The thick rubber boot crunched through the rubble, the wearer of a large radiation suit bending down to pick up a small briefcase. It was scorched and radioactive, but a quick inspection revealed the contents to be intact. It was still squirming inside of its plastic sheath, surrounded by foam in its heavy steel container. The mammal in the suit took it back to the truck that would bring it to the lab, where unspeakable things would be done.

"They're saying the cover-up is a meteor strike, you think anybody'll buy it?" The muffled voice in the suit asked another suited mammal.

"Apparently they used a Neptunium core, the fission products and fallout are nothing like Plutonium or Uranium bombs, unless someone's been doing research illegally, nobody will know where the radiation came from," the other figure said.

"The conspiracy nuts are gonna have a field day."

"Yeah, then Conan O'bearman will call them all idiots, everybody will laugh, and life will go on."

"Hopefully. Nobody should know what happened here. Hell, I wish they hadn't told me."

...

The case was set gently on the black counter, surrounded by equipment of inordinate complexity. A brown paw labeled it the previously agreed upon name; Velensoma Diaboli. A toxic, creative Satan. It would be hard to come up with a better name for a creature that turned mammals into piles of flesh with tentacles and keratinous limbs. It was nearly unique in its metamorphic abilities, but it was absolutely unique in its electromagnetic receptors. Other creatures like it had been stolen from destruction, right under the Agent's noses, but none had promised so much.

The brown paw picked out a small portion of the flesh and watched as it tried to wriggle away. It was set in a mortar and pestle, ground into mush. Liquid nitrogen was poured into the pestle and the grinding continued until only icy dust remained. It would regenerate quickly without the cold. The powder was picked up by a barbaric tool compared to the others that filled the lab; Sticky tape. This would allow the remains to be separated into extremely thin sections, thin enough for the entire chemistry of the creature to be analyzed.

Every protein, every lipid, the entire genome, every chemical structure identified and analyzed by the machinery and computers of the secret lab. It was a marvelous achievement of modern technology, and nobody knew about it. It was buried one kilometer below the muddy flats of the Wet Zone northeast of the city of Zootopia, where the cold air from tundratown created a permanent storm system that flooded out any possibility of life.

It was difficult for things to escape from the lab, and if they did, they were met with an inhospitable landscape. Still, stragglers made it out here and there, and they were swept up by the A3I mop, a lowly regarded team of two that consistently fixed the mistakes and righted wrongs while their higher authority was ignored. Morality was not even on the map for the military, unlike the Agents, who used it as their compass. All that mattered to them was that mammals were safe, while the military's prime objective was the opposite, with minimal but permissible collateral damage.

And now, with the cost of a town annihilated, a new opportunity for destruction and death was awarded to the military, another power beyond their control for them to attempt to harness. Surely, things would end well.

…

The wolf helped the snow leopard inside her home. Clare Blakesley was lucky to be offered a place to live by Tanya, and now it was playing in Tanya's favor too. It was good to have someone around when you were injured. She had fractured cartilage in her nose, three missing teeth, a clean break in her right humerus, a complex left-ankle dislocation/compound fracture, and severe puncture wounds with bone abrasions and partial tendon severance in her left hindpaw. The doctors agreed that, as bad as the injuries were, she would likely recover completely, with a small chance of issues with her hindpaw.

The big cat slowly set herself down on the couch, the wolf helping her down. Tanya was rather unfazed, not unfamiliar with injury, but it was hard for Clare to see her like this. Tanya was the first mammal she saw after she was literally dragged out of hell, and despite being mostly naked and covered in blood, Tanya didn't hesitate to return a very needed hug. Minutes later, she gave the bloody wolf an expensive suit jacket to cover herself, and the next day offered the recently orphaned wolf her home.

Now the mother she had always wanted was sitting on the couch, bandages over her muzzle, her leg in a cast, and her arm in a sling. She could have died, easily. Clare sat down next to her good arm and leaned up against her, trying to hold back tears.

"It's ok Clare, I'm ok," Tanya said, easily able to tell that Clare was bothered. She wrapped her good paw around the teenager. Tanya was thirty-six now, and while she never really wanted kids, she was comfortable with being a sort of mother to the troubled young wolf.

"I know… it's just… I don't… you could have died," Clare whispered, sobbing lightly. Tanya pulled her closer.

"It'll be ok… I don't plan on it, not any time soon," she said.

…

Nick sipped his warm tea, sitting across from the rabbit who was doing much the same. They were in Judy's apartment, taking a day to relax after the horrors they witnessed.

"Have you heard anything about a death toll?" Nick asked quietly.

"No… but I looked it up, Deerbrook, the town, had a few thousand mammals," she replied softly. Nick shuddered.

"I can't believe that those two's parents happened to be on vacation together," Nick said.

"Who? Rob and…?" She started, forgetting the name of the fox.

"Cindy, yeah."

"Yeah. For a second I was thinking we'd end up taking them in like Tanya did with Clare," Judy said. Nick chuckled and smiled.

"Wouldn't that be interesting," he said.

Facilis descensus Averni.

Impares nascimur, pares morimur, ergo iustitiam quaerimus, rem omni auro Cariorem cur pulvis sumus et in pulverem reverterimus.

Fiat Iustitia, mundus pereat.