Big Bad

Katie walks up the street from the bus stop to the library. The bus was running late, after her shift at the coffee shop, and the library will close soon. She could have left it until her day off, but then she’d have to plan her whole day off around returning the books, and it was on the way home — just quick stop, then back on the next bus. But it’s late, now, and it’s getting dark. She can feel her tail tucking between her legs as she walks, broadcasting NERVOUS to everyone who might be watching.

The library steps beckon, promise of respite from anxiety. She hurries her steps a little, too-acutely aware of noises behind her and movements in her periphery which she rationally knows are harmless nothings. Of the four figures to the side of the library steps, smoking. Sheepgirls.

Not girls, she thinks. The patronising diminuitive girl shies from application to them, like a candle shies from a blowtorch. Not like Katie, shuffling through an unconvincing pretense of lupine adulthood; these are not girls in their matching biker jackets.

One grey-muzzled butch ewe, slab-bellied, taking up space in the uncompromisingly automatic way Katie associates with men. Not tall, but wide. One a gym-muscled young turk, taller, scowl and swagger as if she’s apprenticed herself to the elder’s performance of identity, but not yet fully bloomed into the confidence of her own presence. One sharply feminine, hairsprayed just so, eyeliner the wings of a stooping raptor, the last thing to see before you die in her claws. A second elder, laugh lines and the soft colour-leachedness of middle age, holding herself at perfect ease.

A low laugh from one of them; the click of a lighter.

Katie holds the strap of her bag tight enough she can feel the individual fibres of the weave stinging her skin.

She gets her foot onto the first step.

“Hey, Big Bad,” one of the sheepgirls says, and Katie starts so badly she stumbles and nearly falls on her face; the wide butch dives forward and catches her with an arm under her chest, knocking the air out of her.

“Careful,” the ewe says, setting her back on her feet. “Careful.”

Katie is excruciatingly aware that she keeps hold of Katie’s arm.

“Yeah, Big Bad,” the young turk says. “Someone could get hurt.”

The air feels very thick.

“I’m just going to the library,” Katie says in a very thin breathless voice that yells SCARED.

The wide butch looks theatrically all around, still holding Katie’s arm. “This library?” she drawls.

“Yes,” Katie says.

“Well, you picked a good direction to walk for this library.” A wide, blunt-toothed smile makes Katie want to hide her throat. “Well done.”

“My arm,” Katie says, and can’t even hear herself, it comes out of her with so little force, barely aspirated.

“Met any Red Riding Hoods lately?” the young turk says in a lazily menacing way, and when the wide butch pushes her back off the bottom step, Katie expects to collide with the younger butch; but instead it’s the other elder who absorbs Katie’s slight and trembling impact, and winds an arm around her, Katie’s throat in the crook of her elbow, pulse fluttering against muscle each side, held very gently but with the total menace of matter-of-fact confidence.

The young turk tries to take Katie’s bag, and absurdly, that’s what makes her panic instead of sticky-slow tarpit fear. “No,” Katie says, clinging to the strap. “No. No.”

“Relax, Big Bad,” the sheepgirl says, but Katie can’t.

“They’re library books,” she says shrilly. “I have to return them. They’re library books—” and the wide butch puts finger and thumb firmly on each of Katie’s cheeks and squishes her face, not painfully — joltingly ridiculous. Childish. The kind of thing you do to a child. Katie shakes, shrunk even further, belittled.

“Breathe,” she orders, and Katie wants to, she wants to. “The books will make it back to the library.”

Belly-tightening deliberate menace, in that specificity.

“I told you to breathe,” the ewe adds, as if Katie is annoying her. “I expect you to do as you’re told,” and leans in as if to say something close and terrifying, breath hot on Katie’s securely trapped face. “Colour?” she says, growly low.

Katie tries to make herself breathe, gulping like a suffocating fish. “Green?”

Bar-pupilled eyes narrow. “You don’t look it, Kate.” She lightly taps the other elder’s shoulder; the arm around Katie’s neck unwinds, the easy, confident hand settling instead on Katie’s sternum, pulling her lightly back into the warm body behind her.

Katie takes a breath. “Green,” she wobbles out, barely audible.

The wide butch looks her over, then jerks her head. The other elder simply moves her, with the outward effortless grace and actual muscle of a ballet lift, and Katie’s feet don’t touch down for several strides — half a dozen at least of her own, and she’s walked along by the grip on her, like a scruffed puppy. Her bag’s been snaked away in the whirl, dangling in the young turk’s grip. The femme trots smoothly, overtaking them to the parking lot, smoothly opening the side of a beat-up panel van and slipping away to hop in the driver’s seat. The other elder spins Katie on the spot, and she and the wide butch catch her shoulders; the young turk snatches her ankles up away from the ground; and she’s in the back of the van.

The young turk slides the side door shut from outside, and hops in the passenger side. It’s all taken astonishingly few seconds; Katie dizzily wonders if they rehearsed it, the smooth teamwork. Have they done this before? How many times have they done this before? Who has been here before her, on their back in the rear of the van, the other elder holding their wrists down, the wide butch straddling their thighs to stop them kicking?

Katie is too stunned to kick. It occurs to her that she could, in principle, scream; she hesitantly opens her mouth.

“I don’t think so,” the wide butch says cheerily, immediately shoving fingers in.

It occurs to Katie, in a faint, academic, theoretical way, that she could bite them. She looks up at the wide, blunt, menacing smile.

She doesn’t bite.

They unload her with equal well-oiled efficiency at the other end of a short drive, the femme ewe’s innocuous elbow-dangling handbag turning out to be both empty and just the size to pull over Katie’s head to block her sight; she’s manhandled into a chair, the bag comes off, and her head’s pulled back firmly by a fistful of her mane.

“So, Big Bad,” says the young turk. “I hear animals like you go around looking for sheep to eat.”

Katie shakes her head — well, forgets and tries to shake her head, rattling herself and yanking at her scalp with the abortive side-to-side jerk of it.

“No?” the young turk says sceptically.

“I was just going to the library,” Katie whimpers. She can feel tears beading fatly on her lashes.

“Shame for you,” the young turk says, and leers. “Tina might have voted to let you go, if you blew her house down.”

The femme hangs off her shoulder, and gives Katie an evil lipstick smile the colour of a papercut. “Guess we won’t,” she says.

“Are you going to hurt me?” Katie says.

“I don’t like hurting girls.” Tina pouts for a second. “…But I like to watch people who do!”

“Not if you’re good,” the wide butch says, and Katie swallows.

“I’m going to split you open on my cock,” the young turk says, looking at her steadily, and it’s the most authentically in-her-skin she’s been the whole time, and Katie whimpers.

The other elder, gentle and matter-of-fact behind her, says, “Yes.”

They let Katie sit with that for a few long seconds, clutching the arms of the chair, shuddering, and then the wide butch leans right in again.

“Colour?” she murmurs.

“Green,” Katie whispers back.

“Then I’m going outside for a smoke, and Tina’s going to watch these two flip a coin for who gets you first,” which yanks a freshly startled, high-pitched whimper out of Katie. There are eyes on her from all directions, and she’s small and helpless, and they’re a pack. They’re a pack, and she’s prey. “Happy birthday, Katie.”