FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

I shake the sleepiness from my eyes as the sun slowly rises over the horizon. Alex rolls over behind me, trying to shield his eyes. "Come on," I grunt, shaking his shoulder softly. "Rise and shine. They're still looking for us."

Moaning, Alex pushes himself up onto his elbow, struggling in the sand. "Damn it. Really?"

I nod. "I know it's early, but we don't want them catching us."

Alex sighs. "It's too early...fine." He shambles down to the water and splashes his face a few times, then returns, appearing refreshed. "Okay, I'm ready."

"And also dripping wet," I add with a smile.

"It helps," he retorts. I just shake my head and turn to walk down the beach.

Some time later, I comment, "You know, I'm not going to be surprised if we're all over the internet by now."

"Why?"

"Well," I say, "we did fucking jump out of a building and almost die."

"I still haven't thanked you for that, by the way." Alex grins. "Thank you."

"You are very welcome." I laugh. "De nada."

The lake is large, and even by noon, a good five or six hours later, we're only a quarter of the way around from where we started. A sound catches my attention. Alex hears it at the same time. I cock my head right, then left, to try to pinpoint it. It sounds fairly rhythmic, almost like... "The sound of helicopter blades! _Shit,_get into the trees!" I shout at Alex. We make a mad dash for the cover of the forest. He beats me there, and I dive into the undergrowth just as the helicopter comes into view. We breathe silently through flared nostrils. It takes all of my willpower to stop my tail from flipping around nervously. Our ears perk as it flies over us, tracking the sound until it fades out of hearing. It takes another few minutes for my heart to stop racing.

"Shit. That was close," Alex says.

I nod. "We need to be more alert--"

"International Experimentation Agency, put your hands up!"

"--in situations like this," I finish, sighing.

Alex and I stand, putting our hands into the air. "Any ideas?" Alex whispers to me.

"Run?" I suggest. At his look of incredulity, I add, "At them. They won't expect it, so it'll take a while for them to fire. We know the terrain better than they do, as well."

"True," Alex acknowledges.

"On the count of three," I whisper as the gunmen creep closer. "One..."

"Don't try anything," the fur closest to us warns.

"Two..."

"I'm serious," he repeats. "We are not afraid to shoot!"

"Three!" We split sideways, Alex left and I right. A second later, the sounds of gunfire fill the forest. A bullet or two whizz by my head, but most of them are placed far behind me. I loop around to the outermost fur, stalking him quietly. The gun firing almost deafens me. I reach him and grab the knife from his own belt, raising it quickly to his throat and slicing. Blood spurts outward, and he collapses silently to the ground as I step back.

The next gunman--or should I say gunwoman?--is alerted already to my presence, so I have to loop around her several times before she loses me. When she finally does, I slip up behind her and push my hand into her trousers. "Perverted..." she moans out. I grab her knife and slit her throat as well.

Bullets tickle my hackles. I dart behind a tree. I hear the bullets hammer into the other side of the trunk. Thank God for reactions. I peek around the tree, recoiling as a lead shot sails past right in front of my nose. "Hey you!" I shout. The gunfire from this particular fur stops. I dart out and tackle him to the ground. "A lot closer than I thought," I grunt, trying to wrestle him into submission.

"Stop!" he cries, dropping his gun and raising his hands. "It's me, it's me, I don't want to hurt you, okay?"

I halt, claws around his throat. "You better pretend that you're dead, then. Give me your gun." He hands it over. "Make sure to play dead. I don't want anyone coming here and realizing that you're alive." His head falls back. I'm not sure if he actually died, or if he just passed out, but he definitely is not conscious. I don't stop to wait, though. I bring the gun up to my shoulder and continue forward through the undergrowth. The only remaining fur is the leader.

My ears perk up. The sounds of gunfire have stopped. Interesting, I think. And smart. If we can't hear him, then he has every chance of surprising us. My listening seems to skyrocket, every little sound brought to my attention. _Footsteps._I swivel my body, taking aim at the stalker. It turns out to not be a stalker at all, but Alex. He's holding a little nine millimeter pistol.

I gesture with the barrel of my gun to the right, in the general direction of the leader, then mime circling around. Alex nods. I hope he has it. I jerk my gun again, and he sets off, directly away from me. It looks like he's circling around.

The white-and-blue spirit from earlier materializes in front of me, startling me. Calm down!

What...?

Yes, I communicate to you through thoughts. Now, if you want to survive, you must abandon this whole operation and get out of here.

_ I can't!_

_ You must!_

_ If I do, I just sent Alex to his death. I'm not going to let that rest on my own shoulders, even if it means I must die for it._

_You fool!_The spirit turns red and rushes me. The barrel of my gun whips up, and I unleash two bullets immediately.

The spirit stops, screaming silently. Cracks slowly spread along the surface of his body, arcing out from where my bullets penetrated him. Suddenly, his body breaks into a million little pieces, sprinkling a little stardust everywhere as larger chunks of him fall to the ground. I stand frozen for a moment, unsure of what just happened. Then I turn and slink off again, into the undergrowth.

There! I sight down the barrel at the final fur. He's slowly creeping around, remaining alert--but he's looking for enemies who are clumsy, not as silent as Alex and I are. Speak of the devil. Alex is watching me from the other side of the patrolman. I nod to him. He nods back.

"Hands up!" I shout. "We've got guns, and there's more of us than there are of you!"

The fur jumps, then smiles and puts his hands up. "I always heard that you guys were smarter than we all thought. I didn't know that you could be dumb enough to think that we didn't come prepared for this possibility." He whistles.

Minutes pass. He whistles again. "We killed all of your troopers." I glance to either side just to be sure.

He appears startled. "Interesting. Then I'll just have to deal with you two on my own!" His voice rises to a crescendo at the end. He throws a grenade at me. My gun flicks up to it. I pull the trigger and barely see the grenade explode before I roll to the right. It was just a distraction, like I'd thought. He pulls out his secondary--I guess Alex shot away his primary--and starts to fire at both of us. Fuck! "He has Dualies!" I shout. I roll again, then stop on one knee and take a few shots at him. One hits his leg, but he doesn't go down. "Fuck." I duck behind a tree. Then there's a shout of pain. I peek around the tree. Fuck! Was that Alex?

I fire intermittently around the tree. In between one of them, I check the number of bullets I have left. Four?! I'll have to use them wisely.

When he starts to advance on Alex, I dart out from behind the tree and sight down the barrel again. I take a shot. It hits one of his arms. Three. He turns and starts to fire at me. I roll into a natural trench and take a shot back. It hits his other leg, right near the pelvis. He falls. _Two._Shots whizz over my head, so I make my way down the trench and pop out, rushing him. I have to dart sideways to avoid a bullet right as I fire. The shot slams into his shoulder, though, and the arm goes limp. My final shot knocks the other pistol out of his hand. I advance until I'm standing over him, discarding the magazine.

"Finish me, Steele." The fur sneers. "You know you want to."

"Actually," I fire back, "I don't want to. But I must, because you pose a threat to me if I let you live."

"Oh? What threat will I pose?"

"Anybody can see the comm bracelet on your wrist. You can easily call in support and live to another day." And with that, I slam the butt of the gun down onto his throat, crushing it.

He gurgles and thrashes in pain for another minute or two before finally dying. I watch him struggle with silent revulsion. After the ringing in my ears subsides, I find that I'm feeling a little nauseous...I lean over to the side and throw up. My eyes water as I cough up my lunch from yesterday. I'm aware of Alex patting my back.

Once I'm done, I wipe my mouth and glance at the still corpse. The nausea rises again, and I force myself to look away. "That's...nasty."

"You have really good aim," Alex comments, nudging the fur's head with his boot.

I grimace. "I guess going shooting with my old swim coach helped." I start to walk away. Another memory. But the excitement from earlier doesn't penetrate the cold atmosphere of the battlefield.

"I guess."

A rustle off to my left alerts me to someone's presence. I spin over and raise my gun, out of ammo as it is. "Who's there?"

"It's only me." The fox comes out with his hands up.

I grin. "This gun doesn't have any ammo anyways." I toss it to the side. "Alex, we should probably strip some of the less injured soldiers for gear."

"I broke their necks," Alex comments.

"Cleaner than my kills. Let's go." He leads the way to two of the fallen soldiers, a wolf and a rabbit. We strip off their uniforms and armor, putting it on ourselves. I strap a belt around my waist and grab a large backpack. The pistol straps onto the left side of my belt, while the rifle--looks like an M4 of some sort--straps onto the side of my backpack. My knife goes onto the right side of my belt.

I take a minute to loot around for some extra clips for the rifle. In the end, I have the one in the gun and four extras. "Alex, you ready?"

"I'm good."

"How about you...?"

"Jay." The fox grins at me.

"You ready, Jay?" I ask.

"I got a gun from one of my ex-colleagues, if that's what you mean."

"Yeah. And you're fully suited up." I laugh. "Do you even know the point of Alex and I suiting up?"

"Absolutely not."

"Because now," I say, "they won't recognize us as the escaped furs. Now they'll only recognize us as someone from your little experiment organization."

"Smart," Jay comments. "Shall we be going?"

"Yeah," I say. "Let's go."

We make our way back out to the beach and continue around the lake, sticking a little closer to the trees this time. The lapping of waves lull me continuously into a dull reverie, in spite of all my efforts to stay alert. After about the sixth time, I ask, "Does someone have something to talk about? I need to do something other than walk."

"Well..." Alex glances at me. "We could talk about this amnesia thing, and maybe"--here he glances at Jay--"get some extra information as to what the hell happened."

Jay raises his hands in mock surrender. "All I really know is the information I got from monitoring you two."

"You took care of both of us?" I turn and start walking backwards, watching the fox.

"The entire time," he states. Prideful.

"Well," I flatten an ear. "What's all this about the 'experiment' thing? What exactly is going on in there?"

Jay hesitates a step. Then he rushes back up to get even with us. "I don't know much about it. I joined basically right before you two came in." He nods at me. "Colton, you were first. Alex came in about an hour or two later." He fingers his chin for a moment, gathering his thoughts. "Okay. I'm going to tell you guys everything I know about this project." A wince. "Don't tell them that I told you, please? I'll be killed if they knew."

"Of course not," I reassure him.

"All right." Jay takes a deep breath. "It's a little long, so bear with me." His fingers endlessly rearrange themselves, weaving in and out of each other. "Okay. When I joined, all that I really knew is what their slogan said: 'Making the world a better place.' Keep in mind, I was naïve then, but I should have known to shadow somebody there. When I joined, they assigned me to Project 3066C. I had no idea what that meant. They told me to take care of him and ensure that nothing happens to him medically." He pauses. "I studied to be a nurse. Anyways. On the third day after I was assigned to him, he started seizing. Badly. I couldn't do much to stop it. He ended up tearing the IV cord out of his arm. He died shortly later." Jay shakes his head sadly. "That was one of many failures that I had in the first two weeks." He glances down at his feet briefly. "The next one had a heart attack. Since I couldn't detach the metal from his body, I couldn't use the AED, so that turned out to be fatal as well. The third died, I think, because of old age. There were no outward symptoms of any disease or sudden illness. The fourth, I found out after she died, was a cancer patient. Not much I could do about that either." He looks up at us, teary-eyed. "Yet I still feel responsible for their deaths."

I wrap an arm around his shoulders. "I know how that feels...I was a lifeguard for a long time. On two of my shifts, I had two separate people die of heart attacks. It's impossible to withstand alone. But Alex and I are here for you now."

Jay smiles and wipes his eyes. "Thanks, guys." He takes a minute to re-compose himself, then continues: "Sometime during that stretch, I learned that this organization was not to improve furries' future; it was meant to destroy it. Either they were going to make mindless slaves of all furries, or they were going to kill them all before finding the correct formula." He smiles at us. "Then you two came in. For the first few days, I was afraid that they were going to kill you two just like they killed all the others. But days, weeks, months passed, and your conditions remained stable. I began to remember what hope was. And on the sixty-sixth day...you woke up." He smiles brilliantly. "I knew in that moment that the experiment, however horrible it may be, was successful--at least mostly. You obviously have free will still, so it wasn't perfect, but it worked. You survived." Here he twirls his finger at us. "But then you had to go and jump out of the windows." He laughs in amazement. "Completely ludicrous, but it worked. Left a lot of cleanup for me, but I started to wonder if I should get out...somehow. See..." He starts gesticulating, searching for words. "For simplicities' sake, they wouldn't let you quit. Either you died in the job, or you died trying to run away from it. I chose to run away from it." He grins at us. "When I heard about the search brigade going out, I opted to join--I'm just as good with guns as I am with syringes. It was the opportune moment to escape. I was actually surprised, Colton--you helped me."

"Sometimes my compassion gets the best of me," I say, shrugging. Then I break out into a grin. "It obviously didn't get me into trouble with you, but it does, sometimes."

"Well, I guess I'll take that as a compliment?" Jay laughs. "Anyways. I waited in that area where you left me until I heard Karesh die--he was the leader. Then I...well, you know the rest."

I take a long while to process that. "Do you..." My voice cracks, and I start over. "Do you know the CEO of the organization?"

Jay nods. "Only the one at this branch. It's Mr. Dastdra."

"Interesting last name," I comment, laughing. "Why did he say I knew him, though?"

"Honestly, I have no idea," Jay says carefully.

"Are you hiding something from me?"

"No." Then he rethinks. "No, I'm not. I don't really know anything more about him than his last name."

I study him for a moment. He tenses under my gaze. "Okay. I'll believe you."

"Thank you," he says, relaxing.

Alex sidles in between us. "Don't forget about me! I have a question."

"I have an answer," I respond. "Actually, I probably don't. But Jay does!"

"What is it?" Jay asks.

"Well..." Alex considers the phrasing of his question. "Was this whole amnesia thing supposed to happen, or was that just a side effect of the serum?"

After a minute of thinking, Jay answers, "I believe it was intended. Because if slaves could remember their pasts as being a free fur, then what would prevent them from escaping? But if they didn't remember anything other than being a slave, then they would stay. After all, who knows what could be waiting outside the corporation?"

Alex concedes the point with a nod of his head. "Then, why all this struggle? That's cruel to not give people a choice."

"I suppose the man running it all is cruel." Jay shrugs. "I don't know anyone in the hierarchy other than Mr. Dastdra."

"Hm." I hop forward a few times, then resume walking normally. "Isn't this sort of thing banned by the government?"

"Not if the government doesn't know." Jay grimaces.

"What?!" I spin on him. "How can the government not know?"

Jay sighs. "The one time the government decided to investigate what was going on, they opened up a faux position where they actually were doing good experiments." He shrugs. "I don't know what kind of twisted mastermind is running this whole thing, but he is a mastermind."

"That's fucked up, man," I say, shaking my head.

"It is." Jay glances at me. "That's why I ran away."

"Smarter than I am, apparently," I mutter. My ears perk up. "Chopper!" We dive into the bushes, lurking on the outskirts of the undergrowth until the helicopter passes. A good amount of time after the sounds of the blades have faded, Jay creeps out of the undergrowth. He checks around, then signals the 'all-clear'. Alex and I leave the cover of the forest. My paw hovers near the trigger of my rifle.

"Do you not trust me?" Jay asks mischievously.

"Never hurts anyone to be too careful," I respond, letting my paw drop warily.

"That's true." Jay turns down the beach and stares out at the lake. "You know, I always enjoyed views like this when I was younger. I would always walk to the beach after school and stare out at the distant horizon."

I smile and sidle up next to him. "Maybe, once this is all over, we'll be able to go back there, and enjoy the same view."

"Thank you," he says quietly.

"Of course," I say, equally quiet.

The three of us stand there for a long time before heading out again. It's around two or two thirty in the afternoon now, and the sand is starting to heat up. I can feel it through the soles even of the military boots that I have on. "Damn! This sand is hot."

"That's weird," Alex says, glancing around. "It doesn't usually heat up this much, even during the summer."

I frown. "Jay, do you have any guesses?"

"Maybe..." I glance back at him. He's staring straight up into the sky. "Look up..."

My gaze swings upwards, and I stop--in awe or fear, I don't know. "What is that?"

"The hell?" Alex backs towards the forest.

Hovering above us is what appears to be a modern recreation of the Space Shuttle. The heat shields are still black, but they look like they stay in much better condition than the previous ones. The outer coverings are painted a weird, shimmering color that seems to jump around from one color to the next. Maybe it's just the metal that it's made out of.

And the rocket boosters. Those things look like they could push earth out of its orbit in less than a second. I would not want to be behind that thing when it starts up. But we sure are underneath it as it's landing.

"Get out from underneath it!" I shout, turning on my heels and bolting for the trees. Alex is slightly in front of me, but when I break through the undergrowth and look around, I can't find Jay. Then I spot him, standing where he was before. "Jay!" I yell at him. He starts and looks at me. "Come on, you retard! You're going to die!" That seems to grab his attention, and he starts to run towards us. The ship edges closer to the ground every second, and it quickly closes down on Jay. Then he escapes from underneath it--right as it sets down.

"Fuck," he says, breathlessly. "I don't know what came over me. I couldn't...I couldn't move."

"Lucky you survived," I say, distracted. Then I get a...little twang inside of me. "A little more to the left...?" I mutter under my breath, quietly sidling a little left.

"I feel like whatever's in there is friendly."

"That could be what it wants you to think," I respond, watching the sky.

"It's calling me. I have a job to do soon..." Jay trails off, cocking his head as if listening.

"Maybe. But I have a job to do right now." I spot a little glimmer in the sky. There! I raise my hand to my shoulder. Right as the spear flies past, I wrap my hand around it. The momentum shoves me backwards in the dirt. I brace myself against the spear and dig myself even harder into the ground. By the time I stop, I'm teetering on the edge of a cliff. "Damn spears." I spin around and hurl it back in the direction it came. My hand feels wet; I look down at it. It's coated in blood, my blood, but it doesn't concern me. Hand wounds are rarely fatal. I flex my hand experimentally to ensure that no tendons were severed. Everything is working as it should.

"Colton!"

I glance up. Jay is sprinting my way, with Alex close behind him. As he nears, he shouts again: "Colton! What happened? Are you alright?"

"No," I say, grinning quirkily, "I'm all left. But yes, I'm fine."

"Asshole." Jay hits me lightly. "What was that?"

"A spear."

"I know that. But who threw it?"

"I have no idea," I say. Just because I do have an idea doesn't mean I'm not going to hide it from them. "But somehow, I knew exactly when he threw it."

"That's odd," Jay comments, apparently at a loss for words.

"It is, but for now, we have other problems to deal with."

"Like what?" Alex glances at me curiously.

"Like that space shuttle that landed just a few minutes ago. Have you guys already forgotten about that?" I study them. They seem...different, somehow. Of course, I met them yesterday, maybe for the first time, so it's hard to tell if this is just the way they are.

"Oh! No, of course not," Jay says, wits coming about him.

"Then let's go. I don't like the feeling that it was giving off coming down." I frown angrily and set off back towards the ship.