Spike and I take shifts watching over the other two animals. The truth is, I don’t trust her weasel, and she doesn’t trust my dog. But fighting side by side in battle the way we did means we trust each other. I’m looking to the sky more than I would like to admit. Pal should have found us by now. I push down my worry that the camp has been overrun by zombies with an almost physical effort. I can’t believe I’ve gotten this attached to anyone again, but Pal should be here. It doesn’t make sense. I gather firewood and keep the fire going all night, its meager light casting my shadow large against the trees. I imagine that I look terrifying to the neighborhood squirrels and chipmunks. I like it. Maybe I don’t need that cape.
I wake to the sound of whittling. I blink the sleep from my eyes to see Spike creating a new sharpened stick from the one she planted beside the fire. She’s using her powerful front teeth like a wood chipper. Obviously, she got her name from her preferred weapon. I respect that.
“Sun’s coming up,” she says, pointing an ear to the east, “and you grind your teeth when you sleep.”
I nod, my stomach growling.
“I got some mushrooms for us,” she says, pushing forward a leaf full of vegetables. Normally I would turn my nose up at mushrooms, but warriors, like a good fire, need fuel. I force myself to swallow two of the mushrooms, hating every slimy piece, if only to gather the energy to find tastier food. Pal and Trip are the best at spying out good food — an anthill filled with six-legged queen-worshipping drones or a poorly defended honeycomb. Foraging is not generally the work of warriors … unless it’s dangerous. But I suppose if I am striking out on my own, I’d better improve this skill.
I stretch and then bolt for the forest behind us.
I never walk when I can run.
I run in a semicircle around our position on the beach, cataloguing animals, potential food, and probable enemies. I pass the rabbit, who is now jabbing the pointy stick at the air in a practiced kata that involves flipping in the air sideways. On my second orbit, I slow down to glare at the ravens’ nest before scampering halfway up the tree and out on a branch. I scan for zombies. Nothing. Pal still hasn’t passed by in the sky. I don’t like that. I also don’t like that I don’t like that.
I zoom back down the tree, grabbing a few bugs along the way and popping them in my mouth like candy.
I hit the ground at a run, scaring a couple of chipmunks, and I head straight for a crab apple tree I spied on my first pass. I have to walk back to our base camp dragging a large leaf stacked with crab apples, but the way Spike grins at me makes the slower pace worthwhile.
“Perfect,” she says, thrusting her stick into an apple and holding it over the fire. “It sweetens the crab out of the apple,” she explains.
I arrange the rest of the apples around the fire. Then I step back and mimic her kata, kicking the air with a force that should impress. It’s all about follow-through. You have to mean to kick what you kick.
“Karate?” I ask curiously. I watched a lot of fight movies beside my pet, on his laptop. My favorite were the Thor movies, obviously. But I take the best fighting elements from each as part of my warrior development.
She shakes her head. “My pet was an Amazon.”
I’ve heard of the Amazons, of course, but thought they were fiction, or at least extinct. Like the Vikings of old. My heroes.
“Not a real Amazon, of course,” Spike continues, now placing a mushroom on the end of her stick and roasting it over the fire, “but she had every book on the Amazons, and she practiced their culture like a religion. She developed this kata out of her readings, and I learned from my cage.”
She replaces the cooked mushroom on the leaf and moves on to the next fungus.
“Amazon survived?” I ask.
Spike rotates the mushroom a few times over the flames before answering. “Lost her in the first few days after the zombies appeared.”
I suspected as much. “Fighting?”
“To the end,” Spike answers, pride resonating in the straightness of her whiskers. “A warrior’s death.”
The weasel rolls over in his sleep, no doubt smelling a convenient meal beside a fire some other mammal built and protected all night. Typical of the species to be so selfish.
“Weasel?” I ask, trying not to spit out the question. Out of respect for the rabbit, of course.
Spike glances over to where Wheels is sleeping fitfully. “My pet saved his from a whole herd of zombies. I took on her responsibilities after she was gone.”
I shake my head at the sleeping animal. Of course, the pet of a weasel would be as useless as the weasel itself.
“How about you?” Spike asks.
“Betrayed,” I reply. That word best covers how I find myself here. First betrayed by our pets in the house I burned down. Then betrayed by the cats who gave away my home to this weasel.
“By …?”
I watch Diana slowly blink her eyes open before I answer. “Humans. The pets. They became zombies.”
Spike nods as if this is a story she has heard before. “Your pets turned on you. I’m so sorry.”
I shrug to prove I’m over it, passing on what I have learned. “Don’t get attached. Don’t get betrayed.”
Diana stretches languidly, shaking off sand, and turns to look at us, prompting me to underline my plans with more words than I usually would. “I travel now. Travel far. Away from … attachments. Fight. Win. Fight more.”
“For honor and glory?” Spike asks with a grin.
“For honor and glory,” I agree, happy she at least understands.
“How do we get back?” Diana asks, her snout tilted up, looking at the top edge of the cliff we leapt from. The sun is fully up, and we are better able to see our situation.
Diana takes a few tentative steps up the cliff, trying to maintain her balance, but slides back down with a yelp. Spike bounces up the cliffside a bit, but at an angle, trying to find a less vertical way to climb up. She makes it up almost halfway before she loses a foothold and tumbles back down.
“Ouch,” she says, wincing.
“Be careful, Spike,” Diana says, helping her up.
I think I could burrow up if I had to, but it would take some time, and it would need to be a very wide tunnel to fit Diana. Spike stretches and then leaps up the nearest tree. If Trip were here, he would throw us down a rope and we could use that to climb up. Or we could grasp the rope in our teeth and be pulled up by Trip and his raccoon friends.
The weasel is awake now too and scratching in the sand next to him with a twig. The sound is starting to seriously annoy me.
“The cliff extends as far as I can see in both directions,” Spike yells from a branch about thirteen feet above the ground. The way she hopped up the tree from branch to branch would have made a monkey proud.
I don’t need to return to the camp. I was on my way out anyway. But there is no way I’m starting this new expedition with Diana. No dogs. Not for me. Never again. And that means the corgi at least will have to be returned to the humans. The weasel too, if that means he is out of my life. And maybe I need to make sure The Menagerie is still standing. If I am going anyway. I say none of this aloud, of course. I’m watching the trees for movement because no one else is. An owl swoops by, and my heart leaps, thinking it might be Pallas. No. This owl is huge. Three times as big as our owl. The owl, I mean. He’s not mine. Best friends don’t let weasels move in, and warriors don’t need friends. We have allies and we have enemies.
“Upstream or downstream, Wheels?” Spike calls down from her tree.
The weasel either doesn’t hear (I’ve heard that they’re notoriously deaf) or is too lazy to answer. I believe the first because all that scratching in the sand would drive a mammal with normal hearing crazy.
Diana pads over to sit beside me. I wish she wouldn’t — it reminds me of when Ralph would snuggle up next to me after a big meal, all warm and content. “What do you think, Emmy?”
I shrug because I don’t really have a directional opinion, but I say, “Wait here for Pal to find us. Might work. Defend this position.” If Pal shows up, he can join me or he and Diana can escort these random mammals back without me.
“The low ground?” she asks. “Aren’t you always telling us to get to higher ground?”
I’m actually surprised enough to make eye contact with the dog. She was listening? She remembered that? Vance and Ralph were loyal to a fault, to their very last moments, but I don’t think they ever listened to a word I said to them. It’s why my language skills are so sparse. They taught me that actions were more important than words. I didn’t really speak until after I met Pickles and her band of chatty cats. And then, I didn’t want to speak because words were so heavy with meaning. Every word felt heavy. And sad. Even now, it’s not like anyone listens to me. But this dog does.
“Yes,” I reply, because strategically Diana’s right, “but Pal sees us on beach. Not in trees.”
Diana starts scanning the skies hopefully, sniffing at the air as I regard her graceful profile.
“I don’t smell any of our friends,” she says finally, looking downcast.
“Not even Pal?”
“No,” she says. “I know Pal’s scent very well. He’s not here.”
I trust a dog’s sense of smell. “Zombies?” I ask.
She sniffs again. “Upstream, I think.”
I bare my teeth in that direction. I’ll need a bigger fire. And maybe some rope.
Spike, meanwhile, is hopping lithely down the tree a branch at a time, landing with an impressive thud in the sand right between Diana and me.
“Zombies?” she asks, picking up her pointy stick.
“Upstream,” I reply with a grin.
“We need to head downstream,” announces Wheels.
What?
Diana asks before I can, “Why, Wheels?”
“According to what I can remember of my pet’s map,” Wheels says, glancing at the dead zombie and then away with a shudder, “there’s a human tunnel that cuts through this cliffside that should lead us back to your camp.”
Now we’re supposed to trust a zombie’s map and the word of a weasel. I don’t think so.
“We go upstream,” I announce, “kill zombies, find higher ground, stay visible to Pal.”
“You want to go toward the zombies?” Wheels squeaks, finally stepping away from his scratching in the sand.
“Kill them first,” I answer, looking to Spike for support.
“Spike, you can’t agree with this … hamster … we have to get back to the camp,” Wheels sputters. “Diana, please?”
Diana walks around the map in the sand, being careful not to disturb it with her paw prints. “Are you sure about this tunnel, Wheels?”
“I’m sure that’s where it was on the map,” he answers, scratching at his nose. “I’ve never actually seen it.”
“If we go upstream, will we find the camp?” Diana presses, her eyes on the map. “This looks like a shorter route back, up here, across a bridge.”
“That bridge is made of rope, strung between cliffs,” Wheels says. “The tunnel is made of concrete and on the ground.”
“Faster and kill zombies,” I say, tamping out the fire with sand.
“Sounds like a plan,” Diana says, nodding at me. I pick up the second match we almost lost to the ravens and slip it carefully into Diana’s collar. She holds still for me to secure it. We start to walk away, me in front, circling Diana as she sniffs the air. Spike seems to be thinking, tapping the ground with one paw, and Wheels is basically sputtering and pointing at his map. It would be a shame to leave such a resourceful Amazonian warrior behind. But I don’t like to change my mind once I’ve declared my intentions. Wordy negotiations are for cats and humans. Warriors don’t waver. We act.
We’re about six feet away when I hear Spike and Wheels break into a heated argument where we left them. Wheels is gesticulating wildly, and Spike is shaking her head so hard her ears are flapping against her face.
“They’ll follow,” Diana says as I pass her in my orbit. “It’s their only choice.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Because you’re their best chance of making it back to camp,” she answers. “I know that. Spike knows that. Wheels needs a minute to understand that.”
“Don’t want to help a weasel,” I say.
“But you will,” she answers, smiling at me, “because warriors save the helpless. Even if they don’t like them.”
I sigh, because she’s not wrong.
“Emmy, have you thought any more about —”
“Still leaving.”
“But, you’ve talked to Wheels now,” she says. “He’s harmless. He’s not the best zombie fighter …”
I snort at her understatement.
“But he’s not the monster you thought he was,” she continues, her tone adamant. “You have to admit that.”
I force my eyes from the sky. I’m not admitting anything. And I’m so not looking for Pal. I push all of it away. I wish I could push these animals away as easily as my feelings.
“But what’s the plan then? Abandon us?”
Spike hops to catch up with us. “I’ll take the rear,” she announces.
I nod, showing my respect for her skills by stopping my usual orbit and just leading the expedition from the front of the company, something I’ve never done with the cats. I don’t look, but I assume the weasel is along for the ride. At least there will be no guilt or pain when the weasel gets eaten by a zombie. I won’t let him cause the death of Spike or Diana. Maybe that is my mission. Kill zombies. Return mammals. Lose weasels.
Forget the cape, I deserve a halo.