Eva studied her cards by the light of some glowing mushrooms that Isidor had provided before falling asleep, buried under the hay next to Pushki.
"Hit." She said. Pasha dealt her another card. Eva let out a string of profanity.
"Pass?" Pasha asked, popping another slightly stale raisin into his mouth.
"Pass." Eva muttered.
"Okay, show." Pasha flipped over his bottom card. Eva and Matvei did the same.
"Twenty-seven." Eva muttered.
"Eighteen." Pasha said smugly.
"Twenty-one." Matvei announced.
"Lucky git." Eva narrowed her eyes and Matvei shrugged.
"Come on, Eva. Loser sings for us." Pasha clapped the witch on the back.
"Oh.... I once met a whore, a whore, a whore, I once met a whore..."
There was a chatter amidst the trees.
"What the wicked hell was that?" Pasha interrupted Eva mid-verse.
"It sounded dead." Eva said.
"Dead things chatter?" Matvei asked.
Something small and light came bounding up to the side of the hay cart. It stood on the grass and chattered. Eva grabbed one of Isidor's luminous mushrooms and aimed it over the side of the cart.
"HOLY GODS." Pasha and Matvei yelled at the same time and Eva dropped the mushroom. The Thing tore it apart, growling and chattering.
"What... is... that...?" Pasha choked.
"I think it used to be a squirrel." Eva whispered.
"It looks..." Pasha began uneasily.
"Like it was torched by a makeshift incendiary device and then left for dead in the middle of the woods while its better-cooked brothers were eaten for dinner." Eva said.
"That... pretty much covers it." Pasha nodded.
"What's going on?" Ruslan muttered, rolling over in the hay.
"Erm." Eva hesitated.
"Dead squirrels." Matvei said.
"Oh. Okay." Ruslan nodded back into sleep.
"They're closing in on us." Pasha pointed out. More half-torched, very-dead squirrels were coming out of the trees, forming a circle around the hay cart.
"Isidor!" Eva groped about the hay until she found Isidor's hair, at which point she tugged at him viciously.
"Gods! What? Who died?" Isidor muttered, clawing his way out of the straw.
"Several dozen vengeful squirrels." Eva said.
Isidor peered over the edge of the hay cart. He blanched.
"We're all going to DIE." He gasped.
"What now?" Pushki stirred.
"Go back to sleep, Bunny. Pushki. Whatever your name is." Matvei said. The boy made sleepy-snuffling noises and, like Ruslan before him, promptly fell back asleep.
"Maybe we can bribe them. With... with carrot brains or something." Pasha suggested.
"Carrot brains? We're about to have our flesh picked from our bones by undead squirrels and the best we come up with is carrot brains?" Eva hissed.
"...yes." Pasha admitted.
A zombie squirrel let out a barbaric yawp and charged the hay cart.
Chapter Twenty-Four