by Angela Misri
“This is going to make for the best story,” Ginger said, his grin wide. “No one is going to believe me.”
“We will,” said Emmy.
We rounded a bend in the tracks and I stopped suddenly. “Do you see that?”
Hannah squinted where I was pointing, and then her eyes flew wide. “Is that …?”
“It’s a zombie tied to a tree!” said Trip, pulling at his whiskers so hard one came free in his paw. He looked down at it distractedly, and then placed it in the plastic bag he was still dragging around. Waste not, want not.
We gave the undead human a large berth, walking on the other side of the tracks and keeping it in full view. It caught sight or scent or whatever it used to track the living when we were about ten yards from it, turning its gnashing face in our direction and redoubling its efforts to get loose.
“Someone cut off its arms and legs,” Ginger said, revulsion obvious in his tail. “Why didn’t they kill it rather than tie it up like this?”
“He’s a message!” I said, excited. “Look!”
An arrow was painted on the zombie’s wasted chest. We followed the arrow away from the frustrated dead human to a Tupperware box half buried in the ground. Trip wrestled the lid open to find a hand-written note that I carefully unfolded.
“What does it say?” Wally asked.
“It’s a list of names,” I answered, my heart beating fast as I scanned it. “Connor’s name is on it!”
“What about my pets?” demanded Wally.
“Yes! They are both on here as well!” I said, smiling at Wally, who released the breath he had been holding.
“It says this group of humans passed the night here and are moving up the mountain to something called a safe house. They write that it is isolated and hard to access and therefore the zombies will have trouble getting to it.”
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it Pickles?” Hannah said. “Why aren’t you smiling?”
I had reached the end of the note by now and gave it back to Trip to replace in the Tupperware before answering. “They warn that they will be leaving traps along the way so as to stop any zombies who might follow.”
“Traps?” Ginger said, backing up from the Tupperware and scanning the distance.
“I see another zombie,” Wally said, pulling our attention to a dirt road leading away from the train tracks.
Sure enough, tied to another tree was a second armless, legless zombie.
“No message?” Hannah said, circling the zombie, who strained against the chains wrapped around her.
“I think the message in this case is ‘follow us up this path if your brains still work,’” Wally said.
“Why are they using zombies as messages?” Ginger asked, still looking a little green from all the missing limbs.
“Maybe it throws the zombies off their trail?” Hannah suggested. “We still don’t know what senses they use to track the living, but if it’s smell, the smell of these dead things might cover the smell of live humans.”
“We’d need a dog to test that theory, but it’s a good one,” Wally agreed, looking up the road to see the arms and legs of these two unfortunate creatures scattered in our path.
“Traps?” Emmy reminded us helpfully from her travois.
“Traps,” I repeated, Wally taking the lead position and walking up the road away from the zombies.
We walked for an hour in the glorious sunlight before we ran across the first trap. The humans had cut down and sharpened about thirty tree branches and jammed them into the earth, angled towards us like spears. We were looking up at it, discussing whether it would actually work when a teenage zombie offered an effective demonstration, coming out of the trees and scaring us with his silent attack. Trip screeched like an eagle and slid between the spear-like branches before we could do more than leap away, and the teenager followed him, impaling himself on two of the sharpened ends and reaching out with his arms towards the raccoon.
“Trip!” I yelled. “Stop!” The raccoon was running pell-mell down the road and out of our sight.
“I’ll get him,” Ginger called as he took off after Trip. I looked up at the teenaged zombie, who was now reaching for me, but unable to disengage from the thick branches in his torso. Hannah slid through the branches as far away from the zombie as she could, pulling Emmy behind her in the travois. “It stopped him, but do you think he will work his way off?”
Wally and I followed her through and walked another six feet before looking back at the situation. If anything, the zombie was pushing himself further onto the branches as he reached for us, moaning and snapping his jaws.
“As a physical deterrent, it’s effective for one or two of those things,” Wally said finally, “but a herd of them would push the first soldier onto the branches and then push through them with their added weight.”
A few ravens dipped out of the sky, circling our position, so we turned away from the groaning dead human and continued on our way. This part of the outside world was very different from the city. It seemed to have less humanness to it. The trees lined the path, the dirt had not been covered up by pavement and the air just sniffed cleaner. Interesting. Maybe I was beginning to like the world outside the human-made boxes just a little bit.
“Traps.” Emmy reminded us again solemnly, and we all nodded, between the silent attack and the first trap, we needed to stay on high alert.
We saw Ginger and Trip sitting on the side of the road and overheard a bit of their conversation as we rejoined them. Trip seemed quite embarrassed about how fast and far he had run from the skewered zombie, and Ginger, in very un-Ginger-like fashion, was doing his best to reassure the raccoon that no one was judging him.
Instead of joining the conversation at all, I offered to take over pulling Emmy. “Trip, can you detach Emmy from Hannah? I can take her for a little while.”
Trip quietly did as I asked and then walked beside me as I brought up the rear of our small fellowship.
“I think I have to find a way to fight zombies on my own,” he said finally, “like you cats do. You never seem scared.”
“Well, then we’re doing a great job of hiding it,” I said.
He looked surprised and I said, “I’m terrified. All the time. Of losing Connor’s trail. Of losing one of you. Of losing all of you and being alone. This is my first time outside of a house in my whole life, and you have to admit, it’s not exactly ideal.”
Trip’s eyebrows came together, which on the face of a raccoon with a mask looks quite sinister. “How do I stop the fear from taking over?”
“I don’t know, I’m just learning on the fly,” I said, laughing at the idea that I could give advice on how to be brave, “and you’ve been doing incredibly well. That whole deal with the chipmunks? We could never have done that without you.”
“I was ready to shred those little rats,” Ginger growled from a few steps ahead of us. “I still might if I see that Kimchi character again.”
“We had a family of chipmunks living in our tree,” explained Trip, “and every Friday was the neighborhood trade night. They’d host it at different trees, and when it was held in our tree, you could hear the negotiations late into the night. Always sounded more like something on a stage than an auction.”
“Ridiculous creatures,” grumbled Wally, who was leading the group, casting his eyes left and right for traps. Always count on Wally to take his responsibilities seriously.
“You understand this human-made world more than any cat I’ve met,” said Hannah, “and we’re the ones assigned to protect them.”
Trip shrugged before speaking. “They’re a crazy species. They waste almost as much as they create. I don’t understand them, never have. But you don’t have to understand a mammal to learn from them, and I learned a lot from humans … and chipmunks, come to think of it.
“My family hated t
hose neighborhood trading nights,” Trip continued. “They’d head out on garbage patrol when the trade was in our tree, but I would stay behind and listen. Never thought I’d get the chance to participate.”
The mention of Trip’s family quieted us all down as we thought of those we’d never see again, and those we were fighting so hard to find. I had just opened my mouth to ask Emmy about Vance’s last days when Trip suddenly started sniffing the air.
“What? More zombies?” Wally said, stopping and signaling everyone else to do the same.
Now all our noses were in the air, but I was catching nothing.
“No,” Trip whispered, turning this way and that. “Food!”
Ginger grabbed Trip’s tail in both his paws. “Okay, but let’s go slowly. Remember. Traps.”
“Why would humans leave food as traps?” Hannah whispered. “Do zombies eat food?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so, and if it was actual food, wouldn’t we smell it too? Trip, are you smelling food or garbage?”
He looked at me confused and I realized, he really didn’t know the difference. All garbage was food, and all food was … well, food.
“I don’t like it,” Wally said, watching Trip zone in on the location of the food/garbage.
“It’s this way!” Trip whispered, dragging Ginger off the road, his tail still firmly in his grip.
We followed, cautiously, still sniffing the air for whatever Trip was following.
“Up there!” he said, finally, pointing at a plastic bag hanging from a tree.
“I’m liking this less and less,” Wally said, looking up at the bag.
I agreed, and walked a few steps forward to where Trip was straining against Ginger’s hold. “Trip, we’ll find food, but let’s find it ourselves rather than … like this. It’s too convenient.”
“Convenient?” Trip repeated, looking down at me like I was speaking Latin. “It’s human food hauled up into a tree so that scavengers can’t get ahold of it. Haven’t you ever been camping?”
I snorted at the insult. Cats do not camp.
“I sniff rabbit scat nearby,” Hannah said helpfully. “I’m sure between the five of us ….”
“Six!” Emmy announced.
“Between the six of us, we can capture a few for dinner,” she finished.
I didn’t correct her, but there was no way I would be any help in capturing dinner.
“But … just a little?” Trip begged, his eyes dilated as he looked up at the bag like it was sent by angels and unicorns rather than discarded by desperate humans.“No,” said Wally with finality, stalking around the edge of the small clearing, “I have assessed the situation and I will not risk ….”
He never finished his sentence, because in the next second our world became reduced to a tight bag of leaves, sticks, hissing cats, a drooling raccoon, and a very angry hamster.
“THIS IS JUST LIKE that movie!”
“Shut up, Trip.”
“The one with the small bears with spears who wore hoods and ….”
“We KNOW, Trip.”
I had a mouthful of net, trying to bite through the fabric, or I would have answered the raccoon, and probably not with a polite word. I was upside down with my legs sticking straight up, one leg all the way through the netting as I chewed as hard as I could.
“Pickles,” Hannah’s voice said from somewhere above me.
I pushed the net out of my mouth for a second. “What?”
“Grab Emmy.”
I tried to turn my face, but all the mammals on top of me made it impossible. “I can’t see her.”
“Trip, roll my way,” I heard Ginger’s voice say, and I felt a slight easing of the weight, enough so that I could turn my head a little bit. That’s when I saw what Hannah was concerned about: Emmy’s wiggling butt was hanging out of the netting. In fact, from this angle, I couldn’t see what was keeping the hamster in this net with the rest of us.
“Are you holding on to Emmy, Hannah?” I called, reaching my one free leg towards the mammal, and not even coming close.
“Yes, but she’s slipping!”
I looked down, judged the distance, and said, “Let her go. At least one of us will be free of this net. It’s not too far for her to drop.”
“Let go,” repeated Emmy plaintively.
“Are you sure?” Hannah asked.
I heard stirring in the bushes and said, “Let her go. Now!”
Emmy dropped to the ground below me, landing on her side (no cat DNA in that animal), and scampered to a hole at the base of a tree just as three humans entered the glade.
“What did we get, Hussein?” said one to the other, looking up at us in the net.
The one named Hussein walked up so he was directly under me, and I fought the urge to hiss, pulling my leg back into the netting.
He grabbed the net bag and twisted it this way and that. “A bunch of cats and … a raccoon, I think! Weird!”
The other two humans came up to stand under the net beside him, all three now looking up at us.
“They don’t look bitten,” I said.
“Let’s take them back to camp,” Hussein said, walking over to the tree to untie the other end of the rope. “Who’s got the bag?”
“Bag?” Hannah whispered. “I’m not going in a bag.”
“Me neither,” Trip swore.
“What if Connor is with these humans?” I said, desperate but scared.
“Then we follow them back to their camp on our own paws,” Wally said.
I couldn’t disagree with that logic. “Okay, what’s the plan?”
“We bite, claw, get free,” Ginger said through gritted teeth.
“Climb a tree, as high as you can, and stay within sight of this glade,” Wally said as a hand reached into the net and all hell broke loose.
We clawed, hissed, fought, bit, and generally caused as much mayhem as five mammals with a combined weight of less than ninety pounds could in the small space. I heard the squeals of my friends and bit harder and hissed louder.
“What the hell?”
“Are they rabid!?”
“Ouch! Can raccoons be zombies?!”
“Help me!”
I was free first, and I sprinted away from the humans, leaping up the tree in front of me, climbing and climbing until I was at least ten feet off the ground before I looked back down.
The humans were still cursing, but each was holding a sack of squirming mammals.
“No,” I whispered, looking around at the tree branches in the grove with horror. I couldn’t have been the only one to escape.
“Leave it,” Hussein said, looking up at me and then down at his scratched arm with disgust. “More trouble than it’s worth. Damn cat!”
I hissed from my tree branch. “Let them go, you monsters!”
“Pickles!” Hannah called from one of the sacks, breaking my heart. “Help!”
“No,” called Wally from a different sack as the humans started to walk away. “Stick to the plan! Pickles, get Emmy and follow us.”
“Pickles, don’t leave us,” Trip caterwauled as he was carried away.
I climbed down from the tree, so scared and angry my claws refused to recede into my paws. “Emmy,” I hissed. “Emmy.”
“Here,” she called from the tree root, only emerging so far that I could see her snout wiggling in the darkness.
“Come on,” I said, turning to follow the humans. I would have preferred to follow them through the tree branches, but I knew that wasn’t an option with a hamster. Their climbing skills were minimal and Emmy was still injured anyway.
Instead we slunk from tree trunk to tree trunk, moving only fast enough to keep the humans in sight.
“Plan?” Emmy whispered, when we had been following in this manner for about ten minute
s.
“Why do I always have to come up with the plan?” I answered grumpily, scampering to the next tree.
We made three more quick darts before Emmy answered: “Connor.”
I swallowed past my guilt with effort. It was my fault, my quest, that had gotten us into this much trouble. She was right.
“Fine, sorry,” I said finally, grumpier than I meant to sound. “We get to the human camp, rescue our friends, and find Connor.”
That’s when the herd of zombies attacked. I saw them first this time, and grabbed Emmy by the nape of her neck, ignoring her squeak of protest, throwing her towards a gap in the roots of the tree in front of us and diving in after her. A zombie grabbed me by the tail and I hissed, digging my claws into the wood of the tree. Emmy streaked past me with a warrior’s scream.
“Don’t bite it!” I yelled, but I needn’t have worried. Emmy’s strategy of dodging and dashing through the legs of zombies was incredibly effective. He let my tail go to try and grab at her and she sprinted back into the hole under the roots of the tree. I seized her, scooted as far back as I could, and held her close. No matter how far he reached into the roots under the tree, he couldn’t reach us. I closed my eyes against the terror, glad I had Emmy in my paws. The zombie seemed to come to the same conclusion a few terrifying minutes later. He pulled back and rejoined his groaning party chasing the humans. I whispered at Emmy through chattering teeth, “Stay here.”
I climbed back out of the gap and up the tree trunk as fast as I could, leaping from branch to branch, above the heads of the herd of moaning zombies. I could see the humans were running as well, the sacks slung over their shoulders as they evaded their dead peers.
I couldn’t lose them! I jumped from tree branch to tree branch, moving so fast I barely saw my next landing spot. Mid-air, the world slowed as I saw one of the humans swing at a zombie with a long sword, decapitating it, and that’s when the thin branch I landed on cracked underneath me. I fell to the ground and knew no more.
