It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles

by Stephen Graham Jones

  He was looking for me.

  Finally he hooked up with the hand who’d given me a ride. For two hundred more dollars, the hand let Refugio ask questions, so long as it didn’t interfere with work. What the hand was doing then was building a new stock tank and trough, right beside the one I’d slept in, like a mirror image. Because the cattle still wouldn’t drink from mine. And Granger Mosely had had the water tested over and over, had even considered drilling a new well.

  In the end, it was cheaper to just replace all the pipes, and the tank and trough. The cattle still blew into the water in disgust before finally drinking it, though. They knew. Refugio did too.

  I’d intrigued him. My bandoleer of moon rocks. What would they be worth? As far he knew, I’d never delivered them — had never walked up out of the pasture he’d left me in. Granted, fences had been cut clear to Uvalde, but that had to be something different, because I was on foot.

  He went to the pens at the end of the draw but didn’t find any of my coke cans or chip bags, or the board I’d arranged my dead skin on. For him, I was a ghost, moving a few months ahead of him. Taking all the same steps. But he wasn’t giving up, either.

  Because what I had — he’d heard things. Very specific things. My moon rocks weren’t moon rocks.

  Two years before, some graduate anthropology student had uncovered a mass of molten metal and rock deep underneath a Mayan ruin of some sort. Not a pyramid, like for worship, but more like the way you cap off a well.

  There was nearly a thousand pounds of the stuff. And none of the tests they did on it made any sense — even the Geiger counter never gave the same reading twice. The backhoe that tried to pull it up stopped working, and the truck they tied to it, it threw a rod, and nobody’s watches or flashlights would stay working around it.

  As near as the grad student could guess, it was an old meteorite, maybe. The find of a career, of a lifetime, he thought. He wasn’t far off.

  Soon enough all the noise he was making drew the attention of certain farmers, the kind who carried AK-47s and wore night vision goggles. They moved in, interrogated him, and then made him part of the historic record he so loved.

  And, when the properties of the metal rock were checked, it turned out to be even more than he’d said. In cartel-terms, if plutonium at the center of a bomb was dangerous, then this was hell on earth. Times twelve. They put it on the market by the milligram.

  What I’d been muling north, then, was the first shipment of the new empire. They’d given me the new world in a case, and paid me to carry it into America. It had to be by foot, too, because, in amounts more than an ounce, nothing mechanical would keep working around it.

  The reason it had to be carried by somebody disposable but punctual was because it killed whoever was around it. In a very specific timeframe. Evidently, the canisters I’d had were the only shield that even somewhat slowed down the radiation, or fumes, or microbes, or whatever. They were a silver-aluminum alloy. Like the case. Just thick enough for me to make it to Uvalde.

  What they never planned on, though, was a mule who’d sucked on enough sticks of silver nitrate that it had probably accumulated in my glands. It didn’t make me immune, but it made me different, let the stuff slow-cook its way into my DNA or something.

  All Refugio knew, though, was what his informant had told him: I’d walked into the night with millions of dollars, and never walked out. Meaning the canisters were still out there, a few feet from my sun-bleached bones. And, for twenty-six hundred dollars, he’d given them up.

  It kept Refugio up at night, rolled him out of bed before dawn, made him arrange the disappearance of that informant, so he wouldn’t tell anybody else who happened to bust him.

  Over the next few months, then, and for the first time in years, Refugio did his daily patrol like he was supposed to. What he was doing was catching all the coyotes and mules who’d stepped in to take the place of Sebby and me. Not to process them, but to tell them about the get-out-of-jail-free card he was offering for word of any skeleton they chanced on out in the scrub.

  He was looking in the wrong place, though.

  By then, the canisters were who knows where, and me, I was rolled into a couple thousand pounds of wire on the other side of the border. Not alive yet — I have no idea how many times I rotted to bones over those fourteen years, and grew back — but not as dead as I should have been either.

  Just waiting, I guess.

  For what — to understand that, I was going to have to step into that warehouse in Piedras Negras again. And that’s not something any sane rabbit was going to do.

  For months after I pulled myself from my wire casket, I don’t think I had any thoughts. Not human thoughts. Or the kind I have now, anyway.

  And it could have been weeks, even, I suppose.

  Time passes differently, living like I was. The days smear together into one single kind of ideal day. You wake one morning, and it’s no different than the last morning, really, and so you go to the same corners for grass or weeds or roots, you see the same things from the same angles. If there’s a birth, then it’s probably not so different from the last birth. If I’d ever seen another person, a human, I might have made the connections faster — their legs would have been a version of my legs. Sure, I’d have been scared of the way they walked upright, far from the ground, and didn’t seem to be trying to smell everything, but sometimes that’s what you need to jar yourself awake.

  What jarred me, finally, were the jackals, the ones that had been whelped out in the scrub when the mother ran off from the carnival. There were more of them now, and they probably ranged far, their territory not concerned with national borders or city limits. Part of their territory was the yard I lived in.

  In all my time there, though, they’d never come into the warehouse.

  I’d seen them out on the flats, of course, loping to or from food, but they were just motion to watch, like a bird or a lizard or a low cloud. I didn’t connect them to my impulse to run, to hide, in spite of how the other rabbits would stand on their haunches and watch them pass, as if just being sure that the terms of some ancient treaty were being observed.

  They were.

  But treaties are only good until hunger sets in. Until you’ve got something the other side wants. What we had, in the middle of what was probably a drought, was flesh. I was sitting against the fence when it happened.

  First one of the rabbits sat up, its ears directed out the gate, and then another stood, and then another.

  This is maybe the way the Mayans watched a fireball burrow through their sky five or ten thousand years ago.

  Our fireball was two jackals, tongues lolling, black lips set into grins that part of me still remembered from Granger Mosely’s long pasture, I think.

  They were just loping in, like nothing at all was wrong with this.

  When the first of us ducked underground, they lowered their bellies and started pulling the earth toward them. For long seconds they wouldn’t even touch the ground, and then it would just be a puff of dust and they were floating again.

  I watched them for longer than I should have.

  They were slipping through the gate before I even realized they were a threat, and in the space of a heartbeat had one of us thrown up into the air, screaming. It was the worst sound I’d ever heard.

  And then the massacre really began — all the rabbits that hadn’t dived underground yet.

  The jackals crushed their skulls then shook the life from the small bodies, tearing through the fur with their teeth, too hungry to wait.

  The whole time, I just sat there, stone.

  What was happening was that my world was ending. It made me breathe hard, maybe even forget a little bit how to breathe. But, too, the carnage before me — it wasn’t as unfamiliar as it should have been. Instead, it was like a stencil laid on old memories. It was giving the random images in my head form, shape, structure.

  And then it was over.

  I opened my m
outh to, I don’t know, make a sound, maybe — mourn my family? — but the jackals, they were slinking back against the fence now.

  Standing half-in, half-out of the door to the warehouse was one of the babies who had crawled into that darkness years ago, and lived. He was the size of a large dog, and rangy, his nose twitching, eyes flat black. My chest warmed. With love, I think.

  He was our hero, our protector.

  Faster than I could even follow, he was on the closest jackal, taking its snout under his incisors, then rolling sideways with the jackal, so his hind legs could pull its guts out. They splashed on my face. Beside me now, caught in the chainlink of the fence, a rabbit that hadn’t been digested yet. I’d watched her give birth a few weeks ago. She’d even let me touch her once, with the side of my hand, but then had hopped off, as if pretending this had never happened.

  The second jackal tried to make it through the gate, its tail tucked under, but our hero, our protector, our god, he buried his large teeth into the base of the jackal’s spine, pulled it back into the yard. Though the jackal was still alive, he didn’t drop it, but stood there for a few moments, staring out toward the ferris wheel, letting the jackal scream. Only when the message had been sent did it slowhop back into its warehouse, the jackal in tow, thrashing slower and slower.

  Maybe an hour after that, I stood against the fence, my legs wobbly. I had to set my fingers in the chain link to balance. And in the chain link, still, was the undigested rabbit who had let me touch her once.

  I brought my hand back to my face, turned it over, even smelled it, smudging my nose and lips dark red.

  Without thinking, I licked my lips clean, and smiled, my whole face warm now. Next I licked my hand, and then lowered myself to my knees, to pick the meat from the fence with my teeth.

  When I stood again, the rabbits of the yard were watching me, as if disappointed.

  I nodded to them, a gesture I didn’t even know I had, and pushed off from the fence on unsteady legs, made it to the first wire roll, then the second, and then mine.

  Deep in the center of it, as far as I could reach, were the pieces I still had left of my life: a duffel bag packed with two Uvalde phonebooks; the bandoleer; a handful of silver nitrate sticks; and my clothes, rotten on the side the sun had been able to reach, musty on the other side, from straining my fluids of decomposition. But mine.

  I held them all to my chest, then stepped into the pants as much as I could. I remembered how the bandoleer fit, too. This time when I turned around, the rabbits flattened their ears down along their backs, set their wide hind feet in the dirt.

  I understood.

  I threw up some into the back of my throat, but was able to swallow it back down. When I could see again, too, I stepped out into the open, without anything to hold onto, and then lurched to the warehouse headfirst, felt my way to the open doorway. I was making a sound in my throat, I remember, but don’t know what I might have been trying to say.

  On the way to the door, I found a piece of rebar about waist high.

  I carried it inside with me.

  The reason I’m staying with Larkin for an extra day now is to be sure he’s not like me. Because, really, I have no idea how this works. I mean, the rabbits got all messed up just from being in the same yard with me, and I was dead then, not even trying.

  Larkin, his dose has been a lot more intense. For the last few hours of it, something had happened to his tongue, I think. Or his throat. All he could do was creak. I kind of liked it.

  It was more than he gave me, I mean.

  And, if the Texas Rangers were to bust down the door, my only real crime would be being alive, I suppose. Because the storage unit isn’t even registered in my name, who’s to say who’s the captor, who’s the captive. What’s really beautiful is that I haven’t even touched him. I don’t have to. Stand close enough to me these days, and you start to cook from the inside out.

  My clothes don’t last long, sure — skin either — but neither does anybody else. Not that any of this would stop the Rangers from blasting holes in me, just for the way my shadow would look in their flashlights.

  It would kill me for a while, yeah.

  As long as they didn’t mount my head on their office wall, though, I’d be back. Given enough cool nights, I’m pretty sure I can come back from just about anything. I mean — after walking into that empty warehouse in Piedras Negras, guns are nothing.

  Because I didn’t have enough balance for my eyes adjust to the darkness, I just lurched through. It was cool inside. That was a new sensation. And — I had no idea this wasn’t the way every dark space was — there were blue-tinged tracers of light smearing through, at about waist height.

  I wanted to touch that light, but in my dim way, I understood that that was going to have to wait. Standing before me, his maw bloody, was my god. He was growling.

  And I’d like to say that I used my rebar like a sword that day, defended myself like a man instead of animal. But the truth is that the rebar clattered to the floor. I backed away, fell to the concrete, and didn’t get up, just pushed myself back into a spiderwebbed corner.

  I was crying, yeah.

  The rabbit paced me, always just past my feet.

  When I stopped, then, he just stared at me, as if deciding. I’m not sure how long we sat across from each other like that. Maybe we were waiting for him to digest that second jackal, or maybe we were waiting for night to fall, I don’t know. Time had ceased to pass for me. The whole world was that rabbit’s eyes, never looking away from me for even an instant, so that I lost myself in them, didn’t realize until too late that the reason they were so large was that his nose was against my chest.

  I brought my knee up into his sternum with a dull thud and then it was started.

  His teeth tore into my shoulder, ripped me to the left and then back to the right just as fast, and then his hind feet pedaled around, to claw the tops of my thighs, and my stomach. When I was spread out into the thin layer of dust, and not fighting back anymore, the rabbit slow-hopped away a few feet, and situated himself under the smears of blue light.

  He was watching them, too, the smears of blue light. Feeding off them. The veins and capillaries in his ears glowed the same color. About dawn, I think, I rose from the concrete. My stomach and shoulder were still torn open, but the blood had congealed, and the wounds were warm, healing.

  The rabbit looked back around his body to me, showed his teeth, and lost his footing, trying to get to me. This time I was ready, though. As he opened its mouth to take my face in his teeth, I snaked my left arm around to his tall ear, wrenched his head down and around. Enough for me to get his thick neck in the crook of my arm.

  After that it was just a matter of holding on.

  Because the rabbit’s massive yellow teeth had scraped across my face, I couldn’t see anything, but I knew not to let go. At some point I realized that the sounds coming out my broken mouth now, they were words. I was saying I was sorry.

  To the rabbit I was choking, yeah, but also to the rabbits in the yard, each standing back on their haunches, their radar ears painting this picture for them in too much detail. Their god was screaming for air, gouging great furrows in the slick concrete of the warehouse they’d never been in, because it was sacred. After this, the jackals were going to decimate the yard.

  I was a man, though. I knew that now. I was man, and didn’t care.

  Finally, the rabbit I was holding onto relaxed. I knew it was dead because it became heavier, and its muscles, they were creaking against each other, as if there was some vital lubrication missing now.

  It was life.

  I buried my face in the soft fur, and cried long enough that the hair dried into the wound my face was, and, pulling away, I opened it again, the blood stringing between us.

  Over the next day or two, when, out of guilt, I’d decided to be the new protector, I would learn that the blue smears through the air, they were only still there because no sunlight had been in th
e warehouse. And the smears themselves, they had a taste, to me. I was drawn to them.

  What had happened was someone had come back to this warehouse a few months ago. And they’d been carrying some of the black rock. That was what had woken me — called to me.

  The cartel never knew it, but the black rock the Mayans had found, it was the kind of alive that didn’t want to be broken up. It didn’t really think, or resist pain or any of that. It just simply liked being together. It felt like home.

  The whole time I’ve been back, though, I haven’t seen that blue smear again. It could have been a fluke, even. Maybe a grain or two got melted into a belt buckle setting or something. Hopefully not, though. Who knows what that guy’s kids would look like.

  I asked Larkin just now if that was funny. That he didn’t answer was a good thing. For him.

  Because I didn’t have any clothes, and because the rabbit dead on the floor had been my god, I stripped his skin off, used it to bandage my own. And then, because I had a taste for it now, I ate as many of his organs as I could scoop out. His muscle was too tough, though, and for some reason trying to tear it with just my fingers, it felt like sacrilege. But the kidneys and heart and liver, they were enough.

  I held them down, too, started to understand that, in a way, while I’d been infecting this yard of rabbits, mutating them into what they were now, my memories had leeched into them too, somehow, into the simple, instinctual stories that coursed through their veins, so that, though my body was dead all those years, I’d lived on still, in generations of blind litters.

  Eating the biggest of them then, the biggest piece of myself, it was cannibalism, yeah, but it had to happen. Because I had snugged its head down over mine, maybe it was even double-cannibalism, I don’t know.

  It’s not like I haven’t paid for it, though.

  My face and head had been hurt bad enough that — it should be obvious. Or maybe you’ve heard, or seen pictures that you thought had been doctored by the tabloids, or caught something impossible in the sweep of your headlights, that was gone when you looked again.