1.

	High command was shelling again, final preparatory bombardments to try and soften no man’s land some more.  Even from here he could see the gouts of earth and flame carried into the air, shock waves clashing and throwing shreds of wire into the air.
	Theirs?
	The enemy’s?
	Couldn’t tell.
	Low whistling whine.  Higher pitch than usual.  Shell coming in short.  He hunched down a bit, out of habit if nothing else.  Could already tell in some uncanny way that it would land behind him, amongst the support trenches.  Heard the explosion, felt it in his back teeth and held his automatic rifle tight.  Made sure the half moon magazine was held secure to the underside, counted the number of rounds once more.  Shuffled to make room in the bottom of the trench as a stretcher came through, empty and held sideways but dripping with blood.  A jaggedy hole in the fabric the size of a deck of cards gave him a good enough idea of what had happened.  One bearer chewed on the stem of a pipe, the bowl completely missing.  
	Soldiers on either side of him, the trench packed now, squads filing in.  Found himself between a dog and a lynx, fur matted with mud and whiskers trembling.  Tails held between legs or twitching anxiously.  Bayonets fixed but not for him.  He had an automatic, something new and freshly manufactured to win the war a little bit faster.  Already the bipod mounted towards the front of the barrel was beginning to rattle in its mounting, no matter what he did to fix it.
	An officer paced the line.  Shouted something but he didn’t listen, ducked his head and swiped mud over his helmet to dull any shine it might produce.  Knew the rest of him looked about the same, the blue of his uniform dulled to a faint grayish brown.  He listened for the whistle.  Cared not about anything but that.
	Ground his teeth and gripped his rifle.  Felt fear and was angry because of that.  Made sure his gear was in place.  Extra magazines held in a pouch at his side, three for firing, plus another already loaded.  Eighty rounds, then down to a handgun, a knife and his entrenching spade.
	The spade hung at his thigh, contained within a mud stained fabric sheath, the handle protruding.  He pressed one hand down over the blade.  Felt the solidity of steel and was somewhat comforted.  Rifle in his hands, knife and spade at his side, pistol held in a holster beneath one arm.  
	A paw closed on his shoulder.  The lynx.  Young, blue eyed, the fur of her face somewhat maintained but everything else claimed by mud and grime.  She had sergeant’s stripes.  Hadn’t there been someone else as…?
	He tried to remember for a moment but she was speaking, voice raised over the noise of the shells but still just barely audible, whiskers stiff with fright.
	“I want you to stay next to me!”  She was saying, “cover the squad!”  
	He saluted as best he could in the confines of the trench.  Elbow dragged up against the back wall.  Bumped the half rotten wooden frame of a dugout.  Could see a candle burning within, almost down to the little pool of greasy wax sitting at the bottom of its tin holder.  A half finished letter inside.
	Distantly he wondered if its author would ever finish it.  
	No…the lynx definitely wasn’t familiar, he’d never seen her before.  Had to be another replacement.  For Sibley?  No, not Sibley.  Sibley had been the one before the last one, a fox or something, big ears, was shot by a sniper.  Blood probably somewhere nearby, mixed into the mud but still present in some abstract way.
	And then the whistle, the staggered rush for the ladders.  Some went instantly, others stammered and stuttered in their pace, legs unwilling to carry them forward, the whistle continuing to blow.  
	He wanted to know what the lynx sergeant’s name was.  She seemed alright, had sought him out to cover their advance.  He made sure the carrying strap of his rifle was hooked securely into the Y shaped strap that looped over his shoulders.  Its duty was to ensure that he could walk and fire his rifle at the same time.  Thought he’d probably need to.  
	Ahead of them he could still hear the shells exploding but the noise was tapering off, the preliminary bombardment fading out in favor of an infantry assault.  Already gunfire chattered along the enemy line, but that didn’t matter.  
	He made sure he was next to the lynx and climbed the ladder one handed.  Took in the topography of no man’s land as he took his first stumbling steps forward, caught in a cluster of others.  
	Where before it had been recognizable in the lull between actions, now it had been churned into something completely different.  New shell holes and ridges and mounds chewed into the earth, the enemy line shattered in some places but worryingly intact in others.
	Already he could hear the howling response of their artillery, the ears of his furred comrades flattening before anything became apparent to him.  He’d learned to watch them, knew that they could hear things he couldn’t.  
	The lynx rose next to him, once more her hand was on his shoulder, she chopped her free arm forward.  Had no weapon out, not even her pistol, which remained in its leather holster.  The wire ahead of them was shattered, gleaming loops and curls sticking from the mud.  
	They’d seen the same path, an avenue up through the disorganized rows of barbed wire and up to a low berm of mud and earth perhaps twenty yards from the enemy line.  A shell slammed down behind it and outlined it in white light, earth spraying into the air, pattering down onto his helmet.
	He slogged forward, fire crackling in at an angle, ears ringing and breath coming fast, heart thudding heavily in his chest.  Already he felt tired, muscles in his legs protesting under the weight he carried, but there was no choice other than to continue forwards.
	The sergeant said something to that effect.  He looked from side to side and could see a slow motion crush of soldiers being forced forward through similar gaps in the wire, enemy fire scything them down.  
	He stepped over a fallen picket and saw it had been neatly sheared in two by a chunk of shrapnel.  The sergeant stayed with him, shouting commands that barely registered, paw staying ever-present.  He could feel her claws prickling his skin, the strength behind her grip, but nary a tremble.  
	And suddenly they were beyond the wire, into the muddy torn landscape of no man’s land proper.  Fewer of them now, rounds crackling from the ruined, half collapsed trenches ahead, the diamond shaped flashes of light illuminating machine gun nests.  
	“Forward!”  The sergeant urged, pricking him with her claws, forcing him forward, staying right by his side.  Glanced back to gauge the positions of her squad and was torn suddenly away, the crack of a close passing round making him flinch, making the inside of his ear itch.
	He ducked down, one foot skidding forward, dumping him into a kneel.  Glanced back to where the sergeant had been flipped on her back, paws at her throat, wheezing and choking, a fountain of crimson bubbling from her mouth, pinking her teeth.  Her eyes, impossibly blue, were wide with fright.
	He made his way to her side and dug in the front of his uniform for his aid kit.  Rounds splashed into the mud around him, one passing through his coat, severing the Y strap that held his rifle up.  It went barrel first into the mud and he growled under his breath, ripping the brown paper casing and tugging the bandages free from his kit in a messy heap.
	She was trying to say something but he couldn’t make it out, the lower half of her face was covered in blood, beads of crimson rolling down her whiskers, helpless tears welling at the corners of her eyes.  
	“Medic!”  He shouted as he pressed the bandages over the hole in the sergeant’s throat, but his words couldn’t have carried more than a few feet.  No stretcher bearers in sight, only a confused rush of soldiers, some caught in wire, others taking cover in shell holes no more than a few dozen meters from their own lines.
	A soldier knelt down on the other side of the sergeant, a black furred goat.  Reached into his coat and withdrew another kit.
	“Your bandages are soaked,” the goat said, “let me.”  
	He glanced down.  Saw blood trickling freely around the edges of the wad of crimson gauze he’d pressed over the sergeant’s wound.  She was still choking but he couldn’t think of anything to do about that, the blood would continue flowing into her pierced throat no matter how he positioned her.
	He wiped his bloodied hands on the front of his uniform and found the cleanly snipped edge of his Y strap.  Realized there was a neat little hole in the front of his coat where an enemy round had come a centimeter or two from killing him outright.
	“She’s beyond our help,” the goat said, eyes rising from where the sergeant was continuing to tremble and gasp, “we have to-“  A neat black hole appeared in the side of his helmet with a metallic chime and the goat fell silently to the side, instantly limp and very much dead.  The expression on his face didn’t even change, only crinkled somewhat, like he had suddenly smelled something unpleasant.
	The sergeant stared upward, the dead goat’s bandages still lying on her punctured throat, blinked once and then was gone, blue eyes locked in place.
	He dragged his rifle free from the mud and unhooked it from his ruined Y strap, glancing ahead of him to the low earth berm accidentally raised during the shelling.  It couldn’t have been more than two or three feet high but was clearly the best option.  He certainly couldn’t remain where he was, already he could tell simply by looking that he was sitting almost exactly in the center of a strange crescent of dead and wounded soldiers, uniforms of varying newness tangled in wire or soaked in blood or simply blown to ribbons by the disorganized enemy counter-barrage beginning to pick up steam.
	As he picked himself up he tried not to think about the pair of blue eyes still staring at him, the dead sergeant lying in the midst of a pool of her own blood.  It didn’t matter, he told himself, he hadn’t known her for more than five minutes.  But she had been young and pretty and brave, and now she was dead.  That felt like a great loss.
	He stumped forward, head down and rifle held under one arm.  Didn’t dare fire it, not with the muzzle packed with mud.  Somehow he knew it would blow the barrel out and pepper his face with slivers of steel.  For a moment he considered fishing out his pistol but the enemy lines were still forty meters away and he knew he couldn’t hope to hit anything at that distance.
	Now he could see more clearly, the line directly head of him was nothing but a crater, the collapsed remains of a dugout or an officer’s lounge, something big and spacious and important.  But on either side machine gun fire poured forth in a murderous welter of steel and noise.  A mortar shell splashed into a crater to his right and showered him with icy water.  He ducked his head and stood still for a moment, like a mule in the rain.  Swiped one bloody hand over the barrel of his rifle and pressed on forward.
	His breath roared in his ears and though he wanted nothing more than to lie flat and simply wait for the whole thing to be over, he knew that such an action wouldn’t leave him any less exposed to the enemy.  So he forced himself forward, one step at a time.  Could still feel the sergeant’s blood burning on his hands.  That made it easier.
	A bullet slapped hard against the sheath of his entrenching tool, ringing against steel before ricocheting elsewhere.  It felt as though he’d been punched in the leg.  He couldn’t even grit his teeth, needed to keep breathing.  Once, as a boy, he’d been told that the human body was akin to a machine.  That the air and food and water it consumed was like coal for a furnace.  He felt that way now, like an engine pushed too hard, like a steam furnace about to explode.  
	But he didn’t.  He couldn’t.  Even as enemy fired slashed around him like lances of needle sharp rain, he still kept going.  Somehow they seemed to have enough distractions to bother focusing exclusively on him.  He wouldn’t have known, he didn’t dare look back.  Kept his eyes trained forward on the berm.
	A shell exploded behind him and suddenly he was on his knees, teeth jittering his head, thoughts strangely blurred, a sort of liquid warmth flowing down the back of one thigh.  He felt back and encountered a slow trickle of…
	Cold.
	Oh.  Canteen.
	He slumped down onto one knee, huffing for breath, and unbuckled his canteen.  Found the metal dented in, a thin dribble of water issuing from a triangular tear in the back.  He dropped it and forced himself back up, pushing the stock of his rifle into the mud and regaining his feet, staggering to the base of the berm where he all but collapsed.
	Now he looked back towards his trenches, almost impossibly distant.  There were still soldiers coming in their hundreds and thousands, almost indistinguishable from the muddy landscape itself.
	Digging out his cleaning kit, he assembled the little aluminum brush tipped rod and fell onto his side to push it through the rifle’s breech and all the way up through the muzzle.  Didn’t dare remain upright, he’d have had to reach his arm above the edge of the berm.  Somehow the very presence of cover seemed to convince him on some level that the enemy knew he was there and was surely only waiting for him to reveal himself.
	Indeed, every so often a rattling spray of bullets pummeled the top of the berm and the mud beyond it, never quite so random that he couldn’t say there weren’t people deliberately suppressing him.
	He shut his eyes.  Saw blue.  Crimson.  A hole appearing in the side of a steel helmet, as though by magic.  Knew he couldn’t stay still.  Eventually they’d walk their shellfire back behind the berm and kill him.
	Pushing the cleaning rod through the barrel of his rifle he cleared out the mud as best he could and put it away.  Hands steady throughout all of this.  No matter how frightened he ever got his hands had never so much as twitched.  A small blessing, he supposed.
	Flipping the safety off, he forced himself to memorize the terrain between him and enemy lines.  Knew there was a machine gun to his immediate left, just past the edge of the big crater that marked the center of their line.  Didn’t know if there was anything serious to his right, hadn’t taken much direct fire from that way.  
	Squirming through the mud, he moved a few yards left.  Stopped and waited as a shell shrieked down and exploded somewhere behind him, soil pattering down onto his helmet like a gentle hail.  Listened to the sporadic rattle of the gun in its emplacement and readied himself.  Flipped down the bipod and made sure it stayed out.  
	Took a deep breath.  
	Blue eyes.  
	Exhaled.  
	The heat of her blood on his hands.
	Another, a growling edge to his voice.  Anger sparking within him, a sense of outrage.  He needed that.  Knew he needed it and that need only fueled it further.  
	He was going to kill these people.  Every last one of them.
	He rolled over and propped the bipod on the edge of the berm, the little steel legs sinking into soft earth, anchoring his gun in place.  He kept low, aimed directly along the sights to the diamond pattered flashes of white hot light pouring from the muzzle of a machine gun, its barrel wrapped in a grid patterned cage of steel, steam rising from it.  It was firing hot, had been for some time.  
	He squeezed the trigger and his rifle fired with a slow rattling chug, spent rounds ejecting in a high, bright arc to his right.  It slammed back hard against his shoulder but he weathered the recoil, used each moment of kickback to further improve his aim, like he’d been trained to do.  
	The sandbags protecting the front of the nest, mud spattered and dirty, flew apart in a haze of dust and soil.  He adjusted, aimed slightly higher.  Couldn’t get a direct line on the operator but could see at least one other, but the nest was enclosed, shielded by a camouflage mesh thrown over top of it, all he could see were shadows.
	Holding the rifle tight to his shoulder, he put the rest of the magazine through the side of the nest, the barrel of the enemy’s machine gun jerking suddenly skyward.  Then he was clicking empty, the trigger weight relaxing.  
	He fumbled for a second magazine and slammed it home, rising as he drew back the bolt, resting the underside of the rifle’s barrel over his forearm as he slogged forward through the mud, blood roaring in his ears, a horrible vengeful excitement making his heart hammer.  It felt good beyond words to do something to hurt the enemy after all they’d thrown at him.  He didn’t know if he’d killed anyone in the machine gun nest or simply knocked them back for a moment, but-
	Movement in the trench ahead of him, he fired from the hip, clutching the rifle tight against him to absorb the recoil.  He was close enough that he could almost see into the trench now and his first burst knocked a soldier onto his back.  Human like him, but wearing the wrong uniform, forest green rather than blue.  The soldier crumpled and suddenly there were more, pouring from the machine gun nest.  Had he broken their gun?
	No time to think, he dropped to one knee and sprayed fire into the trench, rifle chugging, the recoil throwing the arc high one moment, then low the next.  Caught a fox in the stomach, tore a human’s chest, and suddenly the rifle was still at his side, a round caught halfway in the breech, refusing to eject.
	More movement, but not from the nest.  Further down, shockingly close.  A flash of tawny fur and he was staring at a lioness.  He flicked the round free and brought up his rifle, the enemy going for her belt, where a stick grenade was held.  
	Click.  Empty magazine.  The lioness threw, from barely twenty feet away.  The grenade bounced off his shoulder and spun into a neighboring shell hole.  He dove away, clutching his rifle, and felt the earth shiver under him, a flat, concussive thud hammering his ears.  
	Pushing himself up, he went for his pistol, dragging it free from its shoulder holster as he rose to his knees, shuffling closer to the crater, determined to get an enfilade on the trench.  
	Then the lioness was lunging at him, paws empty but claws out.  Her speed was incredible, his pistol went up and he fired but his hands were slippery with mud, the round went wide and she tackled him into a smaller periphery crater, only a few yards from where her grenade had gone.
	For a moment he was in the air, the lioness’ shoulder driving the air from him, then he crashed hard into the opposite side of the crater, the back of his head striking something hard.  He had enough time to be grateful his helmet was still on before the lioness was going for his throat, jaws open, determined to rip him up.  Pressing his fists hard into her chest, he forced her back just a little, barely enough.  Her teeth clicked shut an inch short of his chin and he drew up one leg, putting it between himself and the lioness.  Her paws slipped in the mud at the bottom of the crater and she slipped to the side, claws dragging free a portion of his sleeve, scratching his skin.  
	He tried to bring his pistol around but it was smeared with mud, the action caught and the lioness was surging forward again, amber eyes wild.  Tried to bring the butt of the pistol down on her but she caught his hand and suddenly they were twisting to the side, caught against the wall of the crater.  His hand caught in the mud, the pistol dragged free from his fingers.
	She was strong, had to be as tall as him, her body hard with muscle, claws sharp and teeth bared once more.  She tried to press him down and he rammed his helmeted head forward into her face, the lioness jolting back, paws flying to her wounded muzzle.  
	But even then her motions weren’t helpless, she kicked hard at the side of his knee, drove him down to an involuntary kneel even as he dragged his entrenching spade free from its sheath.  She scrambled back up, blood running freely from her nose, but whatever it was she was planning to do, he preempted it.  Lunged forward with a cry, spade slashing down in an overhead stroke, sharp steel edge aimed for effect.  The lioness plucked the helmet from her head and held it up as she fell back against the wall of the crater, just barely blocking his stroke.  The spade dented the top of her helmet and ricocheted off to the side, a hard jolt running up his arm, nearly sending the spade flying from his grip.
	Teeth bared, he slashed again, aiming lower, but she rolled aside, his spade sinking into the mud as she cocked one leg and rammed it forward, hard into his chest.  He lost grip on the spade and fell back against the side of the crater, looping a wild haymaker at the lioness as she lunged for him once more.  It hit her on the side of the neck and she flinched, muscle spasming under his fist, just enough to let him squirm from her grip and splash into the mud at the bottom of the crater, on his back.  
	His chest and back ached and he felt almost desperately tired, muscles screaming in protest.  But overriding all of that was a surge of adrenaline, making the pain he felt feel very distant in comparison to the danger right in front of him.
	A flash of gray, out of the corner of his eye.  The spade.  He snatched it up and threw a wild horizontal stroke in front of him, shouting, the lioness dodging back, a low rumbling growl working at the back of her throat, crimson still dripping from her nose, staining her fur.  
	She said something he couldn’t understand.  Dragged a finger sharply across her throat, the claw just barely creasing her tawny fur.
	“Right,” he muttered, rising slowly to his feet, spade held out in front of him, “you first…”  
	Squaring his shoulders, he started forward.  The lioness had no weapons, she-
	Moving fast, she whipped a handful of mud into his face and lunged forward, keeping low.  Taken by surprise, free hand fluttering up to his mud spattered face, vision in one eye completely blocked, he swung.  It was a purely reactionary move, poorly executed.  Still, he caught the lioness on the shoulder with the flat of the blade and knocked her partially aside.  She caught his shoulder with her claws and dragged him down onto his side, at the bottom of the crater once more.  Nearby a shell exploded, mud raining down on the both of them.
	Pulling free, fabric ripping, he twisted around and swung the spade hard, the lioness lunging hard at him, the spade trapped against her side as she forced him onto his back, the top of his head pressed against the wall of the crater.  
	She opened her mouth, blood pinked teeth flashing, and suddenly he knew that there wasn’t anything that could stop her.  She was going to rip his throat out.  He tried to wriggle free, to bring his spade up, to punch or kick or even bite back but he was immobilized, held down.  
	A warm drip of her blood landed at the base of his throat.  For a half second he thought of just how similar it felt to the sergeant’s.  Considered that in a moment it would be joined by a torrent of his, then anyone who had ever witnessed that moment would be dead and gone, barely minutes after it had happened.
	There was something incredibly sad about-
	The thought was driven from his mind by a noise.  A great brassy world rending call that echoed over the land, seeming to come from everywhere all at once.  The ground shivered with the force of it and the lioness froze in place, jaws just barely an inch from his throat.  A drop of crimson hung, quivering, at the tip of one of her fangs for a moment, before being knocked loose by a shuddery, panicked sort of breath.
	He knew he ought to be kicking free, ought to be escaping, but somehow he couldn’t move.  He wasn’t paralyzed, he could still blink and even swallow, but there seemed to be no need for movement of any kind.  He didn’t think he could bear to be standing straight and dealing with the quantity of sound he was hearing.  It had drowned out the shells and the gunfire, erased it all with such totality that it was as if they’d never existed in the first place.  
	Slowly, the lioness keeled over onto her side next to him, paws traveling slowly to cover her ears, blinking slowly and looking oddly distraught.  
	A moment later it was gone.  There were no echoes, no reverberations or signs that it had ever been there at all.  He lay on his back, eyes wide and breath coming in uneven little gasps, the lioness not much better.
	It took him a long moment to even formulate a reasonable next step.  He still had the spade clutched loosely in one hand.  He could sit up and bash the lioness’ head in with it.  That would be the smart thing to do...
	The lioness sat slowly up but made no aggressive movements.  Instead she stared around her, bewildered, eyes held wide.  Wiped some of the blood from her nose with a shaky, uncertain sort of motion.  
	He sat up as well.  Realized, as she had, that the battlefield had gone completely silent.


2.

	Slowly, he shuffled back from her, up against the wall of the crater, one hand rising to his throat, which remained miraculously unharmed.  The only noise he could hear was that of blood rushing in his ears, the jagged sound of his breath.  Of the lioness’.  
	He hadn’t gone deaf, the entire war had just…stopped.
	Somehow.
	He pushed himself to his feet and glanced quickly over the top of the crater, ducking instinctually back down.  But no sniper’s bullet split the air over his head, no soldiers boiled from the broken enemy trench to avenge their comrades.  
	He looked again.  Kept his head up this time, the lioness in the corner of his vision.  Heft distantly paranoid, sure on some level that she’d attack him the moment he looked away, but her body language had gone slack with shock.  She wiped her nose again.  Spat a blob of crimson into the mud.  
	Where before she’d been the very image of a vicious killing machine, all teeth and claws and bristled up fur, now all she looked was lost and bloodied and tired.  
	He supposed he was about the same.  Now that the adrenaline was beginning to fade he could feel the hurts that had been inflicted upon him.  A bruise on his thigh, where his spade had absorbed an enemy rifle bullet.  Scratches on his shoulder that trickled warmth down his arm.  Back and chest and knee all ached, his left leg felt rubbery and unstable beneath him, but he could still stand.  
	It was about then that he fully comprehended just what he was seeing.
	No man’s land was empty.  Where thousands had struggled forward only a few short minutes before, now there was simply nothing.  Nothing but…
	He blinked, eyes catching on a fold of dark blue cloth caught in the nearby wire.  Tattered and faded but empty, a coat lying just in front of a pair of blue pants and white stockings and boots and…
	All of it was scattered, as though the person wearing them had been in the middle of a pace before simply phasing out of existence.
	But that was impossible.  Surely.  
	He looked back to the lioness, who had stepped away to the edge of the crater and was staring into her own trench, back completely turned to him.  It occurred that he could take a single pace forward and split her skull with the edge of his spade, but he hadn’t the will to do so.  Not when…
	The more he looked he more pieces of clothing and equipment he saw scattered across no man’s land.  Jackets and bandoliers and helmets and rifles and boots and spectacles and ammunition pouches all lying lost and abandoned.
	But no sign of their owners.
	He clambered to the top of the crater, favoring his bruised leg as he went, and stood at the lip.  Began to feel, for the first time since the noise had swept over him, a prickle of fear.  Not just at the obvious, there was another later of strangeness beyond it all, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
	The fear was still vague, kept distant by a veil of shock that hung over his eyes like a pad of gauze over a wound, but he could feel it boring into him with relentless intensity.  Everyone was gone.  Everyone but him.
	…And the lioness.
	She wandered into the far end of her destroyed trench, back where she’d thrown her grenade from.  Stood still, amber eyes blinking rapidly, blood still dripping from her crimson stained muzzle.  Took a deep, shivery breath that was all too audible in the eerie quiet that hung over the battlefield.
	He licked dry lips.  Cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, as loud as he could.
	“Hello!”  
	It echoed over the front line, the support trenches, the aid stations and mortar emplacements, the machine gun nests and barbed wire and acres upon acres of mud.
	No response.
	He tried again, so loud he could feel his own voice vibrating in his chest.  So loud it hurt his throat.  But still no cry came back.  Lowering his hands, he realized his fingers were trembling.  Mouth felt dry and tacky with thirst.  He felt for his canteen, remembered a moment too late that it had been punctured by shrapnel.  He’d thrown it away.
	Well…there had to be another one somewhere.  Lying amongst the piles of kit that dotted no man’s land.  But the thought of taking anything from them felt almost sacrilegious.  They’d be back soon, surely.
	Back?
	From where?
	He swallowed again.  Took a deep breath.  Told himself he would not panic.
	The lioness remained at the mouth to her trench, didn’t seem able to proceed any further in.  She glanced quickly back at him, opened her mouth to say something, then seemed to remember the language barrier.  Shook her head briskly.
	“What?”  He asked dully, though he knew she couldn’t understand him.
	The lioness squared her shoulders and stepped into her trench.  He watched her pass out of sight and suddenly felt a jagged scrape of panic pass through him, so intense it was hard to believe.  He’d been alone before, but there had always been the knowledge in the back of his mind that there were other people out there on the earth, millions and millions of them.
	Now…the thought of so much emptiness all around him, a land devoid of people, all but him and…
	He slogged to the end of the enemy trench and peered cautiously in.  The lioness had gone about thirty feet.  Glanced quickly back at him from where she stood, next to a disorganized pile of forest green uniforms and rifles and…
	Right.  Where he’d shot down the crew of the machine gun, just outside their nest.  The lioness reached down and for a terrible moment he was certain she was going for a rifle, but her movements were too slow and deliberate.  Her body language was still shocked.  She snagged a jacket with the tips of her claws and looked at it.  Worked a finger through the hole ripped into the chest and blinked.
	It took him a moment to realize just what she was searching for.  The jacket, aside from the mud it was spattered with, was entirely clean.  No blood.  No sign that a person had ended their life in it.  It might as well have been hung from a coat hanger and then shot through with a rifle.
	Immediately, he stepped to the side of the trench and peered over the top, eyes traveling from blue coat to blue coat.  Some were shredded, others intact but for little holes torn by shrapnel or bullets.  All were dirty and faded and battered…but none were bloody.
	The extra layer of weirdness hanging over the situation suddenly made sense, he realized just what it was.  Let a slow exhalation empty his body of air.  Thought he might start…he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to scream, weep or laugh.  None of this made any sense.
	“I’m dead.”  He said aloud.  Figured there was no harm in the lioness hearing his strange words if she couldn’t understand them.  “I’m dying right now, and this a delusion.  A fantasy.”  
	He’d never been one to believe in a higher power or anything supernatural at all, simply hadn’t had the will to put any work towards doing so, but a dark corner of his mind suddenly believed with furious intensity.  Insisted that he had died and this was Hell.  A land empty of everything but a single enemy soldier who couldn’t even speak his language.
	Hell…
	Somehow the thought of that didn’t worry him nearly as much as the idea that this had simply happened for no reason.  Hell, even if it did mean an eternity spent in torment, still implied a system.  A system meant people or at least some sort of intelligence.  And that was strangely comforting.  If this was real, not a delusion or a spiritual punishment or simply a dying fantasy generated by his oxygen starved brain (perhaps as the lioness ripped his throat out) the thought of it having no rhyme or reason behind it at all was deeply, deeply horrifying.
	The lioness glanced back.  Held up the coat in her paw.
	“Мы здесь. Они не. Найдите что-нибудь лучше сказать.  Тупица…”  Her voice was flat, hovering on the edge of anger..  
	Was she upset at him for killing her comrades?  He blinked.  Swept no man’s land with the point of his spade.
	“You killed plenty of my people too.”  He growled.
	The lioness sighed.  Stepped away from the drift of uniforms and stalked on down the trench, glancing back after a moment to see if he was following.  She seemed to be working past her shock but still wasn’t calling out or checking to see if anyone on her side was still present.  Hadn’t even gone to pick up a weapon.  
	He didn’t much like the conclusions the lioness seemed to have arrived at.  Knew he really ought to be going back to his own lines to see if there was anyone over there, but the thought of encountering endless emptiness, populated only by piles of clothes and rifles sent chills through him.
	Risking capture by the enemy sounded better than roaming around behind his own lines and very possibly encountering nobody at all.  The lioness was better than that, even if she had tried to rip his throat out.
	He followed along, maintaining a distance from her as they moved back to the support trenches, past uniforms and boots and rifles, some puddled onto the damp, half rotted duckboards, others neatly arrayed in the dugouts.  In an officer’s dugout he passed a mirror and a bowl of water with the barest trace of steam still rising from it, a silver handled straight razor sitting at the bottom.  A spatter of shaving cream lay atop an officer’s uniform crumpled on the floor, along with a pair of steel rimmed pince-nez spectacles.
	The lioness kept her head down as she walked.  Seemed not to want to see any of this.  Instead she ground her teeth.  Kept one eye carefully trained back at him.  Just in case.
	After a few minutes of this he realized he still had his spade out.  It had simply never occurred to him, amidst the shock of everything that had happened, to put it away.
	Fumbling at his hip, he returned the spade to its fabric sheath, glancing up to the lioness as he did so.  Had he just shown weakness?  Would she take up a weapon and attack him?
	But nothing changed.  The lioness remained wary, he maintained his distance, and they walked on.  
	As they went he couldn’t help but stare at her.  She was just about the only thing moving other than cloth or paper stirred by the breeze.  She was the only thing other than himself producing any noise, even if it was just breathing and the incessant grinding of her teeth.  
	He hadn’t realized during their fight just how big she was.  Lions always were, but she had a chilly sort of presence to her that seemed to add another few inches to her six foot frame.  Her uniform had been soaked during their brawl and it clung to her tawny fur, outlining muscles and a trim physique achieved via many hours of hard work, both military and athletic.  
	She seemed almost too large for the trench, her head poked over the top in most places.  It was a wonder she hadn’t been shot by a sniper yet.
	Perhaps she was new?  But even as he thought that he discounted the theory.  No…the lioness carried herself like a veteran.  She only walked upright now because she knew there was no danger.  Even if anyone in the opposing lines really was still present, they’d hardly be looking to shoot the other few people left alive.
	Right?
	He sighed to himself.  Glanced back to his own lines, now distant and nearly out of sight.  Knew he could still turn back if he really wanted to, but once more the thought of…
	No.  It was best if he and the lioness stuck together and tried to figure out what to do next.  Getting away from the battlefield seemed to be a good first step,and going into enemy territory was as good a plan as any if it was all…empty.
	He told himself it wasn’t.  Surely there had to be other people out there besides just himself and the lioness.
	Surely.


3.

	After some time the crumpled uniforms, discarded helmets and toppled over boots started to feel almost unreal, as if they had been placed as props for a play.  Like, if he were to push too hard against anything then it would simply topple over like a matte painting.
	And suddenly they were out in an open area, beyond the first few lines of support trenches, facing a line of aid stations.  Great big white tents, flat topped, a few blown to shreds of discolored fabric by shells.  His eyes slid away from those.  Didn’t want to look at them or think about who might have been inside when…
	Ahead of him, the lioness peered in through the open door of one.  Stared into the dead silence.  He stepped carefully next to her, a few feet away, the lioness glancing quickly over before sighing and stepping forward, looking through the emptiness of the tent, ears twitching at the hum of electrical lighting.
	There had to be a generator someplace close, he could wires keeping a string of lights running along the center of the ceiling going, the bulbs wavering slightly, emitting a low hum that made his ears itch.  
	Uniforms choked the floor, and off to one side he could see a small scattering of rings, socks, stockings and nothing else.  Took him a moment to realize that this had probably been where the severed arms and legs had been collected.  Yet the duckboards were clean.  Bloodless.
	The lioness stopped next to an operating table, where a torn uniform lay spread out, surrounded by a white coat.  The surgeon.  A scalpel had fallen point first into the wood, pinning down a fold of clean white cloth.  Next to it was a green uniform, a fallen stretcher lay propped against the next table over, puddles of cloth at either end, rifles and pistols lying abandoned, a bayonet halfway spilled from its sheath.  
	The lioness looked past this scene of subdued chaos, over to a metal instruments tray.  A shallow basin of saline solution, in which sat a small collection of silvery jagged chunks of shrapnel and a single deformed rifle bullet.  The saline was clear but for a few traces of sediment at the bottom.  Mud.  Still no blood anywhere.
	The war had been rendered sterile and clean.  Though, was it really a war anymore?  With nobody left to fight it?
	Leaning over, he picked up a crumpled ball of cotton gauze.  Clearly discarded yet now clean.  Somehow he knew he ought to stop being surprised that all of the spilt blood was simply…gone, but he fixated on it.  Such a central component of the war, eliminated entirely.
	His own blood was still there, however, soaking the shoulder of his uniform.  So was the lioness’.  Her muzzle was stained with the stuff, the front of her uniform sprinkled with little jagged red dots.
	He moved to the side of the tent.  Found a medical locker, one door hanging open, a set of keys still in the lock.  White coat and stethoscope, smeared with mud, crumpled on the floor.
	Inside he could see gauze, bottles of rubbing alcohol, syrettes, sutures, a small wealth of medical supplies.  Reaching inside, he tripped the lock of the other door and pushed it open, the lioness stepping close.
	She sniffed.  Wiped a drip of crimson from her nose.  He handed over a roll of gauze.  She accepted, soft fur brushing against his fingers for an instant, then she was tearing a length free with blood pinked teeth, sniffling blood back.  Spat a glob on the floor and winced, dabbing at her muzzle.
	He undid the front of his uniform shirt and shrugged the torn shoulder off with a little hiss of pain, bloodied fabric unsticking from the scratches the lioness’ claws had dug into his skin.  Found himself a little glass bottle of rubbing alcohol and dampened a pad of gauze with it, pressing it over his cuts before he could consider the pain too much.
	The gauze turned pink with blood, a sort of surface level sting arcing across his shoulder like lightning.  He ignored the pain and cleaned the wound, winding gauze around it.  Looked over to see the lioness washing the blood from her fur with a wetted pad of gauze, doing her best to avoid aggravating her hurt nose.
	Without the blood on her face the lioness looked…normal.  Like someone he could have passed on the street back home.  Black lipped and amber eyed.  Even her fur was flat and relaxed, whiskers straight and still.
	She’d thrown a grenade at him not a half hour before.  He’d done his level best to split her skull with a spade.  Hard to believe now…
	The lioness’ eyes flicked up to meet his gaze, motions slowing.  Her ears flicked back but there wasn’t anything aggressive in her gaze, more a sort of trepidatious concern, like she didn’t know what he was thinking.
	He let his eyes slide away.  Busied himself looking through the medical cabinet.  Still didn’t let the lioness out of his view but she was looking away as well.  Tossed the bloodied pad of gauze aside and probed her nose again.
	“I guess we ought to keep going.”  He said, more to break the silence than anything else.  He didn’t like that it was so absolutely noiseless.  After weeks of shells and gunfire and the constant low level noise of other people in the trenches, being surrounded by such intense quiet was unnerving.
	They continued on at a slow, cautious pace, like people tiptoeing through a closed museum, or a ghost ship.  Past more empty uniforms, a stack of stretchers and a toppled stack of rifles, surrounded by a crush of clothes, so thick they formed a heap.  Doubtlessly a support company in the middle of rushing to the front.
	He wondered if it had taken them all at once or if there had been a wave, a sort of momentary staggering of the effect, like a shockwave.  
	It…taken…
	What was he even thinking?  Was he already anthropomorphizing the disappearance?  Trying to get himself used to it?
	He took a deep breath.  Looked ahead of him.
	The trenches were almost growing vestigial now, sunken roads as opposed to front line fortifications.  They passed big silent artillery pieces, rows and rows of them, shell casings piled ten feet high, crates of unspent shells halfway unpacked.  More uniforms, a sleeve hanging limply from a shell elevator’s ascent handle.
	He touched the barrel of a howitzer as he passed.  Still warm.
	The lioness made no effort to pause or so much as glance at what remained of her comrades.  She’d begun to grind her teeth again.
	Beyond the artillery emplacements were phone and telegraph lines, rising above ground on short little pickets perhaps a foot above the mud, so any break could be immediately identified and fixed.  Some snaked off into officer’s dugouts, others winding further back to where…
	There were fields, overgrown but sown with peas and garlic and cabbages.  He could smell the faintest whiff of mint from underneath the cordite and mud.  Blinked and was shocked to find himself almost frozen in place.  Such a sight, so incongruent next to the industrialized mess of the trenches and no man’s land.  The fences were made of wooden rails, not a loop of barbed wire in sight.  No landmines beneath the furrows.  No lingering traces of gas trapped in the bottom of the few shell holes that pocked the fields at random.  
	On the horizon he could see houses, probably commandeered, but still clearly civilian in appearance.  Brick chimneys and slate roofs, wooden walls, freshly whitewashed.  A cheerful trickle of smoke rose from the nearest chimney.
	Flanking the fields were roads, crowded with vehicles, the ditches covered with duckboards, trucks and armored tractors parked in haphazard rows.  More than a few were crushed together, a few sticking from the ditch where they’d upended.  Clearly they’d been being driven when…
	“What a mess.”  He said.
	“Вы говорите слишком много.”  The lioness sighed and started forward, looking over the vehicles, her paws jammed into the pockets of her uniform jacket, tail twitching uncertainly.
	He followed along.  Was she planning on getting a car and driving away from the front?  If so…would she allow him to come along?  It was an unexpected question, somehow he’d envisioned them being on foot for…well…whatever they were going to do.  The very concept of long term planning beyond all of this seemed unfamiliar.  
	As they walked he drifted further from the lioness, stepping into the field alongside the road, over the battered duckboards and past the trucks and tractors and officer’s touring cars.  The edge of the field where they seemed to be in habit of parking was worn entirely to mud, the soil thickened with gravel so the tires wouldn’t sink.  
	But amongst the intact furrows, where crops had evidently been planted some weeks or months before, when the fighting hadn’t been so bad, he could see pea pickets and rows of garlic sticking up out of the weeds.  Quite a bit of it had survived in fine order.
	Kneeling down with a sigh, he took off his helmet and ran a hand through his hair before taking the stalk of the nearest garlic shoot between two fingers.  Examined the way the lower leaves had gone a golden, tawny brown, almost exactly the color of the lioness’ fur.  That was always a surefire sign that garlic was ripe and ready for harvest.  
	Clearing the weeds from the base of the plant, daddy longlegs scattering before his approach, ants scurrying mindlessly over the torn vegetation, he dug into the soil with his fingers, unearthing the bulb.  It was a good size, pale, crumbs of dirt clinging to its roots.  He set it into his helmet and moved along the row that way, eyes focused on the earth.  A few of the bulbs were shrunken or had been eaten already, but by the time he reached the end of the furrow his helmet was crowded, a plume of green and brown leaves sticking from it.  
	The little harvest felt nice, even if he knew the garlic wasn’t really his.  But the field was commandeered, military property, so whose was it really?  He stood back up with a sigh, bruised knee twinging, shoulder stinging once more.  Moved over to the pea pickets and sorted through them.  
	The pickings there were slimmer than with the garlic.  Where the garlic bulbs had been hidden beneath a few inches of earth, the peas were out in the open, and without the farmer around to weed and ward off insects and hungry animals, they’d been decimated.  Still, a few pods had survived and he picked them, filling the spaces in his helmet.  
	His eyes moved away from the pickets, up towards the cottages sitting at the far edge of the fields, some hundreds of yards away.  He could see himself living someplace like that.  Someplace…not silent, but quiet.  There’d be animals.  Birds.  Insects.  There’d be crickets at night.  No shellfire.  No guns.  He’d never feel the terrible heat of blood on his hands ever again.  The deepest blue he’d see would be the sky.  
	The simple possibility of that was stunning.  A mere day before and he’d have discounted the thought out of hand.  So long as the war was on idealistic thoughts of the future were nothing but danger.  
	From the road he heard a faint sputtering chatter, an engine being crank started.  Stood up and shaded his eyes with one soil stained hand, looking to where the lioness was bent slightly over the front of a sleek black touring car, finishing a half crank.  As he watched she stepped away from the crank and adjusted the spark adjuster, the engine’s puttering mutter smoothing out into a healthy growl.  She clearly knew what she was doing.
	As he stepped closer, the lioness glanced back at him, opening the front door to the car and sliding into the driver’s seat, flexing her paws atop the polished wooden steering wheel.  Her eyes slid down to the garlic shoots sprouting from his helmet, then back up to him.  
	“Are you coming with, or would you prefer to farm?”  She asked.
	He froze in mid-step, blinking hard.  Thought for a half second that her accent was making foreign words sound familiar instead of the usual reverse, but…
	“You…you speak my language?”  He asked disbelievingly, an involuntary grin spreading across his face.  “…Why didn’t you tell me?”
	“You never asked.”  The lioness said, eyes turning to the windscreen in front of her, one paw going to the clutch.  It rested there impatiently.
	He blinked.  Wasn’t sure what to say, or how to say it, if anything at all.  What was the next step?  But beyond all of that was a surprised sort of joy.  He could communicate with the only other person he knew for sure existed.  Really genuinely talk to them…the relief was overwhelming.
	“My name is Jack.”  He said.
	“Lucky you,” the lioness said, “get in.”  Her question from earlier had been seemingly abandoned, her words now had the air of a command.  
	Jack offered no argument.  Shifted his helmet into the crook of one arm and opened the passenger door, settling in next to the lioness, leaving the back of the touring car empty.  It was blessedly free of personal effects or anything but a canvas canopy hooked into the windscreen.  No crumpled uniforms or signs that a person had been disappeared on that very spot.
	“Where are we going?”  He asked as the lioness engaged the reverse and backed the car slowly out onto the road itself, tires rattling over duckboards before digging into the mud and spinning uselessly, finding their grip only after a harrowing moment.  
	The lioness sighed and opened the throttle, the car leaping forward with a throaty roar and a spray of earth, rattling over the abused road.  She maneuvered along the narrow strip of roadway that was open, passing crashed vehicles without a second glance, one paw on the wheel, the other continuing to goose the throttle.  She seemed to want to throw it wide open, but not so long as there was so much debris in the road.
	Even then she traveled worryingly fast, the canvas hood above them, clearly not properly secured by whoever had driven the car last, jittering out of place, being folded back by the force of the wind.  
	Jack glanced behind him, at the crush of military vehicles, the trucks in the midst of being unloaded, troop transports surrounded by dozens of forest green uniforms.  Realized suddenly that he was leaving it all behind.  There was a very real possibility that he would never see the front again.
	And despite his heart being in his throat and his free hand being gripped so tightly to the car door that his knuckles had gone white, he couldn’t help but feel relieved.
	Next to him, the lioness squinted into the wind ahead of her, looking grim.  Began to grind her teeth again, tail twitching anxiously against Jack’s thigh.
	Reluctantly letting go of the door, halfway convinced that they’d crash and he’d be thrown through the windscreen the moment he did so (though, realistically, what would a firm grip on the door really do to save him in a situation like that?), he went for the glovebox.
	It contained a pair of soft white leather gloves, a green fabric pillbox cap with a unit marker he didn’t recognize stitched to the front, and a pair of driving goggles.  
	The goggles were glass fronted and oval, rimmed with steel and leather, trimmed with black velvet.  He handed them over and the lioness immediately moved to put them on, her paws leaving the wheel, guiding the car with only one knee for a terrifying moment.
	Then she was driving normally again, goggles in place, ears twitching as she tried to get used to the leather strap that ran around the back of her head.  The goggles had clearly been meant for a human user.
	For a moment she was silent, then glanced over, almost a little uncertainty.
	“…Thanks.”  She said, having to raise her voice over the engine and the wind.
	Still hadn’t told him where they were going.  Or her name, come to think of it.  He wondered what it was.  If he ought to ask straight up.  What was it she’d said when he’d asked why she hadn’t just told him she spoke his language?
	“What’s your name?”  He asked.
	The lioness’s eyes shifted behind clear glass, over to him for a moment, then settled back on the road.  She sighed.  Said something very quiet and opened the throttle a little more.
	The vehicles crowding the road were beginning to thin out, the military crush easing.  Still, she had to weave more often than not.  They passed a burning transport truck, shreds of flaming fabric lifting into the air on little thermals of heat.
	“What?”  He asked.
	Her ears pinned back as best they could against the goggle straps.
	“Karina.”  She growled, irritated, and turned her gaze back to the road.
	Jack was silent a moment, the lioness’ tail twitching ever more insistently against his thigh.  He wanted to reach down and grab it, though something told him that doing so wouldn’t lead to anything good.  Best case scenario Karina the lioness would jump through the roof and they’d crash.  Worst case she’d finish biting his throat out.
	Still, the temptation remained.  It looked very, very soft.  He forced his eyes back up and onto the road ahead.
	“...Lucky you.”  He said.
	Karina blinked.  Stared at him for a moment, her eyes off the road for an alarmingly long time.  Enough to make him fidget.
	“Come on,” he protested, “we have to be going twenty miles an hour…”
	The lioness rolled her eyes and turned her full attention back to driving.
	“Панси.”  She muttered, then was silent.
	They continued on.  She still hadn’t told him where they were going, but he supposed her name was a start.


4.

	After a harrowing few miles the parade of crashed cars and parked military vehicles, not entirely mutually exclusive, thinned out entirely, leaving the road open and perfectly empty.
	Jack squinted off to the side.  There was no second pair of driving goggles and he didn’t quite have the courage to reach back and attempt to do up the top of the car.  Not when they had to be going thirty miles per hour.  
	Under him he could feel the wheels jittering over the road, the axles trembling, like they’d take off and leave the car behind at any moment.  Yet the lioness refused to slow down.  Her face was grim, eyes focused on some distant point on the horizon that only she could see.  
	After a few miles of this they passed a cart full of what looked to be garlic, like what he had in his helmet, green shoots and brownish leaves, bulbs still caked with earth.  It had upended into the ditch, a harness where a horse might have been lying slack and empty on the side of the road.
	He blinked.  Turned halfway around in his seat, craning back to watch as the sight zipped past at top speed.
	“Did you see that?”  He asked.
	Karina’s ear twitched toward him but she offered no response.  
	There were a few options.  Perhaps the horse drawing the cart had wriggled free of its harness and run off.  Surely…
	But Jack knew, in the back of his mind, what he’d seen.  The harness straps had still been done in neat little loops.  There wasn’t any escaping that if you didn’t have opposable thumbs.  Not unless…
	Had it taken everything?  Had the great noisy scourge simply devoured everything that lived and breathed?  There was a panicked moment where Jack contemplated that.  That they were certainly alone in the world now, no animals or birds or…
	No.  He wasn’t going to think about this.  He needed to talk, to distract himself with something else.
	The inevitable question boiled to his lips, replacing all others.  He spoke before he could stop himself. 
	“What do you think caused it?”  He asked, raising his voice above the rush of wind, the growl of the engine.
	Karina’s shoulders hunched almost imperceptibly up, the fur on the back of her neck rising slowly, buffeted by the breeze.  It was like watching the approach of a thunderhead, a slow gathering of tension atop tension.
	“Это не имеет значения.”  She muttered, voice flat and final.
	“I don’t know what that-“  Jack started to speak, frustrated and frightened.  He knew she spoke his own tongue, why had she reverted to her own?
	The lioness cut him off with a brisk shake of her head.
	“It does not matter.”  She muttered, words nearly lost.
	He took a deep breath.  
	Was silent.
	The crackly, lightning storm tension brewing inside of Karina only seemed to intensify as they drew further and further from the front, leaving all signs of the war behind.  Every so often there were crashed vehicles, and the road turned from dirt to bitumen, but that was almost it.
	Jack maintained a tight grip on the door, Karina’s speed leaving something to be desired.  Wished she would talk to him.  It was maddening, having someone next to him who could potentially speak yet simply chose not to.  
	They passed empty fields upon empty fields, devoid of horses or cows.  Somehow this scared him more than anything else but he knew better than to express it.  Simply swallowed his terror down.  
	It was about then he first saw the smoke.  A faint, subtle faint gray plume of the stuff dulling the blue of the sky way ahead of them.  Karina tried to open the throttle further but she’d already pressed it as far as it would go.  Jack could hear a curious bubbling sound beginning to come from the radiator, wisps of steam escaping from beneath the cap.  
	Karina had to notice as well but she didn’t seem to care.  Kept her paws on the steering wheel, gripping it so tight that Jack could see the very tips of her claws being forced from their sheaths.  
	“What’s that?”  He asked.
	Karina glanced over, amber eyes resting on him for a split second.  She took a deep breath.
	“The capital.”  She said at last.  
	Jack’s eyes turned back to the smoke.  He thought of the officer’s uniform he’d seen back in the trenches, the officer himself disappeared in the middle of shaving.  A little white arc of shaving cream having fallen from the air, the jaw it was attached to no longer present.
	The people of (not the world, his mind insisted.  Anything but the whole world) …the people who had disappeared had been in the middle of all sorts of activities when they’d vanished.  The crashed vehicles testified to that.  The upturned wagons and drifts of clothes, scattered in a forwards motion, people taken in the middle of a stride.  They’d all been doing things, carrying on with their lives, in whatever form that took.  
	He wondered how many had been cooking or lighting pipes or cigarettes.  Checking furnaces or gas lamps.  Carrying candles or…
	They passed a biplane, lying crashed in a field, at the end of a jagged furrow of raw earth.  Jack could see the blue markings on its wings.  One from his side, he realized.  
	No sign of the pilot, though he could see a red scarf caught in a nearby tree, waving like a battle standard.  There had to be dozens of wrecks like this scattered all across their two countries, fighters and bombers.
	The plane hadn’t caught light so much as simply crumpled, splintered struts poking through the canvas wing coverings like broken bones.  One of the nose mounted machine guns had come loose and was poked, muzzle first, into the dirt like a headstone.  
	Karina didn’t offer the sight so much as a second glance.  Just kept going.
	The landscape around them began to change, fields fading into houses, the street going from black, bumpy bitumen to a more fashionable cobble.  They were getting close to the city, Jack realized.  He could smell a hint of smoke in the air, a few buildings already blackened around their windows where small blazes had burnt themselves out.
	“Дерьмо…”  Karina muttered as they crested a rise, already slowing down.  Below them, along the decline of a hill, Jack could see a little town stretching out before dissolving into green space.  Parks and gardens, the roads and tram lines segregated from nature by iron fences.  Perhaps a mile beyond the cordon of parks was the very edge of what he recognized vaguely as the enemy capital.
	He’d seen pictures of it on postcards before, could see a river running through the center of it, canals interspacing neighborhoods.  The architecture was a bit like the buildings already around him, though the buildings there were taller, the city building itself up rather than out.  
	The lioness pulled the touring car to a halt and Jack’s eyes slid down to where she’d been looking the whole time.
	Below them the street was tangled with crashed vehicles and abandoned wagons, completely blocked.  No way they’d be able to force their way through.  He watched as she engaged the handbrake and stepped out of the car, not even bothering to turn the engine off.  
	He did so.  Wasn’t sure why.  Surely it didn’t matter, but somehow it felt like the right thing to do.  The radiator continued to bubble, seeming to let out a relieved huff of steam.
	“Hey, wait!”  He called, stepping out of the car, helmet under his arm.  
	Karina was already halfway down the block, surveying the jam of cars and trucks and wagons, still grinding her teeth.  The fur on her tail had gone jagged and he could see her whiskers twitching frenetically.  If he were to touch her, somehow he knew her heart would be racing at an uneven, raggedy clip.
	The lioness didn’t even look back, though her ears twitched in his direction.  She just kept going, forging on ahead through the mess blocking the streets.
	They were like that for as far as he could see, entirely blocked up, the flow traffic rendered inert and permanently immovable in an instant.  He edged to the sidewalks, which were still blocked but not nearly as bad.  Caught his foot in the neck of a shirt and nearly tripped.  
	Where the road was clogged with vehicles, the sidewalk was choked with clothes.  Every so often there were other things too, a child’s wagon, a hobby horse, a toy gun, a leash and collar for a since disappeared pet.  
	The enormity of what had been taken (taken?  By who?  By what?) stunned him.  He wanted to drop to his knees and put his hands over his eyes.  But instead he forced himself to catch up with Karina.  To think of other things.
	“There have to be others,” he said, “look at where we are, there were thousands of people here…”  
	Karina took a breath.  Kept going, ignoring him completely.
	Jack cupped his hands around his mouth and called out.
	“Hello?!”  His voice echoed through the streets.  Suddenly he recalled doing the same thing back in the trenches.  There had been thousands of people there as well, yet nobody had responded.  Not a soul.  
	Of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers in their section of line, not a single one had answered.  Nobody had made noise.  What hope was there in a suburb of the enemy capital which, in all likelihood, had even fewer people than the place they’d just come from?
	But he couldn’t think like that.  He refused to let himself.  Called out again, Karina forging on ahead of him.  He called until they reached the boundary of the suburb, their surroundings lapsing into parks.  
	No answer.
	Above him the sun was beginning to tack towards the horizon, throwing orange light over the tangled road.  He followed Karina, broken glass crunching beneath his boots, the lioness’ pace growing ever faster.
	He found himself looking for the source of the smoke as they approached the capital proper.  There were little trickles all across the city, but only a few looked to have grown into proper blazes.  Mostly to the north, on the very outskirts.  There looked to be entire neighborhoods afire there.  
	But if the lioness was concerned about any of that she certainly didn’t show it.  Kept her eyes busy scanning the road, looking for gaps where a car could fit through.  Yet she found nothing.  The road was too packed.
	He wanted to ask her a dozen things but knew it would be better to stay silent.  Instead he simply followed along.  Looked down to the parks neighboring the road, just beyond iron fences with the occasional gate, but was appalled by just how still they were.  The breeze had died down as evening approached and there were no birds in the trees or the sky.  He couldn’t even hear the squeak of bats beginning their nightly hunt.
	The walking paths were sprinkled with the occasional set of clothing but nothing beyond that.  A toy boat bobbed against the edge of a stone fountain, pushed there by the flow of water cascading down from its upper tiers.  It listed to one side.  Would probably sink soon.
	Jack wanted to think of something else, but each sight he could look at only inspired worrying things.  Terrible conclusions.  So he rested his eyes on the lioness and tried to draw strength from her, but could only wonder what he could do to make her less tense, less anxious and worried.  
	He wanted her to help him too but knew she wouldn’t do anything but roll her eyes if he voiced that.  So instead he followed, trying to think of what to say.  
	Nothing came to mind.
	By the time they reached the city proper Karina’s pace had accelerated into a sort of semi-jog.  She checked the windows of certain shops, tail lashing behind her, fur bristled up and claws no longer fully sheathed.  
	Her breathing had gone ragged and Jack almost had to run to keep up, the silence of the city sending a shiver down his spine.  Doubly so because, in person it felt almost familiar in a strange, dreamlike sort of way.
	The makes of the automobiles were different, so were the cuts and styles of a lot of the clothes that lay in heaps upon the sidewalks and in the lesser traveled streets, but  though those differences were present, there was more that he found familiar than anything alien or bizarre.
	He couldn’t read the script on the shop windows, knew not the meaning of the green banner that flew from many building and didn’t know what a kopek was or how it related to the money he had in his own pocket, but the underlying framework of civilization was nonetheless the same.  There were newspapers and posters for films and plays.  A toy shop offered wooden sets of toy soldiers, painted in bright, vivid colors.
	Compared to the trenches none of this made any sense.  Or was it the trenches that had usurped reason and order?
	He had to force himself to continue after Karina, the lioness hurrying further along, to the part of the city where the streets grew narrower and the traffic less problematic.  The buildings here were tall but cramped together.  Tenements and shops and factories, glowing with lights but all terribly silent.  From inside a couple Jack could hear a lonely few machines still working away at nothing, but there were no people.  
	Nobody in their right mind would continue to work through the disappearance of their coworkers.
	Jack thought he would have been relieved to be free of the snarl of crashed vehicles that consumed the major thoroughfares of the city, but the absence of any obvious chaos only made the silence worse.  Like everyone in the world had settled their affairs and simply shuffled out of existence in a cold, orderly fashion, like bits on an assembly line.
	There were no crashed cars in the neighborhood Karina was heading into.  Only a few older vehicles, parked neatly at the sides of the road, their canvas covers up in case of rain.  There were no fires, no blackened windows or blazing buildings.  Just silence, and the faintest hint of smoke in the air, acrid and gritty.
	The sunset was in full effect now, orangey reddish light pouring through a thin skein of clouds on the western horizon, complimenting the low red glow of the fires to the north.  Above him the sky was beginning to go a clear, pleasant indigo.  
	Ahead of him, Karina stopped in front of a building, catching her breath.  He jogged next to her.  Thought she might speak for a moment, but instead she padded up the front steps and shouldered the door open, splintering the frame, popping a cheap lock open.  
	Something clattered to the floor and Jack realized it was a key.  The lioness could have opened the front door, he realized, but her paws were shaking too badly.
	It was an apartment building, he realized as he followed her.  Each window in the brick facade had laundry hanging from it, long since dried, but there was nobody left to take it in.  He stepped past the front door and onto cheap clay tile, lacquered a red that had long since faded into a bricky pink.  
	The front lobby of the building was small and cramped, the ceiling almost too low for the lioness, but she hardly seemed to notice.  He followed her down the hallway and to a wooden door, which she shoved open with a splintering crash, nearly taking the frame of the door with it, the doorknob coming completely off in her paw.  
	She hardly seemed to notice.  Dropped it with a clatter and disappeared into the apartment she’d just opened, breath jagged and frightened, entire body trembling, her fur fluffed with barely contained terror.
	“Мама?”  He heard her call, voice high and trembling, “Папа?”  
	There was a shiver at the end of her words that sent a chill through him.  It seemed almost impossible that she could be so vulnerable, yet she was.  For a moment he stood frozen by the broken door to the apartment, mind fizzing uselessly.  It reminded him of the first time he’d ever seen his mother cry.  Vulnerability in figures as strong as that wasn’t supposed to exist.  
	He gripped the half shattered frame of the door and forced himself to follow.  Could hear the lioness in the next room, pacing desperately around.  Something crashed to the floor.
	The apartment he found himself in was small and lived in, the wallpaper a soft sky blue, dimmed somewhat by pipe smoke.  He could smell it, just a tang.  Spotted a pipe sitting in a holder next to a battered fabric armchair, its bowl filled with ash.  A porcelain cup rested on a coaster next to it, half filled with tea, the corner of a newspaper page soaking into it.  There were pages scattered over the floor and the armchair itself.  Beneath them Jack could see a pair of gray woolen pants and a shirt.  A pair of spectacles poked from beneath one page, one lens cracked.
	Across the room, an open window between them, was a piano, the cover up and yellowed ivory keys exposed.  A woolen dress lay puddled over the bench, the brass button on one sleeve caught between the keys, holding it in place.  
	Atop the piano, instead of sheet music sat a photograph.  Old.  Grainy.  A pair of lions and what looked to be their young daughter.  The girl seemed to have turned her head at the last moment, her features were blurry but there was still clearly a grin on her face.  Whatever had caught her attention was deeply amusing.
	He let out a breath, heart sinking, stomach shriveling inside of him.  He’d suspected, but now he knew.
	The lioness stepped out into the main room, blinking hard, shaking like a leaf.  She was trying to hold back panicked tears, Jack realized, but she simply couldn’t do it.  One cut a dark track through the fur beneath one eye, tracing the side of her muzzle.  Her ears were pinned completely back.
	“Karina.”  Jack said.
	The lioness’ eyes jerked up to him.  She shook her head slightly, a stiff, uneven movement.  Made for the front of the apartment.  She had a fire poker in one paw, Jack realized.  He wasn’t sure where she’d gotten it from, but she carried it with terrible purpose, gaze sliding beyond him.
	“Don’t say anything.”  She muttered, voice trembly, barely audible.
	“I’m sorry.”  He said.  Had to do something, say anything at all to express his sympathy, to show he felt bad for-
	Karina grabbed the front of his uniform and ran him backwards out of the apartment, almost before he knew what was happening.  His back hit the wall opposite the door to the apartment with a splintery crash.  He felt drywall crumple and a strut splinter.  He gripped hard onto the handle of his spade but didn’t draw it.  
	She jerked her forearm across his throat, not hard enough to strangle, just enough to pin him in place.  She’d torn the front of his uniform, Jack realized, there were buttons clattering to the floor.  His hand jolted down to the handle of his spade but he made no move to draw it.  Her claws weren’t out and the fire poker remained at her side, pressed flat against one thigh.  
	Karina stared at him through narrowed eyes, teeth instinctively bared, fangs exposed, only an inch or two from his face.  Her ears had gone flat and he could feel her shaking even as she pinned him in place, muscles working against his throat.
	He made no move to resist.  Knew she was in a prime position to bite his face off before he could do anything concrete.  But instead of that, instead of bringing up the poker or crushing his windpipe with her forearm, she spoke.  Her voice was low, her words coming in discordant bursts as she tried to keep the tears at bay.
	“Why do you care?”  She hissed, “don’t you have anything better to do?  Other things to think about?  Your people?  Your country?  Your family?!”
	Jack said nothing.  Took a deep breath and removed his hand from the handle of his spade.  He knew she wasn’t going to hurt him.  If she was then she wouldn’t have bothered speaking.  She’d just have broken him against the wall like a toy.
	Indeed, the lioness stepped back, letting go of his torn uniform, forearm dropping away from his throat.  Turning silently, she walked back out into the street, stiff legged, fur bristled, gripping the fire poker tighter.
	He followed along at a cautious distance.
	There was a car parked in front of the apartment, and the lioness headed straight for it, lips pressed into a tight, thin line.  She raised the poker and put it through the windshield, spraying the interior with glass.  Ripped the steel frame free with her paws and sent it spinning across the street.  Put out the headlights and flattened the tires, shattering the spokes and settling the car down at a crippled, canting angle.  
	She walked in slow circles as she did, finding new things to destroy.  She stabbed the poker through one door and, when she couldn't get it free, kicked the door until it was forced to bend the wrong way, steel and tin squealing, wood paneling splintering under her blows.  Her breath came in jagged, chaotic little gasps, her uniform askew and fur bristled.  
	Jack simply stood and watched as she tore the door of the car free with her bare paws and threw it into the street.  Ripped the engine cover askew and tore free pipes and hoses.  Broken glass and shreds of tin and steel, unbound springs and tatters of rubber littered the street.  
	The lioness didn’t make a sound the entire time, just ripped and tore and pummeled.  And when the car had been reduced to nothing but its chassis and engine, she stepped back, legs trembling under her, paws streaked with blood, watching a trickle of petrol roll into the gutter from a ruptured tank.  
	Slowly, she sat down to sit on the front steps of the apartment building, suddenly looking very lost and tired.  She sniffled, hanging her head.  Bit back a jagged little sob.
	Jack sat next to her.  Silently offered a hand.
	Karina hesitated, looking sidelong at it out of the corner of one tear streaked eye.  Slowly, she reached out and took it, with one bloodied paw.  Squeezed so tight it hurt.
	The two of them said nothing, just watched the sunset fade.


5.

	After a quiet eternity the lioness seemed to get herself back under control.  Locked the hurt behind a quiet, cold exterior.  She took a deep breath and let go of Jack’s hand with a wince.  Tucked her paw against herself, fingers kept clenched into a near fist.
	Jack’s eyes traveled down to the streaks of crimson staining his hand.  Wiped them off on his pant leg.
	“We need to do something about your paw.”  He said quietly.  Got up and started to turn back to the apartment building.  There had to be first aid supplies in there somewhere.  
	“Нет.”  Karina said sharply, then arrested her tone.  Sighed.  “…I’m not going back there.”
	Something told Jack that sentiment extended to him by proxy.  Going back into the building would be like ransacking her family’s grave.  
	He stepped away uncertainly, eyes turning down the street.  He didn’t know the city, and something told him any map he’d be able to scrounge up would be written in Karina’s language.  For a dark moment he wondered why he’d ever followed her to this foreign place.  Took a deep breath.
	“Is there a clinic nearby?”  He asked.
	Karina was silent for a long moment.  Clenched and unclenched one paw absently, droplets of crimson falling to the concrete in front of her.  It had to hurt, but she kept the motion up, almost mechanically.  Perhaps that was why she was doing it, he thought uneasily.
	Knew he had to get her away from the apartment building.  
	“Karina.”  He pressed.
	The lioness’ head lifted and she met his gaze.  Traversed her eyes down the street.
	“A few blocks that way,” she said with a faint nod, “Не то чтобы это важно…”  
	He didn’t ask her what the second part of her response meant.  Got the distinct sense that she’d answered him more to get him to leave her alone more than anything else.  
	Once more he extended a paw but Karina simply stood on her own, ignoring his offer to help.  Kept her eyes focused on the ground, away from the silent buildings that surrounded them.  The effect of the night was eerie.  Most of the windows that surrounded them were lit, the electricity was still clearly on, but there was no noise to accompany that frail facade of normalcy.  
	The lioness walked slowly, her eyes skirting away from each set of clothing she passed.  Jack thought about trailing for a moment, like he had before, but Karina’s body language was different now.  Her earlier energy had flared out, she reminded him now of a burnt out fuse, reduced to cinders by a chaotic surge of power.
	He stepped next to her and together they walked down the street, back out of her neighborhood.  Skirted the vehicle choked main avenues, shattered windshields and twisted steel reflecting the very last bits of evening light, and dipped instead to a neighborhood that bordered a canal.
	It looked more commercial, shops and restaurants and larger department stores.  Barbershops and more flanking a little marina which seemed to serve as a cargo offloading point for canal craft.  
	Jack glanced at Karina as he walked.
	“Where’s the clinic?”  He asked.
	“I don’t need one.”  Her voice was clipped, paws had gone into the pockets of her uniform jacket, so he couldn’t see them.  
	“Your paws are bleeding.”  He said, but the lioness didn’t seem to hear him.  Nodded ahead of herself, to where a big square building with a brownstone facade rose a half dozen stories into the air.  There were warmly lit windows in its front, displaying coats and dresses, suits and waistcoats and jewelry.  All the finery in the world, it seemed.
	“I worked there before the war,” Karina said as they came to a halt in front of the department store, “…and so did all my friends.”
	Jack was silent.  The front steps of the store were lightly sprinkled with abandoned sets of clothing, but it looked as though the disappearance had hit them at an off time.  He was faintly relieved by that.  Didn’t think he could bear the sight of more proof of…
	What could he even call it?  The apocalypse?  End times?  None of the labels seemed to fit.  The world was still present and in fine working order, it was the people that had gone away.
	And the animals, a voice in the back of his mind whispered.  He mustn’t forget the harnesses and collars and leashes that lay abandoned in the street as well.  He’d almost sort of grown numb to the thought that people were gone, but the prospect of animals having vanished too was scary in an entirely new way.
	He decided not think about it.
	“Should we go in?”  He asked, looking to Karina.
	The lioness shrugged listlessly.
	“Might as well.”
	They scaled the steps and entered the store, Jack glancing cautiously around him out of instinct.  It felt unnatural that such a large space could possibly be so quiet.  Each footstep rang out across the open front space.  
	The floor of the store was polished marble, the ground floor divided between shops and attractions and even restaurants.  It all looked distinctly upscale, the clothes were fine and trim, even the lighting was steady and warm.
	“What did you do?”  Jack asked.
	Karina glanced back from where she’d wandered a few yards ahead of him, next to a sales stand offering samples of new imported fabric.  She sighed.  Flicked a square of tartan cloth from the stand.  Each little square, Jack saw, had a tiny brass rivet sunk into its corner, presumably to mark it as a sample.  It clicked and clattered against the stone.
	“I wanted an adventure,” the lioness said, raking more samples from the stand, her claws out and scratching lines into the white velvet the cloth had been laid out on, “that’s why I went to war.  Какая глупая маленькая девочка Я был…”
	She turned the stand over with a crash, wincing as she did so, injured paw retreating back to her side.  Jack’s eyes went to the floor, where he realized the lioness was leaving a little trail of tiny red droplets behind her.  They stood out against the marble floor like rubies.  One had spattered against a card, now toppled, that had once stood atop the samples stand.  To one side was a picture of a proud soldier in green uniform, bayonet tipped rifle held out in defense of the homeland.
	The language was different, but Jack knew in an instant what the card meant.  He’d seen enough of them at home.  Buy certain products to aid the war effort, support at home helped the front…so on and so forth.
	How utterly pointless all of it seemed now.
	Stepping through the split samples, he rejoined the lioness.  She seemed to be making for the back of the store, behind the counters.  He supposed there was something in the employee areas she wanted.  Followed silently along, not knowing what to say or talk about.
	“It was a bit like the army here,” she said as she walked behind the cloth counter, “they were cross if you did not keep your jacket straight and your fur clean.”  A wan smile as she said that.
	Jack glanced down at himself, suddenly keenly aware of just how filthy and dilapidated he was.  His uniform jacket hung off him in tatters, one shoulder entirely gone, the front ripped where Karina had grabbed it.  He was caked in mud and God knew what else…a monster freshly crawled from the trenches.
	The lioness was in slightly better shape, but her uniform was blood stained and muddy, the thighs of her pants blotched with crimson.  She looked like she’d walked straight through a slaughterhouse.  
	Next to the coats and dresses and jackets perfectly arranged on their felt covered mannequin models they looked positively grotesque.
	“So,” the lioness continued, “at the start of each day, before our shift, we always washed.”
	With that she shouldered a door open, splintering the frame.  Jack wasn’t sure if Karina was committing these small acts of destruction to keep her feelings at bay, or if she was simply not willing to expend extra effort reaching for the knob.  Neither option would have surprised him.
	The room she led him to now was tile lined and large, given over to public showers, like in a gymnasium.  An attached room looked to be a sauna.  A few of the shower heads were going, steam curling lazily up from the tiles, a few bars of plain soap lying near the drains, where the water had pushed them.
	Jack looked around, curious despite himself.  This was not normal department store fare, he knew, even if it was explicitly for employee use.  Still, he was glad the lioness had led him here.  The heat wafting back from the showers (they’d been running since the morning and still had hot water?  He supposed they were probably the only sources of hot water being used in the entire building, but that was still impressive) was tantalizing, even if it made his scratched up shoulder sting.  
	Next to them, on the wall beside the door, was a long row of wooden employee lockers, like little cabinets, each marked by a piece of wax sealed cardboard with a name written on it in Karina’s language.  Briefly he wondered which one had been hers before the war.
	A few had clothes or personal items left over, rings and watches and necklaces, all inexpensive but clearly worn and treasured.  
	He had to look away and shuffle to an empty locker, eyes trained on the bare wood before him.  He didn’t want to think about any of that.  It hurt too much.  Made him feel too frightened.
	Beneath that, the fear and stress and pain, was a growing sort of fatigue.  He was tired.  Hadn’t slept much of the previous night because of the pre-assault shelling (how distant it all seemed now) and now the whole day had been a welter of mud and shellfire and blood and…
	He started to take his uniform coat off but found his bandaged shoulder almost too stiff to comply.  Simply finished the job the lioness had started and ripped straight down the front, letting it slide off and puddle onto the floor in a filthy pile.  
	The gauze over his shoulder had gone a dark, angry red, loaded with partially dried blood.  Evidently the wound hadn’t agreed with his constant motion.  
	Standing bare chested, he glanced to where the lioness was, just in time to see her shuck her coat and send it into the corner with a desultory flick of her wrist.  She wore what looked to be a forest green undershirt, only this was sleeveless and left her midriff exposed, hugging her pert breasts.  
	Karina glanced back at him.  Cocked her head.
	“In your army the facilities are for everyone, right?”  She asked, a bare sort of curiosity in her voice.  
	Jack nodded.  Of course they were.  Any country that had men and women fighting side by side wasn’t going to waste money constructing two sets of facilities when they could simply cram everyone together into one.  Such was the military way.
	“Good.”  She said, and stripped off her undergarments, kicking off her pants as she did so, visibly relieved to be free of her torn, dirty uniform.
	Jack followed suit.  Thought for a moment just how differently his day had gone compared to where he’d suspected it would end upon first waking up, then ducked under the spray of the first shower head he could find.
	The water was just short of scalding, stinging his skin and giving him the distinct sensation that his wounded shoulder had just been drenched in acid, but he forced himself to stay under until he got used to it.  His body adjusted, shoulder simply going numb.  He lifted the blood soaked gauze from the deep scratches the lioness had dug into his flesh, beads of crimson infused water rolling down his arm.  
	Next to him, the lioness went through almost the same process, trembling under the hot water for a moment, the fur on her tail fluffing out before being drenched by water.  
	Karina didn’t look quite as big or imposing like this, without her uniform or the vestments of the war clinging to her very being.  Instead she almost looked…normal once more.  Like she had when she’d cleaned the blood from her face back at the aid station.  
	The water swirling into the drain under her paws had taken on a distinctly brownish cast, and he, Jack realized, was in the same position.  Reaching up with his good arm, he ran fingers through his hair.  Searched for the soap and found it, scrubbing himself mercilessly, turning the water hotter and hotter until he was almost panting, his skin itching, not sure whether it was burning or not.
	Through the steam, Jack could see Karina simply standing in place under the water, her eyes shut, paws folded to her chest.  She’d lathered her fur but only part of it was being hit by the water, the rest spiky and frothed with soap, filthy grayish bubbles circling the drain below her.  
	Slowly, her eyes opened. Met his gaze.
	“Jack?”  She asked.  
	Was that the first time she’d ever actually used his name?
	“Hmm?”  He vocalized, stepping partially out from under the water to hear her better.
	“The soap hurts my paws,” she said, “wash my back.”  There wasn’t a question in there, just a curt, stern command with no room for refusal.  
	Not that he was going to.  Karina’s paws were bruised and cut, he couldn’t imagine having to hold a bar of soap in that condition.  It had to feel like gripping onto a cactus.
	He frothed his bar of soap between his hands as he approached, generating a lather.  Couldn’t recall ever being asked to do anything like this with his own comrades but supposed that this was just another in a day full of firsts.
	Karina kept herself almost angled, back not fully facing him.  Her paws stayed at her chest, over her breasts, reddish tinted water running between her fingers.  
	Jack started high, raking his fingers through her fur, lathering between the lioness’ shoulders.  She took an appreciative little breath, staying perfectly still, not quite looking back over her shoulder at him, but every so often he caught little flashes of her gaze.
	Karina’s fur, even soaked and dirty as it was, was soft, muscles working beneath her skin, taut and warm and strong.  She had strength coiled inside of her, resting easy and relaxed at the moment, some of her tensions driven away by the hot water and the steam and the simple pleasure of getting clean after a long time away from such amenities.
	Her tail twitched and swished in the space between her and Jack, its tip brushing against his shins from time to time.  He finished her shoulders and moved down to mid-back.  Felt Karina press back against him just a little as he lathered the fur there, streamers of water cutting lines in the soap, dirt and blood and grime running down the drain below her.
	As he worked Jack felt a curious urge to move closer and simply hug the lioness, press her close to himself and feel that pleasant, reassuring strength.  It was so strong it nearly took his breath away, but the urge remained just that, an urge.  And he shooed it away without more than a half moment’s hesitation.  Knew it would be a bad idea…as much as it hurt him, down somewhere deep, to admit that.  
	Karina stepped fully back into the spray, washing the last of the soap from her fur with careful little sweeps of her paws, ears twitching and beads of water running along her whiskers.
	“Thank you.”  She said, and turned her water off.
	Jack did the same.  Though he thought he could stay and bask under the hot water quite possibly forever, he was clean and so was the lioness.  There were other things that needed to happen.
	As he watched Karina dropped down nearly to all fours and shook, a shivering motion that passed from her shoulders to her hips and all along the length of her tail, shaking the water from her fur.  The motion left her fur damp and fluffed out, whiskers in total disarray.  All the same, her state was clearly improved, her fur looked soft and perfectly clean, perhaps a half shade lighter than when he’d first laid eyes upon her in the trenches.
	Jack felt better as well, skin pink and clean, fingers wrinkly and pale from too much time submerged.  He couldn’t help but shiver as he stepped into the cooler air outside of the showers, grabbing for a towel.
	Karina wrapped one around herself, covering herself from chest to thighs, stretching her arms above her head, paws still kept cautiously half clenched.  The cuts there had stopped bleeding for the moment but still looked swollen and painful.  They needed to be taken care of properly, or at least covered up.
	Wrapping his towel around his midsection, Jack went for his boots before reconsidering.  They were muddy and half rotten, his socks plastered with filth.  Besides, he was in a department store.
	The sheer availability of nearly anything he could have ever wished for, all in a single building, hadn’t quite fully occurred to him until that moment.  He could have new clothes.  New socks and shoes and a shirt and pants, a suit and tie if he wished, a coat or a vest or a pocket-watch…anything at all.
	But first he needed to make sure Karina took care of her paws.  
	He left the employee area behind, stepping back out into the middle of the empty store with a hint of unreality, like he was in a dream.  And, a voice in the back of his mind reminded him, for all he knew he still could be.
	Blinking that unpleasant thought away, he found the cloth counter and searched through the cuts and varieties, searching for…ah.
	Cotton.  Soft.  Velvety.  Absorbent and easy on the skin.  Carefully, he cut a few long strips loose with a pair of scissors he found lying on the counter.  Karina watched him as he worked and nodded respectfully, waving away his attempts to help her bandage her paws.
	A moment later, her paws bandaged and both of them freshly scrubbed and somewhat invigorated, they looked out across the whole wide, silent expanse of the department store.
	For the first time all day, Jack actually felt like things might turn out to be alright.


6.

	In the end they drifted away to explore different sections of the store, but there was nothing anxious or distant about that separation.  Jack could still hear Karina’s claws clicking on the stone, and occasional small act of deliberate devastation ringing through the empty space.
	More war propaganda he assumed.
	He looked through display pieces, racks of dress pants and waistcoats and silk vests imported from elsewhere.  Even spotted, to his amusement, a few pieces that had clearly been made by companies native to his country.
	No matter the vastness of the war, he supposed, business would always march on.
	But when he picked them up, examined their fine, soft threads and tightly sewn stitching he simply couldn’t bring himself to even try them on.  They were too perfect, too absolutely opulent.  He hadn’t seen anything like this in a long time.  Made him feel strangely guilty that he, out of everyone he had shared the trenches with, was getting to do this.  Everyone else was simply…gone.
	He drifted away from the formal ware, the dinner party costumes and other markers of a life of placid, wealthy leisure.  A part of him insisted that he had the freedom to do anything at all.  He could have every bit of the riches in this store, he could do anything at all in this world.  
	But it was just as quickly answered by the cold and apathetic query of just what those riches could really do for him.  Would a silk waistcoat imported from the east really be of much use?  Would a silver chased pocket watch that wound itself via the use of special magnetized coils help him to…
	There was no use wondering about any of this.  He needed to get dressed.  Couldn’t go about his business clad only in a bath towel, even if the weather outside did permit it.
	He found clothes for a working man, surrounded by flashy markers that the assumed meant they were on sale.  He looked over the white collared shirt, loose to allow for easy movement, and the charcoal vest that went with it.  The matching pants.  
	He could see almost anyone wearing an outfit like this.  A construction worker on break could have something like this on, sans vest and gloves and steel toed work boots.  So could an innkeeper or a rumrunner or a judge in court, beneath their robes.  
	It felt ordinary and familiar.  He plucked the pieces from the rack and measured them against himself.  Had to try on a few pairs of pants before he found a set with long enough legs, and even then he had to scrounge for a belt.  
	Jack sought out a mirror once he was dressed.  Blinked hard at the sight of himself, hair damp and still somewhat messy, tamed with nothing more than his fingers (he’d need to find a comb…) cheeks and chin rough with stable, bags under his eyes and bruises on his face.
	Looking quickly away, Jack found himself a pair of steel toed work boots, snatched up a half dozen extra pairs of socks, then paused.  Why was he taking these with him?  It wasn’t like they were scarce.  He certainly wouldn’t need to…
	Letting out a breath, he set them on a counter and went to find Karina.
	He found her in the front room of the store, peering over the perfume counter but making no move to get anything.  She had a sort of sad, wistful look on her face, some remnant of a time when she could afford to be gentler and…
	She’d found herself an outfit, a white cotton blouse, trimmed with crimson, tucked into a pair of dove gray pants that hugged her hips.  Together they outlined her trim figure, ensuring she’d still be able to move and run and do anything at all that needed to be done.
	Jack recalled someone saying that the popularity of dresses always fell after a war.  Supposed he knew why now.  
	One of the lioness’ ears twitched back and she turned, catching sight of him.  Smiled wanly.
	“Лихие,” she said, “…you look nice.”
	Jack couldn’t help but smile at that little, completely genuine compliment.  So did she, he wanted to say, but that would be so derivative…
	Was he really worrying about impressing her?
	“Your blouse matches your bandages.”  He said.
	Karina glanced down, to the little pinpricks of red carrying through the cotton swathing her paws.  Actually laughed, for the first time since Jack had first laid eyes on her.  It wasn’t much more than a chuckle, but it was genuine and it sounded better than anything he’d yet heard amidst the eerie quietness of the new world.
	Then she yawned, her shoulders falling somewhat, like she hadn’t the energy to even keep them squared.  Her whiskers were beginning to droop as well, Jack saw.  The lioness, after everything that had happened, was practically asleep on her feet.
	“Should we find somewhere to bunk down?”  He asked, glancing back out to the darkened streets, aware he sounded halfhearted.  The prospect of going back out there and walking through the city even more wasn’t exactly appealing.
	Not to mention that whatever place they found, whether it was an apartment or a house or even the palace Karina’s whole country was ruled from, that space would be filled with personal effects and reminders that there had once been people living there.
	It would be like sleeping in a mausoleum.  
	Karina shook her head briskly, clearly having come to the same conclusion.
	“Beds are too soft anyway,” she said, “we’ll be fine staying here.”
	In the end they simply moved behind the cloth counter, where they had an easy view of the entrance and no real ways to be snuck up on.  Neither of them said that, but Jack could see the tactical considerations ticking off behind Karina’s eyes.  He unspooled a few bolts of the softer cloths and settled down against them with a sigh.  
	Being there, between the cloth counter and the taller back shelf, still stocked with all its hundreds of fabric varieties, he almost felt like he was in a trench again.  Safe from the shells and the fire of the opposing line.  That was comforting, in a vague sort of way.
	Karina settled down and sighed, eyes half lidded.  
	Before he knew it, Jack was asleep.

	The lynx had him by the arm, wouldn’t let him go search for stretcher bearers, he wanted to tug free but her claws were out and she was trying to tell him something, spouts of arterial crimson pouring free from her mouth.  He couldn’t hear it over the shellfire, the cracks and hums of enemy rounds snapping past.  She was drowning, he knew that.  Wanted to go flip her onto her side to try and clear her throat but frustratingly wasn’t able to move.  Not in the right way, his hand moved to hrs and he could feel her fur but she just wouldn’t let go.
	Her eyes met his, full of terror and a slowly growing emptiness.  
	He shook his head.  Tried to ward it away but there was no stopping the inevitable encroachment of-

	Jack snapped awake with a sharp intake of breath, all too aware of a sort of trembly weakness in the center of himself, like everything vital and solid had been scooped out of him and replaced by air.  Like he would simply collapse in on himself if he tried to move.
	…Not that he even could if he wanted to.  
	The sensation of someone gripping his arm, he realized slowly, hadn’t been limited to the dream.  Karina had scooted close in the night and had his arm in both paws, hugged tight to her side, against the soft fabric of her blouse and the firmness of her body underneath.
	The lioness was shaking like a leaf, her claws out, prickling against his skin.  Behind her eyelids he could see her eyes doing a sort of jittery dance.  Her tail had curled tight around one of her legs, like she was trying to protect herself from something terrible.
	For a moment Jack thought about jerking his arm away, but Karina’s grip was too tight, and there was the matter of her claws as well.  If he scared her then there was a very real chance she’d shred his arm to ribbons.  
	“Karina.”  He said softly.
	No response.
	Taking a breath he tried again, slightly louder.  Kept his arm still and steady, wanted to ease her awake, to short circuit whatever was happening in her mind.
	“Karina.”  He repeated.  “Karina…”
	Slowly, the trembling dissipated.  She opened her eyes, suddenly awake and alert.  She let go of his arm and drew slowly away, scooting back to her original position, a few feet away.  
	Something told Jack that commenting on what had just happened would be a bad idea.  Instead he looked to the pattern of reddish morning light sprayed across the top of the tall shelf in front of him.  But the angle was too high for early morning.  
	He supposed they’d overslept.  Felt a brief hint of panicky unease at that before remembering that there was no schedule to stick to anymore.  No necessary inspections or exercises or…anything really.
	All the same, the curious tint to the light bothered him.  If it was late morning why was there still a sunrise?
	Jack stood with a grunt and looked out the front of the department store to…
	Oh.
	The sky was a curious reddish haze, thick with smoke and sunlight intermingled.  Karina joined him, wincing as she saw just what had frozen him in place.
	“The fires are closer,” he said, “we should get going.”
	But the lioness shook her head, movements still a little stiff and unordered.  
	“It’s in the north of the city,” she said, “there’s a river between us and there.  We’ll be fine.”
	Right…he remembered that.  Decided to trust Karina’s judgement, she was the one who lived here after all.
	All the same, the scene outside was grim.  When he’d contemplated the end times briefly the day before, this had been more like what he’d been expecting.  Yet the cause was entirely natural, he assured himself.  Just fires, caused by the disappearance of…well…everyone.
	He blinked.  Decided not think about it.  
	He was hungry.  All throughout the previous day he’d been so completely anesthetized by shock that he hadn’t noticed not eating.  But now his stomach was complaining and he definitely felt weaker.  He’d gone a whole twenty four hours without anything, after all.  Even though he had…
	Oh right.  His helmet.  Full of garlic bulbs and peas, the bounty of the earth.  He produced it and laid the bulbs out in a neat row under the counter, in a dark, cool shady place.  Then dumped out the peas, along with a scattering of loose earth.  The lioness watched as he divided them neatly into two little portions.  Nodded slightly as she accepted hers.
	The peas were hardly more than a mouthful, especially when divvied up between two people, but it made Jack feel better knowing he was eating something freshly grown for once.  He’d had enough of tinned rations for a lifetime.
	“I could almost eat that garlic on its own.”  Karina said, paws lacing over her stomach.
	“Still needs to cure,” Jack said, “we’ll have to find our food elsewhere.”
	“Cure?”
	Jack blinked, momentarily surprised to find someone who didn’t know anything about plants or…well, she was from the city.  He’d seen where she’d lived before the war, and was even now sitting in the midst of her workplace.  Supposed he shouldn’t be surprised.
	“You have to let the garlic sit in a dry, cool place for a few weeks before you can eat it.”
	“Weeks,” Karina repeated, unenthused, “…were you a farmer before all of this?”
	Jack shrugged.
	“Not by choice.  Grew up on a state farm for…uh…parentless waifs.”  
	“Сирота…”  Karina was silent for a moment, “I shouldn’t have said those things earlier.  I’m sorry.”
	An apology?
	Huh?
	“What things?”  Jack asked.
	The lioness sighed and turned away, looking to the front door.
	“Never mind.  Come on.”
	He followed along, stepping out into the reddish late morning light.  It was curiously dim out, almost reminded him of a time he’d seen an eclipse.  The totality hadn’t been complete and he hadn’t had a piece of dark glass to view the passage of the moon over the sun with, so he’d been left to observe the light.  The way the world went vaguely dim around him, like the beginning stages of blindness.  It had been subtle enough that he’d initially been unsure if it was even happening.  The lack of light had robbed details from the day, had confused his eyes and made him just want it all to go back to normal.
	That was about how he felt now.  The smell was unpleasant too, an acrid stench that hung at the back of his throat.  It wasn’t thick, but he could almost taste it, like he’d licked a battery or a copper coin.
	As they walked, keeping to the sidewalks, away from the medley of crashed vehicles and horseless carts that clogged the streets, Jack suddenly noticed that little gray specks were landing on Karina’s shoulders, too tiny to be noticed until they came to a full stop.
	Ash, he realized.  The city was raining down on top of them.
	He looked north.  Could see the flames reflected where the weird, smoky sky glowed and flickered.  
	“I wish I knew what caused all of this.”  He said, a little plaintively, aware just how pathetic that sounded.  Like he could simply beg an answer for the eminently unanswerable.
	Karina said nothing but her body language changed just a little.  Went tense and taut, like a violin string cranked a few turns past being fully tuned.
	“Even if it was…God or the end of days, I’d feel better having some idea why all of this happened.”
	“It wasn’t.”  The lioness muttered.
	The certainty in her voice was total.  Jack started to speak but she cut him off with a brisk shake of her head.
	“My parents never believed in a higher power,” she said, “and yet they’re gone too.”
	She went silent, seeming to withdraw into herself, not so much angry as just…defeated.
	Jack thought about apologizing for bringing the subject up.  He’d known she didn’t want to talk about it, but the internal pressure had simply been too great.  How could she not even be the slightest bit curious, desperate even, to find out just why the world had changed so suddenly?
	At the same time, the last time he’d apologized or otherwise expressed overt sympathy, Karina had slammed him into a wall.  Sure she’d just found out her parents were…gone, but she clearly didn’t like people feeling sorry for her.
	Jack said nothing, just looked up the street.  Spotted what looked to be a cafe at the end of the block, on a corner.  There were chairs and little tables and even a few umbrellas to shade from the sun.  They’d each acquired a pale coat of ash.
	“Maybe we should go there.”  He said, pointing it out.
	Karina said nothing but followed all the same when Jack stepped past the empty tables, ignoring the few that had clearly been occupied during the disappearance, sets of clothing puddled in chairs, cups of coffee or tea reduced to an ash choked slurry.
	Jack stepped inside, being careful not to accidentally step on any of the abandoned sets of clothes on the ground as he brushed the ash from his shoulders.  Karina did the same, shaking her tail out, dispersing a few flakes of gray ash.  The cafe was a small, cozy little place, with a menu written on a chalkboard in neat but decidedly foreign script.  
	He supposed that didn’t matter, it wasn’t like anyone would be coming to take their orders anyway.
Karina headed around the end of the counter and disappeared into a back room, Jack following.  She took no interest in the samovars or coffee percolators up front, seemed more intent on getting some solid food.
	The back room was dominated on one side by a row of wood paneled electric ice boxes.  Jack could hear them humming, a very noticeable chill wafting from them.  
	The other side of the room seemed dedicated for preparing food, stovetops and ovens and pantries for nonperishables and other food items that didn’t need to be kept cold.
	He opened one of those, coming face to face with loaves of bread, boxes of tea, canisters of coffee, tins of fruit and bottles of oil.  The pantry next to that one was packed with flour, salt, baking powder and spices.  All the dry ingredients anyone would ever need to bake pastries.  
	Behind him Karina stepped abruptly away from the icebox she’d opened, bumping into Jack, jarring him in place.  He looked sharply over, about to remind her to watch out, but the words died on his lips as he caught sight of her face.  Her fur had gone bristly and her whiskers trembled.  She looked deeply unnerved.
	“Вот дерьмо.”  She muttered.  
	He could about guess what that meant.
	Then he saw the interior of the icebox and froze in place, right alongside the lioness.  
	It was strangely empty, but not by design.  Little paper packages, meant to contain cuts of beef and pork and chicken, had been squashed flat under the weight of cartons of eggs that were now completely, strangely empty.  The only things that looked even remotely normal were the bottles of milk and pats of butter, which were untouched.  
	“Oh.”  Jack said.  Stepped forward and began to empty the icebox, searching through it to see what exactly had disappeared.  Even the paper packages that had held their shape crumpled under his grip.  He tore one open but found only a scattering of what he realized was salt and pepper.  In another was a butcher’s string, meant to hold cuts of meat together.  It looked clean and new, like it hadn’t spent time near raw meat.  The paper itself was clean as well, no sign that it had ever been dirtied.
	Karina watched him but made no move to help.  She was curious, he could tell, but clearly didn’t want to get involved.  
	He left the milk and butter and fruit alone.  They were untouched, the disappearance hadn’t effected them in any way he could see.  He remembered seeing honey in the pantry as well, that had remained untouched.  
	Then, in the process of clearing away the rest of the empty paper packages, his fingers hit something solid.  He held it up, almost disbelievingly.  Realized he was gaping at a package of bacon like it was the Holy Grail.
	Slowly, he opened it.  It was there, fully intact, salt and pepper rubbed onto it, ready to be cut into strips and fried.
	He straightened up and set the package on the counter next to the stoves.  Realized they were on and running, heat baking off of the iron surface, though no food was present.  The disappearance had either vanished whatever was being cooked (probably meat and eggs) or caught the staff at a moment where they had nothing going.
	Good thing, too.  If there had been bread toasting then the food could have caught fire and burnt the whole neighborhood down.  
	Silently, they regarded the bacon.
	“There are others.”  Jack said firmly.
	The lioness blinked, looking over to him, as if he’d suddenly lapsed into a foreign language.
	“It didn’t take everything,” Jack continued, “it took all the other cuts of meat…all the eggs…anything that came from an animal…”  But even as he spoke Jack was thinking about the milk.  Why hadn’t it taken that as well?  And why not the wool that made up his uniform.  That had come from animals, and something told him that there wasn’t a bunch of white fluff lying in the fields where herds of sheep had disappeared.
	Karina picked up one of the bottles of milk and opened it.  Sniffed it carefully before taking a cautious sip.  
	“It’s normal,” she said, “…and from an animal.”  
	“The meat and eggs are all gone except for this…”  Jack took a deep breath, “we know there are exceptions.  That’s all that matters.”
	“But how rare are they?”  Karina asked, “for all we know, the pig that this came from is the only other living thing in the world that was left alone.”
	No…not living thing.  Jack had seen insects when he’d harvested the garlic.  Ants and spiders.  And the honey, produced by bees, was still sitting untouched in the pantry.  Unless of course honey was similar to milk and butter in some odd, unknowable way and there were simply no more bees left in the world either.  
	He blinked hard.  Forced himself to focus on the bacon, contemplating the implications if Karina was right.
	“I guess we’d better eat it then.”  He said.
	Karina nodded, approving of that plan.


7.

	Jack divided the bacon into two, handing part of it over to Karina so she could do with it whatever she wanted.  There was space enough in the kitchen for them to move independently, and enough stovetop for both of them to work as they pleased.  All the same, they both had to retreat nearly to the other side of the room as the bacon sizzled and popped on the stove.  
	They exchanged a little look.  Karina was practically drooling, licking her lips none too subtly, her tail swishing behind her.  
	“I wish we had eggs.”  She muttered.
	“There are eggs somewhere in the world,” Jack said, “and chickens too.”
	“Chickens…”  Karina chuckled to herself, “that farm you grew up on, for the waifs, did that have chickens?”
	“Some.”  He shrugged, advancing through a stinging spray of bacon grease to flip the strips.  Karina seemed to like hers less well done, for she snatched them up and ate her portion alongside heavily buttered bread.  Jack waited for his to be nearly burnt, blackened around the edges.
	The lioness winced at his culinary choices.
	“The last bacon in the world, and you do that to it.”
	“You’re eating yours raw,” he countered, “…no wonder we went to war.”
	Taking her lead, he toasted bread and piled the bacon next to it, following Karina out of the kitchen, a pair of milk bottles in his free hand.  
	She accepted one from him as they sat down, safely inside and away from the continual fall of ash.  Her eyes flashed from his burnt bacon to the reddish sky outside.  She seemed distantly amused by the unspoken comparison yet said nothing.  Just took her milk.
	Jack held his bottle out for a toast.
	“To, uh…to hope.”  He decided.
	The lioness raised her eyebrows, slightly disdainful of his optimism, but returned the gesture nonetheless.  
	For the next few minutes they were silent, devouring their breakfasts.  It was only after every bite had been swallowed and every crumb brushed from stubble or fur that they looked up once more.
	“What now?”  Jack voiced the inevitable question.
	“Какой мир…”  Karina sighed, “I would always go see films on my days off.  What would you do?”
	“Don’t know about my days off, but I’ve projected plenty.”
	Karina’s eyes grew perceptibly wider.  She stared.
	“Of films?  No…you?”
	He grinned, surprised by her reaction.
	“What?”
	“I just…”  She made a gesture with one paw, encompassing his solid build, “I thought you were a farmer.”
	“When I was young,” he corrected, “before the war I worked in a cinema.  Changed the reels and everything.”
	Karina nodded decisively.
	“We should go.”  
	With that she took him by the wrist, her grip delicate to avoid aggravating her cut paw, and ushered him out the door.  This time the ash and reddened sky hardly seemed like obstacles at all, Karina didn’t even give them a second look.  She was on a mission, utterly determined.
	Before he knew it, Jack was standing in the front lobby of a theater, broken front door swinging impotently behind him, plush red carpet under his feet.  Posters adorned the walls, titles completely unreadable.  But he could tell well enough what they were about just by looking.  The one with a pair of dancers in white suits had to be a musical, played with a full orchestra next to the screen.  The poster featuring a man and woman gazing into each others’ eyes was clearly a romance.  And so on.
	Karina stood in the center of the lobby, paws on her hips, scanning over the showtimes, seeing what the theater had available.  Her tail swished thoughtfully behind her.
	“Lyubov Tserep…when I was young I wanted to be her.”  The lioness sighed admiringly, eyes locked on one particular part of the showtimes board.  A film starring said actress, Jack assumed.  
	The concept of Karina having ever fawned over anyone at all was strange to him but he said nothing, just walked up next to her.  She pointed to the first film playing, one of three.
	“Had they managed to open up this morning,” she said, “the cinema would have played either The Adventures of Zinaida, The Courage of…ugh…that’s war propaganda, it can be skipped…”  She contemplated the third title briefly, “or Springtime.  I haven’t seen that one.”
	“Is that the one with Lyubov Tserep?”  Jack asked.
	Karina pointed to the first listing.  Corrected his pronunciation before sighing.
	“Она определенно исчезла,” this part she said quietly.  Hesitated a long moment before speaking again, “…it’s a comedy.”
	“And the other one?”
	“A musical,” Karina blew out a breath, “I suppose we’re left with Lyubov.  A musical isn’t much without music.”
	Jack had to agree, though he wondered how much he’d get out of a foreign film without adjusted subtitles.  He’d played movies from all sorts of countries during his time as a projectionist.  No matter the nationality of the filmmakers, the reels had all been the same.  Still, their dialogue cards had at least been translated.
	Karina seemed to notice his trepidation as they walked past the empty concession stand and made for the back, where the film reels were stored.  
	“We’ll make a deal,” she decided, kicking open the door with a splintering crash, one hinge giving way, “you change the reels and I’ll read the cards for you.”  
	“An actress.”  Jack marveled as he stepped into the room, feeling for the light switch.  
	Karina rolled her eyes as she looked over the rows of film reels until she found the ones she was looking for, a stack of three, labelled in her language.
	Jack picked them up and off they went, into the projectionist’s booth.
	The room was large and plain, dominated by the projector itself.  It sat in the center of the room, mounted on a sturdy base.  The base itself was set on a rail, so the projector could be moved forward or backward depending on how wide or tall the image projected was to be.  
	Down below them, in the dark theater, Jack could see rows and rows of perfectly empty seats.  No clothes, no signs that anyone had ever been there.  It looked ordinary, like a cinema freshly opened for a normal day.
	He opened the first metal reel case and removed the film reel, fitting it into the feed spool and carefully threading the first foot or so along, until it was safely, correctly latched into the take-up spool.  Once the film was played out, the reel would be entirely collected in the bottom spool, ready to be replaced with another.
	The projector had been made by a different company than the one he’d used, but the way it functioned was identical.  He flicked the machine on and listened to it hum, the shutter getting up to speed, a field of white appearing on the screen before them.  
	Behind him, Karina had produced a pair of wood and canvas folding chairs.  Placed them right next to each other and took the one furthest from the projector.
	“I’ve seen this before,” she said, “so I’ll…”  She hesitated, “should I try to act out the words?  Say them like the people onscreen?”
	Jack glanced back, meeting Karina’s expectant gaze.  Nodded.
	“Sure.”  He said, and started the projector up.  A flash of pre-film feed testing flew past the screen, to give him time to fix things if the reel malfunctioned, before any of the actual film began to play.
	Then a title card, but he knew what it was already.
	The joy of silent films was that, even if one couldn’t read or simply didn’t know the language, the story was still decipherable simply by motion.  It began with a woman, a white furred wolf he assumed was Lyubov the actress, returning home from a day of work, inadvertently wreaking havoc wherever she went.  A pause to admire flowers spilled a cyclist from his bike, a stop at a corner store to purchase groceries led to the entire store collapsing behind her as she left with her groceries, completely oblivious to the chaos she left in her wake.  Jack couldn’t help but smile, the slapstick was charming, the wolf cheerful and yet deadpan all at once.
	Karina leaned close, keeping shoulder to shoulder with Jack, in preparation of the first card.  He could smell the lavender perfume she was wearing.
	“Zinaida Komeiko,” she read as the card appeared on screen, “an unwitting purveyor of chaos, soon to become acquainted with the father of havoc himself.”  
	Jack could feel the tips of her whiskers tickling his cheek.
	In the film Zinaida the wolf returned to her apartment and unpacked her groceries, discovering, much to her shock, that there was a mysterious parcel in there that she had not purchased.
	“I ought to return this, for I have not paid,” Karina read, injecting concern into her voice, “…but perhaps one little look couldn’t hurt.”
	Onscreen, she opened the parcel, a puff of smoke bursting forth.  She leapt back and suddenly there was a figure on her table, a human with horns atop his head.  The Devil himself.
	Karina read and Jack watched, getting up to change to the second reel as the first approached its end.  The plot from there was simple.  Zinaida, convinced the Devil was simply down on his luck, and continually oblivious to his attempts to guide her into a life committing evil, did her best to help him form a new life.  She took him to get an identification card, showed him to job interviews and even went to a play, the Devil continually being caught up in the whirlwind of accidents and chaos that followed Zinaida wherever she went.  An enthusiastic wag of her tail dumped hot coffee into his lap, she accidentally directed him down an open manhole while walking, and so on.  
	Karina grinned as she read the dialogue, pinching her nose to read the Devil’s lines, forking a pair of fingers behind her head to complete the effect.  Seeing her as relaxed as she was proved infectious.  The troubles of the world seemed to melt away.  By the time he returned from changing over to the third and final reel, he was continually grinning.
	A card popped up but Karina said nothing, her eyes away from the screen, focused on him.  Jack turned, wondering what was wrong.  Had something reminded her of-
	And suddenly her lips were on his, Karina’s paw encircling his shoulders, holding him close.  Jack blinked, taken by surprise, momentarily flummoxed by the sudden turn of events.  Then conscious thought seemed to abdicate entirely and all he could focus on were the sensations of the moment.  The brightness of the projector now dim and unimportant.  
	Karina’s lips were soft, her whiskers stroking along his cheek, one paw wound around his shoulders, the other finding his front.  Soft furred fingers traced his throat for a moment before dipping to his chest, settling over his heart, which had begun to race.  
	Jack kissed her back, hard, the lioness’ tongue meeting his, her breath coming faster.  She left her chair and so did he, stumbling sideways for a moment, both chairs toppling with a crash that made her giggle.  
	Her eyes were wide, excited and eager and nervous all at once, anticipation coursing through her.  Karina broke the kiss, exhaling, an infectious smile on her face, mouth slightly open.  Jack could see the needle sharp tips of her teeth, a hint of her tongue.  The way her whiskers trembled just a little, like they couldn’t quite make sense of what had just happened, was strangely endearing.  
	His hands dropped to the lioness’ hips and she moved forward, guiding him into another kiss.  This one was less sudden, their lips meshed perfectly and Jack allowed his tongue to be wrestled down by hers.  There was a hint of an almost needy dominance in her actions, but Karina seemed to want them be at least somewhat equal when it came to this.  
	They bumped back against the projector and below them the picture jumped in place.  He slid a hand up Karina’s front, working her blouse free from where it was tucked into her pants, pressing it directly against soft fur, muscles working under her skin.  She felt so warm and vital, he was reminded of just what he’d felt in the showers, his urge to hug her tight and simply be close.
	But there was more to that now, an urgency and desire that made his heart pound.  He pushed the front of her blouse up, exposing the lioness’ midriff, the creamy white fur there, melting into burnt gold at her sides.  The top button on her pants had come loose and he could see a little exposed triangle of black cotton panties.
	Though he’d seen her nude only the previous night, had already laid eyes on just what those panties hid from sight, he still felt a great sense of mystery, a desire to slide them down and claim what lay underneath.  
	The shower had been a sort of halt to the day, a platonic rest.  They’d both been dirty and tired and demoralized, sex had been the absolute last thing on his mind.  But now…now she wanted him, and he wanted her right back.  
	His hand pressed further up, cupping the warm, firm swell of her breast, the hard poke of one nipple pressing into Jack’s palm.  Karina’s heart was pattering under his hand and she pressed herself closer to him, trapping that hand between them, letting him feel just how eager she was.  The fabric of her blouse tore with a whispery sigh but she didn’t seem to notice, just ground herself hard against him, claws hooking into his shirt and tearing it from him, an easy display of strength that made something inside of him go fluttery and warm.  He liked seeing her do that, a sensual counterpart to the murderous intensity with which their first meeting had played out.
	The shreds of his shirt fell down his arms and he shrugged it off, lifting his hand regretfully from her breast for a moment to let the ruined garment free, not too accidentally tearing out the front of her blouse as well.  
	She rolled her shoulders, blouse pudding to the ground, muscles rippling beneath her short fur, appraising Jack for a silent half second before diving back onto him, mouth finding not his mouth but his neck instead.  Karina kissed the side of his neck, with just the barest hint of teeth, paws dropping down to frame his hips.  
	Her touch was gentle compared to her other actions, she simply couldn’t grope him as fiercely as she wished with her paws in such a state.  Feeling a bit sorry for her, Jack decided to expedite the process and undid his belt, slipping it off, pants loosened on his hips, a growing pressure building in his groin, evidence of his arousal plain to see.  
	The lioness wasn’t much better off, her breath came in huffs and little bursts.  As in control as she liked to seem, she was riding the tail of the comet, he realized, just barely keeping up.  That made him want to fluster her.  Just to see what would happen.
	His hands found Karina’s trim waist and flared hips, one sliding over her rear, muscles twitching under his fingers as he gave it an appreciative squeeze, the lioness’ tail jerking in place.  The other slid, fingers pointed down, pressed flat against her toned stomach, down the front of her pants, beneath those tantalizing black panties.
	She pressed her pelvis forward, meeting his advance with one of her own.  He felt fluff, soft and velvety, then the tips of his fingers found a scalding heat, a slickness between her legs, Karina’s thighs spread just wide enough to permit it.  The lioness made a low sort of rumbling purr in the back of her throat and pushed close to Jack, all but forcing a pair of his fingers inside of her with a slow, lascivious roll of her hips.
	They slipped in with sinful ease, enveloped in a moment by velvety walls, pressed tight on all sides by a rippling chorus of powerful muscles.  Karina gasped in his ear and pressed harder, rutting herself against his hand.  
	If there had been an urgency before, now there was a need.  Jack recalled his hand from the lioness’ rear and tugged his pants down as quickly as he could, shuffling his boots off without even bothering to undo the laces, determined not to waste a moment.
	Karina did the same, hooking her thumbs into the waist of her pants and sliding them down, panties going with.  She paused for a half second, a visible look of surprise flitting across her face as Jack’s cock bounced free.  Then it was pressed against her hip, soft fur tickling Jack’s length.
	And he could see the full extent of her arousal, the slickness between her legs, the spots where the fur had been laid flat, the ease with which her onyx lipped slit stretched around Jack’s fingers, molding them perfectly.  
	He dragged those fingers free and licked them clean.  Karina tasted of earth and iron and the faintest, tangy note of something sweet and almost electric, like citrus with a current ran through it.  
	“How do I taste?”  Karina breathed, doing her best to get her breath back.
	Jack kissed her and let her find out, aligning his tip with the lioness’ entrance, her tail twitching madly as he guided her back up against the front wall of the projectionist’s booth and pushed in.
	For a moment there was a hint of velvety resistance, a bafflement, like his cock would simply slip away and have its entrance denied, then it yielded and he slid into her, hilting himself inside of the lioness in a single slow thrust.
	Karina mewled into his mouth, clutching him tight, legs spreading to allow him easier access as Jack pinned her against the wall.  Her grip was so tight it nearly squeezed the breath from him, the lioness clinging on for dear life, trembling in place, gasping for breath.  He suspected that if he were to step away she would simply collapse.
	Muscles twitched and spasmed all along the length of Karina’s pussy, squeezing Jack’s length, the walls gripping him tight.  He ground in, to ensure his depth, the lioness’ eyes slitting with pleasure, the very tips of her claws prickling his back as she groaned, a quiver rolling through her.  
	Jack began to thrust, slow at first, to let Karina get used to his length and to gauge his own reaction.  Her pussy was almost vice tight, squeezing hard, almost fighting him each time he thrust back in, balls slapping against the pleasure sodden fur under her tail.
	But beyond even the heady tingly beginnings of pleasure he could already feel beginning to build within him was the trust, the compliance and closeness shared between them.  They were sharing togetherness in the oldest way people knew how.
	“Harder.”  Karina ordered, voice airy but her tone of command absolutely intact.
	Like any good soldier, he obeyed.  Ground hard into her at the end of the next thrust, enough to make her legs quiver, enough to inspire another round of rippling muscle spasms inside of her.  And not just in her pussy, Jack could feel her thighs quivering, the muscles in her stomach and chest jerking in place, breath going jagged.  He fucked gasps and moans and mewls out of her, sweat beading on his forehead as he forced himself to keep the pace up.  
	It was difficult, already he could feel a familiar tightness forming in his center, as though the ecstatic tingling had been concentrated and were soon to be expelled in one euphoric burst.  He tried to force his mind elsewhere, to distance himself from the sensations of the whole thing, the frothing boil that everything was coming to, but everything was simply too present to ignore.  The lavender of Karina’s perfume, the softness of her fur, the way her muscles worked, the tightness of her grip and the heat of her breath on his neck.  The noises she made…
	At that moment the lioness’ lips found his earlobe, sharp teeth nibbling for a moment, a staticky sort of tingle rolling down the side of his head, making him shiver in place.
	“Ебать меня.”  She panted.
	Jack knew not what she said, but her tone set him afire with lust.  He redoubled his pace, Karina holding onto him for dear breath, pinpricks of red hot pain flaring across the backs of his shoulders as her claws dug in, but he hardly noticed.  She was shaking, quivering in place, huffing sharp, abbreviated gasps into his ear.  
	“Fuck…”  The lioness groaned, a hard shiver rolling through her, tawny fur fluffing out, her tail going hard and stiff, a sort of wave of contractions forcing a moan from her lips.  Her eyes, already slitted and foggy with pleasure, shut entirely, a euphoric smile appearing on the lioness’ face as she rode out her climax.  
	Perhaps deliberately, perhaps not, she clamped down hard on Jack as he ground into her, and that pushed him over the edge.  For a half second he thought vainly about trying to hold on for just a bit longer, then simply relaxed and let it all wash him away in a white hot, searing moment of ecstasy.
	Scalding jets of cum sprayed into Karina, Jack clutching the quivering lioness close, gasping, hips jerking almost unconsciously into her as he filled her completely.  Slowly, the two of them sank down, still coupled.  Jack fell into a kneel, Karina on his lap, back pressed against the wall.  Her fur was mussed and in disarray, her whiskers wild and chest heaving.
	She looked to Jack and slowly removed her paws from his back, wincing at the dots of crimson that stained the tip of each claw.  Jack hardly noticed, hadn’t even registered the pain yet, he was still floating high on a fluffy cloud, enveloped entirely in the afterglow.  His eyes traveled down to where he was still buried inside of the lioness, alabaster trickles beginning to escape.
	“Was that-“  He started to ask but Karina simply enfolded him in a hug, pressing his face into her chest, where her racing heart was beginning to slow.
	“Shhh.”  She quieted him.
	They stayed like that for a long while.