I’ve been betrayed again.
I never intended to stay. This compound was a way station on my march against the zombie threat. Somehow, despite all I’ve endured, I’ve once again become dependent on other mammals. Obviously, if the powers that be, namely the cats, are letting in random weasels, it’s time to get off this hamster wheel and focus on my solo quest of ridding the world of zombies.
Unlike Trip, who wears a fanny pack around his thick waist and has a plastic bag of collected garbage he keeps here in The Menagerie, I have nothing to pack. Warriors travel light. I glance around the room now. Pickles and Hannah are in their corner; Ginger, Wally, Sonar, and the kittens of the 4077th are snuggled around the stone pit. Pal and Trip are out on their nightly foraging run, as nocturnal animals are apt to do in the twilight hours. Pal tried to talk me into coming with them, no doubt to try to soften the blow of the cats inviting a weasel into our midst, but I declined. He’s a smart friend. He understood I needed time to myself to mull everything over. I’m hoping he comes to the same conclusion as me about the weasel and leaves this place. I will find him out in the wilderness. We will fight the zombies side by side until the end.
The dog. Where is the dog?
I dash up to Pal’s perch and out onto the roof to peer down into the compound.
Human guards walk the fence line on their raised platforms, and the bonfire they maintain in the east end of the enclosed camp provides a feeble light. If I had a cape it would be billowing in the wind that gusts around me.
I squint into the darkness, annoyed that I can’t see Diana, and equally annoyed that I care. I wonder if she’s out on patrol with the humans. Sometimes, she or Ginger goes out with the guards, walking the circuit around the compound. I have never volunteered for that duty because the humans walk far too slowly. I work alone. They must understand my preference because I have never been asked.
“Whatever,” I say through my teeth, turning to the tree closest to The Menagerie. Trip is the architect in charge of the tree-to-tree highway leading from The Menagerie in this compound all the way to the river, where the beaver dam and the gaze of raccoons are located. I understand the concept, of course — it’s a safe way to travel back and forth above the heads of the zombies — but to me, it’s just another point of failure. Another way for mammals around me to be lost to the zombie threat.
“Not my problem anymore,” I grunt, refusing to risk that loss again, and I zip up the ramp that leads into the tree. It creaks under my paws, and I have a second to wonder how it carries Trip’s additional weight if it can’t even handle mine.
“Where are you going?”
I whip around, teeth bared, ready to do battle.
Diana stands on the lower end of the ramp, looking up at me at the top.
I slowly retract my claws from the wood I’ve dug into. “Out.”
“Out where?” she presses, coming up the ramp a little. So that was why it was creaking behind me: her added weight.
Heroes don’t lie, and I want to cut this short, so I say, “Out. Forever.”
“You’re leaving?” she asks, her voice high and surprised. “Is this about the weasel?”
I hate that my actions are this well known, and that it is this animal, a dog, who knows too much. Aren’t cats the ones who are supposed to be curious?
“You weren’t even going to say goodbye?”
I shake my head. It’s not like the cats checked with me before inviting in a known enemy. Or like my supposed best friend, the owl, stopped them. Again, the dog seems to anticipate my answers.
“You haven’t even met them, Emmy,” she says. “Don’t you think you should talk to them yourself before you write them off and abandon your family?”
“Family?” I spit out. How few words do I need to make my point without revealing my hurt? “Weasels not family.”
“Not them,” she says, stepping even closer so that she’s only about a hamster-length from me. “Us. We’re your family. And you’re leaving us behind.”
I grit my teeth against the vision of two Great Danes that rises in my mind. “Emmy has no family.”
“Fine,” Diana answers, anger displacing the surprise in her voice, her ears actually flattening a little on her fox-shaped head, “but don’t say you don’t care what happens to us, because you have rescued more animals than I can count. Me included.”
I won’t deny that. Warriors rescue helpless animals. It’s part of our reason for being. But these animals aren’t helpless. They’re just gullible, to take in weasels. And if they’re choosing a weasel over me then it’s just a matter of time before I lose one of them to his vile machinations. I’m not sticking around for a betrayal like that. It’s my pets turning into zombies all over again.
“Shouldn’t you at least make sure they’re not dangerous before you leave?” she suggests, sliding backwards down the ramp. She can’t actually turn around on the ramp: it’s too narrow, and she’s too wide. “I think you owe us that.”
I open my mouth to deny owing her anything at all, but the way she’s looking at me with the wind rippling her fur reminds me too much of Vance. I owe my life to two dogs, and it’s a debt I can never repay. And a pain I will never subject myself to again. But I’m not one to shirk my responsibilities.
Instead of answering her question, I prefer to act. I run right under her, brushing her belly with my ears and bouncing off the ramp behind her. I can take care of this before I go.
“Hey!” she calls, but I’m already scampering down from the roof, down to the fence line to run along the wooden perimeter.
New animals and humans are quarantined outside the border fence of the camp. That’s the protocol instituted by Wally and his pet, and one I highly approve of. That means these new humans will have set up their tents on the east wall of our compound, directly below the guard tower, so we can keep an eye on them while they go through the entry process. I run along the battlements, around barrels and rope and uncut logs. Two of our humans, Ginger’s pets I think, stand on guard above the tents, and I sneak between their legs to look out over the fence.
A small fire is burning between the tents, and three humans I don’t know or trust sit around it. They’ve put up a rudimentary fence around their tents, a bunch of sharpened logs pointing outwards like teeth stuck into the ground. The humans have discovered that the average zombie is too stupid to dodge the sharp ends and will invariably impale itself on the logs, stopping the zombie in its tracks.
I eye the distance from our ten-foot-high fence to the roof of the first tent and decide to risk it. I hurl myself over the fence edge, imagining a red cape fluttering majestically behind me, and land with a bounce on the tent. I flatten immediately lest I be seen, but neither the humans around the fire nor the ones back on the fence have noticed. These tents are ragged, with silvery duct tape pressed along the seams and patching several rips. It’s about half original tent material and half tape. I slide my body to the edge of the tarp, avoiding sticky tape, and ride a cord down to the ground, landing soundlessly beside the tent.
“Stop right there,” says a voice behind me.
Instead of obeying the command, I roll to the side and come up, teeth and claws bared, to see a rabbit about twice my size pointing a sharpened stick at me. I hiss at her, and her almond-shaped eyes narrow.
“You’re about two seconds from being skewered, rodent,” she hisses at me.
I grab the sharp end of the stick, and we wrestle for it, hissing and growling at each other. I won’t let go: I’ve got my front paws and my jaw locked on it, and the rabbit can’t shake me loose.
“Diana, what are you doing here?” I hear a human voice say somewhere behind us, but I ignore it. I will not surrender. I’d die first.
A skinny weasel slithers out from under the tent, and his eyes go wide when he sees us. “Spike? Holy whiskers, Spike, stop!”
The rabbit growls in response, “Back off, Wheels, I’ve got this. I told you I’d find us a home.”
“Both of you, stop!” barks Diana from the fence above us.
The weasel steps close enough for me to see that he’s shaking with fear.
“Please, Spike, stop,” he begs the rabbit, scratching at his nose. “We’ll get thrown out of the camp, and I’ve done the calculations — we won’t survive another week out there with the zombies. Please!”
The weasel’s pathetic sniveling is the perfect distraction for the rabbit. With a grunt, I yank the stick free and flip it around in my paws so that I’m pointing the sharp end at the rabbit and the weasel. She hisses, looking around for another weapon, but the weasel surprises both of us by stepping in front of her, his front paws raised. He’s tall when he stands on his hind paws like this.
“We’re not here to hurt you,” he says to me slowly, as if I’m a dull-witted pigeon. His voice is quaking as much as his scrawny body. “We talked to a cat named Wally this afternoon. Ask him. Ask your cats.”
“Do I look like a cat, weasel?” I hiss at him, pressing the pointy end of the stick into his concave chest.
He winces but holds his ground, and my estimation of this weasel goes up a notch. That said, it was pretty low to begin with. Like, underside of the litter paper low.
“Don’t, Emmy, please,” Diana says from behind me, her concerned voice grating on my nerves. The heat of battle is fading, but I still want to run this weasel through. I should. Just on principle.
The rabbit finds a rock and grips it in her paw, panting heavily.
That’s when a zombie rips his way out of the tent right next to us.
Just in case you’re wondering how I know it’s a zombie and not a regular live human, he’s chomping on his own arm like it’s a turkey drumstick. He’s also covered in strips of duct tape, with shreds of the tent trailing after him, which is slowing him down. But not enough.
The fog of war falls over my eyes, and I can barely hear the screams of the humans or Diana’s yelps from above us on the fence.
“Good hunting!” I yell and launch myself at the zombie, thrusting the pointy stick through his bare foot as hard as I can, staking him to the soft forest floor. He stops, pulling at his foot, so I duck into his pant leg, climbing up his hairy leg as quickly as I can. A zombie’s head is its only vulnerable spot, other than burning them in one of my bonfires, so I know I have to somehow detach this undead human’s head from his body. I pull myself out of the pants and head up the torso, passing the bite that must have turned this human from alive to undead. I smell something terrible and realize the weasel has entered the battle, and he is doing more damage to those of us who have working noses than to this zombie. Zombies don’t smell. They just eat. I wish this zombie would eat the weasel and solve my problems.
I yank myself out of the zombie’s shirt and bound onto his shoulder as he stumbles around, pulling his staked foot free and lurching toward a female human cowering in front of him, duct tape waving off his arms like ribbons.
“Haaaaa!” yells the rabbit, leaping impossibly high and landing on the shoulder opposite me.
The zombie starts slapping at the rabbit, but she dodges his clumsy hand and throws me one end of a long piece of barbed wire. “Go!” she yells.
I immediately grasp her plan. I loop myself around the zombie’s neck, and the rabbit goes the opposite way so that we’re both running around and around the zombie’s head, wrapping barbed wire around his neck. Now we’re on opposite shoulders again, and without needing to be asked, I pull tight on my end of the barbed wire.
The rabbit does the same, leaning back so far off the zombie’s shoulder that she falls out of sight, her end of the wire taut with her body weight.
The zombie lurches as humans fire their guns at it from the compound fence above us. My ears ring with the deafening sounds, but the zombie swings toward the weasel, who is frozen in place on the ground in front of us. His strategy reminds me of Trip’s technique when dealing with zombies — equally useless. He starts leaning to the side, signaling he’s going to try the playing-dead thing again. Only this time he might end up the real kind of dead rather than the fake kind.
“No, Wheels! Run!” Spike yells at the weasel as she swings like a pendulum from the end of the barbed wire. She’s getting wound up in the duct tape hanging off the zombie’s back.
Her words change his strategy, and he takes off into the forest at top speed, our zombie lumbering after him.
I leap off the shoulder as well, gripping the barbed wire, but even our combined weights hanging off each side of this zombie aren’t enough to remove the zombie’s head from his neck. We’re flailing around on the ends of our wire, bouncing along as he bashes his way through the rudimentary fence.
“Not working,” I yell at the rabbit. “Let go!”
A muffled “Mmmph!” is all I hear in response.
Still holding on to my end of the barbed wire, I let out a battle trill and scamper along the zombie’s torso like a mountain climber scaling the side of the rock face. I come around the zombie’s side as he barrels into a tree, and I get a smack to the side of the head. Now I’m seeing stars. I shake my head and finally get a glimpse of the rabbit. She’s wrapped up like a mummy in duct tape. She’s not even holding on to the barbed wire anymore; instead, she’s using all four paws and her teeth to try to get free of the sticky tape.
The weasel darts left, so our zombie-ride does the same, and I feel the sting of a branch in my side. I ignore it, using the momentum to hurl myself onto the shoulder above the rabbit. She’s got one paw free, so I reach down and grab it.
I pull as hard as I can and manage to pull her head free. Her eyes are as huge and round as shields, but she’s not scared, just determined.
“Pull!” I growl down at her, but she’s shaking her head, trying to pull her paw free of mine.
“What are you doing?!” I yell, but she yanks her paw out of mine and pushes down the tape around her mouth.
“Look out!” she yells, pointing with her one free paw.
I lean out and see what she’s freaking out about. The zombie is barreling toward the edge of a cliff.
“Jump!” she yells up at me.
The zombie stoops as he runs and grabs the weasel, who shrieks piteously and goes limp in response, and I realize this could be the end. Two warriors vanquishing a zombie and a cowardly weasel. But who will fight tomorrow? Who will protect my friends back at the camp when we are gone? Oddly, I don’t hear the screams as we run out of cliff and start to fall. I hear dogs barking. I imagine that a long red cape is billowing out behind me, following my ascent to ValHamster and to the two Great Danes who loved me.