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HopeyWolf — Hopey's Flight - Chapter 1
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Published: 2011-03-18 07:35:42 +0000 UTC; Views: 15336; Favourites: 74; Downloads: 101
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//Hopey's Flight//by Brett Parsons (VulpineHero)
//Hopey © Zaruchen
A recent rain left the city feeling even more damp and mildewed than usual. Puddles gathered
on the decaying sidewalks and in the potholes of the street. The wet ground reflected the light of the
overhead electric signs with hazy and dull splotches of color. What few cars were on the street at this
hour drove slowly to avoid the dilapidated sections of the road.
Hopey backed into the door to the 24-hour market and pushed it open with her hips, knocking
the bell on the lintel. As she stepped onto the street, she pulled in a deep breath of muggy air. The
humidity was tangible even through her fur. She adjusted the bag of groceries in her grasp and headed
back to her apartment, glancing sideways at a couple low-born humans lurking outside the market.
They had enough metal on their faces to almost be considered augmented high-born. Hopey made a
show of checking the time on her glove computer as she passed by to avoid eye contact.
The humans seemed even more wary of the wolfess than she was of them. Her blue and white
coat rest snug on top of a frame of rippling muscle, cutting an intimidating figure that made most
abandon any thought of trying to tangle with her. But she was hardly a brute.
Her apartment building was a cut slightly above the others in the neighborhood, though it was
still a hovel compared to where she used to live. It was kept clean by the owners, whom she liked. The
old cat and his wife tried to maintain some elegance in this part of town even as more thugs and addicts
were shoved out of the shoreside of the city.
The neighborhood had become a gathering place for low-born anthros of every ilk. The humans
tried their best to keep the highcity pure, only letting in non-humans who were pleasant, well-
mannered, useful and, while they would not admit it, attractive. Hopey used to be one of them, though
getting in did not necessarily entail "being" in. It would always be a humans' club out on The Pillar.
Hopey waved and smiled at the apartment superintendent as she passed through the lobby. He
returned the gesture eagerly; in the past he had made a note of telling the wolfess that she was one of
the best tenants he had ever had.
She stopped in front of her door on the top floor and held out her gloved palm. A holographic
screen appeared an inch above her palm, shimmering in the crossed light from the three emitters sewn
into the leather under her index finger, pinky, and thumb. She navigated the menus by curling her
fingers to press the "buttons" above the image and accessed the glove's inventory. Cycling through the
stored objects, she found her door card and summoned it.
A tiny, fingerprint-sized device in the wristband of the glove hummed. Tiny particles, no larger
than grains of sand, flowed in a whirl out of the opening, forming themselves into the shape of the door
card. In less than two seconds, Hopey held the reconstituted card, perfectly solid, in her paw.
She swiped the card and the magnetic lock disengaged long enough for her to push open the
door. This was one of the few places she could find that had not switched over to biometrics yet. Those
systems made her nervous. The thought of her retinal information in a database somewhere, accessible
to any corporate or government agency with an interest in her, would drive her neurotic.
With the door shut behind her and the extra, and relatively pointless, bolt-lock sealed, Hopey
could finally feel at ease. She set her groceries down on the kitchen counter and put away the
perishables. With the controls on her glove, she opened the window shutters in the living room.
Her apartment had a fairly nice view of the highcity. The jeweled crown of the metropolis rest
atop an artificial platform over the lake, connected to the rest of the city by an enormous span bridge.
The Pillar, as it was called, rose slightly more than twenty stories above the water level to put it even
with the rest of the city squatting on the cliffs surrounding it. The entire structure was little more than
six sleek, black sides that seemed especially dark when the dozens of sparkling towers atop it were aglitter in the night.
Hopey finished putting away her groceries and snuck a pawful of strawberries out of her fridge
to snack on as she headed into the bathroom. She turned on the shower, undressed, and climbed in,
letting the warm water wash the day's troubles into the drain beneath her. Once she was clean and her
fur was fluffed to satisfaction, she got dressed again and headed into the extra room of the apartment,
her study.
It was a bit of a mess, with many of the old textbooks she had collected laying scattered around
her workbench. Small pieces of machinery she was tinkering with rest on the simple wooden table. On
the other end of the dim room, a rack of barbell weights stood against the wall, less dusty than the floor
around it. It was an odd collection, with the lower weights uniform in style, but the higher-end
dumbbells were of different sizes and shapes, scavenged from pawn shops and junk stores around the
city as Hopey tried to find weights heavy enough to provide her with good resistance.
She sat down on her small swivel chair in front of her workbench. The components of an old
radio, one that worked on actual radio waves, rest disassembled in front of her. She flipped the page on
the textbook laying open beside her and got back to work for a little while longer before heading to
bed.
The slick company car struck a puddle on the ruined street, the tire spraying a sheet of water
towards the sidewalk. Unlike in the movies, no one was there to catch it.
"Show me who we're hunting," the man in the passenger seat said.
Without taking his eyes off the road, the driver reached between the seats with a gloved hand
and retrieved a flat screen about the length of his forearm and the thickness of glass. He handed it to the
passenger.
The passenger tapped the screen twice and it came to life. It displayed the mugshot of a red-
orange fox with half of his face missing. Black biometallic parts made up his right eye, ear, and the left
side of his jaw. Red and white fur formed a jagged border around the metal portions of his face. The
look in his remaining eye when the mugshot had been taken was that of death, as cold and dark as the
stare from the mechanical eye. There was no other way to put it.
The fox's name, Malis, was shown at the top of the file, along with his physical information.
The bottom half of the screen was a scrolling list of warrants for his arrest so long it defied common
sense.
"All that gear. His head is worth a fortune – literally. Has to be high-born."
"Sounds about right."
"Vet?"
"Probably how he got messed up."
"What's he doing down here?"
"He went bastard a while back. He's got a gang under him now. Anti-humans."
The passenger lowered the screen and looked out the window. "How dangerous is this going to
be?"
"Nothing to worry about. The whole block will be sealed off and the police know to keep away.
Six teams on the ground and two by air. We'll make the sweep and this will be over in ten minutes. You
just stay behind me and tell the board everything went well."
The driver pulled the car up behind the perimeter of APCs blocking off the streets around the
block. The biomechanics firm's corporate logo was brazenly displayed on the side of the vehicles.
Private soldiers in white armor stood protectively behind the armored hulls, rifles out and ready. Two
twin-engine birds hovered far above the city, waiting for the signal.
Both agents got out of the car, their dark jackets emblazoned on the breast with the same logo as
on the APCs. One of the soldiers motioned for them to join him behind the tank. The faceless white
mask had the countenance of a skull, with the black circles that served as one-way eyepieces and the dark jaw.
The head agent withdrew a pair of sunglasses from his jacket and put them on, despite the hour.
They amplified the light level of the street and added a transparent thermal overlay to his vision. The
white armor of the soldiers now glowed with a faint pink.
"We're ready," he told the soldier.
Drunk on sleep, Hopey swatted aimlessly in the air at a droning noise in her ears. She rolled
over and pulled her pillow over her head, but the sound seemed to follow her. Finally, she sat up and
tracked the sound to her glove.
A harsh, red warning box was blinking in front of her palm. The alert was coming from her
computer. Groggily, the wolfess pushed her way off the bed and staggered over to the computer on the
side of the bedroom without bothering to get dressed.
An array of five holographic screens – four satellites surrounding a core screen in an "X"
pattern – flickered into view. They were all blinking with a sobering red as Hopey rubbed her eyes with
the heel of her paw. Her computer was displaying several video feeds from minuscule cameras she had
hidden around the apartment building.
She froze immediately when she saw a squad of armored goons barrel through the lobby of the
building. They had found her.
With barely any time to think, Hopey rushed back into her clothes and grabbed a backpack from
her closet. Everything she owned that was precious could be contained in the pack or her glove. Paws
shaking with anxiety, she disentangled the fist-sized, cube-shaped computer from the various plugs and
attachments fixed to it. She only needed the computer itself. Everything else was replaceable.
There was no way to know how much time she actually had. She threw the computer into her
backpack with some extra clothes and ran into the bathroom. With a couple flicks of the wrist, she
opened the hot water faucet and the shower. The wolfess ran to the kitchen, turning on her television as
she went and raising the volume to be almost deafening. She grabbed some food and threw it into the
backpack as she turned on the oven, leaving the door hanging open. A wave of warm air immediately
rolled out of the appliance, making Hopey's pant legs cling to her fur.
She slid her thumb over the touchpad on the thermostat to the maximum and ran out of ideas.
That was the most she could do to raise the heat without burning the building down. It was becoming
sweltering in the kitchen. The wolfess' rich blue hair was damp against her head and back.
Her tail fluttering excitedly, she returned to the bedroom and went to the window with the fire
escape outside. It had been painted over at some point in time and the wood had warped, but it was no
trouble for Hopey's strength to overcome. The window rose with a series of squeaks. There was a rush
as the hot air in the apartment blew by to escape.
A crash from the living room momentarily overwhelmed the television. The noise from the
television was cut short and Hopey could hear the plodding of boots throughout the apartment.
The strike team crested the top of the stairs, stalking in ranks two across as they swept the
building. Thermal optics revealed the outlines of all manner of oddly-shaped people dwelling in the
apartments, either still asleep in their beds or wandering fearfully through the rooms.
One soldier kicked open a door to an apartment. He shined the light mounted to his rifle on the
wolf and cat clutching each other in fright in the corner of the living room. Sweeping his gaze across
the other rooms, he saw nothing of interest and backed out.
The sergeant at the head of the squad held up a fist. "Room at the end of the hall is hot," he
explained. Pointing at the two soldiers in the back, he ordered them to continue the sweep and the
others followed to the last apartment.
Someone had flooded the rooms with heat, ruining thermal vision. The corporate thugs stacked
at the door, one flanking either side and a third standing in front. A heavy boot smashed the magnetic
lock from the wall and the door flew open. The soldiers streamed in, fanning out into the living room
and scanning for the tenant. A single bullet passed through the television, cracking the screen and
bringing the sound to an abrupt halt with the last image still frozen onto it.
The soldiers breached into the bedroom and found the window hanging open, a dark hole in the
thermal optics. One soldier headed to the window and looked both up and down, but could not see
anything.
"What now?" another asked.
"Nothing," the sergeant replied. "The roof teams will handle it. Go back to the sweep."
Hopey was already pulling herself onto the roof when the soldiers came to her bedroom door.
Given the amount of APCs swarming outside the apartment building, going down seemed like the less
attractive of her options, so she scaled the wall and lifted herself over the edge of the roof, coming
down hard on the other side of the half-wall ringing the edge. Looking up, the blue wolfess wondered if
this had actually been the better idea.
In her haste to escape from the soldiers, she never heard the dropships descending over the
building. One of them, twin engines on the wings roaring with orange flame, drew close while the other
held back. Wind whipped over the roof, blowing back Hopey's hair. The bay doors on the sides of the
dropship slid open and four soldiers in white armor marked with blue accents leapt the remaining
fifteen feet to the roof. They hit the tiles hard, their boots ejecting bursts of steam as they landed.
The soldiers formed a semicircle around the wolfess. She rose to her feet and stayed back
against the half-wall, her breath heavy and her paws clenched from the adrenaline. She did not want
them to see her. Even now, the soldiers' optics were being sent back to their owners and recorded.
Computers would analyze her image and cross-reference it against a dozen databases. The network of
spy programs that infiltrated every major corporation's systems would spread the data like wildfire.
Alarms in offices in the highcity would screech and even more soldiers would be on her tail.
Her fears were dead-on. Maybe these soldiers had not come for her originally, but they wanted
her now. As one and without communication, all four dropped their rifles and grasped stunning batons
from their belts. Three-foot-long collapsible rods of metal, sparking with electricity, sprung from the
hilts. The soldiers closed in on her slowly, tightening their perimeter and giving her no clear target to
attack.
Hopey pressed her right thumb against the second knuckle of her ring finger and slid it out to
the nail. It was a macro programmed into her glove for just such an emergency. Like before, particles
stormed out of the wristband of the glove and collected in her palm. The wolfess swept up her arm and
took aim even as the heavy-barreled revolver was becoming complete in her grasp.
She got off two shots with the handcannon before the soldiers overcame their surprise and
charged, but by then half of them were dead or dying. Superheated bullets burst from the barrel, leaving
the grooves inside glowing orange. The projectiles shredded armor and seared flesh in their wake. Both
soldiers on Hopey's right fell in their tracks.
The soldier on her far left reached her first, sweeping his baton at her head. She caught the
swing on her wrist and shoved back, knocking him off balance. Extending one foot beside the soldier's
ankle, the wolfess arced her pistol around, forcing back the other soldier and hitting her target on the
shoulder. He stumbled on her foot and bounced over the wall, the first step on a long journey to the
ground.
Enraged, the last soldier lashed out with his baton, striking Hopey on the elbow. The electric
shock ripped through her side, forcing her muscles to clench together. Her pistol clattered onto the roof.
She grit her fangs against the pain and tried to slam into the soldier, but her right leg would not heed
her and she only managed to clip her assailant before fumbling onto the tiles.
The soldier planted a knee into her stomach and tried to pin her down underneath the stun
baton. She grasped his forearms and held him back until he was struggling vigorously against her.
Reversing her press into a pull, she yanked the soldier down as she snapped her head forward,
smashing her forehead into the soldier's faceplace hard enough to leave a crack in it.
Her vision spun and whirled from the impact, but the soldier slumped over onto the tiles,
unconscious. Once she could manage it, Hopey wobbled to her feet, clutching her head and shaking the
last tingles out of her right side. She scooped up her pistol and aimed it at the dropships overhead,
contemplating for a minute if she should try shooting them down. She decided against trying; it would
take some damn lucky shots to manage it at all and that was only going to draw the kind of attention
she did not want. At any rate, the team in the second dropship seemed reluctant to come and try its own
luck. The threat of the muscled wolfess and her revolver was enough of a deterrent, at least.
Hopey materialized two bullets into her left paw and reloaded her gun, dropping the empty
shells into her pockets so they could not be recovered by the goons. Dissolving her gun into her glove
for safekeeping, she scanned the perimeter of the building, looking down on the cordon the corporate
soldiers had set up around the block. They had her fenced in on all sides. Armored cars blocked off the
streets and soldiers kept a wary vigil in case anyone slipped by the sweeping teams.
The wolfess gripped the edge of the half-wall in front of her. There had to be some route she
could take to escape. She had not planned for an attack this brazen. Her contingency for when the
building was stormed by goons was to retreat to the roof, jump to the other buildings, and scamper
away through the abandoned parking garage and hotel nearby, but that assumed the streets were clear.
Pops of gunfire erupted on the other side of the block. Someone was disagreeing fiercely with
the invasion. The soldiers on the ground started to head to the disturbance, but halted and returned to
their posts. So much for a diversion.
Still, if someone punched a hole in the line, she could use it. Getting in the middle of the
fighting would be dangerous, but it was better than waiting on the roof for the soldiers to swarm her. If
she had cover, she might be able to hold out against a half dozen or so, but exposed as she was, it
would only take one that ignored the order to subjugate.
Hopey broke into a sprint across the roof, planting her foot on the half-wall on the opposite side
and soaring over the alley to the other building. She hit and rolled, regaining her feet gracefully and
tugging her top back down. In the alley below, several dark-clothed figures – anthros one and all – were
in a skirmish with the corporate soldiers.
A red-orange fox with a long coat and a high collar stood at the head, spraying SMG bullets into
the soldiers' positions as if he had tons to spare. Maybe he did. The rat-a-tat of his machine gun echoed
through the alley up to Hopey's ears. Behind him, a draconic anthro took his time aiming shots with a
long-barreled rifle at the vehicles, probably hoping to punch through the armor and hit whoever was
hiding behind them. Other various belligerents hung behind the leaders, waiting for a chance to get out
and do some fighting. Several of them were already dead in the alley.
This group seemed like the sort Hopey did not want to have anything to do with, but it was the
best chance of getting away from here. There was a trash bin between this building and the apartments.
Shrugging off her backpack, she clutched the pack tightly to her chest and slipped over the edge of the
wall, twisting in the fall to position her back towards the pile of refuse waiting below.
The head agent put a finger to his ear to better hear the sound from his implant over the din of
gunfire nearby. Standing beside him, the board's representative looked up anxiously. He was visibly
disturbed by the fighting, but he was holding fairly well for a bureaucrat.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"We woke a sleeper."
"A what? Another fugitive?"
"No, a target of interest." He took the screen back from the representative as a new file tab
opened to show information for the new target. The face of a blue wolfess with orange eyes stared out
from the portrait. It was a file photo. In it, she was wearing a trim and expensive work outfit. Not the
kind of thing that could be expected from most living in this area.
"She doesn't look all that bad a sort," the rep commented. "But the company wants her, you
said? What for?"
The agent flexed his hand and his pistol materialized from his glove. "It doesn't matter what the
labcoats want her for. The bounty on her head is a year's pay." He provided the representative with a
glare that demanded obeisance. "Hunting this target is illegal. Is that clear? This is not business the
board will be caught doing."
"I'm not following."
The agent grabbed the representative by the collar of his jacket. "You tell the board about Malis
and only fucking Malis. Nothing about the wolfess ever happened."
"Y-yes, I get it."
"Good." The agent let him go and returned his hand to his ear. "Keep me updated, but do not
pursue. We can't snag her," he lied.
Hopey climbed out of the trash bin, shaking to knock loose any stray pieces of refuse that still
clung to her fur and clothes. She appreciated the trash for breaking her fall, but that was where their
friendship was going to end.
She stuck to the shadows in the alley and knelt beside the corner where the rebels were still
fighting. A wolf with black fur was laying a few feet away, shot several times by the corporate goons. If
he was not dead already, then he was well past the point of any help that could be given him. Trying to
stay focused, the wolfess peered around the corner. The stray bullet occasionally zipped past, breaking
off a piece of concrete from the wall or skidding over the asphalt, so Hopey kept her face as covered as
she could.
The fox was still playing one-man-army in the street, arms extended perpendicular to his body
and machine guns blazing as if he had wings of flame. In the cover provided by his barrage, the rebels
moved out to assault the soldiers head-on. It was a poor decision. As soon as the others were in the
open, the fox and his draconic lieutenant slipped out of sight behind an APC and bolted into the parking
garage, leaving the others to fend for themselves.
It was the best chance Hopey was going to get. She set down the alley in a run, picking her
steps carefully to avoid tripping on bodies or fallen weapons. Once she was in the open space of the
street, she lunged forward in the gap provided by the rebels. Bullets from the soldiers' crossfire
bounced from the hulls of the armored cars and thudded across the street. A tiger caught one with his
throat as he popped up to fire. The others fared only slightly better as they were gunned down like a
pack of animals. Hopey kept running, not stalling even as she got into the parking garage and weaved
between the decaying pillars.
The gunfire in the street ceased and she could only hear her own padding footfalls as she
sprinted across the open space. The door leading to the alley in the back, where she could make her
way to the abandoned hotel, was already opened. She ran for it hard, needing to get out of the open.
A black arm extended across the doorway at the last moment. Hopey could do nothing to stop
her momentum and crashed into it with her waist as if it was a bar of pure steel. Her center of gravity
lurched and rolled over the top of the arm, sending her spinning to an unceremonious flop in the middle
of the doorway.
She was still dazed and out of breath when the dragon grasped her by the scruff around her neck
and hauled her into the air. He wrapped his arm tight around her neck and held her against his shoulder,
tilting her to the side slightly so she could see the fox past her muzzle.
The rebel leader appraised her sternly, his left eye narrowed. Much of his face was made out of
replacement biomechanics. His right eye was little more than a black sphere with a blue shine inside
the pupil. The ear above it was a triangle-shaped dish attached to the exposed metallic portions of his
skull, but the top corner had been blown off by a bullet.
His coat was even more ragged, ripped through and through with bullet holes, cuts, tears, and
burns. Many had been accrued over time and patched or sewn, but several were fresh. There were even
two holes in the fox's shirt that leaked a syrupy black fluid. Somehow the injuries did not bother him.
He pointed the SMG in his right paw at her face. At this distance, she could see that his right
paw was actually made of articulated plates instead of flesh. How much of this fox was even still fox?
"Who the hell are you, blue?" he asked calmly.
Hopey struggled against the dragon's grip and he loosened slightly to let her breathe. Inhaling,
she shot back, adamantly, "You should know better than to ask that. I'm just trying to get by."
The fox raised his good eyebrow. "Bad time to go strolling, when the city's a fucking warzone.
You're just as hellbent on getting away from the goons as we are, but they came here for me. So I take it
you're running because they want you for something. And if I know them as well as I think I do, I'd
wager it's not because you've got middle management potential." He pressed a metallic claw against the
wolfess' exposed abdomen and she flinched. "She's top shelf, isn't she, Rig?"
The dragon snorted. "Check out 'er arms, Mal. They could make lots of implants out o' her."
"No, you imbecile, it's got to be something more unique than muscle. They could put a want ad
in the paper and meatheads like you would walk into the grinder." He directed his gun back up to
Hopey's face, as if that was her cue that she could speak. "What is it they want from you?"
"Just let me go. We don't have time for this."
The fox laughed. "Conveniently enough, a coupon for all the time in the world just fell into my
lap. I don't give a shit what kind of wonderdrugs they can cook out of you. I just know you're scared
enough of them to be worth throwing back. Rig, find a bar to block off the door and chuck her back
into the garage. By the time the white knights catch her and get over their collective boners, we'll be
long go-"
A bullet ripped through the doorway, blew a hole through the fox's extended arm, and thudded
into the brick of the wall. "Mal" jerked his arm back, more out of shock than agony, and stuck his left-
paw gun through the doorway, spraying a hail of lead at the soldiers as they advanced through the
garage.
Hopey seized the distraction and pulled both knees up to her chest. She kicked out with her feet
and smashed the fox on the head and shoulder, sending him spiraling to the concrete. In the same
heartbeat, she summoned her revolver into her paw and stuck the barrel underneath the dragon's elbow.
She closed her eyes against the spray of blood after the shot as the dragon howled in pain and
reflexively released her. The wolfess landed on her feet and rushed away before the fox could manage
to gather his wits. He sprayed bullets after her, but she threw her shoulder into the door to the hotel and
disappeared into the darkness.
She had no idea if they would follow her into the building or stay and hold their ground against
the goons. Hiding was no option, no matter who won. She had to keep moving until she could lose
herself in the city.
The eyes in the sky caught the wolfess fleeing into the old hotel by the parking garage. Striking
off alone while the strike teams were busy getting gunned down by Malis, the agent pushed open the
front doors to the hotel and stalked inside as quietly as he could.
Squatters lived here, evidenced by the cots and piles and ragged clothes gathered in the corners,
but they scattered when the fighting began. There were only two people in the building now.
The agent brightened the light amplification on his shades. Everything in his vision had a blue
cast and some detail was lost, but he could see as well as could be hoped in the near-total darkness.
Shadows seemed longer and stranger to his enhanced vision, dancing around corners and flickering
along the walls even if there was nothing moving.
The wallpaper was peeling away in strips from decay or vandalism. There were knife-slashes,
spray paint tags, and soiled portions of the walls. The carpet was foul and spotted, portions of it
uprooted or lost beneath an inch of trash. Groans and creaks marked his every footstep as he crept
forward, pistol held out in front of him.
Hopey had fled into the building from the alley. She certainly did not intend to exit through the
front, putting her back into the blockade, so she must have been heading either up or towards the
windows on the west side. He would check the windows first.
He passed the lobby and the disabled elevators. The door to the small room with the snack
machines, their glass fronts broken out, and the ice dispenser lay on his right. His feet crunched broken
glass into the carpet as he passed the shattered door to a coin-operated laundromat.
The first floor of the hotel loomed before him, walls of doors on either side extending down the
hallway. The passage made a left turn at the end of the hall and continued onward. This place was a
death trap, but he continued onward anyways, slowing his pace even further to reduce his noise.
He wished he could use his sunglasses' thermal optics, but too much of their power was being
consumed with just amplifying the light in the hotel and they had a poor range to begin with. His pair
was a standard civilian model, not built to the degree of standards the military used. And once he was
close enough to get a distinct reading on the thermal, she would be able to hear him and then there
would be no point.
The agent began checking the doors on the right side of the hallway. Most of the locks were
broken and the doors could be pushed open without much trouble. He searched for any evidence of a
furred paw or elbow having wiped away the dust from the knob or the door's surface. One door
completely lacked a knob or lock and was hanging ajar. He pushed it open slowly with his left hand
crossed in front of his chest and held his gun ready through the crack.
The door swung open with a weary groan. Inside, the room was stale and choked with dust. It
hung heavy in the air, visible even on his sunglasses. The squatters had not even come in here for a
long time. Checking behind him, the agent backed out of the room, leaving the door slightly open. He
continued on to the next door.
He stopped in front of the door and looked down at the carpet. The trash here had been
disturbed. Some pieces of newspaper were laying upturned instead of being smashed down. There were
gashes in the stale, stiff carpet where claws had been. Now that he could see part of it, the entire trail
was visible to him, leading from the bend in the hallway up to this room. The wolfess had walked along
the wall, as if she was checking each door until she reached this one. And as far as he could tell, the
trail did not lead back out.
The agent took a step forward to grasp the doorknob and the floor creaked under his boot.
Hopey took her time making her way through the hotel's dark hallway until her eyes adjusted to
the dimness. Her keen eyes could see in the gloom well enough to get her past objects without
knocking them over, but she had to work mostly on memory of the route she practiced.
She came to the bend in the hallway and continued on, keeping one paw against the wall on her
left. Trash stuck to her bare feet, but she tried her best to ignore it and keep moving. The thought of the
psychotic fox behind her was reason enough to press on. If he found her again, it was guaranteed to be
a firefight and he was too well-armed and augmented to risk her chances.
Her paw found the first door in the hallway. She rest her palm on the knob and recalled how
many doors down she needed to go. One... two... three... four... five... six. At the sixth door, she pushed
her way inside and quietly shut the door, keeping the bolt held back until the door was completely
inside the frame so it would not click as it caught.
The wolfess crept over to the window and wiped it clear with her paw. The sight disheartened
her. Instead of the view she remembered of the alley that would lead away from the blockade, two
white letters from the side of a dumpster stared back at her. That was not there before.
Maybe she had the wrong room. Squaring her shoulders against defeat, she turned and headed
back to the door. She stopped short as her ears picked up a creak right outside in the hallway. There was
nothing left to do. Hopey summoned her revolver and took aim at the door.
He froze, trying his damnedest to sound like just another old noise in the crumbling hotel. But
nothing happened. Red-hot bullets did not tear through the wooden door. A wall of blue muscle and
fury did not burst through in a hail of splinters. There was nothing. Silence.
Yet the hairs on his neck lifted themselves almost vertical. Someone was watching him. As
quietly as he could, he backed away from the door and stood straight, pistol held out in front of him
with the hologram sight aimed dead center at the wood. With all the care he could muster, he lifted his
free hand to his sunglasses and switched them over completely to thermal optics.
The blue-shaded world vanished into darkness. In its place, there stood the red-and-orange
outline of the huge wolfess just beyond the door. There were no details to be seen beyond simply her
silhouette, but from her stance, he could infer that her gun was aimed at the door. But she held still,
save for the flicking of her tail. They both stood hesitating, weapons aimed at one another with only a
flimsy screen of wood between them.
The agent gauged his chances of taking her down with a single bullet. There was no bounty in
killing her, but every second he hesitated was another chance for her to begin shooting first. It meant
life or death now. If he got her square in the head, he might be able to make it out intact, but that was a
big enough if to make a difference. His bullet's path might be warped by the door and only graze her
head or she could react swiftly enough to put a shot through his lung before she fell.
She was the one in the desperate situation. She should be the one shooting first, hoping to bring
him down with a lucky hit. But she did not. He did not. They stood their ground, letting each other live
a little longer.
He listened to the sound of his own shaking breath, wondering what she was thinking on the
other side of the door.
She had no idea who had tracked her into the hotel, but whoever it was, she knew he could see
her. All the soldiers had thermal optics. She assumed the fox did, too, in his biomechanical eye. There
was no point to hiding or running. As soon as she let her attention waver from the door, she would be
vulnerable.
Her ears were strained on the sound of silence in front of her. Why was he waiting? He held
every advantage. He may not have even been directly in front of the door anymore, but judging by how
he did not already begin shooting, Hopey guessed she was pointing her gun in the right direction.
A full minute passed in their standoff. With every second that passed, Hopey crushed the urge to
shoot first. Her arms grew tired from being held still for so long and her aim began to waver. She tried
not to inhale too deeply, lest she might choke on the dust in the air.
After several agonizing minutes, it was clear neither was going to risk dying. Hopey finally
opened her mouth to speak.
"Just go," she called, keeping her gun held high. She swallowed to clear her dust-filled throat.
"Go. Go home."
There was no response from the hallway. There was a soft creak as the person outside began to
move, slowly shifting off to Hopey's left. He continued to trudge away, not bothering to mask the
sounds of his passing. The groaning of the floorboards and the rustle of trash faded away into the
distance. At the end, the wolfess heard the crunch of glass and then silence.
She lowered her gun and waited several more minutes before daring to move. Gingerly, she
crept forward and opened the door an inch, one eye and gun barrel pointed through the crack. It was
clear. She opened the door the rest of the way and stepped out with care, keeping her eyes on both
passageways as she shimmied along the wall to the next door down. It opened behind her and she
slipped inside, letting it shut on its own.
This window was clear. She pushed it up and stuck her head through. It was clear on both sides.
This area was hidden from view behind the dumpster. Above, the sky was clear of the dropships. The
wolfess clambered through the window, barely managing to fit her broad shoulders in the relatively
narrow frame. She dropped to the ground below and adjusted her backpack on her shoulders.
There was nothing between her now and running off into the night.
The representative stood in front of the abandoned hotel as the head agent emerged from the
darkness, looking a bit more sullen and weary for it.
"Not so well, I take it?" the rep asked, holding the screen to his chest.
The head agent took off his sunglasses and tried to look collected. "She got away," he lied,
twisting his expression into a frustrated sneer. He shook his head and looked up at the devastated block.
"What happened with Malis?"
"He got away. He's wounded, though, and can't have gotten far on foot."
"Let him go. This was all a disaster."
The agent walked by the shot-up APCs and inspected the street where the soldiers and rebels
had gotten into the thickest fighting. Soldiers in white armor and anthros in dark clothing lay scattered
and broken throughout the area. Bullet holes and shattered glass covered everything.
"I never expected this. How many did we lose?"
"Four ground teams," the rep answered. "The blue one, she took out an air team. One of them is
still alive, but barely. It's all a mess. What do we do now?"
The head agent ran his hand through his hair. "Call for cleanup. Tell them to radiate the
basement of the apartment building. Make it look like we raided him to stop a bomb threat. It won't be
too hard to make Malis and his bastards look like terrorists; they already are. But we've got to be quick
before morning so we can brief the board on what to tell the press."
"And the wolfess?"
"I already said she was never here."
Hopey wandered the city for a half hour in order to shake off any tails before she finally headed
to one of her safehouses. She shimmied up the pipe running along the side of the building and kicked
her foot out to push open one of the loading doors meant for large deliveries on the side of the loft. She
had torn down the stairs leading up to the makeshift living quarters a long time ago to make it harder to
get in – that was the point, after all.
It was nothing but brick walls and wooden floors in the safehouse, but she had not invested a
whole lot in it. This was just a hiding place. There was an old futon pushed into one corner and a
refrigerator in the other. A wooden board rest across a couple plastic crates to serve as a counter.
She pulled the freight door shut and stopped to look out the large window near the bed as she
shrugged off her backpack. The highcity still twinkled on The Pillar, ignorant to anything that happened
in the lowcity. Only two stories up, she could not see the block where her apartment building stood
from here. It was going to be a week, at the very least, before she could risk going back to collect her
things and a month or two, if not longer, before she could even consider trying to live in it again
without being hounded.
Hopey sat on the edge of the futon, cautiously holding her revolver across her lap. After her
walk, the adrenaline had drained from her system, leaving her exhausted. She tried to keep her eyes
focused on the freight door, but her eyelids were heavy. She rest her forearms across her knees to keep
herself propped up.
Birds chirped outside and the wolfess woke to find herself sitting in the same position, her fur
warmed by the sunlight streaming in from the window. Storing her gun in her glove, she pushed herself
to her feet, feeling the protests of her sore and cramped muscles. She stretched away the tension in her
arms and shoulders and pulled back the freight door over the loading dock.
The morning light blinded her for a moment as a handful of birds resting on the edge of the
floor on the other side of the door fluttered away. In the day, the highcity in the distance seemed
impersonal and drab atop its sleek platform.
Hopey sat with her legs dangling over the side, free for yet another day. The crisp morning wind
cut through her fur and she reclined against the wall with the sunlight warming her.
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Comments: 12
This... is ... a ... masterpiece, really.
Felt every emotion you needed to portray. Quality work if you ask me.
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Awesome! I think you should make a comic or animation
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Awesome story! It kind of reminds me of Forests Of The Night by S. Andrew Swann
Say this would make a great story for my group The-Anthro-Writers
Check it out and join my group.
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this should be a full blown comic (not saying that i appreciate your story of course)
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This story has most of my RPG project storyline, i think i´m not original now...
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Wow, you sure drew me in with that short story. I wasn't even looking for a read, and couldn't stop. Good thing it wasn't any longer, there's only 10 minutes left on my laptop's battery charge! I would've been devastated!
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very interesting story. very long. this gives a good insight to hopey. does hopey ever fall in love with anyone? and please let her keep both of her arms
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