“ARE YOU SURE YOU can do it without hurting yourself?” Hannah asked me for the third time.

I wasn’t sure, but I nodded anyway, pushing up on the metal rod with my head, ignoring its weight and the rusty sound it made as it fought against the ring that held it.

This was the key and lock holding the horses in this train car, and before I could continue on my quest, we had to help them escape their prison. They had, after all, kept me safe while I recovered. I knew nothing of horses before meeting this small group, but they seemed to me to be a fine group of mammals, with a nobility I had never encountered before.

“Is it even moving?” I grunted at Helios, who from this vantage point on the outside of the train car, I could see through a thin slit in the door.

“It moves, yes, Pickles,” he replied. “Keep pushing.”

I did, pressing up until I felt like the metal rod was drilling into the top of my head. A bit more of this and you would be able to hang me from a Christmas tree like an ornament, complete with my own hook through the head.

“It has stopped moving up,” Helios said. “Release it, young feline, before you damage yourself again.”

I would have shaken my head, but that would drop the rod. I felt Hannah winding herself around me and nearly dropped it out of surprise.

“Let me try,” she said, putting her head under my chin and pushing up as well. 

“Mm mph!” I cried, tears falling as my poor skull was bruised. 

“Stop!” Helios begged, and we let the rod drop with a sigh of relief. (Okay, mine might have been a cry of relief.)

“Ow,” I muttered, rubbing a paw on the top of my head.

Hannah bounded on top of the train car to look down at the rod from above. 

“If I could pull it from here as you push it from below,” she speculated, “we might manage it.”

She wrapped her teeth around the metal and gave me a small nod. I dutifully pushed up again with my bruised head, but we got no further than before.

“Enough, feline heroes,” Helios said after our third attempt. “A valiant effort, but it would seem our fates are out of your paws.”

I joined Hannah on the roof, hanging my head down over the side to talk to Helios. “We’ll think of something else.”

“You have delayed your quest too long as it is,” answered Helios, echoing my heart’s fear. “When you find your pets, perhaps you will convince them to come back here and free us.”

“They’ll be long dead by then,” whispered Hannah, her tail twitching as she stalked back and forth on the roof, “and that’s if we manage to communicate with your humans. In my experience they are terrible linguists. My pet never understood a thing I said.”

“Connor is only two, so he can still understand most of what I say to him,” I said. “Wally said he’ll lose that ability as he gets older.” The thought made my heart hurt a little — to know that the understanding Connor and I had had since we were younglings was fading as he got older, but that was the way of life. The younger a human is, the closer to nature and other animals they are.

Hannah tilted her head. “But how good is Connor at communicating with the older pets?”

“Shh …,” I replied, dropping down into a flat crouch. I heard mammals approaching. Hannah flattened beside me and Helios hushed his peers inside the train car. Seconds passed and we heard the groans of zombies, as they dragged themselves our way.

I turned wide eyes towards Hannah, and she returned the stare, her whiskers twitching a message of panic. I sent matching signals back. I didn’t know what we should do, or where we could hide. Would we be safer inside the train car?

They slouched and groaned their way towards us, a group of four, of varying ages and stages of decay. I still had no idea what attracted them, was it smell? Sound? Jazz music? As predators went, zombies seemed to function under very different parameters. Whatever it was that drove them, the train car called their attention and they turned towards it, glazed eyes locked on it.

“What do we do?” Hannah’s whiskers communicated.

“No idea,” I tried to communicate back. Out of our many methods of communication between cats, the whiskers were the third most effective, followed only by the twitching of the tail, which was really only useful in communicating mood.

The zombies slammed against the train car with more violence than I expected from such slow-moving beasts. I cried out in alarm, drawing their attention our way, but not enough to stop their assault. They glanced up at us but groaned at the train car, shoving, pushing, and grunting. Despite the fact that they had no organization or communication between them, the smell of the horses within seemed to be enough to compel them to continue their efforts, and we could feel the train car starting to tip.

The horses panicked, though I could hear Helios trying to calm them, and Hannah called down to them as well. “If they knock the car on its side, the door may come loose! If it does, be ready to bolt.”

“Run east to that tree on the rise,” Helios commanded, trying to raise his voice above the stomping and neighing within and the battering sounds on the outside.

“What about us?” I yelled, now holding on to the train car’s roof for dear life.

“When we tip, the zombies will swarm,” Hannah yelled as I slid past her as the roof tipped beyond forty-five degrees. I managed to grab on to an edge with five claws. “If the door stays closed, we bolt to the tree, as Helios said.”

“And if the door opens?” I yelled back.

“I don’t know,” she replied, her tail twitching with alarm.

“Then we distract the zombies until the horses are free,” I said, twitching my determination back at her, trying to communicate as much courage as I could into each flick of my tail. Not an easy task when you’re holding on by one paw and terrified for your life.

Ten times, twenty, the zombies hit the train car again and again, the sounds of their bodies and bones beating against the metal, gruesome and unyielding. One of my claws broke off, and I gritted my teeth, feeling the train car reach the tipping point.

That’s when a new sound reached my ears: a high-pitched squeal coming at us from ground-level. I had a moment to wonder what new fresh hell this could be and then we were airborne. The train car finally released the tracks it had been sitting on, and with a deafening metallic crash, slammed onto its side.

Hannah and I sprang free seconds before the train car made contact with the ground. As we’d hoped, the door fell open with a noisy clang, but the horses inside were a jumble of long legs and terror.

The zombies hadn’t noticed the open door yet. They were distracted by a small blur of brown that was weaving between their legs, screeching at the top of its lungs. I got my head in the doorway of the train car, calling for Helios, but it was mayhem, and I narrowly missed being kicked in the head by a frantic horse.

“Pickles!” yelled Hannah, pulling my attention out of the train car.

I expected to see her fending off a zombie, but instead, she was pointing at three new animals who had joined the fray. Except they weren’t at all new to me.

“We’re back!” announced Trip, a rope under his arm as he streaked past me. The other end of the rope was in the mouth of Ginger, who gave me a wink and then made a quick turn in the opposite direction. I saw what they were up to immediately — wrapping a long rope around three of the slow-moving humans — but the zombies were totally at a loss, their concentration on a tiny hamster who was still screeching at near supersonic sound levels. Ginger and Trip whipped around the zombies, but it was Wally who was calling out directions a few yards away.

“Left, Emmy!” he yelled. “No! Your other left, you daft hamster!”

I had never seen a hamster before and stood there with my mouth hanging open at this tiny furball of ferocity.

“Pickles,” Helios roared, and I turned to see the fourth zombie had him by the leg, and was pulling him out of the train car, teeth gnashing in anticipation.

I noticed that its neck bone was almost entirely exposed, the flesh around it missing from bites and decomposition, and I remembered Eli and Bree’s effective fight with the zombies. Removing the head was key.

“Helios, kick it in the head as hard as you can,” I said, burrowing between horse bodies to get close to his ears.

“What?”

“The head,” I repeated, as I was shoved right into Helios’s forehead by horses struggling to get upright. “You have to knock its head right off its body. Can you do that?”

Instead of answering, Helios took a good look at the zombie pulling at his right leg and kicked it full in the face with his left leg. The head went sailing out of sight. I sat down on my haunches, shocked, but Helios immediately turned to organizing the other horses. Hannah looked through the long horse legs as they exited the train car, leaving just me and lots and lots of horse poop.

“I can’t believe that worked,” Hannah called from outside the train car.

“Me either,” I replied honestly, trying to get up and failing. My legs were all wobbly.

“Better get out of here before the smell hits you,” Hannah suggested.

I tried again and found that I could manage it, escaping the train car to see that Helios had led his horses over to the zombies Ginger and Trip had, well, tripped, for lack of a better word, and they were handily stomping those threats into dust. Unbound from the train car, the horses seemed to be quite handy at dealing with zombies.

“Well, aren’t you going to say hello?” Wally asked, standing over me with a grin as wide as his girth.

What followed was the happiest reunion I have ever been a part of. With Hannah snuggled into my side, purring contentedly, each of us retold our stories, catching the group up as Helios and his troop went in search of fresh food and water.

We sat atop a train car a few yards away from the still bodies of the zombies. This one was still on the tracks and afforded us the added safety of height.

Emmy the hamster was the only one who couldn’t seem to sit still, and scampered all around us, growling and squealing at the darkness, as if daring it to come at us. 

“We made quick time back to the neighborhood,” Ginger explained, “but we smelled it burning from far away.”

I turned shocked eyes Wally’s way, and he hung his head. “I was unable to save the home of our pets, despite turning on all the taps in the house.”

The only fire I had ever seen was the one our pets lit in our little backyard in the summertime in a small metal container. They would roast something called a marshmallow over the heat at the end of a long stick. I would watch the white fluffy marshmallow catch the fire and turn black and then I would smell the acrid scent of burning sugar, not understanding why Connor would put it in his mouth. I tried to imagine what it would look like covering our little house and found I couldn’t. Maybe that was a good thing.

“How did you get out?” Hannah asked.

“The cat door into the backyard,” Wally said. “The one benefit of fire is that slow-moving zombies are both attracted to it and destroyed by it, so our neighborhood became a central location for the dead.”

Trip burped loudly, and then apologized sheepishly. He had found a store of garbage in the train car we were sitting on and had just finished consuming it. None of us had been interested in the contents.

“Once I got outside, it was mayhem, with zombies flaming past me. They didn’t care that they were being burned to ashes,” Wally continued as Trip scuttled back into the train car to root for more supplies. “I climbed the oak tree out front of Cinnamon’s house, directed some stunned squirrels to abandon their precious nuts, and got as high as I could get. That’s when I saw Ginger and Trip.”

“He called down to us,” Ginger said, taking up the thread, “but like Wally said, it was a dangerous game of dodge-the-flaming-zombie to get to him. I ended up climbing the tree in front of Vance’s house instead, with the intention of meeting Wally in the middle, but that’s when we saw Emmy.”

We all turned to look at the hamster who continued to circle us. Emmy noticed and bared her tiny yellow teeth.

“She was inside her house, which was ablaze. We could see her through the open window, holding a lit branch in her mouth and lighting zombies on fire,” Wally said, shaking his head with amazement at the memory. 

Trip climbed back on the roof carrying a bottle of water and a bag of tiny hot dogs. He distributed the hot dogs among us, and even coaxed Emmy into taking a bite. 

“She doesn’t talk?” I asked, watching her tuck into the hot dogs.

“We think she used to, but she’s been in shock since Vance and Ralph died,” Wally replied. “That hasn’t stopped her from killing more zombies than any mammal her size should be able to. She’s more useful than a legion of trained dogs.”

Trip reached out to stroke Emmy, but she jerked away and returned to her patrol, leaving behind her half-finished meal. I found myself wondering how two mastiffs dealt with having a dictator hamster in charge. Were all hamsters this … impressive?

“So, then what happened?” Hannah prompted, in between licking her paws clean of the salty hot dog treats.

Trip spoke up then, sitting back on his large behind and washing his paws with some of the water. “Well, we had to get her out of there, so I rapped on the window until she saw me.”

“I still don’t think she would have come out if she hadn’t noticed that baby chipmunk losing her grip,” Ginger said.

“Emmy came flying out from under the open window, but she streaked right past me and leapt for the tree between Wally and Ginger,” Trip said, his eyes on the hamster now. “She had that baby chipmunk in hand and back on her mother’s back before I had even figured out what she was up to.”

Emmy walked through our midst, oblivious to the admiring eyes following her wiggling butt. We weren’t actually admiring her butt, she just wiggled hypnotically when she walked and …. Oh, never mind.

“It was pretty clear we had to get the heck out of the trees, because they were catching flames from the idiot zombies below,” Wally said, “and with no home to protect, I made the command decision to join your quest, Pickles.”

“And you two?” I asked Trip and Ginger.

“Are you kidding?” Trip asked, looking around. “You cats are my best friends ever!”

Ginger shrugged, the melancholy of losing his pet still apparent in his whiskers and tail. “Trip and Wally aren’t exactly natural allies, so I thought I would come along and act as ambassador.”

Wally snorted, but in a friendly way, and Trip burst out laughing, holding his large belly.

I smiled at them all, touched and bolstered by their presence. “Together we will find Connor. I know we will.”