The Bunny Wars: ‘Guess how it’s going to end?’ (Pt 1)

    Welcome to a post-apocalyptic future where genetically re-engineered food has turned half the planet into fluffy, over-sized, bunnies, with flatfeet and terrible mobility problems; and, the other half, into giant-wolf-like carnivores with savage-teeth and an insatiable hunger. Divided by a great wall built in the years following the conflagration was first discovered by geneticists it was decided, with political support, to place all those with genetic characteristics or predispositions to one genetic destiny in one half, and the others, in another.

For multiples of six centuries, the great five-tiered twenty metered-wide walls stood; by all accounts, the wolf side have run out of their food sources and propelled by the scent of food beyond the Wall have taken over four of the six tiers climbing over on mountains of bones of prey and Liken alike, they have piled up next to the walls: once one is breached, some of the wolves were able to jump from one tier to the next. Closing the distance between the two species.

The bunnies had gathered. Taking the fight back: the war has continued for many years now. Casualties have piled up. Suddenly, as the stalemate was reached a great vibration had stuck, ‘an earthquake‘, according to the scrolls of the ancients had struck. A fissure in the rock face below the wall had been created. The elders had decided to flood it immediately and turn the water to cement over time. It was too late.

Desperate the likens’ swam through the fissure, through cementing water and by the force of their bodies and teeth they widened it to cause a section of the remaining walls to collapse. The end was neigh as hordes of liken flooded the plush green fertile land of the bunnies laying waste to holdings, home and feasting indiscriminately in savage rapture.

Viciously pursued by the merciless likens, facing slack-jawed at inevitable extinction, the last die hards’ amongst the bunnies converge upon the inner sanctum of the remnants of PETA HQ_, where they gather round a faintly glowing ring of lights to beseech their fabled saviour (hippie patty) to help them.

By accident, coincidence or design, a large fridge like object slowly rises from the centre of the ring: hope burgeoning, the bunnies tentatively open the fridge-like door clumsily with their fluffy paws.  The crouched skeletal inhabitant within- hippie patty-, placed in a cryogenic sleep millennia earlier to save the world from animal cruelty, and armed with savage implements to deliver painful death to animal-hating kind, has become a shrivelled,  green-fungus covered  doo gooder, who had lied about her own off-the-charts high blood-alcohol-drug levels in her application form for ‘cryogenic-ally frozen future saviour of fluffy animal kind’ position, and was now dead. And decomposing, rapidly.

Undeterred, the bunnies strip her of her implements (including’ PETA’ shaped steel-like sharpened throwing stars, scimitars ). Then, after consuming their last rations of cabbage leaves and cutting the last carrot in all the world into roughly 12 equal pieces-one for each survivor- and consuming these ritualistically in turn with a swig of a fizzy drink can found amongst the detritus with an image of a long extinct horned beast on the front, they resolve to fight to the last bunny.

With the vicious likens by now having surrounded the PETA HQ in their hordes; working themselves up to a deafening roar of hunger-fuelled howls,  they breach the last of the bunny defences in a wild frenzy and, with their enhanced nostrils flaring, they rush into the inner sanctum. The final showdown between liken and bunny kind has begun.

As the savage battle rages: screams of anger, fear and dying combining with smells of blood, bowls and exposed flesh permeating the air: the war leader of the bunnies still lived, just. Having survived so far by bouncing their girth from one side of the chamber to the other like a bouncy beach ball, with scimitar in hand- a fuzzy reaper, of high velocity-, the 12 were now three. And their leader lay dying on the ground, mortally wounded by wounds that have lay opened his chest; exposing his still beating heart: the heart’s chamber having been breached- it’s cluck-cluck sound was audible to the ear.

Propelled seemingly by the fear of death or failure, the war leader begins crawling his blood, gore and dirt covered body – his fir matted or missing or cut away altogether – slowly towards the portal where hippie patty’s slime-covered decomposed remains lay crouched, each move sending shards of agony through his body .

  Leaving in his wake a bloody trail of his own  fluids, by the time he made it to the feet of hippie patty,  three had become two; with the second’s arm having been ripped away by a liken’s jaw, that even now fed upon it in ravenous hunger . Laying his exhausted head between the feet of hippie pattie, he begins whispering the prayers of his forefathers- mid chant, his eyes make out the remnants of a bright colour; which, on clearing away some of the fungus reveals a black angular three-petaled flower arranged around a impressively circular buds and set to a field of bright yellow. Smiling contentedly, apparently at the juxtaposition of the sight amidst the battle that raged around him, the war leader of the bunnies closed his eyes for the final time.

When he reopened them, he was in a brightly lit  immaculately clean antechamber devoid of all life and evidence of the brutal violence of moments earlier, save him…and a hooded shape (a woman with hay-like hair from the wisps escaping from the corners) in a study of faint hairline fractures on the chamber wall.

‘Am I dead?’, asked the war leader.
Pressing lips together in a slight frown of annoyance for the interruption to her study, the hooded figure looks on and replies, ‘not yet’
‘your greed has killed us’
‘Quite possible’
Silence.
‘how do I kill them all?’
‘You wish to make the end of you, the end of them all: selfish, that.’
‘I wish to bring peace to my people-
‘by killing them all’? Noble of you, war leader.’
‘I care not for your judgement, female’
Silence.
She continues: ‘…be that as it may; you are dead and this is purgatory; ask yourself why you are here great war leader and none other?’
Silence.
‘you were cruel once’, she concluded.
‘I care not if this place is found between the fields of plentiful, or none: for my question remains unanswered and my patience is now at an end’
‘i may tell you, but, first, tell me: what was that last thought before you died…that caused you to smile?’
The war leader removes a scimitar he had had strapped to his back and moves swiftly forward bringing the sharp implement down in a downward movement at hippie patty’s face-
‘STOPPPP–!’
The blade is angled away at the last moment; leaving behind a cut from hairline, past the ear and cheek diagonally and ending at the edge of the jaw streaming blood.
She breathes heavily- ‘you son of a copula-tor! This place has rules that cannot be ignored: I exchanged my life with that of my predecessor here…and I looked to you for my salvation in vain- so-
She lifts her blood soaked face up to look at the war leader. I ask again, for thoughts to keep me company for eternity and keep madness at bay, if that is possible’
The war leader looking on- eyes affixed still with deadly intent at a blade’s edge from irrupting into horrific violence; unexpectedly, he relents and, then, from behind closed eyes, with lowered head he whispers as every word is precious to him
‘my life has been lived openly and transparently, yet there are some thoughts that remain my own to the last…but I shall share with you this as a mercy: it was a memory of my first born, in the hands of my wife, on a field of dried sea-grass’
‘thank you’ (reaching for the scimitar in the War Leader’s hand, she asked:) ‘may I?’
He hands it gently over- ‘how will I…’
‘You already know: live well; die hard’.- she swung the sword with all her might and opens the war leaders neck. He falls to his knees before her with blood pooling on the white marble beneath him, as his body collapses from his knees to the ground.

Silence.