REDEMPTION

— by Jeff Karamales

Chapter 35
Fire and Ice
 

Richard required several moments of blinking before he recognized the faces around him when he awoke, smiling as Sofiya, Elena and Amanda leaned in closer, relief evident despite the damp fur all of them sported under their eyes. When all three found some way to touch him, to reaffirm that the silver fox was still within the realm of the living, Richard also found himself experiencing a wave of deep emotion.

“You were having us worried, miy liublyy,” Sofiya told the male fox softly.

“How…how bad…was it?” the silver fox asked, far too sore to even try sitting up. His tongue felt thick and had a sweet, plastic taste on it, recalling the way anesthetics let a peculiar flavor from when he had to have his appendix removed when he was seventeen.

“Bad enough,” Mandy said, fresh tears welling in her eyes. “It took Riva and Etienne nine hours to get your innards back inside you all proper like.” She rubbed at her face. “You’ve been out for about two days.”

“Huh. No wonder I feel this bad.”

“And you were losing much blood,” Elena added. “You needed much plasma.”

With a sigh the silver fox slipped back into a fitful doze, something that the vixens had been told would be the norm for the next few days. Getting up from her desk, Riva stepped over and peeked in at her patient. “This is normal. He’ll need a lot of rest after what he went through.” The bat eared fox looked at the other females in turn before looking at Sofiya directly with an apologetic look. “Richard’s out of immediate danger, but I want to keep him here for the next week. I’ll ping your PBJ’s when he wakes, but apart from that, I just don’t have enough room in here for everyone.”

The red fox nodded. “And we are still having duties and tasks to complete,” Sofiya said as she stood straighter, putting on a brave front for her skulk. “I am also waiting to be briefed by Kurt and Daniel and what they were discovering. Joel was taken too easily in my opinion. We need to be protecting the colony if there are more of those…things.”

“Too right!” Amanda agreed with quiet emphasis, her eyes a little wide. “I don’t want whatever it was near here ever again!”

“Schnee drache,” Riva supplied. “It’s German for ‘snow dragon’.”

“A very fitting name for the creature,” Elena added with a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold air outside the medical dome.

“Da. It is being a very fitting name,” Sofiya agreed. “Let us go so that Richard can be getting better. We will be seeing him tonight when we are bringing him his supper.” With that the red fox ushered the other two females out as Riva again looked over her patient and monitored the amount of saline solution fortified with different minerals and vitamins that flowed into the silver fox in her care.

***

Kurt sat across from his colony leader with a cup of tea in his paw-like hands, letting the warmth seep into his padded fingers and palms. “Thirty feet from the nearest dome. That’s where the drache took Joel. Almost to the door of his own shelter. That it did so without detection is disturbing.”

“We’ve learned a lot from examining the animal, though,” Daniel added. “Enough to set up deterrents if there are more in the area.”

The former biologist looked thoughtful prompting Sofiya to push him into telling her more. “There is being something else. I am not caring if you have suppositions, Daniel. I want to hear what you are thinking.”

“Well,” the swift fox said as he leaned forward on his camp chair, “there is nothing, physically speaking, that indicates this is the creature’s normal range. It’s simply not built for our area. The animal is, for want of a better term, designed for snow and mountains. The thing evolved for coping with the cold and a lot more rugged terrain. It’s like finding a polar bear in San Francisco.”

Sofiya listened intently, letting the two that were far more knowledgeable about animals hash out their ideas.

“Then why was it here?” Kurt asked. “If it is like a polar bear, this should still be too warm for it, even though we have snow on the ground.

“Something must have pushed it into our area,” Daniel replied with a shrug. “Some kind of event or a change in where its normal habitat is, perhaps. Or even a shift in the patterns of its normal prey like migration or depleted numbers. It could be almost anything.”

Before any of them could add to the conversation a rumble that seemed to emanate from beneath the dome shook all three anthrofoxes, their fur standing up along their spines a moment before the temblor struck.

“Was that being an earthquake?” Sofiya asked in alarm, her fingers gripping the arms of her chair tightly.

“It was,” Daniel said, looking around as his ears swiveled of their own accord as if searching for a noise. “I lived in California long enough to know exactly what those feel like!”

Shouting from outside the dome drew the attention of Sofiya and she as out the door before the two males could react. Outside most of the other colonists were looking and pointing to the north, the partly cloudy skies enabling them all to see the huge plume that originated well over the horizon.

“A volcano,” Toshiro said without looking to see who it was that joined him. “It must have been a most impressive eruption! That plume must be almost eighty, possibly one hundred miles away.”

“And we would be feeling it so far south?” Sofiya asked, awed by the kind of power that something so far away would have to generate for them to feel it.”

“Most certainly,” the Japanese red fox informed the vixen. “We are not so far from a fault line that the shocks would go unnoticed. “We are tectonically stable, though, or that little ripple we felt would be much, much worse. That would explain why our livestock has been a little nervous today.”

“Would animals that were closer to the volcano be sensing it sooner?” the blond vixen inquired.

Toshiro held his paw-like hands palm up. “Possibly. I know that there are many instances where animals can sense certain events well before they happen. Particularly if there is activity prior to something like a volcanic eruption such as minor quakes or new formed geysers as the aquifer is heated quickly. I know of one geologist that believes the land begins to smell different in some instances, prompting many of the animals surrounding a potential eruption to flee. Perhaps he was right.”

“That would be something enough to drive the schnee drache into our area, especially if it was fleeing something such as this,” Kurt said as he shaded his eyes and stared at the ash cloud, flashes of lightning visible even at this distance.

Sofiya chewed at one claw as her thoughts raced furiously in her head, unaware of Toshiro’s question until he touched her shoulder. “Da?” she asked, her eyebrows rising.

“I was wondering if I could put together a team to investigate?” the Asian red fox asked with a hopeful expression.

“Absolutely not,” the vixen replied firmly. “If this is what the dragon was fleeing, there are possibly being more things that we are not being ready to face. I am to be suspending all surveys outside of the immediate area,” Sofiya continued, ignoring the look of disappointment on Toshiro’s face or the way his tail drooped. “In point of fact, I am going to be re-purposing all survey team members to scouting the immediate area for potential danger.”

“What kind of danger?” Kurt asked after swallowing hard.

The Asian fox spoke when the vixen gestured to him. “In Japan, our biggest fear with any eruptions or earthquakes, apart from immediate damage to buildings and such, were tsunami…what many call tidal waves. It is like throwing a pebble into a pond, but the ripples are tens, sometimes hundreds, of feet tall instead of a fraction of an inch and we are close to the sea. That and many volcanoes on Earth are part of a chain of such geologic phenomena. If one explodes, it may set off others, and judging by the orbital survey maps, we are at the lower most point of a mountain chain that has three dormant volcanoes.”

“Well, so much for me sleeping tonight,” Daniel said with a sick tone to his voice.

Kurt shook his head. “I still don’t understand.”

“It means we may be having to move the colony,” Sofiya told the others as she turned back to the growing plume. “Previously undiscovered animals are only part of the danger this may pose,” she said and pointed at the roiling cloud of ash and smoke.

***

When Richard next opened his eyes he was a little surprised to find Matthew Sykes in the chair next to the medical bed, a somewhat despondent look in the red fox male’s sunshine yellow eyes. “Matthew,” the silver fox husked, letting the other pour a cup of water from a pitcher that was close, but in Richard’s condition still a little too far for him to reach comfortably. “Is something wrong?”

The other Adirondack Fur shook his head and gave a weak smile. “Nah. Not really. Just don’t like seein’ the guy that’s turned out to be about the best friend I’ve ever had being all bunged up is all.”

The response wasn’t what Richard had been expecting and gave the other fox a curious look, knowing that it would probably be best to let Matthew speak his piece than to interrupt his line of thought.

“You know, I was a little sore when I first got to the Institute and all. I didn’t really let it show, but I was an angry fella back then. Didn’t have a lot of choice about signing up really. My business was falling apart with the sudden drop in new housing when the economy tanked a couple of years back, girl I thought I was gonna marry was sleepin’ ‘round on me. Then the bank started to hassle me ‘bout the mortgage and the loan on most of my equipment... There wasn’t a whole lot of choices for me and I signed up with and signed a portion of my bonus off to my creditors. I guess the way I was actin’ towards y’all was wrong. I felt like a failure and was takin’ it out on you an’ the girls.”

Matthew smiled ruefully.

“I ‘spose I should thank you an’ Tipper an’ Charity for not thumpin’ on me for bein’ a jerk. I’d have deserved it, though. You guys were patient an’ I guess I saw with the way you were treatin’ everything that it wasn’t as bad as I was makin’ everything to seem. Now I gotta job, a couple of great ladies that love me and I love right back. We gotta whole world to make a better life like you an’ Sofiya are always goin’ on about…”

Richard only looked at the other fox, still maintaining his silence as he let the other Fur get whatever was on his mind out in the open.

“I guess…I guess I just wanna say thanks. Thanks for puttin’ up with my crap and still bein’ a friend to me. I ‘spose I realized just how much a friend you’ve been when you came in all tore up and I haven’t been able to get a lot a sleep ‘cause of that.”

When the red fox’s face began to contort with the emotions that were welling in him that Matthew couldn’t give voice to having been raised that men were only supposed to act a certain way and never to show anything but the baser emotions, Richard sat up, wincing at the pull to the wound on his side to place a paw-like hand on the other male’s shoulder.

“Of course you’re a friend,” the silver fox said. “And you’ve proven that. You’ve also proven that you are desperately needed here, Matthew.” He gave his former housemate a mischievous grin. “Besides, I got kids on the way. I need their Uncle Matt to show them how to swing a hammer, right? Not to mention those all those future fishing trips.” Richard’s smile helped lift the somber look in the other fox’s eyes. “And I’m happy to be your friend. I wasn’t in the best place either, but I think we’ve both found our pla-”

The temblor caused things in the medical dome to shake, small plastic and glass vials clicking and tinkling together as the entire dome vibrated.

“What was that?” Matthew whispered worriedly while his ears tried to press harder against his skull.

“Earthquake. Not bad, but I bet some of the others are a little freaked.” Richard tried to swing his digitigrade legs over the side before the other fox pushed him with gentle insistence back onto the bed.

“Uh-uh. I let you up an’ you pull them stitches out an’ Sofiya’ll skin me alive! You stay here an’ I’ll find out what happened and come back to tell you,” Matthew informed the other Fur.

“That’s a good idea,” Riva commented from the doorway. “You get up before I tell you to and you’ll find yourself strapped down, mister,” the bat eared vixen said as she leveled a finger at Richard. Once assured that her patient knew she was serious the former Israeli looked at the red fox. “On your way to find out what’s going on, send Kizu to me and any of the other medically trained Furs. I have a feeling life just got a little more interesting.”

***

It was the Furs from Japan that had the most experience in dealing with volcanic activity and imparted what basic survival information they could to the rest of the colony. Most of the quick lessons were delivered by Toshiro, the Asian red fox having gotten into geology due to watching Mount Shinmoedake in the Kirishima range from the middle of the Miyazaki prefecture as a child and finding himself in awe of the power he witnessed. Toshiro explained the different dangers that weren’t as obvious as being close to magma spews or scalding hot landslides and that the two greatest dangers were gasses and ash.

“There are very exotic mineral and chemical compounds beneath the ground,” the red fox told the assembled Furs. “Gas is the most dangerous as it is invisible, normally odorless, and very deadly. You can be in danger before you know, that is why it is best to avoid low places where the wind is unable to reach.

“Ash is capable of blocking waterways, contaminating the soil and the things that use filters may be damaged by the very fine particulate matter that follows some eruptions. One task that all of us will have is to watch the direction of the winds so that we may be properly prepared if the cloud begins to travel in this direction.”

“Are we really going to move the colony?” Emanuella Diaz asked, the kit fox vixen huddling under Hector de la Vega’s arm, the colony’s second in command doing his best to reassure his partner.

“It is a possibility,” Sofiya said as she stepped up to where Toshiro stood in the middle of the commons to address the entire Abeona group. “If there is sufficient danger we will be relocating.”

“What of the satellite? How will we keep in contact with Earth?” Myao Shin asked where he sat with Suki Oniwa, an Asian red fox vixen that had taken a liking to the young student turned cook.

“There is limited maneuvering capabilities that all colony satellites have for just such emergency scenarios,” Sofiya told the group. “Our communications equipment has a beacon that the satellite will follow, adjusting of its orbit as we move, though we can only change our location by a few hundred miles. If we move too far, it will put the satellite in a position where we may still be in communication with it, but it will not be capable of contacting the Earth. That will still be giving us plenty of flexibility to be relocating if we find ourselves threatened.

“We have already sent a message saying as much to Stockholm and should be hearing back from them in a day or so. As this is being so serious, I would like for the survey teams to coordinate a search for a new colony site to the southeast. Remember that we will be having to transport everything in the wagons with several loads and return trips, but only if there is no other recourse but evacuation.”

Sofiya looked at each of the Furs under her command and stood straighter, trying to be a source of confidence for the other Vulps, though in her heart she wished that her Richard could be at her side.

“These are precautions, and while we did not train for an event of this nature, all of us are more than capable of doing what we must. In point of fact, I do not think that there has been a colony group that has better prepared than we are being. I am hoping that all of this will simply be an interesting spectacle to our first year on Bastien. But if that doesn’t turn out to be the situation, we must be prepared for the worst scenario.”

Hector stood, Emanuella standing with him, the look on the South American grey fox’s face also confident. “We can do this, Sofiya. You and Richard have seen to it that we have had the best possible preparation. We can do this!”

The unofficial motto for the Abeona re-seed colony was repeated by all the Furs, the enthusiastic raucous even causing the children Jean Claude and Abriella to try and mimic their various aunts and uncles.

***

“You know how much I am hating this,” Sofiya said as Richard waited for the rest of the medical equipment that could fit in the wagon he rode in was loaded around him.

“About as much as I hate not being able to help you and be with you,” the silver fox replied glumly.

The blond vixen was already fighting back the tears that threatened to spill at having to send her mate away, also filled with the frustration that in moving the colony it was like she’d ailed in her capacity as leader. “Please do not be angry with me,” Sofiya said softly, moving closer as her paw-like hands sought his, Richard wrapping his fingers with hers automatically. “I feel enough of a failure and can’t bear the thought of you being upset.”

The silver ox dashed that line of thinking away when he pulled the vixen to him or a kiss and nuzzle. “I don’t think I could ever be angry with you. If anything I’m ticked about not being able to help or be there for you. None of us asked for that mountain to pop its top or the winds to change. We just have to make do. You aren’t a failure, Lover. This shows me that you’re the right choice for being leader because you’re putting everyone’s safety first.” He gave his vixen a rueful smile. “Even mine.”

“Kokhanyy, I need to know you are being safe,” she whispered tremulously. “I cannot be doing what I need to if I am worried. I know that I am needing to be strong for the others, but I just want all of this over so you can hold me and tell me that it will all be fine.”

Richard didn’t hesitate in pulling his mate closer, feeling the shuddering breath that she let out at the strength he gave, the feel of his warmth. “You are strong. Don’t ever doubt that. Not for a moment. You have gotten us this far, and you will get everyone through the move. Just remember I’ll be at the new site with our home waiting for you and arms to hold you tight with.”

When Sofiya kissed the other fox again there was an almost desperate passion and need to the moment that was broken when she pulled away. “You are making me a little crazy, now,” she told him, smiling at the way he made her not care at the show of affection in front of the others. “And now you and the other must be going. We will be following in a week with the last of the colony materials.”

Richard only nodded, looking at Kurt and Siobhan along with Matthew. “You guys keep her safe for me,” he said, his words sounding thick and full of emotion to his own ears.

“Do not worry. Sofiya is like my sister, and I will not let harm come to her,” the German red fox said with the most serious expression he’ ever worn.

Matthew nodded. “That’s right. Just make sure there’s something hot waiting for us and we’ll be seeing you in five or six days.”

There was no more time for the silver fox to say anything as the wagon gave a lurch, Kizu and Riva riding up front with the bat eared vixen driving the team of horses that pulled the rig. Richard waved jauntily, smiling as Sofiya stood separate from the others, a proud tilt to her chin to show that she was going to be strong for the one that loved her.

Watching until the wagon dipped below the first hill, Sofiya didn’t take her gaze from her lover for a moment, as if she were saving every possible detail she could. With a breath and firming if her internal resolve, she finally turned to the others. “Let us go ahead and be getting the tents set before we begin the final dismantling of the remaining domes.” The vixen cast a critical eye at the approaching cloud of volcanic ash that had shifted and seemed to spread out over a greater area as she watched it. “If it is going to be taking too long we will abandon the materials we cannot be loading in the next three days and return for them later."

The rest of the remaining Furs dispersed to do as instructed save Siobhan. The Irish vixen put her arm around her friend and graced Sofiya with one of her trademark smiles that had males of other Wings back in Stockholm swooning. “This is just a minor setback. We’ll be up to par in a matter of days, don’t you know?”

Sofiya nodded silently, a pang of guilt running through her. “Are you thinking that I should have told Richard that I am being pregnant?”

Siobhan thought about it, her mouth forming a strange moue with its vulpine configuration. “No. I don’t. He’ll be worried enough as it is, and you don’t need him hampering his recovery any more than necessary. It just means you get to direct the rest of us and take it easy, right?” the other vixen asked brightly.

“Taking it easy is the last thing that I will be doing, miy tovarysh.” Sofiya replied with a slight smile as they turned to the work at hand.

— NEXT CHAPTER —

Unless otherwise noted, all material © Ted R. Blasingame. All rights reserved.