She jogged, sweating in the autumn heat and cupping her hands around her face to make a primitive amplifier. "Snickers!" she hissed up at the buildings, but nothing answered her. Did she dare raise her voice louder? The town had looked clear, as if everything had been drawn off a long time ago by the military bunker to the north. "God damn it I miss GPS. What I wouldn't give for a tracking device on this stupid cat," she growled, slowing down as she came upon an old overturned tire filled with water. Hmm. She knelt and pulled out her ceramic water filter, and dipped the nozzle into the water. Pump, pump, pump. Fresh water, at least, would get her through this muggy autumn afternoon. She took a grateful sip.

A murder of crows was perched on the telephone wires around her, unperturbed by her presence, some with bits of infected flesh clasped between their beaks. She sneered at them. "If any of you dare to mutate a bird flu version of all this, I'm going to finally give up and blow my brains out," she confessed as she hooked her water back to her side and lifted up her rifle to peer through the scope.

Where was he? She scanned the horizon down the street, but there was no sign of him. "I'm going to kill him," she muttered. "Night's almost here and we're in the middle of a wasteland ghost town..." Time to risk shouting. "Snickers! Snickers!" She started running again. "Where the hell are you!?" His absence was starting to scare her, and being scared tended to make her giddy: "Here, kitty-kitty-kitty-kitty! Heeeerrreee kitty-kitty-kitty-!"

Something like a cougar scream echoed up from a distant apartment building, and she skid to a halt. Alright, she recognized that sort of call: Nothing like a lion or tiger roar, not one of the spitters, or the tanks. So she'd got some hunter's attention. She slunk back against cover, glancing around and mostly up to better anticipate its arrival.

The rapid cracking and crumbling of brick and tile made her spin about to view the building behind her. She was jut barely fast enough to catch sight of the hunter slowing his fall before he'd repelled off the wall. She twisted back to see him touch down on the dumpster beside her. He shrieked directly in her face, teeth spread wider than would have been humanly possible.

She saw: Clean, dark black hoodie; Neatly bandaged hands; Half missing jaw, the flesh and bone torn into a gaping, toothy, perpetual smirk.

"Snickers," she sighed in relief, dropping the nose of her rifle and then wiping her face clean with her forearm. "Thanks. That was lovely fish breath."

He threw his head back, and what was left of his mouth tightened into a curling grin. He snorted, sniffled and chortled in his retentive way.

She shook her head, still more relieved then she necessarily wanted to say, and came up beside him to pat his shoulder. "Yeah yeah. Laugh it up. Here I was all worried about you, thinking you might have tripped over a witch somewhere, and you've just been strolling about, enjoying the heat..."

He conjured up a rumbling wheeze, a purr, in the back of his throat, and arched his back into her.

"Worst cat ever. Worst dog ever. Worst- Whatever you are, you're doing it wrong- I'm sure of it."

He wouldn't have risked drawing attention to her if he'd smelled anything even remotely dangerous. Snickers might not have understood any words she said, specifically, but the two of them had still been together plenty long enough to communicate regardless. And when he rolled over casually onto his back and flopped all four sets of claws into the air, it was a pretty good indicator this was one of the safest cities they'd ever been in.

"Hmph." She indulged him, playing with his rake-like toes for a moment and letting him kick and paw harmlessly at her palms. "Alright. Come on," she gave his side a hearty smack and then turned to head back towards the safe house she'd been fortifying for the night, "time to get inside."

He mumbled and rolled back over onto all fours, and climbed up onto the nearest window that he might follow along beside her at a useful vantage point. Hunters weren't particularly deadly on open ground, and as experienced as Snickers might have been in using teamwork to bring down enemy infected, he wasn't a free ticket to survival. The missing teeth had denied him the chance at many an important death blow, particularly against other hunters.

Snickers found a good ledge to trot across that was almost level with her head. She lifted a hand up casually to pet him as they walked. "Just because you didn't run into anything doesn't mean this city's abandoned. You better hope there are no other people hiding out here," she reminded herself that more than she could ever successfully chastise him. "That ugly face of yours won't earn us too many friends, and people have got a bit of a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy on undead nowadays."

He just trotted along, right as rain, an apex predator entirely secure in himself and his own abilities, and positive that no nefarious interlopers would dare challenge him for territory. Looking at him all puffed up and smug made her want to scream 'Tank' at the top of her lungs just to scare the shit out of him. That was one of the few words he'd definitely memorized. And when wasn't it funny to startle a cat? One might even argue it was good for them. Alleviated boredom or somesuch. There was a Monty Python skit on this; there had to be.