"Any animal, if cornered, if trapped, if faced with either their survival or their freedom, will turn and fight."

Dallas Tanner

It was a furtive group that slipped out of the sound room. Judy led the way, Chupacabra at the ready and praying madly she wouldn't have to use it. Vicky hung just behind her to provide immediate muscle in case they were pounced. Behind them trailed Nicole, Ellen, Isabelle, Nick, and Taelia, with Xavier watching the rear. Every one of their hearts was pounding loudly enough to sow fears of being heard at a distance by their pulses alone.

"Hey!" Ellen hissed to Judy just as the latter was about to peer around the first corner.

Judy fairly jumped out of her fur. "What?!" she whispered back.

Ellen was holding up a little compact with the mirror open. "I saw this in a movie once."

It was easy to guess what she had in mind. With a grateful nod and tight lips, Judy took the mirror and angled it to check around the corner. Then she jerked her head to signal the others and ducked round it, hustling as quickly as any of them dared.

As they drew nearer to the concert hall, the din of crazed mammals fighting and un-crazed ones fleeing reached their ears like some horrific soundtrack of the afterlife – and not the nicer half. The wailing tone from the speakers added to it, providing background music to the horrors they could only imagine.

"Don't even think about it!" hissed Isabelle, grabbing Nicole by the arm as she started to instinctively move towards the crisis.

Nicole stopped, her training as a responder clashing with her friend's discretion. Shaking, she drew back and nodded. There was nothing she could do – nothing even an army of medics could do – but be destroyed in that madness. The only possibility was to get out of there as quickly as possible and get some help, if there was anyone left to help.

"What's with the sound system?" asked Ellen, clamping her paws over her ears. "Taelia, do you know what this is… Taelia, what are you doing?"

Everyone had been so preoccupied with the din that they hadn't noticed what was going on right in their midst. Taelia had fallen to her knees, clutching the sides of her head and groaning.

"Taelia, come on!" called Nick, running toward her. "We've gotta get out of here!"

Judy looked on as a prickling sensation ran up her spine. Something about this was very familiar… and very, very wrong.

Of the witnesses, only Nick and Judy had ever seen a mammal going savage. Yet everyone knew it could happen to anyone. Even so, the horror of someone like Taelia changing right in front of them into a slavering beast kept them rooted to the ground for precious moments too long.

"NICK!" Judy cried.

It was too late. With a guttural snarl, Taelia sprang from the ground and flung herself at Nick. Her weight took him to the ground as he started to turn, and without the least pause she buried her teeth up to the gums in his shoulder. A pained cry tore from his throat as she shook him like an alligator worrying its prey.

Inside Taelia's mind, besides a pounding headache, was a seething mess of violence that was stronger than survival itself and hotter than the hottest rage. 'Hurt,' her brain slurred like a drunken mammal. 'Enemy. Bite. Maim! KILL!'

Xavier was on her in a flash, wedging his fingers in and pulling at her jaws, which held on with surprising force. It took him and Judy together to get her loose, and it was nothing short of a miracle that they didn't lose fingers in the process.

The sight of the struggle got the rest unglued. Vicky burst in from the side as Taelia scrambled back, crouched on all fours with her teeth showing through reddened lips.

'Enemies! Bite! Slash! Kill!'

Nicole had her patient now. "Shirt off!" she ordered Nick, pulling some bandages out of her handbag. As he numbly obeyed, she threw antiseptic onto the bite and clapped gauze over it. The sight of wounded prey captured the notice of the beast that had been Taelia, and she darted to attack. Vicky seized the distraction and swung her arm with all her might.

Bam! Taelia flew through the air and slammed into the wall, momentarily dazed.

"We have to pin her down!" Judy exclaimed.

"How?!" asked Ellen.

Xavier's brain flashed to a solution. "Keep her busy!" he ordered, fumbling out of his dad's army jacket.

Taelia, meanwhile, had made a lunge for Vicky, her crazed mind raving for vengeance. Vicky caught her and wrestled her to the floor, one paw on her chest and the other fighting to keep her muzzle away from anything she could get her teeth into.

"Is this busy enough!?"

Vaxier threw a sleeve of the coat over Taelia's face, covering her snarls and more importantly her teeth. Vicky grabbed part of the garment and threw it over the vixen's flailing claws. It was a panicked, grisly business, but in a minute or so they had her wrapped in it with Vicky's arms for binding, still crazed but now too cocooned to be an immediate danger.

"What was that?" asked Ellen, still shocked at the change that had seized her friend.

The question had to be stalled, however, as a growl sounded behind them. They all turned as one to see a sniffing, hulking bear come around the corner. Judy at once recognized her attacker from some minutes ago, and the thought flashed through her mind of what might have happened to the others. There was no time to think about it now.

"Run. Run!" she ordered, turning and bolting down the hall. The others were close on her heels, with Nicole carrying Nick and Vicky still clutching the uncontrollable Taelia. Judy did her best to put all other thoughts out of her mind except remembering the way to the room with the secret passage. If they couldn't find that they were done; all of them.

Was this the right hall? She hoped it was. Third or fourth left? No time to question; had to go with her gut. Wait, was that the door ahead?!

"In here!" she ordered, ducking through the open doorway.

The others came hot on her heels, and as soon as the last was in Xavier slammed the door and literally hurled a small table up against it, adding a large padded chair and a nightstand.

"Good enough," Judy affirmed, scrambling to open the passageway. As she heard the trap door open, she didn't even get up before shouting, "Go!"

The improvised barricade shuddered as the company filed in, with Xavier remaining long enough to heave a couch into place for some extra time while the door began to give way. He scrambled into the passage, forced to go on all fours like a savage mammal himself as the barrier fell to bits. He could feel the air vibrating at his tail as the bear stuck in its head and roared after them. Its paws scrabbled violently at the steps, but it was no use. The tunnel was too small, and the stone walls too sturdy for expansion.

Somewhere in the lineup, Nicole collected her wits enough to think of her training. "How are you holding up, Nick?" she asked, her heart pounding.

Nick checked his wound. "I think the bleeding's slowing down," he reported, unable to make a wisecrack. His mind was spinning, the image of Taelia's crazed visage still flashing through his consciousness.

Judy, walking beside him, looked him over for signs of shock even as she guessed his thoughts. "She didn't mean it," she reassured.

He nodded. "Yeah, I know," he admitted, not saying what everyone was probably thinking somewhere in their tumbled minds: Why Taelia?

"Taelia stopped moving," Vicky reported.

Everyone's hearts tightened up at that. Was there more to the poison than they had guessed? Was she going to…

"I'll have to check on her when we're in the clear," Nicole asserted.

Judy nodded. Training as a first responder told her, grimly, that treatment had to be delayed while the greater balance was in jeopardy; same logic as not jumping into the line of fire to recover a single victim.

She hated that part of training.

The tunnel soon brought them out in another room, where scratches on the walls marked their way through two more turnings to a floor plan; clearly, surreptitious marks from Olivia, That easily led them to the exit and the rear garage.

Nicole immediately took Taelia from Vicky, who kept looking furtively back to the mansion.

"How fast can we get back in their?" the hyena pressed.

Nicole shook her head. "No idea. Vick, Xavier, I need you two ready in case she goes crazy again."

When she unwrapped the vixen, however, their help was no needed. Taelia lay still and pale.

"Shoot, we forgot about oxygen," Nicole moaned, checking for a pulse and breathing. The pulse was there, but faint; very faint. She wrapped a paw around Taelia's muzzle and put her lips to her nose, puffing out her cheeks.

After a few puffs of air, Taelia's eyes opened.

"What…?" she asked weakly, looking around.

Nicole breathed a sigh of relief. "That's good. That's very good."

Taelia licked her lips. "Blech. What's that taste in my mouth?"

Judy glanced at Nick and signaled that he might want to duck out of sight. Nick nodded and made himself scarce behind a car.

"You were poisoned with Night Howler toxin," she explained. "I think it was in the food."

"What?!" asked Taelia sharply, sitting up with her eyes wide and her tail puffed. "You mean I-?!"

"It's nothing I couldn't fix," Nicole assured her, putting a paw on her shoulder to hold her down. Everyone else stood looking on like they didn't know what to do. Ellen looked scared. Xavier looked wary, moving forward and then stopping as if not sure what to do. Vicky looked ready to throw up.

Only Nicole remained calm and collected. This was her element; her battleground. "Breathe slowly, and try not to get agitated," she soothed. "We're still not sure of all the details."

"If it was the food, why'd she go crazy when she did?" asked Ellen. "She must have had it ages ago."

Now that she mentioned it, that was pretty puzzling. "You said the other mammals effected all went nuts about the same time, right?" Xavier asked Judy. "Taelia was the only one who went crazy later. That's got to mean something."

Judy hesitated. Her mind hammered at getting after Obearon, but there were mammals dying in there. If they could figure out a solution, they might be able to stop them.

"I think…" she started to say.

As usual, I've done my best to be accurate with the information supplied for anything someone might have to actually do. In the case of animal CPR and rescue breaths, the method Nicole uses (delivery through the nose) is true-to-life, since for several obvious reasons mouth-to-mouth contact would be impractical around sharp teeth and/or a long muzzle. The part about puffing out one's cheeks is based on human care for infants, as trying to put a full adult's worth of air into a baby's lungs – or in this case a wolf's worth into a fox – could be harmful or even fatal. On a side note, the best place to check most quadrupeds for a pulse is under the right foreleg, similar to the right side of the chest on a human.

Obviously, any kind of rescue care on animals or humans should only be done under life-threatening circumstances, and at your own risk.