Rabbits(101)

Darla finally stepped out of the front door around two p.m.

We got out of the car and followed her on foot.

Darla led us up her street, through Volunteer Park, and into a quiet residential area. After we’d been walking for about fifteen minutes, she stepped off the sidewalk and jogged up the stairs of a midsize craftsman-style house. She knocked, and somebody we couldn’t see clearly from where we were standing opened the door and let her in.

The moment Darla was through the door, Chloe yanked me up the stairs and knocked.

Two seconds later, Darla opened the door. She’d barely had time to step inside.

“Hi,” Chloe said.

“Hi,” Darla replied, surprised. “Who are you?”

“I’m Chloe, and this is K.”

I waved hello.

“We’re playing Rabbits and we need some help,” Chloe said.

“Who is it?” a voice called out from inside the house.

“It’s Chloe and K. They say they’re playing the game.”

There was a long pause and then we heard a woman’s voice.

“Well, don’t just stand in the doorway, take your shoes off and get your asses in here.”



* * *



—

The woman who’d spoken was Easton Paruth. She was South Asian, around fifty years old. She had short gray hair with bangs that reminded me of the window in a prison cell door. She was sitting at the head of a long rectangular table in a narrow dining room. There were four other people sitting around the table with Easton: the Colonel, a man who looked to be about sixty-five with wild white hair and round wire-rimmed glasses; Alberto, a Brazilian who had probably been some kind of athlete a decade ago; and a young married couple from Ireland named Jenny and Hugh. Jenny was aggressively tattooed from her wrists to her neck with bleached-blond pink-tipped hair, and Hugh was thin and pale, with extremely short-cropped red hair and sharp green eyes. The house belonged to the two of them. Chloe and I shared a look.

Could one of these people actually be Murmur?

“You know you’re not supposed to talk about the game,” Easton said in a very slight Indian accent. She had a mischievous twinkle in her eye.

I liked her immediately.

“Is that what you’re doing here? Playing the game?” I asked.

Darla took a seat at the table and looked nervously over at Easton and Hugh.

“Oh, we’re not playing,” Darla said. “We’re a kind of…a support group, for those who used to play.”

“Darla, what are you doing?” Hugh demanded.

“It’s okay. We’re among friends,” Easton said.

“Are you sure?” the Colonel asked.

Easton stared at Chloe like she was trying to make up her mind. “You two are friends, aren’t you?”

“We are, yes,” Chloe said.

Easton turned her attention to me.

I nodded. “Friends,” I said.

The Colonel and Alberto grumbled their displeasure.

“Well, you see,” Easton continued, “the game has a way of swallowing your life, and what we’re doing here is trying to keep our explorations…contained. Supporting one another and making sure we don’t…”

“Spiral out of control,” Jenny added.

“Exactly,” Easton said. “The game has become far too dangerous. So we meet here to keep one another…safe.”

Judging by the way the others looked to her before they spoke, I had the feeling Easton might be the leader of the group.

“But you are playing?” I looked directly at Easton as I asked this question, but her eyes betrayed nothing.

“No,” Hugh said. “We’re just…comparing possibilities.”

“We get together to discuss a few rabbit holes and try to figure out one or two puzzles. We solved quite a few during the ninth iteration,” Darla said.

I continued to look over at Easton Paruth, but her face remained expressionless. Was it possible this woman was actually Murmur? She seemed so…nice.

“What are you working on now?” I asked, turning my attention to Darla.

She smiled as she spoke, clearly excited. “It’s pretty cool, actually. A new video was just released on YouTube and we found a hidden—”

“Darla!” Jenny interjected. “What the fuck?”

“It’s okay,” Easton said, glancing over at Jenny, who quickly averted her gaze. I was right. Clearly, Easton was in charge here.

“Somebody found a hidden level in a videogame called Zompocalypso,” Easton said. “We’re just trying to ascertain whether it’s safe to explore that mystery, or if it might be a trailhead connected to Rabbits.”

“So if it was connected to Rabbits, you’d want to avoid it?” I asked.

Easton just smiled.

“Zompocalypso? Isn’t that the Fortnite rip-off?” Chloe asked.

“Well, that description is a bit reductive,” Hugh said, clearly a fan of what was definitely a shitty derivative version of Fortnite. There was no way Hugh was Murmur.

“What’s special about this hidden level?” I asked.

“It contains an image—a collage of symbols and numbers, obviously clues of some kind, but we’ve been unable to figure out exactly what it all means,” Easton continued.