Young Writers Society

That night, rain pounded the windows and obscured any view of the street. As Aria peered through a slit in the blinds, she wondered if her mother had been kept at work by Christine; that vile, loathing snake in human skin.

A voice in her ear: “You’re talking to yourself again, Grey.”

She had? “Ignore me then.”

The small headset she wore always reminded her slightly of a pilot’s. A tiny earpiece connected to a slim plastic covered wire for the mike next to her mouth. It matched her black desktop, three flat screens powered by a 500GB hard drive, quad-core processor, 15GB RAM plus two external hard drives with 5 terabytes of storage on them each. It wasn’t the best she could get her hands on, but it worked. If she needed more processing power, all she needed was to let loose a relatively harmless virus and use any computer it infected as part of her very own little super computer.

All for a girl who really didn’t do a whole lot with computers.

She’d gone home immediately after leaving her father’s office, the well dressed trio from the morning almost forgotten. In the corporate world, suits were casual wear, what difference did three more make? The only odd thing was the timing with which they’d arrived. Normally Mr. Hanley didn’t schedule appointments anywhere inside of an hour after his meetings with her. Those who took notice might start rumours that could stain his impeccable reputation.

“Hello? Earth to Grey. Beta testing going on.”

Adjusting the light on her desk to minimize the glare on her screen she muttered, “Sorry. Distracted today. Find any bugs?”

Her website was open on her computer. Two icons were lit up along the left side bar with names next to them.

Signed in:
Grey Rabbit
Shadow Rabbit

“A few. Nothing that can’t be fixed within minutes. You probably just have to adjust some coding in the program.” Shadow audibly cracked his knuckles before she heard the distinctive clacking of him pressing the keys. “And work on your polygons, they suck.”

On the main screen were two rabbits about ten by fifteen pixels in size. Hers, the silver one, sat in the middle square of a brown room. It had been dubbed “The Burrow” by Shadow for it’s likeness to the Weasley’s home and the name had stuck.

More key clacking.

His dark grey icon moved with a jerky and awkward hop, something she would need to look at later. When she slid the arrow over the icon, his username hovered over it. At least that part looked good.

A small speech bubble appeared over the icon, replacing the username. Can you read this? His voice quickly followed. “See it? Any problems?”

“It’s perfect.” She let out a small sigh. “But I see what you mean with the polygons, they suck. Everything looks pixellized.”

He snickered into her ear. “Awesome. Now, I need to sleep. It’s almost-” a pause where she could hear his chair creaking as he looked for a clock, “- three am here. We’’l continue testing tomorrow. ‘Night Cinderella.”

“Bye Shadow,” she muttered dryly.

Then his icon winked out and disappeared. She logged out of the beta chatroom and stared at the empty site. It was closed to anyone without beta permissions tonight so she could work on the new program. Even so, she had half expected the chat to be as active as usual.

She opened a new tab and went onto the Riverside Post’s website. The main page boldly declared an update on the morning’s Black Rabbit article. Excited, she followed the link it gave.

RABBIT’S ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY

Reading on, she noticed a picture, apparently of the newest victim beaming at whoever had held the camera. The girl looked strangely familiar…Bolting up from her chair, Aria ran to her bookshelf and pulled out a thin, dusty yearbook from her elementary school. Pages flipped by quickly, until she reached the class picture for the third graders. A short, mouse-brown haired girl smiled at her from the page, hand clasped with an orange-haired girl next to her.

The names on the bottom of the page read off in order: “Delain, Aria; Grey, Beatrice…”

The book tumbled from her grip and hit the floor with a muffled thud. Her hand fluttered up to her face and stifled her gasp. More of shock than any emotion of real substance. A slight pain pricked at her heart. She barely remembered her childhood friend, they hadn’t spoken in years, but Beatrice’s death felt more real than any of the ones she’d ever read about. This victim had been a vital creature, teeming with life and substance that was now lost, it’s current location unknown. The girl was now little more than an empty shell to be buried and mourned.

Was this how the other deaths felt like to the people who knew them?

A little bit shaken, she bent to pick up the book and replaced it on the shelf.
Without warning, the lights flickered just as lightning lit up her room immediately followed by a deep boom of thunder. She jumped, startled, but quickly returned to her senses. The storm could be what she needed to get her mind off everything. She settled onto her bed, laying down so she could stare at the ceiling as the sky erupted into an electric storm.

Four soothing minutes passed where the only sounds were thunder, rain and her own breathing.

Then her computer beeped loudly, destroying the calm little world she had only just gotten comfortable in. With a heave, she rolled out of bed and sat in her computer chair and checked what programs were open, trying to find why it had beeped so she wouldn’t have to listen to it all night.

The monitor flickered and suddenly went black.

The hairs on her body stood on end as cold, mechanical laughter poured through the earpiece in her headset. She hadn’t realized it was still on. Her fingers were numb and like ice, losing all feeling and dexterity. Shallow breaths were the only thing she could manage.

“Run, run, little bunny,” whispered a sexless, scrambled mechanical voice. If Aria hadn’t been gripping the armrests until her knuckled whitened, she might have thought it similar to L’s from Death Note.

She gulped and with a trembling tongue asked, “Where?”

“Where the owl can’t find you.” Whether serious or sarcastic, there was no way of knowing what the speaker’s tone was.

Slowly, achingly slow, she relaxed her grip on the chair forcibly and stood, peeking out the window through the slats in the blinds. “W-Who are you?” came her question, her tongue not willing to pronounce a single word properly.

“Don’t ask questions to which you know the answer.”

Icy dread, bitter and nauseating, settled in her abdomen and squeezed life from her heart. Across the street, in what she had though was a sea of shadow, something moved. The silhouette of a person, there one moment and melting back into the darkness the next. She let the blinds drop, not willing to wait for lightning to illuminate the figure.

Black Rabbit.

“You have approximately twenty four hours before the hunt begins. Run little bunny. Run…Grey Rabbit. Don’t let the owl catch you.”

Loud static erupted from the earpiece and she yelped, throwing her headset to the floor. Her screen was restored to normal. There was no sign that anything had happened.

Did it even happen?

In minutes, there was a duffel bag sitting on her bed, stuffed with clothes, her laptop, the headset she’d thrown and a small notebook. She needed to leave, staying and cowering wasn’t an option for her. She couldn’t fight either, this wasn’t some storybook where the good little girls and boys can triumph over the evil witches and wizards who try to kill and eat them. Nor was this a manga, where the untrained weaklings become strong in days. Wasn’t possible, didn’t care either, just move, Move, MOVE!

Throwing her bag over her shoulder, her hand flew to her bare neck. There was something she’d forgotten, but what? Her answer was swinging gently on a tiny hook next to the mirror hanging by her door, a tiny gold pendant in the shape of a rabbit on a delicate gold link chain. She threw it over her head, stuffed her pockets with money, her phone and iPod and took one last look around her room. Something was still out of place. Her gaze fixed on her computer. She shut it down and then slid off a panel of the tower and carefully removed the motherboard and hard-drive, wasting precious minutes. She even bothered putting everything else back in before she slipped the circuitry into her bag. What good it did, she had n idea. She just felt the need to do it.

“Have fun with that, freak,” she spat.

After that, she didn’t care, just ran into the kitchen, leaving the barest of notes for her mother.

“I’ll be gone for a few days. Just call me on my cell if you need me. I’ll be fine. Love, Aria.”

She slipped into the garage, connected to the house by a door in the basement. Inside was an old, beat up Chevy whose original colour was indeterminable, though now it was a dusty brown with mud caked over the paint job. She tore a set of keys from a hook on the wall and hopped in, tossing her bag in the passenger’s seat. The engine coughed and spluttered as it tried to turn over.
“Come on, come on!”

With a shudder, the car roared to life. Its demented purr sounded like a scraggly old cat’s.

“It’ll do,” she muttered.

With a button on the key chain, the garage door opened. As she backed out, watching for the slightest movement in the shadows left dark even with all the streetlights, she felt only the slightest bit of guilt…not for ditching her mom, rather for driving without a license. Fear had already left, but anger hadn’t taken its place either. No, she wasn’t angry, she just watched the shadows so she could run over the man who called himself Black Rabbit.

The garage door closed behind her and she drove off in the river that claimed the street for its own without looking back.

Too bad, if she had, she may have caught a glance at the rain-soaked figure standing plastered to the wall of the garage. Long hair disappeared down his back, bangs hiding the upper half of his face, a black trench coat casually hanging open.

He made a small noise in his throat, between a snort and a sigh, before grinning slyly.

To seemingly no one he whispered, “The Fox is on the move.”