Mister Slithers and the Water Park

Day Zero
76 hours until Last Night.

The sun was so bright they’d turned the climate warmers off for the day.

In the temperates to the northwest, mammals were acting like the world was ending. The sale of fans tripled; the cranked AC everywhere caused a few rolling brownouts; the news was full of stories of people fainting (one yak had trapped three children underneath him as he fell. *More at eleven*). The rest of the city grudged the Square for their ability to suffer the heat without complaint. But that wasn’t it, not really. People in the Square got as hot as everyone else; they just knew what to do about it.

Kanene sat on the shore of a wading pool, her paws dangling in the silty water, and wondered when she’d begun of it as “The Square” like the locals did. She’d picked it because it was as far away from Savanna Central as she could get without freezing her tail off, but she’d always considered it a temporary thing. A break from the Apedamn nightmare that was the burrow’s politics. Her mother had still sent her brothers to check on her every week, and occasionally a sister would come by to gently remind her that she couldn’t play hooky out here in the dunes forever. That had made it a little difficult to consider herself “settled in”.

But settled in she had. An apartment in a stone high rise she shared with a dozen other displaced burrowers, for dirt cheap on account of the size despite a prime (perfect?) location on the misty stretch where Sahara Square met the sea. Her hole didn’t have a view of it, of course, but it was on her walk to work and she’d fallen in love with it somewhere along the line.

The mist wasn’t doing anything for the heat today. It had boiled off hours ago under the sun, which had relentlessly pounded the streets ever since. Which brought her here; cooling her heels in a bayside pool over lunch before getting back to the comfortable darkness of the office.

A shadow loomed over her: a different shadow from the palm tree giving her shade. She looked up.

A wildebeest, rings hanging from his stubby horns and mane braided. Obviously a teenager, as he only loomed over her, rather than towered.

“Mind if I sit here, man?”

She raised an eyebrow, looking around at the pool’s scattered other waders and then back up at him. She pulled the pen whose tip she’d been absently chewing from her mouth. “It’s a free city, ‘man’.”

“Just, you looked like you were zonin’ out, is all. Didn’t wanna harsh whatever deep thoughts you were having.” He grinned.

“That’s, uh… nice of you.”

“Well, ‘cuz, I was also gonna say,” he said, flopping down onto the shore beside her and plunging his hooves into the water. “Ohhh, man. They keep this stuff cold, huh? That’s real nice.”

“You were gonna say?” she prompted eventually.

“Yeah. How cool it is to see another Vanner out here. Most of us go temperate, yanno?”

She shrugged. “That’s where the action is, they say.”

“Yeah, man. Action’s way overrated, though. It’s, like, it’s got its place, don’t get me wrong. But they got a good balance out here. Very mellow.”

*Did this kid just wander off a train?* She made a vaguely committal noise in her throat.

They sat together in blissfully cool silence for a moment, watching a ship pull into the bay.

“Lotta camels, though,” he added, which startled a laugh out of her.

He held his hooves up. “Nothing against camels, man! Just… their lips, sometimes.”

“Ohhh, boy.” She snorted herself back into composure. “Let me guess: first apartment on your own?”

He shuffled a hoof through his mane, smiling awkwardly. “Jeez. Am I, y’know, that clueless?”

“No, no, it’s okay. Pretty much what I’m doing out here too, actually.”

“Yeah? I was wonderin’ what brought a mustelid out here. Wasn’t gonna ask, or nothin’. Shit, I just did, though, didn’t I?”

She chuckled. “Not a mustelid, actually. Herpestid.”

“Oh, man. Sorry. I get you tube dudes confused. Oh *shit*, that was super speciesist too, huh. I am just screwin’ up- what’s funny?”

“*Tube dudes?*” she repeated incredulously.

“Yeah. I mean…” he gestured at himself. “Like, me an’ rhinos and stuff, barrel dudes. You an’ ferrets… tube dudes.”

“That one’s… that one’s new. I’m gonna have to tell the burrow that.”

“You guys gotta burrow out here?”

“No, no. Back in Savanna. Like I said,” she shrugged, “kind of the same deal”.

“You seem like you been at it a little longer than I have, though.”

“Probably. Half a year, maybe? Right around here, too. ‘Tube dude’ privileges.”

“Ohh, sick. So you get a view like this every day?” He tilted his chin in the direction of the bay. She turned to admire it anew. “No, mine’s facing.... What?”

More ships were pulling into harbor beside the first. Two, three. Four. Others were coming from south along the coast. Where had they all come from, so fast?”

“Yeah, I was gonna ask about those. Those not normal?”

She frowned as the first began disgorging black figures into the shallows, which began wading to shore. “Nnnno. No. That’s not normal.” She stood up in the pool to get a better look. Others were doing the same. Pedestrians, then cars, stopped to look as the figures made land and began to trudge up the beach. They were mostly the same size, the same shape, with a variety of different tails and hoods on what (she could see now) were close-fitting black suits. Digitigrades, carrying rods. Or maybe clubs.

The wildebeest stumbled to his feet beside her, and plodded across the pond to the other side, towards the beach. “I’ma go check it out.”

“No, no, what the fuck are you-” she waded after him, silty water soaking into her shorts. “Don’t do that, are you crazy? This is *not normal-*”

He had pushed his way to the front of the forming crowd, and she weaved her way between legs after him. *What the hell am I following him for?* she thought, almost at the same time she emerged from the lower half of the crowd a few people down from him.

There were a lot of ships. There were a lot of figures. There were a lot of reasons for her to be getting out of here. She turned to leave, to push her way back into the crowd.

Something behind her exploded, blasting into her ears and screaming in there. Under the ringing sound that followed, she heard, very faintly, what sounded like someone throwing a handful of mud at the ground.

Without meaning to, certainly without wanting to, she turned to look.

The wildebeest was sitting down, eyes wide, clutching his side with one hoof. Clutching where his side *should* be with one hoof. A lot of it was splattered  along the ground behind him.

She watched his mouth move in shock-numbed response as his free hoof raised to point at the sea. *I can’t hear what you’re saying*, she thought.

There was another bang, one she felt more than heard, and the back of the wildebeest’s head burst open.

Even through the renewed ringing, she heard the screaming start. As she tried to push through the tangle of legs behind her, they began to move, knocking into her, carrying her with them. The bursts of noise from behind her were dull thumps in her ears, dropping people to her left, her right. The crowd shied away from the falling bodies, pressing closer to her. A hoof caught her in the ribs and staggered her sideways.

*Oh, Rhesus*, she thought, with surprising detachment, *I’m gonna get trampled*.

A hoof from behind caught her in the small of the back, lifted her up: she landed on all fours in the water of the wading pool, which splashed over her in waves as others plowed through it. She coughed, wet fur running into her eyes. She swiped a paw through it, looking up-

One of the wading pool’s watering tubes, dry from disuse, was directly in front of her. They hadn’t been turned on since she’d gotten there.

*Holy shit*, she thought, and shot forward. She struggled around a sharp bend upwards, and found the tube grew a little tighter, almost as tight as the escape burrows at home: barely enough room to turn around if you bent double in the middle. She did so, rather than let whatever the fuck was going on loom behind her ass, and waited.

The tube shook with noise. Bangs. Footfalls. Screams, and screams, and screams, sending the hole thing vibrating until she swore her teeth were buzzing with it. She pressed her eyes closed, and held her breath, and imagined herself in her own little hole back and the burrow that she absolutely should not have left.

After a while, the vibration began to lessen. It slowed, then stopped; some while later, so did the ringing in her ears.

The noise had progressed around from her in all directions: she could hear shouts, and what she thought might be the roaring of fires, in the distance. But right here, around the pool, it was very quiet. Occasionally something sloshed through the water outside, but she didn’t hear any footfalls afterwards.

She opened her eyes one at a time, and stared at the glimmer of light coming around the bend in the tube.

*Tube dude*, she thought, and a wobbly, high pitched giggle bubbled out of her.

The tube resonated with the noise. Something sloshed into the pool.

“No,” she mouthed, “no, no, no, no-”

Something climbed onto the outside of the tube. It seemed to grow around it, everywhere at once. Then something scraped at the entrance.

She pressed her paws to her mouth and bit down on her knuckles. The pen she was still (somehow) holding pressed into her cheek.

*Wait. Okay.*

She dropped her paws from her mouth, biting her lip, and grabbed the wrist holding the pen with her other paw.

*Okay. Okay. Breathe. Okay. Ok-*

The light at the end of the pipe was blotted out as something squeezed into it, around the corner, one massive wedge shaped head, mouth open, four large fangs jutting from the scaled jaws, and behind them two eyes glittering in the last of the light-

She stabbed the pen forward. It sunk into one of the eyes, burst it, and carried through. She felt it snap just as her palm pressed to the thing’s socket. A burst of wet, foul air from its mouth caught her in the face as it *hissed*, like it was trying to scream with cut vocal cords. Blood gouted from its wound, down her harm. Its thrashing shook the tube so hard she bit into her lip.

Then, all at once, it went very still. It seized again, once, twice, and finally went slack.

She stared into the dim glaze of its unruined eye. Into what looked like a slitted pupil, like a feline’s.

“Oh,” she said, through stinging lips. “Fffffuck.”

When she eventually got her breathing under control again, she reached forward and pushed gingerly on its nose. The scaly wedge of its head was blocking the pipe entirely, and it was jammed in place. Maybe that was a good thing.

She backed away from it, down the pipe, until it was lost in darkness. Then she turned double and began to crawl as fast as she could.

*Water treatment. Get to the plant at the end. Hide. Wait until things die down.

Go back to the burrow. Go home.*

It didn’t reassure her.