So you want to know what happened to the town of Opal, do you? No, I don't think you do. You want to know what I believe happened. You have your own version, of course, and obviously your version is the correct one, because otherwise you would be the one strapped to a bed with a bag dripping dope into his veins. My version doesn't fit in with your tidy little view of the world, you see, while yours makes all kinds of sense. Mount Rainier, being part of the Ring of Fire that it is, takes a tip from Mount Saint Helens and blasts a few hundred feet off of its peak. The town of Opal is buried in the blink of an eye under sixty feet of mud and volcanic ash, a modern-day Herculaneum, not a single witness, not a single survivor out of all those good people, boo-hoo, boo-hoo.

But you know what? There was a witness. There was a survivor. The only problem is that his story doesn't agree with what you've already concluded. You have no idea how he came to be wandering naked and raving through the streets of Seattle; all you know is that it couldn't have anything to do with the late, lamented Opal.

Let's make a bet. If I win, you get them to make me up a nice certificate that says "not crazy" on it and let me out of here. Here's what you do: go to that big mud flat you keep telling me about and start digging. Dig three or four holes -- no, hell, dig a hundred of them -- and if you find so much as a single brick, a single hubcap, a single scrap of newspaper, then I guess I'll spend the rest of my days making bubble-lips with the rest of the lunatics.

You won't, though. You won't find anything. Not a gum wrapper, not a piece of broken glass, and certainly not any bodies. Why not? Because it's like I told them, there's nothing under that mud!

You still want to hear the story? Fine. Just do me a favor: no nodding, no sympathetic smiles, no little whispers of, "oh, dear, isn't that dreadful?" I'm sick to death of getting that. Sit your ass down, shut up, put on your poker face, and listen good.

I've been living in Opal -- that is, I was living there -- for the last four years, ever since I got out of college. It was the prettiest place on Earth, with lots of trees, big hills and valleys to hike around in, and Mount Rainier rising just like a postcard in the distance. It was about the farthest cry from my old stomping grounds in Oklahoma that you can imagine. I had a good job, a nice house that I'd just put a down payment on, and a beautiful big screen television. The only thing I've been lacking of late is a girlfriend, but that's a different story, and it was a mutual thing so you can't point to that as some sort of trigger for "profound dementia."

Anyway.

I'd gone out jogging, just like I did every morning. I got into the habit back in school and never got out of it, which is how I've managed to keep fit when the fellows I went to high school with are all starting to get guts. Mount Rainier was smoking, but then, it had been smoking for almost six months. We were all getting used to the tremors and such. Everyone had read the pamphlets they put out and we all knew the difference between the types of advisories and what to do and when to get ourselves out of there. The mountain had been so quiet of late that that very morning they had downgraded to an "advisory." That pretty much means, "Hey, there's a mountain over there and one of these days it might explode."

Don't you think it's suspicious that all this would have happened when the mountain's activity was supposedly at its lowest?

So I went out jogging before work. Just like any other day I stopped by Haggarty's to pick up a bottle of water and a paper. I always did that, and would walk home from there to cool down. I got my water and my paper and went to the register to pay for it. Right at the moment the girl started to ring me up the register died. It made this little "eeee" sound and went dark. At the same time the lights on the soda machines went dark. I thought we'd blown a fuse, but then I looked outside. The girl at the counter did, too, and we both just stood there and stared through the window at the street outside.

You know what sunlight looks like, right? Of course you do. And you know what it looks like when a cloud goes in front of the sun. This was -- how can I describe it? -- something in between. The whole street outside was lit with a sort of metallic-looking light. I looked at the girl, and she looked at me, and then we both went outside to see what was going on. There were already some people coming out of stores and things and all staring up at the sky.

Now, here is the part where they usually start nodding and giving me those sympathetic smiles. One dirty look out of you and this story is done. Period. Just listen.

The sky was gone. I tell you, gone! Way high up there was a big expanse of white with dark beams cutting across it. If you looked off toward the horizon you could see walls, dim with haze because of the distance, but they were definitely walls, and there was even a door, a big dark rectangle about in the same spot Mount Rainier should have been. Stretching halfway across the sky was a pair of long, thin lines of bright, glaring light. That's why the lighting in the street looked so odd. It was just starting to hit me that those were fluorescent lights, and that they had to be as big as redwood trees, when I heard someone scream behind me, "Oh, God, look!" and I did.

At the other end of town, and I am never going to forget this until the day I die, there were two giants. They weren't just ordinary giants, either. They were animals, sort of. More like cartoons characters. One was pretty much a tiger, but white instead of orange; the other one was a weird greenish-black rabbit. You know, like Bugs Bunny, standing there on two legs and looking down at us with his arms folded, and smiling. God, the look in their eyes was chilling. It was the same look you see on a kid who is about to soak a frog in gasoline and then light a match. They were huge -- no, huge doesn't even begin to describe it. I figure that they both could've looked at each other over the roof of a twenty-story building. They were standing just outside of town, and we could only see them from the knees up. They were dressed, at least at first, in the baggy kind of clothes that the kids wear in school, and they were just standing there.

We stared at them. They stared back at us, and then they looked at each other and grinned. The rabbit said something to the tiger. It took a good three or four seconds for the sound to reach us, but by the time it did all we heard was a low rumble that made the windows shimmy. They looked back down at us, and then they started to get undressed. What could we do? We all just stood and watched, totally stunned, like we were seeing some kind of bizarre movie being projected on the sky, while they dropped their pants and stepped out of them, then tugged off their shirts and tossed them out of sight. They stood over us naked, all huge and lithe and furry and grinning, and then all at once they stepped forward and started destroying our town.

The rabbit went one way while the tiger came straight toward us. The weird light was glinting off of his fangs and he was staring right at me. I watched him come straight across the buildings on D Street where the big tourist hotel is -- was, sorry. His legs were just smashing right through them and kicking up a gigantic cloud of debris. I watched them come apart, roofs and walls shattering and flying up into the air, and right away in my head I was back in Oklahoma watching a big mother of a tornado ripping up Catoosa. It was exactly the same scene, except this twister was striped black and white. My old instincts to take cover kicked in and I turned and ran back into the store. There's no doubt in my mind that it saved my life. There was no basement and the back room was locked, so I just pressed my back against the back wall and hoped for the best.

I could hear him coming -- boom, boom, boom, with the floor shaking under me and the sound of buildings crashing making my ears ring. Outside the people that I'd been standing with were still standing there, kind of hunched over, and taking slow, tiny steps backward while they kept looking up higher and higher. They were like a whole herd of deer caught in the headlights of a truck. The crashing got louder; they kept retreating in baby steps, and then the street got darker. All at once they screamed and threw their arms up and started to fall down. Just a half-second later I saw a foot, a big furry foot, bigger than a semi truck, come crashing down from above and land right on top of them. The whole store shook and things came tumbling down off of the shelves on either side of me. Strangely enough, I don't recall hearing any sound. The whole thing had for a few seconds turned into a silent movie, this giant foot sinking into the street, the pavement cracking all around it and dust flying up, and then the foot rocking forward and sweeping up out of sight.

A few of the ceiling tiles suddenly fell in and smacked to the floor on either side of me and right away I could hear again. I thought that the tiger was starting to smash up the store so I bolted for the door and ran back out into the street. What I saw there jarred me so much that I stopped short and instantly barfed up last night's dinner. There was a footprint there, deep, three, maybe four times as long as this room. The people who had been standing with me were totally flat, their guts all pressed out and flattened around them. I realized that I could still hear that boom-boom and I turned and saw the tiger walking away from me. There was a whole line of footprints just like this one behind him, and each one filled with bodies. He was walking right down the street, stepping on people the whole way, with his stripy tail flipping around over his ass as though he was having the time of his life.

He turned a corner after a few blocks. No, actually, he made his own corner by just turning and stepping down on the Tru-Value, then kicking his foot forward and ripping the roof up in one big piece. I didn't wait to see what he did then. I just turned and ran back into the store and hid under the counter.

I don't think I was there more than five minutes. It's hard to tell. I did it out of pure, primal instinct, that reptile part of your brain that makes you want to run and hide when there is danger. I think I pissed my pants, too, but I can barely remember. In that time I was able to collect my thoughts, get past the "this can't be happening" stage, and come to the conclusion that I had to get the hell out of town. Running was not an option. I had seen up close where that could get you. No, I had to get to my truck. I had a nice sturdy SUV, one that actually had off-road experience, not one of these yuppie wagons that they're afraid to take over a speed bump. I figured that if I could just get to my wheels, I could make a dash out of town, out into the mountains, then turn off road into one of the deep dark valleys and hide out until these two monsters got bored and went back to wherever they'd come from.

The street outside was quiet. Anyone nearby who could still run or hide had already done so. The rest, well, they were either gone already or too far gone to help. There were still noises in the distance, though, like out of a horror movie: screams, crashing sounds, big loud bangs, this deep thundery rumble that I figured out were these two big boys talking to each other, and there was no way to tell where it was coming from. The sound was bouncing off of the buildings around me, and for all I know off of those hazy walls in the far distance. The echoes were disorienting, and the buildings nearby were just tall enough that I couldn't see over them to know where the danger was. I figured that the best thing to do would be to try to stick as close to the buildings as I could, and try to make as straight a line as I could for my house. You know how a mouse scurries along the baseboard when it's trying to get away? That was me.

The first turn I took turned out to be the wrong one and I almost lost whatever was left of my dinner. The rabbit was right there, just a block away. He was down on his knees, all hunched over, and thank Heaven he was facing straight away from me. He had these big, big long feet, and the bottoms of them were just covered everywhere with blood and pieces of clothing stuck to the fur. His tail was twitching back and forth. I could swear I saw something moving under it. Oh, God...oh, god damn.

That isn't the worst of it, though. I told you that he was hunched over, right? I could see right along the road between his feet. He had a big dick hanging down, hard, like he was getting off on it all. It was swaying back and forth like a pendulum, and past it I could see that he had a whole big group of people trapped in front of him. They were scrambling around and squalling, and he had his head down right over them... ...and..

...Jesus Christ, he was eating them! You wouldn't think a rabbit would eat meat, but I saw it for myself. He was scooping them up to his mouth with one hand, one and two at a time, and just swallowing them whole. I recognized some of them, people I had waved to on my way to work. I could see them going down his throat...

Oh, Jesus. Get me some water, will you? Please, I need some water.

Anyway.

There was no two ways about it: I had to get past him in order to get to my truck. In my dreams I could've just hotwired a car somewhere and taken off, but firstly, I don't have the faintest idea how to hotwire a car, and secondly, most of them that I could see had either been rolled over or smashed outright by one or the other of the giants. No, the only way that I could see to escape depended on my truck. I wish I didn't have to watch what was happening in the next block, but I didn't have much choice. I had to wait until the rabbit's head was facing a little to the right so he would have the least likelihood of catching sight of me behind him, and when I saw my chance I just charged across the street and ducked behind a mailbox on the other side.

The rabbit just kept on eating, all peaceful, like he was grazing on a handful of lettuce. I kept going.

I had to run a zigzag course, since there was no street that cut straight diagonally across town, so it was up one, over one, up one, over one. I didn't want to spend too much time on any one street, especially with what happened on Monroe Avenue. Oh, Lord. See, a few of the streets were empty, but most of them had people running through them. I ran into a couple of hundred people on Monroe, probably out of that big tourist hotel -- Pine Crest? Pine Cone? Pine something. There was nobody directing them; it was every man for himself. I don't know why, but at the time it seemed like a good idea to join them. I guess it's a herd-mentality sort of thing. Safety in numbers, right? They were going my way so I turned the corner and ran with them.

God, was that ever a mistake. We didn't get half a block before the tiger jumped out in front of us. He came flying through the air from behind the bank building and landed on both feet, BOOM, and stood there grinning at us for a second while we all tried to stop. A fellow ahead of me turned around just as someone slammed into my back and smacked me up right against him. He put his arms around me and started squeezing me in a bear hug, all the while letting out this awful high-pitched scream like some sort of animal. Oddly enough, I think that by holding me up like that he kept me alive, because all around us people were getting knocked off their feet and going down in big heaps.

Then BOOM again, and the whole street shook. I looked over my shoulder, and there was the rabbit standing there behind us. He still had a giant hard-on that was bobbing in front of him as he straightened up, and he put his hand on it and started stroking himself as he looked down at us all trapped between him and the tiger. I wasn't about to wait around to see what he had in mind, but I couldn't break free. The guy holding me was still screaming and blubbering, and as much as I tried to kick free he wouldn't let go.

The crowd was going completely insane all around me. Can you blame them? I turned forward in time to see the tiger take a big step forward, bend down, and reach down into the street in front of me. His hand plowed through the people and pushed them into a big pile, then closed around them and lifted them all up into the air. I don't know how many he caught, a dozen maybe. I could see their arms and legs kicking around from between his fingers as he held them in front of his face.

His fist closed tighter. The muscles of his forearm bulged. I cannot even begin to describe the noise they made as he crushed them all like a handful of grapes, with juice squirting out all over and splattering against his muzzle.

I did not have to see any more. Remember how I said it was every man for himself? You will do the most god awful things when it comes to saving your own skin. There was no time to worry about the dumb fuck that was hanging onto me. I brought both my arms up and smashed my fists down as hard as I could on his collarbone, snapping it on both sides. His arms went limp, and I pushed him away as soon as my feet hit the ground. Ahead, the tiger opened his hand and turned it toward us, like he was saying, "Look what I'm going to do to you," but I was too busy looking all around for someplace to run to. There was no way out forward or back without running into one of the boys. All the doors on either side of us were closed and locked, although that did not stop a few desperate people from standing there and beating on them. The only hope I could see was a little cellar window that stood open at the bottom of one of the buildings to my right. It couldn't have been more than eighteen inches wide, but at the time it was the only likely way out.

There were people all around me that I just shoved aside while I headed for that opening, and as for the people on the ground, I just ran right over them. Thank God I never developed a gut like my father had or I would have never fit into that little window. I dove headfirst through it, hit the floor of the cellar and rolled to my feet. Behind me there were a couple of people who looked like they wanted to follow my lead, clawing their way toward the window behind me. I stepped back farther to make room for them, but just as they got to the sidewalk I saw what looked like a white wall with black stripes dropping down from above. I tried to shout at them to move faster, but it wouldn't have done any good, even if I could've gotten the words out in time. The tiger's hand came down sideways right in front of the window. When it rose again there was nobody in sight.

For a minute or two I thought about hiding out where I was. It was that same instinct to duck and cover, but this time I fought it off. The tiger had grabbed those people right as they were about to dive through the window, which meant that he knew there was an escape route there, and for all I knew he had seen me go through first. That meant that at any second he and his friend would probably start tearing the building apart to try to dig me out. Not me, Brother! In less than two seconds I was up the stairs and out the back door, which opened up into a long, thin alley. I could still hear the most sickening sounds coming from the next street, but at least that meant that the boys were still preoccupied. I think I'm going to go to Hell for saying that I was overjoyed to keep hearing those sounds behind me as I made my getaway, and was bitterly disappointed when I could not hear them any longer.

I was faced with a dilemma. Clearly I couldn't just sprint for home; any time I ran into other people I would be in danger of getting swept up in a noisy mob that would attract the giants' attention. On the other hand, I couldn't afford to waste time, because at their size it would not take those boys long to level the entire town, and me with it. I found myself in the bizarre position of having to avoid both the giants and the people of Opal. I decided it was safer to stick to the back alleys and driveways as much as I could rather than risk being out in the open. That slowed me down quite a bit but after what I had seen, I think I would rather have had a house get pushed over onto me than let myself be spotted. Before long I settled into a routine of rushing through the middle of the block, then stopping just shy of the main road and peeking around both corners to make sure the coast was clear of both big furry boys and frightened, fleeing Opalites.

That technique was the third thing that saved my life that day, because when I got to the corner of Richland, two blocks from my house, I came upon the tiger. He was facing my way, and I'm sure that if I had just run around the corner he would have spotted me. As it was, he was too busy having his sick fun with some more of my neighbors. Saint Xavier's -- Saint X, we called it -- used to stand on the corner, a big old stone church. There was nothing left of it. The stones were all crumbled in a big pile that had been shoved across Richland Avenue. The tiger was standing in front of it, stretching up into the sky like a redwood tree. At his feet there were more people. I don't think I knew any of them, but it was hard to tell at that point. He was urinating on them. He had his pecker in his hand and was standing there smirking while he hosed them down, aiming on purpose at anyone who was trying to get up and knocking them around like bowling pins. Some of them were still moving; a lot had stopped.

When he was done pissing he shook off and then turned around. The whole back side of him, backs of his legs, his ass, even his balls were all bright red, like he'd sat in paint. I watched around the corner with just one eye, trying to stay hidden, as he stepped over the pile of rubble that had been Saint X and used his toes to rake it back behind him. Tons of boulders and steel and wood went rolling back over the people and buried them all, and when he was done the tiger just stepped out of my sight, and I could hear more crashing and more screaming.

Luckily he had moved away from my house. I only had two blocks to go, but I made a big detour around the back of Henry Avenue and went that way instead. The smell of cat pee was stifling, and besides, I couldn't bring myself to go past that scene.

Both my house and my truck were intact, but I couldn't say the same for the houses across the street. They were totally flat, their roofs sitting all shattered atop the wreckage. You could tell that they'd been crushed straight down from above. If I still had any thoughts of trying to hide out in my basement, they went out the window right there. I ran inside, grabbed the keys off the hook, jumped into the truck, and headed out onto Richland.

Now, if this were a movie, I'd get out onto the highway, look back in my rearview mirror and see both boys still merrily romping through the town, and then floor it and head for safety while the credits rolled. No such luck. See, the problem with my plan was that I wasn't the only one to come up with it. As I got to the spot where Richland opened up to Route Four Ninety I ran right into a big traffic jam. The idiots were squeezing single-file between an overturned station wagon on the left and the hurricane fence that ran along the right side of the road. I leaned out the window and looked around, but couldn't see any giant furry monsters in sight. Maybe if there had been these people would have been spurred into action, but for some reason -- shock, maybe, or just plain ignorance -- they were lining up like lemmings all trying to merge into that one lane.

If you're going to buy an SUV, buy a Ford. They can go through anything. Mine went through the hurricane fence in four wheel drive and kept right on going. I left a hubcap behind and probably both of my headlights, but who cares? I spun out onto the highway and joined the trickle of refugees who had made it past the blockade. In my rearview mirror I could see the rest of my cars following my lead. I started to feel like Moses. You know, "Follow me, Children of Israel," that sort of thing. I let out a whoop and started beating on the steering wheel and laughing like an idiot. Even so, I wasn't about to forget what I was running from, and I kept glancing in the rearview mirror, scared that at any minute I'd see a big shape on the horizon chasing after me.

Here is the ironic part. You're going to laugh. See, I had a rabbit's foot hanging from my rearview mirror. I figured it would bring me good luck. I was staring into the mirror, with the rabbit's foot swaying just under my line of sight, when around the mirror I suddenly saw a big dark shape appear. It didn't just appear; it dropped out of the sky like a battleship falling across the highway. I hit the brakes hard and started to fishtail, and finally wound up spinning clear around three-sixty. Ahead of me I watched brake lights come on and tires smoke before the cars smashed up against the side of a rabbit's foot a million times bigger than the one on my mirror. It was one of the same ones I had seen before with little people squashed like bugs on their soles. Now this one was standing like a big furry wall across the whole width of the highway, with no way around it for the steep embankments at its toes and at its heel. I could see the black silhouette of his leg rising up into the sky and disappearing at the top of my windshield right around his knee.

Two cars spun out on either side of me. Once again my old tornado safety training kicked in. If you're in a vehicle and one of those mothers is coming for you, you get out and you get down. That was the fourth thing that saved my life, only looking back on it now I'm sorry that it did. I think I would have been a lot happier if I had ended up like the rest of Opal.

I wasn't thinking about that at the time, of course. The only thing going through my reptilian brain was to save my skin. I jumped out of the truck, dodged a big station wagon that was swerving out of control alongside of me, and made a dash for the embankment. The idea in a tornado, of course, is to get down low, and that was the one thought that was going through my mind. I was familiar with that area from the hikes I used to take. On the other side of the embankment on my left was the lake -- no cover there. On the right, though, the embankment rose up and then fell into a deep, deep ravine. I figured that if I could get my ass down there, those big bastards would never find me. I'd be a needle in a haystack to them.

You know how they talk about the best laid plans of mice and men? Well, I was the mouse. A very small, very powerless mouse that was only just then starting to realize what he was up against. The embankment was soggy from the rains we had all the week before. I was scrambling and sliding the whole way, my fingers tearing up big clods of grass and leaving skid marks in the mud, but finally I got to the top. I was expecting to see that nice deep ravine dropping below me, and I could just slide right down the hill and curl up at the bottom among the trees and be safe at last.

Instead, I found myself standing on the edge of a cliff and looking out into infinity.

You don't know what I mean? Here, imagine this. You're standing in a big aircraft hangar at night, with all of its fluorescent lights on, and you're staring at a wall that looks like it's a mile way. That's kind of how it felt. When I looked down I could see a floor way below me with carpeting stretching all the way to that far-away wall, and when I tried to look down further my head hit a wall. That is, it felt like a wall. Maybe it was made of glass or something, but I couldn't see it, not a bit of it. There was no reflection like glass would make, and when I smacked it with my fist it didn't make any noise at all. The top of the embankment just...stopped, and there was the wall keeping me from jumping and taking my chances. I stood up on my toes, even hopped up a few times to see if I could feel a top edge, but there was nothing.

Nothing. Nothing to do but turn around and watch the slaughter.

The rabbit was standing with his arms folded, smug. The highway below was turning into a demolition derby, with cars spinning out and crashing into each other. Here and there people would try to get out, only to be mowed down by other cars rushing past them. They were spinning around in circles, riding up onto the embankments, then spinning around and trying to go back the other way.

Why? Because the tiger was there, too. He was standing about a half mile back or so, in the same posture the rabbit was in. Both of them were staring down at the cars wheeling and skidding and smashing into one another, and both of them were laughing and talking to each other in their thunder-rumble voices. I think I can imagine what they were saying. "Look at that, we don't even have to do anything!"

Then the rabbit bent down all of a sudden and picked up one of those little Toyota cars, the round kind, that was spinning its wheels in the mud on the shoulder. I saw faces behind the windows and hands smacking against the glass. The rabbit eyed the car for just a second, turned it over a few times in his hand, and then turned toward the lake and hurled the car sidearm straight over the embankment. From my spot on the high ground I could see the car skip across the surface of the water, tumbling over five or six times before it finally splashed to a stop and sank under the surface. The tiger let out a roar that hurt my ears and pumped his arm, then bent down and snatched up a car of his own. He threw it the same way into the water; it only bounced once before all four doors flew open, the passengers went sailing out, and they and the car all disappeared into the lake. The rabbit-boy laughed and grabbed another car.

They took turns like this, I guess five or six throws each, and then got bored and turned their attention to the traffic jam boiling between them. The rabbit held out his arm and made a gesture -- well, I can't show you with my wrists tied, but it was like an umpire saying, "You're out!" Just like that, a wave of his hand, and every one of the cars disappeared. Pop! Just like that, gone in a wink. Where the stalled cars had been there were people still sitting, drivers dazed with their hands up like they were still holding the wheel. Where cars had still been moving people were now flying, landing on the pavement and rolling to a stop.

That's when the boys decided to wipe them out, apparently just for the fun of it. They started to walk toward each other, the boys did, and they were being very deliberate at crushing the people like a bunch of bugs under their feet. The ones who could still walk were scrambling for the embankments, but they were so muddied up and slick by then that there was no hope of climbing up to where I was. I sat and watched while the people were squashed to death, these massive feet chasing them as they ran and then coming down and grinding them into the ground. It was all so methodical, and so twisted, the boys grinning and wagging their tails and stroking themselves while blood squirted up between their toes.

There must have been a couple hundred to start with. Then there were a hundred. Then fifty, then thirty. The whole stretch of highway was covered with little broken figures surrounded by bright-red starbursts. At one point I heard the pop-pop of gunshots and saw one little buckaroo trying to fight back, God bless him, with flashes coming from what I guess was a pistol in his hand. The tiger saw him, laughed, bent down and picked him up, and then while the man screamed the tiger pulled him apart, one limb at a time, tossing first each piece, and then what was left into his mouth. There was no more fighting back after that, and the last of the survivors were herded together and crushed all at once beneath the rabbit's heel.

That was when I suddenly realized, What the hell are you doing? You're standing here and gawking while there's open road ahead. Who knows how far you could go before you hit that wall? If you're lucky you can get behind them and they'll turn and head back into Opal without ever noticing you! Jesus, was I an idiot. I'd wasted all that precious time staring at what was happening, just like a train wreck where you can't look away. God damn it!

So I started to run along the top of the embankment, which, in retrospect, was probably the stupidest damned thing I'd ever done in my life -- next to not having gotten my ass out of there when the two were distracted. The tiger's face turned toward me. I saw his eyes focus and he pointed my way. Son of a bitch! There wasn't anything else I could do except keep running, all the while throwing glances back to see if they were following me.

At first they just stood there, watching me skitter like a roach along the crest of the hill. I thought at first that they were actually going to let me go. No such luck. They let me run about a quarter mile, I guess, and then I saw the rabbit bend his legs and crouch way down, and then suddenly leap straight up into the air, a hundred feet or more. He looked like a rocket taking off, until he reached the top of his jump and came back down. Both of his feet hit the ground at the same time, and a shock wave started to rush out away from the crater he made. I let out a yell and poured on as much speed as I could, but in a few seconds I heard the roar of the impact, and a split-second later the ground lurched under my feet and sent me flipping into the air. I landed on the slope and started to roll down, utterly unable to stop myself. The water in the soil had been jarred to the surface, and by the time I rolled to the bottom I was caked with mud six inches thick.

When I finally stopped I was as dizzy as all get-out, so when I first tried to stand up I fell right over again. Then I heard it, a sound I'd heard before, and it sent a jolt of panic through me. Boom-boom-boom. The ground quivered under me, and when I sat up I saw four giant size-feet, two long rabbit ones and two striped tiger ones, crashing toward me. They were walking side by side, both leering down at me with killing in their eyes.

I struggled to my feet but found that I could hardly move. My jogging suit had turned into a mud suit that was weighing me down like lead. The two giants were getting closer. With no time to lose I tore off my sweat shirt, then shoved my pants down and jumped out of them. I stumbled away from them, much lighter now, totally naked. Both of them stopped for a moment as if that surprised them, and then the air itself shook with their laughter and they started toward me again. I didn't know what else to do, so I just ran, while they got bigger and bigger, and then they were right on top of me.

You know, mortal terror is a fantastic motivator. I found out that I had athletic abilities that would have won me a gold metal in dodge-ball at the Olympics. The rabbit lifted his foot over me; he was going to step on me, too, just like he had all those others. I stopped and stood still as it came down, and then just as it blocked out the sight of his face I charged to the side and ran for all I was worth. I broke out into the unnatural light just an instant before I heard a powerful crash behind me, and another wave ran through the ground and made me stagger.

I spun around and looked up just in time to see his expression go from smug to startled. I crouched and waited while he lifted his foot again and once again it glided over me, filling the whole sky. I took a chance and started to rush straight back toward his toes, then cut to the left. I was gambling that he would guess wrongly, and he did. His foot moved to the right at the last moment and slammed down next to me. The shock sent me flying off of my feet, and I landed hard on the pavement.

There wasn't much more than a second for me to recover before I saw the tiger's foot coming down toward me. His was wider, the toes covering more distance than I could probably run with the speed that they were falling. My mind was working overtime, and without any time to think I rushed toward his arch. It was a hell of a risk, and it paid off. There was just enough clearance over my head that I didn't get much more than a bump before I rolled out next to his foot. I wound up on my back and saw them both looming over me. Both of them were hard, and were grinning down at me past these big, obscene erections. I still cannot believe that these monsters could be getting such enjoyment at my expense, not to mention the expense of Opal.

The tiger's foot started to move. I thought, "Oh, shit!" and rolled to my feet. My body was all bruised and I was starting to get winded. Looking up while running was making me dizzy and I was stumbling more and more. The rabbit's foot suddenly appeared out of nowhere and smashed down right in front of me, so close that I ran right into it and bounced off like a rubber ball. I spun and started to race the other way. The tiger's foot came down hard on my left, and when I angled away its mate came crashing down on my right, sending me stumbling back in the other direction. That was when I realized that the rules of the game had changed. They were not trying to kill me any longer. They were toying with me, chasing me around and making me run for their amusement.

No way, I thought. No absolutely fucking way. I'd had enough. I stopped dead in my tracks and stood perfectly still. The rabbit's foot landed, ka-boom, in front of me. I had to fight to keep my balance, but when I was steady again I turned and looked up at him, looked him dead on, and shot him the finger. "Come on, you big asshole!" I shouted, "Playtime's over!" It was a perfect John Wayne Moment, and as it turns out, it was the second stupidest thing I've ever done in my life.

The tiger raised his foot. Its underside was covered with man-stains, and I figured that I was about to become one of them. The rabbit, though, put his hand on his friend's chest and the tiger stopped, and then put his foot back down slowly with a look of disappointment. The rabbit looked down at me, just stared for a long moment, while I stood there with my middle finger poking up at him, and then he started to bend down. His hand swept down toward me -- God, was it ever huge. I dropped my arm down and took a few steps back out of sheer instinct, but damned if I was going to give him the satisfaction of making me run again. His fingers came down, thumb and forefinger on both sides of me, and then pinched together. It was like a furry vice! He had my arms pinned hard against my sides and was squeezing my ribcage so hard I was sure it was going to pop. My guts fell down through my feet as he hauled me up into the air. I never did like heights, and the ground was dropping away fast.

The next thing I knew I was staring right into his eye. It was bigger than my whole head, way bigger, and the most bizarre color of purple you'd ever seen.

Yeah, I know, green rabbit with purple eyes. Don't look at me like that -- remember our deal.

It was bigger than my whole head, and purple around the iris. The pupil itself was almost like a black mirror. I could see my face reflected in it. It didn't move at all, didn't even twitch. He just studied me, right up close. Of all the horrible things I saw that day, as strange as this might sound, I am sure that sight is the one that haunts my nightmares the worst.

After a while he said something. I don't know what it was, since like I said, both of their voices were just rumbles, but after he said it he lowered me down to his mouth. I felt certain that he was going to eat me and I started to kick and shout, "No, please!" and other foolheaded things like that. His lips opened -- he had fangs, I tell you, not just rabbit teeth but fangs as well -- and then this big pink tongue rolled out and dragged up the front of my body. God damn, have you ever been licked by a rabbit? Do you know how utterly soft and smooth their tongues are? Now imagine that sliding over your whole fucking body! He licked me again, and then a third time. My head was spinning. I couldn't believe that I was starting to get turned on by it. How can someone get a boner when he's facing death like that? They say that a lot of times, men who are hanged will shoot a load of cum just as they die. Maybe this was something like that. But whatever the reason, I was getting hard, even though I was scared completely out of my wits.

He licked me one more time, number four, and then lifted me away from his face a little, gave me a bizarrely sweet smile, and tilted me downward. I saw the top of the tiger's head. He was on knees, and the rabbit's dick was in his mouth. I could only stare as he worked on it, moving it in and out, and then he pulled back, let the big thing flop free, and looked up at me. His mouth opened, and the rabbit started to lower me toward it. I could see all the way down into his throat, big teeth framing a black pit. I panicked then -- who wouldn't? -- and started to kick and thrash with every bit of strength I had, but it was no use. I was lowered closer and closer while the tiger waited patiently, his tail flicking and swaying behind him. I guess I was about thirty feet or so away when the rabbit suddenly let go of me. I fell, screaming the whole way, straight down into the tiger's mouth and into his throat, and everything got dark.

I landed on something soft and started to thrash and scream, thinking I was in his stomach. But no -- there was light above me. I stopped screaming and sat up, looked all around, and realized that I had landed in a garbage dumpster. There were brick walls rising up on both sides, and sunlight -- natural sunlight, not the fluorescent glow I'd been seeing all day -- streaming down between them.

I think you know the rest of the story. Running out into the street, naked, covered with stinking garbage, screaming and crying. Cops waving batons and barking into their radios. Pepper spray. Tasers. Handcuffs and shackles, and finally this cozy bed with the leather cuffs and the video camera watching me. Hi, Guys. How're you doing in there?

So that's my side of the story. I guess I can see how you'd prefer your version. You see, in your version, the citizens of Opal were just victims of mindless, unfeeling forces of nature. It's comforting, I know, to imagine that there is no malevolence behind any of it. It is good to believe that nobody is judging you, and to believe that you are something a little more than just a playtoy for a force so savage and cruel that it giggles and masturbates while it tortures you to death.

What does it matter in the end, though? My version or your version, you are just as dead. The only difference is that in my version, you might be one of the unlucky ones who are just amusing enough that you are worth saving for another game, another day. I know that's why I'm here. They haven't gotten all the fun out of me that they are going to, and they are simply waiting until they get bored again and want something fun to play with.

If I were you, I wouldn't want to be around when they decide to come and get me.