The Constant Rabbit

‘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.