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- Chapter 5: TRANSPORT VEHICLES -

"Wait a minute here, that doesn't make any sense." It was the first Benji had interrupted Bolt's story to say anything else than an occasional "mhm" or "go on".

Bolt looked up. "What doesn't make any sense?" The white dog had just finished telling Benji about when the not-too flattering time Mittens was threating him with a piece of Styrofoam.

"You're telling me you managed to distract that cat, eerr... Mittens by saying there's a piano behind her?" Benji continued.

• "Yeah I know, it surprised me too that she'd fall for such a classic" Bolt smiled proudly.

• "No no, not that!" Benji shook his head again. "You just told me how you've spent your entire life like a four-legged Truman - yet you somehow know what a piano is?"

• "Well actually, I was three years old when Penny's dad genetically altered me."

Benji gave him a strange look.

... "I mean when the show started," Bolt corrected himself. "That's plenty of time to learn what a piano is... Wruuff!!" His sentence was interrupted as suddenly, he felt nothing but air under his paws.

The hill they were working on had budged outward forming a cliff-edge which Bolt had walked right out of. The last thing Benji saw of the white dog was his body tumbling over the edge into the drop below, followed by a whine.

"BOLT!" Benji ran up to the ledge and looked over it. Below it, he saw Bolt holding on to a root with his teeth, the rest of his body dangling over the edge. Below him was what Benji estimated to be a hundred feet drop and at the end of it, the roaring river.

"Are you okay!?" Benji was hysterical.

"Ihjm fhine" Bolt mumbled with the root in his mouth.

"Don't let go, I'll pull you up!"

"Waschnt plannihn to" Bolt tried to smile around the root.

Benji hunkered down, bit down around Bolt's neck scruff and lifted up. The white shepherd was too heavy at first, weighing a good eighty pounds, but Bolt soon found grip with his paws and managed to heave himself over the edge.

"You've perfected the art of pulling me by my neck scruff". Bolt got up on his paws, grinned and wagged.

"Yeah well, you better get it into your fat head that you're not indestructible anymore before you end up seriously killing yourself!" Benji was practically hyperventilating. "After all the times I've saved you, you owe me three families at least."

"I ... what?" Bolt just stared at Benji, utterly discombobulated.

"I'm sorry, I was just so worried" Benji moved towards the white shepherd, burying his face in Bolt's soft chest-fur, but Bolt pushed him away.

"Enough!" Bolt stamped the ground with his paw". One second you yell and insult me, the other you act like a helpless pup! What am I supposed to think!?"

Benji looked as if something inside of him just broke. He knew Bolt was right. He lowered his head and scraped in the dirt with a paw. "You really have no idea, do you?..." he mumbled.

"No idea of what?" Bolt felt an exasperating mix of anger, confusion and empathy for the dog in front of him. Are all other dogs this weird?

• "Why I wanted to follow you to begin with"

• "So we can find your persons of course"

• "No, actually I ... well..." Benji stopped himself, trying desperately to find the least catastrophic way to finish that sentence. He could feel his furry cheeks heating up but a voice inside of him told him to go on.

Just tell him Benji. Just let him know...

"The only reason I tagged along was because I wanted to be with ... with..." Halfway through the sentence, his muzzle completely stopped working.

"With?" Bolt looked at Benji with a crooked eyebrow.

"It doesn't matter. Let's just find a way across this river". Benji quickly walked on, leaving a confused Bolt behind.

...

The two side-tracked the ravine for hours, walking in complete silence. After a while, they came to a bridge stretching over the river. Bolt remembered the large steel-structure from before when he had watched it carrying the transport vehicle away over the river. He looked down at the roaring water below. It made him feel a tad insecure.

"Don't worry, we're going over it this time, not through it", Benji said as if knowing what Bolt was thinking.

The white shepherd trotted in the direction of the bridge. Analyzing the steam beings which made out the huge structures skeleton, the former superdog concluded that the structure's integrity should allow for a safe pass over. He was just about to jump on to it when Benji stopped with a paw.

"This is not a normal bridge, like the one humans and dogs walk on. This is a train bridge, for trains to ... train on. "

Bolt nodded compliantly.

"Which means that if we see a train coming, or a transport vehicle or whatever you called it, we kind of have to run", Benji continued.

• "I'm not stupid" Bolt rolled his eyes, then passed the Labrador walking towards the bridge.

He carefully placed a warily paw on the train tracks, then the other one. Bolt took his first step on the railroad. Then a second. Carefully stepping on the wooden beams, he began to make his way across, using his long bushy tail to balance.

Behind him, Benji followed on warily, shaky legs, trying not to look down, failing repeatedly. Each time he glanced down, it would send a shiver running through his body. He looked up at the white superdog in front of him who seemed to have no problem with neither the height nor the river below them. That crazy dog doesn't seem to be afraid of anything , he thought. Bolt was the one who nearly drowned before, yet he was the one with shaky legs

Of course it wasn't as much the water below him as the height that scared him. Just splashing into the water alone would probably break a few ribs. He caught his eyes wondering downwards again, but stopped himself, instead focusing his gaze on the shepherd in front of him, and the hypnotic wagging of his brushy tail. It was actually a very pretty tail, he noted to himself.

He awoke from his trance by a loud woof. He saw Bolt staring back at him, his pupils small and eyes wide. "Incoming transport vehicle!"

That was when Benji heard the chugging sound of an approaching locomotive. Looking back, he saw the steel face of a train speeding towards them. It had already passed onto the bridge.

"It's too late to go back! RUN!"

The two dogs set off. Bolt jumped quickly from beam to beam. Behind him, Benji was running as fast as he could, occasionally tripping and losing speed. He could hear the chugging getting closer and closer. He could almost feel the heat of the steam against the fur on his back.

Meanwhile, Bolt had already made it onto the foot of the bridge. With an impressive leap, the agile dog jumped off the rails and landed on the side. Looking back at the bridge he saw that Benji was still running over the bridge, the loud and furious steel monster that was the train slowly catching up with him.

Benji was running for his life. He could see the foot of the bridge and Bolt staring at him. He would soon reach the end of the bridge.

"Don't worry Bolt! I'll be right th..." the rest of his sentence was caught off by a loud yelp as his left paw got stuck between two of the beams, causing him to fall over. He pulled desperately to free himself, only causing a shock of pain coming from his paw.

Without a moment of hesitation, Bolt leaped on the tracks, sprinting back towards the stuck Labrador. The train was almost half way over the bridge when he reached Benji. "It's stuck under the wooden beam" Benji barked.

Bolt wasted no time. Pulling with paws and teeth, he tried frantically to pull out Benji's stuck paw causing the Labrador to whine out in agony. He said something about going on alone, leaving him behind. Bolt would do no such thing. He could hear the train getting closer with each second.

Looking at the beam, he saw a crack in it. An idea came into the smart dog's mind. Using all the force his shepherd body could master, Bolt started to furiously stomp the bream with his paws.

"What are you doing!?" Benji shouted. "We'll fall!"

• "I got this!"

• "You better not be doing what I think you're doing!"

Bolt just continued stomping. He could hear the crackling noise of wood, and the train which was only a few feet away from the two dogs. Putting all his weight on one final push, Bolt finally managed to break the wood, causing the wide beam to crack under the paws. In one instance, Benji's paw strung free and the beam which they stood on broke into pieces and both of the dogs fell down.

They were falling so fast, Bolt's eyes were tearing up. Looking up, he saw the train pass over the rails just a second before falling through. The last thing he saw was Benji's horrified eyes before the two splashed through the surface.

...

The train jumped as it passed over the bridge, awaking the snoozing back cat. Mittens yawned and proceeded to stretching first her hindlegs, then her front legs, then lastly her clawless paws. After her obligatory morning stretch, she looked around the wooden car.

In a corner of the car, the hamster, no without a plastic ball, was slumbering, some miniature snoring escaping from his nose now and then. Rhino had two tendencies that Mittens found equally annoying; his huge hero complexes and his unyielding tendency to state the obvious. Another train would past by them. "Another train just passed by!" Rhino would say. Sometimes, it would start raining outside. "It's raining!" Rhino would declare. Mittens knew he was just trying to help. Besides, his childlike personality helped taking her mind off her worries - in a silly, distracting sort of way. Although she would never admit, the hamster was

Outside the car, she could see green tries and grey buildings blurring past. They had passed river, hadn't they? They should arrive pretty soon.

Beyond the river, she saw the hills and rocks of Missouri disappearing in the distance. She inhaled the fresh country air. A part of her hated it, a part of her that missed the air of New York; the smell of asphalt and exhaust pipes, the sound of traffic and sirens. Back when life was simple and everything was under her control. Then Bolt happened... Bolt dragged her across the country, her captor and kidnaper. And now he's lost. Had it happened only a few days ago, she might had felt free or at least relived, but right now, her insides were literally aching with worry. And something else. Missing maybe? Mittens wasn't sure what she felt.

It's funny how things change. Did she suffer from some kind of interspecies Stockholm's syndrome or something?

Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw Bolt lying in some ditch, or perhaps locked in at a dog pound or worse. But that's not all. Without his presence, she felt oddly empty, as if the dog had taken with him a big chunk of her soul.

She had followed him from state to state, city to city, waffle restaurant to waffle restaurant. It was enough just to look at him, her captor with pristine white fur, to know that she was right where she wanted to be; needed to be. The once so dominant and determined dog had completely opened up to her and she realized that really, _he_was the victim. That he deserves a life of his choosing. So she gave that to him, helped him see the truth, shared with him the experience of discovering a whole new world filled with snow, car lights, rain, thunder, paper bags flying in the wind. Everyday things that she took for granted; it was all new and fascinating to him. She found it both strange and touching that he, after all he had been put through, could find the world so beautiful. To her, nothing in this world held any beauty. Except for one thing that she hopped was waiting for her at the end of the line.

But now there was no shepherd around, and she felt lost. Worst yet, she felt homeless. For a while, she had thought she was missing the familiar streets of New York, but she realized now that New York wasn't her home. Home was being with Bolt. That's why she needed to find him. She was awoken from her fantasies when the starting to vibrate. She looked out and saw the train slowing down, coming to a stop.

"We're stopping!" Rhino eagerly announced.

The two animals jumped out from the car and landed on the cold concrete of the train platform. Mittens looked around, but could see nothing but humans. Everywhere she looked, humans smiling, humans greeting and hugging, humans packing suitcases out of the wagons and carrying them around, but nowhere could she see any white shepherds.

"Maybe he's somewhere else. Maybe he went looking for us" Rhino said optimistically.

"I just hope he isn't lost. I don't want to have to interrogating any more pigeons to find him". Mittens had turned on her tough exterior, even though it felt like her heart was about to implode.

"That doesn't make any sense!" Rhino shook his little head. "Bolt can't get lost. He is all super and stuff!"

"He probably isn't here yet. That silly dog ran after the train instead of being smart and just waiting for the next one like we did."

• "Meaning?" Rhino looked up.

• "Meaning that even for a superdog like Bolt, that's a pretty long walk. We just have to wait a bit, you know. I promise, he'll be here soon". At least so she hoped.

Looking up, the cat's gaze followed the train tracks from which they came into the distance. Somewhere out there was Bolt, whether dead, lost or on his way here. Please be alive she whispered to herself. Please come here soon".