Trip of the Dead, page 5
I climb the tree the rope is attached to (there’s no way I can leap straight up in the air like Ginger, best not to try) and grab the rope with both paws. Paw over paw, I make my way back to the beach. Now I’m dangling over my friends, the cord slightly dipping from my weight. I’m totally surprised I’ve made it this far, but I keep going. Now I’m over the shallow part of the river. I’m sweating like it’s mid-August in a parked food truck, but I’m still moving forward. I can hear my friends cheering me on from the other side of the bank, behind me, and Pal swoops and comes in for a landing on the other beach ahead of me. I don’t look back. I can’t. But I do look down. And that’s a mistake. The water below me looks as black as the bottom of a garbage bag.
“Don’t stop!” Pal yells from the bank in front of me. He’s so far away.
But I have stopped. I can’t pull my eyes from the water. And I can’t make my paws move forward.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, now I’m swaying, the wind is picking up and really not helping the situation. I can feel the panic rising in my stomach like a rotten meal coming back to take its revenge on me.
“I’m going out to get him!” I hear Ginger yell from far behind me.
“Ye can’t, laddie!” replies Malone’s voice.
“Can raccoons swim?” asks Sonar.
That’s a really good question. I’ve never tried. The doubting voice in my head doesn’t think so. He’s laughing at me. I stare at the water below. Do I want to try going forward or do I drop into the water below and try to swim? I look at the beach ahead and try to unclench my right paw. I put all my willpower into it. Move forward. MOVE. FORWARD.
“Trip!”
“Gah!” I say, and now I’m dangling by one paw, staring up at Pal, who is circling my position like a tiny vulture. I try to reach up and grab the rope again with my right paw, but I miss. I’m holding on with my left paw with everything I’ve got.
“I’m coming, Trip!” he yells, coming in for a landing on the rope.
“No, don’t!” yells Ginger from the beach, seeing what the owl is doing, but Pal is my friend, and he thinks he can help. He slows down right above the rope and drops with all claws extended like he’s landing on a branch. I wait to feel the claws dig into my remaining paw when he misses the rope as he undoubtedly would, but he misses so wildly that he drops past the rope, past my body, his eyes clamped shut.
“Pal,” I whisper, as I watch his body drop like a stone into the water below.
I let go of the rope.
The water hits me like a door slamming in my face, cold, solid, unforgiving. I struggle to open my eyes under the water. I have to fight the overpowering urge to push to the surface; instead I turn around in a circle, looking for Pal. I see him immediately, his eyes still shut tight, tiny bubbles leaving his beak, his feathered arms wrapped protectively around himself. Somehow, I paddle over to him, I’m moving all my limbs, but they don’t seem to have a unified plan. My lungs are burning by the time I get both arms around him and start kicking towards the surface of the water. We bob up and I suck in a gasping breath.
“Trip!”
I can’t answer. The current pulls us down and I kick with everything I’ve got, breaking through the surface again. I squeeze Pal and he coughs spasmodically.
“Dog!”
I must have water in my ears because this time, I could have sworn I heard Ginger yell “Dog!”
I shake my head, my vision clearing as I realize what Ginger is yelling about.
“Log!” I sputter, coughing out water. I try to bob over to the log that seems to be floating upstream past us, but I don’t want to unwrap either of my arms from the owl. I won’t have the energy to find him again underwater. I am not taking the chance of losing him. I lean hard towards the flat part of the log and clamp on with my teeth. That’s when I remember logs don’t really have flat parts.
I hear someone ask, “What in tarnation?” and then we’re airborne.
We hit the sand on the other side of the river and roll to a stop, my arms still tightly around Pal.
“Pal?” I ask, scared to open my eyes.
“Yeah?” he replies from my arms.
“Are we dead?”
“Don’t think so.”
“You don’t know?”
“I’ve got my eyes closed,” he admits.
“Open your eyes!”
“No! You open your eyes.”
“Someone better open someone’s eyes or I’m gonna smack you both into next Tuesday,” says the voice of the log that tossed us ashore.
I open my eyes to see an animal with huge teeth standing over us and I have to swallow before I can speak again.
“Well?” she asks, slapping her large flat tail on the sand. It’s the sound of that tail that puts it together for me: she’s a beaver. No wonder she was swimming against the current.
I get to my feet and put Pal down next to me on the ground. The owl tips over immediately, so I right him, and keep a paw on the top of his head while he uncrosses his eyes.
“Ma’am, I am so sorry for … for …,” I start to say.
“For biting my behind?” the beaver offers, waggling dark brown eyebrows at me.
“I’d never … I mean, I thought you were …,” I’m blubbering at this point. I look at her tail and realize, yes, I did bite her tail … thinking it was … a log. Classic Trip move.
“Trip!” Ginger yells from the other side of the river.
“Hold on to your fleas, cat! We’re in the middle of a palaver here!” the large-toothed animal yells back, sending a glare his way. “You were saying, raccoon?”
The word palaver triggers the negotiator in me, and I stand up a little taller, water dripping off my body, and pooling at my feet. “I was apologizing for biting you. We were drowning and I panicked. I have no other excuse.”
My words seem to surprise her, because she whistles between her teeth, “Is that so?”
“It is,” I reply sincerely. “And we totally owe you our lives for … flicking us to safety like you did.”
Pal shakes his wings free of moisture, and tips over again. I right him again, trying to maintain a bit of professionalism in this negotiation.
The beaver smiles, or at least I think she does. Hard to tell with those two huge front teeth blocking all of her dentition. “Well, it just so happens I’m in need of some help.”
I hesitate. I really need to keep up with Duke and Sarah and Uma, but looking back at my friends across the river, I know I can’t do it alone. I can see the anxiousness on their faces even from this far away, and a plan starts to form in my head.
“I’m Trip, and this is Pallas,” I say, Sonar’s military parlance springing to mind. “How can we be of service?”
“You can call me Mrs. King,” the beaver says with a nod. “My young’uns are the ones who need the help. They’re too small to understand this new dangerous world we live in. I need to build them a stronger more defensive dam. And I need someone to help me.”
I glance around. If there was a dam, we might have avoided all this dunking and drowning.
As if anticipating my question, the beaver says, “It’s a ways downriver from here, but if you’ll come with me, you’ll see the problem.”
Pal clears his throat, and as usual, his deep voice is a surprise coming out of such a tiny body, but he ignores the beaver’s shocked look and says, “I’d think, based on our performance in the water, Mrs. King, that you should find more aquatic animals to help you …”
“No, no,” I say, grabbing the owl’s beak to stop him from ruining my crazy strategy. “We can help. We’re happy to help.”
The beaver looks skeptical, so does the owl, and now they’re both tilting their heads at me, so I stutter out, “We can watch your kits while you work, Mrs. King … and we can … teach them! Yes, we can teach them how to fight the zombies!”
“You?” she asks. “You know how to fight zombies?”
“Not me,” I point across the river, “but those mammals are experts. That’s why we’re traveling with them. Those cats and that hedgehog. They can teach your kits. If we can get them across to this side of the river, that is.”
Pal has recovered enough to fly ahead and check on the humans, so I’m standing alone on my side of the river, watching anxiously as Mrs. King glides back across towards me, Ginger standing on her flat tail, looking totally freaked out. If he were any stiffer, he’d tip right off Mrs. King’s tail. Even his tail is standing straight up along with every orange hair on his body. It’s sad because it’s the best entrance I’ve ever seen him make. I can practically hear the theme music from the Pirates of the Caribbean playing.
Mrs. King is a smooth swimmer and delivers him from the opposite bank to the one where I stand waiting within minutes.
“Thank you,” Ginger says through his clenched jaw as he tries to disembark from the tail without bending any of his appendages or getting wet. He fails at both, tiptoeing onto the sand and then immediately shaking his paws of the wetness.
She’s on her way back to get Sonar and Malone before he whispers to me, “Never make me do that again.”
“Sure, the beaver will probably sublet her dam and we can send Pal back and forth with messages to Pickles’ camp,” I say, nodding.
“Sarcasm is cruel this close to water,” Ginger says, moving away from the shoreline to follow Mrs. King, who has begun leading us down the beach towards her dam. “I just mean we need a new way back across.”
“Do you think we could walk back across your dam?” I ask the beaver, hopefully.
“Depends,” she replies, waddling beside me, her tail moving in a slow rhythm. “My dam runs the full length of the river; it’s not as wide down where we built it, but there are pieces missing that need attention for sure.”
We walk for nearly a half hour before I realize that I may not be coming back. This might be a one-way trip for me, if I find what I’m looking for.
“Trip?”
“Hmm?” I say, brushing away the thought, like a cobweb covering the doorway.
“Sonar,” Ginger says, pointing at the black kitten on the back of the beaver.
Against all feline instinct, Sonar is grinning from ear to ear, holding on to the tail with all four paws, as the wind ripples her long black fur. Beside her paddles the hedgehog, one paw holding the beaver’s tail as he is pulled along.
“This is SOO cool!” she calls out as they glide to a stop in front of me.
“You are one weird cat,” I say, wading into the water and picking her off the beaver’s tail so she doesn’t have to get wet.
The beaver puts her two paws to her mouth, letting out a sharp whistle.
We watch as tiny ripples appear in the water and grow as they get closer to us. Five small beavers surface, each fuzzier and more adorable than the last, and come up on the shore.
“Hetty, Olivia, Alec, Ruth, and Roger,” Mrs. King says, brushing a piece of flotsam off one of the kits’ shoulders. “These mammals are here to help us.”
“I’m Ginger,” Ginger says, stepping forward. “And that’s Trip, and Sonar is the kitten …”
“Corporal Sonar,” Sonar says, standing at attention and saluting the younger mammals, who mimic her in an adorable attempt to salute back. “And this is our friend Malone. He’s a real hedgehog.”
“Now, let me show you what I need,” Mrs. King says, grabbing a small twig and scratching in the sand at our feet.
We divide into two teams: the mammals who can deal with water, and the ones who consider water an evil supervillain bent on ending their species.
The sun is starting to set when I leave the beach, following Malone and Mrs. King, leaving the instructors and their students behind. Ginger is playing the part of drill sergeant and Sonar walks between the recruits, adjusting their tiny bodies.
“The first step is to not panic,” I hear Ginger say to the kits, “because you’re going to want to scramble and hide, but you need to have a plan.”
Ha! Easier said than done my young mammals. Panicking is what I do best!
“I cannae help but notice, Mrs. King, that Mr. King is nowhere to be seen,” Malone says to the beaver, as we follow her upstream to her dam. I’m nervous of leaving the cats behind with the kits, and I keep scanning the skies for Pal. I need confirmation that the humans are down for the night in that cottage, and that we have time to catch up to them. I’m also worried about being alone. I barely know this hedgehog and I just met this beaver. I wish Ginger were with me and Malone were back there helping Sonar.
“No,” she answers, shaking her head at us. “We lost papa right at the start of this. He heard sounds and went out to see if it was hunters wandering a bit close to the dam, and never came back.”
“Och, I’m sorry lass,” Malone says.
Mrs. King nods. “We aren’t the first to lose someone. The beaver family we know upstream of us lost all their kits to the dead humans. Every one of them.” She throws a look over her shoulder at her tiny offspring on the beach.
“I can’t imagine,” I say, and I mean it. I may not have seen another live raccoon in months, but losing this new family of mine — Ginger, Pickles, Pal and everyone else — would be unimaginable. Heck, even Malone has poked his way into my heart.
“Here,” she says, turning left, back towards the river. “You can see the problem, right?”
Even someone who doesn’t engineer dams can see the problem. There’s a moldering zombie stuck headfirst in one end of the dam. He’s less than half a zombie, but despite missing his lower torso, his arms are still moving, scrabbling at the logs and wood that hold his head in place.
“How in the world …?” Malone asks.
“Did he drift downstream and just get stuck?” I ask, pulling on my whiskers at the sight.
“No, he was trying to get in,” Mrs. King answers, leading the way over top of her dam. We follow carefully, it feels barely strong enough to support my weight. “Scared the splinters out of us when we saw him stick his head in through the entrance there, so we ran out the exit.
“I dropped a log on him, but he was still pushing through, so we dropped all the logs on him, took out our back wall.”
“And now he’s stuck,” I say, looking down at the zombie and wondering how I can possibly help. You can’t talk a zombie out of a dam. “He can’t pull himself out and you can’t shove him out from the inside.”
She nods. “I’m just going to seal him in so that he can’t get to us or do any more damage to the dam. The entrance is this way. It’s underwater, but you can hold onto my tail, I’ll pull you into the dam lickety-split.”
I hate that plan.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to kill him?” I ask, stalling.
“Kill him?”
“Yeah, you know,” I make a swiping motion across my throat, “like really dead. Not zombie dead.”
“You can kill these beasts?” she asks, incredulous.
“Oh, yes lassie,” the hedgehog says, as if he’s been dropping zombies left, right, and center. “Turns out even dead humans need their heads.”
Pal swoops overhead and comes in for a rolling landing on the beach.
“They’re halfway to the cabin, and they’re already wiped, so they’ll be staying the night for sure,” Pal yells in a hoarse voice, looking so tired he can barely stand. “They’ve fought off two groups of zombies already.”
“Galloping garburators,” I curse, hoping Sarah and Uma survive. The raccoon-killing man, I couldn’t care less about, but if he leads them to a horrible death, I will have even more to hold against the guy.
“Take a nap, Pal,” I yell back at him. “I’ll wake you in a few hours.”
Pal nods, and heads to the nearest tree, looking for a burrow.
“Ready?” asks Mrs. King, sliding down the side of her dam and floating next to it expectantly.
I won’t go into detail about our short journey from the river’s surface down, down, into the inky darkness of the dam’s underwater entrance. Actually, I can’t go into detail because my eyes are closed the whole way, my paws clamped to Mrs. King’s tail. Suffice to say that I kick Malone in the face in my desperate scramble from the water to the relative safety of the inner dam. I shake my fanny pack free of water and give myself a shake as well.
Things you may not know about the inside of a dam: they are surprisingly dry and cozy, like the inside of a burrow, but there’s the constant sound of rushing water all around you. I think it would be a friendly place if there weren’t a zombie head stuck in it. Not my style, but certainly a viable option in the midst of a zombie apocalypse.
They’re dark places, but not pitch black, which makes sense, since they are underwater but not so deep in the river that sunlight can’t still filter down. Beavers must have a better sense of sight than raccoons, because I bump into the walls of the dam following Mrs. King. I run my hands along the walls and learn something else; they are more than just wood. The beavers who built this dam used anything they could find to build it — plastic, wood, mud, and in at least one wall, what looks like an old rug.
“There he is,” Mrs. King announces, pointing at the gruesome gnashing head. Most of the skin and hair is missing from this dead human, and it’s not an improvement, I promise you. I actually turn away from the sight so I don’t throw up and embarrass myself.
Malone opens his mouth and I raise my paw before he can speak. “Don’t ask me what my plan is, please.”
“But you have one?” Mrs. King asks.
I have the beginnings of one, but I nod as if I do this kind of thing all the time. “You’re the only one who can fix your dam, Mrs. King, so if you gather whatever you need to repair this hole, we will take care of this interloper.”
She glances from me to Malone, who nods, and then she glides back into the river. I wait until the ripples have disappeared from the surface of the dark water before turning to Malone.
