Run, Little Rabbit

The little polka dotted raincoat wasn’t doing much anymore. The rain came down so hard, so fast, and the wind whipped back her hood if she didn’t hold on to it. But if she tried to hold the hood with slick, clammy little fingers, the water ran down into her sleeves instead. And anywhere the water met her seams, it hissed like a kicked cat. There was the crack in her throat too. When droplets trailed down her cheeks, down her chin, down her jaw, they sometimes dripped down the line of her throat and into the exposed gash there. It threw up sparks, then, and made something in her vision go fuzzy and fill with static until the heat of her body burned off the stray drop in a puff of steam. 

As if she didn’t already stand out enough, coming hardly to the knees of the occasional stranger with business urgent enough to be out in the grimy, storm sodden streets at such an awful time of night. It was all she could do to cling in the shadows, splash in the puddles to cover the noise of the hiss and crackle. Try to fall under the radar, to go unseen or unnoticed. To blur into the background.

Did children smoke cigarettes? Maybe that could excuse the streams and twists of smoke drifting up from the shadows of her hood. Maybe no one would notice after all, or would only pay her a second glance. Not a third. It was always the third that got her in trouble. People looked once and saw nothing more than the background set piece of their own lives. People looked twice and saw a thin, twisting, twiggy little child. Maybe an orphan with not enough to eat, stunted and starved. But when people looked three times, they noticed things she’d rather they didn’t. They noticed she wasn’t quite as normal as she tried to look.

The city was bruising in the night. Dark splotches leaned out from under the buildings as they stretched and warped inwards overhead. The towers as tall as the sky twisted and bent like they were tired, and sometimes their metallic groans could be heard echoing down the narrow allies. Flickers of blue washed from the windows, though, bleeding into the dark, the color cool and pale. She didn’t like the lit patches of cracked pavement. Walking through them on little feet felt like stepping onto a stage. That kind of attention was unnerving. 

One of the light up billboards, an archaic relic of a time of prosperity, had fallen from its perch high in the steel spires. Its wires hung and coiled all around it, caught on bent up street lamps with flickering blue bulbs or slipping into the storm drains. They sparked too, in the water, a current dancing in little flickers across the surface. She watched it with a certain sort of kinship licking at her skin before she walked on. Showing off a glitched display of color blocks and bars, it broke up the muted blues and blacks eating up the city. But, it cast too much light. She didn’t like stepping into the glow, but did anyway, because there was no other way past. 

A little body cut a big shadow through color cast across the wet, reflective asphalt. And that big shadow walked just as fast as she did, head tucked down beneath the hood, plumes of smoke curling around her face like a cheshire grin. 

It was the one who lumbered around the corner, all heavy buckled boots, soaked burlap coat, and falling cigar ash, that recognized the little scrap of polka dotted, rubber-coated fabric slipping through the streets didn’t belong to a child. 

He stomped a foot in one of the puddles collected in a missing chunk of pavement and sent what may as well have been a tidal wave of water crashing over her head. All of her seams hissed and sizzled. Her vision shorted and turned to static and fresh sparks and steam spit from her throat. 

“Oh, I’ve got you now.” The voice came grizzled and rough, flowing over with some dark sort of amusement. Satisfaction. 

She still couldn’t see, doubled over to try and drain the excess water from the gash in her throat. The jingle of his boot buckles and the heavy thud of his footsteps were all she had to go on. The stench of tobacco ash and sour vomit was there too, repulsive, but it was so strong all around she couldn’t figure if he was getting closer or not by it. 

The footsteps encroached, faster, closer. She didn’t wait to see how close. Turning on clumsy little legs, she ran off in the direction she’d come, slipping and stumbling on the ragged streets, soaked over with oily rain. Hands out in front of her, reaching, she ran. The boots behind her started running too, their jingle growing louder and more frantic. “You ain’t getting away,” the gnarled voice called, breaking off into a coughing sputter of a growl. 

She hoped he was wrong. She wanted to get away, out of the city to the Garage. None of the few little ones she’d encountered even knew if the Garage was real, but the promise of that haven was enough to keep her sprinting down the street, dodging and weaving, circuits whirring and overheating even in the frigid downpour. 

But just as the static cleared and her vision flickered back to life, her tiny foot caught in a crack in the asphalt and she stumbled. Her face cracked open when it hit, splitting and peeling like the frozen soda can she’d found in the snow last winter. Even as she scrambled to right herself, a massive hand closed around her chest, holding tight and lifting her clear off the ground. The stench was unbearable as she was lifted up to face the brute in the stained burlap coat. His eyes were penciled in with thin red lines all across the white. His smile was crooked and uneven, missing a few teeth. And the ones that were still there ranged in color from black to bloody to gaudy gold. 

The laugh he coughed up was bitter and reeking, sick amusement twisted up in the sound. All the while, she struggled and thrashed against his grip, but it was no use. He held her tight around the middle at first, then passed her over to his other hand, dangled her by the hood instead. “What have we got here, eh?” he questioned around the cigar held in his teeth. When he spoke, he blew out even more smoke than she did. 

He already knew what she was, she was sure, but he gave her a good look over anyway. She kicked and swung at him, but he didn’t let go. Every mechanical bit of wiring and circuitry in her worked frantically, a high whine and click beating out a desperate, panicked pulse. 

“Stray little pest that missed extermination,” he surmised. 

Her thrashing doing her no good, she stilled and looked out at him with her split face, wondering if that was all he saw. It was all anyone saw when they looked long enough. They realized she wasn’t a child. But instead of wires and cables and synthetic skin, they saw a mouse scurrying along the baseboards, or a moth in the old drawers, or a hungry rabbit eating up lettuce and cabbage and carrot tops in the garden. A pest. A nuisance. Something that didn’t belong. And they always sought out to put it to rights. To exterminate the pest. 

The storm thundered on, casting the world full of dark and wet. The blue lit windows didn’t flicker, didn’t bat an eye. The world kept spinning on its axis, slowly losing heat. 

With a prideful grin, the tobacco coated man threw her to the ground, but before she could get to her feet and run, he pinned her legs under a heavy treaded boot. They cracked under the force, fine metal plating and carefully engineered joints giving way and falling to pieces. 

It was with a small huff, a small grunt, that he raised his other boot, high above her. Leveling it over her head was all too easy. 

The world didn’t care about the little rabbit. The farmer with his rifle over his shoulder, his trusty farm mutt at his side, would always win out. 

In her head, the dog barked and bayed; the crack of a shot went off. Maybe it was just the thunder. 

The boot fell. Everything fractured, and dark bled in through the cracks.