Group Therapy (gay furry camp story)

13 - satin

"Just you" Cat's eyes, dim.

The coyote had digested the ear. but whatever nutrients it had given him were gone. Lost to stress, and entropy. Lost to heating the icy bedsheets sprung around his body. He was naked and shivering: clothes so saturated with dried cheetah blood and vomit - as the cheetah had been quite critical about his newly absent ear at the time - that they had itched themselves off of him as he wrestled with the endless cold.

Just you. Bandit's words. Rolling over in his mind.

It was an ironic night to be grasped by sudden insomnia: the bear's snores had subsided.

"Mortar?" The coyote whispered in the darkness. Moonlight lit the canopy above them, projecting the bear's large body like a distant mountain in an underwater night.

He crept out of bed, his paws met the floor but were suddenly bitten. He recoiled, eyes wide with primal night vision swimming in his pupils like fat black fish as he stared at the undersides of his digits.

Frost. Condensation, frozen. His body was so cold they it even melt against the leathery surface of his digits. Gradually, he coaxed his hind-paw close enough to his face to lick it off. Every molecule of moisture lit up like winter-ecstacy on his long canine tongue.

Gradually, he crept over and poked the bear. Mortar only grumbled slightly - not in annoyance, but the disconnect between consciousness and unconsciousness.

"Mortar, hey," He dug his finger into the crook of the bear's back. "wake up man. I want... I need you to come with me. I've got no idea what I'm doing."

Mortar breathed in, swelling the mass of his shadow, before happily snoozing it back out into misty dragon's breath. Dusting the crooks of his pillow as it slowly fell from his snout. Snow on satin white alps.

The coyote sighed. "This is a really bad time for you to hibernate on me, man."

Mortar's heartbeats rocked him with gradual pushes of a low, ensuing nature. Not the 'nature of something', but the phenomena of the collective, physical world. The world of sides, of activity - and the alternative underside of active restoration, of comatose, of slow pulsings of blood. Thump... of plummeting body temperature. These two sides, one glossy and comfortable, only enabled by its rough, hidden underside. Thump...

Ripper's ears pricked up - the bear's body rolled over to its back. The snores came loud, now, as airways contorted. But there was something else there... a tiny shadow illuminating dead-space, like the dorsal fin of a distant shark.

He pried the teddy-bear out from under the bear's grip. Not so much teddy - as it bared a tiny canine snout. Though nearly finished, its form was incomplete - out from one leg spilled a bed of unwoven threads behind it. To a watching eye, the scene of Ryan retrieving this from the bear would look like that of a heart-transport, veins protruding from his large chest.

His finger bled as he pricked himself on a sewing needle, improvised from a damaged metal fork. Licking his finger, the blood was sticky from dehydration - though sweet - like hospital gelatin. And, figuring the bear wouldn't have much more need for it in the next few months, he wrapped it up in its own loose thread like a cloak - along with a piece of paper littered with black letters the coyote's brain couldn't comprehend - and took it with him as he vacated the tent.

–

Outside, gales spat ice through the desert air. Chunks, the size of small golf balls, thudded into the crimson sand, hellfire unto a near alien landscape. They slapped the thick membrane of the desert and were sucked into the warmth beneath its icy surface. An eternal pocket of heat, preserved by time and promise of the infinite scorching days to come.

Ryan threw one into his mouth, sucking on its thick milky shape as he traversed the silent campsite.

He considered Bandit's tent. Larger than the rest - and the only to house a TV. Unlike the other boys, the cat was likely the only one awake. Ryan's thick ears - though stiffened and inflexible from the air that rummaged around in them - picked up the brittle whittlings of pencil on paper, and the fuzz of white-noise from TV static. If a signal were to exist out here, the storm had likely distorted what little chance it had - and, as though it were emphasis, a dash of thunder cracked over the sky above, birthed from blood red clouds and touching down in the direction of Camp A. Where Kyle likely was.

Perhaps it hit him. Ryan thought grimly. Would save me the trip.

Poke. With a cough, especially one underpinned by psychosomatics, it's common for a person to be completely silent as they slept - despite it, as though giving their throats a breather before another day of hacking was to come. With this in mind, Birdflu coughed so hard that he sprayed a mist of frosty saliva into Ryan's mouth.

"Erg-" The bird gargled and rolled onto his side, directing the rest of his influenza attack into his pillow case. He coughed until he wheezed, as the coyote wiped the snot from his own face, "Do you mind?"

"I need your help."

"Ah. I see" He licked his lips as though testing the stew of sickness. "The wings might have some meat on them." He suggested, "But beware: they don't taste like chicken.."

Ryan's ears folded down as he dismissed intrusive thoughts. "No it's... I really need your help with the supply run." He bit his lip. "And, you know... what you said."

Birdflu sighed. "Try Mortar."

"He's hibernating."

The bird sat up, "Really?" his eyes traced something, and he cocked his beak, "Winter already, huh..." before rolling over and returning back to his sleeping position.

"Birdflu, please."

It was increasingly possible - as now observed by the Ripper at his bedside - that the bird had sustained some degree of nerve damage. A hole in the tarp above let cold air straight through, shattering any degree of warmth in the tent, the air was free lace his exposed black feathers with white. White death. Chilling and devastating. Frozen fentanyl. He shivered horribly, yet didn't give any indication of minding it, much in the same way a sailor must become so adjusted to the horrors on his wet and solitary voyage that he becomes desensitized to even the very sea-spray on his brow.

After a long while of silence - throughout which the bird must have realized that the Ripper would likely wait long at his bedside - the bird's words were these. "Flack's blind. Kyle's abducted." He licked his beak weakly. "Mortar's in hibernation. Which leaves Bandit and myself, in the possibility of helping you. The former of which is too busy, even now, writing plans and sucking up to the bloody, earless mess you made... whilst the latter would spit more flu in your face if you were to ask again."

Ryan made his way to the door of the tent, but hesitated as his paw made for the zipper. "Should I even bother with Roadkill?"

There was no answer. The coughing had stopped.

–

An hour's walk from camp, the sun was just beginning to extend fingers into the sky. Now clear from all evidence of storm, the sky was coated with a clear and fragrant pink - fragrant, as the desert, in its damp patches which only now were being heated by the morning sun - wafted up in ancient chorus, like an aftershave of desert spices. Smells of cinnamon. Smells of the in-betweens of Flack's fur. 

The fallen chunks of hail glowed like alien ore, refracting light in crystalline beams that lit up the surrounding sand like red-Christmas, and for once, now feeling a momentary grasp of peace, the Ripper could breath and ponder, undisturbed as he walked wherever it was he was going.

So, you can imagine his despair when - miraculously, despite his keen eyes and keener sense, a natural hunter had snuck up behind him...

A paw tapped firmly on the Ripper's back.