Snippet, Feb 11, 2010 (Zombie Bunnies) (Patreon)

I am cleaning my office and I found a cache of old memory sticks. Here is a weird fragment that hasn't found its way into any book. I have no idea where I was going with this...

Rubina watched the rabbit drop his front paws into the edge of the ocean.  A wave pushed in, soaking the animal. His ears flattened, but he continued to move toward the water, making the guttural noise that Ru still heard in her nightmares.  His eyes stared blankly out at the water—Ru figured he could smell the fish in the water.  The narrow strip of shore was stripped of even the sparse and threadlike grass that still survived the infested land, so the ocean would be the last option before the beast turned to more drastic measures to find the calories his unnatural nature demanded.

The sun glinted off the lines of waves rolling in toward shore, and Ru closed her eyes against memory--empty gazes focused on nothing except devouring greater and greater quantities of food.  They'd devour offspring, mates, any organic material in their sterile cage.  The first time she'd seen an animal turn on itself in a desperate need for calories, Ru had nearly been ill right there in the lab.  Flecks of blood sprayed the inside of the plastic cage, blood pooled in the bottom as the rabbit devoured its own front legs.  Teeth scraped at bone, a grinding magnified by a microphone.   Finally, it died with a scream, zombie healing not able to keep up with a zombie need for calories.

"There a problem?"  Silas sat down next to her on the edge of their platoon boat.

"Nope.  There's only one."  The small rabbit gave a sharp cry of dismay and threw himself into the water.  Ru wondered if he would drown or if Dr. Durand's miracle would keep him alive under the water. 

"I never thought I'd spend my life in fear of bunnies.  That's hard on a man's ego."  Silas’ thick fingers worked the net he was repairing.  Twine slid past his calloused fingers, and Ru watched him at his work. 

"One can hardly call them rabbits.  Genetically, they are unique,” she eventually pointed out.  Maybe if Dr. Durand had chosen a more disgusting animal for his experiments, the human race wouldn't be poised on the brink of extinction.  Guilt stabbed Ru's stomach.

"Zombies, then.  Don't really care what you call the little shits.  Any sign of Arrecife?"

"No."

Jayne grunted.  For a time, that ended their conversation.  Ru wanted to thank Jayne for his defense of their boat when they’d stopped for water, but the words didn’t come. Thanks seemed pointless after the word ended.

"

"You know," Belle said, her voice distant.  "This reminds me of Buffy."

"Oh, good lord, not again," Ru said with exasperation.  While she would rather dig out her eyes with a spork than admit it, she had seen the show... she'd seen enough to know that she didn't want to discuss a stupid American show that had featured a mad scientist creating a half dead monster out of demon parts.  It struck a little too close to home.  While Dr. Durand's rabbits were not the evil monster of science fiction, they were something worse.  Something accidental and monstrous and as unstoppable as a hurricane.

"We have to do something to pass the time," Belle defended herself.

"I could relate the tale of Othello, the Moor of Venice," Ru suggested.  While she hardly expected anyone to have a proper appreciation for the story, it would distract Belle from her story.

"I'd rather hear about Buffy," Silas interrupted.  "At least someone gets some sex in that."

Ru glared at Silas, but he just continued to work his net. That’s all he ever did. "You have a one-track mind," she accused him.

Before Silas could answer, Belle jumped in.  "Anyway, the show had this ex-demon who thought rabbits were the scariest things ever.  The joke at the time was that she was this big-bad ex-demon, but she was afraid of fluffy little rabbits.  Sometimes I wonder if she didn't know something. Or maybe the writers.  I mean, rabbits are kind of scary now."

"I never trusted rabbits in the first place.  There's something wrong about an animal that can't fight back," Silas said with a shrug.

Ru rolled her eyes. "That's ridiculous.  That would assume that either the Buffy characters were real, and this ex-demon had knowledge of the future or that the writers of the show had precognitive skills.  Trust me, no one could have seen this coming." 

Ru stared at the shoreline slowly creeping past them.  No, she had been right there in the beginning, and she still hadn't seen this coming.  Sometimes she still thought of those first days, and she couldn’t understand how any of them had made such horrific mistakes.

Her fingers twitched as memories assaulted her.  The doorknob had been cold... at night the university turned the heat down and the rooms would get so cold that the test animals would huddle in the corners of the plastic cubes.  The ones housed in pairs would tuck their paws and noses into their cubemate's fur, but Dr. Durand 's rabbits still paced, their eyes focusing on nothing other than the small chute that dropped food pellets every hour.

By the end of the hour, they would salivate, their eyes glazed so badly that not even strobing lights would distract them from that chute.  Only the smell of blood would break their utter and total concentration.  That's when Ethan started calling them zombies.  When the first rabbit had finally grown desperate after being denied food for 61 minutes and eaten itself, they had been fascinated.

They’d been morons. The world would have been better if they’d all died that day—burned with the whole damn lab.

"If we can control the need for calories, this will be the scientific find of the century--of the millennium.  Imagine a world without aging... a world where the injured can heal themselves without the need for surgery."  Dr. Durand's eyes had filled with wonder at the glories of his own future.  "I'll be the man who beat nature at her own game.  Even if the university does own the patents, my name will go down in history as the man who changed the world."  The irony was that Ru was probably the only person to still remember his name.

"Ru, you know how to suck the happy right out of a room," Silas complained, and Ru looked up, surprised to see the others still looking at her and the boat and the water and the shore.  The shoreline was full of burned homes, their blackened timbers surreal against the blue sky.  If Silas was right, they would find an uninfected island eventually. Of course, that island would probably be well defended and the inhabitants would execute them, but Ru was beginning to think that was not such a bad ending.

"What?" she asked

Silas shook his head before turning back to Belle.  "So, is this the same ex-demon that liked having sex?"

"Yep," Belle answered, "lots and lots of it."

“Sounds like my kind of gal,” Silas said with an exaggerated sigh even though none of them had so much as slipped a hand between their legs for months now.  Mass extinction events were a turn off, apparently.