FSE

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Keep running! Keep running! Keep running! I repeat in my head like a mantra, a meditative chant to keep one footpaw after the other grazing the ground, powering me forward. In my hands I have my weapon, a 12 gauge semiautomatic shotgun, weighing me down and throwing off my weight. On my back I have my pack, matting and catching on my tawny fur, soaked with sweat, forcing me to hunch into my gait. My breathing is rapid, but rhythmic, music to my large back-swept ears. My heart beats rapidly yet strong as it ever has, never missing a beat, powering and oxygenating my muscles, keeping me running.

I hear cries ahead, screams behind, and explosions all around me, yet I listen to naught but my own music of air pulsing in and out of my lungs. Dust coats me, sewage soaks me, and explosively launched rocks pelt me, and I continue to my sanctuary in hell. The earth heaves and groans, crying out for a cease-fire to the abuse. The sky cracks and thumps me deep in my chest, begging me to end this unnatural rain of soil, rock, metal, and high power precision guided explosive, yet I listen to naught but my own music.

An apparition sways into my path, a brightly colored cloth his only protection from the choking dust, a crudely made and maintained wood stocked rifle clutched in a hand-paw his only offense, I deal swift defense. Two loud coughs from my weapon, and he is being buried in his own gore with the harshly grated remains of his community's homes and businesses and livelihoods. It's almost a poetic ending for his ending.

I stumble past him, a freedom fighter who truly died fighting for freedom, and onward into the maelstrom, towards my sanctuary in hell. A large square shape silhouettes itself in the choking dust, my temporary sanctuary. I push past panicked, unarmed citizens and shoulder my way out of the dust and hell and into the building. Immediately the dust dissipated to a tolerable level and I remove my mask and survey the huddling figures in the room, tails tucked between their legs, and none of whom posed a threat to me if I moved on quickly. I did just that, brushing past them and out the back door.

A courtyard, where denizens past courted the normalcy of peaceful lives, greets my haggard form, the two of us ravaged by war, unrecognizable by the ones who love us. I replace my mask and hurry forward, surging through a broken wall and into the poorly kept field beyond. Behind me, in my previous temporary sanctuary, I hear over the symphony of destruction more screams and gunshots. From my vest I pull a string and spike wrapped grenade. I kneel; I plant two spikes, one with each hand as far opposite as I can reach. The grenade unravels; I plant it on the last spike four stumbles away and continue away from hell.

My breath is ragged, my body is haggard, my mind is exhausted, and my supplies are dwindling. My paws are sore, yet they still have many miles left in them. I hear cracks and reports of gunfire behind me, thumps and explosions of soil around me. I feel a shove from my back, then another, bruising me through the ceramic octagonal plates lining my back side. I'm shot, yet unwounded. I hear my grenade detonate, and masculine screams follow shortly after, the gun fire ceases, yet the dust never clears, the rain of destruction from the corrupt heavens never cease. I run on, searching for my sanctuary in hell.

Another scream reaches my swept back ears, one of rage and indignation, not pain and calamity.

My blood runs cold as it pumps heatedly through my veins. I hear the swish of large avian wings, the high pressure pulses of the down stroke, the avian scream through a hard beak. I run faster to delay the strike, the swoop that will pause me, and the other predator who hunts me. My best friend, my worst foe.

Familiar avian talons catch my pack, drag me to the dirt, I unclip and crawl away. Feline paws rend at my legs, wings pummel and disorient me, avian talons claw at my back, and an eagle's beak screams and tries to sever my neck through my vest and helmet. I struggle to reach my sidearm, to grasp it and buy myself a moment's reprieve, to win my freedom or to die trying. I grasp it awkwardly, only finding purchase with my thumb, but that tentative grasp is a small miracle. It barks many times in my grasp, firing wildly towards the foe on my back, my friend trying to kill me.

In a scream of pain, the gun is wrenched from my grasp, but the weight has shifted and I buck and heave to dislodge the feline avian from me. I manage a moment of freedom to roll desperately to my feet and confront the gryphon. He's hurt badly, his leopard tail is nicked and bleeding, his arms grazed and burned, his nares pour blood from their ruptured sinuses, his chest grazed and pocked with holes, and his beak is crooked. He carries with him no gun, no uniform, no weapons other than what he was born with, no heavy materials to slow and weigh him down in flight. As he pulls himself to his feet slowly and deliberately, exhaustion weighing heavily on his form, I remove the battered and torn remains of my vest, leaving me as weighed down as he is, with naught but exhaustion slowing my movements.

Our gazes cross, no words are uttered, but entire novels could be written over the accusations, curses, betrayal, and questions that flash through our features. No words can ever suffice between this gaunt and battered coyote and that exhausted and betrayed gryphon, and none ever will. Our gazes break as my eyes flash to my shotgun lying at my feet, and just as fast my handpaws flash towards it, and the gryphon leaps towards me. I hear the avian scream of rage, hurt, and betrayal. Just as he no doubtedly hears my howl and snarls of rage, determination, and self-felt treachery.

My gun in brought up in my grip, but his feline hind legs catch me in my gut, forcing the multitude of buck shot to fire into his wing, shattering his marginal coverts and the delicate bones beneath. His claws rend at my face, tearing away at one of my ears. His beak begins to descend to my face, I grasp out my free handpaw desperately to ward off the snapping beak designed to rip and tear hunks of flesh from his prey.

I backpedal and drop my shotgun, allowing his mass to fall with me, so his blows and slashes won't have as much bite into my body. We're both falling to the earth, and he begins to mantle above me, but his ruined wing being held to his body by only a fraction of tendon, muscle, and gore unbalances him and he tilts towards his bad wing. I seize the opportunity and roll with him, keeping his sharp claws impaled inside my body, for giving him any space would allow him to replace his claws and tear at my guts afresh, causing even more life threatening injuries ending me sooner.

I'm on top of him now, he on top of his ruined wing. Wing fragments and sharp open bones pierce into the soil and into his body, no doubtedly blinding him with pain. I know all too well that he is focusing that pain into a mind numbing rage to kill me; I know it so well because we have both learned it the same way, training together all those years ago. Even now the edges of my vision are tinged red, black spots of light dance in my vision as I begin a torrent of blows on his battered body, raining fists and claws into vulnerable areas of his physique.

Liver, groin, neck, solar plexus, stomach, collarbone; all these are brutally and efficiently struck and struck again. I feel his reinforced collar bone snap, I feel his larynx crush, I feel his liver firm up and split, I feel a teste pop, I hear his lungs shutter and wheeze, I see his eyes go wide in overwhelming pain and shock, I smell his bowels spill into his shorts, and I feel his legs tense and push into me. I become aware of his claws pushing and clutching my vulnerable vital organs in their sharp grasp. I know the death grip he has on my life, and he knows that we'll die in each other's deadly embrace.

We wallow in filth made from our communal gore. Mud made from our mutual blood, shit, sweat, and tears surrounds us, sucking us into the soil we fight in. My blood spills from my eradicated ear, smashed nose, shredded gut, gashed legs, and abraded footpaws. His blood pulses weakly from his shattered wing, cracked beak, torn tail, shattered collarbone, and destroyed groin. Our expressions of wide-eyed shock and fear are mirror matches as we stare into each other's souls. Our sins, our loves, lives, our entire beings are exposed to one another. We are no longer two fighters on the battlefield, we are the childhood friends who have lived our entire lives of discovery and adversity together, we are the two young scared boys who learned what sex and love are in the other's arms, we are the misguided blood brothers and lovers who shipped off to foreign battlefields together, we are no longer two individuals, we are one entity wrapped into a world of unforgiving pain and suffering.

As I stare into his golden, adrenaline soaked eyes, and he into my vivid green, we begin to forgive each other this final argument, disagreement, battle. We forget about the bombs and shells exploding, we forget about our brother's in arms dying around us, we forget the world, for now the world is just us dying together, two halves dying whole.

I feel myself drawn downward and him upward, heedless of the claws rending ever deeper into my body. Our eyes never break until my muzzle meets his beak in one final kiss, a kiss to bring us both into eternity, then our eyes shudder shut to spill hot tears to mingle in his feathers.

Everything fades away except the feel of his familiar beak against my muzzle, my pain disappears, the sounds of war fade, the feel of my heart beating weakly ceases, the feel of his body spasming in its death throes still, the bright flashes in a tunnel of light occupy my vision, but the feel and the taste and the comfort of his beak lingers on until I feel no more. I have at last found my sanctuary in hell... I am... I'm...