by Simon Archer
“Thank you, my lord.” She gave me a quick peck on the lips.
“You’re mighty welcome, ma’am,” I said to her.
“You know,” she gave me that coy look I loved so much, “Your Lordship should be aware by now that some bunnies like me have four ears instead of two. You’d have to talk a lot more than that to get all of mine off.”
“Don’t you underestimate me, honey.” I took her challenge. “My momma was the town gossip. She could put enough words out before breakfast to fill the libraries of the world with dictionaries. If there’s one thing she gave me, it was her mouth for filling the space with gab like the Mississippi’s filled with water. The cows come home before the ends of my speeches do. Do not test me. I will be victorious.”
“I’m sure that those are great measurements on your world, my lord.” Hopper giggled at my proud and boastful statement. “I just don’t know what any of them mean.”
“It means I am the best gabber this side of Thumperton Port, ma’am,” I promised her most firmly. “If you challenge me, rest assured, I will have four adorable little ears off by the time I just get warmed up.”
“If it’s anything like I’ve heard so far, I can’t wait.” She pressed into me with a kiss.
“What now, boss?” Foxhound came up to us, forcing me out of what I’d rather be doing to answer his question. I was half tempted to just ignore him for another couple seconds before Old Yeller, Scooby, and Lassie were behind him, waiting for me to speak. Breaking away from Hopper’s lips, I addressed them.
“Everything in place?” I asked the boys.
“Everything except whatever you have him doing,” Scooby said, pointing over to the pale grey Wolf as he stood over the bunker entrance, keeping the gunpowder waterfall steady above it. Already, the floor of the bunker was completely covered, raising the level of the floor a solid couple feet at least. Toby was still looking right at me.
“Toby, you can stop now!” I shouted over to him. “Make sure to put the lid back on the horn. Everybody, step over here.”
Toby followed to the letter, twisting his arm back upright and putting the lid on the endless horn. All the Wolves came behind me as they awaited the next step of my plan. Well, not so much a plan as a precaution. If the Wolf nobles ever found this place, they’d know that we were here by the fact of all the missing things we took and the mess the Wolves made. Hopefully, this little trap would whittle one or two of them down before they reported back.
“Hopper,” I asked my lovely bunny servant, “could you see if you can make the floating hatch door lower itself just down to most of the way? I need a little space to work.”
Hopper waltzed over to the tree with the illusion in it, reaching inside the fake bark to get at the lever inside. I placed myself over the edge of the bunker door opposite the top of the stairs, waiting for the hatch to come down.
“Say, now that I think about it, boys,” I looked over to the Wolves, “What happens if a pack boss dies of something like a disease, or this trap, for example? Or they just get too old? Could I still prove I killed him with my trap somehow?”
The Wolves cocked their heads as Hopper operated the mechanism, bringing the platform lower. They didn’t answer me for a time while they processed my question.
“Why would that happen?” Old Yeller asked.
“What do you mean, ‘why?’” I shook my head in confusion. “When the boss has to kick the bucket, but they didn’t get beat in a fight before that, what happens to the pack? They get caught by surprise, they just keel over from heart disease, or they get too old to keep living. What happens to the ‘wins’ he collected?”
“Are you talking about sneak attacks?” Toby asked for clarification, then explained away, “If you don’t give a challenge upfront, it’s a sneak attack. Doesn’t matter what happened. No challenge, sneak-attack. If you get attacked by a sneak attack, and you still win, it’s like the other Wolf challenged you and lost, so you still get their stuff. Wolves have to accept a challenge from another Wolf, but nobles only have to accept challenges from other nobles. If you challenge them, and they don’t have to accept it, but you still attack them, it’s still a sneak attack. Some Wolves get sneak-attacked by other Wolves, but most of the time, they get sneak-attacked by drowning, or sneak-attacked by getting hit with some construction planks, or sneak-attacked by something heavy falling on them. When a sneak attack kills a leader, the pack breaks up.”
“Happened to my old boss noble,” Scooby told his tale. “We tried to kill each other right afterward, and the little guy came out on top. Then he got beat by a different Wolf who worked for a noble.”
“So, no sneak attacks, no trap kills, or all of the Wolf’s pack members and their stuff is up for grabs?” I said as the hatch got within my reach. “That’s something I should be thinking about now.” I started assembling the string, weight, and matches onto it, even as it got lower. “Hopper, try to stop it now if you can.” I turned back to the Wolves while I worked. “I’m going to have an heir to the household for when I get old and grey. Can’t have you all trying to eat each other and my Rabbits when I eventually die.”
“Do you get old, boss?” Foxhound asked as the platform froze a foot above the entrance. “I thought that only happened to Rabbits.”
“I mean, I thought you might be a bunny,” Toby admitted, “with the hairless parts and all, but you’re a lot bigger than them, and you’ve got that face hair and no rabbit ears.
“You some kind of weird-looking hare?” Old Yeller blurted out.
“Hold on, now,” I finished tying my trap up and addressed a glaring oversight. “Do Wolves not age?”
“I know I haven’t been doing that.” Old Yeller said.
“I always thought aging was what happened when your weakness finally killed you from the inside,” Scooby added. “That’s why it only happened to Rabbits and animals.”
“How long have you guys been around, then?” I asked. New information kept changing the whole game on me, raising way more questions than answers. I waved to Hopper to lower the platform all the way down.
“Oh, it’s gotta be…” Lassie furrowed his wolfish brow as he thought about it. “At least a year?”
If I didn’t know Wolves as well as I did right then, I’d have never believed Lassie was being completely honest with me. Didn’t make things easier to figure out, though. I could pull off a year’s worth of agelessness the same as these fool Wolves were trying to.
“It takes way more than a year to properly age, Lassie,” I told them, stepping onto the forest floor the platform was now a part of. “You’re telling me you’re only a year old?”
“That’s as far back as I remember, boss,” he said. “But I’m pretty sure I was doing stuff before then, too.”
“So you think you’re all ageless based on a communal hunch?”
“We don’t have any old Wolves like the Rabbits do.” Foxhound offered his rebuttal. “We’re all in prime fighting condition right now. Rabbits have a lot of old people.”
“I’ve seen some Rabbits die from the old,” Old Yeller said. “No Wolves.”
I did think that a bit odd. An all-male society with no interest in sex with any females seemed like a recipe for self-extinction. If they weren’t aging, that would keep them from dying off. Where the hell did they come from, then? Maybe I should have been worried about some giant momma somewhere. My shivers couldn’t bear the image of such a monstrous thing. Maybe they were like sponges, just kinda oozing off another one. Or maybe they were grown like plants out of the ground, only coming out of the ground as full-grown plant men. Or maybe they were like the lizards who...
Dear God, I had to hold back my lunch when my mind was just adjacent to the thought of that. That was a kind of rabbit trail I didn’t want to follow. Wolf anatomy wasn’t my concern right at that moment, and I promised myself I would never think about anything remotely related to that thought again.
“You wouldn’t happen to know how you
guys get more Wolves?” I said, hoping to choke that last thought into oblivion where it belonged with a less disturbing reality.
“Not really, no,” Toby answered. “Haven’t seen any new ones to ask them.” Great. I just had to repress those ideas indefinitely, I guess.
I distracted myself with double checking if I remembered all the parts of my trap. I had the string attached to the hatch covered. I had the release attached to that. I had the weight locked in the release, and the matches attached to the weight, using a special makeshift holder that kept them pressing the heads against the striking surface I attached to the inner side of the entrance. The hatch opens, pulls the string to the release, drops the weight, weight drags the matches across the striking surface to light the match, match catches all of the gunpowder on fire, our tracks are covered, and a pack leader might get caught in the explosion, taking it out of play for a little while. It was a long shot, but we had the powder for it. We always had the powder for it, anytime, all the time.
“So, we all ready?” I asked the gang. “All this new Revolutionary War gear got me craving some good old fashioned guerilla warfare. Whaddaya say, boys?”
The Wolves were silent, looking at each other or the ground.
“C’mon now, speak up.” I prompted them. “You want to fight some nobles or what?”
“Are you asking us for our opinion?” Foxhound asked, sounding dumbfounded at the thought.
“Yes.” I answered, with maybe a little bit of sarcastic flair that said, ‘Who did you think I was talking to?’
“I think that…” Old Yeller blurted out. “Um, I’m thinking that… we…”
“Obviously, we should, uh…” Toby tried to fill in, his mouth shaping no words, but instead, what might have sounded like a whining howl if it was voiced.
“If we’re, uh, trying to, uh, do something that, uh, will do something,” Lassie stumbled through his sentence. “We should… do that.”
“I’m laboring under the significant delay to my cognitive faculties in an anxiety-induced response to the ingrained-societal pressures stimulated by the request to utilize said cognition far beyond the capacity previously expected from the cultural norm I had acclimated my psyche to previously.” Scooby spouted randomly, using those fancy words he doesn’t recognize. He probably hadn’t understood what he just said, but I think I was getting enough of it to grasp what was going on.
“Do you guys not make your own opinions?” I asked, though not with the lack of surprise I would have with any other being in any world.
“We’ve never had to with our jobs,” Toby explained. “We just do as we’re asked.”
“We know how we feel about Rabbits, mostly.” Old Yeller defended. “Except the ones that you have, of course. And now all the other ones.”
“Let’s just head out,” I said rather candidly. “I can’t be telling you what your opinions about things are, no matter how lordly I end up getting. Just do what I tell you, and you’re free to feel and express what you want. You don’t like something you’re told to do, that’s fine. You don’t like what I’m doing, you can tell me. I’ll at least consider anything you ask. Fair?”
“I don’t know?” Toby squeaked out.
“Good enough!” I stomped away to lead the charge. “Grab the stuff and let’s go!”
12
Weeks passed by slowly, all of us carrying on to Thumperton Port to beat that Timberpine into a pulp. Rations were getting pretty low, even with my separating them into smaller chunks and stretching them out. I was perfectly fine; I had the army chocolate to keep me by. By design, it isn’t something you can scarf down at any given point, so I was never running out until the next harvest moon. I had packed a lot of army chocolate specifically for its easy rationing for me, and a few oat granolas for Hopper, since Rabbits, both their version and on my world, couldn’t eat the chocolate.
Neither can dogs.
My five new hungry dogs couldn’t have touched either of my major food reserves for weeks. How was I supposed to get them all the way to Thumperton with no food? The only thing I had for them was a handful of homemade jerky. It wouldn’t even last one meal. It’s good stuff, but it isn’t magic. Certainly tasted like magic, let me tell you. Even I wouldn’t be eating it this trip, just in case things made a turn for the worse. For the jerky to be effective, things had to be almost as bad as they could get on the trip.
Yes, I did, in fact, already try the powder horn. It didn’t work on the strips, just made them all bitter and more flammable. More than likely, it was because the magic worked on one particular item at a time, and it was already set for pouring out gunpowder. Or maybe it just hated me. I didn’t know. If I found a way to remove the charms, I might have considered a jerky horn later.
There had to be a way for them to eat. They were stationed way out there by themselves. They must have had reserves to work with. No such luck. They were expected to hunt for their own food out there, which was what Toby’s party was going out to do. I thought that was the solution. Send them out hunting, bring back some fresh kill. They could supply their own food, and I would have never had to think about it.
So, like always, I was trying to look on the brighter side of things when they were looking bleak. The sun was shining a bright blue, which was a beauty to see. A whole different place had a whole different sun with a whole different color. If I learned anything from science class, this place had to be built a whole lot different from my world with a blue one. I was thankful I could breathe. And without the trees about, there was a hell of a view out to the horizon in every direction. With all of this free time on our hands, I had time to reflect on the new things I was learning on this journey.
For example, do you know what’s really hard to find in a forest with no trees? Any big animals that want to live in a forest that has no trees.
Those idiots searched high and low for any kind of good game and found nothing. I was keeping my own eye out for anything resembling an edible animal. This world of Wolf and Rabbit people wasn’t going to just have run-of-the-mill deer running around. I was excited to see what was out there. I’d be the first man in thousands of years to bag a new creature no one else alive had even seen. No such luck there either. It was like a desert out here, but with grass and big flat stumps to trip over. All of my boys were stationed out here, miles away from the next town, to protect a bunker that the nobles hadn’t even found and to die of hunger. This was starting to look like the worst-case scenario. Unfortunately, that meant keeping them all hungry for most of the trip.
But, it was a lesson learned and knowledge gained. It refocused my resolve to find Timberpine so I could work to rebuild the forests around here bit by bit, developing a deeper motivation for my goals. I could find strength in that and in the fact that I still had Hopper with me. We helped each other keep a chipper smile and a hearty laugh throughout the trip, even when we were both starting to get a little hungry and a little upset. Rations did not make for filling meals.
Speaking of which, do you know what happens to Wolves when they starve for too long? When you had to deal with a human who was hangry, there could have been harsh words or flaring tempers, rash decisions, even abandoned commitments. For the most part, though, you could have remained confident in the number of limbs you were going to have by the time you finally got to some food. There was security in that you never knew you had until it was gone.
More accurately, when a toddler experiences ‘hanger,’ there is destruction. Kiddy chairs are tipped, drinks are spilled, toys and little punches are thrown, all as an expression of a primal rage that this tiny ball of wimpy fat rolls was hopelessly attempting to convey to the cruel world that has spurned them so bitterly. They don’t have the brains or the life experience to really properly communicate their emotions into passive-aggressive remarks or fragile patience, and they don’t have the physique to cause any real harm to those around them.
Wolves were a different story.
About three-fo
urths of the way through the trip, tensions rose to their peak, and I was busy restringing whatever snapped, including the tempers of my Wolves.
“Why can’t we have what you’re having?” Lassie groped with his long arms towards the bar of chocolate ration I held outstretched away from him, my foot resisting his push further to grab it.
“It’s going to kill you, you stupid mutt!” I held my .45 by its barrel, smacking Lassie’s muzzle with the butt of it as if it were deterring him in any way. “It’s chocolate! Chocolate is poison to dogs! Are you listening this time? Poy-zun-us. It will hurt the whole time you’re dying.” This was about the twentieth time I’d explained this concept, and that was just to Lassie. I had just told all of this to Foxhound a moment prior and was trying to maneuver around his unconscious body with one foot while holding Lassie with the other.
“Will it fill my stomach?” The brown jackass’s fingers squirmed and wriggled like spider legs as they tried to drag Lassie’s body just the extra few inches he needed to touch the forbidden bar.
“You’ll just throw it up an hour later!” I flipped the gun to hold it properly by the handle. “You know the drill: One chance. Surrender.”
“Just a tast--” Lassie couldn’t get the whole sentence out before a quick and loud bang rang out. He was convulsing in quick spasms, falling off of me and releasing his lecherous claim to the chocolate. A shot to the leg with the storm-modified pistol sent electric waves throughout his body, incapacitating him quickly and efficiently. He wasn’t dead, and he healed quickly, just like the rest of them. As long as you spaced out your heavy damage, you wouldn’t have had to worry about their frustratingly needy lives.
Lassie also wasn’t one to be so amped for food, even as a hungry Wolf. He was probably the calmest of all of them, with the least amount of attempts to try to kill himself on the chocolate. This was an escalation.
Before this instance, each Wolf would have acted this manic separately, and I would have dealt with them accordingly. Their ravenous appetites and short-sighted temperaments kept ramping up with the time we spent traveling, but they were quelled just the same. This time, however, they had all acted up at once, which proved to be a bit of a complication. Less than a minute previous, I was fighting off five dogs, and they almost got their hands on their death bars. I couldn’t even look in her direction, let alone tell her to stop when Hopper snuck into my space, broke off half of the chocolate, and ran, getting three of them to chase her. I kept the other two with me and handled them as effectively as I could.