FSE

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Raz pulled the plastic booties on over his feet and took a couple steps. It reminded him of the padded booties he'd worn as an EMT, only lighter and more flimsy. The fox rubbed the fabric between his fingers, then reached around back to pull the tail flap around his bushy tail. It sealed at the top with a Velcro strip.

"Don't get your fur caught in the Velcro." His new boss, Kilik, a squat vulture with a thin neck and scarred beak, grinned at him from the protection of his own plastic suit.

"Yeah, yeah. I've worn suits before." Raz brushed a black paw over the plain plastic front of his suit. "Lost fur to Velcro, too."

"Soon's Brike gets here we can go." The vulture leaned against the big van, obscuring the "R" in "Recoveries." He tapped a wing against the metal, below the letters that read, since 1997. "You nervous?"

Cars roared by. Raz watched them go, not really looking. "Nah." The fox checked his pockets for his gloves.

"How's the foot?" Kilik asked.

"Fine." The fox pressed it down into the asphalt. Familiar pain tingled up through his pads and calf muscle. "Long as I don't have to run or do anything important."

"Sure, sure." The vulture's beak clacked. "Hey, there's Brike."

A black pickup pulled into the driveway next to the building and paused so a tall brown rat could wave at them. They waved back, and it bumped up over the ramp and disappeared behind the Recoveries offices. A few minutes later, the big rat hurried around the corner of the building, plastic booties shuffling along the ground. "I'm here, I'm here, let's go."

They piled into the van, Raz taking the back while Brike slid into the driver's seat. When Kilik had buckled himself into the front passenger side, they pulled out.

"You nervous?" Brike had a brash voice loud enough to make Raz's ears flick back.

"I'm fine," the fox said.

"Good." The rat turned back to the front. "So boss, tell us about this 'plague lab.' Sounds dicey."

Kilik brought up his tablet and scraped claws along the surface. "Basement, two rooms, up in Rahnsdorf."

"Rahnsdorf?" Brike whistled as he guided the van around a corner. "Don't get to go up there often. What the hell is a plague lab doing there?"

Kilik held up the tablet. "You remember that guy, Red March, the squirrel? Vicious Vixen picked him up last week?"

"That's his place? Ha! How 'bout that?" Brike called back to Raz. "Your first job's a super-villain."

"Great." Raz leaned his ear against the window and looked outside. "You guys do many super-villains?"

"This is only my third." Brike laughed. "This part of Berlin ain't really a hotbed of super-villainy."

"I like it that way," Kilik said. "I've done four since I started the company. Friend of mine does CTS decon down in Berlin proper, he gets a couple a year."

CTS Decon: Crime and Trauma Scene Decontamination. Glorified janitors: That's what he was now. Raz rubbed a paw along his plastic-suited leg. "I met Blink Coyote once," he said.

"Yeah?" Kilik didn't turn around.

"Bad traffic accident. We were first on the scene. He helped, teleported some of the people out of cars. And he stuck around after, shook everyone's paws, thanked us for doing the job we did."

"Cool." Brike chuckled. "The supers are long gone by the time we show up."

Raz fell quiet again, all the way out through the dirty brick industrial buildings and then past the big shopping mall, as the van wound its way through small houses and big parks and then past a few larger houses that each had a yard the size of a small park.

That stirred Raz's interest slightly. He hadn't had much call to come out here: rich people didn't have their accidents out in public. They had them in private and called discreet ambulance services and went to their own hospitals. He curled his tail up around his knees.

Houses rolled by, big three-story otter houses with the shimmering light of pools inside, sprawling two-story houses with big open rooms for wolves, quirky four-story houses with small windows that Raz knew would have hallways and narrow passages where foxes and weasels and martens would feel comfortable, and houses built with large trees poking out of the roof or forming a corner of the building.

It was by one of these that the van stopped, a stone house whose walls met three large oaks. Yellow police tape surrounded the rightmost tree and extended back around the side of the house, and a big plastic tarp stretched across the wide double front door. "Ginsterwäldchen-Straße 21. This is it." Brike put the van in Park.

"Yup." Kilik unbuckled his seat belt. "That's a squirrel house, all right."

They opened up the back of the van, and Raz hung back while the others grabbed their gear. "You're lucky," Brike said, passing Raz a biohazard helmet.

Raz snorted and laid his ears back, examining the filters, the thick plastic shields, the extended muzzle. It looked like a generic canid model, rather than the more expensive fox-specific model, which meant his ears would be cramped and his muzzle slightly too long. "Lucky? We're cleaning up a plague lab. Who knows what's in there?"

"Yeah, but it's just a super-villain lab. The supers got anything really bad out. We gotta be careful, but you won't have to sniff out body fluids, and we won't be scraping horrible stuff off the walls or sponging it up off the floor."

"And we can just do the cleaning," Kilik added. "No weepy relatives to coddle."

There it was. They'd talked to Raz a lot about his background dealing with people, and he'd gotten the impression that neither of them really liked it, mostly because they talked so much about how Chauncey, the armadillo who'd retired, had been great at putting people at ease.

They paraded up to the house with their biohazard gear, Raz pushing the big cart that held the cleaners and the buckets. At the plastic-tarped front door, Kilik pulled out his phone. "I called him from the van," the vulture muttered, and dug around in his pocket just as a red squirrel about twenty years older than Raz came running around the corner in a pale yellow collared shirt and corduroys.

"There you guys are!" He beckoned, his disheveled tail fluttering behind him. "You have to come around the back. Sorry. They won't rebuild the front door until the basement's cleaned up. I've been living in the treehouse out back."

Around the side of the house, the police tape proliferated, stretched across ground-floor windows, a wide perimeter from the corner tree to the stone corner in the back, and across a recessed stairway leading down into the ground. Raz's eyes rested on the stairs, the bright red and white tape across them. That's where they'd be going.

"You can get in and out through the back door, it leads to the kitchen and there's stairs, that's what the police used." The squirrel barely paused for breath. "All the food in the kitchen has to go, they told me that, even the Chanterey Walnut Paste. Can you believe it? That stuff costs eighty an ounce, it's in a sealed container, and we were living here the whole time, but now it's no good."

"Things might've spilled during the fight," Kilik said. They rounded the back corner of the house. The oak at the center of the back wall was larger than either of the two in the front, and up in its branches sat a neat little wooden frame house. In the back wall to the left of the oak, a single door with one strip of red and white tape across it waited.

Kilik ripped the tape off and let it fall to the ground. "Let's have the cart," he said, beckoning to Raz as he and Brike put their head coverings on. So the fox threw his on as well and fastened it, then pushed the cart up while Brike held the door, but as he was pushing the cart over the threshold, he turned his head to work one of his ears free of a fold in the plastic and paused for a moment.

The squirrel stood at the base of the tree, his paws clasped together. For the first time, Raz noticed that his shirt had been buttoned wrong, the top button hanging along on a corner of the collar while the second button had been fastened into the top buttonhole. He was breathing quickly, too, and his eyes were slightly wider than Raz thought were usual. It was easy to overlook stress in squirrels because of their natural excitability. Raz had learned not to do that.

"Hey, Brike," he called. "Can I stay out here and talk to this guy for a few minutes?"

The rat turned and held up a paw, then called ahead to Kilik. A moment later he turned back and made an "OK" sign with his paw, then held up all five fingers. "Five minutes," he called, and grabbed the front of the cart.

Raz stepped back and took his head covering off. "Hey," he said, "I know I don't have a name tag yet. It's my first day. I'm Raz."

"Oh, yeah," the squirrel said, his eyes flicking down to Raz's chest and then back up. "It's cool. I didn't notice. I'm, I'm, uh, Del. Del Masters."

"You were his...dad?"

The squirrel--Del--nodded. "Yeah, it was just me and him. His mom, uh, she left fifteen, sixteen years ago."

Raz waited. He could feel in his whiskers the words building up in the squirrel, and a moment later they burst out.

"Look, whatever you find in there, just..." Del wrung his paws.

"Is there anything you want out of there?"

"No. Maybe." The squirrel looked toward the back door and then down at the ground. "There's a microscope--he probably doesn't use it much anymore. I gave it to him for his birthday when he was ten."

"I'll keep an eye out for it." Raz put on his best smile. "And I'll tell the guys that whatever we can sterilize, we will. Then you can decide what you want to do with it."

"No," Del said again. "No, just--I just want the microscope. Anything else, I don't want it. I don't want to know about it."

"Okay. No problem, Mr. Masters."

Del looked him in the eyes. "How old are you?"

"I'm twenty-four."

"Been doing this long?"

"Uh." Raz's ear itched, but he'd trained himself to ignore itches when in his plastic gear. "This is my first time, but I was an EMT before that for four years."

"You just get tired of trauma?"

Raz shook his head. "No, sir. I slipped and landed on a piece of metal torn up from a car door. Angled just right, punched through the plastic and sliced up the back of my ankle."

Del winced. "Jesus."

"Partly severed tendon. I had to get surgery, stay off it for six months, crutches for three more, and now I can walk, but it'll probably always hurt. I can't be an EMT if my leg might give out at any moment." His foot throbbed. "But I can do this."

"Helping people." Del exhaled, and Raz caught the smell of acorn paste and bread. "Your parents must be proud of you."

The fox kept his ears upright--training, again, but for emotional safety rather than physical contaminant safety. "Actually, they wanted me to study finance."

Del watched him, waiting for him to say more. Raz rubbed one plastic-coated paw along his plastic suit. "I dropped out halfway through college. It wasn't the numbers, it was my classmates, everyone just out to make money, nothing about what to do with that money. Charity was a way to get out of taxes, philanthropy something you did when you had literally too much money to do anything else. I hated it." He bit off the rest of the rant; who knew if Mr. Masters was a stockbroker or something? "I mean, that was just me, but my mom is a VP at a bank and my other mom is an investment counselor." They'd wanted him to go finish his degree when he'd injured his foot, had paid for his surgery on that condition.

The squirrel didn't say anything right away, but when Raz didn't go on, he looked up at his house, and then back to Raz. "So they probably think this is like a slum or something."

"They live in Grunewald."

"Yup." Del looked again at his house.

Raz cleared his throat. "I like your house a lot. I live in the city. My apartment is about the size of that tarp on the front door."

The squirrel laughed, and Raz was pleased to see him relaxing. "I need to go in," he said, "but don't worry about it. We're going to get this all cleaned up in a day--two, tops--and I'll get that microscope for you."

"Thanks." Del shook his head, staring at the back door. "A super-villain. I still can't believe it. It just doesn't make any sense. That's..." Raz waited while the squirrel scraped for words. "It's just not this world."

"Well, uh." Raz pulled words back from his training. "You'll have your basement back and usable soon, and you can start to put this..." Not 'all behind you,' because his son was still alive and in jail. "Uh, into perspective, I guess? I don't know."

"Thanks again."

At least he'd calmed down the squirrel, and Raz found to his surprise that he felt good about that. He turned impulsively after a few steps to the squirrel, still staring at the back door, lost in thought. "Mr. Masters?"

"Oh." Del's eyes focused on him. "Hm?"

"If you want to talk about it...I mean, I know with friends and relatives, it can be difficult, but...you can call Recoveries and they'll give you my number. I'd be happy to sit down and meet you for a beer."

For the first time, the squirrel smiled what looked like a genuine smile. "Thanks. I might just take you up on that." He looked down at Raz's plastic booties. "You take care of that foot. Don't step on anything."

Raz nodded. "Thanks. It'll be fine. I mean...it hurts, but I can deal with it."

The squirrel smiled at him and walked back to his tree. Still, Raz tried not to limp as he crossed the back door and closed it behind him. His paw lingered on the door handle for a moment. These were still people here who needed help, who needed healing, and he could still help them. Maybe he wouldn't meet any superheroes, but in that moment, that didn't seem to matter so much.