FSE

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formerly SoFurry search engine

Tucumcari

By Bunny Hops

Character Sheet:

Casey - male, early 30s, snow leopard with ermine

Valerie - female, early 30s, snowshoe hare

Kincaid - male, late teens, caribou, survivalist

Morty - male, early 40s, Alaskan malamute

Mitzi - female, mid twenties, snowy owl

Seth - male, late twenties, half arctic fox, half red squirrel

_December 21st, the first day of winter. That distinction, however, has become ever more meaningless since the Four Minute War. _

_ _

The warm-weather furs died out long ago, but each day gets colder than the last. I know my hope that it's just because of the season is in vain: last spring was colder than the winter, and summer colder than the spring. I don't know how any fur can survive much longer, but for the sake of my family I must try.

_ _

_This is my daughter's first winter. She's four months old we still haven't given her a name. We've lost so many already that it's just too hard to put a name on someone who might not even make it through her first year. She had a twin brother who was stillborn. At least he never had to feel the cold. _

_ _

From the little that I see her (we only rarely expose her to the harsh constant winter) I can tell she's pure cabbit with all the best features from Valerie and me. Valerie is a snowshoe hare, and thus comes from a long line of winter survivors. Her stillborn brother took more from my side: snow leopard. Although he hadn't the naturally svelte physique from being part ermine like myself, I still saw my own mortality in his glazed over slate eyes.

_ _

She's not our first child. Paxton--Pax--our first born, we can only assume he died two years ago when the city was reduced to ashes. We--Valerie and I--were on vacation in Lake Placid and left Pax with a sitter for the weekend. He was just nineteen months old.

_ _

In two years we've traveled from Lake Placid to the burned out ruins of White Plains, and then headed east. We soon learned to avoid populated areas. Even before the constant cold came, other furs were the hazard to be avoided. These are desperate times, and scared, desperate furs are unpredictable. Hell, I've directly killed seven furs myself, and I'm sure my actions have lead to a few more deaths. I did things I wouldn't think I'd have the balls to do back in my life as a computer scientist, but I'd do them again now to make sure my family stayed safe. Or maybe it's just my own instinctual desire for self preservation.

_ _

Now we're heading south. I don't know where we heard it--we may have just made up the rumor so that we'd have something to keep us moving--but there is talk that Latin America did not get hit during the war. It'll still be cold, but their infrastructure would still be there. Power equals heat.

_ _

_Our group, which used to be larger, but I won't get into those painful memories here, consist of me, our daughter Valerie, Kincaid, Morty, Mitzi, and Seth. _

_ _

Kincaid, who's just a kid at nineteen, has been the reason we've stayed alive as long as we have. We met the caribou in Lake Placid and he's helped us every bit of the way. He grew up in the Adirondacks and had been a survivalist his entire life. He knows harsh winter survival.

_ _

Morty we met in White Plains and was the reason why we started heading east. The Alaskan malamute was just visiting the area from Akron and wished to return. I'm not going to write any more about Akron. What happened in Akron is best left forgotten.

_ _

Mitzi and Seth are a married couple we met in Port Jervis shortly after leaving White Plains. Mitzi is a great scout since she's a snowy owl and can fly up ahead and report back. Seth doesn't really do much. He's well adapted for the cold since he's part arctic fox, but any of his fur that's not covered up by massive layers of clothing is just a glowing red beacon in the snow that has given us away a couple of times. Luckily, I guess, since it's gotten colder the snow just freezes to any exposed fur and makes us all blend in well together.

_ _

_Enough with the background, let me set the scene. We're all huddled together in a room next to some hundred foot cliffs somewhere on the eastern edge of New Mexico. The concrete walls have cracked viciously as ice has seeped into the wall and expanded. Given a year or two more, I doubt this structure will be anything but a crumbled pile. _

_ _

We don't have the ingredients for a warming fire, but we're out of the wind and fairly dry. A few scavenged votive candles flicker dimly, but are enough to allow me to see what I'm writing. We all still have our heavy layers of cloths on, which needless to say have become quit ripe with body odor as we never take them off. Our unnerving light backpacking packs are each by our sides.

_ _

Light chatter fills the air, but I'm not joined in the conversation. Since my daughter's birth I've wanted to start a journal. With everything we've ever known either turned to ash, rubble, or frozen in the unrelenting snow and ice, a journal is my way to reassure myself of the continuance of life. These last two years have been hard, but my daughter's birth has given us all something to hold on to.

_ _

Tomorrow we will be heading into Tucumcari to look for some supplies. Mitzi scouted ahead earlier today and reported back that the town is fairly small, still standing, not completely covered in snow, and looked uninhabited. Hopefully we'll be able to resupply easily, maybe stay a couple of days and rest, and then continue on our southward journey without incident. We need all these things: food, rest, and the continuation of our journey. Hope can only go so far before it's all used up.

"Honey," Valerie soothingly called to Casey, stopping his writing, "put that away for now. Let's have all eat something and then call it a night."

"Alright," Casey closed the journal. "For you."

Casey put the journal down and rummaged through his pack. Kincaid and Seth followed his lead and burrowed to the bottom of their dwindling packs. Together they all shared a meal of two-months-expired garbanzo beans, creamed corn, and tomato paste. Mixing the tomato paste with the garbanzo beans wasn't half bad, all things considered. Although Casey hadn't seen much of his daughter with her being tucked up close to her mother and underneath all those protective layers of clothes, the way Valerie held herself gave the telltale signs that their daughter was enjoying a well deserved meal herself.

###

The snow leopard's wrist watch chimed an alarm at 8:30, waking the worn and weary group to a labored reanimation. The newborn stirred and began to whimper, but Valerie was quick to lazily rock her back to sleep. Casey didn't normally set the alarm on his watch--trying to conserve the battery as long as possible and all--but the group had wanted to get an early start. They helped strap their packs onto each other's backs since the thick padding of clothes that protected them from the harsh environment prevented them from moving with the dexterous grace and mobility required to do it themselves.

Although most days were spent in a sort of battle-worn, depressed silence, Seth was quick to speak up this morning.

"I had a remarkably vivid dream last night," he began, speaking to no one in particular, but from the way Mitzi perked up it was obvious she claimed the conversation her own. "I was in a museum, I don't know which one. It didn't matter which one, really. All at once I was looking at the great works of art--paintings, statutes, craftsmanship--from all walks of life and from all ages of time. I was bound in history from the earliest of man to the most distant future kin. It was inspiring. Hopeful. We march on and survive."

Seth, who, before the war, had been an aspiring art student who dreamed of bringing the graphic novel medium into the literary mainstream did not tell of the group of the end of the dream. He absently twisted one of his eyebrow piercings and grew strength in the hopeful gleams in his comrades' eyes. His wife gripped his shoulder and he let himself forget about the great works of art turning to sand in his paws, melting through his fingers and blowing away in the nipping wind. Seth knew the inspiring works of art had been erased by the combination of the advancement of science and the regression of politics. He kept these thoughts to himself.

Seth's words had lifted the spirits of the group slightly, but they were all still ill at ease for the day's journey. And in that state of artificial hope and tangible trepidation they set off.

A nearby road made the trek up the desert cliff possible, but it was still an arduous task fumbling in the snow. As they got closer and closer to the plateau the wind got worse and worse. Once the group got to level ground it got so bad they couldn't tell if it was snowing sideways or if it was just blowing around what had already fallen.

Fighting the wind every step of the way the small group eventually made it into the town proper. As they crested over a small overpass that transcended what appeared to be long abandoned railroad tracks the town opened up. It was hard to tell if the town had fallen into such ruin before or after the war, but everyone could tell it was worse for wear even through the high snowdrifts.

"It's only another mile and a half or so to that convenience store I found," Mitzi said. Her wings were wrapping here coat tight around her in a desperate and futile attempt to keep the cold out. Her husband tried to stay close to her to give her some of his warmth, but the snow and wind made the gesture overly strenuous.

"I just wish we could have done better than this truck stop community," Casey grumbled. "Although any bigger and the risks would just be too big."

"I'm sorry I couldn't scout farther ahead," Mitzi responded defensively. "It's hard to fly in this wind, you know. Or maybe you just don't care."

Seth nudged closer to Mitzi to sooth her, but it was Valerie who spoke, "No one blames you, Mitzi. We'd be completely lost without you to scout up ahead, and you know it."

Little outbursts like this were commonplace. The constant stress from the constant cold, long days, lack of food, and unknown prospects had made everyone thin skinned.

The one and a half miles to the store was a brutal one. The wind was constantly biting at their exposed skin, but Kincaid's determined strides kept them all from falling into too sluggish a pace. For Casey this brought back all too vivid memories from the early day of The Never Ending Winter when he had been careless and lost an ear to frostbite. The lanky leopard shrugged his shoulders together to keep the hood of coat forward enough to keep his cheeks as covered as he could as he followed in the antlerless caribou's steps.

Eventually they made it to the grocery store. A bare pole jutted out from the parking lot by the street, its sign having fallen off ages ago to disappear somewhere under the snow. A handful of shopping carts and two cars still littered the lot, although they were little more than frozen mounds at this point.

Morty was the first to speak as they made their way to the shattered front windows, "Fuck, man, c'mon. There better be something in here, I don't care what. A tin of cat food, some rancid tripe, the bones of a long dead rat. Just something, anything, to naw on."

"Calm down, Morty," Kincaid said. Kincaid had been a tall, muscular caribou before the war and still held himself as if his muscles hadn't atrophied so much from malnutrition. With every fur around having a weak and slender frame, Kincaid could still be commanding by exuding a muscular air. "We'll take what's ever in there, but if there's nothing we'll continue on. We'll find something eventually, we always do."

"I'd eat a fucking tube of toothpaste just to end this constant feeling of emptiness," Morty lamented to himself.

Morty had been a portly Alaskan malamute with a relative sedate life as real estate businessman, buying up and renting out property in the "less affluent" parts of town. Under his layers of clothing his saggy skin had more or less retreated to comfort his unaccompanied bones.

Kincaid pulled out his rifle and the others did likewise, expect for Casey who already had the muzzle of his revolver poking out from a torn seam in his jacket. He didn't like being unarmed, not now, not ever. He would not let his guard down for fear it would be the end of him. He had seen too many friends and companions drop their guards.

Casey looked at the front of the store and absent mindedly expressed a wondering thought, "I miss icicles."

"What was that?" Valerie asked with an upturned eyebrow.

"There are never any icicles anymore," Casey said as a matter of fact, "Back before the war there were icicles. They were the complete epitome of 'cold,' of 'winter'. They brought up feelings of warmth and coziness, of hot cocoa and fireplaces."

"I never noticed before, but I can't remember the last time I saw icicles," Valerie agree, making her way towards the front of the store.

"Icicles mean warmth," Seth interjected. The fox snuggled up close to Mitzi. "There is no warmth here to melt the snow into those iconic frozen stalactites."

"Harsh," Mitzi curled into her husband as best she could and ushered him forward.

The others joined, eager to move forward into the unknown than dwell in the lost innocence of the past and the harsh realities of the present.

One by one they crawled through a large broken window into the dark store. The vast openness of the store was broken by the tall shelves perfectly aligned in neat little rows except for the three or four which had fallen over to rest wearily on its neighbor. These heavy shelves did not just fall naturally. Likely the store was looted in the early days when people still were able to live in this run down little town supported only by truckers and tourists.

From the looks of it, the shelves were bare. Casey and Valerie took to the right to explore, while Seth and Mitzi went left and Kincaid and Morty took the center aisles. Heading down every aisle that they could, covering front to back, the group was able to gather a small container of chicken bouillon, a five pound bag of dried puppy chow, three dented cans without labels (judging by the location, most likely dog or cat food), and a few dozen car air fresheners. The food, although not very appealing, was much needed sustenance and the air fresheners were the closest things they got to fresh laundry in countless months.

As they made their way back to the store front and off to search for more stores to salvage, Casey halted a breathless moment before the shadow spoke, "You're not going to leave before paying for those, now are ya?"

Kincaid, Casey, Valerie, Mitzi, Seth, and Morty all had a bead on the shadowy figure in the window before they caught eyes on the others coming into view around him. It was obvious they all had weapons.

"We don't want any trouble," Kincaid said, immediately taking the lead like he always did. "We just stopped in on our way through town. Let's just all lower our weapons and be on our way, okay?"

"But why would we just do that, mister," the shadow said. He had a fake country-western accent that would have been soothing on talk radio or as a street peddler, but here, in this situation, it was undeniably sinister. "You're the ones outgunned."

A polar bear who was comically thin for his stature and wrapped in tight woolen robes popped out of the shadows to Casey's left. Before he could do anything about it the bear had the muzzle of a semiautomatic rifle at his neck.

"Now just hand over your weapons," Casey heard to the other side of him. His eyes moved to his right where he was a duplicate bear holding an MAC-10 on Mitzi. "That goes for all of you."

As Casey slipped his sawed-off double barrel--useless thing it was--from his jacket to the bear he made notice of a broken-quilled porcupine making its way to their rear with a pump action shotgun.

They were lead to the window where the shadow stood with forceful shoves. With each step closer a Cheshire Cat grin became more and more clear and vibrant until finally its wearer came into view in the muddled light of the constantly grey sky.

"Ya'll are comin' with me," the lynx stated, never losing his luminous grin.

###

They were marched at gunpoint down the road they came back to the railroad tracks they had passed over before. From those tracks the marched continued a few hundred feet to what was undoubtedly an ancient train station, seemingly out of use for decades even before the war.

As they were herded inside Morty's foot hit the busted up old threshold and he tumbled hard to the ground, smacking his forehead on the frozen wood planks. Casey accidently stepped on his ankle as he was shoved inside and ended up on his knees at the malamute's side. The armed guards roughly stripped the awkward packs from the backs of their prisoners and tossed them into a corner of the room. They would no doubt be stealing what little was inside later; such a callous act was tantamount to pulling the trigger of a gun pointed directly between their eyes.

As the group was placed kneeling against a far wall both Casey and Kincaid were quick to size up their captors. There were the two stark white polar bears, the porcupine, and the Cheshire lynx who captured them in the store, plus the beaver-like creature and the balding loon that were waiting for them outside the store. A short, oddly pudgy little otter and a sickly-looking moose were waiting for them inside the train station. Valerie and Mitzi were quick to notice that there was not a single female among their captors; Casey and Seth were not too far behind in that realization.

The train station was the warmest place the group had been in a long while. Not only was it filled with enough furs to radiate some heat, but the walls and roof were thickly insulated with pink and white fiberglass wool that had likely been salvaged from the other buildings in town. It looked like the padded walls of an asylum, but it did protect them from the outside tundra by at least twenty degrees. Not that it wasn't well below freezing inside the station.

The Cheshire lynx made his way in front of them with such pomposity it was as if someone had just introduced him to come up and receive an award for excellence.

"You might be wondering why I called you all hear today," the lynx chuckled at his own wry little joke. "You see, you came to pillage my fair town, and for that you must be punished. Oh, it's not all bad. We might spare one or two of your lives to send you out on your way. You've already probably guessed which two of you have the winning odds at having the opportunity to go die in the desert."

"Isn't that a little harsh for salvaging a bag of doggie kibble?" Kincaid tried to reason with the man.

"When you take food from us you're sentencing us to certain death. Why should we treat you any differently than you treat us?"

"We're hungry," Kincaid continued, "We were just looking for something to hold us over on our way through your town."

"And that was your mistake," the lynx started pacing back and forth in front of the group with his paws crossed behind his back which pulled his grungy jacket tight against his thin chest. He addressed each of them individually while only conversing with Kincaid, "This is my town. I don't go wondering around stealing other people's food. I sit. I wait. I take."

"You trap."

"Precisely." He turned his back to them and let his booming voice fad into the insulation, "We're hungry too, you see. Aren't we lads?"

His lads agreed whole heartedly.

"But now some food has come to us. We had laid in wait for something or someone to approach, and approach it has. Tonight, my friends, Tucumcari eats."

"You're just going to eat us?" Kincaid was on his feet, which drew the bead of the lynx's seven friends. "That's barbaric! You bastard, how could you even think of something like that!"

Kincaid wanted to rush the fucking pointy-eared cat. Tear him limb from limb. Desecrate his soul. Drink his blood and eat his bones in the same hate filled cannibalistic fashion the lynx was sentencing them all to. He wanted to kill all of the grinning bastard's friends. Instead he stood there, trying to calm himself down. Trying to think himself out of this situation like he had gotten his group out of countless others. He knew he was their only chance of surviving.

The lone standing caribou opened his mouth to protest some more but the only sound that filled the station was a deep repetitive "tattattat".

Synthetic fibers exploded out of Kincaid's chest as the rounds from the MAC-10 tore through his jacket. He convulsed uncontrollably as the rounds ripped through him, spasming all the way to the floor. It was only after he hit the ground that his blood began making its way through the sudden holes in his jacket and out into the frosty air.

"Jesus Fuck!" Seth blasphemed as he bolted to his feet. He didn't know what he was going to do, but his fight or flight instincts kicked in immediately. As he turned to pick up his wife from the floor he caught a glimpse of the barrel of a semiautomatic pistol pointed alarmingly close to his muzzle. Before he could react the barrel exploded in a light brighter than anything he had ever witnessed before.

Casey hugged his wife and daughter as he gazed helpless as Seth was shot in the face. Blood and body matter plumbed from his cheek as the fox fell backward onto the floor, as if in slow motion. Mitzi's wings escaped her jacket and wrapped around her injured husband. Casey heard his baby whimper, but Valerie hugged her tight to drown out the noise and consol the newborn.

Mitzi howled as tears coursed down the plumage of her face, "Don't you dare die on me, Seth. Don't you dare die."

Casey couldn't stop himself from standing. He got his knees halfway unbent before the porcupine fired off a deafening round from his shotgun. The leopard's down jacket erupted in a cloud of fluttering grey feathers as the round tore through the fibers. Casey fumbled back down.

"Oh my god," Valerie gripped him close, desperately pawing at his the hole in his jacket to find the wound and stop the bleeding.

"It's okay," he said. Then, whispering into her ear, "It was just birdshot."

Mitzi was whispering into her husband's ear as well, "Goddammit, you son of a bitch. Don't die. You can't die. I'm pregnant. Don't make me do this on my own. I can't do this on my own."

Seth heard her, but her voice was distant and echoed as if they were trapped in a dark dank cave. The round had grazed the left side of his muzzle, tearing out his nose ring and carving a bloody path through his fur until it stopped cold in his cheekbone. Instantly he had felt as weak as a blind kitten, but still he tried to communicate with his darling wife.

All he could muster, however, was a gargle that let loose a river of blood from his mouth and a bubble of bloody snot from his one good nostril.

"Well, that was fun, wasn't it?" the Cheshire lynx said with an enthusiastic grin, still holding the smoking pistol out in front of him. It did not just smoke from the muzzle, but cascaded a steady stream of steam from all around its hot barrel. "Let's try to keep from doing stupid things again, shall we?"

###

Hours had passed.

After some time waiting to make sure the group they had captured didn't try anything funny again they had dragged Kincaid's lifeless, bleeding corpse over next to a little half-walled adjunct off in a corner of the station, leaving a smeared trail of blood to freeze solid on the wooden floor boards of the station. As the captured group watched in silent horror they stripped his body bare of clothes.

His body was so thin and frail. His fur and skin were little more than a thin sheet covering his bones. Bald patches from malnutrition, disease, infection, and parasites littered his frame. His gaping bullets wounds lazily seeped his cooling blood. The only life left in him was the lice and fleas and ticks and other parasites feasting on his corpse. The caribou had been a young man, barely to adulthood and would still have been unable to buy a beer in The World Before The War, and yet, here, stripped naked in the harsh cold of the station, he seemed unworldly old in his emaciation.

The lynx himself was the one to wrap a chain around the lifeless caribou's ankle and hoist him into the air until his antler-less head was two feet or so off the ground. The otter placed a large stock pot under the caribou's head between his limply dangling arms and, without ceremony, ran a blade across his throat.

The blade must have been quite sharp since the caribou's neck eagerly opened up like a grotesque mouth spewing out its macabre meal. The clotting blood poured across the caribou's face, parting only around his jutting muzzle and streaming back together in his eyes before clattering into the pot.

The group could only avert their gaze at the grisly scene, but their ears caught the sound of the blood rapping on the metal pot, then drizzling into the growing crimson pool, until it gradually declined to a slowing drip. And then silence.

The otter slid the stockpot across the ground into the half-walled adjunct, but it was the lynx who address the captured group, "Waste not, want not, that's what I always say." He punctuated his sentence with a sly wink and a sinister upturned slip of his lip.

The Cheshire lynx let the caribou's body drop. It crashed rather wetly for having just been bled dry, but the chains rattling somehow was more gruesome, reminiscent of Jacob Marley's haunting postmortem chains. The body was dragged into the adjunct and the smell of a propane fire filled the train station. Then the smell was replaced by that of charring flesh. The group fought a losing battle with their salivary glands. Survival beat out everything else in situations like these, and each one of them knew Famine's boney grip was at their throats.

Casey looked at the adjunct and could just make out his captors over the half wall. They were huddled around a small propane stove in what looked to have been the old station's kitchen. What looked to be a withered ham hock was cooking on a pan.

Casey gaze moved to fall on the smeared trail of blood from Kincaid's body. He wasn't certain and dared not look, but some of the birdshot might have made its way into his flesh. Blood was a sacred thing these days. It was warmth. Without blood a fur was just a cold body.

Morty raised his hands so suddenly it had frightened Mitzi, Casey, and Valerie. Only Seth was immune since he had fallen into unconsciousness as he was cradled in his wife's loving wings.

The two polar bears guarding them raised their weapons, but Morty spoke in a soothing voice as he stood, "I wish to speak with the leader of your pack. I wish to possibly make a deal with him."

"Morty, what the fuck are you doing?" Casey never trusted that fat dog.

A bear kicked Casey rather hard in the back of the head before leading the malamute into the adjunct room to presumable speak with the Cheshire lynx.

They all waited. For what, they did not know. The smell of meat was making them all realize how truly hungry they had become, and that almost scared them as much as the possibility of what would come next.

It seemed like an eternity, but eventually Morty came out of the room with a happy gait. The lynx was following close behind, his pistol at the dog's back.

"My fellow travelers," Morty began, "I hate to bring our time together to such a sudden close, but I have made a rather sweet deal with our friends here."

He motioned to the captors. Casey noticed that he had a dribble of fat gleaming in the fur of his chin. He had made it clear in front of the store that he didn't care what he ate and long as he ate something. He had gotten his wish, he had eaten.

"All I have to do is kill one of you, and then I'll be a part of their group. I'll be able to eat and fill my belly on a routine basis and I will no longer have to lug those fucking filthy packs across the god forsaken country." There was venom in his voice.

The otter walked up to Morty's side and handed him Kincaid's rifle. Immediately he raised it to point at Seth's head, which Mitzi of course protected with her body.

The lynx stopped him with a forceful grip on his shoulder, "Not the fox. That wouldn't be sporting, he's already dead."

"Alright, fair enough," Morty agreed. He pointed the rifle at Valerie and spoke directly as Casey pushed her behind him, "Open up your jacket."

"You monster," she cried out.

"You filthy fucking fleabag," Casey agreed with his wife.

"She's just a newborn. She nothing," Morty said. "She doesn't even have a fucking name."

"It's Therma," Casey found himself shouting out defensively. "Her name's Therma." He knew if he could just humanize his daughter to these vial creatures she may get a fighting chance.

"A newborn?" the lynx's interested was piqued at what she was, not what her name might be. "I bet it's got some tender fat meat on it, hasn't it? Milk feed and all that. Best not shoot it, then, just go ahead and take it."

As Morty took a step forward the lynx stopped him. Without saying a word he traded the gun for a comically large tactical knife. The bastard malamute smiled a grin as devious as the lynx's. Morty's eyes were fixated on the hare's coat where Therma lay, blinded by the hope that slaying a baby might bring him.

He got three steps closer to his former traveling companion before a pistol round ripped into his temple and out the top of his skull. Before the dog hit the floor another round sounded off and the polar bear to the far left collapsed with a red hole above his right eye. As the bodies crumpled to the floorboards and the other furs left the roasting body of Kincaid Casey was able to see Seth holding a pistol out in front of him. The fox squeezed the trigger again and the unarmed otter hit the floor.

Seth turned his aim to the lynx. He lined up the sights on the pistol systematically as he had done with the malamute, the polar bear, and the otter, taking his time to make the shot count, but doing so in a hasty manner.

He was so concentrated on the sights that he did not see the porcupine step out from behind the lynx with his shotgun. The first round completely caved in the fox's skull that there was no need for a second blast, but the porcupine did so anyway. Two rounds from the buckshot tore into Mitzi's wing, but her howling cry was not for her physical pain.

Casey turned his attention from the chilling cloud of Seth's vaporized brain matter to the lynx storming toward him and his family. He pushed Valerie and his daughter farther behind him and attempted to stand, but before he could the lynx slammed the hilt of his pistol hard against the leopard's skull. Everything went black.

###

When Casey's eyes finally opened he found his chin to be on the floor. His hearing was muted, but he could make out a scuffle around him.

Before he would do anything about the scuffle a subtle movement on the ground in front of him caught his attention: a little white speck hobbling across the frozen wooden planks with awkward spastic leg jerks. Without moving his head he let his eyes follow the line the speck was moving. A well-frosted spider web was the apparent destination. It lay a foot away, nestled between the long gaping split of a floorboard; tiny dots of wrapped up insect carcasses decorated the web.

Casey looked back to the speck. It was a tiny spider, as white as the ubiquitous snow and ice of the world they lived in. The spider was hobbling along on seven legs. How long had the spider been crippled? Casey thought. What caused it to be displaced? How is it able to survive the cold?

How many legs can a spider lose before it can no longer walk? Six? Five? Can it still lie in wait in its web, ready to attack and consume any straggling bug that happens to cross its path? Or would it be too immobile to overpower its prey? Maybe with seven legs it was already dead.

###

The commotion of the room exponentially increased in his ears until Casey found his mind rather oddly freed from the fog of his head wound. Above him he saw the lynx jerking on Valerie's arm, fighting her to get her to open her jacket. The moose and the loon were coming to help.

From his position on the floor Casey opened his own jacket. His slender frame and billowing jacket concealed his movements. The muzzle of his pistol peaked out from his collar. He looked down at the barrel and followed its beeline to the lynxes head. He was not too sure of his shot so he waited until his wife jerked her body away from his.

Then he pulled the trigger.

A guttural spray of blood splattered onto his wife's face, but she did not scream. She watched as the lynx's eyes went from a portrait of primeval hunger to that of an infantile dismay, which gave way to a silent wide-eyed panic. She did not feel pity as the warmth drained from his neck in pulsing spurts. Still holding Therma in one arm underneath her jacket she pushed over her dying tormentor. He collapsed to the floor like a dehydrated sack of shit.

Casey rose to his feet as the lynx collapsed to the ground, the Cheshire grin across his face finally erased. He wanted so badly to embrace his wife, but he looked past her to Mitzi. The owl had apparently taken the tactical knife from Morty's corpse and was now driving it under the chin of the mangy moose.

The cursed ratatattat from the MAC-10 of the polar bear once again filled the room. Mitzi spun around and used the moose as a shield as the rounds haphazardly sprayed around her. Casey's eyes narrowed as he raised his gun once again. He knew he was being stupid, but he could not put his arm down. It stretched too far in front of him, giving away his intentions.

He pulled the trigger too soon. The round hit the polar bear in his shoulder, but it wasn't devastating enough to cause him to drop his weapon. The polar bear turned his attention to Casey. The leopard fired again, this time hitting the bear square in the nose, dropping him cold. The wound wasn't an initially fatal one, but it sure had stopping power, which was all he needed.

A piercing blow hit Casey's side. He spun around and fired off two shot randomly as his feet gave way and he once again landed on the wooden floorboards.

Casey did not see his rounds hit, but Valerie saw discharge of blood spray from two spots in the loon's chest. She knelt down next to her husband, knowing he had been hit. She fumbled with one paw into his jacket, but he pushed her back as he attempted to get back to his feet. Still, her paw was painted in his blood.

Mitzi crashed into Valerie's back and, to the best of her ability, lifted her to her feet and she screamed into her ear, "We need to leave!"

Valerie did not need to be told twice. Together the two women got Casey to his feet. Supporting his weight on his wife's body, Casey took aim into the adjunct where the porcupine and beaver were kidding. His first shot did little but splinter some wood. His second shot hit its mark, filling the air with a whirlwind hiss that evolved into a clamoring percussion. A hole had been shot into a propane tank, the escaping pressure turning it into a rocket bouncing around the tiny kitchen.

Casey dropped the pistol and fell into Valerie's embrace. He could hear the panicked cries from the adjunct, but he the energy was draining from him too fast to register what it meant.

As Valerie was ushering her husband out the train station door, Mitzi was hastily grabbing the hunting rifle and semiautomatic rifle from the corpses on the ground. She strapped the two weapons to her back and, as she made her way through the door, grabbed two of their packs and dragged them out with her.

"Take a pack," Mitzi shouted, "Take a pack."

She tossed one to Valerie, but the hare was too busy rushing her dazed husband from the train station.

Mitzi cried out with a voice that pierced through the frozen wind, "Valerie! Just take a fucking pack!"

Valerie looked down and saw the pack at her feet. She stopped momentarily to hoist it on her back before proceeding.

Mitzi was walking backwards, keeping the assault rifle poised at the open door of the train station. A shadowy head appeared in the opening and the owl let off a round. The kickback bruised her shoulder and antagonized the bullet wounds on her wing, but the figure did not fall. She fired two quick rounds into the wood where the figure had loomed behind. Mitzi was about to fire another round when she saw the shadow keel over in the doorway.

No one else came to the door. Mitzi did not lower her gun or turn her back until well after the windblown snow had washed the view of the train station away into memory.

###

The three survivors had continued out of Tucumcari, past the grocery store, past the highway, past any semblance of civilization.

Casey was bleeding badly, but his jacket had absorbed much of his blood. Up to this point in time, however, the leopard had done well at walking on his own. His wife had to help him, though, with one arm wrapped around him as Mitzi carried their whimpering child. As a new morning dawned, however, Casey's vision could not cast away the black of night.

He collapsed to in the snow, but his wife was quick to roll him over and embrace him.

"Do you know what I miss?" Casey said absently as he stared up at his wife's concerned face, "The smell of spring. That first day when it warm enough that the molecules from the trees, from the dirt, from everything can vibrate around and reach our nostrils. And that our noses are warm enough to function. Blood flows freely into the capillaries and we can smell again. Smell is one of the first signs that we have survived winter. That's what I miss.

"It's okay now, Valerie. It's okay. It's warmer now, I can feel it. Can't you feel it? I'm warm, Valerie. Val, I'm so warm. Val. Val.

"It's so fucking hot Val."

Val's tears froze to the fur on her cheeks as she gripped her husband's paws in hers. Valerie trembled, unable to find her voice.

Casey started fumbling at his jacket with useless numb fingers. "Get dis offa me," he slurred, "gittit ov. 's kellin'ma."

Valerie stopped his paws and he had no choice but to relent in his weakened state.

As the wind whipped around them, dusting crystals of ice over them, Valerie leaned in close to her husband. Although his voice was weak and his body uncooperative and numb, as the last bit of warmth escaped him she knew what her husband's last words were:

"I'm not scared anymore."

###

Valerie and Mitzi were a third of the way to Roswell before they stopped for a night. They huddled together behind a snowdrift next to a long dead Joshua tree and desperately searched through their packs for something to eat. Luckily the cans of dog food where hidden away in one of the two packs and they greedily devoured one of the unmarked tins.

While searching through the packs Valerie found a notebook she instantly recognized as her husband's. The next morning she was able to read his only entry, poxing it with her steady stream of tears.

Valerie found a pen in the depths of the pack and began a new entry:

I'm not going to write any more about Tucumcari. What happened in Tucumcari is best left forgotten.