistakeably sharp object into the wood at eye height, and judging by the thin twirls of bark hanging off the exposed wood underneath, the threatening warning had been applied very recently. Despite this, however, Dietrich soon found his fierce growl giving way to a tipsy giggle.

"And who are you to stop me?" he sniggered, buffing out his chest like a raising cake and flipping the bird before stumbling past it and almost tripping over a small berry bush, but eventually he came upon an oddly bare, rectangular section of ground; the thin layer of foliage circumventing the patch of brown, root-speckled earth seeming to cowardly back away in fear. His bladder needed no further invitation, of which it eagerly reminded the Alsatian as his paws wasted precious seconds attempting to locate the camouflaged zipper on the front of his trousers, but with a deeply contended shudder, he zig-zagged his steadily-increasing urine stream around the patch of land, watching with amusement as the warm, yellow liquid evaporated against the cold ground upon contact. Even this simple act had gone a long way to clearing the fog within his mind, and had even put him in a better mood about the stubborn Yamaha; with hindsight, he had been a little hard on that fragile engine.

"It's probably just overheated" he reassured himself as the sound of a barely worn-in zip broke the silence of the night, replaced with the soft rustle of a pair of motocross boots against dew-lined grass as Dietrich swaggered back out onto the path. Retracing his steps seemed like the best option, and aside from the section he'd traversed just before his engine gave up, the journey back would be mostly downhill, enabling him to coast even if the engine wouldn't run. He gently rested the backpack on the ground, determining that the reduced strain on his back would enable him to focus all of his strength towards the kick-start lever, before mounting the bike once more, holding his breath as the ignition key slotted into place and taking one final sigh, momentarily glancing upwards towards the canopy. The radiant, full moon splintered its rays in between the oppressively looming trees beyond him, but the split-second Dietrich had been about to angle his head back down again to position his toe on the kick-start lever, the moon abruptly disappeared; at least, it had become abruptly hidden from view, replaced by a large, abnormally-shaped mass of blackness.

"Huh?" This oddity was all his eyes were able to see, however, before a sharp, elephantine mass rocketed into the right-hand side of his face; a piercing light flashed in front of his eyes as the Alsatian was hurled off the bike and knocked hard against the uneven ground, reliving the countless times the Yamaha had got the better of him in the process. Momentarily blacking out, he let out a sustained, groggy moan as his lead-weight of a head forcefully fought against his complaining neck muscles in the act of pulling it off the makeshift vegetation pillow, but the true extent of his injury sadistically revealed itself to him in physical form as a warm, sticky liquid meandered its way in numerous tributaries over his right eye and down his cheek. Trembling maniacally, Dietrich slowly brought his paw up to the affected area to check the damage, but the adrenaline coursing through his body chose that exact moment to wear off long enough for his pain-receptors to judder back into life, and as they did so, he forced his eyes open, only for his right retina to respond with an all-enveloping blackness. Feeling an excruciatingly fierce series of agonising stabs across his cheek, the Alsatian let out an ear-curdling scream as his right paw finally made contact with his face, revealing a spider's web of deep cuts and gashes that snaked their way through his fur. He staggered blindly to his feet with his paw latched to his torn cheek, howling in abject agony as the blood began to flow down his sleeve and soak his fur; a frantic glance to the ground, however, finally revealed the source of the blow as a series of razor-sharp flint fragments littered the floor around him. Within its turbulent storm, however, his brain had somehow managed to remind him that a rock of that magnitude could only have been thrown by something frighteningly large, and worse, he realised with a terrified whimper, they might still be here. This frightening revelation sent a wave of electrifying anger through his senses, and the Alsatian forced his right paw away from his blood-coated cheek to fumble for the backpack, sat propped against the bottom of the bike's frame, and through a string of foul obscenities and frustrated roars which culminated in his clammy, shaking paws practically tearing the bag in two, he finally located his one palpable saviour.

"_You think you can take me, huh?! Well who's laughing now? Come on, fight me; I fucking dare you!"_he screamed uncontrollably, clasping the barrel of a pistol like the hands of a dying friend; any and all logical reasoning that would've told him to drop the gun, sod the bike and leg it was well and truly washed away with the blood streaming down his cheek and starving his brain. A level of dizziness unlike anything heroin could've ever hoped to inflict upon him took hold of the stumbling, moaning dog as the gun swung in a disinterested arc in his paw; his ears, however, took full advantage of their undamaged state to alert him to a soft whisper of footfall merely a few centimetres away from him. Holding back a pained cry as droplets of tears began to mingle with the blood that had now dripped down onto his torso and irreversibly stained his three-figure motocross armour, Dietrich frantically pointed the gun in the direction of the noise, but even his darting, disorientated vision made frantic gestures with his brain to momentarily hold his fire; a pair of minute, circular white eyes, barely at knee-height and dotted with peppercorn black pupils that emanated a look of inquisitiveness, rather than contemplation as to how he would taste, arced up towards him, though with the creature's body hidden by the shadow of the trees.

"Wha...what do you, you w-want, little guy?" he stammered with a deathly quiet whimper; the gun falling limply to his side. However, his flustered, swimming vision had no chance of spotting a triangular, grey slit of glinting material to the left of the creature's torso, and before his woozy brain had even begun to contemplate the notion of maths, let alone put two and two together, the creature bared its remarkably human-esque set of teeth before pulling its left arm behind its body and bringing it promptly back into view as it hurled the seemingly tiny object towards him. Dietrich had only just noticed the long, thin stick that the tip was attached to before the tribal hunting spear rocketed into his neck with pin-point accuracy, tearing into an artery which erupted a grotesque fountain of blood towards the ground. Unable to even clamour for his now flooded vocal chords as his increasingly stone-cold eyes began to roll like a slot machine, almost all life had escaped the Alsatian before his body had even flopped backwards onto the ground; with his muscles emitting a final, futile spasm, his killer bounded forwards, clasped a section of his shirt collar and dragged the lifeless corpse through a pool of his own blood towards the boundary of the path, and into the beckoning depths of the undergrowth beyond.