Buck held the crate comfortably under his arm as he walked up the driveway. It had been a good haul, seventeen adult Fluffies and five Foals had gotten themselves caught in traps. There was likely quite a few more babies, but only checking the traps every four days had ensured many had been eaten. He’d weed out the baby-eaters during the torture, and give them an extra dose of misery (he actually wouldn’t, since his choice of torment was moment to moment. It was merely one of his self-justification methods).
The modified traps allowed around two to five Fluffies depending on breed and health into the cage at once to feed from the bowl of cheap spaghetti before the weight would trigger the door to snap shut. These groups were starving, allowing him to get a good chunk of a herd at once in each of the three traps. The sprays of shit from the outside amusing him greatly, imagining the idiotic justification they had to try and punish the victims as well as the emotional pain of the caged Fluffies from the attempt. Though it made dumping all the traps into the large crate for transport a pain. He’d be sure to punish them all extra hard for the crap he got on the torn up steering wheel of his truck.
He was always glad to find a Smarty, which was in more cages than not due to being the first to the food bowl. He punished each as if they were guilty for the sins of Smarty-kind regardless of the protestations from their herd at their friendliness (which was always the case due to the fact only a Smarty-friend would eat alongside others), though as he sodomized them with whatever he felt like trying that day he would also be gleeful at the thought of how ostracized Fluffies that survived his traps due to their loner status were likely far worse than the imagined sins of the screaming meat doll spasming in his grip. The ferals were turning more Hellgremlin by the day, and nobody knew Buck was the genius doing it! The worse they got, the better it felt to hurt them, the worse they got! The town of Harriston was his own personal Earth where he was god, setting them up to sin then claiming them for his sick pleasure. The sicker he was, the more exciting. The more terrified he was someone would find out his acts, the better they felt to do. He wished someone could watch. More than on e he’d considered a webcam, though he wasn’t tech savvy enough to feel safe from someone doing computer things to find his real identity.
He practically did a dance as he set the carrier down on the table and closed the door. It was still five days until Independence Day but fireworks had been lit off for most of each day for the last few by the neighborhood kids. No doubt the Fluffies had been terrified, unable to escape the sounds. This lot would have to keep him busy until the week after, when the folks would run out and cops would start telling them to knock it off. Only then would his tiny wicked mortal souls return.
As he headed for the kitchen he heard a sound. The instinctual part of his mind was working through a reaction while his consciousness was on the liter of flat soda in the fridge. The bullet tore through the side of his head, lodging itself in the skull on the other side. Consciousness was gone, the primitive brain forcing random muscle movements for several seconds. Buck never knew he was going to die, didn’t know he was dying, and was unaware the cause was the disemboweled purple Fluffy in his waste bin out back. Or rather the tracking chip in her collar, which was soaked in her blood and still lying on the table in the garage. He didn’t know he’d killed the pet of the mayor’s son Randy, who had searched his house and found his Fluffy target practice pistol. After all, what kind of moron would give a drawn-out monologue to some sick fuck? Randy was pissed, and Buck was just some asshole that killed his pet.
Randy’s hiding place behind the couch spared him the red mist of gore, and the constant popping outside disguising the sound of the shot. The terrified Fluffies howled, but the neighbors were not home and wouldn’t have thought twice about a pistol fire and Fluffy shrieks if they were; Buck had bullshitted the cops and waved the threat of political entanglement from various gun owner and anti-Fluffy organizations so much they’d even avoided his street entirely when they could.
Randy popped the crate open, allowing the Fluffies to go where they wanted. Most hid in the house, though some of the more emaciated ones began lapping up blood eagerly. He thought they’d be afraid of him given he was wearing a full body purple spandex skinsuit, but they were either too traumatized or their color recognition meant being a featureless purple man was quite normal in their minds.
Randy threw the pistol near Buck’s outstretched hand and left the front door open for the Fluffies, then ran off. He stripped off the skinsuit and burned it in a park grilling station, then at home he buried his poor sweet Prancer with her favorite toys, a blanket, and her collar sans chip. Buck had torn her open with a lacquered coyote skull for the fear factor, which thankfully kept his parents from questioning what happened to her when they saw him carrying her broken form.
Police found Buck’s body due to the smell complaints from civic employees that were working on the shorted electrical pole that had been hit by a rocket outside his house. Minimal investigative work was done, the department was already lax in most things and the paperwork was an incredible hassle. He was written off as a suicide, the Fluffies still in his home delivered to the local Hugbox shelter (mostly as an insult to Buck; the fact they had eating a fair amount of his body was left off any reports as the coroner had just marked his body down as partially eaten by wild animals).
Randy became an aid to several prominent North Dakota State Senators, and owned many Fluffies throughout his life. He confessed to the killing as an old man in a self-published autobiography that sold very poorly, and was remembered as a trivia question regarding North Dakota only for how memorable the idea of the skinsuit was.