The White Rabbit Chronicles - Part I

The worms vaporized from White Rabbit’s head. One moment, they were vibrating through every nerve space, and the next they slid out without so much as a hiccup. She didn’t even catch the obvious—to ease up on the gun.  She was too strung out in the sickening, twisted destiny they had caught her in.

It was that loathsome recoil that snapped her to. The embers in her cheeks and the stinging in her eyes. She blinked and caught on that this was the encore of her conscious control.

She swiped her gun downwards, away from the two men standing ahead.

“Run!” she said breathlessly and hurled the gun to the side. It clattered on the floor. It was a reckless reaction, but she couldn’t have the death-machine near her traitorous hands.

“Before he makes me do it again!” she blurted.

The four men turned in the tight squeeze of a hallway. All side-eyed her dubiously.

And then one split from the pack, bounding for the gun she had tossed away. It was a paralyzing jolt, leaving White Rabbit gaping and immobile. Until another of the four made straight for her.

She stumbled back to a slipshod beat. The man took a swing and lit up a plume of indignation in her. This time at her erstwhile compatriots.

“That wasn’t me! That was the Ashen Phoenix!” she cried out.

“Looked like you to me!” the man spat through his tight clenched teeth, his fist aiming for hers.

“Zack, get out of the way!” the one who had grabbed the gun blurted as White Rabbit twisted out of his friend’s attack’s trajectory.

“He got in my brain!” White Rabbit jabbered, feeling out the rhythm of the strikes. Each breath a blurt of info. “I’m being real with you. He was controlling my actions!”

“Funny, we didn’t have any problems,” a third guy cut in harshly.

“He’s playing with us!” she bellowed. But they weren’t on her wavelength. They couldn’t be. The Ashen Phoenix had been no more than a cosmic fairytale to them. Not until his all-out victory.

“Shut up, traitor!” howled the man behind the barrel of the gun, craning for a clear shot at the dancing Rabbit. But Zack was still diving wildly, swiping at the empty air where she just was. His yearning to make her pay personally blocked off his buddy’s aim.

And then the buddy was clocked by the lightning crack of a fist. DeShawn Noble shoved the gun and the man’s body against the wall before a stray shot could be fired.

White Rabbit twisted under Zack’s hasty swing and whirled around in stride. One leg jutting out, she dropped low and off Zack’s radar. Before he could clock what was going on, his shins were swept aside and he toppled flat. White Rabbit bounded back on her feet, seeking out the last man.

When she locked onto him, he took two steps back, mouth agape. DeShawn ripped the gun out of the zonked man’s clutch and let him crumple like a paper bag. He oriented himself back towards the burnt-out commotion, the heater held to his chest.

“Yours aren’t the only strings cut,” DeShawn said in a brittle voice. He was eyeing White Rabbit with his usual stare. A stare that could make a boulder leap out of his way. Only their occasional past run-ins clued her in to the true meaning of his tone. The realization that it was no threat was all that let her hold her ground.

And then the second wave of awareness hit her. Gunfire and shouts outside their building, layered on top of each other in a clattering cacophony. Time Peace headquarters had gone from clenched silence to uproarious calamity in a few heartbeats.

“You believe her, Noble?” Zack demanded from his heap behind White Rabbit.

“She could lie,” he tossed out, “but I have the gun.”

“You’re the best, DeShawn,” White Rabbit riffed, a little bit of her old cool easing back in. “Tell you what, if we don’t take back IP, you cats can shoot me. No fuss.”

“Are you joking?” the fourth man popped off.

“She’s right,” Zack said abruptly. The new paradigm seemed to have zapped through him, and as he shot to his feet, he declared, “We gotta go.”

“The gates,” DeShawn intoned, “we take the gates back. Run. Sitrep, Rabbit.”

His heels spun, and the other men fell right in, meeting his pace. White Rabbit wasn’t far behind and beat feet to the front of the pack. She slid up next to DeShawn as he dropped her name.

“Either this is another of the Phoenix’s sick games,” she laid out with off-beat sarcasm, “or he’s dead.”

The words left her lips at the exact moment it clicked in. In the Ashen Phoenix’s twisted mind, making her take other Time Peace agents prisoners would be an exquisite coup. But if he wanted to reverse the scene, leave her at the mercy of her former captives, this wasn’t the cue. That would have been after she had been forced to off some of them.

So the rushed release had to mean that somehow, inconceivably, that creep had gotten what was coming to him. How? Who in the twelve Earths could say? But that would have to wait.

DeShawn was right. They needed to hit the gates.

They burst out into the funky highway that ran through Iterant Point towards the space-age command center in the middle of it all. Right into the middle of the storm. Two Anarakian soldiers were cut down before they even saw Rabbit’s crew, DeShawn scanning for the next pair in the vicinity. But the suddenly liberated Time Peace agents had seized the moment. The invaders were getting stomped in every sense of the word.

At least here. But if they got to the nerve center of it all…

White Rabbit dove into a nearby obsidian jeep, kicking it into action as soon as her feet found the pedals. The engine’s snorting growl was the only invitation the others needed. Zack and his buddy leapt in last, clinging to the dead Anarakians’ guns like they were hidden treasures.

Rabbit gunned the vehicle down the stuffed street. They cruised through the haze of smoldering vehicles, dashed out from the recent action, or the one before that. The invasion. When a slew of Time Peace agents tripped out and turned on their brothers-in-arms, taking the headquarters in record time. And then let the Anarakians in.

They’ve gone to ground, Rabbit mused as she steered – almost none of the enemy was out and about now. Though there were plenty of Time Peace crew.

“The Phoenix is dead?” One of the guys asked, still catching up to the idea of him being real.

“Check it,” White Rabit suggested, and tossed back a radio.

Zack caught it and dialed in for a status report. The squawking that came back was garbled babble. Everyone on the Point was chiming in. But finally:

“He’s dead! The Ashen Phoenix has fallen! What a shot! Right in the eye- the ol’ brain-hole! The Anarakians are scattering like roaches in the light!”

One of the men whooped his delight.

“We won?” the other asked dumbfounded.

“Not for long,” DeShawn reminded him.

“Anarakia’ll try and do a me,” White Rabbit laid out. After all, she wasn’t the only one who could dive down a rabbit hole. “We gotta stop them.”

“But they’ve got their own complex!” Zack gasped. “Their own gates! How can we—?”

“You ain’t there,” DeShawn cut out. “We got gates here to take care of.”

“Step on it, Rabbit,” the whooping man hollered, suddenly changing his tune. “We gotta beat the spyders there!”

The radio squawked again. “It’s Sainne! He’s here. Hunkered down at—no! He’s moving towards Alpha—”

A burst of static cut the words short.

“We might not have the chance,” Rabbit said without missing a beat. “We might have to go Plan B.”

“And plan B is?” Zack asked worriedly.

A big rig flew in ahead of the racing jeep. The long container spanned the whole road. White Rabbit stood on the brake and spun the wheel. The jeep almost flipped itself over before skidding to a stop at a near 180 from where it had been pointing.

“Hey Rabbit!” someone called.

She almost popped up, but a quick peak clued her in. Gun barrels. All pointed at her.

She popped the door and split. Rolling for cover behind the engine block, she caught the caustic roar, “All of you out of the way!”

Zack and crew scattered like rats. But the gunshots didn’t pop off.

“I said out of the way!” the grindstone voice echoed itself.

“You first.”

It was DeShawn. He stood tall on the flipside of the jeep, eyeballing the three armed men. Rabbit’s piece still cradled in his arms like it always belonged there.

“You ain’t blocking Sainne,” he observed in his hard-as-brick voice.

“Are you with the Rabbits?” the second of the obstructors demanded.

“I’m against Sainne. He’s about to rabbit. You’re facing the wrong way to stop him.”

A couple of the men checked each other, taken aback. But the leader held firm.

“The Rabbits turned on us. If you’re with them, you’d be lying to us. It sure looks like you’re protecting one now.”

The other two got edgy again. But there was an uncertain vibe in their stance. This was the moment to jam. Rabbit slowly rose, brushed aside her hair, and planted one hand on her hip.

“You got it backwards, man,” she threw out. “The rabbits didn’t turn – they were turned.”

The two followers chewed on that. The big man didn’t. He was as wide as both of them and a third guy put together, and tall enough to make that more chilling than freaky. His uniform was splotched with a single blob of grease, but his face was real clean, aside from some whiskers that threatened to bloom into mutton chops. His bright close-set eyes never wavered. But he didn’t swing the gun around.

“Anarakia’s got a weapon, see,” Rabbit went on. “Or they had one. Radio says someone’s just taken it out. So now it’s a race. Who gets to the gate first? Sainne? Or me?”

She popped a thumb out and jabbed it towards herself.

“I’ve got a mission, boys,” she said with conviction, a self-assured smile painted across her face. And then laid down a lie. “I’m on deck. White Rabbit the First. I get this information back down the pipe, and we’ve got this war wrapped up in a bow. Just gotta do it before the spyders open up their own Rabbit Hole.”

The big man curled his upper lip into an expression that was the wilted half-brother of a grin. His teeth shone and his eyes sparkled, anyway.

“Is that so?” he asked. “Well, we better let you through.”

He banged twice on the big rig, and its brakes hissed as it lurched backwards. As it cleared the path like a curtain sweeping aside to reveal a stage, new players were revealed to DeShawn and Rabbit. Four more men, and another jeep. This one with a girl sprawled out in a disheveled heap on the hood. Totally motionless, her ivory locks spilling over the windshield.

“Funny thing,” the big man added with an even less friendly expression. “This one was also number 1.”

A cold distortion hit Rabbit’s body. She slowly flexed her knees, ready to do her best gazelle leap out of the danger zone. DeShawn glanced back.

“That so?” he called loudly to her.

Rabbit scanned him for a beat. What was his angle? He knew perfectly well that she wasn’t the original. She had rewound the meta-timeline once already, and turned out to be the eighteenth of her kind in this rendition of the war. So it wasn’t a question. It was a stall.

“There’s something you gotta do,” DeShawn said. His gaze never softened. “You gotta make this right.”

One of the men with the guns smirked. He heard it as a threat to her. He heard it wrong.

For that one moment, Deshawn and White Rabbit’s minds were in complete resonance. Their minds racing to the terrible inevitability that came at the end of time. Of things that had to be done.

In that same blink, Deshawn pivoted and Rabbit dashed back for the wheel. Deshawn’s weapon was spitting out lead before any of the others could twitch. And when they did start dancing, it sure wasn’t to their own beat.

The return fire came anyway, and Rabbit peeled away from the scene for a heartbeat. Then she swung back around. Just in time to catch Deshawn and the big man drop. Both glaring at the other, their wills holding them up long after their bodies failed.

But like everything else, that couldn’t last forever.

Rabbit gunned the engine. She seized the moments that had been bought by a sacrifice only she would remember. Two survivors kept pelting the jeep, but she blocked them out. Keeping low behind the wheel, her jeep blazed past them. Straight towards the Alpha facility.

As the golf ball grew in the windshield, she sought out one shaft in particular. Not one of the support shafts, something else. And she found it.

Booking it towards the gate, she bailed before the perimeter guards cottoned on. The jeep soared through the already gaping gates, past the burning wreckage from the last skirmish, and right into the power shaft.

It crumpled and blew in a mind-boggling fireball, reverberating through the whole facility. Or at least Rabbit’s awareness of it. Everyone clutched at their heads, sprawled on the ground.

White Rabbit grinned despite the pain vibrating through her. The time gates were cut off. Sainne wouldn’t be swiping this victory from them. At least not that way.

“Move an inch,” a harsh voice dared from above and behind Rabbit.

“I just can’t wait for an excuse,” Commander Fia Florentine hissed.

…

END TRANSMISSION