by Angela Misri
“She doesn’t talk?” I asked, watching her tuck into the hot dogs.
“We think she used to, but she’s been in shock since Vance and Ralph died,” Wally replied. “That hasn’t stopped her from killing more zombies than any mammal her size should be able to. She’s more useful than a legion of trained dogs.”
Trip reached out to stroke Emmy, but she jerked away and returned to her patrol, leaving behind her half-finished meal. I found myself wondering how two mastiffs dealt with having a dictator hamster in charge. Were all hamsters this … impressive?
“So, then what happened?” Hannah prompted, in between licking her paws clean of the salty hot dog treats.
Trip spoke up then, sitting back on his large behind and washing his paws with some of the water. “Well, we had to get her out of there, so I rapped on the window until she saw me.”
“I still don’t think she would have come out if she hadn’t noticed that baby chipmunk losing her grip,” Ginger said.
“Emmy came flying out from under the open window, but she streaked right past me and leapt for the tree between Wally and Ginger,” Trip said, his eyes on the hamster now. “She had that baby chipmunk in hand and back on her mother’s back before I had even figured out what she was up to.”
Emmy walked through our midst, oblivious to the admiring eyes following her wiggling butt. We weren’t actually admiring her butt, she just wiggled hypnotically when she walked and …. Oh, never mind.
“It was pretty clear we had to get the heck out of the trees, because they were catching flames from the idiot zombies below,” Wally said, “and with no home to protect, I made the command decision to join your quest, Pickles.”
“And you two?” I asked Trip and Ginger.
“Are you kidding?” Trip asked, looking around. “You cats are my best friends ever!”
Ginger shrugged, the melancholy of losing his pet still apparent in his whiskers and tail. “Trip and Wally aren’t exactly natural allies, so I thought I would come along and act as ambassador.”
Wally snorted, but in a friendly way, and Trip burst out laughing, holding his large belly.
I smiled at them all, touched and bolstered by their presence. “Together we will find Connor. I know we will.”
WE SET OUT THE next morning at dawn with the blessings of our equine friends. Helios was especially sad to see us go, and even offered to take us as far as he could down the railway tracks before returning to his group, but we had no idea how far that might be, so we turned him down.
Their plan was to make it into the hills as far away from human populations as they could, but they promised that if that plan did not work, they would follow the railway to us. We in turn promised to leave signs if we turned from this path.
“Wait,” Hannah said as I turned to lead the way. “Pickles, are you sure you want me to come with you?”
“What a question,” I said, bumping my forehead to hers. “We need you.”
“But what about ….”
“Please don’t bring up that crazy fat cat again,” I said.
“But …,” she trailed off, running her eyes over the animals who waited for us a few steps away. “You trust these mammals?”
I cast my eyes over them. We probably made the strangest fellowship since the one in The Lord of the Rings, with a wizard, an elf, a dwarf, a bunch of hobbits, and some men. Those books had been some of my favorites, and I couldn’t help but wonder how those travelers would have seen us: four cats and a raccoon led by a truly hyperactive hamster who circled us like an angry, furry moon.
“With my life,” I said.
She nodded slowly, and I wrapped my tail around her, gently tugging her along.
About a half hour into our walk we found the remnants of what we could only assume was a pack of dogs, perhaps the ones who had attacked Bast’s group before Hannah had escaped.
“Torn apart by zombies,” Wally said, standing over the tail of a golden retriever. “Poor canines. Never thought I would say that in my lifetime.”
Hannah and I had found the ear of a whippet, and she gave it an angry kick. “That’s for Tiger!” She snarled at it and stalked off, back on the tracks before I could do more than shiver at her anger. I walked slowly over to Ginger’s side; he had avoided investigating what was left of the dogs. I felt a little ill myself. I hoped I never got used to seeing the remnants of a zombie attack.
“So, the zombies will consume an entire dog if they can,” I said in a low voice, watching Emmy circle past us before continuing, “but what happens when they bite? Did you ever find out what happened to Vance? Did he turn into a zombie or did he just die?”
Ginger shook his head. “We never saw him again, and Emmy hasn’t talked, as you know.”
We fell in step behind Hannah, her fur glowing in the sunlight like a beacon, and Ginger poked his whiskers at me. “You landed on your paws, though, didn’t you?”
I couldn’t help but grin, because he was right, I had. “She’s incredible, isn’t she?”
“No more so than the cat she hangs out with, but yes,” Ginger replied with a wink that was so much his old self I would have laughed aloud but for the obstacle that came into view at that moment. About a mile ahead of us, we could see a large black mouth with boulder-shaped teeth all around it.
“What is it?” I asked in a hushed whisper.
“It’s called a tunnel,” Trip said, pulling on his whiskers. “Humans burrow through rock and make tunnels. Like moles. So, do we go around it?”
The only moles I knew were the ones Wally’s pets cursed for destroying their vegetable garden, but they were burrowing through dirt, not solid rock. The way humans could so dramatically change the world we all shared was astounding. This had been a mountain before the humans had encountered it. And now it was a mountain with a hole that went right through it. What kind of animals could burrow through solid rock?
“Do you see a way around it?” Wally challenged. “There’s a mountain on the left and a cliff on the right. And Pickles said the last train went south. This tunnel is directly south.”
“Are you sure?” asked Trip, staring at the sky.
Ginger snorted. “Cats always know which direction we’re going. From the time we’re kittens.”
“What do you want to do, Pickles?” Wally asked.
I must have look surprised at the question because he sat back on his haunches and waited for a reply, polishing his bronze star.
“I … I’m not in charge. I’m sure Ginger could …,” I started to say.
“Oh no,” Ginger said, waving a paw in front of me. “This is your mission to find your pet. Like it or not, Pickles, you’re leading this expedition.”
Wally nodded. “I agree. My pets are adults, and as much as I am worried about them, they are able to take care of themselves. Unlike Connor. So, I ask again, what do you want to do, Pickles?”
I looked at Hannah, who nodded back at me encouragingly.
“I have never been in a tunnel before. What is after the tunnel?” I asked.
“The train tracks should continue through the tunnel and beyond it,” Trip said, squinting at the darkness as if he could see the other side. “Like I said, humans use it to get through to somewhere else. They aren’t like caves. They don’t end. They go through.”
“Then I want to keep going. The train took the humans south, and south is through that tunnel,” I said, swallowing my doubts.
“All right. Cats aren’t afraid of the dark, but hamsters might be,” Ginger said, looking at Emmy, who had stopped orbiting us and now sat on her haunches sniffing the air.
“Emmy, you don’t have to follow us in there,” I said, and then extended that message further. “None of you do. I’m the only one who is committed to finding my pet.”
Wally snorted, sliding past me on the tracks to walk straight to
wards the tunnel, his thick gray tail twitching his opinion loud and clear. Hannah was sticking to me like glue, but Ginger shrugged and followed him, as did Trip, though the raccoon wanted to discuss in detail our options for escape in a tunnel. And who would be in charge of raccoon-saving.
“Emmy?” I repeated. I owed her this much patience. She had helped save us from the zombies at the train car.
She twitched her nose and I tried to decipher her hamster-speech. I was usually very good at foreign languages, but the most I could get from her was that she was still very upset about Vance and Ralph. I had never heard of a hamster attaching itself so strongly to dogs, but perhaps it was the manner of their deaths that had struck her so hard. If nothing, dogs are stupidly loyal. They’ll throw themselves in front of their pets, their friends — heck, I once saw a corgi defend a beach towel against a flock of diarrhea-stricken pigeons for three hours. (Again, don’t ask.) Ralph’s sacrifice would have been honorable to any other dog, but to a hamster, it probably seemed unfathomable.
Finally, she seemed to come to a decision and dropped to all fours, racing ahead of the rest of the troop to lead us into the inky maw ahead.
The tunnel wound its way through the mountain, so by the time we were about a mile in, it was impossible to tell if it was day or night because we could not see any light ahead or behind us. The wind whistled through the tunnel, making sounds that kept my nerves on edge. We were also moving up at a steady rate, climbing the mountain. It was cooler, and despite the fact that we cats could see in here almost as well as we could in sunlight, our group condensed so that I could feel Hannah on my left, Ginger on my right, their whiskers brushing against mine comfortingly. We always knew exactly where Trip was because he kept up a nervous chatter throughout, most of it directed at Wally, who was at the front again now that Emmy had returned to her circling.
Her sight was the weakest, but she kept up her patrol, running into everything from the walls to the tracks to us, and squeaking her protests every time.
“Trip, it’s unlikely that you’re the last raccoon on Earth,” Wally was saying. “Oh, for Saber’s sake, Emmy, that was my paw!”
A squeak was her only apology (and truth be told, it sounded more like a swear than an apology to my ears).
Hannah giggled nervously, and the sound echoed through the tunnel. “I know cats aren’t supposed to care about the dark, but I hate this.”
“Me too,” I assured her, glad she’d said it first. It was nice to know that I wasn’t the only one. I rubbed my whiskers against her face. “But it has to end sometime.”
“Did you get any other information on the pets since I left you?” Ginger asked from my right. “I mean, since that mad opossum?”
“None,” I replied, “but I have to hope that we get some clue before the tracks end.”
“The other raccoons are probably in hiding,” Wally continued to assure Trip. “Weren’t you alone when you found Pickles and Ginger?”
“I was,” Trip said, “but I know for a fact that I would be bird feed if not for your pretty partner.”
I felt Hannah’s smile before she purred at me, and felt my heart swell a little more. “One benefit to this forsaken tunnel is that we haven’t seen a tail feather of an eagle since entering it.”
Ginger nodded, and for a second, I thought he was purring at me too — the whole tunnel seemed to be vibrating suddenly.
That’s when Emmy shot by us, knocking Hannah and I apart, screeching at the top of her tiny lungs: “TRAIN! TRAIN! TRAIN!”
I leapt to the left instinctively, calling for my friends to do the same, and felt the whoosh of something very fast fly past me as I hit the wall of the tunnel. The sound was deafening, like a thunderstorm confined to a small space, the echoes threatening to destroy the tiny hairs in my ears. I howled in response, trying to drown out the terror. My claws dug into the wall, and I felt the speed of the train trying to pull me with it. Faintly, I could hear Emmy shrieking, and I wondered what kind of claws hamsters had. Would they be enough? Where was Hannah? The train seemed to go on and on, and just when I felt like I couldn’t hold on any longer, it passed and I dropped to the floor of the tunnel, my legs burning with fatigue. The smell of electricity and steel lingered in the air like a cloud created by Thor himself.
“Hannah?” I croaked at the darkness, picking myself up with difficulty, my limbs like jelly. “Wally?”
But it was the hamster of all mammals who crawled out of the darkness, whimpering and lost.
“Emmy,” I called to her, and she stopped shuffling long enough for me to put my paws around her and pull her shaking body close. She was moving stiffly, and I licked at her until I found the location of her injury. Her back leg was bleeding, and she hissed when I found the wound.
“Just hold still,” I advised, licking the dirt out of the wound. “We’ll find something to cover this; you’ll be good as new.”
I scanned the area around us, hesitant to move forward or back. Surely the rest of our friends were close by? With Emmy hobbling behind me, each step punctuated by a squeak of pain, I made a small circuit, finding a hair elastic and a piece of cloth, once again, a solution provided by the humans who had created them. I could use them to stop the bleeding. I was binding them around the hamster’s leg when Wally found us, walking a little dizzily, but in one piece.
“Pickles, thank the Saber-toothed tiger,” he said, collapsing at our side. “I thought that opossum said humans took the LAST train.”
“Someone didn’t get the memo,” I replied, “or the mad opossum got his wires crossed along with his brain waves. Who knows? So, that was a train?”
“That was definitely a train. I got knocked into the wall of the tunnel and walked in the wrong direction for who knows how long until I realized I was walking downhill,” Wally said. “Basic training saves me again.”
“Do you think any of the others are walking back out of the tunnel the wrong way?” I asked, squinting anxious eyes in the direction he had come.
“I don’t know,” he admitted, taking a look at Emmy’s leg, and giving her a comforting lick. “Do you think we should go back or forward?”
I realized they were both looking to me for an answer and I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t know what we should do. Again. My heart pulled me in two directions — towards Connor at the end of this tunnel and towards Hannah, wherever she was.
“South is that way I believe,” Wally said, pointing with his tail.
We waited for as long as I could stomach it, calling out each name again and again, listening to our calls echo back at us. Eventually, with a heavy heart, I got up and restarted our upward exit of the tunnel. Wally and I took turns helping Emmy. We would need to find a better way to transport her, because at this rate, with her hobbling between us, it could take us days to get out of the hellish tunnel.
The silence was stifling, but other than calling out the names of our friends, none of us had the heart to speak. Emmy continued to squeak her distress which I knew would attract our friends if they heard it. I had no sense of how long we walked in that fashion, only that every sound made me turn in hopes of seeing Hannah, Trip, or Ginger, but none appeared.
It was Wally who saw the glow of light at the end of the tunnel, and that sped up our steps, even Emmy found new strength at the prospect of escaping the absolute darkness. We exited the tunnel and immediately got off the tracks, finding a small patch of moss and plunking down in exhaustion.
“Water?” Wally croaked from his prone position, Emmy panting beside him. His fur was matted and messy, which was totally out of character, and his bronze star hidden from view.
“I’ll look for some. You keep calling for the others?” I offered, though I was as tired as him.
He nodded, and sat facing the tunnel, repeating the names of our friends.
I pulled myself up and looked at the fir tree above us.
I might find something of use up there. I climbed the tree slowly, feeling every inch I gained in my bones. I made it to one of the lower branches, and seeing a squirrel hole, I sniffed at it. No one was home, so I stuck my head in. Mostly nuts, as expected, but also a pile of string and strips of cloth. I pulled both out and tossed them below, hearing Emmy’s surprised squeak when they hit the ground. I kept climbing until I ran out of branches, and looked all around.
Ahead I could see the tracks continued, curling their way around the mountainside. The sun was setting soon, we would need to find better shelter than our patch of moss. I could see zombies moving silently in the forests that lined the cliff face, but the angle of the cliff didn’t seem to encourage climbing, so we might be safe from that side. I scanned the trees to my left and right and did a double-take, one tree over and about a yard below my vantage point was a suspended platform. It had a roof and a base, and the size made me sure it was human-built rather than squirrel or bird. It looked a little like Connor’s tree house in our backyard, only with fewer walls and no toys. Humans again, changing the environment to suit their needs. Amazing.
I carefully climbed from my tree to the floor of this platform, which was only ten feet off the ground. The dimensions were right for a human, and there was wiring stuck through the wood. I pulled on it steadily, hoping it was not electrified, and getting enough of it out to drop it to the forest floor below.
With Wally’s help, I tied the wires around Emmy, and hoisted her up into the roofed platform. She squeaked in protest, but settled in nicely once she was up. Water had pooled in a small mug on the corner of the platform, so we sated our thirst and then Wally and I curled around Emmy. Soon, their breathing slowed into a steady rhythm of sleep. I couldn’t close my eyes, they were locked on the tunnel we had escaped, looking for any sign of the rest of our friends.
“ARE YOU SURE?” WALLY asked again.
“I have to try,” I answered, flicking water off my whiskers. We had woken to a drizzle of rain that had quickly turned to a deluge. Our treehouse didn’t have walls, but the roof was doing a decent job of keeping us dry. Damp, if you wanted to be accurate. Have I mentioned where water sits on a cat’s list of worst enemies?
