It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles by Stephen Graham Jones

me across any number of years. Just the memory of the picture, even.
    But that dull, cold fluid rushing through you. It’s coming so fast, so constant, that you never even have a chance to think, to dredge up anything you might still have inside. Soon all you know is that you’ve got to keep your head tilted back.
    So, yeah, the gag reflex — that’s one thing you take, I guess. You don’t want to choke.
    And you can still see, in a way, and feel something like tears rimming out the corners of your eyes, but it’s not crying anymore. It’s just the natural state of things, the only way you’ve ever been. Without you, the whole place would come crumbling down. And everything on top of it too.
    If you don’t keep your head tilted back, all the unaware people up in life, the real world, they’ll fall through into this too.
    Maybe.
    There’s no chance to think of any other way it might be, though, so you close your eyes as tight as you can, and open your throat, and hope you can maintain this position long enough for whatever’s supposed to happen to happen, and in this way fourteen years can pass. A blink of the eye, yeah, but it’s the way corpses blink.
    And when you come back, you don’t know anything. It’s all been washed away, rounded off, dulled so much you can’t pick it up.
    Larkin’s lucky, really. He gets to stay there, dead.
    Some of us have to open our eyes again, though. When I did, all I could see was lines of brown. For probably two weeks, I watched it, not understanding, but then something stepped into all that wire, twitched its nose around in a way that probably made me smile an infant’s smile. Then, all I did was turn my head to follow where this moving thing was going. That such things existed in this world of brown lines was a miracle to me.
    A month after that, I’d pulled myself far enough from the center of my roll of wire to push against the sides, fall out into the dirt. The rabbits sat back on their haunches, canted their ears over at me. I studied each of them in turn, then turned back to the roll of wire, tried to get back in.
    It was all I knew.

    Our first day in the storage unit together, Larkin finally slid this notebook back across the cement to me. He’d just used one page. This was after he’d remembered me, of course. When he thought he knew what I wanted, why I was there.
    Written in big blocks letters like I was a child were five names, with addresses. Each of the addresses had question marks by them. Because they were from fifteen years ago. I understood, looked up to him.
    He was nodding like we’d made a deal. The names were the people he’d worked with back then.
    “The ones who gave you orders?” I said, the notebook loose by my knee.
    We were sitting on opposite walls, like this was a secret clubhouse. Larkin nodded, kept nodding. I shook my head no, looked to the metal door.
    “You would never have known their names,” I told him. “They were careful. Better than that.”
    “I followed them,” he said then, whispering like he was still watching them go into their office buildings or suburban homes or wherever.
    I came back to Larkin, studied him now.
    “Why?” I finally asked.
    “Because I like to know who I’m working for too.”
    I raised the list again, had to turn my head a bit sideways to really see it like I wanted to in the unsteady light of the lantern.
    “This is them, then?” I said.
    “I don’t know, shit. They were who got sent to talk to me, anyway. I’m not making any promises here.”
    “But you had these all in your head.”
    “I was real good at Memory when I was a kid.”
    “These people — that was forever ago.”
    “What was your first girlfriend’s middle name?” he asked.
    I smiled, shrugged. Said, “She kissed me.”
    “Exactly,” Larkin said back. “They paid me twenty thousand dollars for a single day’s work.”
    I kept smiling. It was too late for him to live by then, of course, but I tried to pick the