The Midnight Train.

The Midnight Train.

VIR Day +56.

      The Guard’s Van of the long freight train passed over the crossing in front of him and the black and yellow crash gates retracted into their housings in the pavement and red and white cross arms swung upwards into their cowlings. Von Ackerman advanced the shifter to the first position and stepped on the accelerator, thumping across the double-tracked mainline of the Steinherring Regional Authority. For the people of Europe and Russia the war was over, but for the men like von Ackerman it was never over, even after they had died.

      The year was now nineteen-ninety-one plus change, and everyone was out celebrating with friends, sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. It was going to be interesting to watch how the next nine years would play out it terms of military engagements. Iraq and Iran were already trying to throw their weight around in the Middle East. The Americans weren’t particularly liked in that part of the world, and Europe was also on the list of places that weren’t liked by the countries in that region. Israel was on that list too, and in lieu of events between the Jewish and German people more than fifty years ago, Germany was backing the Israelis more than the United States could have ever dreamed. Israel was not only the most heavily Jewish country in the world, it was the third most heavily Furry country outside of Europe, and the surrounding countries that were all heavily Muslim hated both Jews and Furs. If there would be a huge conflict in that area, Europe and Israel would be the victors.

      But since conflict was not imminent in the area von Ackerman could at least relax for the time being. The speed limit on this road was ninety miles an hour and his speedometer told him he was doing ninety-seven. Up ahead was a high, hemispherical glow of soft yellow light. Steinherring, Germany at ten at night.

      Steinherring was a wheat town. It seemed like everyone in Steinherring owned a wheat farm, or worked on a wheat farm, or knew a hell of a lot about wheat; all forty-thousand inhabitants. The small town was founded in the early eighteen-hundreds by a wealthy man from somewhere in Austria and numbered a scant seventy people when it was established. When the first winter came that number dropped to about thirty people. Over the years the mildly hilly town gathered more and more people and a large variety of crops as well. Peanuts, corn, tomatoes, bell peppers, and soybeans were all tried, but nothing seemed to like the soil. Until one day a man bought a farm and planted a hundred acres of wheat. The wheat took to the soil very readily.

      With people not being able to grow anything else around him, this man soon acquired a large amount of farms in Steinherring and offered work to the people who had been unable to grow anything else, and he was even generous enough to let the people keep their farms under their own name. The man’s name was Mathis Steinherring, and his family name was eventually given to the town that he had saved.

      Eventually Steinherring numbered ten-thousand people, and back then that was big enough for a railroad to come to the town, but rather than wait for a railroad to be built from afar, the inhabitants decided to build one of their own. The Steinherring Regional Authority started in eighteen-seventy with six miles of track, one locomotive, and three wagons for hauling grain. By eighteen-eighty this had grown to over six-hundred miles of track, two-hundred locomotives, and three-thousand wagons for hauling grain. By nineteen-hundred, track mileage was at two-thousand miles, extending from Steinherring to Hamburg and all points in between. Only in nineteen-ten did another railroad reach into Steinherring, the JC&H, and back then the JC&H was just a fledgling industrial switching railroad.

      By the time he was around, World War Two was long over, but von Ackerman remembered buildings that hadn’t been knocked down yet that were riddled with old bullet holes and charred wood frames. Steinherring had been bombed to hell and back by Avro Lancaster and Consolidated Liberator bombers from nineteen-forty-two onward to the very last day of the war in Europe, and with good reason. Being Germany’s breadbasket, destroying Steinherring’s productivity would systematically starve the Wehrmacht into submission, and it did. By the end of the war, Steinherring’s production had plummeted seventy-six percent, and only now was it back up to full capacity.

      Now with a new war over, Steinherring was Europe’s breadbasket, and even more so Russia’s breadbasket as they tried to pick themselves up from the thirty years of civil war that had crippled the huge country. Steinherring was no longer just a wheat town; it was a staging zone for giant supply trains going to Russia’s devastated farmlands. With any luck the Russians would be able to feed themselves again in a decade, but even then there would be a hell of a lot of luck involved in getting the country back to being stable. The new capitalist government was having problems with the rest of the planet, and they weren’t sure how to solve them.

      The road paralleled the tracks for about ten miles and then it made a wide sweep to the south towards Munich. The tracks stayed straight and turned into a huge classification yard that could hold no fewer than a hundred different trains at a time. Here, trains were pulled apart and put back together and turned around and refueled and new crew went on shift and old crews came off shift, there were as many as twenty trains in each direction every day one after another every hour on the hour. The JC&H interchanged with the SRA here, and its four tracked mainline to Munich crossed the SRA main about two miles out of the west side of the yard. Foxy Transit ran four high speed passenger trains through Steinherring on their twin track main that crossed the JC&H and SRA mains six miles out of the west side of the yard.

      After the road curved away from the tracks it curved back in and resumed its parallel course with them until it reached little Steinherring itself, nestled into a small valley. It was a one road town. The twin tracks of the SRA split off from each other and sandwiched the main drag and downtown businesses for three miles, so there was an inordinate amount of railroad crossings in the area. The permanent residences were up above the downtown area on the hills. He slowed down to thirty miles per hour and burbled through town, all the stop-lights blinking yellow at him, the street signs illuminated, and neon lights on bar signs mixing together into a soup. Titan’s Public House loomed up ahead, and he briefly considered stopping in for a drink, but the pub wasn’t his destination.

      The tiny motel came up on his left two blocks later. He nosed the car into the lot and slotted himself into a spot next to an old beat up sedan. He shut the car down and stretched himself out in the lot. He looked around for a minute and assured himself that he was alone in the night time stillness.

      He was dressed in dark grey BDUs, black boots, and an eight-point cap. His cap was drawn low like it was supposed to be and it had a gold oak leaf in the precise dead-center of the front panel. He had two more on his collar, and his soft ones were on his shoulders below his German flags. His huge cast was now long gone and his leg felt better than it had even before he had broken it in that damn hole. Under his left armpit was his trusty USP .45 in its holster, cleaned, polished, cocked, and locked. It had gotten some work done while he was recovering. The grip had been lengthened slightly as had the magazines, which now held fourteen-rounds instead of twelve. It was a little longer than standard, and the grip had been fattened up for his huge hands. The weapon had been beefed-up to cope with the rough and tumble world that he was accustomed to operating in.

      The motel was two-stories tall and made entirely of wood. It had seen better days. It had been painted blue and white when he was a child, but all that was left of the paint scheme now was a few random strips of paint that hadn’t chipped off quite yet. The stairs up to the front deck had been straight and neat at one point but now sagged and creaked and threatened to split in two any time any weight was put on them. The windows were simple one-pane things from the fifties that bled heat during the winter and sucked heat during the summer. But it was Steinherring’s only accommodation to weary travelers who wanted a good night’s sleep.

      He locked the doors and headed inside. The door squeaked loudly against its hinges, threatening to wake up everyone in the place. He held his breath. After a few moments he started breathing again. No one came out to see who had walked into the place, and that confirmed a little theory of his. Benson, the man who now owned the place, slept like a rock after the hour of nine PM. He shut the door as quietly as was possible and padded across the bare wood floor in his thick-soled boots to the stairs that led up to the second floor.

      These stairs squeaked no matter how light you were or where you stepped on them. They probably squeaked in anticipation of weight be placed on them. So he bounded up them two at a time and arrived at the head a couple of seconds later.

      He walked down the dark hallway to a door marked with a big number six; it had dim, yellow light coming from under it. He raised his hand to knock but withdrew it when the yellow light was blocked off completely by a pair of shadows that merged into one collective. There were a series of metal-on-metal sounds and a loud clunk as the dead-bolt was withdrawn and the door swung inward, away from him.

      “Hallo, Major,” she said.

Second in Command Leona F. Hughes was tall for a female. She stood at six feet three inches to the top of her skull and six feet nine inches to the tips of her ears. That and her very thick soled boots clocked her in at just shy of seven feet tall, overall. But that was not the circumstance as of this moment.

      She stood on the balls of her feet as she often did in private, scantily dressed in a crimson red bathrobe with a band of pink fabric around her waist. Standing only on the balls of her feet she stood a mere five feet seven inches to the tips of her ears, an overall less intimidating stance matched by the gorgeous tangerine orange fur that covered her perfectly formed body. She tugged at her terra cotta brown hair with a brush in one of her black hands, a seasonal abnormality, as the black stockings on her legs and fore-arms only appeared during the winter as the color black. During the rest of the year those stockings would be either light-brown or just as tangerine as the rest of her body.

      “Hallo, ma’am,” he said.

      She stepped backwards into the room, hiding herself behind the door.

      “Please come in.”

      Von Ackerman had his cap off and he stepped into the room. It was a small, square space of about two-hundred-twenty-five square feet with a small, rectangular space blocked off for the bathroom. The ceiling was a little low. The walls were all painted a subtle yellow color, the floor was carpeted with a thick area rug the size of Manhattan, and there was a single lamp on a night stand by the bed casting dim, yellow light. The room had a window looking out over the street. The room was cold. Overall it was a cozy little place, nearly perfect for such a beautiful woman.

      She shut the door and did up all of the locks,” I see you’re in uniform already.”

      “Yes, ma’am.”

      “You know you don’t get back on duty for another two weeks, right?”

      “Yes, ma’am.”

      “You know you don’t have to call me ‘ma’am’ when I’m not in uniform, right?”

      “No, ma’am.”

      “Then stop calling me ‘ma’am.’ You’re starting to make me feel old.”

      Von Ackerman didn’t say anything.

      “From now on,” she said,” you and I are going to be on a first name basis. I don’t want you calling me anything but Leona from this point onward, and I won’t call you anything but Johan from now on.”

      “Understood.”

      “And I want you take off that damned military hat of yours,” she said,” When we’re talking I don’t want you even thinking like a soldier. You and I are going to be frank with each other. We’re using plain language, Johan. I’m a big girl. A little cursing isn’t going to upset me.”

      “Okay.”

      Leona smiled,” You see? You’re making progress already.”

      “I aim to please.”

      He took a seat on the edge of the bed and began tugging at his long, black whiskers. Leona had learned in the past few weeks that this was a sign of general outward displeasure. It was obvious that he didn’t fully understand why he was here in the same room with a woman other than his mate.

      “Something bothering you?”

      “I wish I was able to understand why I was here, Leona,” he said,” I’ve only just met you, and you’re already getting more scantily clothed by the day. I don’t mean any offence, but I would like to know the real reason why I am here.”

      “Has this been a reoccurring thought?”

      Yes, it has.”

      The kid was pretty quick.

      The truth was that Leona didn’t really know why she brought the Major to her room, but she did know that there was a reason behind it.

      “If,” he said,” it is a sexual reason; I have good news and bad news.”

      How in the hell had he come to such an accurate conclusion so rapidly? Leona was surprised. It was a little unsettling having a junior officer see through her like see wasn’t even there. But then again she had made him come to a hotel in his home town and had answered the door in a somewhat revealing bathrobe. What else had he observed that might have given him the impression that sex might be awaiting him behind door number six?

      “Good news first, then.”

      Johan smiled a cool, neutral smile,” the good news is that my lady and I share an open relationship.”

      Leona was surprised. The woman she knew only as Foxee was small and vulnerable and undoubtedly needy. And Johan and this Foxee had a daughter, a four year old little girl, all cuteness and sunbeams. If Leona was the mate of this big, strong wolf, she would have kept him close at all times to protect her and her baby, and no other woman would be allowed in the same room with him, not even under supervision.

      “And the bad news?”

      Johan smiled a cool, neutral smile again,” Foxee is going to be so jealous. She’s always wanted to take a run on you, and now here I am about to do that and she won’t be here to watch. Frankly, I’m flattered that you’d want to do this.”

      This was not how she had thought this would blow over at all. She had counted on him being outraged at the mere idea and that he would go into a big, macho shake-your-fist-in-the-air type speech about his duty and commitment as a man to his mate. She hadn’t even considered that this man might be in a casual, open relationship. Never in a million years would that thought have crossed her mind.

      Even so, it was probably inevitable that this moment had come. So much sexual tension could be built up between two Furs in a few days let alone a few weeks. Johan was a wolf, big, strong, and aggressive with a healthy alpha-male mentality factory installed. Leona was a fox, small, delicate, and aggressive in her own way with the need to make babies factory installed with a maximum setting. This probably would have developed over time anyway, regardless of the Major’s relationship with his mate, and her own Ivan had been gone for the better part of fifteen years, a victim of his own countrymen during the fighting in Murmansk. This was probably for the better of both of them.

      Johan stood up and wrapped his arms around her waist; it was sort of an awkward position for him, being more than seven feet tall, but he made it work and held her as close as he dared. She was forty years old, and he had just recently turned twenty-one. All grown up, not teenagers. They didn’t rush, didn’t fumble, they took their time. It was a casual, affectionate embrace that she wanted to last forever. He was so warm. She felt like if it ended the world would end with it.

      But it didn’t. The world stayed just how it was, and she still felt warm. They sat down on the bed and she began unbuttoning his BDU top. She got it off after all the buttons were undone, and she began tugging at the black shirt he was wearing underneath it. He helped her by undoing his big leather belt and it popped up out of his waistband with vigor. She stopped for a second and he knew she had found the parallel shrapnel scars on his right peck.

      “Bi-pod legs,” he said,” from my rifle in Stalin- …Volgograd.”

      She rubbed her hand on the two bare patches of flesh where new, white fur was just starting to grow back as soft peach fuzz.

      “How did your bi-pod do this?”

      “I was reloading,” he said,” on the move with an HVI. I had been shifting from position to position for a few hours, taking out all the visible targets I could see. The Reds didn’t really like that very much. So they stopped sending in guys with SVDs and called in an artillery barrage on the building I was getting out of.”

      He ran his own hand along the two scars once. The one on the right was about four inches long. The one on the left was close to six inches long.

      “Big one-fifty-two guns,” he said,” shell hit the building at the wrong time, blew up about twenty feet in front of me; blew a hole in the wall about twelve-feet around. The concussion caused my rifle to basically vaporize, or so it seemed. It just sort of fell apart and various pieces went all over the place.”

      He patted his right bicep.

      “Fore-stock broke my arm,” he said,” hurt like hell. My left hand should have gotten cut off; I was holding a metal magazine for Christ’s sake. Anyway, I was holding the gun just right and the bi-pod slammed into my chest. It sort of burned its way into it and got stuck. I guess it was hot enough that the Russian doctors had to cut it out because it had cauterized the wound and was still imbedded.”

      He looked down at her, legs tucked under herself; hand on his chest, eyes locked on the two long pink shapes. He reached over with his left hand and lifted her chin so he could see her eyes. Her eyes locked on his and she smiled her cute vixen smile. He kissed her. It lasted for a minute or two. They came up for air and she went for the thick strip of pink that was holding her robe on.

      “No, no, no,” he said,” let me.”

      He took a hold of her hands and held them for a second. They were fairly small and delicate. He liked them a lot. He rested them down on her legs and went for the little knot in the dead-center of the pink-strip.

      She smiled, said,” is that your thing? Undressing a woman?”

      He smiled back and said,” I like to do the work whenever I can, it keeps things fun for me, plus it’s one of my most favorite things in the world.”

      The robe was thicker than it looked from the outside. It was only cotton but it was soft and fuzzy like velvet. He got it opened a little and she got a jump on him. No sooner was he was down on his back than he was being swallowed whole by the big red robe and smothered in the small Leona’s wet kisses. It was five minutes before he saw the dim light from the lamp on the nightstand, and when he did it was when the beautiful woman above him needed to come up for air. She was sitting on his chest.

      The robe had fallen open even more and revealed a pink bra that covered the whole of her breasts, all lace, cotton, and elastic. He looked along the length of her belly, bottom to top, up into her blue eyes. There was trust there which was a good sign.

      He stretched his hand up, rubbing up her belly. She cooed a little deeper than he figured necessary, but she wasn’t necessarily a typical woman. She took his hand in hers and hauled it up to her shoulder. He reached around her with his other hand and found her bra strap, which spanned a cleft back there like it was a little bridge. Her robe fell off of her shoulders and parachuted down, landing across his legs. He found the little clasp and the bra fell forward and on to his neck.

      They were a pretty fantastic sight. She was a thirty-three percenter, or a member of the third of all anthros that didn’t have exposed sex organs. He was a thirty-three percenter himself, and he actually liked women who were thirty-three percenters over the other sixty-six percent because it added a little fun on the part of the woman.

      She smiled at him, said,” Like what you see?”

      “I love what I see.”

      She giggled at him. For being such a hardass, she was very cute.

      “Seems fair now,” she said,” I got your shirt off, I guess you couldn’t wait to see my chest either.”

      “Well,” he admitted,” I’ve been known to like a big, squishy breast as much as the next guy, but I’m usually nice to them.”

      She giggled again and got off of his chest. It didn’t make much sense to her to make love while half-clothed so she slid off of the bed and to the floor and began taking his boots off. She tugged the laces out of them at the top where he had bloused his pants and struggled with the insane knots for a minute or two, but she managed to get them undone and she ripped them off.

      “You wear toe-socks?” She asked, raising an eyebrow at the offending molted brown cloth items.

      “Can’t get blisters between your toes in toe-socks,” he said,” and they’re pretty damn comfortable.”

      “PX for sure.”

      “Only a Mark; couldn’t resist.”

      She removed the socks, holding her breath, but she was surprised that his feet didn’t smell. He must have had really good habits regarding personal hygiene, which was a plus. The room was suddenly cold now that her robe was off. She wanted to be held in his arms again. She must have communicated it subliminally because he reached down to her and placed his hands on her shoulders. It was a simple gesture.

      She stood back up and sat on the bed next to him and he wrapped his arms around her. She felt at home with this man. If the world ended right now, she wouldn’t care a bit because she felt totally content and safe right where she was, on the edge of the bed with Johan next to her. He kissed her forehead.

      She tugged on his belt. If she was going to be in nothing but her panties than he was going to be in nothing but his boxers. She got the belt out of the loops and briefly considered using it as a whip, but ultimately, if he was going to be this nice to her, she figured she should be nice to him. With any luck he had a button-up fly on his BDU bottoms, and sure enough he did. She struggled with the first button, but after that all the other ones were loose enough for her to just sort of wiggle them around and out of their slots. Getting his pants off was going to be a problem. He was a really big guy.

      That’s when Johan helped her by raising himself up a little. He raised his butt a few inches off the bed just long enough for her to get his BDUs around his mid-thigh, and from there it was just a matter of persistent tugging and nudging. Her arms weren’t long enough so they wound up around his knees. She didn’t want to leave his arms and his warmth, so that would have to be good enough for now.

      His boxers were a fairly generic black with white pattern. They were unimpressive except for the growing bulge between his thighs. This was going to be fun.

      It was his turn to do a little undressing, and all that she was wearing now where her pink panties. With his arms still around her, he rocked back on to his back and turned himself towards her. She liked that a bit and chuckled a little at him. He was now on his side lying along her flank with his left hand spread out on her belly. His chest was on-line with hers, but because he was so tall her head was under his chin. He was gently chewing on her ear, like he liked to do with Foxee. He wasn’t sure what it was about vixen ears, but they were fun to munch on when he was bored.

      It was by good nature that he began working his hand on her belly like he was polishing a car. Rubbing a vixen’s belly was something he had learned a long time ago from Dominique. Dom was not known to be particularly physical with people, male or female, and she was hardly ever impressed by physical forms of pleasure, but Johan remembered her going crazy over a casual rendezvous at his house. It was Christmas, and Dom had come over with some of her girlfriends, meaning friends that were also female, for a party and Johan’s mildly famous ham. Foxee showed off the newest addition to the von Ackerman residence, a tiny baby fox no bigger than a loaf of bread, they ate the aforementioned ham, and Dom and her cadre of women voted to crash at Johan’s place for the night. They gathered in the living room and began watching movies.

      As the night rolled on, they began to peel off and go to their rooms until the last ones still awake were Dom and Johan, lying together on the couch still watching a non-stop, action-packed thrill-ride movie about cops who, apparently, didn’t have to do any paperwork. It was by accident that Johan’s hand draped over her flank and his nervous energy caused him to start an incessant rubbing of her belly right under her navel. He didn’t even realize that he was doing anything, and when he reached for the remote to stop the movie, she asked him why he had stopped.

      That was as close as he had ever come to making love to his adopted sister, which probably would have ended in a lawsuit had it come to that, but he had learned a new trick that night. He was now applying what he had learned on that night to this situation, with a different vixen, but the result was just the same. Leona’s eyes were only half-open, her breathing was deep, and she sighed occasionally.

      It was now time to kick it up a notch or two. He dropped his hand down off her belly and cupped it over her vulva. He didn’t rush this step; it was too important that the lady enjoyed it. This particular woman was enjoying quite a bit, and she helped him remove her pink panties. Her legs were long, sleek, and sexy like they were supposed to be and they were smooth like velvet. Getting the offending item off of her gorgeous body involved a lot of moving her legs and helping in ways that meant he was able to touch and hold them in his hands.

      The offending panties dropped to the floor on top of his boots and socks. As a vixen, she was now sufficiently aroused for penetration, but Johan didn’t like rushing into it. He knew that rushing it usually ended in him finishing first, the woman wallowing in emotional limbo for a while, and him feeling guilty for it all. What he did next was something that his Foxee, who liked long sessions that lasted for an hour or more, had shown him after a stint with a woman named Tammy.

      He shifted his position from the edge of the bed, lifted Leona’s legs over his shoulders, and placed his muzzle so he could lick her soft, pink vulva.

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      Leona cried out loud and long and the room began to shake as his buried himself deep within her. The world was coming to an end in a flash of red and white light, a deafening roar, the piercing shrill of air being expelled through a tube, and the loud agony of steel on steel. Time seemed to slow down for the longest of moments as he drained his seminal vesicles into her and contributed his share of what could be a child in the next nine months. The windows rattled and the single caged bulb hung from a wire in the ceiling swayed from side to side. They waited whole minutes for the fire to come and consume them.

      The fire never came to get them. The noise and vibrations faded away as they collapsed into each other and fell on to the bed in a hopeless tangle of limbs, hair, and love. The sleep that came was long, warm, and peaceful and it was well spent. Leona curled up into a ball in Johan’s arms and pressed herself into him as hard as she could and he held her sweetly around her waist. What came was uninterrupted.