by Angela Misri
I’M NOT SURE WHAT pulled me from my unconscious state first, Emmy prodding at my tail, or the faint hooting near my ear.
“Emmy, stop. Please,” I mumbled, rubbing at my head. I was pretty sure I had landed on it despite making fun of Emmy’s earlier landing. In my defense, I was chasing zombies who were chasing humans who had my friends in sacks.
I tried to stand up and fell back on my side, causing a new flurry of hoots.
“What in the Saber?” I said, poking a weirdly shaped pile of leaves underneath me. Only it wasn’t leaves. It was an upside-down nest.
I flipped over the nest to find a small brown owl, a chick really, about the size of Emmy, hooting up at me.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said to the chick as two large tears rolled out of its big round eyes.
“Kidding,” repeated Emmy, shaking her head at the bird.
“Not kidding,” said the chick in a deep voice.
I jumped back in surprise. This owl was older than he looked and could speak a common language.
“I don’t have time for this,” I said to Emmy. “I don’t know if this bird is dangerous to hamsters. Emmy, do you need me to kill it?”
The owl looked offended, which made sense of course, and more tears started leaking out of his eyes, but Emmy shook her head immediately. Good, because I wasn’t sure how to kill it.
I needed to find which way the humans went, so I climbed the tree nearest to me. Nothing, in any direction. I called out for Hannah. For Wally. For Ginger and for Trip. My meows died in the air. I was no tracker. How was I going to find them, or Connor?
“What are you looking for?” said a deep voice behind me, and I whipped around, claws ready. It was the owl.
“How? What?” I said, looking stupidly at the bird, and then back down at Emmy, so far below us.
“Emmy says you are looking for something,” the owl said, taking two tries to settle on my branch with me. It was weird hearing such a deep voice coming from so small an animal, very weird.
“My friends. They were thrown into bags by three humans,” I said desperately, scanning the horizon of tree tops. “There were zombies, a whole herd. I can’t even see them ….”
Instead of answering, the owl took off into the sky, flying out of my sight quickly.
I climbed back down, my eyes on the sky.
Emmy was waiting for me, pacing in her usual circles. “He’s Runt. He’s alone too,” she said, speaking the most words in a row I’d ever heard her say.
“Can we believe him?” I asked, my neck starting to feel sore from staring up at the sky. “Because an adult owl, say his angry mama, would be a tough fight for just the two of us.”
“She abandoned me,” the owl said as he descended, sliding to a stop that included a half-roll. “A month ago. She and my brothers and sisters left me for sunnier skies.”
Before I could do more than glance at Emmy quizzically, the owl continued. “I see the dead ones in a pile close by.”
“Lead us there,” I said.
The owl took off, flying a few yards off the ground, close enough for us to follow. Emmy and I took off after him, and just as he said, less than a mile away was a pile of zombies. The owl lifted into the sky as Emmy and I approached the pile cautiously on the ground.
“These humans are skilled at killing zombies,” I said, looking carefully at the carcasses as we circled the pile, trying to ignore the smell and the oozing. “I count twelve zombies, killed by three humans.”
Emmy had circled the pile three times in the time it took me to do one circuit. “All dead. Not regular dead. Totally dead.”
“And no sacks at all,” I said, looking up at the sky.
“RUNT!” I yelled.
“Don’t think he likes that name,” Emmy said, following me into another glade where we could once again see sky between the trees.
“OWL!” I yelled again.
He circled our glade and came in for a stumbling landing.
I sensed that his weird landings were a sore spot for him, so instead I said, “We need your help, friend.”
“Friend?” he repeated, cocking his head in that weird way owls do, all big eyes and non-existent necks.
“Friend,” I said, pointing at Emmy and myself. “We would be your friends.”
“Don’t know what this word ‘friend’ is,” the owl said. “Is it like family? Does that mean you’re leaving?”
Emmy shook her head at him. “It means we never,ever leave you.”
At first, I thought he still didn’t understand, and then his eyes filled again and he started sobbing anew, hiding his face under his wing. It took us a full ten minutes to calm the creature down, and another five to explain the whole friendship idea again. Finally, he sat back so that his weird, spindly legs disappeared beneath his voluminous feathers, his tears spent.
“Listen, now that we’re friends, I need your help with something,” I said, doing everything I could not to restart the waterworks. “Our friends. The ones in the sacks. We think the humans were taking them to a camp nearby.”
Runt shook his head again, and I sighed. This owl had never ventured from his nest.
Emmy announced she was going to scrounge for food, so I carefully explained the difference between a human and a zombie, what a camp looked like, and what the heck a sack was. This was a weird position to be in because usually other mammals were explaining the outside world to me.
By the time she got back to us, the sun had set. Emmy had eaten her fill of small insects, but carried a few handfuls back for the owl, who set to eating them immediately. Despite my desperation to get back on the trail of the humans, I took a moment to hunt a bit myself, catching two small mice arguing over a nut, and considered eating them. Thankfully they noticed me and took off, so I settled for a couple mouthfuls of ants, though I really didn’t like the way they wiggled on my tongue. The mice would have been worse. I missed food you didn’t have to kill. Oh, for the convenience of the convenience store filled with food that humans nicely packaged into bags labeled with an adorable kitten face.
I found Emmy snoring in a hollow at the foot of a tree, a small nest of grass and leaves beneath her.
“Thank you,” I said to the owl, sure this was his handiwork.
“I will go and find the camp now, friend Pickles,” he said, spreading his wings. “You rest here with Emmy.”
“Wait, before you go,” I said, “what shall I call you?”
He seemed to hesitate, so I clarified. “Emmy didn’t think the name you gave her was one you liked. Since the only animals who called you by that name are gone, I thought this might be a chance to start over. With a new name.”
I’d never spoken to an owl before, so I couldn’t be sure what was happening with his beak, but two little dimples appeared in the feathers on either side of his mouth, which could have been his version of a smile. Truthfully, I was just glad he wasn’t in tears again.
“How about Pallas?” I suggested. “After Athena, who valued wise owls above all other animals. We could call you Pal for short.”
Emmy snorted in her sleep and murmured “Pal.”
“Pal,” he repeated, testing the word. And then he nodded and took off on his mission.
I paced around Emmy for the first two hours, unwilling to close my eyes in this forest. I kept looking up at the star-filled sky, hoping against hope to see our new friend coming back towards us. I was filled with guilt, and scared that I would lose the trail of my friends and of Connor, but at least I wasn’t entirely alone.
I dragged a few loose branches over the hole she slept in and climbed up to the lowest branches of the tree where I could see zombies coming, should they wander into this grove.
A GUNSHOT WOKE ME, and I sprang up in alarm, hearing Emmy do the same below me. I only knew it was a gunshot because of all the cop sho
ws Connor’s parents watched, and in real life it is so much louder.
“Pickles?” she cried out, and I leapt down to her side.
“I’m here,” I said, staring up at the sky. Were the humans being attacked by zombies?
Gunshots were something I could follow, though. “Come on, Emmy,” I said. “Grab my tail. I can lead you in the dark.”
We took off between the trees, Emmy holding lightly to the tip of my tail with her teeth, heading towards the receding echo of the sound. I sniffed at the air and found the acrid smell of ammonia and sourness. Is that what a gunshot smells like?
“Traps,” Emmy said from behind me, dropping my tail for a second to remind me of the danger.
I nodded, doing my best to continue my tracking while looking for disturbances in the grass that might indicate another net ready to grab us or something worse. Fifteen minutes passed and though the sound was gone, the ammonia smell was still there, and I could hear the voices of humans, so I knew we were getting close to the camp.
I slowed down, dropping my shoulders so I could sneak to the edge of the camp.
All around the humans had stacked sharpened logs in the same manner as the one we had run into earlier, and a few zombies lurched and fought against the wood that skewered their bodies. We picked a spot that didn’t hold zombies and peeked between the logs.
Emmy crawled up to crouch beside me, her beady eyes everywhere, able to see more in the light of the bonfire in the center of the camp.
The camp was basically a circle of sharpened logs around a circle of tents with spaces between them where clothes and supplies seemed to be stacked. Humans of all sizes roamed the camp, and armed guards were posted at the single entrance to the east.
“Connor?” Emmy whispered at me, anticipating what I was already doing, running my eyes over every human in there for either my pet or Wally’s.
“I don’t see him, or his parents,” I said, “though they could be in the tents.”
Just then two of the humans walked up to the entrance from outside the camp, arms in the air.
“It’s us.”
“We can see that, Cathy. Did you get the bird?”
“Bird?” Emmy repeated, her eyes going wide.
“Might not be Pallas,” I muttered, my eyes on the weapons the humans were carrying and a ring of keys hanging off one of the guard’s belts. Humans used keys to open things. And lock things.
“Nah, too dark. A coyote might have snagged it while we were searching.”
“Find bird first,” Emmy declared, baring her teeth as if daring me to stop her.
I was the one who could see in the dark, so I led the way, retracing back in the direction we had seen the humans come.
We walked in a zig zag, left and right, left and right, Emmy calling for Pallas in a soft voice I’d never heard her use before. I alternated between looking at the ground and looking to the skies, still hoping to see our friend swooping down between the trees, unharmed and annoyed that we’d left our glade.
It was not to be. While we were still within sight of the human’s camp, we heard blubbering we recognized.
“Pallas!” Emmy declared, running straight into a hollow log where I heard her collide with something that cried out in pain.
I followed her in more carefully, seeing the pile of feathers and fur that were an owl and a hamster.
Emmy was running her paws all over the owl, squeaking and asking “Okay?” over and over again.
“Give the owl a second, Emmy!” I said, relieved to not have caused the death of this ridiculous bird. “Now, how badly are you hurt, Pal?”
Pal was still sobbing uncontrollably, so I directed my question at Emmy, who, against all odds, was the rational one of the pair.
“Do you feel any wounds, Emmy?”
Emmy raised her paws in front of me, which were clean. “Nothing.”
“Thank the Saber,” I said, sitting back on my haunches.
Emmy was petting the owl, humming to it softly, in almost a purr.
“You two stay here, I’m going back to the camp to look for Connor.”
“No, wait, Pickles,” Pal said in a watery voice. “I saw your friends.”
“What?”
Pal took a deep steadying breath. “I’m sorry, the sound, it scared me ….”
“Shhhh,” said Emmy, continuing her ministrations.
“It’s okay, Pal. The gunshot scared all of us,” I said, trying to calm my hammering heart the way Emmy was calming this owl. “What did you see?”
“Your friends at the camp,” Pal said. “I saw them.”
“Alive?”
“Yes, alive, but Pickles ….”
“Never mind. If they’re alive, then Connor is probably there with them,” I said excitedly, backing out of the log. “We just need to sneak into the camp ….”
“No, you don’t understand, Pickles. They are prisoners,” Pal explained, following me out of the log.
“That’s okay, we’ll free them,” I said, my tail out of the log now.
“There’s more.”
That stopped me at the mouth of the log. “What do you mean?”
Pal looked back at Emmy for encouragement, and she rubbed his back, nodding.
“They’re in cages, Pickles,” Pal answered finally. “The humans are going to eat them next.”
“IT CAN’T BE TRUE,” I said for the fifth time. We had left the log and snuck to the edge of the camp, along the side of the fence where Pal said he saw the cages. The owl was walking on the ground with us and was even slower than the hamster. That wasn’t fair since he could also fly, but it was very frustrating for me because the sun was starting to come up over the horizon and we were losing the advantage of stealth and surprise.
My mind kept bouncing between two possible truths: either Connor was here in this camp, or my friends were about to become dinner for these humans. They couldn’t both be true at the same time. They just couldn’t.
Emmy and Pal finally caught up to me, and the owl puffed out his chest, pointing between the logs. “There. Go through there.”
Emmy nodded at me, and I slid between the logs to the boxes on the other side. I scratched at the first one. “Hannah,” I hissed.
“Pickles?” asked Trip from inside the box I was scratching at.
“Yes,” I hissed back.
“Pickles, I can’t believe you came back for us,” said Hannah’s voice, the balm that I needed so badly.
“Of course I came for you,” I said. “I will always find you.”
Hannah started sniffing and I had to ask, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, we’re having a tea party in here, Pickles,” said Wally’s voice. “Ginger’s wearing a crown and pretending to be one of the Queen’s prized corgis.”
“If that were true,” Ginger’s voice spoke out of the box, “I would be doing a truly fabulous job of it.”
“This isn’t funny,” said Trip’s voice.
I leaned against the box in relief. They were all fine.
“Now, could you get us out of here, please?” Trip said.
“Yes,” I replied immediately, though I didn’t have a plan as of yet. “What can you tell me about this box?”
“The sides are wood,” Ginger said, “but the top has bars and we can see a latch with a lock.”
The darkness was becoming less of a cover every second I delayed. “That’s what the keys were for,” I said to my friends. “I’ll get the key. You, Emmy, and Pal come up with a distraction that we can launch when I get back.”
“Who’s Pal?” asked Wally.
I slid back through the logs and relayed the message to Pal and Emmy, leaving it to them to work out introductions and details with the rest of the fellowship.
Following the edges of the camp, I headed back the way we
had come, looking for the guard I had seen earlier with the ring of keys. She wasn’t at the gate anymore, and I couldn’t see her in the camp itself. I was about to head back and grab Pal so he could do a more aerial search when I caught sight of her between the trees.
I sprinted after her, cursing the light that was starting to show as she walked away from the camp. Where was she going? I climbed a trunk and started to follow her that way, so that I was directly above her as she wove between trees. Finally, she seemed to find what she was looking for, and using a spade, she dug a shallow hole in the ground.
I finally understood what was going on: she was looking for a quiet place to litter. She took off her pants and hung them on a tree branch a couple steps away, squatting over the hole she had made. This was my chance.
I slid down the tree silently, an inch at a time. I could see the ring of keys. They were hooked onto a belt. Carefully, so carefully, I got my paws on the hook.
“How do you work this stupid thing?” I hissed under my breath, cursing my paws and applying my teeth instead. That didn’t work either. Whatever the mechanism, I did not have the physical dexterity to get these keys off this belt. I glanced at the human. She seemed to be struggling with her morning litter, perhaps because she had altered her diet by eating cats and raccoons. Served her right.
The belt hung loose on the pants, so I grabbed the buckle and pulled it, backing up along the branch and dragging the belt through the belt loops. The keys jingled and I stopped, glancing down at the human, my mouth full of brass belt buckle. She hadn’t noticed. I backed up again, slowly, so slowly until the belt was free of the pants.
“Hey!”
Not even bothering to look back, I climbed the tree, higher and higher, the buckle clamped in my teeth. Only when I was as high as I could go did I look back down to see the human pulling on her pants and cursing at me.
I would have laughed if that hadn’t meant losing the keys, as she ran off towards the camp, yelling for help. As soon as she was gone, I leapt from tree to tree, lower and lower until I was running along the ground, the belt trailing behind me like a long tail, the keys jingling lightly along the ground. I had started to think about possible distractions when I heard yells go up from the camp.
