This evening, Mark had found four crisp packets, three crushed beer cans, two used condoms and a lost car key with a nice leather key fob. He carried the fob now in his mouth, the key being the only thing he reckoned had any value. Of course, he didn't know what a car key was, or what use it had, but he knew it had to be valuable for precisely that reason - he knew the rest was trash, because he knew what trash was. He didn't know what this was, so it couldn't have been trash. It was rabbit logic, and Mark had always lived by it. It had got him exiled, for sure, but when the brothers started up their own warren, as they planned to do, and started trading, Mark was sure this key would be a much sought after item.

Mark heard a rustle in the long grass and then Tom's fluffy white bunny's tail appeared, followed by his ample backside. He was trying to walk backwards, always an awkward thing for a big-footed rabbit to do. Mark hopped over to see why.

"What the hell is that?" he asked, dropping the fob at his feet.

"I have no idea," Tom confessed.

The thing he had found was pink and cylindrical, as long as the rabbits themselves. He had rolled it backward with his forepaws from where he'd found it in the bushes. Once it was stationary on the curb, Tom stopped to catch his breath.

"What does it do?" Mark wondered.

"Well, if you bite this bit on the end, it does this."

He got his mouth around the flat end and gnawed at it for a moment or two. Something clicked inside his mouth and Mark winced, thinking Tom had just broken a tooth. Then he noticed the thing come to life and hopped backward himself.

"It's alive!" he cried. The end nearest him was vibrating.

"Yes, but it's easy to put to sleep," Tom explained.

Then he gnawed at it for another second and the pink thing became still once more. Mark put his nose to the ground, not yet convinced Tom had complete control over its dormancy. Tom snorted with laughter at Mark's fear.

"Who'd want a thing like that?" Mark muttered. "It's useless."

"It's a curio," Tom said. "We could sell it to a badger."

"Get rid of it. There's not enough room in our hole."

"Yes, there is. Just get rid of all those funny pictures of pink humans rolling around on the floor together that you found last week."

"They'll sell, I keep telling you. Everyone loves laughing at the humans."

Tom snorted with derision, then went back into the long grass. Once he was out of sight, Mark tentatively climbed over the pink thing, put his weight onto his front legs and then kicked back. The vibrator didn't stop rolling until it tipped over the curb and ended up in the gutter. Satisfied, Mark picked the key fob back up in his mouth and followed after Tom.

Mark and Tom and their other brother Travis knew full well that rabbits were not natural scavengers. Consequently, they thought themselves damn well superior for adapting to circumstances. Scavengers tend to be those carnivorous creatures who just aren't strong enough to catch their own prey, and need to hang around and eat whatever everyone else leaves. They are nature's thieves, as it were. It's in their very nature to steal what is left unguarded by others. Rabbits, on the other hand, have no need to steal because all they eat is grass. Grass is readily available, so theft is not in a rabbit's genetic education. Wherever Mark, Tom and Travis got it from, it was not any of the other rabbits. The other rabbits exiled them partly in the hope that Mark, Tom and Travis' thieving ways would be exiled along with them.

As Mark and Tom snuffled around in the grass for little pieces of junk discarded by humans, Travis was meanwhile nursing a wounded paw on the central reservation. Always the most adventurous of the trio, he had crossed the road between the speeding cars on this side of the reservation and started looking for a smouldering cigarette butt amongst the grass and grit.

Travis liked to smoke. He'd sat by the side of the road many times and watched human drivers pass the time in their traffic jams by sucking on these shrinking rolls of white paper and blowing out clouds of smoke like the exhaust pipes of their cars. One time he had been scavenging on the central reservation when the butt of one of these cigarettes hit him on the back and given him a fright. He bawled obscenities up at the driver who'd tossed it out the window, but the driver was already roaring away down the A12. So Travis had been forced to take his anger out on the cigarette butt. He found it amongst the grass and attacked it, picking it up in his mouth and shaking it all about. Of course, he just happened to breathe in, and when he coughed out again, he realised he looked just like those human drivers.

Mark and Tom didn't know he had started smoking. They were contemptuous for everything the humans did except throw precious trade goods out the window. Having seen what humans did with cigarettes, and realising it had no purpose, Mark had announced cigarettes were trash and were not to be collected. Travis ignored him every time they went scavenging and always looked out for a butt he could have a drag on. He'd been looking for one when he had pricked his foot on the barbed wire.

"Ow! Ow!" He winced as he licked the grit away from the wound. There wasn't much blood but he would be limping for days. The rabbits knew all about barbed wire, but Travis hadn't expected to find any half buried in the ground like this. It was usually strung up along fences on the grass verge beside the motorway, and wasn't designed to be a menace to animals as small as him.

He had an intense feeling of wanting to punish the barbed wire, which he could see poking out of the ground in such an obvious way he wouldn't be able to admit to Mark and Tom that he had never seen it. Once his foot stopped stinging so badly, he stood up and tested how much weight he could put on his foot. It was only a scratch, he told himself, then sighed quietly with relief.

He moved around the barbed wire, tracing where it came out of the soil and where it went back in again, like some sort of worm coming up to check the time of day then deciding it was still too early to get up. With his front paws he began to scrape the dirt away around it, slowly uncovering more and more of it. Then he suddenly reached the end of it, and it sprang into his face. He hopped backwards.

He didn't know barbed wire had an end. He thought it was like the motorway. It came from one direction, went in another, and the only part of it that mattered was the bit nearest him. He dug with more fervour. Perhaps if it had one end it also had another. And sure enough it did. When he'd uncovered it all, it was about two metres long, a measurement that only meant anything to him in terms of how long it took him to hop from one end to the other.

This was certainly an exciting discovery and he had to tell Mark and Tom. He went down to the curb, as close to the roadside as he could. The number of cars zipping past continued to grow. It would be harder for him to get back than it was to get here in the first place. In fact, it was going to be a wasted effort to go back there just to tell them what he had found if he then had to come all the way back again to get it. He decided to call out for them instead.

"Mark! Tom!"

He watched the long grass tremble as his two brothers made their way through it to the curb. They were most surprised to find him where he was. "What the hell are you doing over there?" Mark demanded to know.

"I've found something," he called back.

"Found what?" Tom shouted.

"It's some barbed wire."

"Barbed wire?!" Mark shrieked.

"We've got enough of that over here already," Tom added.

"Not like this," Travis murmured to himself.

"Get back over here right this instant," Mark ordered him.

"I'll bring it over, shall I?"

"No. Leave it there."

Then Mark and Tom hopped back into the grass. Travis looked after them angrily, then looked back at his find. It seemed like such a wasted effort just to leave it here. The pain started to throb through that gash on his foot, as if to remind him of what he'd already gone through to uncover it.

So he went over to the first end he found. It was dirty and rusty, but there weren't any protruding barbs for him to catch himself on. He moved around it a couple of times, wondering how best to get hold of it. He tried brushing it along with his paw, but he couldn't get enough purchase on it that way. The barbs kept catching on the weeds and the wire sprang back to where it was. He reckoned once he got it to the tarmac there wouldn't be anything for it to catch onto, but this method would take too long and he had to cross that road in a flash. On one side of the road there was still gridlock, but more and more drivers had started to break across the central reservation and head the wrong way down the empty carriageways instead.

He took the end of the wire in his teeth, just to see if he could. It tasted revolting. Rabbits are used to a bland diet of grasses and wild mushrooms, and what Travis tasted was iron and rust. His impulse was to spit it out, but he found he could get quite a firm grip on it with his mouth. He tugged it past a few weeds. They just bent beneath the wire now, so he tugged it a little further.

Gradually he edged toward the curb again, stepping sideways so as not to have the barbs cutting into his back. He wasn't sure if he had the strength to bend the wire anyway. He'd never had anything so tough in his jaw before, not even the bone of some smaller mammal. When he reached the curb he looked back across the road. Mark and Tom were nowhere to be seen. Part of him wanted them to see this feat, but part of him was glad they weren't there to berate him.

He watched the two blinding eyes of an approaching car race toward him and roar past. This one roared particularly loudly, as if to warn him off being so stupid. The next car was just as loud. And the next was even worse. This was as bad as having Mark and Tom watch him, after all.

Then the road was clear. He could hear another car coming his way. He could hear the distant thundering, but he knew it was safe to go as long as he couldn't see the headlights. He dropped down over the side of the curb and sidled out into the road, dragging the wire after him. The twisted bit of metal bounced across the tarmac behind him and didn't catch on anything.

By the time he got past the first carriageway he could see the twin beams bearing toward him. He tried to speed up a bit, which was awkward, and he just tripped over his own big feet trying to be so hasty. He was already out of the way of the wheels now, he just feared being sucked beneath the terrible machine. He kept on going until he reached the curb, then he dropped the wire to climb up.

The car shot past, blowing up dust, which briefly blinded him. Whilst blind he heard the airy clap of the barbed wire whip right past his ear. Then he heard the awful sound of metal grinding against metal. Then he heard the tyres screech and screech and not stop. When his sight returned, he saw the car skidding around and around.

And he'd never seen a car fly before.

The barbed wire had wrapped itself around some axle or other whilst the car was going over 70mph. The front wheels suddenly stopped moving altogether, but the rear wheels kept driving it on and on. It went up the curb, up the grass verge, up into the air backwards, and turned over before it landed, crashed, all at 70mph.

Travis could see the orange flames reaching into the air on the other side of the hedgerow, but he couldn't see anything of the car anymore. Mark and Tom suddenly bounded out of the grass together and stared at Travis with boggling eyes.

"What the fuck is going on?" Mark cried.

"One of them crashed again," Travis told him quietly.

"Ooh, let's go see," went Tom.

The three rabbits waded through the hedgerow to look, but they were too close and it was too hot and they had to retreat further into the cornfield. There was nobody left alive within the car, now just a black frame in which the heart of the fire was beating. It was so bright the rabbits couldn't even look at it. Little fires had sprung up everywhere. Ears of corn were ablaze, wilting onto their neighbours and spreading the blaze. Travis looked at the flickering tips of the orange flames whipping back and forth like his bit of barbed wire and realised what had happened.

"I think I did this," he told his brothers.

"Don't be silly," Mark said in a low voice.

"Things like this happen all the time," Tom added.

"I know," said Travis. "I know, but still, I did this."

"Well, don't worry about it," Mark told him as he urinated into the bushes.

"I killed human beings..."

"And I said don't worry about it."

"But I killed them."

Mark finished urinating, scuffed the ground with his feet and then turned angrily on his youngest brother. "Look around, Travis," he said. "How many of their own kind have stopped? Look... none! They all just keep going."

"Yeah," Tom agreed. "They don't care. Why should we?"

Travis choked. "I'm not... I'm just..."

"We're just rabbits," Mark continued. "Nobody's going to blame us for this. Now come on, let's get back to the burrow. You only made me go and lose that metal thing on a ring, you know!"

NOTES:
This chapter was played more for laughs, despite the car crash. Mark, Tom and Travis are your archetypal comedy triptych with an established hierarchy of Mark believing himself in charge, Tom always outwitting him, and Travis the runt of the litter. They're named after the members of Blink 182, not for any particular reason apart from the usual - my difficulty with coming up with names. The alternative was Kurt, Dave and Krist after Messrs Cobain, Grohl and Novoselic, but I wanted more everyday, throwaway names after the archaic tradition of the warren rabbits.

Somebody's already pointed out to me that barbed wire getting caught round the wheel of a car and making it crash is implausible. In response I was very petty and pointed out that rabbits talking was hardly plausible either, but they hadn't picked up on that in 5000 words...