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__________________________________ Lagomorphs Copyright © July, 2015, FurryWurry All rights reserved

Chapter 8 -- Strawberries __________________________________

After a while, the tunnel did start sloping up and eventually the darkness gave way to dim light again. Was it sunlight? Not much, though, and it seemed a little green. The tunnel shrank until he was on hands and knees. When it started sloping down again, his heart sank. But the light kept getting brighter. Soon he saw the source: it was sunlight filtering through a layer of shrubbery and roots! He gratefully forced his way through the wet tangle and into the open.

His phone was still dead, dark and non-responsive. The late afternoon Sun was nearing the horizon ahead of him, and he could see sunlight flickering off wet leaves and a rapidly flowing stream down below. This had to be the inner slope of the caldera, but where were the roads? He was sure the map he'd studied had shown at least one dirt road and a pipeline near the stream, which had to be San Antonio Creek. He couldn't see any roads on the caldera's floor, either. Several of them should have been visible from this vantage point. There was a narrow, muddy trail off to his left that went down toward the water, but it looked like something animals might have made.

With a cooling breeze at his back, he trudged down the slope toward the stream. He was almost out of water and glad he'd packed the filter. It was going to be a long hike up over the caldera's rim and back to the base camp.

"Hi! Hi!"

Somebody had popped out from behind a tree near the foot of the hill, waving vigorously.

Jeff stopped and stared. What he saw couldn't be real. Was someone actually wearing a Halloween costume, a fursuit, in the wilds of New Mexico? Only a lunatic would do that. It must be incredibly hot inside. Built-in cooling, maybe? It looked like a stocky, cream-furred anthropomorphic male rabbit, wearing nothing but a brightly colored loincloth. Its front flap was decorated with a crimson starburst on a vivid green background. The furred costume was snug, too: he could actually see the guy panting.

And it was very sexy.

"Get off the trail! Raptors!" The long ears were twitching, as if trying to listen in several directions at once.

Raptors? He glanced at the empty sky. The local birds did seem to be unusually quiet. Was there a hawk nearby? He moved under the trees, out of the sunlight. It was rougher going, but there was no point in getting the guy more agitated, especially if he was crazy. He'd have to go by him to get to the stream.

The closer he got, the more details he could see in the costume. The wearer was a couple of inches shorter than Jeff, but the long ears more than made up for that. A welcoming, buck-toothed grin spread across the very non-human face, and the ears turned toward Jeff. The whiskers twitched occasionally. There didn't seem to be any seams around the lips or the dark blue eyes, and the head was way too elaborate to be made of separate appliances. Mask-making was getting more and more sophisticated, though. Hadn't there been competitions in making them a few years back? He'd heard that some could even mimic the wearer's expressions without needing puppeteers.

"Boy, am I glad to see you! Being out here alone is scary." The face suddenly looked distressed. "My cousins got Taken by Raptors just a little bit ago." The humanoid rabbit shivered, but then brightened. "But you're here now. Weren't you scared all by yourself? I haven't seen or smelled anybody like you before. You smell friendly, though. Strange, but...." The rabbit closed his eyes, took a deep breath through a twitching nose, then grinned again. "Where'd you come from? A long ways, I guess, or I'd'a heard about your folk. Are there lots of them? I'm Skylight-of-Morning, but you can call me Sky. What's your name?" He finally paused, looking at Jeff expectantly.

"I... I'm Jeff," he stuttered. It wasn't a costume. It couldn't be. The fur was short but not artificial. It was even matted in places, like it had gotten wet during the thunderstorm. If it had been a costume, it would have been extremely expensive and nobody would have let that happen to it. The guy wasn't even wearing sandals to protect it from the dirt. And the faint odor -- almost like cut grass but musky, not human sweat at all. "I gotta siddown," he muttered and collapsed onto a convenient tree root.

"You OK? You sick?" Instantly concerned, the buck squatted and felt Jeff's forehead. The soft, bare palm was warm. Bare? Weren't rabbits' extremities furred? "You're kinda cool. You sick? I could get some water if you want. Or you need food? I've got some strawberries we found. We were gonna take'm back to Gran'Dam, but you can have some if you're hungry. Wait here, I'll get'm." He bounded quickly into the trees, almost hopping. His thighs were thick above strong calves and digitigrade feet. Jeff couldn't help but watch the short, fluffy tail supporting the loincloth in the back. Yup, very sexy.

A sexy, bipedal, buck rabbit, speaking English? What the hell?

Was it a 'bot like Nathan's dogs? A hybrid like Luke? Was he dreaming? Or worse, hallucinating? Maybe he actually was dying under that rock slide.

He pinched himself. Ouch! At least one or two of the possibilities seemed unlikely. The sky was a bright blue and the air had that freshness of a storm that had just passed, along with the scent of pine trees. He really didn't remember ever smelling things in his dreams, or them being so long and consistent.

Could Luke have been wrong about what the DARPA project had done? About the types of hybridizations that had been attempted? That seemed unlikely, although lots of biological testing used rabbits as guinea pigs. (Did any actually use guinea pigs any more, he suddenly wondered.) Maybe they were from someone else's secret project.

But, wait. The rabbit had mentioned raptors carrying off his cousins. There were no birds big enough to do that, not on Jeff's Earth. He couldn't possibly mean dinosaurs, could he? But maybe he was just lying. Or his "cousins" actually were of the small, four-footed variety.

Or maybe the multiverse hypothesis was real. Maybe Jeff simply wasn't in Kansas... um, New Mexico, any more. Bill had said they wanted to measure inter-brane potentials in the area. Had he been sucked through to another brane somehow? No, that wasn't possible. Surely he would have felt something if the tunnels had transported him from one timeline to another. It would have taken lots of energy, wouldn't it? And what about mass/energy conservation? Wouldn't it have to stay the same in any particular universe? The topography he could see looked like Vales Caldera, just without the roads. Even the types of trees looked familiar. Would adjacent branes be comparable? If adjacent was the right word for the relationship.

He was hallucinating. That had to be it.

"Here. Try one." A hand was suddenly shoved in front of his face, a tiny, ripe strawberry in its palm. It smelled incredibly sweet.

Food. Would a 'bot eat food? Maybe, if only to make its simulated life believable. The possibilities were just too confusing. It probably was better to act as if things were as they seemed. It might be dangerous if this were really happening and he acted as if it weren't. He'd seen enough scifi programs of people making fools of themselves that way.

"Thanks!" It turned to mush between his fingers when he tried to pick it up. "Oops." He sucked the goo off his fingers. "It tastes great."

The rabbit licked the remains of the mashed berry off his own palm. "It does, doesn't it," he grinned. "Let's try that again."

Carefully using the claws of a thumb and middle finger he plucked another berry from his grass basket. "Open up." He waved the strawberry in front of Jeff's nose, then used his index finger to flick it into Jeff's open mouth.

Jeff closed his eyes as he squished the berry against the roof of his mouth. It was almost too sweet, incredibly delicious.

"Another?" the rabbit asked.

"No, thanks. It tasted great, but didn't you say you'd gotten then for your Gran'Dam? Maybe we should save the rest for her."

"Yeah, you're prob'ly right. Gran'Sir wouldn't be happy, either. He gets really provoked sometimes. Don't wanna make him mad. So where're you from? You didn' say. You got a place to stay tonight? We've got room in the Warren, I know for sure." He looked sad, maybe about his cousins. Their rooms would be empty from now on. If that's how they lived.

"I came from a long way to the East." Before Puye, anyhow. "Could I stay at your place tonight?" Then what would he do afterward? He had only a few energy bars left in his backpack. Where would he get food? Maybe there were towns or cities not too far away. What kind of place was this, anyhow? Was there an advanced civilization? Or just a few rabbit warrens dug in the dirt?

"Sure. Maybe we can get Gran'Sir to let you stay longer, too. You're a good guy, Jeff, I can tell. He'll see that, I know he will. But we gotta get started. The Sun's almost down. We don't wanna be caught out in the dark. Bad things could happen if we do. Worse than Raptors." Sky shuddered.

"OK. But you'll have to show me the way. I don't where your warren is."

"It's up that way." He gestured uphill, toward the northeast, along the stream. "But we gotta hurry. Comon."

"I'm almost out of water, I thought I'd..."

"Don't worry. It's close, just up the hill a ways. Getting water from that stream is not a good idea. We've gotta get going."