FSE

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formerly SoFurry search engine

AN: This story is done to tie with another novel on Wattpad.com. The title of the novel is Secrets In Warfare and it's written by my friend CitrusPterrordayctal. Type her name in the box and her profile should pop up. This story gets updated when SIW does, so be patient with me guys, I can only work this one so quickly.

22 years prior

The sun had set behind the mountain ranges of the Sahara desert hours ago, now replaced by the moon and countless flickering stars in a crystal clear night sky. The light breeze was picking up small grains of sand and throwing them against us. We had been walking since noon and I was starting to get too tired to continue.

"Hey Dad", I asked.

"Yes son?", he asked.

My Dad was seven feet and nine inches at the top of his head. His scales were coffee brown and his underbelly was tan. He had bright green eyes that shined like flashlights in the dark. His horns were maybe a foot or so long and his head crest, which matched mine, almost hung down in his face. His wings were 16 or 20 feet long, which dwarfed my tiny, 10 foot ones and he always dressed in worn, desert camouflage pants and a white shirt with his old US Army armor carrier over it. He carried an AK-47 with plastic clips and a laser sight as well as a suppressor, custom stock parts and a EoTech sight mounted on a custom tactical rail.

"I'm getting tired", I yawned, "can we stop soon."

He nodded, "I can see an old train car up ahead, we can stop there."

We had been traveling for maybe a year now, all over the Sahara desert. Our uproot came when a terrorist organization rolled into a town close to ours and took it over. Dad was afraid that our town would be next since we were sitting on top of an oasis, so that night we had loaded up his old, white Ford Ranger and left. The next morning, Dad watched from a hill as KA machine gun trucks rolled into town and killed everyone. Mom had tried to keep me from hearing it, Dad had told me that I shouldn't have watched it with him, but I did, I still have nightmares. We had lost the truck shortly after that when we hit a bump and cracked the rear differential. We ran the truck another week with the power loss, and then Dad hit another bump and cracked the front springs, we'd been on foot since. It stunk because Dad was teaching me how to drive when we lost it.

It took about two minutes for us to cover the distance to the train car, which was sitting on no rails. Dad sat down his backpack and chambered a round in his AK and Mom did the same with her Sagia.

Mom was a couple of years younger than Dad, about 30 I think. She was cobalt blue with brown underbelly and tail scales. Her horns were about 10 inches long and her head crest was a lot shorter than Dad's, but not as short as mine. She was about six feet tall and her wings were only about 14 feet long. She normally dressed in a long sleeved white shirt with her vest over it and tan camouflage pants like Dad did. She carried a Sagia 12 shotgun with an assault stock and a muzzle brake because she wasn't the best with recoil control. I ironic considering she could empty a 10 round magazine in less than 3 seconds.

I was the smallest of all three of us at barely 5'10. My scales are a dark shade of tan and my under belly is a dark shade of brown, the reverse of my Dad. My horns were barely 8 inches and my head crest was just big enough to hide the base of my horns and ears. My wings were barley 12 feet. My eyes were liquid blue with strands of chrome threaded into them. When I was younger, a friend of mine used to tell me that she'd kill to have eyes like mine, claiming that she could tell what was I was thinking just by looking at the way the moved. I normally wore a tan shirt with sleeves just long enough to cover my elbows so I wouldn't burn them up on the sand when I was prone, and a set of old tan pants, practically all of our stuff was some shade of white or tan. My weapon was an old, scratched and worn Dragonov SVD with a high powered scope that Dad had got me for my tenth birthday and a desert tan paint job which masked the old, decaying wood and helped to stall the rot. I was also the only one of us who carried a handgun, which was a Colt Python. I wasn't sure where I picked it up at, but it had become a trusty sidekick just like the Dragonov, and like my rifle, I was good with it.

I put my hand on my Colt as Mom and Dad each took a side of the rail car and Dad swung the door open, Mom shined her strobe light inside the car and Dad did the same.

"Clear", Mom said.

"Clear", Dad said heaving himself up and then helping Mom up. I tossed their packs up to them and then Mom helped my up as Dad cracked a few glowsticks. Mom and I set up our sleeping bags in one end of the car while Dad jumped out and picked up an old rim and grating from the pile of scrap that surrounded the car. He cleaned it off and then set it up in the middle of the car, lighting it with a jest of flame.

"Just like home", I said sitting back against the wall and untying my boots.

"Not quite", Dad smiled, "but it's better than sleeping on the ground. Hand me that Jack Rabbit you shot earlier son."

I reached into my pack and pulled out a large, plastic wrapped rabbit that I had been keeping in an old dry bag. We had dried it out a few days ago after I had shot it on our last hunting trip, weeks ago.

"Home had running water and air conditioning to", Mom said unstrapping the plate carrier.

I sighed, "to bad it got burned down."

"Yep", Dad sighed, "but were all still together, we have that to be thankful for."

Mom smiled as Dad cut the rabbit into strips, lay them in his mess kit and then placed a few vegetables that he had bought from a traveling merchant about a day ago. I wasn't a big fan of vegetables, because they get stuck in my fangs and sometimes they give me stomach problems. But as long as Dad is cooking, I don't care. You have not lived until my Dad has cooked for you over a campfire. He's not able to make a lot, but what we do get is more than satisfying enough to hold you over for days. We were near the ocean once and Dad bought some dolphin meat from a street vendor and brought it and a lot of spices back to camp. As far as I was concerned, that night I belonged to Royalty, that meat was that good. Though tonight, it seemed that I was the only one that was suffering from food torture. The smell lofting through the train car was making my stomach growl and my mouth water and I had to cover my nose with my paws to keep the smell out. I could see my Dad with his head lowered on the other side of the fire. The way the shadows cast on his face made him seem like the devil.

"I see you are resisting the influence", he said lowly, but playful, "resistance is futile, cross over, to the other side."

My response was to wrap my paws around my snout to keep in a laugh that so desperately wanted to escape. The forty minutes that it took for dad to dehydrate that rabbit with the juices from those veggies was absolute torture, a fate worse than death. The worst part, it took forty minutes to prepare that and it was gone in under a minute. After dinner, Mom and Dad stepped outside to clean up while I threw off my shirt and lay back in my sleeping bag. My entire body ached from the hiking and my shoulders were still numb from the time I'd spent on that McMillan Tac.50 about six weeks ago when Dad and I helped some Rebels take their town back from the KA. We'd just left that town this morning after straying there, they'd taken good care of us, and I wanted to stay and help fight the KA, but Mom and Dad had insisted that we keep moving, saying it was dangerous for us to stay in one place for too long. I wished that I could figure them out when it came to the drifting, but honestly, as long as I had them I'd be fine.

I wiggled into my sleeping bag and was almost asleep when I heard Mom and Dad climb back into the car. Dad slowly pulled the door shut and locked it from the inside while Mom put the fire out. Dad opened a few of the small windows above us and then he and Mom sat down in the corner and I could hear them talking.

"I hate this damn thing", Mom muttered, "it doesn't get any reception out this far."

"Even these tablets have their limitations sweetheart", Dad said, "just wait for it to buffer."

There was a long pause before Dad started talking again, but I didn't catch it because I fell asleep.