FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

The first thing that alerted Parker to trouble was that the lights were on in the library. The locked library. The one he'd personally cleared out and said goodbye to for three precious evenings of freedom. He stood at the end of the hallway and stared down its length at the deceivingly welcoming glow of soft, fluorescent lights on the empty chairs and desks, not quite believing what he was seeing. He felt as though he should be rubbing at his eyes and gaping in astonishment like some starry-eyed child in a Christmas commercial, but he could only stand there dumbly.

You were so focused on getting out that you forgot the lights?

Nuh-huh.

It could be the janitor...

Parker had seen the night janitor once in his six months on campus, and that had been at one of the vending machines. He hadn't been cleaning. The state of the hallways in the morning spoke of his laissez-faire attitude towards school cleanliness, the library being the least of his concerns when there was someone else there to de-smudge the windows and toss the empty chip bags into the trash.

If Parker was one thing, it was meticulous. Those lights had been off.

The courage that had flared in him when there was still daylight began to sputter and fail. The only ones who'd be sneaking around campus at these hours would be drunks and perverts, neither of which he wanted to confront alone, unarmed, and at night. He supposed that heavy petting would be easy enough to break up just by being an audience (he hoped so, anyway), but he'd have a hard time removing anyone else from the library or not becoming a target if they were looking for trouble.

He found that if he shuffled closer with his back pressed against the wall, he could see two figures at the far end of the library. They were tall and too broad-shouldered to be women, both of them standing with their backs hunched by the supply closet where the rags, cleaning fluids, and other miscellany were stored. He heard the almost imperceptible murmur of a private conversation taking place, and then a series of loud thuds rattled the door on its hinges. The two struggled to hold it in place, one of them gripping the handle and twisting it counter to some force coming from within.

Well, they're obviously not sneaking in with that noise, Parker thought dryly. Just more punks giving the new kids a hard time.

Distracted as they were, the thought of sneaking in gave him pause. It would only take a moment with the doors already unlocked, and he could take his papers from the main desk and slip out the door again before they were done with... whatever they were doing. That would be for campus security to determine when he got back to his room.

Parker glanced in again. Balked. Went for it.

He found everything on the desk was precisely as he'd left it: precise. His papers sat in a neat stack next to the telephone and a set of sharpened, side-by-side pencils. Quizzes, notes, recipe cards, everything he would need for the weekend. Parker reached out, and his fingertips had only grazed the stack before a bloodcurdling wail made his heart leap into his mouth and his hand jerk. The papers scattered and drifted towards the floor.

The sound had come from the closet.

The first mistake Parker made was to hesitate. He'd assumed they were pranking some poor shmuck who'd run afoul of them, but that sound was not human.

The second mistake Parker made was to turn with a high-pitched, "What the fuuu -"

His back was slammed against the cold, unyielding wood of the desk before he could complete the exclamation, and he found himself with the front of his jacket held in the grip of a wild-haired young man with eyes the color of pond scum. As opposed to urinating himself as a lesser man might do, he tried to wheeze out a plea, something along the lines of, "Please don't hurt me, you hobo." It was probably for the best that all that came out was a terrified gurgle.

"Didn't your mother ever teach you not to go around spying on people?" The man spat.

"I-I wasn't spying!" Parker squeaked. He'd hate himself for it later. "I work here!"

"Oh, really? At 10 p.m. on a Friday? I ought to -"

"I mean it! Shit!"

"Cut it out, Will." Another man in a turtleneck spoke. "He's just a student. Like us."

Parker watched as the two exchanged furtive glances. A world of silent debate seemed to pass between them, and his assailant backed off. He was left to fight his own wobbly legs for balance. Pond Scum - or Will, though it didn't suit him - loped back to his friend's side and coldly returned Parker's stare.

They weren't anyone he'd seen around campus before, not that culinary students were particularly prone to seeing the light of day. For a moment he wondered if these two had been at the windows earlier in the day, and then he remembered there had been three. There had been three, and they looked much more rugged than these two weirdos.

While Pond Scum's posture brimmed with barely contained aggression, his friend was as calm and collected as if he were sitting in class instead of breaking into a library and an accessory to assaulting the student aide. Turtleneck was tall and angular in a way that was almost skeletal, and his dark clothing passingly reminded parker of the childhood films that always seemed to air around Halloween: Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands, Nightmare on Elm Street. He really hoped the last wasn't a portent of things to come.

Turtleneck was also brave, because all the money in the world couldn't have gotten Parker to go anywhere near the door of the supply closet, let alone press his ear to it to listen to the aching silence within. He could hear the clock ticking with every second that the three stood in an awkward truce, and not so much as a rustle or a clattering from the source of that awful sound.

"Will." Turtleneck spoke. "I think it's okay now."

Pond Scum's expression lightened into one of relief, but he tensed when he saw Parker watching them with his mouth slightly open. "Get the fuck out of here!"

Parker rose, intending to happily get the fuck out of whatever mess he'd gotten himself into by trying to be a responsible student, but Turtleneck stopped him. "Do us a favor and keep this a secret? We ought to... ah..."

The sound of scrabbling followed by another heavy thud from within the closet caused all three students to jump. Pond Scum lost his brief composure, cursed, and kicked over a chair, which Parker had to step out of the way of as it went clanging end over end into the wall. His bruised side back throbbed in protest, and fire sparked back into his chest and made his blood turn hot in his veins.

"You know what?" Parker glared at them both. "No. I'm sick of drunks and weirdos like you coming in here and making a mess. You know who has to clean it up?"

Pond Scum and Turtleneck were silent, so Parker answered for them. "Me! I'm the one who has to clean your greasy fingerprints off the windows, your vomit out of the wastebaskets, and god only knows what kind of fluids from the closets and the backroom. You get the fuck out."

Parker's chest heaved. Turtleneck averted his gaze and pressed his ear back against the closet door.

"We've got business to attend to, dork." Pond Scum snarled. He stepped forward. "I'm not playing around, and I don't give a damn about your windows."

He advanced again, and Parker's hand dove into his pocket to fish out his cell phone. He held it out as if it were a cross in a campy vampire movie, and Pond Scum laughed.

"What, are you going to throw that at me?"

"N-no." Parker didn't know why he was holding it out. "I'm going to use it to make a call. Campus security, in fact."

Turtleneck had disappeared. Neither of them cared where he'd gone.

"Really?" Pond Scum said. "Security?"

"Uh-huh."

"And what are you going to do in the 15 minutes it takes them to get here?"

"I..." Parker didn't know that, either. "I... uh..."

Pond Scum stepped forward, and Parker feinted to the left only to stumble over a chair and find himself on his hands and knees. Before he could right himself, Pond Scum was on top of him and putting him in a chokehold. Gasping, Parker reached out for something - anything - to help him. Wasn't there always something in the movies? A vase? A telephone? A conveniently-placed liquor bottle that hadn't been there in the previous shot?

Well, you stood up for yourself, his brain shrieked. Now look at you. Wrestling on the floor with a strange, sweaty, angry man like your brothers always said was your fate.

Parker was too tired to argue with himself about whether or not Simon and Michael had meant like this. The fire of defiance still burned like a bed of hot coals in his stomach, but his fists found hard, unforgiving muscle wherever they struck and the grip around his neck began to tighten.

Turtleneck was back, and he wasn't happy. "William!"

"Shut up, Elijah!" Pond Scum shot back over Parker's head. "You're not the boss of me. This guy's going to blow our cover."

"What are you going to do, kill him?"

Pond Scum's rage dwindled and his grip relaxed. A moment later Parker was breathing freely again, if breathing freely meant gasping for air like a landed perch on the floor, prostrate before complete strangers.

Elijah knelt next to him and Parker scooted back away from his outstretched hand.

"Sorry about Will. We've just... we can't afford another reprimand, you know? It's been a hard semester."

With friends like his, Parker didn't doubt that. There were many downsides to being a loner, but having to be accountable for people like Pond Scum wasn't one of them. He stared him down as he struggled to slow his breathing.

"Maybe it's asking a bit much..." Elijah mused. "But could you help us move our friend? He's had a bit too much to drink and seems to have passed out."

"Huh?"

"Our friend. He's the one you heard in the closet, raising a fuss like he always does. Honestly, he should probably stop drinking altogether..."

"Or just stay in your dorm... Wait, he's in the closet? What the fuck is wrong with him?"

"He's drunk." Pond Scum chimed in. "That's all."

Elijah smiled, and Parker found he hated it in a way that was almost visceral. It was placating and polite, almost deceptively so but for the humorous quirk at one corner.

"Yes," Elijah said, "and right now he's a bit more than the two of us can carry back unless we have someone to open the doors for us. It's a long way to our dorm."

Parker glanced between the two of them as they exchanged glances again, keeping him locked out of their private world as he always was. He may have bombed those homemade guess-the-card ESP tests like nobody's business, but his gut was telling him that something was off here. Either that, or that he was going to throw up blood when he got home from the sharp elbow to the stomach he'd received during his scuffle with Pond Scum. One of the two.

Other people's business had never been Parker's business, moral or otherwise, but something about this was rank. He had the feeling that he'd stumbled onto something forbidden to him and entirely apart from the quiet, mundane life that was Alma Tech. Call him a coward, call him an underachiever, but never call him a fool. Parker wanted out as quickly as possible.

He nodded mutely, and Elijah stood.

The closet door was opened to reveal total annihilation inside (Parker winced at the thought of Monday's cleanup), an unconscious figure was hefted onto the shoulders of Elijah and Pond Scum, and the three of them slipped through the series of doors from the library down to the dorms with Parker holding them open. No one spoke.

What would they say? They were all happy with the unspoken agreement of never speaking to each other again.

The end of the longest Friday night in memory seemed within Parker's grasp until the last leg of their journey. He yanked open the handle to Haskell Hall and gestured for them to enter. Relief was written across the faces of Elijah and Pond Scum as well as they staggered past him under the weight of their unconscious friend, and Parker mentally bid good riddance to bad rubbish.

Elijah turned to speak for the last time, and his eyes fixed on a point past Parker's shoulder. There was a ruckus going on back down the hall, consisting of several voices shouting in unison over the clattering and stomping that heralded the kind of drunks you didn't want to run into at night. As if the Psycho Safari hadn't already sated his thirst for adventure.

So much for goodbye, Parker thought. I could just run... they're already back...

Parker had no such opportunity. The first careened around the corner at a speed that almost carried him into the far wall, heedless of his own safety as he shouldered past without so much as an, "Out of my way, fuckers!"

The second and third runners were courteous enough to shout garbled insults as they sent Pond Scum sprawling, leaving Elijah to support his friend's bulk. Pond Scum had a few choice words of his own as he rose and took off after them, presumably to show them his chokehold technique out of nothing more than the goodness of his heart. Elijah began to stumble.

Parker moved instinctively to slip an arm around the unconscious young man still half-on Elijah's shoulder, and Elijah repaid him with a smile. This time, an honest one that reached the dark circles under his eyes.

Elijah's friend repaid him with his teeth in Parker's hand and a guttural snarl that said, "Tastes like chicken."

"Oh, fuck no." Parker said. He swung.