"And, CUT!" The cameras ceased rolling. The 'dead' Knights of the Round Table sat up, wiping off their makeup wounds. The Beast of Terramog accepted a cigarette off 'Tim the sorcerer', who raised a laugh by using his staff prop to light it.
The 'Beast' wandered back to the canteen while the pyrotechnics guys rigged out the set for the Holy Hand Grenade, wondering where his agent was. He found him on a payphone.
"You're gonna have to do better than that, Fred. My client's got to eat and pay the rent, you know, not to mention my fee. Either you stump up three grand a day or you find another rabbit, right?" He noticed his client's approach. "Look, I've gotta go. Remember; three grand a day or no dice. Chow!"
He turned. "Woundwort, hi. That was that penny-pinching bastard from ITV. Said he wanted a class act for some 'animal magic' kiddie stuff then only offers five hundred a day. OK, all he wanted you to do was pop out of a hat, but-"
"Mike, I really don't want anything to do with children's TV. I'll be damned if I'll be typecast, but there is NO WAY I'm quite literally jumping through hoops all day everyday, got that?"
"Look, rabbits don't get serious roles anymore. It was all I could do to get you a voice part for the movie of Watership Down, and you were there in real life! I don't like it, but there you go." Woundwort shrugged, or tried; rabbits aren't designed with such gestures. He supposed he shouldn't complain. He'd blundered his way into the film and TV world after a cameo on a documentary about some animal rescue centre (courtesy of a certain large dog- "Thanks, Hazel!", one chapter of his autobiography would be titled) and been spotted by one of the Pythons whilst working as an extra in the legendary Dead Parrot Sketch. Now he was trying to break into more mainstream stuff. General Woundwort was no stranger to obsessions, but fate had successfully channelled all that ego and megalomania into something less likely to cause death and destruction; his secret dream was a pair of pawprints somewhere on Hollywood Boulevard.
"By the way, Mike, I'm still not happy about this ridiculous makeup. I mean, what's wrong with my natural colouring?"
"Yeah, I know, but you know what those white bunnies are like. It's irony, y'know?"
"Ha ha. Wonderful, I'm sure. Now you'd better find something half-decent for me to do after this or I find myself another agent, got that?"
Bloody prima donna, Mike thought to himself. Thinks he's still boss of that Efrafa gang; a hard bastard on a power trip he never quite came down from even after he took a right good kicking.
Surprisingly, the payphone rang. Instinctively, Mike picked it up.
"The Beast of Terramog's agent?"
"Yes, speaking. Can I help you?"
"We have a proposition for your client, one which involves a very large amount of money." The voice on the other end of the line turned out to be a little-known independent director who had just landed a pretty big contract with Fox for a strange, semi sci-fi picture about a bunch of various animals who have their intelligence boosted, and are given voices, by the stereotypical mad scientist. The plot just got dafter after that, but Mike's eyes lit up at the offer of TEN THOUSAND QUID per week for a six-month project. His agreed fee was twenty percent.
"Woundwort, we just hit SERIOUS paydirt!"
Woundwort's eyes gleamed terrifyingly as Mike explained. This was it, the big one. Hollywood Boulevard, here he came!
It never occurred to either of them, as the plane tickets were arranged and the contract finalised, whether this was too good to be true. Just where the hell had this bloke got that kind of money? Who were the other animals? And, most of all, how had he known to call the exact payphone Mike had been standing next to?
Later on, once the smoke had cleared and the worst of the scars had faded, both of them wished that they had paid more attention to this.
~#~ =:[
Things did not turn out quite as expected. Woundwort found himself stuck with a half-dozen other rabbits of assorted breed, who had mostly spent very little time outside a hutch. As can well be imagined, he found their company rather dull for the long bus ride to the set.
"You'd think they'd lay on something a bit more comfortable," Mike remarked. "I mean, if they can afford to pay ten thousand bucks a day they can rent a nicer coach, surely." Woundwort suspected that the production team had reached a few conclusions about salaries versus perks and made a pragmatic choice. He probably would have done things a bit differently, but ten thousand was ten thousand.
They reached the set, an old abandoned hotel, and Woundwort headed for the nearest bush; the coach had possesed a lavatory, but bitter experience had held him back from attempting to use it. This vital function performed, the despot-turned-actor proceeded to the stage for the sound check.
The building was deserted. There was no apparent film equipment, little or no sign that anybody had been in here recently, and no sign of his travelling companions.
"Mike? What's going on?" Woundwort began to feel more annoyed than puzzled. "Who's playing funny buggers- What the hell?" A sack descended fast, catching him before he could react. There was a long, dark, and bumpy journey followed by a short drop into a holding cage of some kind.
As soon as he exhausted his reserve of obscenity in Lapine and English, Woundwort looked about him. There was a little ambient light, and a sensation of space. There were also apparently a few other creatures huddled in corners, though the cage was surely designed for several dozen rabbit-sized bodies.
"Who's there? Is that the guy who wandered off?" a voice asked anxiously.
"Yes, it is, and he's not happy. What is all this?" Woundwort replied. Several voices, in Lapine, woodland talk and- to Woundwort's surprise and alarm- English replied. All of them seemed to have different theories of what was going on, and none of them seemed to agree.
"The upshot of all that," a new voice remarked once the noise had died away, "is that we really have no idea. Some of us can talk like humans, some can't. For those who can, only a few can do so naturally; the rest, like myself, were forcibly altered by men." Woundwort was more than slightly taken aback.
"That's a new one on me. Why in Frith's name would they want to do that?"
"To find out how 'naturals' like you do it, General," the new voice replied. Woundwort spun around, recognition dawning, and beheld a rabbit he hadn't seen for several years.
"Thayali! What are you doing here?" His former foe tried to shrug, but was inhibited by weight of scar tissue. "I'm sure I don't know," he replied wearily. "I mean, I'm a perfectly normal rabbit, not even unusually intelligent. Perhaps they just grabbed me at random." He let that sink in.
"Well, we'd better think of a way out of here before they come up with something even more creatively unpleasant to do to us," Woundwort suggested. Bigwig glared at him.
"You think I'm going to help YOU? Ha, it doesn't look like you're unusually intelligent either; quite the reverse, in fact."
"Look," interjected another rabbit, placing himself between the two enemies, "I don't care why you don't like each other, but can you declare an armistice until we're safely out of this mess?"
Woundwort and Bigwig looked at each other, conveying a lot of information with one glance; starting with mutual acknowledgement of a temporary truce and working its way onwards from there.
"OK, then. Now, has anybody got any bright ideas?"
There were several minutes of thought and argument. A mixture of guesswork and deduction led them to decide that they were in a large packing case. Light could be seen around its edges, so the lid was probably loose. Surprisingly, the first idea came from a mouse.
"They are NOT paying me enough for this kind of thing," Woundwort grumbled. "Hold still, for crying out loud!" The doe perched on his shoulders regained her footing. "Sorry. Rabbits aren't built for this kind of thing." She nodded to the hamster standing on her cupped forepaws. "Ready whenever you are."
"Alright. 1, 2, 3... LIFT!" All three thrust themselves upward. The lid of the crate, weighted by no fewer than four house bricks, moved about a centimetre, wobbled for a moment and then dropped back, stunning the hamster and causing the doe to lose her footing and land heavily on Bigwig.
Woundwort struggled for a moment, then gave in and burst out laughing. There was a moment of tension you could have broken a knife blade on, then Bigwig started to laugh as well. The other prisoners followed suit, mostly out of relief that he hadn't started killing things.
"You know," Bigwig gasped after a while, "the first time I saw a rabbit do this it scared the pellets out of me. But now..." He shook with mirth for a few seconds more, "... it doesn't seem all that bad." The doe who had landed on him nursed her bruised hindquarters; Bigwig was far from a soft landing, with very little excess fat and so much missing fur that from some angles he looked like a hairy man's fist.
"Well, that was good for morale," she remarked rather testily, "but we're still stuck in a box."
"I've got an idea," put in the fourth rabbit, the one who had brokered the Bigwig/Woundwort ceasefire. "If we all run at the side of the crate hard enough, we can tip it over and get out."
They did so, Woundwort putting all his weight into the dash. The box failed to budge, but Woundwort hit a frail, rotten patch of wood and crashed straight through.
"Well," he remarked laconically, "I suppose that's one way of getting out."
It turned out that they were in the back of what appeared to be a truck, which was stacked with assorted goods. They took stock of their numbers; four rabbits, three mice and six hamsters. They had to be the oddest assortment of creatures that ever broke free from captivity.
"Hey! Who's there?" a voice demanded from inside another crate. Woundwort leapt atop it, shoving the collection of bricks with his forehead, and Bigwig came to his aid. After some minutes of dilligent work they knocked all the bricks to the ground.
"Alright, you can get the lid open," Woundwort helpfully informed the unseen voice. The lid flew across the vehicle, and a very disgruntled-looking cat poked its head out.
"Do you mind explaining," it demanded acidly, "just what the hell is going on?"
"We aren't really sure ourselves," Bigwig replied, determined not to be put off by the cat's mastery of the English language and strong American accent. He suspected that this was far from the strangest sight he'd be seeing before he made it back to Watership; currently the idea that he wouldn't actually GET home was not one he cared to entertain.
"Hey, how come you can talk like me?" the cat asked, astonished. They explained the little they knew.
"So, whadda we do now? We're stuck in the back of a semi, I ain't seen a way out, and I don't even know where we are!" They looked at one another.
"We can let everyone else out of these crates, for a start," suggested one of the hamsters. Nobody could think of anything better to do, so they patiently wrestled the crates open one at a time, releasing a staggeringly diverse selection of animals; wild and domesticated, large and small. The biggest was a badger, the smallest a vole. Just about the only thing they shared was some kind of special trait, either the power of speech, unusual intelligence or both.
Some of the predators looked rather hungrily at the smaller animals, but to Bigwig's surprise it was Woundwort who stood up to them on this issue.
"Nobody eats anybody else whilst I'm around to stop it," he warned. Some of the dozen or so rabbits that formed this ecclectic menagerie stood by him. Most of them were tough-looking fellows who had been through just about everything the outside world could throw at them, and Woundwort looked like he could bring down a wolf.
"OK, we'll lay off you little guys until we're outta here," promised the American cat. "I'd give him 'little guys' if he weren't backed up by enough elil to wipe out Efrafa," Bigwig muttered to Woundwort.
Suddenly, the rear door of the truck swung open, and another crate was flung inside without much consideration for its occupants. The door banged shut again. "Bastard!" a voice bellowed from inside the crate, which appeared to have split slightly.
"Are you all right?" asked one of the braver creatures. "That depends if being stuck in a box with a bunch of kittens counts as 'all right' in your book," the voice replied. "I'm not hurt, though; thank you for taking an interest." The crate split even further, and a rabbit stuck his head out. "Now, who are you?"
Introductions were made, but before they could be completed the vehicle lurched and began to move. Several bricks were dislodged from the crates, and there were one or two narrow escapes. At length, they came to a halt. The rear doors opened.
"Come on now, my little friends," a man's voice said in sugar-coated tones. "Oh, if you knew what I've got in store for you..." Woundwort didn't wait for an explanation. He hurled himself towards the man at throat height, teeth bared. There was a terrible scream.
Bigwig poked his head out from behind a reassuringly solid crate. There was no sign of the man, but Woundwort was trying to clean arterial-looking blood from his pelt.
"I don't believe it. You killed a man single-pawed!" exclaimed one of the other animals.
"I do all my own stunts," he replied enigmatically. "Come on, let's get out of here before his friends come to investigate."
They were in a loading bay of some kind, dim and reeking of oil. Woundwort led the way in his usual assured manner. Bigwig tolerated this, reasoning that it would be the General who got killed first if anything went wrong.
"Damn," he said to himself after a moment. "They've shut the doors." This was correct; the only obvious exit was closed and locked.
"So, General," Bigwig said rather derisively, "what are you going to do now?"
"We're going to wait. Somebody will turn up eventually to investigate that fellow's absence, and I'll be ready for them!"
"Oh, Frith up a duck's arse," Bigwig said to himself. "He hasn't changed a bit. That isn't a tactic, that's complete lunacy! We're all going to die."
"Oh, so you have a better idea?" There was a long and thoughtful pause.
"All right, all RIGHT. But you can do the fighting for a change," Bigwig replied. "I'm getting too old for this kind of thing."
"Chief Rabbits, dear chap," Woundwort observed genially, "must never say things like that. How long do you think you'd stay in charge if your Owsla heard you talking about getting old?"
One of these days, Bigwig decided, I'm going to explain government by consent to El Presidente here. He never did get the hang of staying Chief by having all the clever ideas, or by winning the hearts and minds of the warren.
A few minutes later, the door opened. A man walked in, his uniform suggesting him to be either a security guard or henchman to Dr Evil (watch the movie, if you can stand more than five minutes). Woundwort, who had been waiting for this moment, sank teth and claws into the man's ankle. He screamed, and grabbed for the pistol at his side, but the other animals got to him before he could draw it. He collapsed, bleeding, and curled up as tightly as he could.
"Leave him! We've got to get out of here before the rest of them come after us!" Bigwig yelled. The animals abandonned their attack and retreated through the open door. "I've never seen a man go tharn before," Woundwort remarked breathlessly. "Just shut up and RUN!" Bigwig replied, accelerating.
All of them pelted as one down endless grey corridors without any real idea of where they were going. Eventually, they came to a closed door.
"Watch out!" shouted Woundwort, skidding towards the door on the polished tiles despite his best efforts. While most of the animals were fairly successful in arresting their forward motion, several were not. The badger was one of the latter, and smashed head first into the door braining himself and knocking the door clean off its hinges. There was a short crescendo of yells and banging noises, followed by the traditional little tinkle. Then, after a brief interval: "Bugger!"
"Are you alright?" asked Woundwort, cautiously peering around the doorframe.
The badger was caught up in a pile of expensive looking laboratory equipment, now broken. A woman in a white coat was staring at him in complete astonishment.
"Sorry, just passing through," Woundwort observed with as near as a rabbit can get to an apologetic smile.
"Wait!" shouted the woman. "You're those animals that the Professor said could talk!" Several animals muttered something about stating the bleedin' obvious. "You're all part of a biological engineering programme," she continued. "We wanted to create whole new sentient species, so that the human race would have some REAL competition. But the government stepped in and decided to use the research to create intelligent killing machines."
The animals looked at one another in total amazement. Each of them remembered their experiences with the great majority of humans. Few of them were actually cruel, but they tended to regard most of the animal kingdom as barely tolerated inferior beings who might provide occasional amusement. Even the cats remembered the odd thrown boot. And now it appeared that when a few sympathetic ones tried to even the odds some the majority had decided to use the results for the purpose of killing each other.
"Listen," the female scientist continued, "in this bag there are a number of cultures of a special retrovirus which will give certain animals higher intelligence and the power of speech. They haven't worked out how we did it yet, and they don't know I've got any left. Get it as far away as you can, and try to distribute it to as many animals as possible, but for God's sake get out of this building before they find you! You'll be up on the dissecting table if you're caught!" She hastily secured a canvas bag to the badger, who accepted it proudly.
As the whole posse raced for the vehicle pool, Bigwig pondered the situation. He'd heard a few nasty stories about the damage caused by men from Keehar, and from the animals at the centre where he'd been imprisoned and... altered was the best word, probably. They all might just be the only hope for the whole planet.
Woundwort was examining a van carefully. It was apparently being loaded with cardboard boxes, and both the driver's and rear doors were open. The engine was idling.
"I," he said in an awful impresion of Baldrick, "have a cunning plan." Bigwig had never seen Blackadder, so he didn't get the gag, but he still laughed.
"General, you may be a tyrannical nutcase, but you have a great store of jokes...," he saw Woundwort's face, and the mad gleam in his eyes. "You aren't joking, are you? Oh, Frith. No, no NO! Absolutely not!" However, in the end a majority vote won the day; which is to say that the few who dared question Woundwort's authority were seized and dragged bodily into the van.
Shutting the doors required a bit of effort, and the cat delegated for the job had to scramble in through the window. Woundwort balanced carefully on the central bar of the steering wheel, shouted "Hang on, folks!" to those in the back, and shouted at the badger (whose name incidentally was Oak) to move the gear stick to Drive and then lean on the accelerator. The van's legitimate driver had thoughtfully left the handbrake off, so the van surged ahead.
By shifting his weight carefully, Woundwort found he could steer pretty well. Oak soon got the hang of lessening his pressure on the accelerator and giving the brake an occasional touch when cornering, after a few fur-raising moments and the loss of a litre of paint from one side to an inconvenient telegraph pole.
The van sped on through the desert, without any obvious sign of pursuit. Bigwig finally worked out how to get into the cab, and emerged from the rear of the van looking like he had recently fallen into Nuthangar Farm's baling machine.
"General, we had both better survive this whole ridiculous escapade," he growled, "because when its all over I am going to kill you."
The 'Beast' wandered back to the canteen while the pyrotechnics guys rigged out the set for the Holy Hand Grenade, wondering where his agent was. He found him on a payphone.
"You're gonna have to do better than that, Fred. My client's got to eat and pay the rent, you know, not to mention my fee. Either you stump up three grand a day or you find another rabbit, right?" He noticed his client's approach. "Look, I've gotta go. Remember; three grand a day or no dice. Chow!"
He turned. "Woundwort, hi. That was that penny-pinching bastard from ITV. Said he wanted a class act for some 'animal magic' kiddie stuff then only offers five hundred a day. OK, all he wanted you to do was pop out of a hat, but-"
"Mike, I really don't want anything to do with children's TV. I'll be damned if I'll be typecast, but there is NO WAY I'm quite literally jumping through hoops all day everyday, got that?"
"Look, rabbits don't get serious roles anymore. It was all I could do to get you a voice part for the movie of Watership Down, and you were there in real life! I don't like it, but there you go." Woundwort shrugged, or tried; rabbits aren't designed with such gestures. He supposed he shouldn't complain. He'd blundered his way into the film and TV world after a cameo on a documentary about some animal rescue centre (courtesy of a certain large dog- "Thanks, Hazel!", one chapter of his autobiography would be titled) and been spotted by one of the Pythons whilst working as an extra in the legendary Dead Parrot Sketch. Now he was trying to break into more mainstream stuff. General Woundwort was no stranger to obsessions, but fate had successfully channelled all that ego and megalomania into something less likely to cause death and destruction; his secret dream was a pair of pawprints somewhere on Hollywood Boulevard.
"By the way, Mike, I'm still not happy about this ridiculous makeup. I mean, what's wrong with my natural colouring?"
"Yeah, I know, but you know what those white bunnies are like. It's irony, y'know?"
"Ha ha. Wonderful, I'm sure. Now you'd better find something half-decent for me to do after this or I find myself another agent, got that?"
Bloody prima donna, Mike thought to himself. Thinks he's still boss of that Efrafa gang; a hard bastard on a power trip he never quite came down from even after he took a right good kicking.
Surprisingly, the payphone rang. Instinctively, Mike picked it up.
"The Beast of Terramog's agent?"
"Yes, speaking. Can I help you?"
"We have a proposition for your client, one which involves a very large amount of money." The voice on the other end of the line turned out to be a little-known independent director who had just landed a pretty big contract with Fox for a strange, semi sci-fi picture about a bunch of various animals who have their intelligence boosted, and are given voices, by the stereotypical mad scientist. The plot just got dafter after that, but Mike's eyes lit up at the offer of TEN THOUSAND QUID per week for a six-month project. His agreed fee was twenty percent.
"Woundwort, we just hit SERIOUS paydirt!"
Woundwort's eyes gleamed terrifyingly as Mike explained. This was it, the big one. Hollywood Boulevard, here he came!
It never occurred to either of them, as the plane tickets were arranged and the contract finalised, whether this was too good to be true. Just where the hell had this bloke got that kind of money? Who were the other animals? And, most of all, how had he known to call the exact payphone Mike had been standing next to?
Later on, once the smoke had cleared and the worst of the scars had faded, both of them wished that they had paid more attention to this.
~#~ =:[
Things did not turn out quite as expected. Woundwort found himself stuck with a half-dozen other rabbits of assorted breed, who had mostly spent very little time outside a hutch. As can well be imagined, he found their company rather dull for the long bus ride to the set.
"You'd think they'd lay on something a bit more comfortable," Mike remarked. "I mean, if they can afford to pay ten thousand bucks a day they can rent a nicer coach, surely." Woundwort suspected that the production team had reached a few conclusions about salaries versus perks and made a pragmatic choice. He probably would have done things a bit differently, but ten thousand was ten thousand.
They reached the set, an old abandoned hotel, and Woundwort headed for the nearest bush; the coach had possesed a lavatory, but bitter experience had held him back from attempting to use it. This vital function performed, the despot-turned-actor proceeded to the stage for the sound check.
The building was deserted. There was no apparent film equipment, little or no sign that anybody had been in here recently, and no sign of his travelling companions.
"Mike? What's going on?" Woundwort began to feel more annoyed than puzzled. "Who's playing funny buggers- What the hell?" A sack descended fast, catching him before he could react. There was a long, dark, and bumpy journey followed by a short drop into a holding cage of some kind.
As soon as he exhausted his reserve of obscenity in Lapine and English, Woundwort looked about him. There was a little ambient light, and a sensation of space. There were also apparently a few other creatures huddled in corners, though the cage was surely designed for several dozen rabbit-sized bodies.
"Who's there? Is that the guy who wandered off?" a voice asked anxiously.
"Yes, it is, and he's not happy. What is all this?" Woundwort replied. Several voices, in Lapine, woodland talk and- to Woundwort's surprise and alarm- English replied. All of them seemed to have different theories of what was going on, and none of them seemed to agree.
"The upshot of all that," a new voice remarked once the noise had died away, "is that we really have no idea. Some of us can talk like humans, some can't. For those who can, only a few can do so naturally; the rest, like myself, were forcibly altered by men." Woundwort was more than slightly taken aback.
"That's a new one on me. Why in Frith's name would they want to do that?"
"To find out how 'naturals' like you do it, General," the new voice replied. Woundwort spun around, recognition dawning, and beheld a rabbit he hadn't seen for several years.
"Thayali! What are you doing here?" His former foe tried to shrug, but was inhibited by weight of scar tissue. "I'm sure I don't know," he replied wearily. "I mean, I'm a perfectly normal rabbit, not even unusually intelligent. Perhaps they just grabbed me at random." He let that sink in.
"Well, we'd better think of a way out of here before they come up with something even more creatively unpleasant to do to us," Woundwort suggested. Bigwig glared at him.
"You think I'm going to help YOU? Ha, it doesn't look like you're unusually intelligent either; quite the reverse, in fact."
"Look," interjected another rabbit, placing himself between the two enemies, "I don't care why you don't like each other, but can you declare an armistice until we're safely out of this mess?"
Woundwort and Bigwig looked at each other, conveying a lot of information with one glance; starting with mutual acknowledgement of a temporary truce and working its way onwards from there.
"OK, then. Now, has anybody got any bright ideas?"
There were several minutes of thought and argument. A mixture of guesswork and deduction led them to decide that they were in a large packing case. Light could be seen around its edges, so the lid was probably loose. Surprisingly, the first idea came from a mouse.
"They are NOT paying me enough for this kind of thing," Woundwort grumbled. "Hold still, for crying out loud!" The doe perched on his shoulders regained her footing. "Sorry. Rabbits aren't built for this kind of thing." She nodded to the hamster standing on her cupped forepaws. "Ready whenever you are."
"Alright. 1, 2, 3... LIFT!" All three thrust themselves upward. The lid of the crate, weighted by no fewer than four house bricks, moved about a centimetre, wobbled for a moment and then dropped back, stunning the hamster and causing the doe to lose her footing and land heavily on Bigwig.
Woundwort struggled for a moment, then gave in and burst out laughing. There was a moment of tension you could have broken a knife blade on, then Bigwig started to laugh as well. The other prisoners followed suit, mostly out of relief that he hadn't started killing things.
"You know," Bigwig gasped after a while, "the first time I saw a rabbit do this it scared the pellets out of me. But now..." He shook with mirth for a few seconds more, "... it doesn't seem all that bad." The doe who had landed on him nursed her bruised hindquarters; Bigwig was far from a soft landing, with very little excess fat and so much missing fur that from some angles he looked like a hairy man's fist.
"Well, that was good for morale," she remarked rather testily, "but we're still stuck in a box."
"I've got an idea," put in the fourth rabbit, the one who had brokered the Bigwig/Woundwort ceasefire. "If we all run at the side of the crate hard enough, we can tip it over and get out."
They did so, Woundwort putting all his weight into the dash. The box failed to budge, but Woundwort hit a frail, rotten patch of wood and crashed straight through.
"Well," he remarked laconically, "I suppose that's one way of getting out."
It turned out that they were in the back of what appeared to be a truck, which was stacked with assorted goods. They took stock of their numbers; four rabbits, three mice and six hamsters. They had to be the oddest assortment of creatures that ever broke free from captivity.
"Hey! Who's there?" a voice demanded from inside another crate. Woundwort leapt atop it, shoving the collection of bricks with his forehead, and Bigwig came to his aid. After some minutes of dilligent work they knocked all the bricks to the ground.
"Alright, you can get the lid open," Woundwort helpfully informed the unseen voice. The lid flew across the vehicle, and a very disgruntled-looking cat poked its head out.
"Do you mind explaining," it demanded acidly, "just what the hell is going on?"
"We aren't really sure ourselves," Bigwig replied, determined not to be put off by the cat's mastery of the English language and strong American accent. He suspected that this was far from the strangest sight he'd be seeing before he made it back to Watership; currently the idea that he wouldn't actually GET home was not one he cared to entertain.
"Hey, how come you can talk like me?" the cat asked, astonished. They explained the little they knew.
"So, whadda we do now? We're stuck in the back of a semi, I ain't seen a way out, and I don't even know where we are!" They looked at one another.
"We can let everyone else out of these crates, for a start," suggested one of the hamsters. Nobody could think of anything better to do, so they patiently wrestled the crates open one at a time, releasing a staggeringly diverse selection of animals; wild and domesticated, large and small. The biggest was a badger, the smallest a vole. Just about the only thing they shared was some kind of special trait, either the power of speech, unusual intelligence or both.
Some of the predators looked rather hungrily at the smaller animals, but to Bigwig's surprise it was Woundwort who stood up to them on this issue.
"Nobody eats anybody else whilst I'm around to stop it," he warned. Some of the dozen or so rabbits that formed this ecclectic menagerie stood by him. Most of them were tough-looking fellows who had been through just about everything the outside world could throw at them, and Woundwort looked like he could bring down a wolf.
"OK, we'll lay off you little guys until we're outta here," promised the American cat. "I'd give him 'little guys' if he weren't backed up by enough elil to wipe out Efrafa," Bigwig muttered to Woundwort.
Suddenly, the rear door of the truck swung open, and another crate was flung inside without much consideration for its occupants. The door banged shut again. "Bastard!" a voice bellowed from inside the crate, which appeared to have split slightly.
"Are you all right?" asked one of the braver creatures. "That depends if being stuck in a box with a bunch of kittens counts as 'all right' in your book," the voice replied. "I'm not hurt, though; thank you for taking an interest." The crate split even further, and a rabbit stuck his head out. "Now, who are you?"
Introductions were made, but before they could be completed the vehicle lurched and began to move. Several bricks were dislodged from the crates, and there were one or two narrow escapes. At length, they came to a halt. The rear doors opened.
"Come on now, my little friends," a man's voice said in sugar-coated tones. "Oh, if you knew what I've got in store for you..." Woundwort didn't wait for an explanation. He hurled himself towards the man at throat height, teeth bared. There was a terrible scream.
Bigwig poked his head out from behind a reassuringly solid crate. There was no sign of the man, but Woundwort was trying to clean arterial-looking blood from his pelt.
"I don't believe it. You killed a man single-pawed!" exclaimed one of the other animals.
"I do all my own stunts," he replied enigmatically. "Come on, let's get out of here before his friends come to investigate."
They were in a loading bay of some kind, dim and reeking of oil. Woundwort led the way in his usual assured manner. Bigwig tolerated this, reasoning that it would be the General who got killed first if anything went wrong.
"Damn," he said to himself after a moment. "They've shut the doors." This was correct; the only obvious exit was closed and locked.
"So, General," Bigwig said rather derisively, "what are you going to do now?"
"We're going to wait. Somebody will turn up eventually to investigate that fellow's absence, and I'll be ready for them!"
"Oh, Frith up a duck's arse," Bigwig said to himself. "He hasn't changed a bit. That isn't a tactic, that's complete lunacy! We're all going to die."
"Oh, so you have a better idea?" There was a long and thoughtful pause.
"All right, all RIGHT. But you can do the fighting for a change," Bigwig replied. "I'm getting too old for this kind of thing."
"Chief Rabbits, dear chap," Woundwort observed genially, "must never say things like that. How long do you think you'd stay in charge if your Owsla heard you talking about getting old?"
One of these days, Bigwig decided, I'm going to explain government by consent to El Presidente here. He never did get the hang of staying Chief by having all the clever ideas, or by winning the hearts and minds of the warren.
A few minutes later, the door opened. A man walked in, his uniform suggesting him to be either a security guard or henchman to Dr Evil (watch the movie, if you can stand more than five minutes). Woundwort, who had been waiting for this moment, sank teth and claws into the man's ankle. He screamed, and grabbed for the pistol at his side, but the other animals got to him before he could draw it. He collapsed, bleeding, and curled up as tightly as he could.
"Leave him! We've got to get out of here before the rest of them come after us!" Bigwig yelled. The animals abandonned their attack and retreated through the open door. "I've never seen a man go tharn before," Woundwort remarked breathlessly. "Just shut up and RUN!" Bigwig replied, accelerating.
All of them pelted as one down endless grey corridors without any real idea of where they were going. Eventually, they came to a closed door.
"Watch out!" shouted Woundwort, skidding towards the door on the polished tiles despite his best efforts. While most of the animals were fairly successful in arresting their forward motion, several were not. The badger was one of the latter, and smashed head first into the door braining himself and knocking the door clean off its hinges. There was a short crescendo of yells and banging noises, followed by the traditional little tinkle. Then, after a brief interval: "Bugger!"
"Are you alright?" asked Woundwort, cautiously peering around the doorframe.
The badger was caught up in a pile of expensive looking laboratory equipment, now broken. A woman in a white coat was staring at him in complete astonishment.
"Sorry, just passing through," Woundwort observed with as near as a rabbit can get to an apologetic smile.
"Wait!" shouted the woman. "You're those animals that the Professor said could talk!" Several animals muttered something about stating the bleedin' obvious. "You're all part of a biological engineering programme," she continued. "We wanted to create whole new sentient species, so that the human race would have some REAL competition. But the government stepped in and decided to use the research to create intelligent killing machines."
The animals looked at one another in total amazement. Each of them remembered their experiences with the great majority of humans. Few of them were actually cruel, but they tended to regard most of the animal kingdom as barely tolerated inferior beings who might provide occasional amusement. Even the cats remembered the odd thrown boot. And now it appeared that when a few sympathetic ones tried to even the odds some the majority had decided to use the results for the purpose of killing each other.
"Listen," the female scientist continued, "in this bag there are a number of cultures of a special retrovirus which will give certain animals higher intelligence and the power of speech. They haven't worked out how we did it yet, and they don't know I've got any left. Get it as far away as you can, and try to distribute it to as many animals as possible, but for God's sake get out of this building before they find you! You'll be up on the dissecting table if you're caught!" She hastily secured a canvas bag to the badger, who accepted it proudly.
As the whole posse raced for the vehicle pool, Bigwig pondered the situation. He'd heard a few nasty stories about the damage caused by men from Keehar, and from the animals at the centre where he'd been imprisoned and... altered was the best word, probably. They all might just be the only hope for the whole planet.
Woundwort was examining a van carefully. It was apparently being loaded with cardboard boxes, and both the driver's and rear doors were open. The engine was idling.
"I," he said in an awful impresion of Baldrick, "have a cunning plan." Bigwig had never seen Blackadder, so he didn't get the gag, but he still laughed.
"General, you may be a tyrannical nutcase, but you have a great store of jokes...," he saw Woundwort's face, and the mad gleam in his eyes. "You aren't joking, are you? Oh, Frith. No, no NO! Absolutely not!" However, in the end a majority vote won the day; which is to say that the few who dared question Woundwort's authority were seized and dragged bodily into the van.
Shutting the doors required a bit of effort, and the cat delegated for the job had to scramble in through the window. Woundwort balanced carefully on the central bar of the steering wheel, shouted "Hang on, folks!" to those in the back, and shouted at the badger (whose name incidentally was Oak) to move the gear stick to Drive and then lean on the accelerator. The van's legitimate driver had thoughtfully left the handbrake off, so the van surged ahead.
By shifting his weight carefully, Woundwort found he could steer pretty well. Oak soon got the hang of lessening his pressure on the accelerator and giving the brake an occasional touch when cornering, after a few fur-raising moments and the loss of a litre of paint from one side to an inconvenient telegraph pole.
The van sped on through the desert, without any obvious sign of pursuit. Bigwig finally worked out how to get into the cab, and emerged from the rear of the van looking like he had recently fallen into Nuthangar Farm's baling machine.
"General, we had both better survive this whole ridiculous escapade," he growled, "because when its all over I am going to kill you."