“I WOULD HAVE LOVED to see a transcript of those minutes,” I said as soon as we were out of earshot of the chipmunks. We left them in the midst of loudly electing a new leader. Kimchi was in tears and taking the brunt of their failure to negotiate a winning hand. Carl was alternating between consoling him and smacking him with his tiny notebook.

“It was a pile of leaves?” Trip kept repeating at Hannah, walking beside her. “You hid behind a pile of leaves and then snuck out, and they didn’t even notice?”

“You didn’t notice,” Wally pointed out, taking his turn pulling Emmy’s tiny travois, “and their eyesight is much weaker than yours.”

“Hey, Trip was busy giving the performance of a lifetime,” Hannah said, patting the raccoon on the back. “I’ve never heard anything like it.”

Trip pulled at his whiskers. “I don’t think I’ve ever been more surprised than when I looked up to see what you had done to those chipmunks.”

“We!” squeaked Emmy from her travois.

Emmy’s voice had returned for good and it was laced with well-earned pride. Hannah had climbed up the back of the tree and cut Emmy’s bonds first. It was she who had cowed the chipmunks into shocked silence as Hannah released Wally. Then the three of them trussed up the mammals in a bundle of fur and shocked faces and waited to see the results of our negotiations below.

“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 those 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.