Poached (4 page)

“You idiot!” Vance barked. “You led the cops right to us!”

“They were already coming for you!” I shot back. “They knew you were up to something!”

“If we get busted for this, I'm gonna kill you,” Vance threatened.

We burst through the exit doors, only to find a phalanx of security guards racing toward Shark Odyssey, responding to Marge's call for backup. As the only kid who lived at FunJungle, I was well-known enough for all of them to recognize me at once.

“There he is!” one guard shouted, and everyone veered toward me.

Vance immediately showed his true colors and sacrificed me to save his own skin. He lashed out a leg and sent me sprawling. “We're not with him!” Vance declared. “He's the one who did it!”

His ploy might have worked if TimJim had been
intelligent enough to play along. But instead of stopping to help implicate me, they kept running.

The guards immediately suspected something was up. “Don't believe them! They're all in cahoots!” the leader yelled, and part of the group split off after them. Vance had no choice but to flee as well. The bullies all raced toward the entrance of the park.

As the remainder of the guards bore down on me, I scrambled to my feet, dodged a few hands, and sprinted away.

Large Marge and the other guards emerged from Shark Odyssey just in time to take up the chase as well. Marge was now quite rumpled from her tumble in the shark tube—and there was a huge splotch of someone else's vomit covering the front of her uniform. She was as angry as I'd ever seen her. I half expected fire to burst from her eyes. “Whoever catches that kid gets a raise!” she bellowed.

I ran as fast as I could down Adventure Road, heading for the rear gate. I shot past the swim-with-the-dolphins area (temporarily closed due to frigid weather) and the Amazing Skyway boarding station.

It was getting near to closing time, and with night coming, most park guests were heading the opposite direction, toward the front gates. I zigzagged through them, topping a small rise, and the Land Down Under came into view.
Ahead of me another group of guards blocked the way to the rear exit. For a few frightening moments I thought I was trapped—but then a new plan to escape the security squad came to me. I veered toward Australia.

For most of FunJungle's existence, the Land Down Under had been the least-visited part of the park. Like the real Australia, it was remote and filled with animals people had never heard of. Creatures like bettongs, bandicoots, numbats, and quokkas. True, there were also a lot of kangaroos, which people liked well enough, but after walking for miles around the rest of the park, few guests felt like taking a fifteen-minute detour to see them. However, in the last few weeks the Land Down Under had become the most popular part of FunJungle, thanks to another of J.J. McCracken's schemes to boost attendance.

FunJungle had acquired a koala.

Although zoos and aquariums are popular throughout the world, there are very few animals that can draw big crowds on their own. Giant pandas are probably the most notable for this, but koalas are a close second. For one thing, they're adorable—they're basically living teddy bears—and for another, they're quite rare to see. Australia is very protective of its koalas and doesn't allow many to be taken out of the country, so only a few zoos have them.

J.J. McCracken, however, was rich and influential enough to
get anything he wanted. He owned several businesses in Australia and was friends with a lot of politicians there. So he twisted a few arms, dashed off a five-million-dollar check for koala conservation (tax-deductible, of course)—and within less than a week a koala was on its way to FunJungle.

There was only one catch: The Australians hadn't sold the koala to the park; they'd merely lent the koala for six months as a “goodwill ambassador.” In truth this wasn't unusual. Every giant panda in the United States has technically only been lent out by China. Australia had done it plenty of times for koalas. However, J.J. was fine with this. He figured that having the koala for a limited time made its arrival more of an event. And so FunJungle's mighty marketing machine swung into action.

The very first thing was to change the koala's name. The koala had originally been christened Goongiwarri, which was an Aboriginal Australian word for “swamp,” but J.J. McCracken claimed it sounded “like an elephant passing gas.” Thousands of dollars worth of marketing research indicated that park goers preferred animal names that were short, cute, and alliterative—and thus Goongiwarri was rechristened Kazoo.

Next a deluge of press releases went out. Within a day the story was all over the national news. In FunJungle-mad Texas, it was the lead story in every major market.

A large section of the Land Down Under suddenly became KoalaVille, the center of which was a temporary koala exhibit built in just three days. (Luckily, koalas don't need much room, so the exhibit didn't have to be very big.) But Kazoo's habitat was puny compared to the most significant part of KoalaVille: the Kazoo merchandise area. A huge tent, designed to look like it was part of some exotic bazaar (never mind that bazaars were Middle Eastern, not Australian) was erected and filled with anything you could slap a koala's photo on: T-shirts, sweatshirts, coffee mugs, backpacks, license plate frames, beach towels, posters, pennants, jigsaw puzzles, plates, napkins, and of course commemorative boomerangs. (The photo on the items wasn't even Kazoo. It was just some random photo that Pete Thwacker, the head of PR, had found on the Internet, but as Pete explained, “No one will notice. All koalas look exactly the same.”) The bazaar covered an entire acre. There were four aisles of Kazoo the Koala plush toys alone.

The marketing push worked. People who'd canceled their Christmas trips to FunJungle now rebooked. And attendance numbers, which had been dismal, rebounded a bit. People who lived within a day's drive of FunJungle streamed back to see the new arrival and snapped up plenty of koala merchandise to boot. Given the time of year, the crowds weren't massive, but attendance predictions for the next few months were beginning to look up, thanks to Kazoo.

Therefore, as closing time approached, lots of people were streaming out of KoalaVille. It seemed as though half that day's visitors were there. I plunged in, fighting my way against the tide of humanity like a salmon swimming upstream. The security guards quickly lost sight of me amongst all the tourists.

I ducked into the bazaar, veered down an aisle of T-shirts, and slipped around the back of Kazoo's exhibit. There was a door marked with a sign that read
AUTHORIZED KOALA PERSONNEL ONLY
. I pounded on the door but got no answer.

Instead of a standard keyhole, the door had a coded entry keypad. Every door at FunJungle was like this. Each had a different code, which was changed almost every day for security purposes. However, there was also one secret code that worked on every door: J.J. McCracken's personal code. He'd shared it with Summer, who had shared it with me in a moment of crisis. I hadn't used it since, figuring it was only for emergencies, but at the moment this seemed to qualify. I could hear Large Marge storming through the bazaar close by.

I typed in J.J.'s code, hoping it hadn't been changed in the last six months.

The door clicked open.

I stepped through it into the koala keepers' office.

The room wasn't very big. The koala exhibit had been built so quickly that FunJungle had almost forgotten to add
the keepers' office in the first place. There was a tiny desk and a folding chair, but the space was mostly used for storage. Jugs of water were stacked against one wall. Sheaves of eucalyptus lined another. The desk was piled with books and magazines. A door on the other side of the office led into Kazoo's habitat.

The door had a window in it, and I peered through this. Kazoo's room wasn't a whole lot larger than the office—about twelve feet square. The rest of the exhibit was taken up by the viewing area, which arced around Kazoo's habitat like a horseshoe. Kazoo's habitat was filled with eucalyptus trees. I spotted the koala in the central one, asleep as usual. Beyond him, through the foliage, I could see through the glass into the viewing area.

Guests were lined up at the glass, pressing their noses against it for a glimpse of Kazoo. Beyond them I could see the keeper on duty.

It was Kristi Sullivan.

I heaved a sigh of relief. Kristi was one of my favorite keepers at FunJungle. She'd only been hired a few weeks before, as part of the new staff for Kazoo. She was his main keeper, meaning she was on duty most days, but since koalas don't do a whole lot, much of her job involved standing at a podium in the viewing area and dispensing fascinating koala facts over a loudspeaker. As Kristi was young, pretty, and
extremely perky, a lot of the guests ended up watching her more than the koala. (Especially the male guests, Mom liked to point out.) Kristi had always been nice to me. I was hoping she wouldn't have to get involved in my current crisis, but if she did, I was sure she'd back me rather than Marge.

At the moment it was four forty-five, and Kristi was trying to herd the tourists out of the viewing area. Kazoo's habitat was actually supposed to close at four thirty, a half hour before most other exhibits, because it was a long way to the park gate. (In the winter, FunJungle closed two hours earlier than it did in summer, on account of darkness.) However, Kristi never had the heart to just kick the tourists out, so it generally took her fifteen minutes to gently coax everyone out the door. “Go on now,” I could hear her teasing the stragglers. “If you folks don't get out of here, I'll have to lock you in for the night.”

Behind me, outside the keepers' office, I could hear the far less sweet sound of Large Marge shouting at her underlings. “He must be around here somewhere, you morons! Just find him!”

Kristi shooed the last tourists out of the viewing area and then slipped out after them.

There was no lock on the door that led into Kazoo's habitat; the one on the office door was assumed to be security enough. I slipped inside the exhibit.

The room was extremely warm and smelled like cough drops. The heat was jacked up to simulate the hot, dry climate Kazoo was used to—and eucalyptus is a main ingredient in lozenges. Since koalas eat nothing but eucalyptus, they tend to smell a bit like cough drops too.

Kazoo didn't flinch at the sound of my entry. This wasn't a surprise, though. If there's one thing koalas are good at, it's sleeping. Even sloths are more active than koalas.

This is because koalas have a really lousy diet. Eucalyptus leaves are chock-full of chemicals that are toxic to other animals. For a long time many scientists suspected that koalas were so lethargic because the compounds that make eucalyptus a good medicine also kept the cute little marsupials in a drugged-out haze their whole lives. But more recent research has shown that the leaves are simply so low in nutrients that koalas have almost no energy. Therefore they tend to move as little as possible—and when they do move, they often look as though they're in slow motion. (They
can
move quickly when they need to, however.) They rest sixteen to eighteen hours a day and spend most of that unconscious. In fact koalas spend so little time thinking, their brains actually appear to have shrunk over the last few centuries; the koala is the only known animal whose brain only fills half of its skull.

The FunJungle keepers who cared for far more active
animals always marveled at how something as sluggish as a koala could attract such crowds. Tourists would walk right past exhibits full of playful monkeys, antelope, or otters so they could crowd ten deep at Kazoo's windows and watch him sleep. And more often than not he was tucked far back in the eucalyptus trees, so the guests couldn't even see him well. All most people got was a glimpse of gray fur hidden among the leaves.

“They might as well be looking at lint,” a carnivore keeper had groused to me one day. “Koalas aren't animals. They're statues with fur.”

At the moment, however, I was perfectly fine with Kazoo being such a sound sleeper. I was never supposed to enter any animal's habitat without permission, and I certainly didn't need Kazoo making a racket. (Kristi had told me that koalas have a startlingly loud cry when they're upset, though I'd never heard Kazoo make a sound.) I gave Kazoo a wide berth and tried to be as quiet as possible. I took off my backpack and hid behind a thick clump of eucalyptus.

No sooner had I done this than Large Marge burst into the viewing area. Kristi Sullivan was right on her heels.

“I told you he's not in here,” Kristi said.

“I'd prefer to see that for myself,” Marge replied. She then stormed from one end of the viewing area to the other. The only place for me to hide out there would have been
under the bench that ran along the back wall of the room, where guests could sit after getting bored of watching Kazoo sleep. Marge checked under every inch of it.

“Are you satisfied now?” Kristi asked.

Marge fixed her with a suspicious glare. “Why are you in such a hurry to get rid of me?”

Kristi sighed. “Because it's closing time and I want to go home.”

Marge kept her gaze locked on the keeper. “You're friends with Teddy, aren't you?”

“Teddy is ten years younger than I am,” Kristi replied coldly. “I'm not friends with any twelve-year-olds. But if you're asking do I like the kid? Then yes, I do.”

“Just as I thought,” Marge said. “I'll need to see in your office as well.”

Kristi rolled her eyes. “You're wasting your time. He couldn't possibly be in there.”

“I'll decide what's a waste of my time and what isn't.” Marge started out the door, then paused and stared through the glass into Kazoo's exhibit.

I held my breath, hoping I was far back enough in the leaves to be hidden from her view.