The cat, the rat and the archer, a Savage the tiger story
Second of the Savage stories. Savage and The Rat meet again, and Savage contends with his self proclaimed arch-enemy. There's a certain amount of fairly mild scat content at the end.
The cat, the rat and the archer
A "Savage" superhero vore story
By Strega
It was the sixth night of the stakeout, and the archer almost didn't notice the tiger was there.
He had placed three motion-activated cameras on light poles in the parking lot while undercover as the electrician. Five more on the west side of the building, looking down on the river. He'd reasoned that the tiger almost certainly swam the river to get to the meat packing plant, since the only other way in was a covered bridge. From previous experience he knew how cautious Savage was in enclosed spaces like that. He'd even put a vibration sensor on the roof of the bridge itself, though he was pretty sure the wooden paneling wouldn't support a twenty-foot-long, one and a half ton tiger. It proved almost useless in any case, as every passing car triggered both it and the camera looking into the open end of the bridge. He had two DVRs full of camera footage of cars.
He didn't dare put down actual tripwires or ground-level sensors, because just one of those would alert Savage that something was up. He had to rely on the cameras, and even with eight of them, he would have missed the tiger entirely had the barrel itself not moved and triggered the camera.
The Black Bowman dropped his book and leaned in close to the monitor. The barrel moved again, and the top of it blurred. When the blur cleared, the level of bones in it was visibly lower.
Damn, the tiger's camouflage was good! He darted into the next room and shut the door, leaving himself in complete darkness. Only then did he take the patch off his right eye and raise the blinds.
The barrel was near the one light on the river side of the plant. The moon was up, but passing behind clouds, and there was no sign of activity. On a table next to the window were two pairs of binoculars. The first one didn't show him anything, but when he switched to the infrared ones he saw some interesting things indeed.
It seemed that Savage's adaptive camouflage was not perfect, not in the infrared anyway. Hot slits of eyes appeared and disappeared as the tiger turned its head, and a boomerang-shaped nose pad glowed. Occasionally there was a lava-like flick of hot tongue or a glimpse of flesh-hot maw as the big cat crunched up the bones.
The bowman watched Savage eat, and thought. His compound bow was next to the window, with a quiver of barbed arrows and half a dozen "special" ones. From here he could put a shaft into the tiger's tough hide...but he'd only get one hit. A hit in the eye might kill the cat, but only if it went right through the brain. Maybe even not then. The special arrows included shafts packed feathers to tip with plastic explosives. One of those would blow a man apart, but he'd hit Savage with those before and while they hurt the big cat, it was little more than an annoyance. And the last time he'd merely annoyed Savage he'd ended up in the hospital. The big cat had come through a dozen traps, taken half a dozen arrows, and then beaten him to a pulp. His knee still hurt when the weather changed.
Forty years ago there would have been security guards at the meat packing plant. There'd have been more lights in the parking lot, and more lights out back where the camouflaged tiger lurked in the shadows. This old fire station tower, so disused he'd had to run new wiring, would have been manned and ready to respond to emergencies. Back when there were only a few heroes, men had to rely on each other. Not on heroes to save them every time a fire broke out, every time a crime occurred. A few heroes was not so bad: the bowman didn't begrudge Sovereign or the Ragman their places in history.
These days there seemed to be a hero on every block. Even the Olympics hardly seemed to matter any more, with so many supers on the news capable of feats no human could match. Heroes were destroying Man's belief in himself, his self-reliance.
He couldn't do anything about the big names, the teams of heroes. But he could do something about Savage. It was time to think outside the box.
Savage wasn't very hungry and took his time with the bones, licking the meat off with his broad raspy tongue then cracking them to get at the marrow. If he'd been in a hurry he could have emptied the barrel in one or two gulps. Bone, like metal or even stone, was not immune to the powerful acids he could produce in his gut. It was just that there there weren't many calories to be had from such food. Most of the actual sustenance he got from this meal was from the meat and marrow. Tonight he was merely here for a snack.
Two nights before a policeman had heard a roof creak beneath his tread and called up to him. A pack of feral dogs near the river had attacked two people the night before. Animal control was going to be called, and with such vicious animals it was unlikely any would be put up for adoption. The policeman opined that it'd be better if animal control didn't have to be called at all.
"I'll see what I can do," he'd rumbled from the roof.
He had already known about the pack and had picked off a dog or two on hungry nights, but now he had a reason to deal with them all at once. They slept in a disused dock building, the same building that had been used by a gang a couple of years before. When the pack was out scavenging he'd picked up a rusted-out car in his jaws and blocked the back entrance. Then it was just a matter of waiting for them to return.
It was the biggest meal he'd had in a year. One of the smaller dogs managed to squeeze out past the car, but the others, some the size of German shepherds, were cornered and fought. One by one and in pairs and trios they snarled and leapt at him, to be crushed beneath his paws or snapped up and swallowed alive. Eleven of the twelve dogs ended up in his bulging belly, some still yelping and squirming, and he'd uttered a resounding belch and curled up to sleep it off. Two days later he was still barely interested in food.
He cracked the last bone and took his time licking out the marrow. He had friends here at the plant, thus the bones, but it was not the only one reason he came here. Sooner or later someone would talk, and someone would try to ambush him here. It might be a gang, or it might be a villain. Sooner or later, though, and it'd save him the trouble of hunting them down. But apparently not tonight.
With a lazy stretch he rose to his feet and padded downslope to the river. Time to go back on patrol. As he swam he let his energy-intensive adaptive camouflage drop and took on a mottled gray pattern, to blend with the water. The river was a quarter mile wide here, but tigers are strong swimmers.
The Rat was fighting Brass Monkey. It was an unfair fight. Rat was a Were, with enhanced strength and durability to go with his claws and chisel teeth. Brass Monkey's armor protected him from most anything Rat could do, and his mechanically augmented strength was at least twice that of his opponent. Throw in a telescoping metal staff, whipping cybernetic tail and formidable martial arts skill and it was a bad match up for The Rat.
The Rat danced in close enough to land a clawed swipe from time to time, but it just scratched the brass armor, and each time the spinning staff or a swipe of Monkey's tail drove him back. Finally he dodged a hair too slowly, and Brass Monkey reached out to tap him firmly on the shoulder with the tip of the staff. The capacitors in the staff discharged several thousand volts through the two prongs on the tip, and thus through Rat, blowing him through the wall of the jewelry store he'd been protecting. He was only out for a few seconds, but by the time he staggered to his feet, fur standing out in all directions, the monkey was gone.
"Sorry," he muttered over his shoulder to the proprietor, who just glared. At least Brass Monkey hadn't had time to rob the place, but that didn't seem to matter. Rat picked a shard of glass out of his hip - he'd gone through the plate glass window too -- and practically ran up a wall, claws finding purchase in the gaps between the bricks. A few people in the crowd that'd gathered to watch the fight laughed.
Five stories over their heads The Rat sat on the corner of the roof and cursed. His team, the Four, hadn't exactly broken up, but there were cracks forming. Rat had said something he shouldn't have about the night the Professor disappeared, and Stature and Chill had come to suspect that there was something he and Doomknight weren't telling them. The resulting series of arguments had led the two to decide they needed some time off. Last he heard, they were in Europe. Doomknight was off sulking somewhere. The Rat picked splinters of glass out of his fur as his fast healing expelled them from his flesh, and wondered when he would see them all again.
He realized he smelled a cat. More properly, he smelled Savage. The huge tiger's odor was strong here, and glancing around he saw that this patch of roof was just large enough for Savage to stretch out on to watch the street below. He knew the cat followed regular paths across the rooftops, roofs chosen for their ability to support his weight, and there were also places where the tiger merely sat and watched.
Then he realized the smell was too strong. He turned to see the enormous tiger fading into view, not five feet away.
"Jesus! How did you sneak up on me?"
Savage assumed his his rarely seen natural color pattern, orange and cream with black stripes. It was much more common to see him gray with irregular darker blotches, as though he were draped in urban camouflage. Of course, that was exactly what it was. When he really needed to be stealthy he would shimmer in and out of visibility, fur taking on the patterns and colors of objects behind him. He couldn't actually emit light, though, so he always cast a shadow and would be silhouetted against a bright background. That was why he was almost never active during the day. He was a night walker, a huge friendly stalker of the night. Friendly if you were on the right side, anyway.
"I didn't," he rumbled, and chuckled low in his chest. "I was watching you fight. There was no place to drop down and help, the crowd was too thick."
The Rat got a glimpse into his mouth as he spoke and had to look away. He'd had...thoughts...since he saw the Professor and Sidle disappear into that maw. "He got away. I can't get past that armor of his."
"You kept him from robbing the store. It's good enough." Savage's ears swiveled to and fro, and The Rat's ears too picked up a distant siren. "You know, you have hands. There's no reason you couldn't get a utility belt, carry some gear to help you deal with guys like Monkey."
Savage could have hands too, but he didn't seem to like his ogre-sized tiger-man form. Rat remembered hearing him say that standing upright made his back hurt. "That's an idea. Say, have you thought about what I said? Bandit says he might be interested."
"Too similar," Savage rumbled. "Our powers are too similar. Bandit has some tech gear, but mostly he's a were-raccoon, as you are a were-rat. A good team should have a variety of powers. We wouldn't have a flier, no one who's really invulnerable, no ranged attacks."
"Well, Bandit was thinking of doing more tech stuff. He's really good with machines. He said something about riding on your back manning a cannon or something."
"Hrrrrm." Savage thought. "Cute idea. That could work. He might get squished if I have a building fall on me, though."
"We can take it. We Weres are as tough as you are. Did you know he got eaten last year?"
"Eaten?" Savage flicked his whiskers, his equivalent of a sly smile. "It wasn't me."
The Rat chuckled. "No, it was Cretaceous Sam's T-Rex. Bandit was trying to wrestle him out of that howdah on the Rex's back and it swallowed him whole. It managed to digest him, but he, er, regenerated back afterward. From the...residue."
"Heh, heh." Savage actually grinned. "You Weres are sturdy. You have magic on your side. Me, I was just made to be tough."
"The Chinese did a good job." The Rat was fishing. No one was sure who had made Savage.
"Mmm." The siren in the distance had been joined by a second. "Shall we patrol together tonight? You can ride on my back if you like."
"Sure." The Rat scrambled up on the massive tiger's back, gripping the fur to hang on. "You just need a saddle, is all."
"Don't push your luck," the tiger said over his shoulder s he cleared fifty feet to the next building. A few norms who were still looking up cheered as they saw the giant tiger pass by overhead.
*****
The Black Bowman unlocked the last padlock on the storage container and pulled the door open. The hinges needed oil. He hadn't been here in months, not since he escaped from prison the last time.
He was a professional archer, and his powers suited that perfectly. He could shoot or throw with deadly accuracy and his vision was unmatched. He could, and had, put an arrow right into the barrel of a policeman's gun. His stock of arrows ranged from barbed, to explosive, to Taser-tipped, to drugged and poisoned. He had wire-trailing arrows that let him scale buildings. He could sense when he was being watched. On top of all that he was tough. Even without the black Kevlar suit he could soak up a few bullets and only get bruised.
But arrows were sometimes not enough. One side of the container was all traps. Bear traps, snares, boxes of homemade caltrops, and custom-built traps, some with jaws big enough to encircle a man's waist...or a giant tiger's ankle. He did not turn to that side of the container, but to the other.
When he wasn't fighting heroes he did vigilante work, for violent criminals were as disruptive to society as the heroes themselves. He captured mundane weapons from the criminals and the odd hero or villain, and here on floor to ceiling shelves was his collection. He opened a case and took out a sniper rifle, Yugoslav-built, and checked the action. Then he put it back in its place on the shelf. It would not hit significantly harder than his bow, and its sound would give him away.
Also on the shelves were tournament-quality target pistols and various single-shot and semiautomatic rifles, the best he had acquired over the years. The archer took out of their cases one after another and put them back after a moment's thought. Eventually he had worked his way to the end of the container, and leaning in the corner was a weapon he though he'd never want to use. It was a felony just to have it in his possession, but if he wanted to kill a giant tiger as tough as a tank, a Dragon anti-tank missile launcher might be just the tool.
In a case to the right were three missiles for the launcher, and in the cardboard boxes next to that were more weapons he never thought he'd use. He rubbed the dust off the curved side of one, exposing the stenciled writing.
Front Toward Enemy.
*****
Two days later The Rat and Savage were patrolling together again. Riding on the tiger's back took getting used to - the bounding gait and huge leaps could be nausea inducing -- so Rat alternated that with loping alongside the big cat. Savage moved with spooky speed and grace for such a huge creature, and he could leap much farther than Rat. Sometimes me made a game of it, racing ahead and then seeing how long he could keep The Rat from finding him. It was remarkably hard to spot the huge cat when he was still and had altered his coloration to blend in with the background. Sometimes it was only his scent that gave him away.
"Yes," Savage rumbled when The Rat mentioned this to him. "There is only so much I can do. My fur has to stay clean so my color changing can work, and I can't just change my scent. Sometimes I roll in local garbage if I am hunting someone with enhanced senses, but then that works against me if I go somewhere where garbage is out of place."
"I talked to Bandit again," The Rat said. "He says he was working with Archimedes Junior again. They picked up a force field generator off Tanker when they captured her last week. It's too bulky for us to use unless we put it on a car or something, but it could project a field over your whole body, keep out gas and give you some additional protection. Maybe it could keep your scent in too."
"As long as it didn't --" Savage said, and then the roof blew up. He had just leapt across a thirty-foot gap in the streets onto an abandoned mechanic's shop. The roof was littered with rusty old toolboxes and one of them, one big enough to hold a whole tool set, went up with a flash and roar just as he was about to leap off the far side.
The Rat was a building behind the tiger and even there the shock wave blew him backwards. It threw Savage sideways and right off the roof. The concussion and fragments tore off his right ear and blinded the eye on that side, but stunned as he was he twisted in midair and landed on his paws, three stories down. He landed in an alley liberally strewn with caltrops.
Savage let out an agonized roar as the spikes pierced three of his paws. There was blood all along his right side where shrapnel had cut his thick hide, but he knew a trap when he saw it and was fairly sure who was responsible. Savage knew what was going to happen next and ignored the pain in his paws to leap forward. The arrow that came down after him missed his torso and went through his tail, sticking there like a decoration. Then it exploded and blew it off. The pain aided his leap, and he cleared a magnificent seventy feet to land on an abandoned car.
In the apartment above, looking out of the windows that gave him a clear view of both the alley Savage had landed in and the street the tiger was in now, the Black Bowman pushed another button. The car the tiger landed on exploded.
Savage was tough, far tougher than any normal creature. His hide was as tough as chain maille, shot through with bundles of impossibly strong fiber. The rest of him was just as tough, his bones like spring-steel bars supporting his inhumanly strong musculature, which itself would stop a bullet. His sheer toughness was one reason he rarely changed shape. Unlike The Rat or the other Weres and shapechangers, changing his form took a huge effort, and it hurt. Only rarely did he assume his man-tiger form, even less often his "tiger-otter" shape, the last only for really serious swims.
But there were limits. The Black Bowman had copious supplies of explosives in his storage container, and the charge in the car he landed on was enough to make it a really serious bomb. The blast tore the car to pieces, broke both of Savage's forelegs and threw him against the building. The structure there, weakened by the explosion, collapsed on top of him. Underneath the rubble his body was pierced by shrapnel in a dozen places.
There was a moment's silence. The Bowman had picked this location for his ambush because the buildings were virtually deserted, but someone was screaming down the street and car alarms set off by the massive explosion were going off for blocks around. It would not be long before other heroes arrived, with the cops right behind them, and the SWAT teams if not the military right behind them. He had maybe two minutes before he had to go.
Savage stayed under the rubble for as long as he could, desperately repairing the worst of his injuries, but for all his toughness he needed to breathe. As he struggled up out of the brickwork, still half-blind and crippled, the Black Bowman readied the Dragon launcher.
And then The Rat came through the window next to him. The Black Bowman had removed the glass from every window in this useful perch so he need not worry about razor-sharp shrapnel of his own and the first warning he had was a heavy body slamming into him from the side. He had been an instant from triggering the launcher and was afraid for a moment it would fire into the room as he was thrown to the side. The blast in this confined area would have torn him and The Rat to pieces.
He lost the launcher as he rolled with the hit, managing to throw the Were off as claws tore into his kevlar. They both came to their feet together, Rat's ears bleeding from the blast, the Bowman at full ability thanks to earplugs and an early warning for each of the explosions. The Rat was instantly in close combat and the Bowman had a combat knife in each hand. The archer had a bomb on his belt, but that was a last resort in case he ended up in Savage's mouth.
The Bowman saw advantages and disadvantages in this fight. The Rat was a Were, superhumanly strong, tough and fast. His claws could cut kevlar, as the Bowman's bleeding side proved. On the other hand, The Rat's balance was off due to his ear injuries, and he hadn't had time to fully recover. The bowman put a combat knife blade through The Rat's forearm - no silver blade, but he hadn't realized they were hunting together! -- and barely missed having his throat ripped out in return. The Were was fighting for keeps.
He maneuvered for the door, for he had to make his escape before more help arrived, but the Rat blocked his way. He'd never fought this particular hero and the attacks were coming in too fast for him to go for any of his tricks. He had pepper spray on his belt, which should hurt the were-rat even more than it would hurt a human, with that long rat nose. Then he lost a knife - it wedged between the bones of the Rat's forearm and was torn from his grip - and he saw his chance. He whipped the cylinder from his belt and sprayed the Were right in the face as it charged him.
The effect was all he could have hoped. The Rat screamed, tears running from his eyes, but he also thrust himself forward in agonized response. The windowsill hit the Black Bowman's thighs and they were both falling. It was three stories to the ground and the bowman tried to twist free. The Rat gripped his waist with frantic strength. The archer stabbed the other knife to the hilt in the Rat's kidney just as they hit the hard, cold sidewalk.
The Black Bowman was tough, as was The Rat, but they were stunned by the impact. Neither had been able to brace for it, engrossed as they were in deadly combat, and the Were's superior toughness balanced out what little preparation the archer had been able to make for the hit. The Bowman ignored the pain in his side and twisted the knife. The Rat just growled and held on tighter.
And then a set of huge paws came in and pulled them apart. One bloody paw held the Black Bowman to the rubble-strewn street, the other lifted, and then everything went black.
The Rat gasped as he pulled the knife from his back. Thank God the bowman had not had a silver blade, or a magic one, or he'd be bleeding out right now. He made it to his knees just as Savage, bloody all over, hit the Black Bowman so hard it drove him inches into the street. It would have killed a normal human instantly, but The Rat saw that the archer was still alive.
Savage was a mess. The pelt had been peeled off the right side of his face, taking away an ear and an eye, and all along that side his pelt was bloody. His forelegs barely worked, with bone protruding from the one that held the archer down. The tiger's underside was even worse. No normal creature could have survived the blast and puncture wounds all along his chest and belly. It was a miracle his guts weren't hanging out. There must have been a gallon of blood on his fur, not counting what was on the street.
"Rat..." It was a horrible gurgle. There was damage to Savage's mouth too. One of his dagger-sized canines fell out as he tried to talk. "Talk to the police. Meet me...at my den."
Briefly the tiger raked his claws over the bowman's body. He pulled away a chest harness with more knives and a utility belt with a bulky package at the back. "Careful...probably bomb." Then he picked up the Black Bowman sideways in his mouth and limped off, each step leaving bloody paw prints. He stopped to mumble one last order.
"Tell them the bad guy got away."
The Black Bowman woke up on a cold concrete floor. There was a strip of some metal wrapped around his waist, pinning his arms to his sides, and another around his ankles. He was otherwise naked, and Savage was licking him. The huge tiger's tongue was as rough as a rasp.
He lay there blinking until he was coherent. He was lucky to be alive, he knew. The street had probably been weakened by the blast, or Savage was, because the blow the tiger had hit him with should have killed him.
He was damp all over. How long had the huge cat been licking him?
"Enjoying the taste?" He grinned up at the furry face. Savage had regrown his eye and ear, but his fur was still red.
"Perhaps. It is unlike you to use bombs, archer."
The Black Bowman looked around. Scraps of his kevlar littered the floor, and he felt the scrapes where the tiger had clawed it off his body. There was no weapon within reach, even had he not been right beneath the paws of a ton and a half of tiger. "I guess I'm lucky I didn't wake up in your stomach."
"Mmmrr. I don't make a habit of eating people."
"Yet I've heard that a few bad guys have disappeared on your watch. Where did they end up, I wonder?" He spat out a tooth. "Why don't you hurry up and call the police, kitty? I want to work on getting out of prison again, so I can lay a bigger bomb in your path next time."
There was a tap on the door, and the archer looked to see that same Were-rat enter. The Rat, he thought it was. Terrible name, but a pretty good fighter. The Were had on a ragged pair of shorts and leather wrist wrappings, one of them bloody.
From the looks of things they were an abandoned garage. A car lift was perpetually halfway to its elevated position. The double doors were big enough for the cat to squeeze through, and the maintenance bays were large enough to accommodate him. One of them had half a dozen mattresses in it. Presumably where he slept. More surprisingly, the next bay over had a good-sized television, the old CRT type, and a computer. There was what must have been a custom made keyboard with keys each three inches wide, and an oversized mouse. The TV was on a local news station, and though the volume was muted he could see the fire and debris from the ambush. There must have been a dozen fire trucks and fifty policemen in view.
"I gave the belt and bomb to the cops," the rat-man said, "And they found lots more stuff in that apartment. Half the cars on that street were wired to blow up, and if you'd gone the other way the walls were covered with some sort of mine. Antipersonnel, throws ball bearings the cops said."
The Rat was worried. Savage's wounds were mostly closed, but there was a gaunt look to the tiger he hadn't seen before. "Are you all right?" Savage's tail hadn't grown back yet, and The Rat hadn't been able to find the original.
"Regenerating so much damage takes a lot of effort. I am not like you Weres. The energy has to come from somewhere, and lacking food, it had to come from me." Savage shrugged, one-shouldered, so his paw did not leave the archer's chest.
The Bowman glared up at Savage. "This world does not need you 'heroes'. If you put me back in jail I'll get out again and I guarantee I'll get you next time."
The tiger narrowed his eyes and sniffed him carefully. Then, a wash of that sandpaper tongue again. The big cat was studying him, looking for...what? Scars?
"Savage, I told the police the attacker got away and that you were too hurt to stay and talk to them. I checked all the buildings and I didn't find any cameras, so there are no records."
"He is not a rapist," the big cat rumbled. "He has not done enough."
"There were some homeless people two buildings down. One was a woman. She got a shard of shrapnel right through her belly. They don't think she is going to survive. One of the men was killed outright."
"So." There was a new note in the big cat's voice, and looking up the length of muscular furry foreleg to Savage's face, the Black Bowman knew he wasn't going to be delivered to the police. No, he was going someplace even less pleasant. The other forepaw, still weak but stronger than he was, slid over to grip him as well.
"What are you going to do, kitty?" The archer kicked the cat's chest as he was forced into a sitting position.
"I will not miss you, Black Bowman," Savage said, and his jaws opened.
Without his belt bomb, the archer could only resign himself to being cat food. He'd suspected the tiger might occasional eat his opponents, but he hadn't been sure enough to endure an operation to put a bomb physically inside his body. Such a thing would have to be remote controlled, and a stray transmission might set it off.
Savage still hadn't regrown the missing fang, and the archer braced himself for sudden bloody death as the remaining three encircled his head. But the big cat surprised him. Instead of biting down, Savage thrust his muzzle downward. Big as the cat was, his snout was not as long as the bowman's head and torso, and his shoulders rammed into the tight back of the tiger's jaws.
Rammed into, and then slid past. The side fangs scraped him as his head, and then his shoulders, pushed past the tightness at the back of the tiger's jaws and into its throat. Then the huge paws pulled his legs out straight and pushed them in, too.
It should have been impossible. He'd have bet that Savage could swallow a house cat if he wanted, perhaps even a medium sized dog, but a man? His shoulders should have been too broad. Even big snakes found men unmanageable meals, and they were built to swallow prey whole.
And yet Savage slid him in with ease, pushing him in until his feet were past the front fangs. Most of him lay stretched out in the disgusting wetness and heat of the gullet. He could kick, and little else, and kick he did, hurting his toes as he stuck the tiger's palate . Then the great cat lifted his head, closed his mouth, and with one wet gulp he was gone. As he slid downward into the nose-hurting stink of the stomach, where acids seared his tough skin, he took satisfaction in knowing that that the cat had made a mistake.
The great cat licked his chops briefly, then flicked his whiskers. "Well, so much for not having any food to replace that energy. Two hundred pounds of archer will...." Then his eyes went wide.
Down inside the tiger the Black Bowman used the saliva, his own softening skin, and years of escape artist training to slip out of the metal bar that held his arms. It hurt, for the cat had bent it cruelly tight, but pain was no longer a concern. It was very unlikely he'd survive this even if he did kill the cat - Savage's hide was just too tough.
The tiger had sniffed him all over, tasted him, checked for scars. Savage must realize that swallowing thinking prey alive was very risky. No doubt he did it to minimize evidence. Instead of blood and bits and DNA everywhere, he need only dispose of the eventual droppings. But there was a place a man could hide a weapon if he was desperate enough or paranoid enough.
The Black Bowman retrieved the package from where he'd hidden it. Five inches long and an inch wide, sealed in a condom tied shut at the end. As the condom dissolved in the tiger's digestive juices he recovered the two identical Buck knives inside it and flicked the blades open.
Savage snarled and pawed his belly, which heaved as he tried to retch. "He...he has a knife!" He tried to retch again, but only a little pink slime came up. "I think he's using the knives to hold on in there when I try to throw him up." His pupils had contacted to points.
"Digest him! Turn up the acid like you did with the Professor!" The Rat ran up close to hold Savage's muzzle. He never thought he'd see the big cat go pale, but the blood was going out of the tiger's nosepad, and even the purple-black lips were going pink.
"I can't. I'd digest myself. Like an ulcer...I had to turn all the acid off just now." Savage was clawing at his belly now. "Do you have a knife? We have to cut him out or I will bleed to death. He's doing too much damage."
The Rat did not have a knife, but he did have a plan. "Swallow me, Savage. I'll hold him still long enough for you to turn on the acids, all you've got, and digest us both."
The huge cat was weakening, supporting his heavy head with his paws now. "I can't, you're my friend...."
"I'll survive it! Bandit did. Now eat me!" Rat pried at the huge cat's jaws, forced them open and stuck in his head. "Eat me dammit!"
And Savage did. The Rat had fantasized about this moment, an unhealthy fixation that'd started when he saw the tiger effortlessly gulp down the Professor and Sidle. He craved the chance to stick his head in the big cat's jaws. His only complaint was that it was over too quickly.
Savage's huge paws swept in from each side and gripped his rump, stuffing him in. The big cat was not gentle or slow, but crammed him in with a sudden violence that would have broken a norm's bones. Instead of going smoothly down headfirst, as had the bowman, or feetfirst, like Sidle, he ended up balled up in the cat's jaws. Without a pause Savage lifted his great head, and what had happened to the Professor six months before happened to him. The cat's raspy tongue forced him to the back of its jaws, and with a single heavy gulp Savage swallowed him whole. The last in was his tail, which slid into the tiger's mouth like a noodle.
The Rat slid down the tiger's throat, still bunched up in a ball, and arrived a moment later at a looser place. He knew he had gotten where he was going when some sort of fleshy valve expanded to let him in, then closed behind him. The smell of acid was almost hidden by the stink of blood. It was everywhere, puddled in the folds of the stomach, and pressed up against him was the Black Bowman.
For the second time in one day he took the archer by surprise, and he wrapped his arms around the man in a bear hug. His rat-nose ended up over the archer's shoulder as they began to struggle, and he whispered lovingly into the Black Bowman's ear.
"Guess what, friend. We're both tiger shit. Now relax and enjoy it."
Savage let out a gasp of relief as the pain stopped. At least, there was no new pain. He put all his concentration into repairing his stomach, for the struggle was ongoing down there and there was no telling whether the bowman would get loose and start cutting again. Extra-fast regeneration could be accomplished by moving flesh around, but it was even more energy intensive than normal fast healing.
He could feel himself weakening as he turned all his resources to that task, and the very instant he thought he was healed enough he turned his stomach acids on full bore. That much acid, of that potency, was more than was needed to digest a cyborg. Less had been needed to dissolve the Professor's steel-hard skin. It gave him heartburn. It did worse things to his meals.
When the acid came flooding in The Rat laughed. He had a knife in his thigh and another in his belly, but he still clung to the Black Bowman with all his might. He was stronger than his adversary for a change.
"You know what?" He said as his pelt began to fall away in patches. His Were regeneration struggled to keep up, but he knew it would fail. "I've got you where I want you. I could signal Savage to barf us up right now, and he would." He didn't stop to think about how he would give the signal. He'd have thought of something.
"But I'm not going to. We're going to do this together, you and I."
He could feel the knives corroding away as Savage bathed them with acids that'd have dissolved a bellyful of rocks.
The Black Bowman screamed as his flesh dissolved. The scream ended in a horrible gurgle as the acids rushed in. Then there was just a lower, wet gurgling as the big cat digested them both.
When the awful struggle in his belly finally stopped, Savage turned down the acids. He was too weak to do much besides lie there, and the only good thing to be said for the whole ordeal was he wouldn't have to go hunting for food to replenish his strength. No, his belly was stuffed with close to four hundred pounds of meat and bone. Part of that meat was his friend, but there was no help for it now.
Savage crawled over to his bed, pulled himself up on the mattresses, and too sore to even curl up, stretched out to sleep.
When The Rat regained consciousness, he was lying in a mass of tiger shit. That stood to reason, as until recently he had been that shit. Savage had shat him out in a little walled yard that had been part of the garage. Other than some rubble, there was nothing here but a few straggly weeds and some rusty barrels.
Suddenly water cascaded down, washing off most of the dung. The Rat coughed and spat, then looked up to see Savage holding a 55-gallon drum in humanoid hands. The huge tiger-man put down the barrel and picked up another. When he had emptied that over the Were as well, he pointed at a third barrel.
"That one's half full, and there's soap."
Later, feeling much cleaner, The Rat watched Savage shovel the pile of crap into a barred drain. The smell of cat piss rose from it and almost overpowered the stink of droppings. Savage must use it as a urinal when he was too lazy or injured to find a manhole. The washwater followed the shit down the drain. "I don't usually relieve myself here. But this is a special occasion. You Weres really are amazing."
He leaned the shovel against the wall and gradually, as The Rat watched, Savage resumed his full tiger form. From a squatting position he settled down seated, until a minute later he was his tigery self, seemingly fully healed. "The thing is...well, when I am that hurt my body absorbs almost everything I eat. I would have sworn there wasn't enough there to make a Rat, but you grew right back out of the pile."
"Not enough...you could have mentioned that beforehand."
"I was busy not dying," the tiger said reasonably. "And you did stick your head in my mouth." He continued, "I've been talking to the police. I begged off any press interviews on the basis of being too hurt. Luckily, no one's blaming us for the explosion or deaths. They've ID'd the Black Bowman as the culprit and he's just gone way up the wanted lists."
The Rat smiled. "They'll have about as much luck finding him as they will the Professor. Well, unless a clone or whatever shows up." That led him to think. "Did you worry about him growing back like that? The Professor that is. Appearing out of some sewer manhole and going on try to conquer the world again?"
"No." The big cat flicked his whiskers. "Because he didn't go into a sewer. You will note," and he pointed with his nose at the pile of rubble. The Rat realized that it was not from the fallen-in roof, as he'd thought. This rubble must have been carried in by mouthfuls and dropped there on purpose. There was an almost regular pyramid of it, several tons worth.
"The Professor?", he guessed, and Savage nodded.
"I was not going to take any chances," the cat rumbled. "I dug a pit and shat into it all that day, burying it with dirt each time and weighing it down with rubble. When I had grown hungry again and was sure there was no more of him inside me, I filled in the rest of the pit and piled the rocks on top. If he regenerates, he will have to to it from under six feet of packed dirt and a few tons of concrete."
The pile really was regular. "It's almost like a monument. A what you call it, a cairn."
"It was the least I could do.", Savage rumbled.
"Why?" The Rat tilted his head at the cat.
"Because he was the one who made me, Rat. The Professor did. Not China."
The Rat blinked. "You didn't say anything. You just ate him."
"Of course I did," Savage said with a fanged grin. "I said he made me. I didn't say I liked him." The big cat let the grin linger a moment, then continued.
"Now, tell me about this force field generator."