October 19th, 2052 — Part 3: Gavin Oeste, age 35

     The warden must have noticed the uncertainty in Gavin’s eyes, because he smiled and said: “Don’t worry, you can’t even feel them. On the way in.”
     The feline spat on his own cock—Gavin was amazed he was able to do so over that gut—and dispersed the saliva around his glans with a paw. He aligned the tapered head with the canine’s entrance, already slick with spit, and pressed forward without so much as a finger to prepare him. Though those meaty fingers may have in fact been girthier than his cock. 
     The tiger hadn’t lied: the barbs were hardly noticeable at first. But he wasn’t even all the way in yet, and he hadn’t yet begun to thrust.
     Gavin fought back tears—tears that came not because of the insignificant pain (which was somewhat dulled by the drugs anyway), but rather tears of mourning. He cried for the death of his pride, just as the tiger had wanted. The warden pushed himself in slowly and steadily, with a grace rarely afforded to persons in Gavin’s position.
     The tiger hilted, and growled. He leaned forward, pressing himself against Gavin’s chest. The cat’s hot breath blew like steam in the wolf’s face, smelling faintly of steak and eggs. The warden placed his hands on Gavin’s shoulders and pushed, lifting himself up. He opened his eyes and started into his prisoner’s. His cheek twitched into what could have been mistaken for a half smile. And then he began to pull out.
     Gavin thought that maybe, in another life, he might learn to enjoy it. But not here. Not now. He understood now why felines rarely mated outside of their taxonomic family. His hands grasped at the air, stretching their leather cuffs, longing to dig into the tiger’s flesh with their useless, capped claws.
     “It’ll stop hurting soon. Not that it matters, anyway.”
     It didn’t hurt, really. They weren’t nearly as sharp as they looked. Gavin supposed that if he had had a persistent itch deep within his rectum, a tiger’s cock would be the perfect cure. But he didn’t, so instead it just served as an added inconvenience to his unfortunate predicament. Still, he wondered if he might be bleeding. The feline thrust in again.
     The wolf’s stifled sobs came out only in short, staggered breaths. The tiger shushed him. Gavin snarled back. Some part of him tried in vain to be grateful that at least he had gotten one last good fuck before they killed him, but the part that seethed with rage was much louder. He would fucking kill this tiger. If only he could get a foot loose… If only he could get to that gun…
     “I wish I could say it would be over soon, but it hasn’t even begun yet.” The warden slowly pulled out once more. The wolf’s leg muscles tensed at the sandpapery feeling deep inside him. And then the tiger thrusted again. He roared, loud enough to shake the doors and allegedly soundproof glass. Loud enough that the whole damned prison must have heard it. But no one could do anything—nor would they try. Non-disclosure agreements threatened their livelihoods and, for some, their lives.
     Breathing heavily, the tiger’s eyes popped open, embarrassed, breaking his cool, calm demeanor for the first time in the many years Gavin had known him. The cat stood up, swallowed, and licked his lips. 
	Did he cum already?
	The warden withdrew his cock sluggishly, until it was all the way out. It came to rest between the wolf’s testicles, continuing to squirt cum all over the canine’s swollen sheath and heaving stomach.
     Gavin almost began to laugh. The warden cleared his throat. He removed the wolf’s left sock angrily and began wiping his cock clean, careful to do so from the tip to the shaft as to not catch his barbs on the wooly fabric. Balling the sock up, he then tossed it at Gavin, where it landed in a pool of feline semen on his belly. The warden quietly walked over to the gurney where his clothes sat and retrieved his walkie-talkie. He turned a dial and then pressed a button that produced a blip!.
     “We’re ready,” he said, then released the button with a skzzt! and tossed the device back onto the gurney. He then fished around in his pants pockets and pulled out a bulky pair of safety goggles that were tinted a deep purple, like the hood of a welder. He put them on and tightened the straps. The warden stood facing Gavin, his arms crossed and his cock not quite flaccid yet. It didn’t appear as if he was looking at the wolf, but it was hard to tell behind those goggles. 
     It was then that the Gavin heard some kind of ungulate walking towards the door—hoping to God that it was that young buck from earlier that had guided him to his death. Perhaps the boy would take pity on him. Report his superior and help him get the hell out of there. A long shot, but perhaps.
     But as the clopping hoofsteps drew closer, he realized they were much heavier and denser than the boy’s had been. He decided with the weight and stride, and the distinct sound, it had to be a horse—or an equine of some kind. A donkey, maybe. Mule, less likely. Zebras were rare around these parts, but he had known a few nonetheless.
     But he had known none of these to work at the prison, not in all the twelve years he had been there—though their bulk and stature would have made them the perfect material for a prison guard. And, now that he could hear them better, it sounded instead like two sets of equine hooves, marching down the hall in uncanny tandem. 
     The hoofsteps stopped and the doors swung open, but the blinding light that once burned brightly on the other side had been since replaced by a black void that seeped into the room in creeping tendrils. Tendrils of dark smoke that seemed not only to be a solid, impossible black, but that also seemed to leech the light out of the space around them. Looking directly at them made Gavin’s retinas quiver and unleashed a whining sound in his head, like tinnitus but somehow deeper. They appeared to be sniffing the air and—could it be?—searching for something. Something nearby. 
     The lights above him flickered, as if he had finally graduated from an exploitative rape-revenge film from the seventies to your average eighties B-horror movie. The temperature in the already cold room dropped considerably. 
     A curious plume of obsidian vapor caught sight of him. He watched in terror as it looked at him, though the very sight of the incredible thing jackhammered his brain and blurred his vision. It was as if he was staring at something that couldn’t possibly exist, yet was still appearing before his very eyes. He closed his eyes and the pain dulled greatly, but they shot open again when the thing—it really was the only word he could find to describe it—grazed against the fur on the sole of his naked left foot. It stopped to sniff the air again for a second, leeching the heat from his body the same way it seemed to do to the light around it. Then, it abruptly wrapped itself around his ankle, inducing a horrid chill that snuck up his leg and settled somewhere in his taint. Not long after making contact, his flesh was already cracked and frostbitten from its touch.
     From the other side of the doorframe, a booming voice stated: This one will do.
     Another tendril reached out and took hold of his right leg, and then both of his arms, as if the leather restraints weren’t going to be enough to hold him down. His body was frigid, rigid, yet trembling. Then, slowly, the source of the hoofsteps entered the room.
     The creature had the vague appearance of a horse—but a horse that had gone through some sort of horrific transformation. It was much larger than any horse he had seen before—its snout was nearly twice as long yet just as narrow. But this horse moved unnaturally, as if it were made to walk on four legs, and it was doing just that. Its haunches were round and wide; veiny and covered in gentle white down that almost glowed lavender in the flickering fluorescent light. Where its hands should have been were a second set of hooves (Four fucking hooves! Gavin exclaimed to himself), and its neck appeared to be bent at an uncomfortable angle, as if it were constantly craning to bray in terror at its own horrific appearance. Its eyes were blank and thoughtless—two gaunt black holes to top off its repulsive face. However, they seemed to shine scarlet when the lights flickered off.
     Sprouted from its forehead was a single horn—like a cross between the tusk of a narwhal and a fish hook—the slightly curved ivory sporting a spiral pattern from its base to its tip, and wielding a jagged barb just a few inches below its sharp point.
     I’m hungry, the thing said. Or, rather, thought. Its mouth didn’t move in the slightest. Gavin heard this not with his ears but rather felt it resonating somewhere in his skull, with the echoes bouncing around in his chest cavity like the bass in a concert hall. For a second, Gavin thought he saw the flick of a black, serpentine tongue sniffing the air in the room. But it had to be his imagination. Or one of those damned smoke monsters.
     I’m hungry, the thing repeated with a snarl as its ears flattened back against its head. Its voice was somehow louder this time.
     An ear twitched as it smiled—the fucking thing smiled at him—and the wolf could see that it didn’t have broad, flat teeth like a horse does, but sharp, gnarled fangs that appeared to be caked in dried blood and smelled inherently of death.
     The tiger knew the creature’s name: Srätherøk. No one at the prison or even higher up had ever told him this, let alone the creature itself, yet something etched it upon his soul the first time he encountered the beast. But no one he knew had never spoken it aloud, for fear of invoking its wrath. He never learned, however, the name of its species. That was reserved for the suits in the Department of Defense.
     There was a smell in the room, one that neither Gavin nor the warden could name. The warden was always reminded of the time as child that he found a dead robin that had hit the window and fallen into his mother’s gardenia patch. Its beak had been smashed in and bloody; its eyes milky white, crawling with ants, and staring into infinity. The scent of fresh rot and old flowers. Sick and sweet at the same time. Toxic nostalgia. Why did it have to die, mommy? he had asked. He understood the answer to that question now better than ever.
     As the horse-thing entered the room, it seemed to withdraw the smoke that surrounded it. Almost all of the mist quickly retreated to its source (it seemed to have been coming from the thing’s eyes) except for the four tentacles that held tightly onto Gavin’s limbs. They remained firmly in place.
     Yes, this one will do, the thing reiterated, and approached the trembling wolf. It stopped, briefly, and examined the canine’s ruined tailhole and matted stomach. A serpentine tongue flicked rapidly in and out of its mouth, smelling the wolf—or rather, the mess the tiger had left on him. It hadn’t been his imagination, after all. It did have a fucking snake tongue.