Heroes of Zootopia

Chapter 13 "The Story Of A Soldier"

By DragonMan1997

Zootopia © Disney

Nick lead Adam Wolff through the back entrance to the ZPD. They didn't need a flashing costume to draw attention, and they didn't want to turn heads with a random citizen entering the forensics lab in the basement.

Adam stared at Nick who was wearing grey sweats and his ZPD sweater instead of his usual uniform. "Feeling any better?"

Nick said nothing about the aftermath of that day. He had already said what he needed to say. He'd dragged on enough with the ceaseless rants to the wolf about his shortcomings with his partner Judy. "Come on, the bodies are back here."

Adam just followed Nick. In the basement, he saw Judy and Agent Einswine. "Einswine. What are you doing here?"

The boar twirled her keys around as they approached. "I has coroner van. So, I bring body of little doe. Bad business that." Penelope unlatched the door to the cold chamber. She pulled out the long stainless steel bed holding up a lifeless corpse with a toe tag. "Take a look." She pulled back the sheet covering the body to reveal its face.

"Geese." Nick muttered. "Just a kid." He looked at Adam who seemed indifferent to the lifeless doe. "Doesn't it bother you?"

Adam read the toe tag. "Daisy. Hmm. No. I mean, I saw most of my family killed, and with my time as a vigilante," he rested a paw on the doe's head, remembering another like her he once knew, "there were other vigilantes, young, who didn't always make it." He pulled the sheet down further. "Hey Nick." Adam puckered his face and covered his nose. He pointed to the black spot that smelled of charred fur and flesh. "What do you make of that?"

Nick covered his nose and stepped up onto a chair to look. "Thats a burn."

Penelope handed them both latex gloves. "Gets more interesting. Here, have look." She pulled on her own gloves and lifted the doe's shoulder up. "See? Clean through!"

Nick looked at the light that passed through the gaping hole where the doe's heart should have been. "It was cauterized. Something really hot, but it would have to have been moving fast enough to go clean through like that. And, what do you think the size of that hole is?"

Adam used his paw to guestimate the size of the hole. "At least four, maybe five inches wide. It's almost like a cookie cutter. Look, bone is missing." He looked up at Nick. "This isn't exactly the Raven's calling card."

"No." Nick agreed as he felt his heart ache in memory of his heart attack. It had happened to Bogo, it happened to him too. That was the only other thing. Nick wondered if the heart attack gun known as the reaper was at large again. "The Raven would have been more subtle, unless she wanted to make an example of someone. But, prey animals the NP attacked were usually found in alleyways or just up and disappeared."

Adam examined the wound. "Doesn't make sense. The two mammals with the white raven masks at ZNN, they were prey. Why would they be working with the Raven." He frowned. "No, that's not possible. It can't be."

"Vhat is it?" Penelope asked Adam.

The wolf slipped his gloves off and crossed his arms. "I think I know who'll recognize this wound."

Lily cracked the door to Daniel's room open. "Sweety, there's pizza downstairs."

Daniel just sat there at his desk, his eyes glued to the rainy sky outside his window, a strange crystal in his grasp. Lily had always wondered about that crystal. There was something familiar about it.

"Okay." The snow leopard shut her son's door and sighed at Kathrine who was camping by her brother's door in a little makeshift teepee.

"Mommy?" The fox looked back and forth between Daniel's room and her mother. "Is he sad?"

Lily wasn't sure. "Just give him time." She picked up the paper plate at the base of the fox's teepee. Usually she'd parent and tell Katherine how she shouldn't eat food upstairs, but she didn't want to make a fuss with Daniel's state. Halfway down the stairs with pizza plate in hand, Lily felt her pocket buzzing. She checked her cellphone. It was adam. Tapping the green button she whispered over the phone. "Hi honey, what's up?"

"Lily. How is Daniel?"

Lily moved to the kitchen where she threw away the paper plate and started wrapping up the leftover pizza. "He's not crying. It's off. It's like he's shellshocked."

"You said he only knew her for a few days."

Lily sat down in a nearby stool as she took deep breaths, thinking about what she was able to get from the Redds about the first date Daniel somehow failed to mention to either her or Adam. "Yeah. Is there another reason you called?"

"Well, ugh, yeah. There's a photo I need you to take a look at. It's of the doe's body. Remember that other timeline you told me about?"

"Yes. What about it?" Lily looked at the text she had just been sent. She opened it up. "Oh, my word. No. No, no, no. Not here. It can't be here!"

"You recognize it?"

Lily concentrated to control her breathing. "Adam," her mind began to flash back to that dark place, "Adam," where he was dead. "This is the doe?"

"Yes. Is it what I think?"

"That's a burn from a plasma rifle." She felt her world cave in as an old nightmare returned. "Adam, please come home." Lily pulled a bag from the cupboard and began to breath in and out of it.

"On my way!"

Lily grabbed her ears as noise filled the air around her. Her mind burned as realities collided. We have to get her out now! Suddenly, she was on the battlefield once more, plasma bursts flying past her face.Take cover! Shrapnel and fire filled the air. Bodies were scattered everywhere. Smoke rose from the burned out holes in their chests. You are in grave danger, Lily Clawhauser. Lily could see her younger and older selves. It's your fault she's dead! No, he didn't remember her. My name is really of no consequence. Mammals were dying. Sky? Time broken...help to fix time…

Lily was brought back to reality by the doorbell. "Coming!" She worked to compose herself despite the pain crawling through her ears. She opened the front door. "Caleb, Sara?"

The two wolves stood as though there were coals beneath their feet. Caleb was still in his Bug-Burga uniform and Sara was wide eyed and jittery. Caleb spoke. "Can we see Daniel?"

"Yeah, there's pizza in the kitchen. Why don't you try and take him some." Lily rushed them inside and stepped out, closing the door behind her. She hoped fresh air would help. It didn't. Again, she saw flashes of the past future. She remembered the feel of the neoprene garment and the her trench coat, only tattered. A holster held weight on her hip. Lily drew the plasma revolver from the holster and took aim at voices around her. She could see the faces of mammals she'd fought side by side with to change the course of history, to save the world, to save Adam.

"LILY."

Lily turned, pointing the plasma revolver at a cloaked snow leopard. "I remember you."

"Descendent, take Deerenger's crystal to the monastery."

A tail swept by in the corner of Lily's eyes. It looked hairless. She followed it left, and right, left again. It kept moving until it swept her up and knocked her on her back. Rolling over she saw firey silhouettes. Standing, she could make them out. A wolf, a snow leopard, and a deer. Two she recognized. "Finish what we started." Their voices bombarded Lily's ears. Fire roared around her and she began to cry out for help.

"Lily!"

Lily came out of the vision to see her husband shaking her shoulders. "Adam?" She looked around. The warzone was gone. She was back in the present in front of their home in the rainforest district. "Adam." She buried her head into her husband's chest as he wrapped his arms around her.

Caleb looked at his sister as she carefully place a few pieces of pizza on a paper plate. Daniel's favorite, it was plain cheese pizza. His sister remembered that more than he did. "You've been acting strange."

"What?" Sara grabbed a few napkins and moved past her brother.

Caleb didn't like it. He wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but he wasn't the slowest either. "You've been acting really weird around Daniel. What is it?"

"Caleb!" Sara frowned at her brother. "Daniel's hurt now. Can we just focus on being here for him."

Caleb nodded. He still didn't like it, but he followed his sister upstairs to Daniel's room which was guarded by a vigilant little fox with a foam sword. Katherine put up a finger to her lips, motioning Caleb and Sara to be quiet for a second. She listened to the door. "Okay, you can go in." Caleb snorted, as if he needed permission to be there for his best friend. Katherine hugged Sara. "You'll make him better, won't you?" Caleb hid his disapproving look from from the girls. He couldn't figure out what it was, but it seemed like Katherine was in on it. Caleb could only conclude that it was a girly thing, in which case, he realized he would never understand.

"We'll try." Sara opened the door to Daniel's room. She faintly cried when she saw Daniel sitting there the way he was.

Caleb felt like a knife sunk into his heart, hearing that sound from his sister. The only time he remembered hearing that sound, or anything similar, was from his mother when their uncle died. He looked at Daniel. A second knife. "Dan? Daniel? Danny Boy?" There was no response, directly at least. The deer was silently muttering. "Daniel. Come on. Talk to us!"

Sara held her brother back. She set the plate of pizza on Daniel's desk before gently grabbing the deer's hand. "Hey."

Daniel finally closed his eyes. "I should have listened." He tucked the crystal into his pocket. "It's my fault."

"No." Sara softly said to him.

Daniel yanked his hand away from hers, knocking his lamp off the desk. The bulb in the lamp shattered across the floor. "Not a game." Daniel snapped. "I know it's not a game!" With his arm, he wiped everything off his desk, including the pizza which landed in the glass of the broken bulb. "Careful, no game, too fast!"

Caleb held Sara back from reaching out to him.

Daniel screamed as he pounded on the wall until he broke through the drywall. Pulling his fist from the fresh hole, he staggered back, off balance.

Sara lunged forward and caught him. She gently pulled him to his bed. Caleb helped lift Daniel up on the bed where Sara cradled him. He was bigger than she, but somehow she managed to hold him like a mother cradling a child.

Daniel was now in full cry mode. His eyes were swollen with waterworks as his mouth almost began to drool.

"Sh. Sh. We're here." Sara wiped tears from Daniel's face and held his arm to wipe off the drywall dust.

Caleb forgot all the suspicion he had earlier as his sisters words finally struck him. As his best friend laid there, weeping, he remembered why they came. Caleb grabbed his friend's hand. "Let it out. It's gonna be," he didn't want to say alright.

"I barely knew her." Daniel finally huffed out. "It's my fault. I told my mom to put her paper in. It's my fault."

Sara grabbed the base of one of Daniel's antlers and cupped his face in a paw. "It's not your fault. Don't you dare believe its your fault. You didn't know anyone would do this to her."

As sudden as Daniel's fit came, it stopped. He repeated after Sara. "It's not my fault."

Sara repeated. "No, it's not your fault."

Daniel's eyes opened. They were red and bloodshot. "It's the Raven's fault."

Caleb felt a chill go down his spine. There were very few times he'd seen any extreme emotion from Daniel. But, this? Caleb had never seen anything like it. He saw a quiet rage of realization. He saw madness and anger. It was more than just that, though. This was unrelenting, unyielding. Caleb had never seen the look of murder in his friend's eyes.

Dawn treaded lightly as she crept around one of the cabinets in the Empire's data room. It was basically a library. Everyone called it that. Only, there was no warmth to it. Shelves were filing cabinets, records were computers and there was no silence. The hum of the computers was overwhelmed by the steady stream of classical music that was fed through the library's sounds system. This was the scene where Dawn had taken to sneaking about. Watching. Straightening her glasses, she looked at the wolf who was zipping through records. She had started observing Vernon Hunter. She didn't trust him. The way he carried himself, she believed it too good to be true. Dawn knew there had to be something up the sleeves of this dirty pawed dog.

Vernon continued looking through the Empire's database. "You're horrible at that."

Dawn didn't know who he was talking too.

"Miss Bellwether, I may not have hearing like Officer Hopps or Agent Savage, but I can hear you."

Dawn stepped out from behind the filing cabinet. "You heard me?"

Vernon sighed as he scrutinized a record a little more than the rest. "You're a loud breather."

"I am not!" Dawn's collar beeped as she folded her arms.

Vernon's ear twitched at the beep. "Significantly above average volume." He cocked a brow. "Why are you spying on me?"

Dawn's arms dug deeper into her defensive stance. "Why would I be spying on a pred?"

Vernon sighed again. "You read my file nineteen times. It's on the Empire's record, who reads what, how many times, and how long. And from that snippy tone in your voice, I can tell you don't trust me."

"I don't." Dawn snapped back. "Well, I don't know."

Vernon nodded as he spun away from the computer screen, blinking away the pain from a few hours of research. He looked Dawn up and down. "You find me unsettling. But, why is that?"

Dawn's arms loosened up. "You look familiar."

"But, you don't remember." Vernon tapped the desk he sat at. "Is it that I remind you of some jerk that bumped you in the street, invoking further racism and prejudice against predators?"

Dawn's mind had suddenly been scrambled for anything that could make sense. It was like she'd thrown a ball tied to a string. It came swinging right back at her. She lost herself in Vernon's tapping. The tapping evolved into a scattered sound. Dawn could see a stretched out broken string, letter beads, her mother crying, the silhouette of a young-. "No." Dawn saw something else, bullies in a playground. Her hero, the-. "You remind me of a good mammal. But I've convinced myself that predators could never be good, so I can't believe you're who you say you are."

Vernon stopped tapping his fingers. "This good mammal, was he a predator?"

Dawn froze the moment Vernon said the one word. "I didn't say it was a he."

Vernon hummed as he scratched the back of his neck. "I read your file." The wolf smiled, only weakly. "I didn't remember either, why you looked familiar. It's hard to believe you are who you are. I remember someone, but the someone I remember is a culmination of childhood fantasies and half forgotten midnight summer dreams." The wolf twirled a cellphone around in his paw. "I remember puzzles, uniforms that don't fit quite right. But that's wrong. Or at least, it's wrong now. So, why do I remember it? Why do I remember by brother wade-"

"-Giselle." Dawn blubbered out.

Vernon stared at Dawn. "Why did you say that name? Who's Giselle?"

"The giraffe at Snarlbucks-" Dawn stopped as she felt her nose run. "I-I-uh. I don't reme-. Brother's." Her collar flashed red.

"Hey!"

Dawn's collar went back to green as she looked up to see Vernon suddenly over her with a napkin under her face. "What?"

"Your nose." Vernon pulled her hand up to the napkin so she could hold it.

Dawn saw a flash of red and quickly worked to stop her nose from gushing. "I'm sorry!" Dawn's nasally voice was muffled by the napkin. "AH! My head!"

Vernon grabbed at his head as it too began to burn. "Floof…" He scowled. "Gah!" His nose began to drip with blood, scaring Dawn who fled the library. Vernon blinked as he squeezed his nose shut. "Miss Bellwetter?" Dawn was gone.

"Bedwetter?"

Vernon turned to see Peter with half a taco in his mouth and a take out bag. "No." He made a gesture to Dawn's height and made a horrible impression of a sheep noise. "Bellwetter."

Peter stopped chewing for a minute. "Oh! Knockout. What about-" The boar noticed Vernon pinching his own snout and the blood droplets on the floor. "Nose bugging you again?" Peter pulled brown napkins from the take out bag and passed them to Vernon.

"Yeah." Vernon tilted his head back as he compressed the napkins into his nose. "Were you looking for me?"

"Oh, yeah." Peter inhaled another taco. "Adam's looking for you, something about that Grasshopper guy that dead doe wrote about."

"Yeah." Vernon remembered he was supposed to talk to Adam about that. "Agent Einswine is having trouble tracking him. It's like he dropped off the face of the earth."

"Einswine? Did she say anything about me?"

Vernon squinted at Peter as he tried to look at him without bringing his head down. "Uhhh. No."

"Oh." Peter nodded. "I'm gonna go now."

Vernon turned his head, "Wait," but Peter was already gone. "Gosh, did I forget to shower or something?"

"No." A voice came from nowhere. "You smell just fine."

"Gah!" Vernon turned around and realized who it was when he saw nobody. "Crystal. Put on some clothes will ya!"

"I'm invisible." Crystal pointed out.

Vernon rolled his eyes as he left the library.

Adam looked over the map of all the recorded sightings of the Grasshopper. "There's no pattern. Dang it." Looking up he noticed Vernon walk in the room with his snout in the air and a fistfull of bloody napkins. "What happened to you?"

Vernon thought about it. "Still not sure. Anyways. I'm here now what did you want to discuss?"

"I need your help." The wolf pointed to the map. "I'm trying to figure out how he's been responding to all these crimes across Zootopia. It's been a decade since I acted as a vigilante and even longer since I started. I think this guy is an amateur. I don't know. I think I just need a fresh pair of eyes."

Vernon looked at the map, covering his nose as he did so. "Ah, a puzzle. I used to be good at these."

"I need help, not jokes, Vernon." Adam crossed his arms.

"No, Seriously. I was way into finding patterns and solving puzzles before my brother died." Vernon looked at the map. He turned it upside down and sideways. "Sudoku, hidden object games, word puzzles, symbols, and trivia. This is right up my alley." He looked at the pattern which was almost a triangle. Trying to connect the dots he gave up since the shape was so irregular. "Have you tried separating them by days and times?"

Adam blinked as he pulled out more maps of the city. "No."

The two laid out the maps and began marking them up. They started with early sightings which were more or less central to the Rainforest District.

Vernon chewed on a pencil. "He probably lives around the there. The early incidents look like he just sort of helped wherever he happened to be."

Adam laughed. "That's where I live. To think, I might have even bumped into him at the grocery store for all I know. Shoot, maybe he's young enough that my son knows him."

Vernon continued to look for patterns as he mapped out events. "Why the sudden interest in this guy?"

"That doe that wrote the article about him," Adam talked as he fingered through police reports, "she has burn marks that might be connected to the Raven."

"How so?" Vernon asked as he circled a cluster of sightings.

Adam froze for a bit. "Word from a soldier I know."

"A soldier?" Vernon asked.

Adam had a distant look about him as he circled clusters of his own. "Vernon? Do you believe in time travel?"

Vernon chuckled. "You mean like stainless steel cars going back in time, almost splitting up your parents so you weren't born kind of time travel? Or robots coming to the past to murder the leader of a future rebellion?" He saw that Adam wasn't amused. "Wait, are you serious?"

"Let's keep this conversation between you and me." Adam looked at his maps and Vernon's. Frustrated by the lack of a pattern.

"Woah. You are serious." Vernon closed the door to the room. "You're saying there's proof that it exists."

Adam sighed. "Let's just say that this soldier has seen the future and s-. They recognized a wound on that journalist's body that shouldn't exist here and now."

"The future?" Vernon smiled. "What did this soldier say the future was like?"

Adam sat back in his chair as his face became grave. "There was a war, and we had lost against Novus Purificatio. I died, and so did most of everyone else."

Vernon set the maps down as he felt the weight of what Adam was saying. "You look spooked."

"Because what I thought was fantasy, of this soldier's deep sleep, had some truth to it." Adam pulled up photos on a terminal. "During the rise of the conflict with the NPs, the soldier told us information, predicted things. The soldier showed us how to use EMP devices to disrupt mind control devices. And when NP foot soldiers were examined, we found components that had been implanted into their scalps. This soldier identified the Raven. When we investigated, we found it to be true.

Vernon looked at the EMP cannons attached to swat vehicles and the picture of Katherine Fawkes. "You're worried that if this much is true, then that future which the soldier saw could also be true."

"That's right." Adam groaned at the maps. "Still don't see a pattern outside the original sightings."

Vernon looked between the circles of clusters. "Oh." He smiled. "This bug has a schedule!"

Adam shot up. "What do you see?"

"Mondays, Tuesdays…" Vernon made stacks and redrew the dots on seven maps. "Like I said," He circled the clusters on each new map.

Adam looked at them. "In each of these the radius is the same. He must be using a short range police scanner. Now we can predict where we can catch him."

Vernon clicked his tongue. "Uh, explain to me again how you expect to catch a mammal they say can outrun a train?"

Adam tossed a newspaper to Vernon. "Did you read about what happened to that doe? And how they connected her death with the Raven? That's the article she wrote."

"Woah." Vernon was already shaken by the weight of the title. "My Date With a Superhero?" He kept reading. "Woah, woah, you're not thinking he wants to get revenge on the Raven do you?"

Adam hummed as he looked at the map that corresponded with tomorrow. "I'm counting on it."