When the plan goes wrong
When an undercover op goes wrong all you can do it try to ride it out. Sometimes that ride involves a trip through someone's digestive tract.
Note: There's something wrong with line wrap on SoFurry today, or some hiccup with my computer. I'm still trying to fix it.
No one paid much attention when the nondescript van rolled by. It was a battered old Ford Econoline, big enough for someone to live in, and the bearded man behind the wheel looked like the sort to do it. The two guards outside the house kept an eye on it until it went around the corner, drove halfway down the block and parked. One walked to the van to make sure nothing strange was going on, but nothing was. No unusual antennas, no obvious cameras, just a probably-homeless man leaned back in the driver's seat trying to sleep. The seat next to him was full of trash, fast food bags and soda cans.
The guard nodded and went back to the house. Behind the partition in the van two people watched him walk away, for while the cameras were not obvious they were there.
The two were both police officers, though dramatically different in appearance. One was a barely five foot tall Asian woman, the other was nine feet tall and furry.
"You sure about this," growled the werewolf. His shorts said POLICE down each side and he was covered most other places with tactical body armor including a helmet custom-fitted to his muzzled face. On both shoulder pieces and his breastplate was the number 6, for this was Unit Six of the Lupine Unit squad.
Where the armor did not cover, his fur was black and well-kept, and his eyes were yellow. "I'm not. We could get more Units in, rush the place."
"I'm sure," said the woman. "I recruited him myself, but he slipped up this time and they suspect he's our contact. If we go in guns blazing they will shoot him for sure. He's been very useful, I'm willing to take a chance to get him out."
Unit Six shook his head, but he didn't contradict her. She was the expert on this sort of operation. He was just the backup.
Six was crouched at the front of the van's passenger compartment. Folding himself up and sitting was the only way he fit. The Lupine Units normally traveled in police vans twice the size of this one with storage lockers for their gear. This van was made as commonplace as possible, with the drawback that if you had to get two werewolves into at once they would have to be very friendly indeed. Even one werewolf had required double-strength springs and shocks to support the six hundred pound bulk moving around in the back.
"This is really Five's specialty, but I've been practicing," the woman said. "I know enough about their operation to get inside, and I only need a few seconds once I get to the informant."
Unit Six nodded. "Be careful. There's a lot of firepower in there."
"I will," said the woman She checked the cameras, no one was in view. "If the floor plan is accurate I'll come out in the alley."
"I'll be there," Six rumbled.
The woman slipped out the back of the van. The van only looked run-down from the outside and thick rubber gaskets let her shut the doors with barely a sound.
They'd parked by an alley that she knew doubled back next to the target.
Overflowing garbage cans filled the alley with stink but she was not afraid of garbage, rats, or even muggers. She'd caught plenty of muggers and would-be rapists in alleys like this one. Sometimes she didn't even eat them.
The guards smoking outside the house looked her over when she appeared from the alley. She was dirty, ragged, but not bad looking. They watched her hesitate, watched her peer around for anyone who might see her.
"My dealer said you have stuff here," she said when she'd finally nerved herself up to approach. "He ran out."
"You have money?" The other guard took a drag on his cigarette as he looked around. The street was empty. Just them and this junkie.
"I have some," the woman said.
"I dunno," said the first guard. "What can you give me to let you in the door?"
"I only have enough for -"
"Oh, I'm sure you got something," the guard grinned.
"Jake," said the second guard as the first went to undo his fly. "You know what the boss said. Not out in public any more."
"Fuck," Jake said, because getting blowjobs from desperate junkies was his favorite part of the job. "Fine." He settled for groping the woman as he frisked her for weapons, then reached behind him and rapped on the door. "Customer."
The woman in the ragged coat let herself be led up the stairs all the way to the third floor. Noises from a door they passed told her someone was paying for their fix with something besides cash.
By the smell of it there were at least a dozen people in the house. It was a narrow three-story thing, a century old brick row house. She sniffed, wrinkled her noise. The place stank of urine and desperation. They should have raided it long since, but her contact said it was being used for human trafficking too.
They'd held off to wait for a supposedly delivery of human cargo, then this happened. The operation tonight would probably ruin any chance of intercepting the shipment, but she hadn't lied about her contact. He was valuable enough to save even at this cost.
And here she was. The guard shoved her into a small room with a shuttered window and two other people. One was a skinny, sunken-eyed woman who was every bit the junky she pretended to be to get in here and another was a 20-something man in a Megadeth T-shirt. Her contact.
He didn't recognize her. He wouldn't. She hadn't looked like this the last time they met.
This was the tricky part. Now she needed a reason to show her true self. If she changed for no reason they'd work out that something funny was going on.
Luckily, the sort of people who worked here were easy to provoke. The house dealer came in and when she tried to haggle over the price of her fix he backhanded her across the face.
"Bitch, it costs what I say it costs," the man snapped. Then his eyes widened. He had a dozen rings on the hand that slapped her and one had left a long oozing scratch on her cheek. He sucked in a breath as he watched the scratch knit shut in seconds.
"What the fuck," he said, and the Asian woman grabbed him by the collar and threw him against the wall. Suddenly she was taller, her limbs longer, sharp claws sprouting from her fingers.
"Fuck!" Shouted the guard. "Werewolf, werewolf!"
Werefox, rather. She went from five feet to eight feet tall in an instant, ripping out of her ragged jacket. Orange-red fur sprouted, and white on her belly, dark brown on hands and feet. A tail burst out of her pants, as long as she was tall a moment before. She was tall and lanky and terrifyingly strong, swatting the guard's gun away away as he fumbled for it. The junkie woman managed to duck out the door before the guard fell back and slammed it shut.
All she'd needed was an excuse, and she got the perfect one. She snarled and reached for the guard and the man scrambled behind her contact and shoved him at her as a shield.
Bill, his name was. Bill, who'd frozen when he saw her change, because he knew this was a raid now but wasn't sure if he should run or go with her. Bill, whose head disappeared into her snarling maw when the guard pushed him toward her.
Unit Nine growled and swallowed, trying to clear her throat so she could rip the guard to shreds, but the man knew what would happen if she got hold of him. He hid behind Bill, grabbed the contact by the hips and shoved with all his might.
The guard probably thought she'd take the time to spit Bill out and give him the chance to escape. Instead Unit Nine stubbornly moved forward to get at him and suddenly Bill was nothing but a set of legs kicking from her jaws. Unit Nine reached past the legs and pinned the guard to the door with one huge, clawed hand. She gave him an amber-eyed look that said 'You're next', tossed her muzzle upward and swallowed Bill whole.
It took only three tosses of her muzzle to do it. The first engulfed Bill's ass, the second one his knees, and the third toss of her muzzle took in his feet.
Her fanged jaws closed around a kicking set of shoes and the guard could only watch the bulge move through her white neckfur as she swallowed.
Though she was eight feet tall she was foxy-slender and a lumpy bulge swelled out of her middle as Bill arrived in her stomach clothes, shoes and all. Unit Nine belched crassly and grinned at the guard. With her free hand she rubbed the squirming bulge in her middle.
"Plenty of room for another," Unit Nine purred, and she yawned to swallow him too. She paused only because of a sudden pounding on the door.
"Shoot!" She'd forgotten the dealer, who she threw against the wall but not hard enough to kill. She'd been in human form then, with shorter limbs and less leverage.
The dealer saw the whole thing and foresaw an imminent future where he, the guard and Bill took a short tour of a werefox's digestive system together. "Shoot through the door damn it!"
And they did. A hail of bullets came through the door, from pistols and the larger weapons the indoor guards carried. The door deflected some of them and the guard soaked up more, but the higher velocity rifle rounds ripped through him and into the werefox. Other rounds missed the guard and hit her in the chest and shoulder. One shattered her cheekbone and only superhuman reflexes saved her from even more hits. She twisted, stepping away from the door, and with her full strength threw the bullet-riddled guard at the window.
The Unit Weres are five times as strong as a man pound for pound and Unit Nine was four hundred pounds of lanky muscle. The guard took out the window and part of the wall around it and she sprang through the opening almost before it formed.
The guards burst into the room after her but she'd already bounced off the wall of the opposite row house. Unit Nine landed on all fours in the alley, just in time to see Unit Six decapitate one of the door guards who was unfortunate enough to choose that moment to poke his head into the alley. One swipe of Six's claws and the man was minus a head and the black-furred werewolf pointed urgently down the alley.
Nine didn't need any urging. On all fours she could run over forty miles an hour, or a little slower with a swaying bulge in her middle. By the time the guards appeared at the third story hole that used to be a window she and Six weren't in the alley any more. All that was there was a shattered windowframe, the bricks from around it and the guard who'd been shot, thrown through a wall and then had a well-fed werefox land on him. The only good thing about that guard's death was that the last thing he heard was not a werefox belch heard from inside the werefox.
Before the guards got their act together Nine and Six were back at the van. The driver had only feigned sleep and the van was in motion even as Six shut the back doors. Only then did he turn to look at Unit Nine.
"I'll get the kit," he growled, for Nine was shot up. She'd absorbed at least a dozen bullets. It takes a lot to kill a Were but she was bloody all over save her belly. The guard that served as an unwilling shield had on a ballistic vest and that plus his body protected at least part of her. None of the rounds had gone through her swollen belly. "Throw your contact up before he suffocates."
"No," Nine said, her low purr of a voice more of a growl now. With the medical kit in his hands Unit Six watched as she belched, sucked in a breath and swallowed the air. "Got shot in the jaw and chest." With a clawed finger she pointed at bullet holes in both her collarbones. "Can't throw him up until I heal."
She belched again, swallowed more air as he bandaged the worst of her wounds. Werewolves are tough but not bulletproof.
She was badly hurt. She could regenerate even this much damage, but needed food to do it. And there was a thing that happened when a badly hurt Were needed to heal. Their body seized on the nearest source of food to power that healing. It is why many werewolf hunters who very nearly killed their quarry then found themselves suddenly inside a wounded werewolf, and then just as suddenly part of it. A badly wounded werewolf could digest a meal almost instantly, with all those calories going to heal it.
The still moving man in Nine's stomach was that meal. Six bandaged her as best he could but he could see she was resisting the instinctual urge to heal. If she gave in there would be a weird groan from her middle and the bulge would all but disappear. She's heal back up in moments but that would be little consolation for her contact. Not all of Bill would be absorbed and she'd eventually have to relieve herself of the rest but the contact would be of little use as a pile of werewolf droppings and maybe a partly digested shoe or two.
There were vet-doctors at the Unit police stations who specialized in treating them, but that wasn't going to help. The only way they could get the man out would be to cut Nine's belly open and in the state she was in that might kill her. That assumed she could keep him alive that long. They needed a quick way to get him out, or....
Then Six had an idea. He poked his muzzle through the porthole into the cab. "Jose, you remember that beach I go to?"
"Damn well should, I've driven Two there a few times, and then you last week."
"Get there as fast as you can. Make sure it's the right friendly beach, it's a matter of life and death."
Jose nodded, grasping the situation at once. He knew the plan was for Nine to swallow their contact and spirit him out of the drug house. The dealers would assume he was werefox shit and the contact would make himself useful elsewhere. Jose saw how shot up Nine was, and guessed she was too badly hurt to cough the contact back up. He also knew what happened when a badly hurt werewolf needed to regenerate. They needed food and a lot of it.
That meant Bill was getting a trip through Nine's bowels like it or not, but that might not be the end for him. Luckily they were only ten minutes from the beach, barring traffic.
At two in the morning even Los Angeles freeway are usually clear of traffic and the one time a cop cruiser gave them the stink-eye for driving a hundred miles an hour on the freeway Jose turned on the undercover cop flasher behind the radiator and the cruiser turned away.
"Almost there," Jose said through the porthole. "Just got off the freeway." He took a chance and ran two stop signs, then pulled into an open spot in the beach parking lot next to the pier.
"We're past the markers. Do whatever you need to do back there."
In the back Six had his clawed hand on Nine's belly, like an anxious father feeling for a baby's kick. He nodded and looked up at Unit Nine. "Bill's weak but he's not dead yet. We're past the reformation markers, go ahead!"
He'd watched Nine grit her teeth for ten minutes, resisting the overpowering urge to digest her contact, and now finally saw her give in. There was a gurgle from her swollen middle and a sudden, desperate struggle as the nearly suffocated man realized what was happening. The struggle was brief. The lumpy bulge of swallowed man twitched, shivered, and shrank.
Unit Six had digested a dozen men and a couple of women since coming to this world but he'd never had to do it this way. He needed a whole day to do what Unit Nine did in ten seconds. In that short space of time the lumpy bulge all but disappeared and Nine's wounds knitted shut.
The werefox let out a long sigh and relaxed. One clawed hand plucked at the bandages wrapped around her thigh and Six helped her strip them off.
"This place really works, right?" Her voice was back to its familiar purr. Other than being covered in blood she looked fully recovered.
"None of us have eaten anyone here," Six growled, meaning the Lupine Units. "But people get eaten here all the time. I met a cheetah anthro here who says she'd been through the guts of every creature on the beach big enough to swallow her. Except me and Two, anyway."
"'Met'," Unit Nine purred.
"Met," Unit Six grinned. "She stuck her head in my mouth. I stuck something of mine in her mouth. It was a fair exchange."
"But you didn't eat her."
"I wanted to, she wanted me to. But Two talked to the precinct lawyer about it and she said it would look bad if we started taking willing meals, even here.
'Did you eat that perp because he deserved it or do you just like eating people that much,' we'd hear in court sooner or later."
Unit Nine let out a long belch as all the remaining air she'd swallowed, plus the air from Bill's lungs, came back up. There was no Bill to need it any more.
"How long until he reforms?"
"They say an hour," Six growled and Jose looked through the porthole and nodded.
"I can't go out on the beach like this," Nine purred. "Not even in the middle of the night."
"I can lick you clean," Six growled.
Unit Nine's eyes narrowed. "You can what."
Six held up a clawed hand placatingly. "I'm a horny fucker. You know that, I know that. But I also know you are not interested. You lick where you can reach, I will lick where you can't, and we'll get you cleaned up."
With no better idea and having exhausted the supply of cleaning wipes in the medical kit Nine nodded. Six put his broad wet tongue to work, Nine used hers where she could reach and Jose got out of the van so not to think about all the wet slurping noises coming from the back.
Soon enough Nine was damp and smelled strongly of werewolf drool but was reasonably clean. Only then did she peer accusingly down at the bulge in Unit Six's shorts. That bulge was much larger than when he started.
"Sorry," he growled. "I know you're not interested. But I had to lick you all over. I can't help having a reaction."
A werefox's fur keeps a blush from showing but the twitch of her ears carried the same emphasis. They could each smell the other and knew the other was horny. He really had to lick her all over, even her butt and belly almost to her sex.
The driver's door opened and closed and Jose passed a bundle of clothing through the porthole. "From the reformation clothing box. Closest to your size I could find, Nine."
"Thank you Jose," purred Nine, who along with Six was happy to change the subject. She pulled on a T-shirt too short for her long torso and a pair of shorts that fit well enough.
"We still have forty minutes," growled Six, who would very much have liked to lick Nine even further down her belly but wouldn't, not unless she asked. Nine had a problem with men. He wasn't sure exactly why, something to do with her experiences before coming to Earth. His had been bad enough, so he let her have her quirks and didn't press the issue.
"Good," purred Nine, who opened the back doors and climbed out of the van. A midnight passerby gawked as an eight foot tall werefox and a nine foot tall werewolf climbed out of an unassuming old van. Nine made a "shoo" gesture and the man left as Six removed his tactical gear.
"Set your alarm," Nine purred, and set her own watch as she made her way under the pier. She was very horny. The urge to grab Six's cheek ruffs and guide his tongue to her sex had been strong.
There were relationships among the Units. One was fucking Seven, Unit Three had a good thing going with Unit Eight, and Unit Six occasionally got it on with a fellow male wolf or two. There were plenty of interested human lovers but they were small and fragile and occasionally a wolf wants to go all out.
Nine wasn't interested in any of them. But that didn't mean she wasn't interested in males. Down by the surf she found what she was looking for, the furry brown torpedo of a big male river otter. The water-weasels hereabout grew big and this one was at least her size.
They had met before. "Met" in much the same way Six met the cheetah. He woke from his nap, sniffing as he picked up her need, and all she had to do was lie on the sand and present her butt. He needed no further invitation and stepped over her. His short legs meant his sheath, stiff as an iron bar, slipped through her tailfur as he dropped it between her thighs. Then he wrapped his forepaws around her, nipped into her scruff and went to work.
Unit Six for his part was less picky. He wandered under the pier, accepted a sheath-rub from the first person he met, and then tapped a sleeping seal awake to see if it was interested. It was, and soon he was living out an old joke.
"The mechanic says it looks like you blew a seal," he growled under his breath. Or rather a seal blew him, in this case. The sea beast had no trouble swallowing a werewolf cock knot and all, and it rolled its lower body over so he could return the favor. Until that moment, horny as he was, he didn't know or care about the seal's sex. It turned out he was going to blow a seal after all.
Half an hour later, their urges at least blunted, they waited for Bill to reform. Nine went through the donated clothes box and found things that would fit the contact, because he wasn't going to want the ones he wore before back even if some of them made their way through her bowels intact.
"I hope this works," Nine purred. "I'd feel bad if I accidentally digested - oh, here we go." For just then a naked man appeared between them.
"Jesus!" Yelped Bill, who sat down suddenly in the sand when he found himself with a towering Were on either side of him. Unit Nine handed him the clothing and he pulled on shorts, T-shirt and a mismatched set of flip-flops, one of which had probably been through some critter's digestive tract from the look of it.
"You ate me!" From his seated position he was looking up at the bulge that used to be him. Two-thirds of it had disappeared when she healed itself but fifty- plus pounds of meat and bone still made a bulge on her slender frame.
"I did. But I didn't mean to digest you." Unit Nine explained the plan, and how she'd planned to cough him back up. "The drug house gang will assume I digested you. You're dead as far as they know."
Bill stood up and nodded. "Okay, that makes sense. But it hurt in there. It was tight, it was hot, it stung, and then there was this gurgle and -"
"It was the only way I could get you out safely," Unit Nine purred. "I didn't mean to digest you. I was too hurt to cough you up so we came here so you'd survive."
Her bulging belly chose that moment to let out a long groan. It was still working on the parts of him she hadn't absorbed to heal.
"Did you have anything on you you'd...want back?" Nine had the good grace to look embarrassed.
"I had my wallet on me. It's leather, though."
"Was leather," Unit Six growled. "Nine will see if anything survived. We have a procedure for when we eat things we'll want back later."
The procedure involved a screen that stopped anything too bulky from making it into the toilet. Bill's expression showed he didn't want to know.
"Sorry Bill," Unit Nine purred. She leaned down and nuzzled his neck. "I'll make it up to you once we get you processed."
Her guts gurgled as they worked on processing Previous Bill and the four of them climbed back into the van. Bill got the passenger set in front as Nine was still too full to resume human form and it was cramped in back. Once they'd dropped Bill off the conversation in back started up again.
"Make it up to him, will you," Six said with a grin.
"That's right," Nine purred. "Bill has the hots for me. It's how I recruited him. I can string him along, but every so often I give him what he wants."
"And not when you're in human form," Six growled.
"He's not interested in me then," Nine purred. "He wants the full package."
"All eight feet of you," Six said. "You know, I've heard about Five doing stuff like you did. He says he almost digested someone one time. They had a hidden knife and cut him to pieces from the inside. He still resisted the urge."
"And?" Nine said warily.
"You weren't hurt nearly that badly. Now, Five is a specialist. But I saw your wounds. I think you could have coughed him up. Then we could could have gotten you takeout. Or we could have brought the one you killed or the one I killed. There was just enough time...if we'd known you could cough him up."
Unit Nine, the Unit undercover specialist and the only Were they knew of still able to change form, looked him up and down. "You're smarter than you look."
"I don't always think with my dick," growled Six. "Just often. You knew we'd be near the beach. If I hadn't said something you would have."
"Yes," purred Unit Nine. She ran a clawed hand over the bulge of Previous Bill. Her guts sloshed as liquefied flesh shifted under the pressure."I could also have this gone by now. I know how to speed things up even when I don't need to heal."
"You wanted him to see it."
"Oh yes," Unit Nine purred. "I wanted him to see what used to be him. I wanted him to know what it was like to be eaten. He knows if he ever double crosses me he'll end up in there. Now he knows I can keep him alive a while even as he melts. Five is a lot better at turning off his stomach acids than I am."
"And yet you're going to be nice to him later," Unit Six growled. "If he's good, he gets the giant fox lady lover. If he'd bad, he hears you burp from the inside."
"That's right," Unit Nine purred. "You get it. Who needs good cop/bad cop when you can be both?"