The Constant Rabbit Read online

  ‘Take a seat, everyone,’ said Lugless, switching on the overhead projector and pulling a bundle of acetate sheets from his case. Rabbits – all rabbits, not just ones who worked in Compliance – despised PowerPoint presentations, and not because it meant fiddling around with paw-unfriendly keyboards or pointers. No, it was rather the rabbit’s wholly practical approach to technology. If something worked perfectly adequately and did not actually need to be replaced, they’d stick with it. Most of the colonies still used fax machines, printing presses and manual telephone switchboards, although this was probably not just a technological issue, but the fact that rabbits like to gossip, and manual switchboards made eavesdropping not only easy, but irresistible.

  ‘An unidentified Labstock rabbit,’ said Lugless placing the first acetate on the projector, ‘similar to thousands like him. For the purposes of this operation, he’ll be known as John Flopsy13 7770.’

  We stared at the nondescript white rabbit that had come up on the screen.

  ‘What’s he done?’ asked one of the compliance officers.

  ‘It’s not what he’s done,’ said Lugless, ‘or about what he will do. It’s about what he knows. Deep intel says the Bunty might be hanging out in Colony One, not twenty-five miles from where we’re standing right now.’

  The ‘Bunty’ to whom he referred would be the Venerable Bunty,14 the rabbit’s spiritual leader for the past decade and a rabbit of considerable influence. Her whereabouts were a closely guarded secret as Smethwick had once said in public that ‘if we had Bunty in our hands, the rabbits would do anything we asked of them’. She remained a rabbit of great interest to the authorities, but had always evaded capture. Quite how she had done this was a mystery, as she routinely moved from colony to colony in order to offer spiritual and culinary guidance, as Lago, the Grand Matriarch, was as big on home cooking as she was on metaphysical well-being. It didn’t help that no one knew what she looked like, and she usually gave sermons in disguise so few rabbits knew either – insurance against any rabbits who could be turned by the Compliance Taskforce.

  ‘She has a pernicious influence on the rabbit,’ said Flemming, ‘and the Senior Group Leader wants her in custody to more fully ascertain her motives.’

  By this he probably meant that it was actually Smethwick who wanted her for questioning, but the PM liked to stay one step removed from anything too controversial.

  ‘Are we thinking of snatching the Bunty from inside the colony?’ asked Boscombe, seemingly quite excited about the idea as it probably involved several helicopters, lots of hardware and a totally knock-out cool code name.

  ‘Eventually,’ said Whizelle, ‘but in truth it’s only rumoured she’s in Colony One, figuring out ways to “Complete the Circle”.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ asked Boscombe.

  ‘We think,’ said Flemming in the manner of someone more comfortable with conjecture than truth, ‘that it may relate to the rabbit’s plan to weaponise their reproductive capabilities in order to overrun the UK.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Whizelle. ‘The geographically restricting environment of MegaWarren is needed now more than ever to curb the ugly spectre of a sustained campaign of LitterBombing.’

  Everyone in the room nodded sagely at this; it was an ongoing concern, but with little evidence to support it. The Council of Coneys branded the LitterBomb notion ‘patently ridiculous’, along with other leporiphobic conspiracy theories, such as a desire for ‘Universal Veganism’, a change to running the country ‘the Rabbit Way’ and a wholesale switch to the worship of Lago, the rabbit goddess.

  ‘The point is,’ continued Flemming, ‘that there are at least fifty miles of warren inside the colony, and we need to narrow down the search. The Rabbit Underground Movement are doubtless in constant communication with the Bunty, and that’s why we’re eager to capture and interview this individual. Get to him and we get to her. Get her and we’ve got the rabbit where we want them.’

  After we’d all stared pointlessly at the Flopsy for a few minutes Lugless replaced the picture on the projector with another, this time of the high street in Ross.

  ‘Intel tells us Flopsy 7770 visits the post office in Ross-on-Wye every Tuesday to post letters to the other colonies. He uses the exterior pillar box and ensures he is there at the time of the four p.m. postal collection so he can add them to the mailbag directly. It’s not exactly a freshly pulled carrot,15 but I think Flopsy 7770 is acting suspiciously enough to warrant further investigation.’

  ‘Labstocks are almost impossible to break,’ murmured Boscombe.

  This was true. When your kind were vivisected before the Spontaneous Anthropomorphising Event, it kind of made the ‘continuous application of harsh coercive force’ indistinguishable from ‘last Tuesday’. Anyone in the Rabbit Underground who held sensitive material and had to go off-colony was usually Labstock for this precise reason.

  ‘I haven’t met a rabbit I couldn’t turn,’ said Lugless in an ominous manner. Gathering intel in the old days had been easy because rabbits were so trusting, but they had wised up over the years and now adopted a ‘blank expression while blinking’ approach to law enforcement questions which was devastatingly effective. But rabbits knew how to get to other rabbits, especially if they could feign dominance and had no ears, which was about as creepy and shocking to them as seeing someone with half a face might be to us.

  ‘OK then,’ said Lugless, laying another sheet of acetate on the overhead projector with his very precise plan on it, ‘this is how we’re going to do it.’

  It was pretty much a standard sharp arrest. Always unexpected, always fast. An escaping rabbit might take three to five seconds to get up to a fast enough run to initiate the first bounce – and after that only an officer with a powerful net-gun could bring one down, and that was a weapon that had limited range and required the team to know in which direction the rabbit might go – an almost impossible task. ‘Trounce before Bounce’ was the guiding policy.

  As Lugless outlined the plan everyone took notes. All the officers were to be in civilian clothes and ready to pounce on Flopsy 7770 the moment he posted the letters. There were questions and answers until most of the officers were satisfied. Whizelle wouldn’t be coming as he was easily recognised, but Lugless would be present, coordinating the grab – but in disguise, he said, which I was intrigued about. Rabbits had a hard time looking like anything but rabbits.

  ‘What’s my function in all this?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re our plan B,’ said Lugless. ‘You’re to get a good look at the Flopsy before the arrest, just in case he slips through our fingers. You can ID him later.’

  ‘I can’t guarantee that,’ I said. ‘He’s a Labstock.’

  Lugless stared at me in a dangerous sort of way.

  ‘… but I’ll do my best,’ I added.

  ‘I really hope so,’ said Lugless, ‘for your sake.’

  The briefing broke up ten minutes later.

  Ross & Rabbits

  Rabbity was the English word for the rabbit language; the rabbit word was ‘Niff’, one of the few pronounceable words in the rabbit language. Dismayingly, Niff could also mean, depending on context: ‘rabbit, life, wholeness, carrot (straight), warmth, sky, ratchet screwdriver, aeroplane, wagon, carrot (curved), Wensleydale cheese, hopscotch and sleeve-valve engines.’

  Ross-on-Wye had a pre-rabbit population of eight thousand, all human. Today that had risen to twenty thousand, chiefly rabbits. Most were long-term residents, part of an early experiment in rabbit/human integration undertaken in the seventies by RabToil, which had initially been set up as an NGO to find employment for rabbits, but had grown and darkened over the years to control all rabbit employment and was now integrated into the Ministry for Rabbit Affairs.

  The Ross integration experiment, while hugely successful at the time and still regarded as the gold standard for peaceful inter-species coexistence, was never rolled out further owing to a concerted smear campaign by UKARP, who despised
the concept of integration and instigated numerous complaints about the rabbit’s ‘bacchanalian nature of rampant promiscuity that would surely corrupt the nation’s youth’. Despite no evidence that the nation’s youth needed any outside forces to help corrupt itself in the least, UKARP succeeded in casting doubt over further integration and were as surprised as anyone when their plan succeeded, and integration plans were abandoned. They used it as a springboard to further pursue their anti-rabbit agenda. No one could have foreseen that they’d actually lead the nation four decades later.

  ‘Before Ross we had only failure,’ said a spokesman for UKARP, ‘afterwards, only success.’

  Despite the leporiphobic rhetoric, the once sleepy market town of Ross was now a bustling centre of commerce which encompassed trade, crafts and literary and artistic pursuits, as well as two centres for higher learning that revolved around philosophy, high cuisine and sustainability. While a few residents initially complained about the rabbits, all were won over by the vibrant nightlife, friendly upbeat manner of the newcomers and, of course, the trading opportunities. Although rabbits were not paid well, they liked to spend what they earned quickly. The gourmet lettuce bars did particularly well, as did the numerous greengrocers, a thriving bookstore and several hookah dens where rabbits discussed politics, economics and carrot hybridisation issues while their hookahs bubbled and puffed with the aromatic scent of a variety of rabbit tobacco: dock leaf, catnip, burdock, celeriac and dandelion. Mornings in the hookah dens were reserved for performance readings: the one we passed had a reading of The Hunchback of Notre Dame going on all week.

  More relevant to the Rabbit Compliance Taskforce, Ross was by local statute an ‘Open Town’ commercially, residentially and – crucially – for those on a day permit from Rabbit Colony One, eight miles to the east. Thanks to a well-intentioned by-law passed forty years before, busloads of rabbits could move between the two locations without identification checks, something of a headache for RabCoT as it made potential free movement of those in the banned Rabbit Underground that much easier. None of the other colonies enjoyed such freedoms, so it had long been assumed that Colony One was where the movement was based.

  It was now half past three, and Lugless AY-002 and I were sitting in his Cadillac Eldorado on the opposite side of the road from the post office.

  ‘Where are you now, Fudd One?’ asked Lugless, who was wearing an eyepatch and a large tartan tam-o’-shanter stuffed with newspapers to disguise his earless state.The officer in question reported that he was across the street from the post office, standing in the doorway of a shop that repaired light bulbs. All the Compliance Officers were deployed in various places in the locale, either drinking acorn coffee at a sidewalk café, having an animated conversation on a mobile or simply waiting out of sight, ready to amble past and pounce when Flopsy 7770 made his move.

  ‘Copy that,’ said Lugless into his mic, acknowledging a message from Sergeant Boscombe that a Labstock carrying a briefcase was approaching from the north. Lugless checked his watch, then asked the officer tailing the post office van for an ETA. We received the reply that the van was still twenty minutes away. Having acknowledged both reports, Lugless then dug a carrot out of a brown-paper bag and crunched it up noisily.

  ‘So,’ I said, trying to ignore the carrot-munching, ‘you’re an AY-002?’

  ‘Yup,’ said Lugless, neither wanting nor expecting to expand upon the subject.

  Since he carried the alphanumeric surname he would be descended from the three laboratory rabbits anthropomorphised at the Event. The DG-6721s were the most numerous with the MNU-683s not far behind. They all suffered ongoing health issues owing to experimentation pre-Event, aside from the AY-002s, whose ancestor, to their constant shame, had been a ‘control rabbit’ in the lab and subjected to no tests at all, something that gave them huge residual guilt that often manifested itself in antisocial behaviour. That, in itself, wasn’t enough to justify cropping. Lugless must have done something seriously unpleasant. Either improper sexual conduct or doing what he was doing now. Rabbits despised a collaborator as much as they despised those who extracted favours by coercion.

  We sat for another five minutes in silence.

  ‘Am I here on some sort of test?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lugless without looking up from the crossword he was attempting. ‘Are you?’

  ‘I was on the Dylan Rabbit arrest detail,’ I said. ‘The Senior Group Leader wanted me to concur on an ID and I wasn’t sure but was overruled. But I was right after all, and the shit hit the—’

  ‘Is there a point to this story?’ asked Lugless. ‘Because you’re getting kind of whiny and self-pitying in that uniquely human way.’

  ‘I guess not,’ I said, ‘but an innocent rabbit was jugged because I didn’t stand my ground, and I thought that was a good—’

  ‘Look,’ said Lugless, ‘there are no innocent rabbits. There are simply those who have drifted into criminality, and those that will. You heard Whizelle and Flemming: there is an extremely good chance that the rabbit community might be planning to kick off a LitterBombing campaign that will outnumber Fudds in this green and pleasant land by at least three to one in under five years. Do you want to be outnumbered in your own country?’

  ‘Well, no, obviously.’

  ‘Right, then,’ said Lugless, ‘so why don’t you shut your trap, do the spotting that a quirk of fate has bestowed upon you, and leave broad strategy to Nigel Smethwick and the Senior Group Leader?’

  I fell silent. The notion of Reproductive Weaponisation had been the pet conspiracy theory of UKARP for over three decades, but given the rabbit had been here fifty-five years and barely numbered a million, ‘commendable restraint’ would be a more realistic appraisal of their reproductive habits.16

  My earpiece crackled into life.

  ‘Flopsy 7770 with you in one minute,’ came the voice of Boscombe, followed by a report that the post van was heading into the town centre to do the teatime pick-up. Lugless shuffled in his seat and peered intently up the road, as did I, and within a short time a Labstock rabbit turned the corner and walked towards the postbox with the curious gait that anthropomorphic rabbits possessed – upright and on two legs but with an uncertain and almost comical waddle. He was holding a leather briefcase that was chained to his wrist and dressed in a practical tweed shooting jacket over a checked shirt and tie. Perched between his ears at a jaunty angle was a matching flat cap.

  ‘Recognise him?’ asked Lugless.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me neither. Get out there for a closer look.’

  Although Labstocks were the hardest to ID, up close it often became easier – the wrinkles on the nose, a distinctive mark on the iris, whisker placement. If I manoeuvred down-sun of him I could view the capillaries in his ears for later reference, but I’d have to be lucky with my timing – the sun had been in and out all day.

  I swung a leather satchel around my shoulder and placed a flat cap on my head. Since rabbits were as poor at identifying humans as the average human was at identifying them, they took cues from clothing and manner, so RabCoT agents either affected an odd walk, or, more usually, disguised themselves as regional or cultural stereotypes. I had opted to pose as a Yorkshireman. For the next half-hour I’d be Eric Althwaite, a mill worker from Harrogate.

  I climbed out of the car, popped the live whippet under my arm to augment my disguise and, clasping several postcards, walked across the road in a confident manner, telling random passers-by I was from Yorkshire.17 Flopsy 7770 was already waiting at the postbox, and I wended my way through the pedestrians – nearly all rabbits – who were either lolloping, walking or half-hopping along the street. I was feeling nervous as perhaps never before, but knew I couldn’t make it show. The future of my career and earning potential was weighing heavily upon me. I needed to get this right.

  My timing was quite good because I could see the bright red post van driving down the road towards us. If Flopsy 7770 was
nervous, he didn’t show it. He didn’t check his watch, didn’t turn to observe the van approach, didn’t seem to do anything at all, in fact – just stood there in a relaxed manner, his nose twitching, his expression blank. Annoyingly, there weren’t enough distinguishing marks for me to recognise him if I saw him again, so I moved closer and bought some stamps from the vending machine, then nonchalantly stuck them on my postcards. At that moment the sun came out, and I turned to look at the Flopsy, thinking my luck had changed, but it hadn’t – the post van had placed itself in between the sun and the Labstock. Unless he moved forward, I would not be able to see the fine network of veins in his ears. I could sense the other agents near by, too – dressed variously as a Village Person, a Pearly King and a Scotsman – and ready to grab him the moment the postman unlocked the pillar box and the Flopsy made to deposit his satchel of post. But as I watched, something unusual happened. Three more Labstocks appeared from nowhere, all similar heights and build and dressed identically with briefcases also chained to their wrists. Lugless’s plan had been compromised: the Underground had been taking precautions. They probably knew that a snatch squad typically had three agents – even if they could arrest three they’d not manage four – and all were Labstock to confound any potential Spotters.

  I heard Lugless swear in my earpiece, and then the order:

  ‘Take them. Take them all.’

  The agents made to arrest the Labstocks, which could have a very different outcome if the rabbits decided to bring violence into the mix – a kick from the hind legs would be powerful enough to break bones and rupture internal organs, as well as catapult the victim at speed through a shop window, while a well-aimed bite would be fatal in as long a time as it takes to bleed out.