Sea of Bunnies

My name is Van Jason Hillard, and I am sitting in the living room with my girlfriend Elizabeth and our dog MJ. We are on the second floor of an old brick apartment building in the waterside neighborhood of Georgetown, DC, and, for all purposes, we are safe.

(It is the middle of August. The temperature outside is around 95 degrees and the sky is [still] the color of an impressionist peach.)

We have enough food to last us about one month if we eat modestly and only when we are hungry (no snacking). Our proximity to a CVS enabled us to Super Mario our way over to it and preemptively stock up on milk and juice and toilet paper and canned goods, et cetera, in the nascent hours of what the news channels are now gloomily calling B Day.

 Two weeks ago I was fishing at a little spot where the C&O Canal meets Rock Creek when I heard a cacophony of sirens coming from seemingly every direction. I initially thought nothing of this, since sirens are as common in DC as field mice, but it was the sound of people that instilled a queasy curiosity in me. The sound of people yelling, screaming, hollering, laying on their car horns… I scrambled up the hill away from the canal toward M Street to inspect the ruckus.

Everything was everywhere, people in the streets, cars on the sidewalk, upside buses sliding into the buildings that flanked the street… Nothing anywhere was still. People were running spastically, zig-zagging up and down the street and sidewalk, jumping, falling, as if avoiding some unseen menace.

There . . . The ground was moving, impossibly. Something was all over the road and the sidewalks, impossibly clinging to the storefronts. Something brownish grey (or greyish brown) . . . Rats? No, bigger than rats. And endowed with massive ears . . .

Rabbits.

Hundreds of bunny rabbits. No, thousands of them… Tens of thousands.

A man on a electric scooter capsized. Immediately he was covered in bunnies.

In the middle of M street: a lady with a shopping bag started kicking at the ground, hands at her side, like she was Riverdancing… She grunted as she kicked, muttering sentence fragments. And then she began screaming an awful scream. A wail, they call it… A wail of unmitigated horror in cahoots with sincere pain. And then she was gone, carried off down the midday Georgetown thoroughfare on her back like she was on a waterslide.

The whole weird scene was encroaching on me. I dashed to the apartment. I fumbled with my keys and opened the door to my building and closed it behind me and ran up the stairs.

Can bunnies open doors? No, they cannot. Bumping sounds at the base of the door. Were they trying to get in? How sharp are their little bunny teeth?

“What’s going on out there?” Elizabeth said as I entered, closing the door behind me. The dog was panting, as he does, and shaking. The carpet beneath where he stood was dotted in droplets of drool.

“Rabbits,” I said, crisply. “Bunny rabbits. Tons of them. And they’re attacking everyone.”

She looked at me like I was covered in grape jelly, so I explained what I saw with as few exclamation points as possible and then we clicked on the news and stared at our TV for a while, which was showing footage from drones and helicopters of, what appeared to be the entirety of the United States of America being besieged by millions of hostile bunny rabbits.

Later that afternoon we smoked cigs and drank beer on the patio and watched the sky go from blue to grey to yellow to peach.

 That was two weeks ago.

The bunnies are still outside. Everywhere. It’s an inland sea of bunnies. I’ve not heard a siren in ten days.

Most of the networks stopped broadcasting, but we still have France24. There’s talk of sending in big mean dogs. Millions and millions of big mean dogs. They’re actually calling it Operation Big Mean Dog… And all the aviaries have been opened. Its contents now divebombing the bunnies, snatching them up one by one by one by one. The enemy is being penny & nickeled while it churns out million dollar bills on the daily. There are more bunnies today out there than there were yesterday. And there were more bunnies yesterday than there was the day before.  

Staying out of sight of the bunnies is key. If they see you, they pursue you like athletic zombies, toppling over each other to sink their awful little teeth into you.

Our balcony is out of sight of the ground. We need goddamn cigarettes.

“No,” Elizabeth said, flatly. “No more sorties. Did you forget what happened when you raided Taj Mahal?”

A week ago I ran over to a nearby Indian restaurant which had been abandoned. I swiped an unopened case of Absolut vodka and bottle of Johnny Walker Black. I got bit thirty-six times in less than four minutes and walked with a limp for six days.

“No, I did not forget,” I told her. “Look, we have ten bottles of Absolut left, half a thing of scotch, and a mere two packs of cigarettes. I cannot work with that ratio.”

“You won’t make it ten feet, much less ten blocks,” she said, reading my mind. My plan was to sneakily dash to the 7-11 and back. Our car, outlandishly bad luck would have it, was at her father’s place, way too far away.

“It’s five blocks. And they’re not that active during the day,” I said. “Especially in the middle of the day.”

“Van. No.”

 At some point in the last week we stopped hearing the few other residents of our apartment building. Either they were keeping hush or they had escaped or they had been eaten alive by bunny rabbits.

“Watch a movie?”

“Sure.”

“What are you in the mood for?”

“Anything but Watership Down.”

Time passes, we go up on the roof sometimes, belly crawl to the edge and sneak a peek at M street. The ground is all bunnies, sort of roiling down the street. The soundlessness to it all is somehow more sinister than the sight of it. It’s just kind of a low whooshing sound with little clicks mixed in. The sound of an expensive washing machine or maybe a Japanese golf cart. Of course it was neither of those things. It was billions of bunnies cloaking everything to the horizon and probably beyond.

 “Ha.”

“Huh.”

“What is a nine letter word for hare?” Elizabeth asked me. She was doing a New York Times crossword puzzle from three weeks ago.

“Hair as in pelo or hare as in conejo?”

“H-A-R-E,” she said, “as in la fin du monde.”

“Oh,” I said, and snapped my fingers. “Lagomorph.”

She penned it in, nodding.

The Bunny Level, as we called it, somewhat predictably, was one foot. One foot of bunnies. I used a street level window of a storefront across the way to measure. One foot from the bottom of the window to the bunnies. I estimated the bottom of the window was two feet from the ground. So, yeah, a whole foot of bunnies, two or three on top of each other, all wriggling their way east.

I went up on the roof, came down . . .

“The Bunny Level is getting higher,” I said to Elizabeth, as if I was remarking on the difference between home fries and hash browns. I imagined the three of us on the roof, castaways in a sea of bunnies.

She was now rolling a joint and watching something on her phone.

“I’m watching this Youtube channel, some chick in Inner Mongolia . . . She teaches you how to turn off your nervous system.”

“Inner Mongolia is just a baroque way of saying People’s Republic of China.”

“No, it is not. Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region within China. It’s China but it’s not China.”

“Schrodinger’s China.”

“Pretty much.”

The dog wheezed and jerked in his sleep. In his dream he was either chasing something or being chased by something.

“Why do you want to learn how to turn off your nervous system?”

She looked up from her joint and her phone and said, “In case they get in.”

France24 is starting to rear its ugly head. All the wackadoo conspiracy theorists, brains marinating in low-hanging algorithms, have started popping up, presumably because FOX News is kaput, along with the myriad of shit-budget internet channels that stay in existence by gargling pure uncut disinformation all day all week… Big ugly fat faces blaming China, blaming the Democratic party, blaming the Mossad, blaming global warming, blaming billionaires, blaming poor people . . . Are the bunnies Chinese? Are they not from this planet? (weirdly, this seems more plausible to me that them being sent from China) . . . Are they from the center of this planet? And why are they so hostile or hungry or both? And why’s the sky peach-colored? Or is it more orange than peach?

 “Operation Big Mean Dog was a bust,” Elizabeth said to me while filling up the coffee grinder.

“What do you mean?”

“The bunnies ate the dogs.”

“Shit. All of them?”

“Every single one.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Poor dudes didn’t have a chance.”

“Guess not.”

 Midnight storm. The bunnies, it seemed, did not at all dig the rain. They made a strange buzzing sound to express their disapproval, sounding like a chorus of cicadas all brushing up on their Cantonese. It was an awful sound, but it made me happy that the rain made them unhappy.

 “I caught one,” I said to Elizabeth. She was watching a reality TV show about a rich and famous carnivorous plant.

“Caught one what?”

“What do you think?” I said, revealing the contents of the plastic bag I was carrying. “I caught a bunny.”

The bunny was kind of flat-faced and had big round eyes, creepily observant, and each with a mustard iris. It was doing this weird thing with its mouth like it was trying to crack an Atomic Fireball. It did not look pleased with its current predicament.

“Whoa... Is he sick?”

“I don’t know what his deal is,” I said, petting his head with my index finger. “I think he’s just punch drunk. I thwacked him pretty good on the head with a curtain rod.”

“Where’d you get a curtain rod?”

“At what’s-her-name’s below us. The door was open but, yeah, no sign of her. This little guy was sprawled out right in the middle of her living room. Pretty weird, actually.”

“He’s gonna be pissed when he comes to,” she said, inspecting the bunny. The thing was brown and dirty and had a permanent sneer on its tiny face. It smelled like a mixture of raw sewage and a car fire. “Holy shit,” she said, holding his paw and examining his claws. “I hope he doesn’t start hollering for his friends.”

“I’m gonna chop his goddamn head off,” I said, getting a huge knife out of the kitchen. “Make an example out of him.”

“Van . . . Go do that in the sink or in the shower.”

“Good idea.” I held the bunny over the sink and started sawing his head off with the bread knife. It hissed at me and started wriggling.

“It would be easier if you killed him first.”

“I know,” I said, sawing away. “But I want to give him the Taliban treatment. I want his whole terrible life to flash before his creepy little eyes.”

“What if he’s a good bunny?”

“No such thing.

Something like sympathy kicked when I was about halfway through the bunny’s neck. Elizabeth noticed this and commandeered the knife and deftly detached the bunny’s head from its body and deposited both in a garbage bag. Tomorrow we would toss the garbage bag on a neighboring roof.

 The Bunny Level stayed where it was for a few days and then appeared to be ebbing a few inches.

Elizabeth and I were lying on the roof on our bellies. Classic recon pose of cinema . . . She had her binoculars out and was looking up and down the street.

“Bunnies upon bunnies upon bunnies,” she said.

I lit the second to last of our American Spirits and said, “Last night I dreamt that this was all my fault.”

She took her binoculars from her face and looked at me.

“I dreamt that I changed the wallpaper on my phone to a picture of Harvey the Rabbit, you know, from that Jimmy Stewart flick, and that’s what made these fuckers all come out of the woodwork and go nutso on us.”

She contemplated this and said, “But in the movie, you never actually Harvey, right?”

I hadn’t seen Harvey in probably twenty years and could only remember an especially aloof Jimmy Stewart trying to out-hokey himself. It was a cutesy movie for kids and dolts and insomniacs.

“Yeah, I don’t really remember. I don’t think you do ever see him.”

“Further proof that dreams don’t mean anything,” she said, reapplying the binoculars to her face.

“My real wallpaper know is a Yakuza tattoo,” I said, holding up my phone so she could see. “My dream is not a premonition.”

“What blows my mind,” Elizabeth said, “is how nobody saw this coming. I mean, we know when the Sultan of Fuckistan last pooted in public, but we don’t know ten trillion bunnies are about to invade us and eat us alive.”

“Yeah, it’s weird,” I said for probably the thousandth time in the last couple of weeks. “If you went to the ATM and withdrew a million bucks from the Pentagon’s bank account every single hour of every single day on the calendar, grass would grow on the moon before they dipped into overdraft.”

“A world without carrots is chaos.”

“That is a fact.”

The implied rumble of the sea of bunnies gave way to the sound of helicopters...

Dozens of helicopters on the western horizon, heading toward us. I couldn’t remember if I dreamt that they were sending helicopters for us or if I somehow heard it or read it somewhere.

“How do we get the dog up here?” I hollered, as the helicopters whooshed over us and off toward the White House and Capitol and all that.

“There’s a solution for everything,” Elizabeth said, lighting the last cigarette.

 Epilogue: Ten thousand band-aids later, Elizabeth and I and MJ are now on the Shrimpbuster, a charter boat as big and sturdy as an Emirati limo. We are cruising southeast in the Potomac, heading towards the ocean. It eats our souls that the apartment is now infested with bunnies, and probably will be from now until the sun falls into the sea, but the concept of worldly possessions is pretty much a thing of the past. For all the land—I hear, and I see—now belongs to the bunnies. 

The Potomac reflected the impossible sky… The ship’s crew, exclusively Honduran, gazed up and grimaced at it, blabbing in animated Spanish.

I said to Elizabeth, “They’re talking about peaches.”

She tuned in to their chatter for a second. ““They’re talking about the sky, saying the same dumb shit that everybody else is saying.” The breeze from chugging along at twenty knots elevated her hair. The dog—all tongue now—turned his attention from a flotilla of city ducks to look up at Elizabeth, as she drably said, “But the sky is not peach-colored.”

I turned and looked at her, knowing what she was about to say, but still marauded with queasiness upon hearing it…

“It’s the color of carrots.”