“THIS IS JUST LIKE that movie!”

“Shut up, Trip.”

“The one with the small bears with spears who wore hoods and ….”

“We KNOW, Trip.”

I had a mouthful of net, trying to bite through the fabric, or I would have answered the raccoon, and probably not with a polite word. I was upside down with my legs sticking straight up, one leg all the way through the netting as I chewed as hard as I could.

“Pickles,” Hannah’s voice said from somewhere above me.

I pushed the net out of my mouth for a second. “What?”

“Grab Emmy.”

I tried to turn my face, but all the mammals on top of me made it impossible. “I can’t see her.”

“Trip, roll my way,” I heard Ginger’s voice say, and I felt a slight easing of the weight, enough so that I could turn my head a little bit. That’s when I saw what Hannah was concerned about: Emmy’s wiggling butt was hanging out of the netting. In fact, from this angle, I couldn’t see what was keeping the hamster in this net with the rest of us.

“Are you holding on to Emmy, Hannah?” I called, reaching my one free leg towards the mammal, and not even coming close.

“Yes, but she’s slipping!”

I looked down, judged the distance, and said, “Let her go. At least one of us will be free of this net. It’s not too far for her to drop.”

“Let go,” repeated Emmy plaintively.

“Are you sure?” Hannah asked.

I heard stirring in the bushes and said, “Let her go. Now!”

Emmy dropped to the ground below me, landing on her side (no cat DNA in that animal), and scampered to a hole at the base of a tree just as three humans entered the glade.

“What did we get, Hussein?” said one to the other, looking up at us in the net.

The one named Hussein walked up so he was directly under me, and I fought the urge to hiss, pulling my leg back into the netting.

He grabbed the net bag and twisted it this way and that. “A bunch of cats and … a raccoon, I think! Weird!”

The other two humans came up to stand under the net beside him, all three now looking up at us.

“They don’t look bitten,” I said.

“Let’s take them back to camp,” Hussein said, walking over to the tree to untie the other end of the rope. “Who’s got the bag?”

“Bag?” Hannah whispered. “I’m not going in a bag.”

“Me neither,” Trip swore.

“What if Connor is with these humans?” I said, desperate but scared.

“Then we follow them back to their camp on our own paws,” Wally said.

I couldn’t disagree with that logic. “Okay, what’s the plan?”

“We bite, claw, get free,” Ginger said through gritted teeth.

“Climb a tree, as high as you can, and stay within sight of this glade,” Wally said as a hand reached into the net and all hell broke loose.

We clawed, hissed, fought, bit, and generally caused as much mayhem as five mammals with a combined weight of less than ninety pounds could in the small space. I heard the squeals of my friends and bit harder and hissed louder.

“What the hell?”

“Are they rabid!?”

“Ouch! Can raccoons be zombies?!”

“Help me!”

I was free first, and I sprinted away from the humans, leaping up the tree in front of me, climbing and climbing until I was at least ten feet off the ground before I looked back down.

The humans were still cursing, but each was holding a sack of squirming mammals.

“No,” I whispered, looking around at the tree branches in the grove with horror. I couldn’t have been the only one to escape.

“Leave it,” Hussein said, looking up at me and then down at his scratched arm with disgust. “More trouble than it’s worth. Damn cat!”

I hissed from my tree branch. “Let them go, you monsters!”

“Pickles!” Hannah called from one of the sacks, breaking my heart. “Help!”

“No,” called Wally from a different sack as the humans started to walk away. “Stick to the plan! Pickles, get Emmy and follow us.”

“Pickles, don’t leave us,” Trip caterwauled as he was carried away.

I climbed down from the tree, so scared and angry my claws refused to recede into my paws. “Emmy,” I hissed. “Emmy.”

“Here,” she called from the tree root, only emerging so far that I could see her snout wiggling in the darkness.

“Come on,” I said, turning to follow the humans. I would have preferred to follow them through the tree branches, but I knew that wasn’t an option with a hamster. Their climbing skills were minimal and Emmy was still injured anyway.

Instead we slunk from tree trunk to tree trunk, moving only fast enough to keep the humans in sight.

“Plan?” Emmy whispered, when we had been following in this manner for about ten minutes.

“Why do I always have to come up with the plan?” I answered grumpily, scampering to the next tree.

We made three more quick darts before Emmy answered: “Connor.”

I swallowed past my guilt with effort. It was my fault, my quest, that had gotten us into this much trouble. She was right.

“Fine, sorry,” I said finally, grumpier than I meant to sound. “We get to the human camp, rescue our friends, and find Connor.”

That’s when the herd of zombies attacked. I saw them first this time, and grabbed Emmy by the nape of her neck, ignoring her squeak of protest, throwing her towards a gap in the roots of the tree in front of us and diving in after her. A zombie grabbed me by the tail and I hissed, digging my claws into the wood of the tree. Emmy streaked past me with a warrior’s scream.

“Don’t bite it!” I yelled, but I needn’t have worried. Emmy’s strategy of dodging and dashing through the legs of zombies was incredibly effective. He let my tail go to try and grab at her and she sprinted back into the hole under the roots of the tree. I seized her, scooted as far back as I could, and held her close. No matter how far he reached into the roots under the tree, he couldn’t reach us. I closed my eyes against the terror, glad I had Emmy in my paws. The zombie seemed to come to the same conclusion a few terrifying minutes later. He pulled back and rejoined his groaning party chasing the humans. I whispered at Emmy through chattering teeth, “Stay here.”

I climbed back out of the gap and up the tree trunk as fast as I could, leaping from branch to branch, above the heads of the herd of moaning zombies. I could see the humans were running as well, the sacks slung over their shoulders as they evaded their dead peers.

I couldn’t lose them! I jumped from tree branch to tree branch, moving so fast I barely saw my next landing spot. Mid-air, the world slowed as I saw one of the humans swing at a zombie with a long sword, decapitating it, and that’s when the thin branch I landed on cracked underneath me. I fell to the ground and knew no more.

I’M NOT SURE WHAT pulled me from my unconscious state first, Emmy prodding at my tail, or the faint hooting near my ear.

“Emmy, stop. Please,” I mumbled, rubbing at my head. I was pretty sure I had landed on it despite making fun of Emmy’s earlier landing. In my defense, I was chasing zombies who were chasing humans who had my friends in sacks.

I tried to stand up and fell back on my side, causing a new flurry of hoots.

“What in the Saber?” I said, poking a weirdly shaped pile of leaves underneath me. Only it wasn’t leaves. It was an upside-down nest.

I flipped over the nest to find a small brown owl, a chick really, about the size of Emmy, hooting up at me.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said to the chick as two large tears rolled out of its big round eyes.

“Kidding,” repeated Emmy, shaking her head at the bird.

“Not kidding,” said the chick in a deep voice.

I jumped back in surprise. This owl was older than he looked and could speak a common language.

“I don’t have time for this,” I said to Emmy. “I don’t know if this bird is dangerous to hamsters. Emmy, do you need me to kill it?”

The owl looked offended, which made sense of course, and more tears started leaking out of his eyes, but Emmy shook her head immediately. Good, because I wasn’t sure how to kill it.

I needed to find which way the humans went, so I climbed the tree nearest to me. Nothing, in any direction. I called out for Hannah. For Wally. For Ginger and for Trip. My meows died in the air. I was no tracker. How was I going to find them, or Connor?

“What are you looking for?” said a deep voice behind me, and I whipped around, claws ready. It was the owl.

“How? What?” I said, looking stupidly at the bird, and then back down at Emmy, so far below us.

“Emmy says you are looking for something,” the owl said, taking two tries to settle on my branch with me. It was weird hearing such a deep voice coming from so small an animal, very weird.

“My friends. They were thrown into bags by three humans,” I said desperately, scanning the horizon of tree tops. “There were zombies, a whole herd. I can’t even see them ….”

Instead of answering, the owl took off into the sky, flying out of my sight quickly.

I climbed back down, my eyes on the sky.

Emmy was waiting for me, pacing in her usual circles. “He’s Runt. He’s alone too,” she said, speaking the most words in a row I’d ever heard her say.

“Can we believe him?” I asked, my neck starting to feel sore from staring up at the sky. “Because an adult owl, say his angry mama, would be a tough fight for just the two of us.”

“She abandoned me,” the owl said as he descended, sliding to a stop that included a half-roll. “A month ago. She and my brothers and sisters left me for sunnier skies.”

Before I could do more than glance at Emmy quizzically, the owl continued. “I see the dead ones in a pile close by.”

“Lead us there,” I said.

The owl took off, flying a few yards off the ground, close enough for us to follow. Emmy and I took off after him, and just as he said, less than a mile away was a pile of zombies. The owl lifted into the sky as Emmy and I approached the pile cautiously on the ground.

“These humans are skilled at killing zombies,” I said, looking carefully at the carcasses as we circled the pile, trying to ignore the smell and the oozing. “I count twelve zombies, killed by three humans.”

Emmy had circled the pile three times in the time it took me to do one circuit. “All dead. Not regular dead. Totally dead.”

“And no sacks at all,” I said, looking up at the sky.

“RUNT!” I yelled.

“Don’t think he likes that name,” Emmy said, following me into another glade where we could once again see sky between the trees.

“OWL!” I yelled again.

He circled our glade and came in for a stumbling landing.

I sensed that his weird landings were a sore spot for him, so instead I said, “We need your help, friend.”

“Friend?” he repeated, cocking his head in that weird way owls do, all big eyes and non-existent necks.

“Friend,” I said, pointing at Emmy and myself. “We would be your friends.”

“Don’t know what this word ‘friend’ is,” the owl said. “Is it like family? Does that mean you’re leaving?”

Emmy shook her head at him. “It means we never,ever leave you.”

At first, I thought he still didn’t understand, and then his eyes filled again and he started sobbing anew, hiding his face under his wing. It took us a full ten minutes to calm the creature down, and another five to explain the whole friendship idea again. Finally, he sat back so that his weird, spindly legs disappeared beneath his voluminous feathers, his tears spent.

“Listen, now that we’re friends, I need your help with something,” I said, doing everything I could not to restart the waterworks. “Our friends. The ones in the sacks. We think the humans were taking them to a camp nearby.”

Runt shook his head again, and I sighed. This owl had never ventured from his nest.

Emmy announced she was going to scrounge for food, so I carefully explained the difference between a human and a zombie, what a camp looked like, and what the heck a sack was. This was a weird position to be in because usually other mammals were explaining the outside world to me.

By the time she got back to us, the sun had set. Emmy had eaten her fill of small insects, but carried a few handfuls back for the owl, who set to eating them immediately. Despite my desperation to get back on the trail of the humans, I took a moment to hunt a bit myself, catching two small mice arguing over a nut, and considered eating them. Thankfully they noticed me and took off, so I settled for a couple mouthfuls of ants, though I really didn’t like the way they wiggled on my tongue. The mice would have been worse. I missed food you didn’t have to kill. Oh, for the convenience of the convenience store filled with food that humans nicely packaged into bags labeled with an adorable kitten face.

I found Emmy snoring in a hollow at the foot of a tree, a small nest of grass and leaves beneath her.

“Thank you,” I said to the owl, sure this was his handiwork.

“I will go and find the camp now, friend Pickles,” he said, spreading his wings. “You rest here with Emmy.”

“Wait, before you go,” I said, “what shall I call you?”

He seemed to hesitate, so I clarified. “Emmy didn’t think the name you gave her was one you liked. Since the only animals who called you by that name are gone, I thought this might be a chance to start over. With a new name.”

I’d never spoken to an owl before, so I couldn’t be sure what was happening with his beak, but two little dimples appeared in the feathers on either side of his mouth, which could have been his version of a smile. Truthfully, I was just glad he wasn’t in tears again.

“How about Pallas?” I suggested. “After Athena, who valued wise owls above all other animals. We could call you Pal for short.”

Emmy snorted in her sleep and murmured “Pal.”

“Pal,” he repeated, testing the word. And then he nodded and took off on his mission.

I paced around Emmy for the first two hours, unwilling to close my eyes in this forest. I kept looking up at the star-filled sky, hoping against hope to see our new friend coming back towards us. I was filled with guilt, and scared that I would lose the trail of my friends and of Connor, but at least I wasn’t entirely alone.

I dragged a few loose branches over the hole she slept in and climbed up to the lowest branches of the tree where I could see zombies coming, should they wander into this grove.