The Furry MEGAPACK® Read online

  Table of Contents

  THE FURRY MEGAPACK®

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  INTRODUCTION, by Huskyteer

  PAVLOV’S HOUSE, by Malcolm Cross

  PERSONAL HISTORY, by Tim Susman

  LUNAR CAVITY, by Mary E. Lowd

  THE GOING FORTH OF UADJET, by Frances Pauli

  AFTER THE LAST BELL’S RUNG, by Patrick “Bahu” Rochefort

  AS BELOW, SO ABOVE, by Mut

  THE LANGUAGE OF EMOTION, by Bill Rogers

  A BAG OF CUSTARD, by Michael H. Payne

  DEITY THEORY, by James L. Steele

  DRAWN FROM MEMORY, by Renee Carter Hall

  BEST INTERESTS, by Whyte Yoté

  CLEARANCE PAPERS, by by Fred Patten

  IN THE DAYS OF THE WITCH-QUEENS, by Donald Jacob Uitvlugt

  MONSTERS, by Ryan Campbell

  RAINFALL, by Kandrel

  WIT’S END, by Watts Martin

  THE DARKNESS OF DEAD STARS, by Dwale

  LASSIE, GO HOME!, by Jaleta Clegg

  REATTACHMENT, by Kevin Frane

  THE FURRY MEGAPACK®

  Edited by Huskyteer

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 2021 by Wildside Press LLC.

  The MEGAPACK® name is a registered trademark of Wildside Press LLC.

  Published by Wildside Press LLC.

  wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

  *

  “Pavlov’s House” was originally published in Strange Horizons, April 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Malcolm Cross. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Personal History” was originally published in ROAR 8, Bad Dog Books, 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Tim Susman. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Lunar Cavity” was originally published in The Furry Future, FurPlanet Productions, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Mary E. Lowd. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Going Forth of Uadjet” was originally published in Gods With Fur, FurPlanet Productions, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Frances Pauli. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “After The Last Bell’s Rung” was originally published in Claw the Way to Victory, Goal Publications, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Patrick “Bahu” Rochefort. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “As Below, So Above” was originally published in Gods With Fur, FurPlanet Productions, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Mut. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Language of Emotion” was originally published in Anthrozine, 2008. Copyright © 2008 by Bill Rogers. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “A Bag of Custard” was originally published in Asimov’s, February 1994. Copyright © 19994 by Michael H. Payne. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Deity Theory” was originally published in Gods With Fur, FurPlanet Productions, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by James L. Steele. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Drawn From Memory” was originally published in ROAR 3, Bad Dog Books, 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Renee Carter Hall. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Best Interests” was originally published in ROAR 4, Bad Dog Books, 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Whyte Yoté. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Clearance Papers” was originally published in ROAR 6, Bad Dog Books, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Fred Patten. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “In the Days of the Witch-Queens” was originally published in Donald Jacob Uitvlugt, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Donald Jacob Uitvlugt. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Monsters” was originally published in New Fables, Sofawolf Press, 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Ryan Campbell. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Rainfall,” was originally published in Abandoned Places, FurPlanet Productions, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Kandrel. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Wit’s End,” was originally published in Heat 13, Sofawolf Press, 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Watts Martin. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Darkness of Dead Stars” was originally published in The Furry Future, FurPlanet Productions, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Dwale. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Lassie, Go Home!” was originally published in Brain Candy, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Jaleta Clegg. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Reattachment” was originally published in New Fables, Sofawolf Press, 2008. Copyright © 2008 by Rikoshi Kisaragi. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  For those who aren’t familiar with it, Furry Fandom is a fandom that enjoys anthropomorphised animals, and enjoys a rich culture with costuming, songs, and (of course) literature. For this volume, we have enlisted the help of Huskyteer to assemble a selection of some of the best furry-themed stories in recent years.

  I first became aware of things Furry in the 1990s, when I was told at a science fiction convention that one of my science fiction novels, Rememory (nothing to do with the recent movie of the same name) had been labelled as a Furry book because it featured heroes who had been surgically altered to resemble cats. (Indeed, it features a whole culture of animalform humans, including villainous dogmen.) Another story set in the same universe appeared in Esther Friesner’s science fiction anthology, Alien Pregnant by Elvis, and a few years ago it was reprinted in a Furry anthology. So unwittingly I became a Furry author.

  Enjoy this selection of fantasy and science fiction stories featuring Furry themes and characters, selected by Huskyteer.

  —John Betancourt

  Publisher, Wildside Press LLC

  wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

  ABOUT THE SERIES

  Over the last few years, our MEGAPACK® ebook series has grown to be our most popular endeavor. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, “Who’s the editor?”

  The MEGAPACK® ebook series (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt (me), Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Shawn Garrett, Helen McGee, Bonner Menking, Sam Cooper, Helen McGee and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!)

  RECOMMEND A FAVORITE STORY?

  Do you know a great classic science fiction story, or have a favorite author whom you believe is perfect for the MEGAPACK® ebook series? We’d love your suggestions! You can email the publisher at [email protected].

  Note: we only consider stories that have already been professionally published. This is not a market for new works.

  TYPOS

  Unfortunately, as hard as we try, a few typos do slip through. We update our ebooks periodically, so make sure you have the current version (or download a fresh copy if it’s been sitting in your ebook reader for months.) It may have already been updated.

  If you spot a new typo, please let us know. We’ll fix it for everyone. You can email the publisher at [email protected].

  INTRODUCTION, by Huskyteer

  Furry is as much an aesthetic as a genre.

  Anthropomorphic fiction encompasses fantasy and sci-fi, the usual domiciles of animal people in fiction, but also horror, romance, historical, slice-of-life, noir—pretty much every category of fiction can be given a furry spin.

  Sometimes the animal nature of the characters is more pronounced, and integral to the plot, but just as often it is an ingredient added for flavour. Just as some people like to read tales about cowboys, or set in picturesque English villages, others happen to like their fiction seasoned with talking foxes (it’s very often foxes, for some reason) who walk on two legs and wear clothes.


  Outside the fandom, furry is known for visually arresting art, animation, and the work of those who make, and perform in, incredible fursuits. Our writers may attract less attention, but the work they produce is original, often touching, and explores through animals what it means to be human.

  From household pets who find a voice to alien societies via worlds very like our own, but with humans nowhere to be seen, you’ll find many variations on the furry theme in these pages. I’m thrilled to be bringing some of our fandom’s best writing, including the stories and authors I found inspiring when I was starting out as a furry writer, to a wider audience.

  PAVLOV’S HOUSE, by Malcolm Cross

  Once I was strong and believed, now I am small and unbelieving.

  —Anonymous German Soldier in Stalingrad, 1943

  The dream always starts the same way.

  A drop of rain seeps through the shattered rock-block beams that now serve as a ceiling, and falls into the child’s eye. The rain is deadlier than the tank shells that blew the upper storeys of the housing block to rubble, better able to penetrate the building and kill the inhabitants.

  This is how: A biowarfare spore, gengineered in a corporate lab and released during the Eurasian war, has survived for forty years in the water cycle. It has been dried to dust and picked up on the wind, laced the clouds, and fallen to earth over and over until, at last, the spore contacts human tissue. The spore’s cortex ruptures, spilling its gengineered payload.

  From the child’s eye the payload travels to the mother’s hand, and from her hand to all her children. Within twenty minutes they are all dead. Spasming, wheezing, kicking, dying. It takes the family longer to asphyxiate than it took the spores to produce fast and extreme anaphylactic shock, making every tissue bed in their bodies uncontrollably swell.

  Setzen, Eversen, Sokolai, Stolnik, Eberstetten, Ereli and Steinfelde stop drinking the rain water.

  They have been told they are immune, that the fast biowarfare agents are tuned to specifically kill human beings, and they are only dogs built to superficially resemble human beings. They are not sure whether or not to believe it, because the corporate labs that gengineered the spores, and later told the world that the spores were a safe way to end the war, were the same labs that later gengineered the dogs, and told the world that they and many similar products under development would be ethical, willing slaves. Not many people believe the claims Estian Incorporated used to make, these days.

  There is no water in the house except for the rain. When the revolution began, the water was cut off. By the time the brothers had barricaded themselves in the house—they call it that, though it’s actually a small apartment block—there were only rusty dregs in toilet cisterns. The water boilers had been siphoned dry, and the plumbing was so empty it did not gurgle.

  There is an empty bucket, lying beside the dead eldest child. On the second day the family in the basement had been drinking from it, and offered to share with the brothers, even if they were dogs, because there was a story in their holy book in which a woman gave water to a dog and was blessed for it. Other than that, the people of Tajikistan do not like dogs, and they do not like the brothers. The brothers had politely refused. After all, the family were civilians, and the brothers had been hired from their home, far away in the Middle American Corporate Preserve, to protect civilians.

  The buckets lasted the family until the third day, when the revolution ended. The family did not want to leave the building, after the revolution’s end, because the revolutionaries had lynched their father from a street light when he came out to see if it was safe to leave.

  Drip by drip the bucket fills with rainwater. Setzen watches the surface of the water dance, his mouth dry.

  He has spent ninety six hours killing people. He has not slept. His judgement is fuzzy. He and his brothers used their guns to kill the revolutionaries who came to remove them from the house. He and his brothers used their fists to kill the revolutionaries who came to remove them from the house. He and his brothers used their teeth, their feet, their knives, bricks and pipes torn from the walls, scavenged grenades, and a bottle of cleaning alcohol to kill the revolutionaries who came to remove them from the house.

  The reason the revolutionaries killed the family’s father is, he thinks, that bottle of cleaning alcohol. The brothers should not have set that revolutionary alight and thrown him from what was left of the third floor, but the revolutionaries did not fucking understand that they would never take the brothers out of the house, alive or dead, because the brothers were dogs who had been genetically engineered to kill human beings more quickly and efficiently than even the biowarfare agents could.

  But no matter how deadly Setzen is, he is also thirsty. He has not had any water for four days. He has not eaten in four days. Four sleepless days, in which he has killed fifty-seven people.

  Sixty-two, including the family, if he alone were responsible.

  The dream, up to this point, is factual memory. From here on it diverges with what really happened.

  Setzen is afraid of the water. He feels like he will piss himself, he feels like the fur all over his body has been set alight, he feels like a real dog—a four legged dog—that is about to be kicked. He is afraid.

  Setzen drinks the water. At first everything seems to be alright. He laps it up with his tongue, and his tongue does not swell. His heart does not race. His throat does not close up. He can breathe easily. The water tastes cool and fresh. For the first time in days he is not thirsty.

  The rest of the brothers join in, lapping at the rain, holding tin cans up to the drips, shuddering in fear of the spores until they have sipped enough water to feel the cool, clean sensation of water in their mouths. Their thirst is quenched, and they forget to be afraid. They decide, after guilty discussion, to move the family to the latrine corner of the basement, which has already been fouled, because the corpses are soiled with leaking shit and there is nowhere to bury them. They cannot throw the corpses from the third floor position until nightfall, because they will have to expose themselves to snipers.

  Brothers upstairs cry out that there is an incoming assault. It is time to fight. Setzen feels glad. He cannot fight the biowarfare spores, but he can fight the enemy.

  A bullet bores into the top of his head, splashing blood and pink-grey slime out of his caved in skull, and crashes into the poured concrete floor beneath Setzen.

  This really happened. The revolutionaries had taken control of the government and deployed the sympathetic remnants of the Tajik army’s special forces to kill the brothers with hypervelocity armour-piercing rifles—which could also penetrate crumbling rock-block beams, if properly aimed with wall penetrating radar. Setzen was really dead.

  But Setzen didn’t drink the water first, it was Sokolai. That is what is different, that is what makes it a dream, that is why Sokolai can dream of the fresh taste of the cold water, and why he dreams of Setzen’s head being broken through with agony so terrible that Sokolai cannot even dream it, only scream as he wakes up, scream and howl like an animal, as though he is experiencing unimaginable pain. Sokolai is not experiencing that.

  He is experiencing what it feels like to be powerless to help his brother Setzen. To be powerless to help himself.

  It hurts.

  * * * *

  There were four windows. Sokolai moved from one, to the next, to the next, to the next, all without exposing himself. A smooth roll of shoulder against paint, ducking beneath the sill, edging back into the room, back again. There was a good line of sight on the street from three of the windows, but the fourth one was on the other wall, showed him the neighbours.

  The neighbours weren’t going to attack. The neighbours were having a barbecue.

  The neighbours were out in their yard, under equatorial sunshine, throwing a garden party on gengineered green lawns that were soft underfoot, walking happily around talking to each other, and Sokolai was inside, alone, seeing broken glass everywhere it wasn’t.

>   There was a car in the street, and there were three people inside, and none of them were revolutionaries. Sokolai was sure of that. There weren’t any revolutionaries in the car, or even in the country. The three people in the car weren’t revolutionaries, but Sokolai had to check. Had to squint, had to stand there with his heart thumping and his tail slack and his fur on fire and a tight feeling in his guts until he had seen that one of them was black, and the other two were white and pale-pink coloured, too pale-pink to be Tajik. Tajiks were pale-pink-olive coloured, different enough that Sokolai could tell in full sunlight, similar enough that he couldn’t in shadow.

  Sokolai moved from window to window, and watched the car drive itself away, its three passengers unaware that they’d been watched by a gengineered monster with a hunting rifle locked in his gun safe. He’d tried to give the ammunition to one of his brothers to keep, but his hands had shaken and his mouth had grown too wet and hot, like he needed to pant the heat out of himself, and he hadn’t been able to bring himself to do it. So he had the rifle and the ammunition, and he knew, roughly, how to aim so the bullets would still hit the three passengers in their heads even after being knocked off course by breaking up on impact with the car roof.

  “Socks?” Ajay always called out softly, before knocking. The thumps at the door didn’t startle Sokolai. “Can I come in?”

  “Yeah.”

  Ajay came in. He had a tray with cookies and milk on it. “Heather and Limmy are picking out a movie. They wanted me to ask if you’d join us, but I knew you’d say no, so, I brought you a snack instead.” He smiled, beautifully.

  Sokolai knew, every time Ajay smiled, why Ajay and Sokolai’s foster-brother Michael had been in love for so long. Michael, whose family had adopted Sokolai after Estian Incorporated had been legally outmanoeuvred and forced into emancipating Sokolai rather than selling him into slavery, had always loved a pretty smile. Michael had, in fact, taught Sokolai how to smile when they were both eight years old.