Rabbit in the Moon by Fiona Moore

Author:Fiona Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Epic Publishing

There were three of them this time, Ken realised with the calm, abstract part of his brain. Two bears and some sort of large cat, a mountain lion, he supposed. Bayer screamed, high, a surprisingly feminine sound. Ken saw red, saw the man fall, eyes squeezed shut as if he was about to cry. Beside him Woolf stood momentarily hypnotised. Without thinking, Ken pushed the young man out of reach just as a clawed forepaw slashed down, but didn’t stop to make sure he was all right. The youth blasphemed again, but nobody told him off this time. Ken ran as hard as he could, hearing other footsteps behind him and alongside.

He collapsed beside a small cliff-face, gasping. The others joined him. Better to be eaten by bears than nibbled away by rabbits, Ken thought hysterically, and began to laugh. Manders glared at him and he got himself back under control.

“Can’t—keep—doing this—sir,” Al panted.

“Working in groups.” Manders turned to Ken. “That’s different, isn’t it?”

“Very,” Ken said.

“Look, will you just tell me what the hell is going on?” Rennert looked at Ken with terrified eyes. “I got off a round just now, it only made the thing madder. What the hell are they?”

Ken looked around, made a decision. “Okay. We’ve seen something like these further North,” he said. “They were part of a construction system—no, it’d take too long to explain. It wasn’t bears there, it was coyotes, foxes, small animals. They were drawn to clusters of large objects. Trees, rocks, that sort of thing, and when they got there, they’d explode, and that would trigger a biotech cycle that would grow a building out of locally available materials. Now, the headpieces on the bears are a little different, and we’ve never seen anything larger than a deer, but this is a different environment. I think it’s gone rogue. Latched on to the wrong kind of animal, screwed up the cycle, made it attack people.” He thought of the pod-animals detonating under vehicles and in groups of people, heading for things of the right temperature and/or size. Clearly the biotech wasn’t above being fooled. “But if it’s the same pods, it’s going to follow the same cycle.”

“So you think if we lure them in to…” Rennert appeared to come to his own decision, nodded. “…we could trigger the mechanism? Make them explode?”

“It’s your territory,” Ken said. “Clearly the trees here are too low to trigger them, or they’d’ve done it. Is there some place with a stand of trees, or something like that, which is much higher? We’d be safe there.”

Rennert considered. “Yeah. About a quarter-mile from here, deeper into the pine forest, some of them get pretty big. We’ll head for that.”

He came to a further decision. He took two of the guns he’d confiscated from Manders, handed one to Manders and the other to Al. “Best we don’t lose any more men,” he said.

Woolf shouldered his rifle, grinned. He stepped forward to walk beside Ken. He seemed more than a little relieved not to be a guard anymore, just one of a group of human beings, trying to survive.

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