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"Does this place smell right, Addy?" asked Mack, scratching idly behind his right ear.
"No, not really..." the Irish Setter replied, sniffing around the mailbox.
The 'Dog Couriers R Us' driver had just opened the back of his van to let them and their friend Warren hop out, and waved after them with a dazed look as he drove away.
"Check our paperwork, huh, Warren?" Addy asked the older chocolate lab, who was standing alert at the end of the driveway to the unfamiliar smelling house. Warren nodded as she shrugged off her doggie backpack and opened the zipper with her teeth. Addy and Mack, a blond cocker spaniel, helped get their copy of the delivery instructions out of the bag, and smoothed it out with their paws on the driveway they were gathered in. (Warren was the most organized, the oldest, and the best reader, so she always hung on to their papers and helped divide out their snacks and stuff.)
"Well, the address on our destination paperwork matches the address on this newspaper you found over there, Mack...except...oh, no...oh no."
"What is it, Warren?" Mack asked, switching legs to scratch his other ear.
"Well, we're at 400 Mountain Ave in Collins, all right. But...in CO, not CA."
"Huh?"
"We're in Colorado...not at our peoples' new home in California..."
At this shocking news, Addy and Mack had a little tussle and growled at each other a bit, both knowing they didn't actually blame each other, how could they? It was that spaced out driver who had accepted the courier job, apparently thinking it was great pay for 30 miles to Collins...CO. Unfortunately they were still far from their family and their new home, and the driver was long gone.
"Well, let's get going, you two. It's a long walk to California" Warren snarled. The others always followed her lead, so stopped their little "fight" and helped pack up their stuff and tighten the straps on her pack. Addy grabbed a stick with spiky branches in one end, and through her teeth mumbled that she would use it to protect them on the way.
---
Within a few days, the trio had joined up with a few more pooches, all victims of that guy Wrecking Ball, who apparently couldn't even read as well as a dog. Warren and Addy had managed to connect to Dog Couriers R Us tapping out messages with their claws on the chat function on their website, using a phone they had found along a running trail on the edge of town. A nice guy working there named Citizen Z said Wrecking Ball had since dropped off their radar, but CZ had been helping them with directions and landmarks along the way.
Their group now included a kind of funny looking Blue Heeler with scruffy patches of fur, named Murphy, who seemed to complain and whine a lot, a young black pitbull mix puppy with spiky fur, called 10k, a beautiful girl (or at least 10k though so) called Cassandra, who had silky wavy fur 10k imagined running his paws through, if he wasn't so shy, and an older medium sized poodle mix named Doc, who had long white fur poofed around his face and head. All headed for their families' new homes in Collins...California.