A Love Story
#1 of Untitled
What follows is a love story:
The car pulls up to the curb, jerkily, as if Spence hasn't driven in a while. I can feel the sickness start to wash over me and I'm about to ask if I can switch, if he can go in and I'll drive. I stop when I realize that no matter which part I play in this operation, I'm still not going to enjoy it. Spence has said that the first five or six times, it's the hardest. I buck up and step out of the car, onto the pavement. I reach back in, grabbing the satchel that's on the passenger-side floormat, before closing the door.
It's hot and humid, the date is August 3rd. A breeze blows in my face as I'm walking up to the entrance, ruffling my headfur. I pat down my pockets and come up with only one bottle â€" orange, plastic, half-full of Haldol. It'll do, I think. I walk into the bathroom, regulating my breathing, taking long, even strides â€" not too fast! They'll catch on, reveal your shuck â€" and stand over the sink. There's one other fur in there, and I figure he's either homeless or getting there, because who the hell else is in a library at 3 in the afternoon on a weekday? I wait for him to leave so I can be alone while I prepare. He leaves, unsteadily, and I reflect on how sad and fucked up a fur's life must be, drunk in a library with no job (presumably). I go into the stall and sit down without removing my pants. I shake out two of the haloperidol capsules and toss them down my throat. There. Now that that's done, I get back up. I'm walking towards the door, my shoes sticking to the tile floor apparently due to some sort of cleaning product that's reacted with the vile combination of urine and vomit there. I'm breathing heavily again, my panting echoing off of the tile walls, creating an ethereal sort of effect. I turn towards the mirror again, thinking I might throw up. One sick kitty is staring back at me. He's twentyfiveish, but the dark rings under his eyes, caused by lack of sleep and severe anxiety, make him look older. His paws are shaking so hard that he has to grip the fucking sink to keep still. His eyes are crazy, yes, but caring. He is not a sociopath but perhaps a classic paranoid schizophrenic. He's a fucking weakling. He's a worthless piece of garbage with no purpose to his life. He should kill himself as soon as possible, just because the world would be so much better without his contaminating presence. He's a fucking idiot, and a psychopath to boot. Maybe he doesn't know why he's doing this, causing all this mayhem.
Maybe he just thinks it's fun.
I shake my head and turn from the mirror and these morbid thoughts. The door is less than 5 paces away, but something's holding me back. For a second, a very frightening second, I start to think about what I'm doing. Then, I mutter ‘fuck it' under my breath and walk out into the library. I'm walking into the library, which is, like most others, just a large room with no doors but plenty of doorways. I pretend to browse the shelves, looking for a book, until I'm in an ignored corner of the library. Nobody is here and it's out of sight of the librarians and other staff. I drop the satchel on a bookshelf and start walking away. I am almost to the circulation desk before I realize I am walking far too fast, nearly jogging. I slow down just in time to avoid detection. I'm walking out when I pass a fire alarm. It's not too late to stop it, not too late to pull the alarm, not too late to save lives. I walk past it, out into the muggy summer air. The car is where it was, idling. Spence is sitting in the drivers seat, smoking and cleaning out under his claws with a combat knife. His cigarette is halfway gone but still has a long cylinder of ash on the end. I'm surprised it hasn't fallen off yet. Almost as I think this, Spence turns toward me and all the ash falls in his lap. He looks down and brushes it off, then looks back up at me questioningly. I nod and climb into the passenger seat. The car is completely nondescript, a dark grey Jeep. Spence drives off, far too fast for the small-town road.
"Slow down, please."
"Why?"
"Because, it wouldn't do to get pulled over. You've been doing this longer than me, I'd think you'd know that."
He says nothing but slows to a reasonable speed. He's driving with just one paw, the other alternately hanging out the window and moving to his face to smoke.
"That reminds me," he says. "Do you want to do the honors?" He pulls a cell phone out of his pocket and hands it to me.
"Sure." I feel a little more relaxed and assume it's the antipsychotics finally kicking in. I flip open the cell phone and navigate in the contacts to "Janice". The name is a ruse, a rudimentary disguise of the true nature of this number. I ask how far we are from the library. Spence says, "Far enough."
I hit the send key and bring the phone to my ear.
Ring.
Ring.
The cell phone in the satchel rings, sending an electrical impulse down the wires attatched to it, into the other end of the wires which are jammed into 15 pounds of C-4 plastic explosive.
The explosion is awesome in the old sense of the word, meaning "inspiring wonder or excitement". The shock wave, it seems, actually affects the movement of the car, shooting us forward a little bit. The noise is terrific, and I shut my eyes and wait for it to be over. It finally is, and Spence speeds up to keep up with traffic which is moving away from the blast.
"How many furs," he says, "do you think were in that library?"
"About 20," I say.
"Describe one you saw."
"Umm...okay. There was one, a fox, about 30, maybe. As tall as me, a little more muscular."
"He's dead now. You killed him." Spence stubs out his cigarette.
His words thrill me and I close my eyes and exhale.
"Can I have one?" I ask.
He hands me a single Marlboro and a book of matches. I light up and we drive away, listening to fallout hit the road.
Spence picked me up a month ago when I was hitchhiking home from a failed job in Wisconsin. I was on a deserted road in Wyoming, walking and looking for a place to sleep. I heard a car coming and stuck my paw out in the ISL for "pick me up please". The brights were on and didn't dim when he saw me so I assumed he was like just about everyone who passed me and didn't give a damn. He slowed though, and opened the door. My first impression of Spence was a good one; the wolf was dressed well although I couldn't identify his suit's designer. His tie was the same color as his fur, a dark grey. The car was new. I hopped in, although I had a butterfly knife in my pocket. You can't be too careful. He asked where I was going. I said Idaho. We started driving and were silent for maybe 20 minutes. I was considering saying something, but then he beat me to it.
"You know," he said, "I'm going to make a couple of informed guesses about you."
"Huh?"
"I'm guessing," he continued, without pausing to acknowledge me, "that you never really ‘got your life together', so to speak. I think that your problem is, you never really realized your potential as a beautiful, unique creation of God."
I sighed inwardly and a little bit outwardly as well. "Look, if you're going to preach to me I'm gonna have to ask you to let me out."
He looked at me briefly before returning his attention to the road. "Oh, no, please, I'm not a religious man. I'm not here to convert you or to preach the word of some god or another. All I'm saying is that you are beautiful and unique, just by virtue of being here."
The conversation was starting to sketch me out. I moved my paw towards my pocket, trying to cover it up by shifting my weight.
"I think the reason for that is, you never had a frame of reference â€" you've always been this alive, so it's nothing special for you."
I slipped my paw into my pocket and fingered the butterfly. He chuckled and said, "Okay, I'll make you a deal. You don't stab me and I'll stop talking."
I took my paw out of my pocket.
We drove that way, in silence, for about an hour. On the outskirts of a tiny town, he pulled into an empty parking lot. My paw instantly went for the knife. In a practiced-looking motion, he leaned over and broke my wrist in more than one place. I instantly started screaming, scrabbling for the door handle but just injuring myself more in the process. Finally the pain became such that I stopped screaming, too overwhelmed with pain to summon the effort. A while passed in silence. I couldn't think of anything appropriate to say for the situation, so I just started screaming again. The wolf reached behind his seat and brought up a small leather bag. He took out a pistol, matte black plastic, and a metal silencer he attached to the end.
"Now, I don't want you to scream anymore," he said. I stopped, eying the gun, breathing heavily through my nose.
"The pain's bad now, I can tell." I just nodded. "Now relax," he continued. "I'm not going to kill you, not unless you want me to. I want you to just think for a minute. How did you start today?"
It was a minute before I felt courageous enough to talk. "I was in a hostel in Casper."
"Right, okay. You've just been hitchhiking today?" I nodded.
"No offense, but it kind of shows," the wolf said, looking at my beat-up coat, pants, and pack dubiously. "How did you feel, hitchhiking?"
"Okay, I guess." I was still looking for a way to get out of the car and away from this psycho without getting shot.
"Okay? That's it? Just okay? Not morose, not bubbly, not talkative, not down? Just okay?"
I started to cry under the pressure of his rapid, interrogative sentences. "Just okay..."
He seemed to consider this for a second. "Alright. Now consider the last...three minutes. How have you felt in the last three minutes, since I broke your wrist?"
I was taken aback. I would think that would be obvious. "Scared. I don't want to die, please don't kill me."
He lost his temper. "Jesus! I already said I'm not going to kill you! Were you not listening, you stupid motherfucker?!" He started waving the gun around.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," I said, crying, cringing as far away from him as I could get in the confines of the front of the car.
He took a few deep breaths. "Okay. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have yelled at you like that. I just get...worked up when furs I meet say that. So many furs are so concerned about dying, they forget to really live." He smiled at me. "Cliche, but true. Okay, moving on. So. Scared, in pain, desperate, anything else?" It took me a moment to think back to what we were talking about before he started shouting. The pain that had taken hold of my right paw was making a coherent train of thought near impossible. "Well, kind of...dreamy..." I stopped, gaging his reaction. He just smiled and motioned with the barrel of the gun to continue. "It reminds me of..." He nodded. I had a feeling he wasn't going to like what I had to say. "It reminds me of being on drugs."
To my surprise, he laughed. "And do you like being on drugs? Does it feel good?"
"Yes?" I phrased it like a question, in case he was trying to trick me.
"So, you feel like you are on drugs and you like being on drugs. Therefore, you like how you feel, yes?" I was so surprised at this logical step, I answered truthfully. "Yes."
He laughed again and tweaked my broken paw. I screamed in spite of his orders. He just kept laughing. "There you go!" he forced out between bursts of hearty laughter. "You'll thank me for that one later!"
I calmed down a little, stopped screaming, and started crying again.
"Now," the wolf said over the sound of my sobs, "I should introduce myself. I am Spencer Platt. You may call me Spence. And you are?"
I swallowed my tears and gave my name. "A pleasure," said Spence. "We should probably get you to a hospital."
After my first library job in Minnesota, we drive around the Midwest aimlessly for a while before heading out to California. In Cali, we stop at a hotel in Anaheim for a few days so we can catalogue our supplies and see what we need. We each carry 2 big suitcases up to our room, even though we only ever pack 2 changes of clothes each, plus bare toiletries. The rest of the suitcases are filled with weapons, cash, drugs, and various lockpicks, slimjims, freon canisters, hammers, and explosives. I'm checking how much explosive we have compared to how much we had a month ago, and writing the figures down on a scrap of paper. Spence is reclining on the bed watching a porno.
"We have 3 pounds of C-4," I say.
Spence mutes the TV and rolls to face me. "Only 3? How much did you use in the library?"
I thrill a little at the words, even though a week has passed since I claimed about 20 lives in the explosion. "Fifteen."
He looks a little bit irked. "I told you ten."
"I wanted to be sure."
He sighs. "Alright, we'll have to get some more. Hang on." He picks up the phone and starts dialing. I start watching the movie on the TV while he's talking. After about twenty minutes, he hangs up, then calls someone else, speaking in rapid French this time. After only a minute or two he hangs up and says sourly, "300 dollars per pound. How much money do we have?"
"Eight thousand, nine hundred and seventy-two dollars."
Spence looks pleasantly surprised. "Well, that's not so bad then."
I nod and look at the clock. 11:20 PM. "Well, what time are we getting the C4?"
"Should be about 2 in the afternoon. You want to have lunch at this guy's house? They're from New Orleans, this fur and his wife, and they make the best catfish you'll ever have."
"Yeah, sure."
"Alright, it's a date. Now, let's have a little nap, and then we're going to go out and have some fun."
We wake up at about seven in the evening, then sit for an hour trying to think of something to do tonight. After a while, Spence speaks up.
"Well...I've got an idea, but it's pretty extreme."
"What is it?" I'm intrigued; I've never heard Spence without confidence in his voice.
"You're not gonna like it."
"Tell me anyway."
He stands up and lights a cigarette right next to the prominent 'NO SMOKING' sign in English and Spanish. "You've killed furs before." I savor the words. "But it's been impersonal, done from a mile away with a phone call. You've never really felt what it's like to take the life of a fellow being. You've felt it intellectually, not viscerally."
"So?"
"So, we should go out and find somebody to kill. Do it one on one."
At first, Spence is right. I'm repulsed by the idea. But then, as I start to think about it, I realize it's not such a stretch. Honestly, I wouldn't be doing the whole cross-country destruction spree if I wasn't going to see it through to the end. Logically, I suppose I'd been expecting this. Besides, there were plenty of bad furs out there I could waste. It didn't have to be Mother Teresa.
"Okay. Okay, let's do it."
Spence breaks into a beam. "That's my boy."
We cruise around for a while, looking for a good target. All the while, I feel drunk. The feeling of looking at furs and deciding whether or not they live or die is, in a word, intoxicating. After another hour of cruising around, when all light is gone from the sky, we finally stumble upon the perfect mark.
This fur, a tall, lanky drink-of-water dog, has several things about him that make him worthy of murder. One, he's on his own in this neighborhood after dark. That speaks to general stupidity. Two, he's drinking straight from a pint of whiskey. So no self-control. We stop the car and I jump out and hit him, hard, on the back of the head â€" really hard - with a tire iron. Three, he's carrying a bunch of tracts with him, and when I pick one of them up I realize it reads "God Hates Fags" in bold letters. So he's a bigot. I laugh, quietly, to myself. We literally could not have picked a better fur to take off the face of the earth. Spence gets out of the Jeep and helps me pick him up to put in the back.
He comes to at just the right time, about a minute after we've finished duct-taping him to a chair in this abandoned warehouse on the edges of the city. He tries to scream against his gag. All this was my idea, by the way. Spence was all for shooting the poor motherfucker while he was unconscious, but I'd grown steadily more enthusiastic about the idea of seeing the life go out of his eyes. I've discovered a passion for murder in myself. First off, I pick up the tire iron and deliver a carefully calculated blow to his throat. It's done beautifully â€" it's bound to make him raspy without rupturing his windpipe and killing him. I tear out the gag.
"Please...please, I have a...family..." It clearly hurts him to speak.
"Yes, most of us do," Spence says pleasantly.
"Do you have anything you'd like to say before you die?" I ask, matching Spence's tone.
Clearly, this is where the full gravity of the situation sinks in for our prize. He's driven mute by the realization, and just starts shaking his head madly.
I hit him in the face, open-pawed. Just like in the movies, where the handsome lead strikes the hysterical dame, he shuts up.
"Think about it," I say. "Most furs die in their sleep, or they get hit by a bus or something. Not many get to choose their last words. I'll even let you think about it for a little while."
Spence and I fall silent and smoke. The dog starts pleading for his life, but we don't listen. I crush my butt under my shoe and start talking again.
"Look, I realize it's pretty much reflexive to beg for your life. I've been in your position before. But you have to know â€" not say, know â€" that you will not live out the night. Now, have you given any though to your last words?" He just shakes his head some more. I get tired of it and shoot him between the eyes, with the matte-black Colt Python .357 that is Spence's favorite handgun. The exit wound is really messy, nauseatingly so. I turn away from it, this 'it' that was a living, breathing fur 10 seconds ago, and walk over to the pile of his clothes and personal effects we removed from him before securing him to the chair.
"Who was he?" Spence asks.
I pull his California driver's license out of his wallet.
"Halstead, Daniel Raymond."
The thrill and horror and banality of my act overcomes me, and I lean over and vomit on the floor.
The ride back to the hotel is silent except for a radio that, fittingly, plays Simon and Garfunkel's 'The Sound of Silence'. I can feel tears rolling down my cheeks, making shiny wet trails in my fur. I'm not crying for Halstead, Daniel Raymond, because he seemed like a bastard, and I'm not crying for myself. I'm crying mostly because I know, in my heart as well as my mind, that the enormity of this deed has gone more or less unnoticed by the universe.
Back at the hotel, we decide to call it a night. I'm still a little numb from my first personal murder, and I find against all my expectations that I can't sleep. I can tell, from the sounds of tossing and turning in the next bed, that Spence can't either. Finally, after nearly an hour of silence, I ask, "Why do you do what you do?"
It's quiet for a minute. Spence's bedside lamp goes on in a sudden flare, and I shield my eyes and cringe into the pillow. The handsome wolf is propped up on an elbow, the inadequate hotel comforter bunched around his waist. He's looking at me for a minute then he says, "Tell you what. You tell me, then I'll tell you."
I grin. "That's so not fair. I asked first."
"Just do it." He's grinning back at me.
"Okay...well, here goes. I've actually been thinking about this for a while, so I've got a speech ready and everything. The thing is, self-betterment has become so ingrained in us, in furs in general. All of us are striving for the bigger house, the faster car, the higher-paying job. It takes work to ignore this instinct. I just think that...in the end, self-destruction is nobler than self-improvement. And you know, self-destruction is the only way this can end. We're wanted by the FBI. Once they work out the fact the same furs did the library bombing in Minnesota and the other library bombings elsewhere and all the other shit we've done, they'll have the National goddamn Guard after us."
Spence nods. "So you do all this because it seems more noble to you?"
I nod back. "Turnabout's fair play. Why do you do this?"
He laughs, surprisingly hard. I'm bewildered. Eventually, he regains control of himself and says, "I don't have a reason. It's just fucking fun. Honestly, these last few weeks with you have been the most fun of my life."
That makes me feel good. "Thanks," I say, genuinely touched.
"Hey, no worries."
He lies down and is about to turn off the light when I burst out, "Why me?"
His paw freezes on the black power knob. He looks at me, openly, for a moment.
"What do you mean?" he says, slowly.
"I mean, you know as well as I do there's no way out now. From what you've told me, you were leading a successful, rewarding life as a career criminal before you picked me up. Why throw it all away?"
He sighs, scoots over in his bed and pats the now-empty space beside him. Now I'm really confused, but I don't think I've ever disobeyed an order, direct or implied, from Spence. I get up and switch over to his bed and lie on my side, facing him. He gets up, opens the curtains, then gets back in the bed and says, "Shut off the lights." I do.
The full moon streams in the window, backlighting the wolf so all I can see is his silhouette. He's quiet for a moment, but I don't push the matter.
"You remember the night I picked you up, right?"
"Vividly," I chuckle.
"Originally, I had planned to just kill you and dump you in a ditch somewhere. But there was....I saw potential in you. And more than that, I saw a kindred spirit. It was a split-second decision, but I let you live, just to see where it would go. And you lived up to my expectations, and then some. You've...you're....would you believe you're the first real friend I've ever had?" He's crying now, his voice husky. I'm stunned. I've never seen the wolf display much emotion before. I hug him before I even think about it, just wanting to comfort him, make him stop crying. He hugs me back. "Shh...look, I'm flattered. But..."
"But what?"
"No, it's nothing. Forget it." I break the embrace. My voice sounds flat and unconvincing, even to me. It's painfully obvious I want him to pursue the matter.
"Tell me."
"No."
Spence produces a handgun from God knows where, probably under his pillow. He jams it in my mouth.
"Tell me," he growls. I can't tell which gun it is until I start running my tongue around it, trying to tell the shape of the barrel. Square, barrel in the center, flush with the front, gets wider at the bottom towards the trigger guard: it's the Glock 17. At this range, a 9mm parabellum round like in the Glock would have quite a bit of bounce and turn, probably turn my medulla oblongata into mush before a hundredth of a second had passed. I use my tongue to force the gun into my cheek and say, "Take the gun out of my mouth and I will."
He does. "So, what's on your mind?" he asks jovially. I can still hear tears in his voice, though.
"It's just...you don't do that, don't consciously shorten your life for any friend. That's something more like...well, like love." He moves, violently, in the bed, and for a terrifying fraction of a second I'm positive he's going to blow my brains out just for questioning his masculinity.
Instead, he kisses me.
It's the first time I've ever kissed a male. I hear the thump of Spence tossing the handgun to the floor, and then he's on top of me, bearing down on my muzzle like it's the only thing in the world for him. His tongue hits mine, starts playing with it. Eventually, he extricates himself and says the words I've been wanting to hear from him, really, from day one.
"I love you."
"I love you too," I say. I hadn't even thought about the matter, honestly, until now. I knew I wanted him to love me, I just wasn't sure if I loved him back. As soon as I say it, though, I know it's true.
"Will you...hell, will you have sex with me? I'll understand if the idea isn't..." He trails off. It's touching, really: I've never seen Spence this open, this trusting. The idea that I could have spawned such a reaction is even more of a turn-on than Spence's (admittedly spectacular) body. As a response to his question, I reach down and pull off his boxers, running my paw over his malehood briefly. He shudders, then kisses me again, manic. I remove my own undergarments, the brush of cotton-poly against my barbed cock making me moan slightly into Spence's mouth. He reaches one of his paws down from where it was next to my head, and wraps it around me, running a claw around the head and eliciting another moan.
"Mmmm...kitty like?"
I laugh and respond affirmatively. As a response, he starts stroking, pressing his muzzle to mine again. I get so lost in the sensation, I stop him just before the point of no return, a second before I would have gone over the edge and shot my load into his paw.
I have to give myself a second to return from the brink of orgasm, then I ask him, "Are you top or bottom?"
He get off of me, and we're facing each other on our sides again. "I'm flexible. Yourself?"
I don't answer, just prop myself on my paws and knees and shove my ass in the air, lifting my tail. Spence chuckles.
"Are you sure you want to do this? It's kind of a painful experience if â€" wait, is this your first time?"
He guessed right. I'm a virgin. I nod anyways. I'm prepared to put up with pain if it means I can feel Spence inside me.
"Okay."
He positions himself above me, and I can feel the tip of his meat pressing against my tailhole. A thought strikes me and I say, "Wait a second." I reach over and turn on the light, then turn around to look at Spence. As soon as I see his cock, I nearly faint. Fully engorged, it's about nine inches long and ridiculously thick. I sigh, preparing myself for more pain than I had anticipated. He reads me. "I don't want you to do this if you're not sure-"
"I'm sure," I say.
A very, well, wolfish grin appears on his face and he says "Don't interrupt me, you little bitch." He grabs my hips and effortlessly shoves me up against the headboard, positioning me for his entrance. I reach over to turn the lamp back off but Spence says "Leave it on," so I do. His paws still on my hips, he starts to draw me toward him, slowly but surely. I gasp and muffle a scream as the first inch slides inside me, violating my hitherto unviolated tail. With the devilish grin still stretching his muzzle, he starts to pump, moving that first inch in and out of me. Every time, I gasp. As soon as my gasps assume a different, more sensual tone, he pushes in a little further, bringing all the pain that had dissolved back. After 15 minutes of this, he's pumping his full length in and out of me, and I'm loving it. My gasps and small noises of pain have been replaced by moans and outright screams of pleasure. Spence bends over to kiss me, humping all the while. As soon as his lips meet mine, I orgasm, spraying cum on both our stomachs and chests. My tailhole clenches reflexively, and Spence drives his knot into me, howling with his climax and his conquest. He collapses on top of me and whispers, "I love you," into my sensitive feline ears. We fall asleep like that, him tied into me, and me whispering softly, "I love you too."
-To be continued-