WT

Story Snippet:

A Beginning of the End: One Rabbit

His mother had just made him a cup of warm carrot soup when the world exploded.
Foxes, hundreds of them howling and screaming, surged up to the edge of the warren. Smoke bombs streamed down into the deeply burrowed tunnels. (How had the foxes found the air vents?) Then came the flames, the whizz and bang of fire crackers, the screech of fox face-painted hell rockets, and the dull thump of earth shattering anti-bunny bombs.

The last thing he ever remembered from his old life was his mother’s soup trickling away from its broken clay mug.

But somehow, out of that chaos and hell, the fires and the flames, the insane leers of snarling foxes and petrol bombed horror, and the squeals of bunnies, the Rabbit escaped. He rushed across the smoldering grass and burning brambles only to find himself on one of the worst things a bunny could face….. a street. He had never been on a street before, dreaded places and much avoided by bunnies. Looking around he remembered his great-grandfather’s words, “You can’t dig a Warren in stone.” What a horrible place it was.

As the dull thumps, explosions, and rocket fire receded behind him he realized all was lost, but possibly even worse, he was lost.

How could he have known as he made his way along the dank cobbles and high walls, that one day he would emerge from all this as, "The Rabbit,” "the Warrior Rabbit,” Lord of the Bunny Wastelands. For just then it seemed to him, as he tried to hide in the growing gloom, that the time of the bunnies was over.

© ABJ