"Seventy six by our count," Mark told him.

Peter wasn't expecting so many. Seventy-six rabbits were half the warren. In fact, until they knew just how many had died underground, seventy-six rabbits were probably more than half the warren. Peter looked over their faces. He recognised whole family groups. They were looking back at him now, waiting for him to say something. But he didn't know what to say.

"I thold you," Benjamin whispered in his ear.

"Y'see, Pete," Mark began. "It doesn't matter that Nicholas got seven votes when nobody out here would have voted for him. They'll want to get rid of us, but it'll be simpler if they just leave themselves. You're our leader now."

A murmur of quick agreement rose from the entire crowd.

Peter grinned. "The funny thing is, Nicholas only got four," he muttered.

"Then that's even worse," Tom said. "It means we've got a leader nobody wants, not even our elders. A leader who everyone knows is going to be a disaster, and all because of a couple of pig-headed old men."

"And pig-headed old women!" someone called out. A couple of others laughed and agreed. Peter looked past Mark and Tom. It was Genevieve's own daughter who'd shouted. The resemblance was frightening.

"We could be exiled just for talking about this," Peter pointed out.

"Let them try," Mark growled.

"Who's gonna tell them?" Tom shrugged.

Peter looked around the eager faces again and it was like seeing seventy-six mirrors of his own feelings. He nodded. "All right," he said. "Have you decided amongst yourselves what you want to do yet?"

"The plan hasn't changed," Mark said. "Kill the human."

"Kill the human!" The echo passed back over the crowd like a wave.

"And soon," Tom said. "Before it gets dark again."

"Whilst everyone else is sleeping," Mark added with a wink.

Peter frowned. "And how do you plan to get close?" he asked. "Angus has rabbits hanging around him with food and water all the time. How are you going to distract them? Or have you got something else planned?"

Mark leant in close. "Why d'you think we need a leader?" he whispered.

Peter nodded. He knew what Mark meant. None of them had actually sat down and thought this through. That was his job. "Okay," he said slowly. "So if we stick with our old plan... Are our original gang still up to it?"

"Yes," said Tom, glancing back at the fifteen of them.

"Then all we have to do is wait."

"Wait?" said Mark and Tom together.

"Yes, wait," Peter repeated. "Sebastian and whoever else Angus got looking after the human need their sleep as much as I do right now. At some point later in the day that man's gonna be left unattended, and then you strike. No witnesses, no blame, and more importantly, no more human being."

Some of the rabbits looked disappointed with their new leader's plan.

"But we want to do it now," one of them whined.

"Then do it now." He knew they wouldn't. "But I haven't slept properly in two very long days so I'm going to find a nice warm spot beneath the hedgerow and I'm going to stay there a very long time."

The rabbit crowd looked unsure.

"Look," Peter went on. "He's pretty badly injured as it is. If he doesn't get human medicine soon he'll probably die of his injuries anyway."

"Yeah, but that's not the same," Elliot muttered.

"He's dead. What does it matter how?"

Where before the crowd was in complete agreement, a few murmurs of dissent were quickly spreading. Mark knew he had to quell the unrest. "Okay," he announced. "We'll set up a watch. Take it in turns to spy on Sebastian. As soon as the human's left unguarded for more than a second we launch our assault."

The murmuring died down again.

"Me and my brothers will take first watch," he decided. Travis glanced over uneasily. "The rest of you... don't go too far. When Sebastian leaves, we might only have a minute to do this. Stay in the hedgerow. Nap if you must. But be ready."

Peter smiled. The crowd began to murmur again, but it was a positive sounding murmur accompanied by nods of agreement. "Who says you needed a leader?" he said to Mark. Mark shrugged modestly. "Anyway," Peter breathed. Then he turned round and headed back along the curb.

"Where will you be?" Tom called after him.

"Wherever my dreams take me..." Peter called back wearily.

"But where can we find you?"

"Where I can't be found..."

They didn't pester him anymore after that. He continued along the curb, past Benjamin Bunny. Benjamin had finally worn himself out and was snoozing in the long grass, lying on his back with his feet in the air again. His mouth was open and he was snoring. Peter treaded quietly past as not to wake him. When he reached the roadside exit he kept on going. There were no other rabbits beyond it. He found a nice spot in the sun and lay down, and he quickly fell asleep.

Mark, Tom and Travis were still on watch at noon. No-one came to relieve them. They nestled in the long grass on the other side of the hedgerow where they could see the ambulance and the paramedic behind it. Travis rested his chin on a low branch and struggled to keep his eyes open.

When the sun was at its highest, the man stirred again and began to make low moaning noises in his throat. His brow furrowed from the pain but he opened his eyes and saw Sebastian still by his side. He licked his lips. Mark, Tom and Travis watched as Sebastian galvanised the other two conscripts into fetching more food. Then he began a relay race up and down the man's chest with pieces of mushroom. Soon he'd had enough and turned his face away. Then his creased expression straightened out as he dropped off once again and began to snore.

"They just have to leave this time," Tom murmured sluggishly.

"What's wrong with them?" Mark snapped. "Don't they need sleep?"

"No, but I do," said Travis under his breath. Neither of his brothers heard.

"Hang on, who's this?" Mark said, standing up out of the grass.

A fourth rabbit had appeared from the corn on the other side of the ambulance. Tom also stood up to see, but Travis didn't have the strength. His eyes were heavy and even as he sat there his brothers' voices grew distant.

"Oh, no, not another one!" Tom groaned.

"I know him," Mark muttered. "Oh, what's his name?"

"Isn't that Sebastian's cousin?"

"Ah, yes! Morgan! See, I told you I knew him."

"Great," Travis slurred sarcastically.

"Oh, just go away and sleep!" Tom snapped.

"Yes, you're going to be no use here," Mark added.

"Fine," Travis said, trying not to sound too grateful.

As his brothers continued to bitch about Morgan's arrival and how this disrupted their plans, Travis trundled away, already half asleep. His legs walked of their own accord, carrying him to a suitable spot further along the hedgerow. When they got there, his legs collapsed beneath him.

Travis stayed put. He shuffled around to make himself comfortable and tucked his head into his belly. Just then a twig snapped and Travis opened his eyes. Nicholas was on the other side of a bramble patch. Travis jumped, but only because Nicholas had been there all along, and it hadn't even registered. Nicholas climbed through the barbed wire awkwardly and began to strut around. Travis gulped.

"Don't think I'm not watching you," Nicholas hissed. "At every moment of every day, I'm going to be right here. And if not me, someone who's loyal to me. I'm going to know everything you're doing. Every time you move your bowels I'm going to know exactly where and when you did it."

"I'm just trying to sleep," Travis cried.

"Yes, and by all means, go ahead," Nicholas said, increasingly bitterly. "But you so much as dream about breaking any of my rules and I'm going to exile you again. Understood? Make no mistakes, little bunny, you're only here because of your father. I don't know why I let him talk me into it."

"We're not going to cause any trouble," Travis said forcefully, then he remembered what he'd left Mark and Tom doing and ducked his head guiltily. Nicholas seemed to pick up on it and stopped suspiciously.

"See that you don't," he spat. Then he elbowed rudely past and urinated along the path Travis would have to take to get back.

Meanwhile, Sebastian stood beside the paramedic with Morgan whilst his two helpers collected more mushrooms for when the human next felt peckish. Morgan was telling a long tale, possibly apocryphal, undoubtedly elaborated upon. Sebastian listened, but half of his mind was elsewhere.

Morgan was his father's brother's son. Within his family's burrow there was not much contact with that side of the bloodline. They were, by reputation, dim and backward, in an amusing kind of way. For Sebastian's father, however, it was a source of heartache and angst, because his young nieces and nephews often ended up in perilous situations because they were too stupid to know better and their parents were too stupid to teach them.

Sebastian remembered the tale his father had told him of cousin Marmaduke, who had, like Peter, declared war on humanity and gone out to fight them alone. His war lasted the three seconds it took him to be squashed flat beneath a stampeding HGV. Sebastian had been thinking about Marmaduke again in the last few hours. His parents had ridiculed Peter's new war and said it would end the same way. Sebastian wasn't so sure himself.

The story Morgan was telling now was about cousin Monty, one of his own littermates. Sebastian knew Morgan was the sole survivor from that litter of eight, though there were so many improbable ways they all could have died in he wasn't sure if he'd actually heard this one before or not.

"Does this story actually go anywhere?" Sebastian sighed.

"Yes, yes," Morgan snapped. "I'm just getting to the important bit."

"Couldn't you just have skipped to that in the first place?"

"Oh, be quiet," Morgan hissed. "Anyway, as I was saying, Monty, poor old Monty, beautiful little Monty, who thought he was a girl and liked flowers. Anyway, he went along the hedgerow one day and brought back these pink flowers and asked mama to mix them up with the dinner. And mama, dear mama, beautiful old mama, she did what he asked, okay, and anyway, to cut this long story even shorter, they all died, didn't they? Well, except for me. Oh, and mama, of course. And papa. But everyone else, they died. Anyway, you must have heard it before."

Sebastian's aunt and uncle were frequently killing off entire litters of kids, which was why they always had room for a new one. Sebastian might well have heard this before, he just hadn't heard Morgan's version of it.

"So what killed them, then?" Sebastian asked.

"Well, it was the flowers, wasn't it?"

"I don't know. Was it? Why didn't it kill you and your folks?"

"Ah, that's the thing, isn't it? None of us actually ate the stuff, did we? Ugh, it looked revolting!" Morgan turned up his nose. "Pink bits floating in it. Looked like someone had been sick and they were expecting me to eat it. Anyway, mama and papa only ever eat mushrooms, don't they? But everyone else died. And they all ate the pink flowery vomit meal. And none of us have eaten it before or since. So, anyway, what do you think, Seb?"

Sebastian frowned. "About what?"

"Using the pink flowers to kill the human."

Sebastian flinched. He quickly looked around. "Keep your voice down, Morgan," he said through his teeth. "People are listening."

"So? You do want to kill the human, don't you?"

"Yes, of course," Sebastian snapped. "But that's not up to us."

"Why not?" Morgan said. "Who else is going to do it?"

"Well, Peter Rabbit, of course," Sebastian continued. "You heard the kinds of things he was saying earlier."

"That was earlier. Before all this happened. When Alexander was still the boss. Peter's not going to do anything now." Morgan shook his head. "I heard the elders talking in the corn. Nicholas wants to chuck him out. And if Peter's not on his best behaviour, the elders will let Nicholas get rid of him."

"So?" said Sebastian. "That won't stop Peter."

Morgan shook his head again. "We're the only two rabbits who want to do this anymore," he said. "And anyway, I've already found some of those pink flowers. They're just over there in the corn. If I leave them there some dumb kids might find them and eat them. And then they'll die too and you'll be to blame."

"Tell your brothers and sisters to keep away from them, then..."

Morgan bared his teeth. "Come on, Seb," he said quietly. "Nobody will ever know. Just put some in the mushrooms. Everyone thinks you want to help Angus save the human. They'll think he died naturally or something."

"I should talk to Peter first..."

"No," Morgan snapped. "He'll tell Nicholas. He wants to stay in Nicholas' good books. What better way to prove what a good boy he is than grass on us? No, if we're gonna do this, we have to do it ourselves."

Sebastian bit his tongue. He hated it when Morgan was right. It made him feel dumb. Fortunately, Morgan wasn't right very often. He nodded. "All right," he said. "I'll send these two away, then you bring the flowers up here."

Morgan grinned, then hopped happily back into the corn.

"Hey, you two," Sebastian called out. "Fetch some more mushrooms."

The two other rabbits - he didn't know their names - stopped on the paramedic's thigh and looked at each other quizzically. Sebastian was standing by a large pile of mushrooms. Why did he want anymore?

William and Elliot came to replace Mark and Tom on their watch just after Morgan had run away and the two other conscripts were leaving as well. The four of them watched in silence, waiting for Sebastian to follow. Mark's heart galloped in his chest so hard he could feel the blood pumping through the pads of his paws.

"I think you should go and get the others," Mark whispered.

"Tell them to get ready," Tom added.

Elliot slipped away. But as they continued to watch, Sebastian didn't move, and in fact, Morgan returned shortly thereafter. He was shuffling along awkwardly, looking around sheepishly. He didn't see them skulking in the long grass.

"What's he doing?" William murmured.

"Looks like he's carrying something under his belly," Tom muttered.

"Yes, but carrying what?"

Mark frowned. He saw a flash of pink foxglove, but thought nothing of it. The paramedic stirred again and opened his lips expectantly. Both Sebastian and Morgan hunched over their little pile of mushrooms so that none of the rabbits watching them from the grass could see what they were doing.

Then Morgan suddenly ran away again. Mark saw him hide with his nose to the ground just beyond the first few ears of corn. Sebastian climbed back up to the man's shoulder, lean in and drop a piece of masticated mushroom into his mouth. Then he ran back down to the ground and waited.

Behind Mark and Tom, the rest of the gang gathered.

Mark glanced over his shoulder. "Where's Peter?" he asked.

"Couldn't find him." Elliot shrugged.

Mark and Tom exchanged looks.

Suddenly the paramedic let out a wretched cry and snapped his head back against the back of the ambulance. All the rabbits in the long grass flinched. A couple leapt back into the hedgerow. Beside the human, the other two volunteers returned and dropped their mushrooms in shock. When the man stuck out his tongue and his belly began to heave, Sebastian ran into the corn. The other two joined him.

As all the rabbits nearby watched, the paramedic hunched his shoulders up and grabbed at his throat. His face went red, almost like he was strangling himself. His hands went down his gullet. He clawed at his chest, as if trying to tear out his own heart. Tears streamed from beneath his flickering eyelids. The rabbits all ran.

The paramedic slipped down onto his back. He convulsed twice.

Then he was dead.

NOTES:
The first aim of this chapter was to allow Peter Rabbit some shut eye. Originally I did want him involved in killing the paramedic, but I realised this was turning into the rabbit version of "24" (though more "48" by this time), in which he's barely got a moment's rest in the last couple of days. This idea superseded the plot twist that it isn't Peter, nor any of his fellow conspirators, who end up killing the human - which leads to all the unconvincing denials of the next chapter.