There had long been legends of a deranged man living in the woods outside Jackson City, Virginia, but until recently it had been dismissed as an urban legend. A tall tale that mothers told their young children to prevent them from wandering off alone. Many a mother had told their children:
“Stay close, or else the Bunnyman will get you,”
The story was that deep in the forest, a family of hillbillies lived in a shack not far from a bridge where a set of train tracks crossed a back road. The family lived there for generations, without much contact with the outside world (inbreeding is a common part of the Bunnyman legend no matter who is telling the story). They were supposedly hostile to any outsiders who would encroach upon their land, even police, so everyone with any sense left them alone. To ward off any trouble makers the father of the family would catch rabbits, splay them open and leave them hanging by their necks from the bridge. A warning, scrawled in rabbit blood, was left on the over pass saying that anyone who trespassed would end up like the rabbits they saw before them.
One night, they say, the youngster of the family snapped. Either because of his terrible up bringing or inbred brain, depending on who tells the story, the youngster took an axe to his sleeping parents and siblings before hanging them up from the bridge that same way as the rabbits. The story goes on to say that in solidarity with the rabbits that his father had killed the young man created for himself a suit made of rabbit fur that resembled, best he could, a large bipedal rabbit.
After the bodies of his parents were discovered, police searched the area only to discover the shack and carcasses of skinned rabbits. No trace of the boy who would become the Bunnyman. The case was never solved, so the legend went.
Very little credibility was given to the old legend, until recently. There were dozens of sightings reported in the nearby hamlets of a large creature stalking through the underbrush at twilight. Pets within a few miles of the bridge began to disappear if they were left out over night. People were scared but nothing had happened to make police suspect anything sinister. A bear could easily fit the description of the creature spotted crashing through the woods and would also explain why animals were disappearing at night. The police chief of Jackson City and the surrounding areas took it upon himself to announce to the general population that there was no such thing as the Bunnyman. It was only a legend he assured them.
Worry over the creature in the woods died down after the police chief made his public statement. A bear was the logical thing, not some deranged, inbred murderer slinking around in a self made rabbit suit. That was the sort of thing that belonged in the realm of the Jersey Devil, the Chupacabra, and Big Foot. It was nothing more than a superstition. Animal control was dispatched to search the areas where there had been sightings or where pets had gone missing. No evidence of a bear was found, leading them to believe that it had moved on.
Everything was alright, the people were at ease once again and Police Chief Nicholas Lovering felt he was the reason why.
Lovering was a good chief, well liked by the community and by the men who served under him. There had never been much crime in Jackson City and he was credited for keeping it that way. He had been instrumental in pushing through several popular ordinances, such as the ban of skateboarding on city sidewalks, the ban of smoking indoors, and the relocation of the nearby Fey Institute for Violent Minds. The latter was a pressing matter that Lovering championed unceasingly and last year the move was finally made. The relocation of some of the most dangerous minds on the East Coast had been successful, for the most part.
Lovering didn’t like to think of the hiccup in the process that allowed four inmates to escape. He was simply thankful that the driver of the bus had the wherewithal to shoot dead the Chesapeake Bay Cannibal before he escaped. That would have been the cause of mass panic. The four that did escape were not caught, but have yet to be linked to any sort of trouble. Lovering was of the opinion that they simply disappeared into the woods and starved to death.
It was late on a summer night when Lovering and his wife were awoken by the sound of their German Sheppard, Lucy, barking from downstairs. After the bear scare they had started keeping her in at night and she often barked in protest of being cooped up.
Lovering personally didn’t see the point in keeping the dog in. They lived on the outskirts of the suburbs that surrounded Jackson City and their property was boardered by forest, it was true, but the area was far too heavily populated for a bear to wander into.
He opened his eyes slowly after feeling his wife, Bertha, jolt awake violently beside him. As his eyes grew accustomed to being awake in the dark he could see that she was sitting straight up, ears wiggling slightly, trying to discern what was making Lucy so agitated.
“Do you want me to go look?” Lovering asked groggily, desperately hoping the answer to be “No” but he knew it wasn’t going to be.
“She sounds scared,” Bertha whimpered.
“She’s a dog, she sounds like she’s barking,” he replied as he threw off the light covers and put his feet to the floor.
He put on his slippers and found his way in the dark to the door. Not wishing to turn on the light and hurt his eyes, he opened it and continued in the dark.
“Are you going to bring your gun?” his wife protested as he was shutting the door behind him.
“I don’t think I’m gonna need my gun to quiet the dog down,” he replied.
He descended the stairs noisily to let the dog know he was approaching, hoping that the fact he was coming would be enough to shut the dog up. It wasn’t. His slippers made contact with the tile of the first floor.
“Lucy,” he called out into the darkness.
Her barking didn’t stop. It sounded like it was coming from the living room down the hall. He made his way down to her, all the while calling her name. As he breached the door way into the living room he looked around for her saying:
“Lucy, that’s enough now god damnit. You’re gonna wake up the neighbors with all this noise.”
He looked around for her in the dark but couldn’t see her. He was forced to turn on the light. As his finger flipped the switch and the lights burst their illumination into the room Lovering managed to catch sight through the sliding door of something running away from the house in the backyard.
He grabbed a flashlight from the side table next to the TV and shone it out into the backyard. Whatever it was he couldn’t see it any more. He opened the sliding door and stepped out onto the back porch, shining the light around the backyard, hoping to catch sight of what had just been on his property. He took another step forward and felt he foot press down onto something warm and wet. He looked down to see he was standing on a skinned rabbit.
He let out a cry of surprise. The cry was echoed by what sounded like laughter, manic laughter emanating from the dark woods beyond his property.
Someone had been on his porch.
The next morning Lovering went to work looking around his property for any sort of evidence as to who it had been that he saw last night. He had told his wife that the disturbance had been nothing more that some deer in the yard that the dog was anxious to get after. The rabbit carcass was quickly disposed of, thrown into an evidence bag and sent to the station for the technicians to examine.
Probably a prank, he thought to himself. Some punks who had a problem with cops decided it’d be funny to invade his privacy and leave a gruesome calling card. It was the only logical explanation. The only explanation that he would allow himself to think on, anyways. Another, more horrifying thought tried to gain access to his mind but he pushed it aside. He couldn’t let himself to fall prey to that sort of thinking.
He finished combing the yard with little success. Nothing, not even a footprint was present to suggest that anything strange had happened last night. He went back into his house, a little upset with himself as a police officer for not being able to find anything.
“Did the deer leave any presents?” Bertha asked.
“What?” he replied, not understanding the question.
“The deer, did they leave behind any you know…”
“Oh,”
“Leavings.”
“No, no not a trace of them,” he said as he plopped down on his favorite chair in the living room.
“That’s strange,” Bertha said exiting into the kitchen to start making breakfast for the two of them.
“Why?” Lovering asked, trying to sound inconspicuous about her disbelief.
“Lucy sounded so upset last night,”
“Well,” he said and paused. “Well, she is a hunter at heart, she couldn’t get at them and it must’ve driven her nuts.”
“My brave little girl. Is she still at the slider?”
In fact the dog was still sitting at the sliding door that led to the porch. She had been there all morning watching the woods for any sign of movement. She didn’t even leave when Bertha began to cook in the kitchen. Normally, the second the tantalizing odor of Bertha’s breakfast sausages wafted into the room, Lucy was in the kitchen praying for a piece to fall on the floor.
Not this morning.
She stood incredibly still watching the woods. Her ears were perfectly erect, periodically twisting, trying to pick up a sound that may or may not have even been there in the first place.
Lovering normally would have scolded the dog for such odd behavior but in a weird way it made him feel safe knowing she was standing watch. And that made him feel ashamed. He, a police officer, a chief no less, was grateful that his pampered German Sheppard, Lucy, named after the Charlie Brown character, was watching over him.
“It’s almost ready,” Bertha called from the other room.
“Coming,” he answered.
He heaved a heavy sigh and pushed himself out of the chair. Walking into the kitchen he found that his wife had already set the table, something he normally did.
“I would have done that, honey,” he protested.
“Oh, never mind,” she said “I knew you were tired from being up last night checking on the deer so I decided I’d take care of it.”
“You’re too wonderful,” He said as he pulled her in for a kiss.
Before their lips could touch Lucy’s barking erupted from the next room.
“Oh Lucy! Hush now!” Bertha called but Lucy paid no heed to this order and continued to bark loudly and ferociously.
She started to exit to the living room to quiet the dog herself but Lovering stopped her short.
“I’ll take care of it, hon,” he said gently guiding her back to the table. “I’ll see what it is.”
Despite her protests she sat back down and began to eat. Lovering walked into the room quickly but apprehensively. He didn’t know what Lucy was barking at so ferociously, but he hoped it wasn’t what she was watching for.
As he entered the room, Lucy stopped barking and looked at him. Her look pleaded with Lovering to open the slider and allow her to chase down what she had seen, but he wasn’t about to comply. He looked out through the glass.
Nothing.
His eyes carefully scanned the underbrush at the edge of his property, taking in every leaf, every bush, every sapling. Sapling. He noticed that a sapling was swaying back and forward rapidly, as if something had just been behind it.
It might be the wind, he thought. He looked up at the taller trees to see which way the wind was blowing. It wasn’t. His imagination started to run away on him but he quickly checked it back into place. Lucy had been known to bark like this when she saw squirrels in the back yard which would also explain why the young tree was wobbling back and forth. The squirrels in this area were prodigiously fat, more than enough to cause the movement he caught the tail end of.
Lucy whined at him, pleading to be let out.
“It’s ok,” he said in an undertone to the dog. “You just keep your eyes out ok?’
And with that he exited back into the kitchen, leaving Lucy in the same stance that she had been in all morning. As he reentered the kitchen his wife looked up at him with a questioning expression.
“I couldn’t see anything,” he answered. “Probably just a squirrel.”
“Oh, that makes sense,” Bertha bubbled “You know how she loves to bark at those squirrels.”
“I sure do,”
There was a silence as they ate their respective meals. Hers was nearly finished due to the head start she had been given. When she noticed this she stopped under the pretense of asking him a question.
“So what was that you gave to Jimmy this morning?” she inquired.
“Hm?” he replied with a mouthful of sausage.
“I saw you hand an evidence bag to Jimmy this morning,” she clarified.
She was referring to the bag that contained the mutilated rabbit. He had to think of a lie and he had to think of it quick.
“Oh it was just something I had taken home to examine,” he answered lamely.
That was the best he could come up with?
“I see,” she said, clearly buying it “Anything interesting?”
“Not really.”
They finished their meals and went about their morning rituals. Normally Lovering took Lucy for a walk, but under the circumstances he was reluctant to leave the house and even more so to take her away from her post. Bertha went upstairs for her shower around 11 o’clock. It was about this time that the mail arrived and if he didn’t retrieve it before she was done there would be questions. Questions he didn’t want to answer.
So Lovering strapped on his gun, taking his wife’s advice from the night prior, and exited the house. His eyes darted erratically around the drive way as he stepped out. He didn’t want them too but he couldn’t help it. He was still shaken from the night before. The vague image of the figure running from his back porch played over and over in his head, taunting him with the unknown.
He arrived at his mail box and opened it to find the normal mail box stuffers: fliers, bills, random junk etc. There was however, something else inside. Lovering cautiously pulled out a small box, wrapped in brown paper, with “TO THE CHIEF” scrawled on it in red ink.
Warily he brought the box inside. He was opening it just as his wife came down the stairs; she had cut her shower short today.
“What’s that honey?” she innocently inquired.
“I… don’t know,” he answered.
“Who’s it from?”
“Doesn’t say,”
“Well open it,”
“I am,”
He paused slightly. Bertha reached for the package, to open it herself but he pulled it away.
“Well if you wanna do it hurry up!” she exclaimed.
He tore open the rest of the paper revealing a small, brown cardboard box. Before his wife could prompt him further he opened it. Inside was a small digital camera.
“What in the world?” pondered Bertha. “Who would send you a camera?”
“Honey,” Lovering said carefully as he retrieved some rubber gloves from his gun belt, “I need you to call Jimmy and tell him I’m coming in today,”
She was about to question him but something in his voice deterred her. She exited quickly.
Now with gloves on Lovering raised the camera out of its package. Lucy entered from the other room growling. She sniffed at the camera in Lovering’s hands and her hair stood on end.
Afraid of what he was going to see, Lovering switched the camera on. He pressed the button to view the pictures stored on the memory card and what he found made him gasp in terror.
The first shot was of his house, time stamped the night before. The next was of Lucy barking out of the window. The next was also Lucy barking, but this one was taken on the porch. The next was from the woods, as Lovering shined the flashlight out into the darkness.
He thought that would be all, he was wrong. He hit the “next button” and saw his house. In the daylight. Time stamped an hour ago.
Lovering was at the station now. He had taken the camera along with him and was currently awaiting the test results from the lab. Results that would hopefully find fingerprints, skin, anything that could provide a tip as to who was watching him. He had sent Bertha to her mother’s house along with Lucy. He told her only of the camera, not that the unknown intruder had been on their porch only the night before. He wanted to spare her that.
He ran through lists in his head. Lists of people that he might have angered during his career in law enforcement or at any point during his life for that matter. Everyone he could come up with, however, was either in prison, dead, or not nearly unstable enough to be doing something like this. It didn’t make any sense to Lovering as he rocked gently back in his chair.
The door opened and the head of the lab walked in with a manila envelope in his hands and an expression that meant bad things on his face.
All the tests had come back negative. There were no traces of any person who might have touched this camera before it came into the Chief’s possession.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the tech said.
Lovering only grunted in response.
“This sort of thing is… well…”
“Terrifying,” Lovering said curtly.
“Yeah,” He shifted nervously on his feet.
A silence fell between the two men. Two men of law that were finding themselves not only beaten, but afraid.
“Tell me about the rabbit,” the Chief said, trying to mask his mounting anxiety.
“Not much to tell sir,” the tech responded. “The rabbit is a species that is commonly found in this area and the woodland areas that surround the city. The dissection was made with some sort of cutting instrument, most likely a mid sized fixed blade knife. The blade is a little dull. The cutting was done… violently, for lack of a better term.”
“What do you mean ‘for lack of a better term’?”
“Well, it wasn’t poorly done. The blade follows the path of least resistance. It’s as if this person has done this before but the fact that the blade was dull and the cut was this well done suggests that whoever did it… enjoyed it.”
“Great,” he moaned. “Where’d the camera come from?”
“A camera store owner downtown reported a break in this morning. He said the only thing that was missing was this model of camera. And…”
“And?”
“And a dead rabbit, much similar to this one was stuffed into the cash register.”
“Any surveilance−”
The phone on his desk rang. Very few people knew the number to his personal phone, specifically the heads of the departments, the mayor, and his wife. Somehow he knew who it was.
He picked up the phone.
“Bertha?”
She was crying.
The blue lights of the squad cars shone out in the late afternoon as Lovering entered his mother-in-law’s house. The house itself was on the edge of town, several miles from Lovering’s, but was surrounded by the same thick forest.
The place was wrecked. Large footprints in what appeared to be either blood or mud, probably both, were tracked all of the otherwise immaculate carpet. Vases that she had had on display were shattered with carless abandon and the glass slider, not unlike the one in his own house, was now nothing more than shards on the floor.
But he didn’t notice any of that.
Bertha and her mother were upstairs. As Lovering entered the bedroom where they were, he noticed that the door frame was broken. They had locked themselves in the room upon hearing the attacker’s entrance. She was on the bed still sobbing from the experience. Lovering ran up to her and gathered her up in his arms, pressing her tightly to his body for fear that if he didn’t she would dematerialize straight through the walls, as if she had never been there.
“You’re ok now,” he kept saying to her.
It took her a long time to stop crying enough to tell her husband what had happened.
She and her mother (who was currently receiving medical care for the shock she had suffered) were upstairs when they heard a manic laughter emanating from the woods. Lucy began to bark loudly and viciously, sensing that her duty as man’s best friend was about to lead her into a fight for the lives of the ones she loved. Lucy ran up the stairs to the bedroom and positioned herself at the door.
They were about to look out when they heard the slider being shattered downstairs.
In a panic they closed the door and locked it, Lucy standing guard now behind the frame, awaiting the inevitable. They heard the downstairs destruction through the closed door. Years of memories and other valuables were being destroyed right beneath their feet. Then it grew quiet. Painfully quiet. The silence had reached its maddening crescendo when finally they heard a hoarse and soul chilling voice begin singing:
“Here comes Peter Cotton Tale, hopin’ down the bunny trail, hippity, hoppity, Easter’s on its way.”
Lucy growled determinedly as the voice climbed the stairs while continuing to serenade the terrified occupants of the locked bedroom. When the voice was just outside the door the singing stopped. He tried the knob. When he couldn’t get in, he knocked on the door, twice. Two knocks, loud and powerful.
Silence fell.
“Don’t make me knock again,” the voice hissed through the hinge.
For a moment there was nothing, only the sound of Lucy’s growl and their own hearts beating so loud they were sure he could hear them.
Then came the explosion of sound and shower of splinters as the door was kicked open with a single, barbaric strike. The women screamed as the assailant walked through the shower of shards. The face was a horror to behold, the skin covered in matted, mangled fur, and the stench was overpowering.
They had come face to face with the Bunnyman.
Lucy didn’t take the time to appraise the looks of the attacker, she pounced and she pounced quickly, biting into his arm only milliseconds after he was within range. She sunk her teeth in as far as they could go, to the bone, she was sure of it. The Bunnyman screamed in pain and rage turning his gaze away from the woman and onto his canine attacker.
He pulled a knife out from behind his back and quickly slashed at the dog’s face. She yelped with pain but didn’t let go, not this dog, she bit down hard, trying her damndest to crack the bone.
Bleeding profusely, the Bunnyman raised his razor high once more, but this time instead of slashing, he brought it down in a vicious stab to the back of Lucy’s neck. The spinal cord cut, Lucy had no choice but to fall limp to the ground. She died quickly. It had been her finest hour.
With the defender down, the Bunnyman slowly walked over to the women cowering in the corner. They might have been able to seize the chance to escape during Lucy’s battle, but fear had incapacitated them. He leaned down right in front of Bertha. His breath was noxious and his eyes were terrible. They pierced all the way to the back of Bertha’s skull.
“Mrs. Lovering, would you do me a favor?” he spat
Bertha couldn’t respond out of terror. He took this as an affirmative.
“You tell your husband come and get me. He knows where.”
With that he drew back his head and laughed. When Bertha had the strength to look up again, he was gone.
Lovering stepped out of his Suburban in front of the tunnel. It was made of concrete that had been whitewashed to make it look clean. The road that passed beneath the train tracks slithered through a perfect half pipe tunnel. There was a dead rabbit hanging from the overpass. This was the right place, Bunnyman Bridge.
Lovering looked around. Nothing but woods on all sides as the other officers stepped out of their squad cars. It was starting to get dark, that was a risk and he knew it. He couldn’t, however, wait another night knowing that the deranged psychopath that attacked his wife and killed his dog was still out here. Somewhere.
“Alright men, fall in.” He called.
The officers eagerly complied.
“What we have,” he said “Is a psychopathic suspect. He is armed and very dangerous. We know that he is in possession of a knife, we do not know how many, or if that is the extent of his arsenal. It is quite possible that he has fire arms. He is to be handled with the utmost caution. If that means fire on sight, so be it. He knows this area intimately so never go alone. There is only one of him and a dozen of us but if he splits someone off from the group that is bad news. We will be advancing through that area there,” he said pointing “in a wave type formation. I will be on point with Ted. Are there any questions?”
No response.
“You all know you’re position in the formation?” he asked.
They all replied in the affirmative.
“Then let’s go get this son of a bitch.” He declared.
The men echoed his sentiment and drew their weapons. They fanned out into the formation and took their first crunching steps into the underbrush.
They advanced slowly, hyperaware of every sound around them, knowing that each could be the deranged legend preparing to attack. The trees over head loomed over them like vultures. The creeping Spanish Moss hung down almost at face level; some of the taller officers had to duck. It was painfully quiet save for the rhythmic crunching of the squad’s steps on the forest floor.
A sharp cry from the right side of the formation brought everyone to an armed halt. Lovering looked over, and upon seeing no rabbit clad killer, lowered his weapon. An officer raised his hands apologetically to the rest of the group.
A rabbit, he mouthed, pointing to the ground in front of him.
He bent down to touch it.
“Don’t!” Lovering called in a harsh whisper but…
As the officer tugged the rabbit out of the underbrush he broke a string. This triggered the trap as a small sapling, still highly bendable with youth flew forward with a knife fastened to the top. The blade hit the man square in the chest, knocking him to the forest floor gasping.
Hit him in the lung, thought Lovering.
The man’s partner bent down and began tending to his fallen comrade’s health.
“Get him outta here!” Lovering called.
The officer replied by nodding his head. He gathered his comrade up in his arms and began walking quickly back to the vehicles they had left guarded on the street. Lovering watched the two men disappear into the foliage. After they were gone he turned to the remaining men.
“Proceed with extra caution,” he signaled to his squad as they all continued forward.
He wasn’t entirely sure what he was looking for but the presence of traps was a good sign. It meant they were heading the right way. They continued on, heads ducked low, eyes darting from the path ahead, to their feet, back to the path and so on. The radio on Lovering’s arm crackled to life.
“Sir!” said the voice of the man who had returned to the motorcade.
“Have you arrived back at the entry point?” Lovering asked quietly.
“Yes, but sir,”
“What is it?”
“There’s something wrong here,”
“What do you mean?”
“The guards… they’re gone.”
“What the hell?” Lovering said as he stopped.
He held up his fist to signal the rest of the squad to halt as well.
“Is there sign of a struggle?”
“There’s no sign of anything, there’s only…”
His sentence was interrupted by a terrible cry of pain. The cry was followed by gunshots in the distance.
“Do you copy? What the hell is happening?” Lovering screamed into the radio.
The response was choppy and punctuated by groans of pain.
“It’s… Bunnyman… the guards… cut…”
The transition went dead.
“Fuck.” He yelled. Then pointing to a where they came “He’s behind us. We need to circle back…”
Pain exploded into Lovering’s arm turning his vision white with the shock of it. He fell to the ground and looked at the arm he had been pointing with. A crude arrow was protruding from the skin. Another flew above his skull and hit Ted behind him. The arrow found Ted’s neck and he dropped to the forest floor gurgling.
The rest of the squad began firing in the direction the arrows had come from. The problem was they were shooting deeper into the woods. The only explanation was that there were two people out here trying to kill him.
“Cease fire,” he called but they couldn’t hear him “I said cease fire god damnit!”
They heard him this time. They stopped and each took cover behind a tree. They looked to him for leadership.
“Now listen closely,” he said “There are two suspects out here. One up a head and one closing in from behind us. You, you, and you, turn back and cover six o’clock. He’s already killed two officers, you see him, you drop him you understand?”
They did.
“The rest of you stay with me. We’re going to get the one up ahead.”
“But sir, your arm,” one of them protested.
“Jesus,” Lovering growled as he snapped the arrow off at the point.
They got the message. He was going forward and nothing but death itself was going to stop him.
The squad broke into two, each heading in their own direction ducking behind trees for cover. There was no way of knowing if any of the bullets that they fired blindly into the woods hit a mark, but they weren’t going to chance it by being optimistic.
They moved quickly from tree to tree, pausing behind each new cover for random amounts of time so that the bow and arrow armed sniper in the forest couldn’t predict their movements. They covered ground bit by bit and eventually, in the dying sunlight, they could see a shack on the horizon.
It was a small wooden lean-to at the top of a small hill in an obviously manmade clearing. It looked as though it only had one room with two large, glassless windows facing the direction of their approach. They drew closer to it with the utmost caution.
Lovering signaled for two men to enter the shack from the front, another was to come to the side with him. Lovering and his wingman circled around a large group of trees and found that there was another entrance on the side of the shack.
Two means of escape, Lovering thought. As he was pondering the significance of this architectural peculiarity, his wingman began the approach without him. He reached out to stop the man walking away from him but it was too late. He collapsed, screaming in pain holding his left leg.
Abandoning caution Lovering ran to the man’s side. He brushed away the leaves around the man’s foot and revealed a bear trap. The iron jaws dug themselves deep into his calves and try as hard as he could to part them, they were not budging. Lovering sniffed the air as something putrid got his attention. He looked more closely at the trap’s teeth. They were covered in human excrement. The wound was covered in the infectious sludge.
“Hang tight,” Lovering said to the man who was writhing in pain before him “I’m gonna−”
But before he could finish his statement he heard a dual scream from the other side of the shack.
“SHIT!” he cried.
He leapt from the man’s side and ran back to where he had last seen the other two. His eyes searched the area in a frenzy but he couldn’t find them anywhere. Finally his eyes fell on a large hole in the ground. A hole that had not been there two minutes ago. He ran to the edge and looked in. It was about seven feet deep and the bottom was lined with sharpened sticks. The two officers were lying at the bottom, dead.
He was on his own now. He reached for his radio as he took cover behind a large tree about twenty feet from the entrance to the shack.
“Second team, come in, do you read?” he said into the radio, praying for a response.
His prayers were answered as the radio crackled into life.
“We’re here sir,” the voice at the other end said.
“What is your status?”
“We’re alright. Did not encounter the suspect. We’re back at the entrance point.”
“What’s the status there?”
“They’re dead. They’re all dead. Looks like a knife was the weapon,”
“How could someone with a knife….Never mind. I’ve got three officers down out here. Two dead, one badly wounded. I’m outside of a small shack, presumably the location of the shooter. I’m going to check it out.”
“Are you sure that’s wise sir? We’ve called for back up−”
“There’s no time for that,” he yelled “It’s getting dark; if I don't go in now we’re not gonna get this asshole. I’m going in now, out”
“Be careful sir,” the voice said.
He didn’t say anything back. He reloaded his pistol and emerged from his hiding spot. He was suspicious of every step he took that lead up to the shack. He made it up quickly and silently, putting his back the left of the door frame.
For Lucy, he thought as he wheeled and kicked the door down.
He thrust his weapon forward and pointed it at every corner of the room, searching for a body to pump the contents of his clip into.
But the room was empty.
There was a small table, a cot and a wood stove in the room. Lovering took a step forward into the space, cautious and fully aware that it could be a trap. As his footsteps reverberated off the floorboards he noticed the glass strewn all over the room. The shots the officers fired had been on target, so where was the shooter?
It was just then he thought: How many shacks have wood floors? He dove out of the way just as a blade shot up between the floor boards. He landed hard on the arm the arrow had struck but he had no time for pain now. Rolling over he narrowly avoided a second blade, this one aimed at his heart. He fired wildly into the floor, the muzzle flashes lighting the room and revealing a figure under the floor. A scream of pain from bellow prompted Lovering to cease fire.
He looked around for the trap door, not seeing it he flipped the cot over. It was there. He opened it quickly, shining his flashlight down into the void. At the bottom of the ditch laid a man, dressed as a normal man, with a bow, arrows, and a long machete like blade.
Lovering descended quickly. He looked the man over and saw a bleeding bullet wound in his stomach. He kicked the weapons out of his reach. The man looked up at him.
“Looks like you got me, pig” he wheezed.
His eyes were fierce and the skin under them was reddish purple, like all the blood vessels had been broken.
“Who the fuck are you?” Lovering demanded.
“Hunter Fey, who the fuck are you?” the man responded.
“Fey?” Lovering echoed, “You’re one of the men who escaped from the mental institution.”
“No shit,” he said as he spat blood at Lovering.
“Who’s your partner?”
“What?”
“I said who’s your partner!”
“I ain’t got no fuckin partner,”
“Then who the fuck’s helping you, you little shit?”
“Shit. And they call me fuckin’ crazy,”
“Tell me!”
“I ain’t got the answers for you pig boy,”
A silence fell.
“But,” Fey said “I will tell you this… I didn’t make them traps.”
“You didn’t?”
“Naw, and this shack… I found it,” he answered. Then quietly “There’s weird shit in the woods around here. Weird shit. Shoulda listened to Great Grandma. Granpa and ma ain’t here. Shouldna stayed.”
“The fuck you talking about?” Lovering demanded.
“Nothing that concerns you, pig.”
“How did you know where I live, then?”
“Fucker I don’t even know your name,”
“Where’s the rabbit suit?”
He grew quiet. Lovering noticed he was looking up. A pair of feet was above them.
“Thanks for evicting this home wrecker, Chief.” The figure above said. “Give Bertha my regards.”
And with that he ran out of the door laughing manically into the balmy Virginian night. Lovering clamored through the trap back into the room but he was gone. In the woods he could see the flashlights of the approaching back up and medical team.
After that night, Lovering resigned as Chief of the Jackson City Police and moved to a different home in the suburbs, away from the forest. Hunter Fey, one of the four brothers who had escaped from the bus crash survived long enough to tell the story of how he found the shack, surrounded by traps. Instead of going on to business he refused to mention, he decided to stay. He said that he couldn’t stay out of the shack long though, because he “felt someone was watching him”.
The second man, the one who wiped out the entry point was never apprehended. Lovering still thinks of him though. Telling people who have children not to let them near the forest unsupervised, lest the Bunnyman should get them.
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