Deputies

Chapter 1

Written by RedPen

Artwork by RedPen

The reflection that stared back from the mirror was a rabbit at ease with her place in the world. Her posture purposefully straight. Her fur immaculately groomed. Those violet eyes that shone like cut amethysts, eyes that you could lose hours staring into, as if hypnotized.

She eyed her likewise-beautiful doppelganger, and allowed herself a moment of indulgence. "No wonder Nick fell for you," she said with a smile. "You've got it, hot-stuff. You're the complete package. Sexy and dangerous."

She made a pistol of her forefinger and thumb and pointed it at her double, who drew on her in the same fashion. For a moment they stared one another down, like gunslingers in some dusty western saloon.

Then she stopped; partly because she had a shift to get to and she didn't want to be made late on account of posing in front of the mirror, and partly because the last thing she needed was someone walking in on her, and to start circulating the silly story about how badly Judy actually wanted to be a cowgirl.

She sighed, then snatched her duty belt from her locker and buckled it on, slotting her radio into its holster and her cuffs onto their clasp. Then she reached for her tranq-pistol.

For the first time, she paused to consider it, this piece of white and black plastic, this tool of enforcement. Not just for what it was, but its distant origins.

She knew firearms had once been a thing. She'd seen a photo of Nick's grandfather, dressed in olive fatigues with his rifle slung over his shoulder. She'd seen like examples in the ZPD's museum - brutish things of cold metal and oiled wood, their barrels lead-filled, their potency extinguished. Firearms had been outlawed in Zootopia for nearly a century now, long enough that most mammals had never even seen one, let alone heard what one sounded like - gunfire was, effectively, extinct. Guns and bullets had passed into antiquity along with the spear and the longbow and bloodletting and all the other barbaric marks of their past. For the better, she knew.

And yet…what would it have felt like?

She slotted her tranq-pistol into her holster, and then, one last time, made the same pistol-like gesture at her reflection. She tried to imagine it; the pressure of the trigger, the spark and flash of gunpowder, the force as the weapon jumped backward like something alive.

Her imagination left something wanting.

She took one last look at the armed-and-dangerous rabbit in the mirror, then shut her locker door and left.

"Wait, you want to do the wild west again?" Nick asked, one eyebrow arched.

Judy shook his head. "It'd be different. See? It says we'd be acting as deputies. You know? Partners."

Nick looked at the option on the screen; so it declared in pixelated font. He glanced back at her.

"Is that really what you want? You don't want to…" He scanned the other entries on the list. "…Try warriors in a fantasy kingdom, maybe? Ooh, or pirates! I'd make a fantastic pirate, I think."

"I can't see it," Judy said, measuring him from tip to tail with her gaze. "You, hobbling around with an eyepatch? Seducing tavern wenches? Bleugh."

"No need to impugn my honour over it," Nick muttered wryly, leaning back to inspect the screen. "Well, fantasy kingdom then. It says you'll play a valiant sword-swinging warrior, me a black-cloaked mercenary. That sounds exciting."

"I'm still kind of sold on deputies," Judy said, trying to keep any nervous gesture under wraps. She hadn't thought Nick would be so hard to sway on this. He turned and fixed her with a peculiar look,

"What's gotten into you?" he asked, paws on hips. "Did you watch a Clint Beastwood movie when I wasn't looking or something?"

"What are you talking about?"

"You just seem suddenly very keen to put on a cowboy hat and go shoot up a saloon. What's up?"

"Well…we don't have to," Judy muttered. "I just…we enforce the law every day, right? As partners. And it's the best thing in the world. It's the thing I love most. Why not do that, just in a different time and place? As 'pardners'?" She put her best Podunk drawl on that last word, and Nick smiled.

"Alright, Carrots," he said. "It's a deal. But we're doing pirates the next time, alright?"

The sun was noon high and the shadows all but vanished from the world when two figures appeared at the end of Roadkill Alley and started walking towards Main Street.

They seemed an unlikely pair, and they dressed in a fashion that invited curiosity - the shorter in a flowing duster coat with a coiled lasso hanging from her belt, the taller in shirtsleeves and a quilted vest. They both had holstered guns, and they both had glinting badges on their chests. Deputy's stars.

A strong wind sent waves of grit to clatter across the brim of the smaller one's ridgetop hat. It was rare to see rabbits in headwear such as this; most opted for a sort of loose headscarf, or a bonnet with cuts for their ears to poke through. But deputy Judy Hopps had this one specially made to fit. No slits for her ears; she kept them tucked down behind her back, protection against them getting shot off.

Nick Wilde, on the other paw, rather liked his ears on display; he'd said before that tucking them away, "upset the outline of his beautiful face." He wore a hat not much seen in that country - a pork pie hat with a cloven brim - and carried a coach gun in a backsling alongside the pistol at his hip.

"So, there a plan this time, Carrots?" Nick asked.

"Them varmints is holed up in this town somewhere," Judy replied. "We find 'em, shoot at 'em 'til they give up, and drag 'em back to the jail."

"That ain't no plan, Carrots," Nick said with a frown. "It's a wishlist. These here's hardened criminals. Train robbers. Murderers. What happens when they won't give up?"

"I can be very persuasive," Judy said. She touched the grips of her 1880 Bounder revolvers; gleaming six-shot weapons, all case-hardened blue steel and polished walnut. Not many gunsmiths were manufacturing pistols that a mammal as small as a rabbit could comfortably fire. As luck had it, the one that was, Michael Bounder, was one of the finest ever to take up the trade.

"Persuasive, huh?" Nick replied. "Yeah. Talk 'em into just throwin' their guns away. Well, if you can't do somethin' smart, do somethin' dumb, right? Lord, how'd I ever let you talk me into bein' a damned lawmammal in the first place? Ain't no perks to this job 'cept gettin' shot at."

"Speaking of, has your aim improved any, recently?" Judy asked. "I seen you practicin' in the yard."

"If I really try, on a good day, when there ain't no wind, I can just about hit a can at twenty steps. Just about…"

Judy arched an eyebrow. "I think you're gettin' worse, Slick."

"Yeah, well, that's why I got ol' Thundercrack here," he muttered, jerking his thumb at the shotgun hanging from his back. "At close range, at least, she might stop me gettin' a bullet in my sorry ass."

"Since when did you start cussin' this often?"

"Since I started gettin' shot at so much."

The two deputies came to the junction and found a main road that was utterly empty of traffic; the locals had sensed trouble brewing and had quit the open to shelter behind locked doors and bolted shutters. A wagon at the other end of the street, parked between the hardware store and the local drinking hole, had been abandoned halfway through its unloading, with crates, sacks and parcels, boxes of soda bottles and battered-looking steamer trunks, all stacked up like the raced preparations for a siege. And it was behind these fortifications that the brewing trouble was entrenched.

There were the Antlerson twins, 'Bloody' Bucky and 'Three Pistols' Pronk, whose tall, ebony antlers could be seen protruding above the parapets of deserted luggage. Doug Ramsey, the 'Sharpest Shot in the West', was there as well. He carried an older breech-loading rifle, but with it he could put a bullet in a hamster a hundred feet away through the spokes of a rolling wheel. The last of the muscle was Gideon 'The Baker' Grey, whose name, like the mammal bearing it, was not terrifically complicated; he used to work in a bakery. They all peered at these two arrivals through mean squints, loaded weapons in their paws. But they did not shoot; they were waiting on orders from the leader of their outfit.

She sat atop the wagon, watching the lawmammals approach with a vicious grin. Her name was Dawn - Dawn 'Hellspawn' Bellwether - and she was, without doubt, the brains of the operation. Word was she'd been brought up on some desolate ranch further west, and quit that life when she realised it wasn't going to sate an emerging taste for adventure, money and, soon enough, violence. She was craftier than a coyote playing chess, mean to boot, and she didn't squirm at the sight of blood. Not much for shooting, mind, but she didn't need to be; her strength had always lain in getting others to do the killing for her.

"Now I reckon that'd be close enough," she hollered, and the pair came to a halt between the halves of a low brick wall, marking the corners of the Nighthowler Inn to the right and Otterton's florist to the left.

"Bellwether," Judy called. "The state of Zootopia has issued a warrant for your arrest, and with the blame for that train heist out in Podunk getting' laid at your feet, you ain't lookin' to be let off easy. Now you turn yourself in, you might just get off with hard labour. But if we have to drag you in, they'll put a rope necklace 'round you, sure as Monday follows Sunday. What's it gonna be?"

There was a chorus of threatening snaps - hammers being cocked. Bellwether's evil grin grew a fraction wider, and she opened her mouth to speak.

"Yeah, well ain't so!" came Gideon's blurted response. "You's about to be deader than…than…you's about to be real dead!"

Bellwether's look was long-suffering, and she shot a glance downward. "Gideon? Sugar? Shut your trap before I force a bushel of cottonwool down your throat."

"Uh, yes ma'am."

Bellwether turned back to the deputies, and cocked her head at them. "You know what y'all look like?" she asked slowly. "A pair a dead mammals walkin'. Y'all are outgunned, two to one. I don't care how good y'all supposed to be, Hopps; havin' the numbers never lets you down. So how do you propose on draggin' me in, then?"

Judy's lip twitched. She could see the narrow eyes of their adversaries, staring her down like devils in the shadows. Her paw touched the grips of her Bounder revolvers; her badge was her source of authority, but those pistols were the tools that carved justice out of the unmarshalled chaos of the world. They begged to be unleashed.

Beside her, Nick muttered, "What's all this about how good you are, Carrots? Don't I count?"

Judy shot her partner an edgewise glance, her eyes asquint.

As it turned out, Bellwether never got an answer to her question. Not that it mattered; everyone knew the answer already.

Dawn dived off the wagon's heights and vanished behind the blockade of baggage, just as every gun in the vicinity went off at once, filling the street with pounding noise and the reek of gunsmoke.

Judy and Nick both went for cover, diving behind the low brick wall on their respective street sides, firing on the enemy as they went. Nick had barely pulled his head down before a salvo clipped the top of the wall, scattering gravel onto the brim of his hat. He raised his pistol and blind-fired back at the enemy, but it was of little use; Nick wasn't exactly a prize-shot under the best of conditions, and he realised he wasn't doing much beyond making noise and wasting bullets.

"Well this here's a fine start to things," Nick shouted across the street, still pressed against the wall, able to feel the resonance of each bullet that smacked into it. "It always works out so well when we barge in like this." Whatever could be said of the duo - and appraisal of them as tacticians would be wanting commendation - they had a knack for figuring things out on the fly. Judy glanced around.

"Maybe we can skedaddle over to the other street?" she suggested. "Sneak up and flank 'em?"

Nick shook his head. "Ain't no way to get over there without presentin' our asses as targets. Besides, how d'ya know she aint got some back-up over there fixin' to drygulch us?"

Judy bit her lip, mulling over the other options. There was no way she was going to let Dawn and her gang slip through her fingers this time. Sherriff Bogo would tan her and Nick's hides and wear them as a pair of slippers if they didn't get cuffs on her. That damned sheep would face justice if it was the last thing Judy did.

She looked around and spotted the upper floor of the tavern to her right, its shutters all closed tight to keep stray bullets out, the occupants no doubt hunkered down against the wall, listening to the gunfight outside. She realised that if she could get up there, she might just be able to advance on them from the rooftop, and get a fine view of them behind their cover as well.

"Nick," she said. "I need you to get on over to my side."

A stray round ricocheted off the flower cart Otterton left parked outside his door. A spray of ruined petals went up and floated down around Nick like coloured snow. He stared at her.

"You must be dreamin'."

"Come on, you yellow-belly! Just stay low and move quick!"

"Hellfire," Nick breathed. "And that Ramsey sonovabitch is a fine shot'n all." He stuffed his pistol back in its holster, whispered a prayer to a god he wasn't rightly sure was listening, and dived into the street.

Immediately a hail of bullets bore down on him, skipping just under his toes. The crack of a rifle sounded over all the chaos and the shot whipped past his head with a horrifying clap of concussed air. At the end Nick came off his feet, falling behind the wall in a tumble, coming to a rest nearly in Judy's lap.

"Oh lord!" he gasped, eyes boggling. "I've been shot!"

Well, that was true; Doug's rifle had clipped a fraction of his eartip off. A tiny ball of blood welled at the wound and trickled down onto his hat brim.

"You're hardly dyin'," Judy muttered, grabbing him by the shoulders and propping him up. "What I need is for you to cup your paws and launch me upstairs, alright? I'll put the fire on them from that vantage point."

"My perfect looks, ruined!" Nick mourned, touching his scraped ear with a fingertip.

"Hey! Focus, Nick, or it's our tails!"

Grumbling about the importance of symmetry to fox beauty, Nick squatted before the inn wall and laced his fingers together. Judy was small enough that she could stand here without presenting a target, and she backed up far enough for a run-up. Then, with a nod at her partner, she dashed forward and planted her foot right in his paws.

Nick gave a great heave and Judy rocketed into the air, crashing like a cannonball into the window slats and bursting them off their hinges. A wave of pistolfire chased her, stripping splinters off the window frame and showering her where she lay on the floor.

There was an antelope and a zebra inside, both pressed against the wall at the far end of the room, quaking with fear.

"No call for alarm. Official Sheriff's business. Everything is under control," Judy gasped, getting shakily to her feet and tipping the splintered wood out of her hat. She flicked her badge, as if it would allay their terror. Then she dashed out of the room, ducking between the startled antelope's legs and into the hallway.

Inside, the gunfire became a muted succession of pops, and Judy doubted that much of it was coming from Nick. She sprinted through a door to the right, kicked open a window, and clambered onto the roof, struggling not to slip on the uneven clay tiles. Then she managed to edge her way down the street, coming to a halt at the edge of the inn and taking refuge behind a pair of chimney stacks. From here she could see Bellwether's gang popping up from their cover to fire on Nick; could see her partner pinned down, unable to do other than shelter from the assault; could see the brick wall eroded by the enemy fire.
Judy drew her brace of Bounder revolvers, cocking both hammers.

It was time to right the odds in favour of the good guys.