This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, The Attack of the Atomic Bunny Rabbits!
Four rabbits were eventually delivered to the Kelly home, but not until after the crews had spent a good bit of time rebuilding it. The agents had seen the insurance and made sure everything was built to their specifications.
Mike had a new treehouse. The garage was expanded to hold three cars, along with lots of shop room for Destin to work on his next degree. He was doing something dangerous with poisonous snakes. They didn’t scare him anything like facing up to the giant rabbit, and the other little monsters they’d handled.
While Mike called his Fireball, and it went almost everywhere with him, fierce and loyal to the boy, Destin called his Jeremy and tried to get Maria to call hers Nippy, but she’d have none of it. She returned hers, citing that the Kelly family was more than she could handle at the moment. She wanted a cat and was going to stick to that. Mr. Red said he had the perfect cat in mind for her, but she refused that as well, knowing that anything coming from the agents was likely to try and tear her head off, and she was right about that.
Destin took Jeremy to the school and kept him in his classroom most of the time. Every once in a while, when his class was being particularly good, he’d take Jeremy out, and put him on the counter, and tickle him until he turned red, and blew fire into the room. The first couple of times, he set off the sprinklers, but he learned the trick over time and could get a blast of flame small enough not to set them off.
He’d say “You wanna see him?” and that’s all it took. He could get an entire class’s attention when he wanted to. As a student, you paid attention when Destin was teaching. The man had a fire breathing atomic bunny. You paid attention and you aced your quizzes.
Annie kept one of the bunnies. She wanted the runt and looked for the smallest one she could find. She called him Big Al and kept him in her backpack all the time. She wasn’t allowed to take him to school, but she was able to take him everywhere else.
The family went everywhere with their new pets. Fireball, Jeremy and Big Al went with them to the beach, to the mountains, and to the city.
They took an entire suitcase of carrots with them when they went out. No sense fooling around there.
Mr. Red and Mr. Green visited from time to time. It was useful to have the agents around, even if they felt like they were being watched all the time.
They fell into a routine. Destin would tease his students with his rabbit, Annie would use hers to terrorize any boy who was bullying her, and Mike would occasionally set his loose, just to give the local cops a workout. Mike also learned how to grow his own prize carrots. Monster carrots. At record his largest carrot was over three hundred-fifty pounds, and capable of taking his rabbit from a full-grown monster down to its regular bunny size in five minutes.
The trick to getting the rabbits to grow to enormous size wasn’t to get them mad or to starve them but to tickle their bellies. Mike had mastered the ability to grow his to just the perfect size for riding through the woods. He and Annie would ride them back and forth from their house to their father’s school, then with a carrot or two, hidden in the back shed or in the lawnmower shed at the school, they would shrink the rabbits back down to size and hide them in their backpacks.
One day after school, Mr. Green showed up at Destin’s classroom.
“Hello there Mr. Green,” said Destin.
“Destin, hello. I’ve got something I want you to look at.”
“Sure, I’ll take a look. What is it?”
Mr. Green had a handful of feathers. “We found these in the middle of a crop circle south of town.”
“Do those happen outside of England?”
“Oh, they happen. Atypical. Can you identify them?”
“Let’s look at them under the microscope.”
He took the feathers and put one under the microscope. He focused, and then looked up.
“I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.”
“What?”
“It seems like you have yourself some chickens.”
“Chickens.”
Mr. Red came through the door.
“It’s worse than we thought,” said Mr. Green.
“Worse what?”
“Chickens. We have chickens.”
“What’s wrong with that?” said Destin.
“Chickens are the worst kind of news.”
Annie and Mike were listening at the window.
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know, but it’s the third sighting of chicken feathers we’ve seen near UFOs in the last ten days.”
“Well we’ve got to get right on that, then don’t we?” said Mike.
He and Annie put their rabbits down and tickled them. They grew to the size of small dinosaurs. Then the kids pulled saddles and utility vests from their backpacks. They put on the vests. The pockets had different kinds of tools, and flashlights in them. They tossed the saddles on the rabbits, which fastened under each of the rabbit’s front legs, and pulled themselves up.
“Let’s ride!” said Annie, “Where’s that crop circle?”
“Right this way,” said Mr. Green.
The kids galloped off towards the end of the street. In the distance, they could see the agent’s van parked on the other side of the hill.
The rabbits jumped over it and vanished into the field beyond.
