FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Hey guys, thanks for reading!

Sadly, no sex in this one, but I'm tentatively pleased with how it turned out.

I'd love to get more critique and comments :) They're like fuel for the creativity engine.

Warning - This chapter contains some semi-graphic ouchness.

Chapter VIII

Through the haze and burning nausea that seemed to come from her head and gut all at once, Tamra came to realize she wasn't out any more, at least not completely.

The world all around her was a mass of black and colorful swirls, with distant noises making their way in, distorted as if they were coming through rushing water.

"-may be looking in the hospitals for us-"

"-they'll die without medical-"

For a while, the pain and disorientation drifted away, along with the damned sweat giving her rashes under her fur...

Then she woke to bright lights all around her, the nausea back though not as severe. She felt like she was bound again, and briefly, feebly struggled.

A face leaned into her vision, blurry and indistinct until the voice helped her eyes. Arlen, puffy-faced and more wide-eyed and anxious than she'd ever seen the normally jovial tiger, spoke to her in a watery tone broken up by a thudding sound that nearly made her throw up in his face.

"You're going to be okay..." Another moment of darkness... "helicopter to Sirio Libanes..."

Her mind sluggishly worked through the words, coming to remember that Sirio Libanes was a private hospital in Sao Paolo. Despite her injuries, she managed a tight, painful smile, and raised a shaking paw to give a thumbs-up.

Arlen took her paw and gave it a squeeze, which she returned, finding that the poor tiger was shaking like a leaf himself.

"S...Sorry...Sh-shouldn't have...Gone in..." she managed to slur out, feeling like she was on day ten of an eleven-day bender.

From the other corner of her tiny, swirl-filled world, a gruff voice she recognized as Captain Buck spoke over the sound of the helicopter rotors she now understood for what they were.

"It was the right call. If you'd lost him, we would've been mission failure and THEN ambushed anyway."

"Oh...G-good..."

Satisfied, she felt a tension in her chest suddenly relax, guilt she hadn't realized she was beginning to feel released at least momentarily by her commander's say-so.

The relaxation of tension spread through her body, and in an instant she faded back into the comforting darkness.

Arlen snarled, fangs bared at the nurse who'd tried to approach him with a syringe in her paw. The mousy woman backed away a few paces, then fixed him with a stern and matrony glare, before speaking at him in rapid-fire Portuguese.

The black tiger glared at her, while speaking from the examination table he was sitting on, still dressed in his blood and mud-splattered outfit.

"You put that shit in me I will kill you, you understand? Where's Sato?! Answer my fucking questions!"

He waved his arms in the air in exasperation at the language barrier...Then gasped as fiery heat and pain arced from his left shoulder.

A grizzled veteran herself, the mouse darted forward and jabbed the hypo-syringe into his neck before the tiger could uncoil from his pain spasm.

"Mother...fuck...er...!"

The sedative was powerful, powerful enough that Arlen's consciousness swirled away into blackness before he realized what was happening.

The bleeding wound in his shoulder had been totally unfelt thanks to the adrenaline, the rage, the fear, not knowing how Sato was doing.

Buck sat upright as the doctors worked on him, clenching his flat teeth and gripping a bar bolted to the wall in front of him as they worked on extracting the bullet fragments that had gotten through his armor early on in the flight through Rocinha.

As the mouse nurse came back in, he gave her a terse, stiff nod, and questioned her in fluent Portuguese.

"How is he?"

The woman looked surprised, but nodded and responded, professional to the tee.

"His wound is not serious. A through-and-through hit in the meat of his upper shoulder. It should heal perfectly, with a little therapy and time to heal."

Buck nodded. Arlen was tough as nails, unsurprising given his upbringing. He'd read enough of the tiger's dossier to know he was once a kid who spent half his time being beaten by an abusive ex-military father and the other half living on the street to get away from him.

"What about Sato? The silver wo-ng!"

He snarled in pain, gripping the bar hard enough that some of the drywall around the bolts cracked. A little 'tink' told him that another bullet shard had been removed.

The nurse kept a very professional face, he noticed, but the tightening around the corners of her mouth told him almost everything she was about to say.

"He is not doing well. Two of his three bullet wounds are potentially fatal. The bullet in his upper thigh damaged the femoral artery, and the wound in his gut has perforated part of his intestine. If that tourniquet hadn't been applied, he would have died in minutes. As it is...Well, the surgery will continue until he is stable and out of danger. If all goes well."

The stag raised an eyebrow at her, and fixed the woman with a hard but understanding look.

"Is he going to live or not?"

She shook her head, as the doctors pulled another bit of metal from his flesh.

"It is...Well, the chances are about 50%. If he does survive, he will never walk again un-assisted. The damage to his knee is too great, and the tourniquet almost certainly destroyed nerves."

Buck grunted, though his instinct was to cuss up a storm. He knew it would help nothing, and might frighten the doctors. Though he was confident in their skill, these were hardly combat medical techs. Stress would impede their work.

"You are sure you will not take a sedative?"

Buck shook his head, sharply, once, while biting down again to avoid grunting out in pain.

"No, I'll be fine."

The nurse shook her head, musing that if this were her old job at the public hospital, the male wouldn't have been given a choice.

Buck knew that if he were given a sedative, the unit would have no defense if Gecko somehow found out they'd doubled back into the city. Even a private hospital paid as much as Goza was promising couldn't stop a group of dedicated mercs from walking in and popping a bunch of sleeping, defenseless, wounded furs.

The pain had long since gone, and it felt as if he had been drifting in a sea of nothingness for years, generations, his mind empty and his body a thing so distant he could forget who he was, where he was...For he was nowhere.

After a time, eons perhaps, he came to himself enough to think a single thought.

Am I dead?

This seemed to summon up something from the white void in which he drifted, aimless and relaxed...Distantly, he could perceive voices arguing or shouting, their distant urgency so far removed he couldn't quite comprehend its cause.

The silver wolf contemplated, at peace in his meditation, except for some tiny niggling thought he couldn't quite put a name to. Something just barely not-right, that told him this was not some heightened Buddhist state he'd achieved by accident, but something else. Something less, something wrong...

An image flashed before the theater of his mind's eye; a jungle canopy ahead of him, as if he were lying down...So beautiful, he nearly wept for the wonder of its streaming sunlight and dark shadows, flashes of colors of the entire rainbow...In his mind's eye, the beautiful arbor paradise passed overhead in slow-motion for an eternity, until he realized it was eventually shifting, looking down.

He saw something red and black and silver, and for a while didn't recognize it. When he did, it jarred him oddly, to see a pile of ruined meat that might once have been a leg. Perhaps a knee, reduced to hamburger, shards of white sticking out of it, the wound surrounded by silvery, silken fur on what remained of the skin there.

Silver fur...I have silver fur...

That is my leg.

The slow-motion crawl of the world in his mind shifted forward, suddenly speeding to a break-neck pace. Just beyond his feet, a stag he couldn't quite name was tying something around his upper thigh that he couldn't feel as much more than pressure, and over the crouched creature's head, a black on black blur steamed with an aura of violence and wrath, hurling gouts of fire and death behind them as black smoke ruined the jungle's placidity.

His heart ached, thunderous in his chest in its slowness. The weakness in his limbs stopping him from reaching out to that god of darkness and fire and destruction, from comforting him, from telling him things would be all right.

The jungle and its gods faded to white in his vision in a tunnel effect he knew, somehow, was the sign his wounds were severe...That he was dying.

Hours had passed, and Sao Paolo had faded entirely into night. By midnight, Buck had walked, albeit unsteadily, out of the operating room he'd been in and visited each of the unit mates he could.

Tamra was alive, severely concussed with a fractured skull. No wonder there, he mused, given the beating she'd evidently received from those Gecko-paid goons. More a wonder she'd survived at all.

At least, he thought, she hadn't been raped. He'd ordered the kit to be done as soon as she was out of critical danger, and it had been. Apparently his unit had moved in too quickly. Probably a sentry had called on a cell phone to warn the goons that hostiles were incoming, and there'd been no time for funny-business of that sort.

Thank God for small miracles.

Arlen was still sedated, he noticed, glancing through the glass partitions into the black tiger's room. The fur was laid out on his chest on a bed, his shoulder a pile of well-wrapped bandages, and an IV sticking into the back of his leg.

Stopping to give him the once-over, Buck noted a few things on the tiger's hanging chart.

"Violent towards staff, keep sedated."

He couldn't help but laugh grimly under his breath. They had no idea how dangerous the tiger could be, and made a mental note to get him out from under sedation soon.

The last room in the hall belonged to Rene Pileau, the copilot who'd helped fly their air transport to this god-awful country. Of the whole team, he was the only other conscious member, Buck could see.

The hare was sitting up in his adjustable hospital bed, a tv controller in his paw, his chest wrapped with bandages and a pair of breathing tubes running from a large machine and into his snout.

But he was alive, and conscious.

Buck knocked on the glass door to the room, and gave a two-finger wave, which received a startled blink and then a sad half-smile from the grey and brown-furred male. Then a wave, indicating he could enter.

"Shit, Pileau, you look like hammered hell."

Rene grinned and shook his head slightly, speaking in a grainy whisper.

"Don't make me laugh. Punctured lung, remember?"

Buck let his face crack into a grin, as he eased his aching body down into a chair next to the bed, and glanced past Pileau into the cityscape of night-time Sao Paolo.

"Can't help it. I'm being all nostalgic about Vietnam. Good times." The buck snorted, his tone ironic.

Rene just grinned and shook his head again, for a moment the happiness of seeing an old friend alive blotting out his sorrow at the loss of his best buddy and pilot.

"So when do we strike back? What's going on back home?"

Buck shook his head and looked the green-eyed hare in the eyes. His posture was relaxed, but the stag's eyes were full of a burning wariness.

"Goza Securities teams were attacked all over the place. We're the closest to being combat effective, if you believe that shit. Naruhito himself nearly got killed about an hour after we got attacked. Car bomb and a fake ambulance team."

The hare's eyes widened, hearing that their CEO and chief operations manager had been attacked.

"What the fuck? Who's behind it? Is the boss all right?"

Buck shook his head and pulled out a cigarette from his breast pocket, then realized what a bad idea it'd be to light up in a room with an active oxygen machine, and tossed it on the other fur's lap.

"Far as I can tell, three of our four main field teams got taken out by Gecko. The fourth I'm not so sure. No survivors to talk to. As for Naruhito, he would've died if his brother hadn't been there. Word is that the bomb in his car caught on fire instead of exploding, and Kiyosato pulled him out. Then killed the two fake paramedics with his bare hands."

"No shit...Heh. Saved by the sinister mob-boss brother, that's a twist. Thought they fucking hated each other."

The hare laid back again with a flinch despite his smile.

"Yeah, that's what they say, but I guess family is family."

Buck cleared his throat and looked out into the hall.

"Sato's..."

The hare winced and looked away from Buck, towards the pristine white ceiling, the news on his tv set talking about some kind of violent incident in New York involving suspected terrorists.

"Don't tell me he didn't make it. Sato's a fucking iron wolf, he couldn't die to some bullshit-ass AK-47."

Buck shook his head and looked down at the floor, then back at the hare.

"Not dead, and not a Kalashnikov. The rounds were sniper ammo, 30-06. Only reason he survived is the boat bucked at the right second and wrecked the shots. He's stable and they give him just better than even chances, but...He's not going in the field ever again."

"Fuck. He's going to be pissed. Arlen's gonna fucking kill people as soon as they let him get up..."

"Yeah. That's why I'm putting together a team to go out and fucking DO something about this. Chances are good those double-crossing bastards are still in town somewhere. In a day or two, he and I are going to go hunting."

Rene blinked at him.

"You're fucking crazy. You'll have no support. I can't even change my altitude until my lung heals or it might collapse again. Sato's down for the count. I hear the rookie's all fucked too. Just the two of you? Against however many they have? You're nuts."

The stag shook his head again and shifted, trying to keep the bandages on his back from pressing into the healing bullet shrapnel wounds.

"Maybe. But I'm not letting your partner die without a reprisal. Not letting Arlen stew in here when we could be out there getting the job done."

Rene sighed and put a big paw over his face.

"Hey, do me a favor?"

"Yeah?"

"Well, two favors. Get those motherfuckers. And have someone bring me something good to read. Like...Playboy or something?"

Buck snorted out a laugh strong enough it made him wince as the wound twinged.

"You fucking shitbird. Okay, fine, will do my best."

"Heh, you fucking better."