I nodded glumly, grateful for her support but still mentally kicking myself for getting us stuck in our current predicament.
“I know one thing,” George said. “This seat wasn’t built for four adults. My ass is already going numb.”
I shook my head in frustration. “Mine, too.”
The four of us were crammed onto an uncomfortable, vinyl-covered bench seat, which was separated from the front by a steel mesh partition. Already sick of the confined space, I tried opening the door beside me and rattling the sturdy cage wall in front of us, but neither budged.
George smirked. “Really thought that was gonna work?”
I shrugged. “Had to try.”
Just then, the ranger unlocked the rear gate and deposited my weapons-filled crate in his spacious trunk—which was, unfortunately, also separated from us by an unyielding partition.
“Hang tight, folks,” Ranger Bob said, as if we were mere passengers and not caged animals. “Be right back.”
Staring through the windshield, I watched as he rounded the vehicle, stepped over the tripwire, and retrieved the rest of our weapons—well, at least those in plain sight.
“Guess I should feel lucky he doesn’t know about all the other guns.”
I reflected on the rest of my weapons—the shotguns, rifles, pistols, grenades, and various blades packed inside the cabinets and beneath the sofa. George’s rifle still lay in her car as well.
“Not that they’re doing us much good way over there,” George replied.
“True,” I muttered.
“And here I thought we had bigger concerns,” Clare said, staring straight ahead. “So much for hordes of zombies invading our campsite.”
I exhaled, but the frustration remained. “Yeah, who would’ve thought a fat, obnoxious ranger would be our downfall?”
After two more round-trip treks between our campsite and his trunk, Ranger Bob had collected all the weapons he’d spotted. Perhaps he suspected we had more stashed away somewhere (maybe even a few homemade bombs), but he was either too lazy to search for them or too anxious to lock up his hapless captives.
He slammed the rear gate shut then headed for his driver’s-side door.
“Told you, Joe,” Jill said, her voice raspy and weary. “You should’ve just shot him when you had the chance.”
I almost snorted. Apparently, she had been talking to me.
But as Ranger Bob slipped into his seat and slammed the door shut, I decided to keep my thoughts to myself. Besides, Jill looked so weak and frail, scrunched against the fortified door behind the driver’s seat, I couldn’t summon the will to retort.
As the engine roared to life, I glanced at the back of our captor’s head. I considered trying to reason with him again, but I knew there was no point. He obviously believed he’d prevented four unlikely terrorists from planning an attack in his precious woods, and he staunchly refused to listen to reason.
Ranger Bob reversed up the driveway and backed onto the road. Before he could shift into drive, however, Clare gasped.
“Oh, my god,” she cried. “We left Azazel!”
I traced her pinched gaze to the passenger-side window of the van, where, illuminated by George’s headlights, our little furry wonder leaned against the glass, staring straight at us.
“Christ,” the ranger sputtered, whipping his head around to face my wife. “You nearly gave me a heart attack.”
“And we left the back doors open,” she added, her eyes watering.
“Who the heck is Azazel?” He glared at me. “You said there was no one else in the camp.”
“Azazel is our cat,” I patiently explained.
Yep, I’m sure lots of terrorists run around with their cats in tow, right?
Clare leaned forward, gripping the steel partition. “Please let me go back for my cat. With the doors wide open like that, she could run off and get hurt.”
“Or a zombie could eat her,” Jill said, not sounding displeased by such an outcome.
Clare was so upset that she failed to react to her mother’s uncharitable comment.
Ranger Fucktard, meanwhile, vehemently shook his head. Clearly, he didn’t believe either of us. In his mind, “Azazel” was either a figment of our warped imagination or a last-ditch effort to deceive him and escape. If he’d only turned around, he might’ve seen her confused face watching us from the passenger seat. But instead, he turned the wheel hard to the right and tore off down the paved road, headed away from MS-33.
Clare pleaded and whimpered, but her cries fell upon deaf ears. I couldn’t bear to hear her pain—or consider my own. Particularly since a similar scenario had happened to us before. A few years prior to Azazel’s arrival in our life, we’d had another precious feline, a slender, underweight calico named Pawws.
I’d adopted her—the runt of the litter—in a shelter in Lansing, Michigan, on what could’ve been the last day of her life. According to the sign beside the cage, if no one claimed her and her caterwauling siblings that day, they would all be euthanized the following morning. A college student at the time, I could barely afford one cat, much less a posse of them, so though it saddened me to think of the others’ impending doom, it was the runt, the one resting in the back of the cage, the one resigned to her fate, that I took home.
Everyone I already knew or later befriended adored that little calico—truly the most serene, even-tempered feline I’d ever encountered—and I was her proud papa for a decade before Clare entered my life and fell in love with both of us.
Pawws spent the next seven or so years traveling around the country with us, living with us in places as far afield as Chicago, South Padre Island, and Las Vegas. Clare and I both racked up a slew of funny, tender moments with her. But perhaps the scariest experience of our lives (before the zombie apocalypse, of course) occurred when we were living in a trailer park near Los Angeles.
We’d spent the previous evening watching a marathon of horror flicks—one of our favorite pastimes prior to Zombiegeddon—and gone to bed in the wee hours of
