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 shows 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.

“Fire!”

Fire? No way. I sprinted around the edge of the camp, dodging a zombie who had worked himself down to the ground while still impaled on a sharpened log.

Emmy and Pal were not where I had left them, but I suspected they were responsible for the panic on the other side of the camp where humans were now congregating. I leapt on top of the box, lowering the belt through the bars at the top.

“Here,” I said. “Get Trip to open the lock, I don’t know how. Get free and meet us ….”

I shrieked as someone grabbed me from behind, turning in mid-air to confront my attacker. It was a human, so I deployed claws on all four limbs, swiping and screeching and doing as much damage as I could.

The female had me securely by the scruff, but she squawked in response as my claw connected with her sensitive eye area, calling for help. Fortunately, the fire and the response to it meant it was just the two of us for now. My hide felt like it was being pulled from my skeleton, but I twisted and turned, trying to get free.

“Attack scenario Bravo!” yelled Wally from somewhere behind us, and I felt three bodies hit the human at the legs. With a scream, she tipped over, finally releasing my scruff.

“Let’s go,” I yelled, standing next to the human’s head. I wasn’t moving this time until I had seen all my friends to safety. Trip sprang away, bounding out towards the logs and shimmying his belly through, followed by Ginger and Wally. Emmy had already gone through and poked her head back to yell at us. Hannah shoved me towards the fence, but I still hadn’t seen Pal. That’s when he streaked over our heads, low enough to scare the human into a ball of fear. He led the way out of the camp, low to the ground and purring like a cat.