Well, it isn't much, but it's enough. Despite being on opposite sides of the room, the two beds took up most of the space. The very narrow passage between them led to a tiny nightstand with a desk lamp on it. It had only one drawer. Below the right bed, I could see a metal box, most likely filled with my future roommate (tentmate?)'s flight gear, and a large duffel bag. No harm in checking what's inside, right? I mean, I should know something about the mammal I'll be sharing a tent with for the foreseeable future. No, don't go there. Not your bag, don't touch it. The sound of someone clearing their throat brought me back to reality.
"Can I help you?" the voice sounded more curious than angry. I turned away from the bag I didn't notice I had been reaching for. The voice belonged to a bunny with blue eyes and tan fur, currently in uniform. Probably who I'll be sharing the tent with. Probably who the bag I was almost snooping through belongs to.
"Yeah, s-sorry, I uhm I didn't mean to…" Great start, man, just peachy. Take a deep breath, start over. "It's just that I just got here, and I figured I'd check out the place I'm gonna live in for the next few months. Let me start over: Lieutenant James Barkley, I'm assigned to aircraft 42-35407 as co-pilot." I said, reaching out for a pawshake. Said gesture was met with a snort, almost laughter
"Bucky O'Hare, assigned to aircraft 42-35407 as navigator." He mimicked as he shook my paw. "So you're the new guy, huh? Wasn't expecting a fox but eh, as long as you do your job well, I won't really bring it up."
"Thanks. I gotta say this is a far better welcome than I expected. Where are all the angry rabbits with pitchforks?"
"Oh, don't worry, you'll meet them. Needless to say, a lot of the guys here would probably shoot you if they weren't scared of being court-martialed." He said as he knelt down and pulled his bag from under the bed and opened it.
He began digging through his bag for something, and I stopped to think about what he said. I had a feeling that rabbits wouldn't be too happy about having a fox among them, but then why was he being nice to me? Well, not necessarily nice, but definitely not giving me the classic 'I hate you, please die' vibe.
"You look like you wanna ask something, so ask." Well that was straightforward. I'm starting to notice that he's kept a very calm tone this entire conversation.
"Uhm, well, if most of the guys here want to shoot me, how come you…"
"Don't? Let's just say I do research into anything I'm told is an 'unquestionable fact', and that includes a lot of stuff not just about preds, but about everything. Example: It was probably awful hard for you to get here, was it not? Yet if you just show up at an army booth, they give you a gun and tell you to 'go get 'em'. It's because they don't want a fox to do complicated tasks, they want you to join the army, go to the frontlines and die a quick death, so they have one less 'dangerous savage' in the world. It's the same reason they encourage us to join. They already tax us out of the city, but that still doesn't fully negate the fact that rabbits reproduce at a faster rate than any other mammal, so they send us out here, to die."
"That's uhm…that's a lot to take in."
Found the conspiracy theorist. Didn't think there'd be one in the Air Force, but apparently there is. Something's still kinda bugging me though.
"Hey, Bucky? If they're sending you here to die, then why did you join?"
He stopped messing with his bag and gave me a smirk.
"To piss them off. They want to send me out here to die? Well, what if I don't die? That sort of breaks their perfect little system, now doesn't it? Ah, here it is!"
He pulled out a carton of cigarettes and lit one, before offering it to me.
"Oh, uhm, I don't smoke."
He gave a quick chuckle.
"Trust me, after you've been up there, you're gonna want a smoke. Or a good bottle of scotch, which incidentally, I also have."
"I don't really drink either."
And now he was just plain laughing.
"You're really something else, foxy. Anyway, let's go." He said, getting up.
"Go, go where?" I asked, following him outside.
"I'd say it's about time you meet the rest of the crew. They're waiting by the old lady."
Old lady? Does he mean his wife? Do they let family stay here?
"The old lady?"
He stopped and I nearly bumped into him. He turned around before giving me a smile.
"The old lady, the giant metal bird, whatever you want to call 'er. I mean, we did come up with a few names: 'The Big Bad Doe', 'The Jackrabbit', we even talked about just writing 'Happy Easter' below the cockpit and drawing some egg-shaped bombs. Never really did any of that"
The walk was surprisingly long. I was expecting the plane to be parked along with the others behind the main taxiway, but instead it was sitting in a hangar on the opposite side of the runway. Well, the front half was, anyway, since the wings and tail were too big to fit inside it. As I slowly walked around, I took a good look at what I'd be flying for the next few months. Sure, I've seen these planes many times before, and had to fly them all the time during training, but they still amazed me. Despite being designed for relatively small mammals (rabbits), the plane was huge. The design was also incredibly sleek: It looked fast and flew fast. The body itself looked like a rocket, with a few gun turrets scattered across it and two massive bomb bays in the middle, while the gigantic engines were slung under the wings like massive talons, the two outer ones also hiding bomb bays of their own. The air intakes on the sides of the engines kinda looked like bear ears from the front, along with a much bigger one underneath for the oil cooler that made it look like the engine was smiling. The tailplane was particularly odd, having a shallow 'V' shape to it from both above and the front with a tailfin on each end.
"Where have you been, man? We've been waiting for almost an hour!" A voice caught my attention.
"Did you get the smokes?" Another chimed in.
I turned around to see Bucky talking to four other rabbits near the nose section. Three of them were standing up and one was sitting with his back on the left nose wheel. He tossed the pack of cigarettes onto the latter's lap, who quickly picked it up and lit one. His fur was white with some light gray spots around his eyes. The one standing closest to Bucky was cream colored and had brown eyes, while the one in the middle was shorter with completely white fur and the other one had a reddish-brown color to him and green eyes.
"So, how's the old girl?" Bucky asked.
"Cleared for flight operations, as of November 5th, 1944!" The rabbit with cream fur proudly said.
"We're thinking we call the skip and run some tests." Said the rabbit who was sitting, between puffs of smoke. "20 bucks says that engine's gonna start acting up the second they start shooting at us."
"Hey, lucky rabbit's feet, man, nothing bad can happen." Bucky responded.
"The rest of me is unlucky enough to drag all of you down too." The rabbit said, while nervously taking puffs of his cigarette.
"Then we'll just have to throw you out during the flight." Retorted the reddish-brown one, while crouching down to take one of the cigarettes. "Who knows? Maybe they'll shoot you instead of us."
"Real funny, Marty" He angrily stood up and climbed aboard the plane through the nose hatch. "Real funny."
Marty just shrugged and turned to Bucky.
"What took you, anyway?"
"Was talking to our new co-pilot." Bucky answered in his usual calm tone.
"Well I'll be damned! Plane's fixed and the replacement's here? We might be back in the flight board for tonight's raid!" The cream colored rabbit celebrated.
"Just in time, too. Been itching to shoot something; it's so boring down here." Marty added. "So when do we get to meet the new guy?"
Bucky gestured for me to come forward. As I stepped into the light, the mood seemed to drop pretty quickly. I couldn't quite tell what the looks on their faces were. Fear? Confusion? I could smell a hint of fear, but how much of that was just the normal reaction to seeing a fox? Bucky didn't seem to notice, or maybe pretended not to.
"Gentlemen, this is Lieutenant James Barkley, our new co-pilot." Bucky then gestured to the rabbit with reddish-brown fur. "Jimmy, this is Marty Grayson, our tail-end."
I reached out to shake his paw. He seemed a bit hesitant, but accepted it soon enough.
"That's Andy Hopkins, our radioman and top gunner." He said of the rabbit in white fur. Andy showed no hesitation whatsoever and just shook my paw.
"And this is Charlie McLeaps, our belly gunner."
Charlie immediately started shaking my paw up and down very quickly.
"A real live fox, this is amazing!" He's still shaking my paw, very excitedly, might I add. "Have you ever bitten anyone? Do you guys actually like eating bugs or just kinda accept it? What does fish taste like?"
"Woah, woah, that it a lot of questions in a very short amount of time. Can I get back to you on that?"
"Yeah, sure, no problem!"
I really had no idea how to react to this. Bucky seemed to pick up on that, at least.
"Charlie…"
"Yeah?"
"Can you let go of his paw?"
Charlie seemed to freeze for a moment. Did he not notice he was still shaking my paw?
"Sorry about that…" He deflated, finally letting go.
"The moody one is Eddie Aardvark, our bombardier." Bucky continued "Anyway, shall we?"
Bucky nodded towards the main entrance hatch, between the landing gear and the bottom turret.
The hatch left us in the middle of the radio room, one desk to each side. Behind that sat the turret control station for the top gunner, and further aft was a small compartment, taking up only the left half of the fuselage in width. This thing was built for high altitude, and since you can't keep a bomb bay pressurized they just added an airlock between it and the flight deck. We climbed forwards, sidestepping the two huge bumps on the floor, made necessary to accommodate the dual-tire nose gear. I couldn't help but notice that as big as these planes were on the outside, they were still incredibly small on the inside. I guess that's probably because it was designed for rabbits. Bucky walked up to the cockpit and sat on the pilot's seat. I sat in the co-pilot's seat.
"Okay, so first we're gonna test engine number 3 to see if they actually fixed it." He said, as he pulled out a checklist. We went through every item before finally engaging the starter. We could hear the inertia wheel spool up, and slowly the massive propeller began to rotate. As the engine started firing, I pushed the mixture lever all the way forward and the engine sprung to life. After making sure it would keep running, we proceeded with every test in the book. We moved every switch and lever to both extremes to check for drops in RPM and oil pressure, and the engine responded almost immediately. We then held her at full power for a little while and the noise was deafening. Still, the engine behaved exactly as it was supposed to: we couldn't find a thing wrong. After shutting off the engine we got up and were about ready to leave when the bombardier popped up from the nose. I honestly forgot he was even here.
"So, what have we got? Overheating? Choking? Oil leaks? Burnt booster coils? Manifold pressure too low? Too high? Fuel leaks? Turbocharger busted? Why is there a fox here, who the hell is this guy?"
Bucky chuckled a little before turning to him with a smile on his face and replying.
"I'm sorry to disappoint you, Eddie, but everything seems to be in working order. We'll be back in rotation by this time tomorrow. And this is James Barkley, by the way, he's our new co-pilot."
"Hey" I waved at him, but he just kinda stood there for a while. Then he just crawled back into the nose and jumped down the forward hatch. O-Okay then…?
"Don't worry about him. He's just a little… It's complicated. He's a good kit, wasn't really ready for any of this."
He then once again sidestepped the nose wheel "bumps", the radio equipment and the gunner's station, before stopping near the airlock.
"Hey, Charlie, we're all done up here! You wanna test the guns?" he shouted through the bomb bay.
"Yeah, just gotta fire up the put-put!" Came Charlie's reply, from the back of the plane.
"Put-put?" I wondered out loud.
"It's what we call the APU, y'know, that generator in the back?" Bucky explained.
"Oh"
"Anyway, our job here's done. What do you say we swing by mess hall to pick up something to eat?"
"Yeah, sure thing" I didn't even notice that I hadn't eaten all day
"I should probably warn you though, they don't have any meat. This is a bunny squadron after all."
I honestly did not think of that. Shit, I'm gonna have to spend months without meat. How bad can it be though?