21. "The Journey of a Thousand Miles"

When the small talk ran dry and the silence became unbearable, she went ahead and addressed the question they both had. "So… do you know what we're doing here?"

The tiger was a bit shocked by this, having been operating under the assumption that they had both nonverbally agreed not to ask the obvious for lack of an answer, and since he didn't know what else to say, he said that. "Uh… I dunno, um… I just sort of thought we both agreed without saying that we weren't gonna ask that, 'cause… y'know, if you wanna know and I wanna know, then clearly neither of us do know."

The antelope took a sip of her can of Diet Coke, which by now seemed warmer than the air in the room. Perhaps that was for the better; it was absolutely freezing in the records room. It was in the upper eighties outside, so the central air conditioning in the precinct was set to full blast, which was probably an agreeable arrangement in the rooms that were getting bombarded by sunlight through their windows, but the records room had no windows, so it felt like the equivalent of being in a windy cave.

"Oh, I know that," she said as she put the can down. "But we can guess. Let's hypothesize."

"Uh… well, I guess it makes sense why you're here," said the tiger, "he probably can't navigate the records all by himself."

"Well, they asked me to load up the missing persons database, and I did, so now any idiot could just type in the deets on whoever they're looking for and find them. Boom, plug and chug."

"Yeah, but you know how that guy's like… a technophobe or something."

"Ah. True that, true that…" she murmured. "But who does he need me to look up?"

"Uh- jeez, I dunno, Jimmy Hoofa?" the tiger shrugged. "I'm more curious why they needed an officer in the room. I-I mean… he's got the Sheriff basically riding his dick at all times, right? Why do they need me for that he can't do?"

Halfway through that statement, the antelope's expression soured. "I know you don't know me much, Jake, but I am a Christian and I really don't appreciate that dirty language of yours."

"OH! Oh, oh, Jesus shit, I-I'm sorry, I- wait, I just did it again, didn't I? Took the Lord's name in vain I mean. Hey, I-"

And the antelope just burst out laughing. "Aw, no, man, I'm just playin' witchu! Don't worry, it don't mean nothin'."

"Oh, uh… heh, he-um…" the officer tried to chuckle.

"That sheriff is a dickrider, though," she said, and then was silent for a moment as she stared at the tiger and contemplated what a pity it was that a guy who was so smoking hot could be so awkward. After the moment passed, she added, "I could really care less to work with the mayor in person."

"What, you're scared the lion's gonna eat ya?" the tiger asked with a self-amused smirk, choosing the worst possible time to display confidence.

She looked unamused again, and this caused him to chuckle harder, thinking he was in on the joke this time. But when he opened his eyes again and she still wasn't chuckling with him, he realized the offense was real.

"I ain't scared of no lion," she said. "'Specially not a British one. Hell, you stick me in a room with a British lion and an African lion and me and the African lion'll gang up on the British one for fucking up our continent!" She took another sip of soda, her body language seeming a tad tense. "I'd like to see that British motherfucker just try to bite my ass! Probably couldn't even break the skin with his fucked-up British teeth…"

Jake's posture suffered as he tried to shrink into his chair. "S-sorry, I, uh… it was a bad joke, my bad."

She saw his discomfort and figured she might as well go easy on him, seeing as they were probably going to have to work together to get the mayor in and out of their lives as quickly as possible. "I mean… it ain't just that. It- it's mostly not that. I can see him as an individual and I still don't like him. I mean, by all accounts, he's a whiny little bi-"

Knock, knock, knock.

"Speak of the devil," the tiger muttered.

"Come in!" the antelope called, putting on a well-rehearsed façade of warmth when she really wasn't feeling like warmly greeting her new audience.

As Rocky opened the door for him, the mayor took a deep breath as he entered the room alone. What was about to transpire may have been very easy or very, very difficult, and he was going to force himself to get through it without his assistant nor his sheriff by his side. And those bandits had the audacity to call him a coward? They ought to see how brave he was being now.

"Hello, Mayor!" the beaming records clerk greeted, extending a hand for shaking. "I'm Kristy Mwangi, I'm the recordkeeper."

"Mayor John Norman." Prince John had never much been a fan of shaking commoners' hands, but he bear-and-grinned it as he accepted it, turned it, and kissed the back of her hand - that's what an important man is supposed to do when he meets an important woman, right? "The pleasure is mine."

Kristy took deep breaths through her nose as she used all her power to refrain from backhanding him across the snout. She retreated her arm and wondered where that bottle of hand sanitizer went.

"Uh- Jacob Stripling, Nottingham P.D.," the tiger coughed out, seeing the weird way the lion had greeted the antelope and hoping not to get the same treatment when he presented his own hand for shaking.

Instead, the mayor did that thing where he wrapped his hand around the other person's fingers and shook hands that way. "Officer, a pleasure to meet- Just a minute, now. Haven't we met?"

"Uh… no. N-no-uh-not, uh… officially," the tiger sputtered, less disturbed by the random question and more disturbed by how he could feel that the mayor's thumb seemed to be strangely… damp.

"Oh, surely we have! I have a very good memory of faces and I recognize yours!" He dropped the handshake to ponder the tiger's face. "Stand up, would you please?"

Thoroughly confused, he obliged and stood, and he looked a tad worried as he glanced down at the undersized lion who didn't even make it up to his shoulders. Kristy looked upon the scene with a similarly confused look, and Rocky the Bodyguard, wanting no part of this awkward moment, closed the door and stood in the hallway, prepared to answer if anyone asked that it would be more useful to watch for intruders than to keep the mayor safe from an antelope and a tiger with visible anxiety issues.

John had to catch his top hat as he craned his neck to meet the tiger's gaze. "Ah! Yes! Yes, I remember now! You're the tiger who works as Commissioner Roe's bodyguard! I didn't know they assigned an officer to her! Fascinating…"

"Uh- n-no, I… I'm… I've always been a cop. F-for the City force, I mean. Never worked private security."

"Nonsense! You're the tiger I always see with Doty! Why, I saw you just the other day!"

"...Was his name Ryan?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Her bodyguard. Is his name Ryan?"

The mayor tilted his head down and looked blankly straight ahead, which incidentally was where Jake's badge was on his chest. "It may have been."

"Yeah, that's probably my half-brother."

The mayor winced at the tiger's badge. "I see."

"C-uh… can I sit down now?"

The mayor didn't answer. He instead turned his head away from the both of them and dug his lip into the webbing between his thumb and forefinger, pondering how such a misunderstanding could have happened.

"I-I'm gonna sit down now," the tiger said, and he did.

"This half-brother of yours, is his surname also Stripling?"

"I don't know his last name, I didn't grow up with him, but I know his last name isn't Stripling. That's my mom's last name."

"Interesting."

"Yeah, our dad got around a lot. I've got half-brothers and half-sisters all over the city and probably all over the country at this point. Some of them are turning thirty-five this year, some of them are still being born this year."

"And who exactly is your father?"

"Oh, some guy I've never met. I don't even know the guy's name," he lied.

"By the way, speaking of absentees," Kristy interjected, "where's that dude with no arms?"

"Who-? Ah. Yes, Hess. Charles. He works very hard for me year-round, around the clock, so when he requested today off, his first day off in recent memory, I allowed it." Indeed, Hiss had come to the Mayor that morning with two pieces of news: first that something strange had happened with two public works workers sent to Sherwood Forest, and secondly that he desperately needed the day off to go and have his wrist-watch repaired; suffice it to say that the shock of the former ensured that the mayor would not think too hard about the latter.

"And what about Woodland and Nutzinger?" Stripling asked. "They told me you requested to have a cop because you might want to file a police report about something, but usually those two are always at your beck and call."

"They're presently off scouring Sherwood Forest looking for some wanted criminals. Which leads me to why I'm here today…" He positioned himself in the best possible spot to address both of them without having to move his head and risk toppling his top hat. "As you may have heard, yesterday afternoon, bordering on evening, two public works laborers were sent into that forest preserve to cut down a particularly pesky tree, thought to be used as a sort of 'base-camp' for highly dangerous and most wanted criminals; the laborers awoke this morning in hospital in-"

"You mean 'awoke in the hospital'?" asked the officer, the look on his face like that of a confused child. "Or 'a hospital'?"

The mayor simply glared. "...They awoke in hospital in Lewes, far from the forest, having no memory of ever having arrived. As for the bandits? If they do exist - if seven years' worth of incidents such as these all were indeed committed by the same perpetrators - they not only remain at large, but their identities remain unknown. It is thought that not only are they masters of disguise, escape, and illusion, but also masters of sewing fear, and it is not a matter of their record being flawless in never once leaving evidence of their identities, but rather that they have so thoroughly convinced everyone in this city - including our law enforcement - that they are such an indomitable force that nobody dare testify against them too loudly. It is in confidence that this conversation be kept private that I clarify that their refusal to be identified or to even have their existence verified is why there has not to date been any formal action taken against them, instead being handled off-record by the highest-ranking and my most trusted of law enforcement officers, lest it make the management of this city's law and order look incompetent for not being able to capture them. Before I continue, would either of you like to declare that you are indeed privy to the names of the wanted?"

"Uh… n-no, not really," said Jake.

"No, sir," said Kristy, who just wanted the mayor to get to his point.

"Very well, then," Mayor Norman said as he nodded slightly, not making eye contact with either of them. "You see, it is thought that their identities may have been hiding under our noses this entire time. Despite my dreadfully busy schedule, I, along with Hi- Hess, Charles Hess - have been doing research into the clues left us by the perpetrators, and while it is to our understanding that searching criminal databases is a fruitless endeavor as the suspects do not match the descriptions of any previously known and convicted offenders, the fact that they may have been operating in such a clandestine manner for nearly a decade may make one wonder - what if one were to find them on a list of missing persons?"

"And I imagine that's why you wanted me to already have the database pulled up," said the recordkeeper.

"Precisely, Miz Kristy," the mayor said confidently, not remembering the clerk's last name and not really caring.

"I mean, we can thumb through here, but we can only filter results by vague details so much. Especially if-"

"Ah, but I may have more than vague details! Shall I elaborate?"

"Please," she said, more politely than she wanted to.

"I've, er… I've been made aware of some names that some denizens of this city have attached to these characters. Now, I've no idea whether these names are real, whether they are pseudonyms, whether they were misheard, whether they are pseudonyms which were themselves misheard, whether they were-"

"Mayor, would you like to take a seat?" asked Kristy. "Maybe if we got you seated, we can start plugging these names in and see whether we can get any leads off them!" She gestured to a swivel chair in the corner, hoping she wasn't being too obvious.

They mayor glanced back at the chair, looking surprised by its existence. "Ah, yes! Thank you, Miz Kristy." He walked slowly and stiffly to retrieve the chair and push it into place in front of the computer screen between Kristy and Jake. He sat down like molasses dripping from a ladle, looking stiff, uncomfortable, pained, keeping his back almost unnaturally straight as he bent his knees, eventually losing balance and falling backward into the chair, which almost slid out from under him, and he wouldn't have been able to break his own fall because both of his hands went up to secure his hat.

"You alright, Mayor?" asked Stripling.

"Er- y-yes, yes, I just- I merely… I'm not a fan of these 'swivel chairs,' as they call them."

"So, you have some names for us? I can start typing them in," the antelope insisted.

"Patience, Miz Kristy, patience." He turned to Officer Stripling. "Now, Officer, I have a question for you…"

And with nobody looking at her, this inspired Kristy to throw her head back and roll her eyes as dramatically as possible for the amusement of nobody but herself.

"...Have you received the news of the DNA results from the pig mask found this past weekend?"

"Uh, no sir, I'm not on that case," the tiger answered meekly.

The mayor was unimpressed, but he soldiered on. "Well, to enlighten you, the results were that the hair on the mask was indeed fox hair, although again, it did not match the DNA profile of any convicted criminal for whom we have a DNA sample."

"Uh… okay. Good to know, I guess. So do you have a name on this fox?"

"I may," he said as he turned back to the computer screen. His heart was racing, but he was able to temper it with another long, slow monologue; he had always found that forcing himself to break out into an eloquent speech helped him regulate his emotions when he needed to. "Now, I feel the need to remind you that these names are… purely anecdotal. They may indeed be wrong! It's quite possible that I may have been misled when I discovered these names-"

"MAYOR," the antelope snapped; the resulting shock made the lion jerk his head, jostling the hat out of its perch and tumbling it down onto the table.

Kristy realized she may have overdone it. "Uh… I-I apologize, Mayor, but, uh… the anticipation is killing me just as much as it is for you! And hey, the sooner we find out if those names are right, the sooner we can move forward with nabbing 'em, right!?" She put her fingers on the home row of the keyboard. "So here we have a database where we can find anybody who's ever been reported missing without being found. Say the name and I can search from anybody who's gone missing in the state of Delaware since 1885!"

And the mayor looked a bit disappointed by that. "Only Delaware?"

And the recordkeeper looked a bit confused by that. "I-I mean… yeah, that's what it's set to search through by default. I can, uh… it's a nationwide database, so I can add Maryland to the search if you want-"

"And the District of Columbia, too, please! A-a-and Virginia, just for good measure! A-and Pennsylvania, and New York! Please," the mayor sputtered, trying to contain his excitement. "We want to cast a wide net!"

"Uh… oookayyy…" the antelope agreed as she added "MD", "DC", "VA", "PA", and "NY" to the search criteria. "Alright, so what's this fox's name?"

Kristy and Jake weren't going to say anything, but they could absolutely feel the table moving from John's restless leg shaking up a nervous storm.

After a deep breath, Prince John finally said, "First name Robert… last name Hood."

Kristy typed the letters in, hit Enter, and was taken aback when there was indeed exactly one result.

"And we have a hit," quipped Jake.

"That we do," Kristy said as she clicked on the page, which loaded with a cache of information on the fox, who she couldn't help but think looked downright dashing in his last known government photograph, not the most masculine of specimens but more like 'boy-band' attractive. "Last seen May 3rd, 1998, reported missing on the 6th. In Washington, DC. Huh. Good call, Mayor."

"Y-yes, thank you," the mayor squeaked. "So, er… now what?"

"Wh-? Whaddaya mean, now what?" asked the clerk, noticeably offended by the lack of a plan.

"How can we, er… how can we officially connect this man to the outlaws in the forest?" He turned to Officer Stripling. "Perhaps for this we'd best turn to you, Officer Stripling."

"Uh, w-well, I mean… you got his name right, so that's a start," the officer replied. "That ought to be enough to formally accuse him, if you wanted to do that, but if we don't have more than a name to go off of, this might all be an enormous waste of time if it's not him."

"Plus, you know, there's no guarantee that he's still even alive," Kristy added.

"That, too."

"Hm, speaking of…" Kristy murmured as she noticed something. "That was just over seven years ago. If they do things in DC like they do here, the family probably got a call last month asking if they wanted to formally declare him dead. But either somebody forgot to call them or they said no, because he would be marked here as 'Declared Dead' if he had been."

Oh, dear. The family. John hadn't even considered that a missing person's file might indicate their closest relatives. Granted, the fox wasn't formally related to Richard, but they only had two degrees of separation, so maybe-

"Who is his family?" the antelope mused aloud as she read. "Hm. All he's got are a Marian V. Swift, listed as a girlfriend… a William J. E. Scarlett, a brother - different last names, but whatever-"

"Hey, maybe they're half-brothers!" Jake interrupted. "Maybe I'm not the only one whose dad got around."

"Hey, good point," she conceded disinterestedly. "...aaand an Anne E… Cloge? C-L-O-U-G-H. However you pronounce that. Listed as just a 'roommate'. By the looks of it, these are just the people he listed as his I-C-E contacts on employment forms and stuff. He's also got a Brianna Hood and an Oliver Chase listed as parents, but they don't have any contact information. But, uh, yeah… that's all he has for known relatives and contacts."

The mayor breathed a quiet sigh of relief.

"Oh, this makes more sense!" Kristy continued. "Apparently he was a British national - so he probably didn't have any real family in the States."

"Looks like he's one of you, eh!?" Jake said to John with a smirk. "But I guess that means he's not our guy."

"H-how do you mean?" asked the mayor.

"Well, I think people would have noticed if the bad guys had a British accent."

"This specific bad guy DOES have an English accent!"

"...He did?"

"Yes! R-er- reportedly, I mean. H-have you no working familiarity with these characters at all!?"

"Naw, man, I usually get stuck on bicycle duty down by the tourist traps. Jesus, man, I don't care if you're the mayor or not, don't snap at me like that! Do you want my help or not?"

And the mayor recoiled. "Er- dreadfully sorry, Officer, that was quite unprofessional of me, but er- No. No, no excuses! That was my mistake! But, er, tell me, Officer, does the detail of the matching English origins help our case of pegging this man as one of our suspects?"

Jake could feel himself growing a backbone to this guy. "I mean, it could, but it would help a lot more if we had eyewitnesses - or, fuck, I guess earwitnesses in this case - all come forward and say the same things about him, and not just you."

"Witnesses?" The mayor thought about it for a moment. "Yes, I can get you witnesses."

"You can?"

"I'll tell you what, though," said Kristy, "even if we do bag this guy, you can't have him deported. He's an American citizen. It looks like… oh! It looks like he took the test right before he disappeared and was granted citizenship in absentia. Poor bastard. But damn, he got citizenship fast for having moved here in '92… oh! Oh, he graduated NYU. Yeah, that probably helped put him on the fast track. Fancy-ass Brit..."

"Jesus, how much information do they have on this guy?" Jake said as he leaned over to get a good look himself."

"As much as they can find," Kristy explained. "They do an extensive background check on these people when they disappear to get all the clues they can. Like… here, we see a listed alias as 'Robin Hood', and then you check the Notes section and that tells you that he was into acting and that was apparently his stage name - I always thought of Robin as a girl's name, but whatever-"

"Wait, is that a fucking typo!?"

"Where?"

"There," the tiger pointed. "Four foot ten? And he's a fox?"

"Wait, really?"

The mayor silently let them make their discoveries, not wanting to interrupt.

"Are we sure he's not a coyote or a wolf or a… a hybrid or something?"

"Hybrid of what?"

"Shit, I dunno!"

"Well, it also says a hundred and fifteen pounds, and if the rest of his body is as skinny as his face looks, proportionally speaking, this guy's gotta be stretched. Unless both numbers are wrong..."

"Christ is Lord, how do you even lose a fox that big-?"

"Perhaps it is best for me to note…" the mayor found the nerve to cut in, "...that the mysterious fox outlaw has also been described as exceptionally tall for his species. And any eyewitnesses will surely corroborate this fact."

The other two backed away from the screen, starting to feel as though the mayor wasn't going into this as blindly as he had originally seemed.

"Oh, uh… okay," Jake mumbled. "That helps to know. So… you definitely seem pretty confident that this is your guy. Now, our options are-"

"Ah, but there is another. His name is-"

"Is it his brother?" asked Kristy.

"Er- I beg your pardon?"

"I just realized in the notes at the bottom that it says his brother, that Scarlett guy, he went missing a few days later, and investigators say that before he disappeared, he said he was reported as saying he was gonna go find Hood."

"Er, erm- n-no, I don't care about him. I haven't heard that one's name tossed around; that one's probably dead. But the other person is - and his name will not make this obvious, so note that I am saying this before we see his picture, especially you, Officer - the other one is described as a brown bear, about eight feet tall, with a faint but noticeable Southern accent. Miz Kristy, if you would please execute a search for a John Little having gone missing in Delaware."

"Hm, sure, I can do that." She readjusted the search criteria and typed in the name. She got three results, which only listed names and dates with no pictures. "We got one from 1897, one from 1922, and one from 1998."

"1998, please."

She clicked and the three of them were greeted with the face of a big brown bear whose smile was teetering on the border of adorably bashful and unattractively anxious. And all his stats listed alongside his picture matched what the mayor had predicted.

"And let us note the date he went missing."

"Last seen May 4th, reported missing May 7th," the antelope murmured, both shocked and impressed.

"Another hit," the tiger muttered, sharing much the same tone as the antelope. "Sunk my battleship."

"I see this guy wasn't declared dead in the last month either," Kristy mused as she investigated the page. "Oh, I see why. So… for us to do that, we would've had to have contacted the family and gotten their permission, but… looks like this guy didn't have any family. Man, that's kinda sad."

"What, he didn't have any family anywhere on Planet Earth?" Jake asked. "Did this guy just blink into existence?"

Now it was Prince John who was silently sitting there, watching the other two converse, waiting impatiently for them to get to the point - the point in this case being how they could go about formally declaring that these two did indeed exist and were enemies of the state. If need be, he had one of the Merry Men's old signed notes folded and stuffed and ready to go in his suit's breast pocket, to produce if nothing else qualified as irrefutable evidence that these were indeed their guys, but he wasn't looking forward to explaining why he'd been sitting on this evidence of a crime for six years, so he was really hoping it wouldn't come down to that. But if it were going to come down to that, well, this would once again be his way of proving his bravery to the doubters and naysayers; at least that's what he was telling himself as he sat there, watching them gawk at the missing individuals' profiles, waiting for them to draw their banter to a close.

"Okay, my bad, lemme rephrase that: he didn't have any family he kept in contact with. I mean, we have his name and his SSN right here, we could probably find them if we wanted to, but if they were all dead or if he cut off all ties to them, then it's as good as them never having existed. We'd've had nobody to contact."

"Then who was this guy listing as his In-Case-of-Emergency's? Just his friends?"

"Looks like lots of landlords and former bosses. Closest thing to an actual normal relationship is a guy named Thomas J. O'Malley, listed as a roommate."

"Oh, uh… hm," Jake muttered, trying to pretend to keep the volley of the conversation going so neither of the other two would see his uncontrollable expression of shock when he heard that name. He wondered for a second if it was the very same, but he told himself that both that first name and that last name were very common and not species-specific, so he shouldn't just up and assume that this bear was old roommates with-

"Pardon my impatience," said the mayor, "but if I may ask, what more do we need to… oh, how would you say it… place formal suspicion upon them, as it were? To make these characters officially wanted by law enforcement?"

"Uh, well, um…" the tiger spat out, his thoughts not fully formed yet but ready to say anything to keep the conversation moving in a new direction. "It-it's a good start that you were able to, uh… predict who these guys were, I guess. But we'd need to get, like… actual… tangible proof these guys are still alive, in the woods or not. Like, uh… like, we'd need a witness. Um… this might be a dumb question, but, uh… have you seen them, Mayor?"

The lion was quietly pensive for a moment.

And Jake found the mayor's hesitance thoroughly confusing. "Uh… b-because that would make this all a lot easier if you could give the first witness statement right now."

And John was all ready to reach into his breast pocket and show them the note that he had been saving for years for an occasion just like this, telling himself that no matter how weird they thought he was for keeping it a secret, he was still their mayor and they still worked for him and he shouldn't care what they thought, and that he ought to be thankful that they even found fox hair on that pig mask at all to make a moment like this even possible.

But wait. The pig mask. Maybe he wouldn't have to be the first formal eyewitness. Nor would he have to wait for stupid Woodland to put in a statement. There was another.

"Er… Miz Kristy, would it be possible for us to print out these men's photos?"

"Uh, y-yeah, but, uh… why?" She didn't know who he had in mind.

"To show them to someone who could not be with us right now. We may be able to verify our first eyewitness within the hour."

The antelope figured it was as good a reason as any if it got the lion out of her presence, so she clicked around on the bear's profile to print the page, and as soon as the printer in the corner started buzzing with life, she clicked back to the fox's page and clicked in the same sequence. She was still wondering why the mayor had no interest in the other missing fox brother, but again, she knew that she would regret her curiosity if she asked.

"Yes… you may have to help me find him, Officer, but now that I've had some time to think on it, I do recall that there was a case of someone seeing these bandits recently… and not conveniently falling ill with amnesia shortly thereafter…"

"I-if you say so…" the officer mumbled, not knowing what else to say.

The second page finished printing, and Mayor Norman went over to retrieve what would be his tools in the next step of capturing Robinhood'n'littlejohn. He swiped the pages out of the printer tray. "And when we find that person, we shall show him these-!"

He glanced down at the pages and did not recognize what he was looking at. The closest thing to the faces of a fox and a bear were the silhouettes formed by repeating stripes of magenta flowing horizontally down the page.

"Er… pardon my, er, technological ignorance, as it were, but, er…" He turned the pages around and held them up to the Gen-Xers in the room. "...are they supposed to look like this?"

Kristy hardly waited a millisecond before she stood from her seat and made her way to the door. "Goddammit, wait right here, I'll go get more ink from the supply room."

-IllI-

The boy nurse walks you back from the bathroom to your room. The girl nurse and Dr. Buckner are waiting there. The boy nurse and the girl nurse both help you back up onto the bed, and get you seated upright against the pillows. You don't like sitting this way because there's nowhere for your tail to go, but you can't convey to them that this arrangement makes you uncomfortable.

You could try to convey it to them, but you will likely fail. Just as you tried to tell the police what happened, the words wouldn't come out. Just as you tried to write for the doctors what happened, you could not hold the pencil straight. Just as you tried to pantomime what had transpired a few nights back to anybody who might be halfway decent at charades, you can't figure out how to get a message across.

And it's the strangest thing. You want to just tell them - "my tail is uncomfortable this way," "I'm worried about my parents and I'm frightened because I don't know where they are," "this is what I remember from the SUV the other night but please don't quote me on this because I'm not sure if it was all a dream" - but at best you spit out incoherent gibberish and at worst your vocal cords fail altogether. You've sat in this very room with Dr. Buckner for three hours giving her a beat-by-beat play-by-play of what happened that night, just as you had tried to do when the cops found you, but Dr. Buckner didn't catch a word of what you were trying to say. You'd snuck a glance at her clipboard; she scribbled down that you had been, quote, "frantically speaking in tongue." At least when the cops were interrogating you at the crime scene, they eventually got a sliver of the story when they outright asked if you had been robbed and you pointed in the direction you remember the strangers' footsteps going. They must think you're stupid for not being able to talk. Stupid and evil. Evil for impeding justice. They want to find the people who hurt your parents and you want to help them but you just can't. You're just so overcome with fear that the adults will be angry with you if you do something wrong that you simply cannot make yourself calm down enough to speak clearly. Perhaps this is what moral cowardice was: wanting to do the right thing but being so crippled by fear that it leads one to be ineffectual or perhaps even a hindrance to the force for good. You suppose it's true what you'd heard, that any fear you can overcome was never truly a fear after all, because if you were truly, deeply, animalistically afraid of something, the inhibitors in your brain would have never allowed you to confront it; you can say with certainty that you are certifiably afraid to speak - except you can't say it, because, well… you know…

You reposition your legs to give your tail more space to stick out on the right side; the paper on the plastic bed crinkles and crunches as you shift yourself. You know that a guest, or guests, are coming to see you. The nurses and Dr. Buckner won't tell you who they are, but they have ruled out that it's your parents, who they reassure you are still "in the hospital" - they keep saying "in the hospital" even though you're in the hospital, and you wish they'd just clarify whether they're in this one or a different one but you can't ask them so for now you'll just have to assume by their syntax that they mean they're in some other facility entirely.

You look at the boy nurse who just brought you back from the bathroom. It was the third time you had to go in twenty minutes; the anticipation of these mysterious guests is making you nervous. You don't remember what the boy nurse's species is called but he's smaller than you. When he takes you to the bathroom he always sort of stares off into space at a forty-five degree angle to you and you know that he was trying to balance his duty to watch out for you and make sure you didn't drown yourself in the toilet while still trying to give you some semblance of privacy and you want to appreciate his diligence but he just always seemed so annoyed. He always seemed like he didn't want to be there. Like he was only a nurse because his family wanted him to go into medicine in some capacity. Like he was trying to force himself to be a good person but kept getting the inkling that deep down he would be having a lot more fun if he were a bad person. You believed that he had your best interests in mind but you also believed that one day he would not, and when that day came he would not hurt you because you were not important enough to him to be worth hurting; when that day came, you would simply never see him again.

The girl nurse is a pig. It's not her fault that she's reminding you of the fox's costume. It's not her fault that you feel so uncomfortable when you make eye contact with her. It's not her fault that you keep expecting her to rip off her own face and reveal something else. It was a shame, too, because she was a lot nicer than the boy nurse - the boy nurse wasn't mean, he just wasn't nice either. The girl nurse was nice. She was the one who noticed that you pointing to your crotch meant you had to use the bathroom. She was the one who fluffed your pillows and made sure your room wasn't too cold, and who explained as gently as she could that you weren't allowed to have blankets because you could "hurt yourself with them." She was the one who popped her head into your room at midnight to say goodnight, she was clocking out and going home for the night, but she would be back in twelve hours. And as nice as it was that she was probably slightly bending the rules of how much she was supposed to be interacting with her patients, good God Almighty did it scare the everloving bejesus out of you when you saw that pig's face in the half-light of the hallway in the dead of night, just as you saw that fox's pig mask by the light of the moon.

That's another thing you wish you could tell them. The fox and the bear, while frightening, were not themselves frightening. Thinking of their faces now frightened you, but remembering when you looked at their faces, you remember an overwhelming feeling of benevolence. It was as though the fox and the bear were not evil, but something about their presence was indicative of the presence of evil. They had done nothing to harm you, if anything they had gone out of their way to give you comfort, but the fact that they were there meant that something was horribly wrong. It was like the tales told by those who have come back from brief moments of clinical death, wherein they are cradled by angels of light who reassure them that everything will be okay; you appreciate the comfort of the angel, but the fact that you're seeing one at all worries you beyond any balm the angel can provide. It is for this reason that envisioning that fox and that bear nevertheless fills you with dread: despite their faces so friendly and their voices so sweet, you understand that they are here to save you from a peril you cannot even begin to comprehend, and that worries you.

There's a knock at the door. All four of you turn toward it. Dr. Buckner gets up to answer it. You can sense the nurses' eyes turn to you to ensure you keep relatively calm as these strange visitors enter. The nurses are serving a purpose not unlike the fox and bear did; they're trying to help you feel safe even though you know you would be safer if you were in a position where you didn't need them to keep you safe. The fox and bear filled this role better, but with that came a higher sense of ambient danger, so you find yourself preferring the presence of the nurses.

Dr. Buckner leads three men into the room. First is a police officer. A tiger, tall and fairly athletic-looking. He seems friendly enough. He looks at you; he's smiling; he waves, flailing all his fingers. His other hand is at his side, carrying a manila folder. Secondly is a scant little lion, and he's dressed in Edwardian apparel for some reason. He looks rather distinguished, or rather looks like he wants you to think he's distinguished. He's not smiling, but he's not scowling either, but he looks like he wants to. He oddly does not have a visible mane, and for some reason this strikes you as familiar; you feel like you should know who this is. You know he's someone important, like he's the president or something but he's clearly not the president. You know your father speaks of him being an idiot but an idiot whose idiotic leadership is beneficial to the rich people who idiotically live within the city limits instead of out in the suburbs like your father chose to. The third man is a rhinoceros wearing a much more modern suit. He's probably the important guy's bodyguard, but it looks like he's not planning to say a word to you, so his occupation likely won't matter.

"Martin," Dr. Buckner says, trying her best to sound sweet, "this is Officer Stripling and Mayor John Norman. They're here to ask you a few questions about what happened to you. Now, don't worry, Martin, you're not in any trouble; they just need your help!"

The officer steps forward to the side of your bed and gets on a knee so he doesn't loom over you; the lion and the rhino stay back by the far wall, watching. You can feel your extremities start to tremble, and each of the nurses laces one hand through one of yours and places their other hand on top. Dr. Buckner stands close by the officer; whether or not she means to, it seems like she's trying to signal that he's dangerous and she's protecting you from him.

"Hi there, Martin," says the officer. "My name's Officer Stripling, but you can call me Jake! M'kay, buddy?" His voice is a little bit bassy, a little more-so than the bear's voice, the kind of voice that can sound either very heroic or very villainous, and it sounds like he's trying his hardest to push it to the good side.

He also seemed to be filling the role of someone who provides solace in a place of peril, but while you could commend his efforts, he just wasn't selling it as well as the fox and the bear, nor even the nurses. Perhaps it was because his efforts were being offset by the strange sense of antagonism that was radiating from the lion. You glance over at him for just a second. You see a smile creeping on his face, but you can tell that it's not a smile that's supposed to give you comfort; it's a smile that is entirely self-serving.

The lion's using you for something. He's only there to see you because he has something to gain from doing so. You don't know how such a notion enters your head, but it does, and it won't go away.

Therefore the officer is inextricably tied to this evil force in your head, and his attempts to calm you are futile. Like the fox and bear, you don't believe that he is evil, but unlike the fox and bear, you get the feeling that he is not here to save you from the evil that is present, but rather to make that evil - alongside which he is operating - more bearable. He is not an angel here to save you from death; he is a wrongfully damned soul here to tell you that not everyone in hell is looking to harm you because some of them are only here because they simply never had a feasible way to get to heaven.

Jake puts the folder on your bed and looks at you again. "Now, Martin, I don't want to bring up any bad memories, but… we understand that you may have saw some people who may have hurt your mom and dad that night. Now… there are two guys in particular who my friend the mayor and I think might have been them. Now, uh… we understand that you're not much in the mood for speaking right now, but Martin, you could help us out a bunch if you could just communicate by… nodding, or shaking your head, or pointing if you recognize one but not the other, alright? We're just doing this to try to catch the bad guys so they'll never hurt anybody else ever again, alright?" When you don't answer for a moment, he turns to the doctor. "Are you sure this is alright? Should you be doing this?"

"I'm right here," she says stoically.

He nods, glances at you one more time looking more remorseful than friendly, and looks down at the folder. You watch as he flips it open and spreads out the two sheets of paper.

You don't even have to wait for him to hold them up to recognize them. You don't even have to wait for him to take them out of the folder or lift them off the plane of the bed to recognize them. You see the faces you will likely remember for the rest of your life. Faces you will see in your sweetest dreams and your darkest nightmares. Faces that will flash before your eyes in negative space during the split second when the lights are switched off. Faces you expect to await you in the waning moments before your consciousness is finally extinguished.

And again you scream not because the faces scare you, but because you are scared of the mysterious things the faces are trying to save you from. And you scream so loud and so long your own ears hurt. And you scream so loud and so long you start to see spots in your vision. And you scream so loud and so long your hands go numb and your tongue goes dry. And you scream so loud and so long that by the time you're done your voice is probably as deep as the tiger's from all the irreparable damage you've done to your throat and lungs. But eventually your screaming fades out, replaced by the sounds of the lion softly chuckling to himself, sounding very pleased by your torment indeed.