Probably pissed as a newt.
Uncle Dan’s reflections were brought to an end by a signal that the beaters — armed with rattles, cymbals and electronic flash — were driving the rabbits.
Uncle Dan observed proceedings for a moment or two. More than a hundred, he thought.
Possibly two hundred. Perhaps the little bastards were popping up out of the ground. The rabbits were moving slowly. They did not seem too concerned about all the noise and the lines of men. But they were beginning to move more quickly now, and were frisking about a bit.
Uncle Dan became anxious. They looked just like ordinary rabbits. In a short time the dogs would be released. What if they just mangled the rabbits? Shit! What a waste of time.
Feeling suddenly depressed, Uncle Dan signalled vid one and got thumbs up. He turned to it with a broad smile on his homely weatherbeaten face.
“Ahoy, there, me hearties!” he boomed genially. “This is your very own Uncle Dan, alone in the desolate wilds of Yorkshire, the real Laurence Olivier country, where Emily Brontë once wrote The Bride of Frankenstein and John Braine penned his immortal Room At the Wuthering Heights. Yes, folks, we are in country rich with passion and mystery, a surprising land where the rabbits have all gone mad. Join your very own Uncle Dan, and watch yet another beauty of Mother Nature.”
The rabbits were now less than fifty metres away. It was time for the dogs. Uncle Dan raised his hand to his beard. Vid one cut to the rabbits. The dogs were let loose.
So was all hell.
The dogs ran at the rabbits. The rabbits surrounded the dogs. The dogs barked and snapped and were permitted a few moments of glorious disbelief before scores of rabbits coolly and systematically leaped at them and, regardless of casualties, kicked and stamped them into the ground. It was all over in a few seconds — with the death howls of the dogs fading into the wind — but it was wonderful vid.
Uncle Dan was happy once more. Life had been good to him.
But Life, alas, as far as Uncle Dan was concerned, had just run out of unnatural generosity.
And what followed was also wonderful vid. But not for Beauties of Mother Nature. Only for the Late Late Horrorshow.
Perhaps the death of a few dogs had simply acted as a stimulus to the rabbits’ blood lust.
Perhaps the mad rabbits did not approve of the cut of Uncle Dan’s Norfolk jacket. Perhaps they were offended by his bright red beard. Or perhaps he was simply the next nearest target.
Before anyone could do anything, they charged; Vid one, about five paces from Uncle Dan, had the presence of mind to drop everything and run. Uncle Dan’s reactions were slower.
Although he had the advantage of the late dogs in that he already knew that the rabbits were unhinged, like the dogs he simply could not emotionally accept the fact of their unhingement.
He stood and stared.
But not for long. The rabbits were all about him. They made high, curious, squeaky noises like wet fingers rubbed hard on glass. They leaped at his legs, they ran between his feet, and they deliberately tripped him up. He fell heavily, flattening three or four in the process.
But the rest of the rabbits did not seem to care. It was all part of the show. They swarmed all over him, so that he looked like a seethig, writhing, screaming mountain of palpitating fur.
They kicked him and scratched him and bit him and stamped upon him.
And within less than a minute, while a few brave NaTel souls were clubbing peripheral attackers with vids, tripods and any items of equipment that were handy, the mad rabbits of Yorkshire had kicked a still incredulous Uncle Dan to death.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Time passed, and the parasitic spirochete P 939 travelled far, creating its own subtly hidden bacterial empire, moving in mysterious ways its wonders to perform. Time passed, and Brother Peter’s message of Perfect Universal Love also continued to expand and, like its tiny bacterial ally, was no respecter of race, colour, creed or religion. Millions of people throughout the world became promiscuous, then gluttonous, then tranquil and then loving.
The suicide rate among statesmen, politicians, generals, dictators, revolutionaries and all manner of con men rose alarmingly. Economists, financiers, churchmen and historians (at least, those who remained celibate recluses — and there were still some) gloomily predicted the end of civilization.
At the General Assembly of the United Nations, the representative of the People’s Republic of China made a major speech. Before the world, and on behalf of his great country, he pleaded guilty to aggravating the global population explosion, fomenting revolution in capitalist countries, stealing territory from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, supplying western countries with fifty billion cans of chow mein, thirty billion cans of fried rice and a million tons of vacuum-packed sweet and sour pork all unfit for human consumption. And on behalf of the Chinese Communist party, he also pleaded guilty to starving the prolific peoples of seven rebellious Chinese provinces, to over-indulgence in the cult of personality in the case of the Mao Tse Tungs One, Two and Three, and to the persistent spreading of empty slogans thinly disguised as distillations of political philosophy.
In reparation, his country offered to sterilize one hundred million Chinese peasants, buy no more cigars from Cuba, allow fifty million qualified Chinese cooks to emigrate to the West, give Mongolia to Russia and Tibet to Tibet, and order twelve million five hundred thousand of the most dedicated members of the Chinese Communist Party to eat their first edition Thoughts of Chairman Mao.
American retaliation was swift and efficient. The President of the United States ordered a vast and hastily assembled task force to steam at top speed for China. It consisted of ten aircraft carriers, twenty nuclear-powered submarines, and thirty supertankers. Even before the task force arrived, one thousand American bombers completed five successful missions over the mainland of China with only one casualty — a plane brought down in the sea shortly after take-off by an unusually belligerent albatross.
The bombers made their first run over Peking. They dropped five thousand tons of oral contraceptives, five million fresh frozen ready-to-cook chickens, ten million packets of chewing gun, two thousand tons of sugar, one thousand tons of freeze-dried coffee, one hundred tons of cream, fifty tons of cosmetics, and five tons of marijuana.
Later the task force delivered a further twenty thousand tons of contraceptives, two million tons of canned food, five thousand tractors and ploughs, ten million tons of solid and liquid fertilizers, one hundred million frozen turkeys, two thousand million hamburgers, ten completely portable maternity hospitals and two hundred volunteer Chinese-speaking American psychiatrists.
The Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party resigned and offered to help rebuild a Tibetan monastery. The President of the United States was made an honorary Qualified Chinese Cook (Second Class) and had his face on the cover of Time for the third time in three months.
In Berlin one hundred crack East German athletes challenged one hundred crack West German athletes to a wall-smashing contest — hand and sledge-hammers only. The centre of the Wall was carefully determined. The East Germans then started at one end, the West Germans at the other. The East Germans won by low cunning, the liberal consumption of East German vodka and by six metres thirty centimetres of Wall.
The West Germans acknowledged defeat gracefully, and then drank the victors under the table. West Berlin overflowed into East Berlin. East Berlin overflowed into West Berlin. The Volkspolizei resigned to a man. The chairman of the council of state of the German Democratic Republic defected to the West and fulfilled a lifelong ambition by becoming a pastrycook in Munich. The seventy-five year old chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany died of a heart attack through over-exertion in his promiscuous phase.