The Secret Zoo (9 page)

E
lla and Richie stepped out of the cave and into a blast of hot air and blinding light. The landscape was dry and dusty. Cacti grew across the dry terrain, some with round stems that resembled prickly mittens and others with long stems like the pipes of a green organ. The ground was pitted with countless holes. Prairie dogs raced from one hole to another, kicking up clouds of dust as they dived recklessly in and out. The furry critters dashed around in erratic zigzags. They sprinted and stopped, sprinted and stopped, looking confused or surprised by every spot that their own paws carried them to.

Far across the plain, a strange light blinked on and off. Each surge displayed a new color—red, green, yellow, blue, and orange.

“What's that light?” Ella asked.

“I have no idea.” Richie looked around and said, “Where are we?”

Ella scooped up a handful of dirt and let it sift through her fingers. “I don't know,” she said, “but this place is dry and hot—and filled with gophers.”

“Stop calling them gophers. They're prairie dogs.”

“Whatever!” she said. “Look, Richie, I only know what you know. We crawled through some kind of secret tunnel and wound up here. This doesn't make sense to me either.”

“Will any of this
ever
make sense?”

Ella thought about it. “I hope so. Maybe it will just take awhile. C'mon! Let's see what there is to see.”

She started out across the flat terrain.

“Like the bear,” Richie said, hurrying after her.

“The who?”

“The bear—the bear that went over the mountain. You know that song.” He threw back his head and sang, “‘The bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain, the bear—'”

“Richie!”

“‘—went over the mooouuunnn-TONNN…to see—'”

“Richie!”

“Okay, okay. Hold on a second.” Richie reached into his backpack and pulled out his flashy metallic running shoes. They glittered in the sunlight. “Let me put on my walking feet first.”

“Great,” Ella moaned. “You're gonna blind the gophers.”

Richie tied his shoelaces, and the scouts headed off. After a while, they stripped off their jackets and crammed them into Richie's backpack. In no time, sweat dripped from their brows, and their hair clung to their foreheads. Occasionally a prairie dog sat on its rear end and peered up at them. The hard, fixed stares of the rodents suggested that they expected something from the children. At one point, a gang of prairie dogs started to trail Richie. Their eyes were riveted on his running shoes. They chased his feet in little zigzags, stopping and starting abruptly and crashing into one another.

“Look, Richie! You have a fan club!” Ella exclaimed.

“Yeah. What's up with that?”

“I guess you're not the only one who likes those shoes.”

Richie glanced at his heels. “You think they like my shoes?”

“Well,” Ella said with a smile, “they shine more than your personality does. That's for sure.”

Richie took a few steps forward and watched the animals rush around his shoes again. As the scouts made
their way across the dry landscape, more and more prairie dogs tagged along behind him. Glancing over his shoulder and under his arm, Richie kept an inventory of the animals. They seemed mesmerized by and afraid of his shoes at the same time.

The group advanced steadily. In the dry terrain, they passed cacti shaped like pitchforks, walked through thin patches of knee-high grass, and maneuvered around countless holes made by prairie dogs. As Richie walked, his slick shoes sparkled in the sunlight. More than a hundred prairie dogs were now chasing him, running in spurts that loosely matched the movement of his feet. Every so often, a prairie dog darted between Ella's legs or across her toes, prompting her to holler, “Hey!” or “Bad gopher!”

The scouts continued their journey across the barren plain, passing strange, oddly shaped cacti and kicking up clouds of dust. Eventually they reached the light. For a light with such a bright and powerful beam, it was unexpectedly small—about the size of an orange. Ella looked at Richie. Every time the light blinked, he was saturated in a new color.

When the blue color flashed, she said, “You look like a Smurf.”

Richie shot her a scornful look and stuck out his tongue, which turned green in the simultaneous flash of green light.

Below the light was a curtain—purple and velvet, with yellow tassels hanging beneath it. It looked like the curtain they'd seen at the Chamber of Lights.

“Look familiar?” Ella asked.

“Yep.”

The curtain was fastened to a rod, but the rod, like the light, wasn't fastened to anything. It just hovered in the air.

“Who does the decorating around this place?” Ella said. “Houdini?”

Beside the curtain was an old wooden sign that stood on a single post. It read,
END OF SECTOR
62. “Sector Sixty-two?” Richie asked.

“No clue,” Ella said.

“Should we go through the curtain,” Richie asked, “or around it?”

“You decide.”

Richie shrugged his shoulders and decided to walk beside it. Suddenly his head snapped back as if he'd walked into a wall. He staggered and dropped on his rear end.

“Whoa!” Ella said. “You okay? What happened?”

She reached out and touched the space beside the curtain. The space touched her back! It
was
a wall—a wall painted to look exactly like the desert they were in. It felt soft and gooey, like Jell-O. Ella pushed her palm forward,
and the wall gooped over her fingertips. Then it firmed up and spit out her hand.

“What in the world?”

The paint was gone from the spot that she'd touched, and a black handprint had replaced it. Then, like magic, fresh paint appeared and the handprint melted away. The image on the strange wall had restored itself. Ella looked down at her hand. Sure enough, some sort of paint was smeared all over it.

“Eeew!” She wiped the gunk off on her pants. “Gross!”

Richie was covered with paint splotches. His face was as blue as the sky, and his legs looked as yellowy brown as the desert plain. He stood up and wiped the gunk off his nose, saying, “So much for going around it.”

“I guess that means we go through it,” Ella said.

Richie wiped his hands on the back of his pants. “Ladies first,” he said.

She shook the tension out of her shoulders, gingerly stepped forward, and grumbled, “Always the gentleman,” as she pulled back the curtain.

N
oah woke and casually stretched. He opened his eyes, expecting to find the usual contents of his room, but instead discovering a one-ton polar bear lying beside him. He sprang to his feet.

“What—? Where am I?”

He first thought that his room had turned magically into an igloo overnight. Then he remembered where he was and all the crazy events that had brought him here.

Blizzard was also waking from a nap. The bear rolled over, reached out his massive paws, and yawned. Nearby, Podgy stood like an attentive soldier. Noah looked down
and realized he was naked. He crossed his legs and dropped his hands in front of himself.

“Guys!” he said. “You mind?”

Blizzard and Podgy turned their heads. Noah scooped up his clothes and discovered that they were soaking wet.

“Oh great.”

He picked up his watch and saw the water had ruined it. The once-glowing digits were now dim.

“More good news.”

He went to the pile of dry clothing and rummaged through it.

“Where did you guys find this stuff?” he asked.

He pulled out jeans, a sweatshirt, a jacket, insulated underwear, purple snow pants, yellow boots, a red hunting cap with earflaps as big and round as pancakes, and a green poncho. When he was dressed, he held his arms out to his sides and faced his new friends.

“How do I look?”

Blizzard buried his snout in his paws. Podgy looked away and tilted his bill in the air. Noah rolled his eyes in disgust.

He walked to the door and looked outside. How long had he slept? He didn't know, but judging by how groggy he felt, he guessed it wasn't much more than a half hour. Back home, it probably was around one o'clock in the morning.

“We'd better go,” he said. “I'm not sure how much time we've lost.”

The band of three slipped out into the cold. Blizzard hunched down, inviting Noah to climb onto his back. Noah looked at the large penguin beside him.

“Is there room for Podgy? Podgy, can you climb up there?”

Podgy looked from Blizzard to the ground, considering Noah's question. Then he waddled forward and, with as much energy as he could muster, leaped up, managing only to smack his belly against Blizzard's furry side.

“Try again, Podge,” Noah said. “This time I'll help you.”

When Podgy jumped again, Noah grabbed his blubbery rear end and pushed him up.

“Holy smokes, Podge! How much you weigh?” he moaned.

Flapping his flippers and rolling his body like a caterpillar, Podgy squirmed and heaved his way onto Blizzard's back. He settled precariously right behind the bear's head.

Noah scaled Blizzard's side and sat behind Podgy. He wrapped his arms around the penguin's middle and grabbed the bear's neck. Podgy closed his flippers around Noah's forearms. The two of them looked as though they were cuddling together.

“Yeah,” Noah said. “This will work.” He tapped Blizzard's neck. “C'mon, big guy! Let's ride out of here!”

Blizzard growled and headed off, his big paws flattening the snow. Less than five minutes later, a storm rose up. Snow started to fall sideways, and the wind beat against them. Within a matter of minutes, the igloo had disappeared behind them in a sea of white. Noah was thankful for his winter hat, regardless of how ridiculous it looked.

After walking for a half hour, Blizzard reached a hill and began to climb. As they advanced, Noah saw penguins huddled in icy hillside crevices, sheltering themselves from the storm. The three of them reached the crest and, from there, saw a light blinking in the snowy valley below.

Using an outward-facing palm, Noah shielded his face from the cold push of the snow and wind. “Is that where we're headed?” He had to raise his voice above the noisy storm.

Blizzard growled and swung his head in a circle. He immediately started the decline, bouncing Podgy around like a plump infant on a jittery knee. The hill was so steep that Noah was afraid Blizzard would slip and send them snowballing into the valley below. Penguins scattered when they found themselves in Blizzard's path. And for the first time, Noah saw another kind of animal: arctic foxes. Their coats were as white and clean as the blowing snow. They raced about in all directions, leaping over snowy drifts and ducking into dark crevices.

At the bottom of the hill, the light was so bright that Noah had to shield his eyes. It flashed a new color across the white landscape every few seconds. Directly beneath it hung an orange curtain with wild green tassels. The curtain was suspended from a rod, which, in turn, was held up by nothing at all. The curtain rod dangled in the air like a magic trick.

“That's impossible,” Noah said.

But at this point, he knew that nothing was impossible. They passed a snow-covered sign, and Blizzard paused. Noah reached down and brushed off the snow. The wooden sign was carved with large black letters:
END OF SECTOR
24.

“Sector Twenty-four?”

Blizzard jerked his nose up to the sky and let out a deafening roar. Covering his head with his arms, Noah worried that the snowy mountains might avalanche. A moment later, the bear drove the velvet curtain back with his snout and stepped into it. The curtain slid across Noah's back and closed off the storm behind them.

E
lla and Richie stood in awe, with several prairie dogs at their feet. They'd entered a city that seemed to have been built by the most potent pieces of a hundred imaginations. It was situated in the middle of a dense forest. Buildings and trees shared the streets in equal numbers, just feet or inches apart from one another. In some places, trees grew inside buildings, and their branches jutted through walls and windows, making the buildings appear to be giant metal tree forts. Everywhere the scouts looked, the city and the forest seemed to need each other, as if one couldn't exist without the other.

Each building was a different size, shape, and design. Some were steel and iron, some marble and stone, and others nothing but glass. Brick sidewalks ran in all directions, leading to doorsteps, disappearing into mysterious alleys, or traversing patches of flowery bushes. Treetops functioned as rooftops, bamboo chutes worked as down-spouts, and branches served as signposts. The place before them was a strange and stunning union of forest and city.

Water flowed throughout the city. Streams ran in the middle of sidewalks. Waterfalls cascaded down tall glass buildings and splashed into fountains below. Clouds of mist drifted through the streets.

Besides all this, the city contained something even more spectacular: animals—thousands of them. They crowded everywhere and rushed in all directions. Zebras, tigers, camels, pandas, hippos—every animal imaginable. Ella glimpsed a family of giraffes striding down a street, bobbing their heads to miss electrical wires. Then a crowd of bears caught her eye; they had stopped at an intersection to let three slow-moving tortoises pass. She looked up and saw hundreds of flying squirrels leaping through trees and across rooftops.

The city had its share of people, too. They seemed to be going about normal, everyday business. Groups stood at storefronts, reading posters. Individuals sat on balconies,
talking in groups and drinking from colorful mugs. Some meandered along the sidewalks, carrying flowers and bags and books and babies. Others rode animals. One woman was carried by a lion, a man rode an ostrich, and an entire family sat atop an elephant. As the riders passed her, they looked as casual and ho-hum as they would be if they were in ordinary cars.

“Richie,” Ella said, “what's going on?”

High above them was a complicated web of glass tunnels. Some narrow and others wide, they wove through the buildings and trees. They all were filled with fresh, churning water and a mixture of sea creatures—fish, crabs, and turtles. The tunnels carried these water animals across the streets, from one place to another. Ella watched a bizarre rainbow of fish jump through an opening in a tunnel roof and splash down in a nearby fountain.

Velvet curtains hung in front of doorways. They looked like the curtain that the scouts had just pushed through, but each one was a different color. Near every curtain was a sign. Ella could read some of them from where she stood. They announced different sectors, whatever those were:
SECTOR
38,
SECTOR
32,
SECTOR
28,
SECTOR
5,
SECTOR
47. She watched a gang of alligators push through the curtain beside a
SECTOR
14 sign and join the dreamy herds of animals on the street.

Richie mumbled, stuttered, and made noises like
“What—? Wh-wh-what—? Er…what?” He sounded like a worn-out moped.

Four elephants stomped by. They shook the ground with a force so great that the children bounced. This made Richie's shoes sparkle in the sunlight and catch the attention of two anteaters, who raced up and sniffed his toes, jabbing at his feet with their long, tubular snouts.

“Hey!” Richie said.

He jumped to avoid them. Their tongues flicked in and out, snapping at his heels. When they realized that Richie's shoes weren't edible, they gave up and walked off, working their snouts like vacuums to suck bugs off the street.

A moment later, more members of Richie's prairie dog fan club scampered through the curtain and surrounded him. They sat up on their small rumps and dangled their front legs in front of their pudgy bellies.

Ella looked down and said, “Don't you gophers have any holes to dig?”

A couple of prairie dogs yipped defiantly. Ella turned her attention back to the city. Above the treetops, the sky was blue—so spotlessly blue that it looked fake. She even suspected that it might be. Perhaps it wasn't even the sky—at least not the one she'd always known.

The air was filled with birds. Some, small and colorful, feverishly worked their wings. Others, large and gray,
coasted on their wide wingspans. They dived down to the street and flew back into the sky, moving in elegant sweeps that seemed choreographed. Monkeys landed on ledges, jumped back into the forest, sat on balconies and awnings, and hitched rides on the backs of elephants and rhinos.

Ella read a wooden sign that dangled from a tree:

“I think this is it,” Ella said. “I think we made it.”

“Yeah.” Richie pushed his glasses up on his nose. “But made it where?”

Ella shrugged her shoulders. “All I know is, Megan's here. Noah, too. If we—” She thrust her arm forward and pointed across the street. “Hey! That guy look like anyone we know?”

A lanky man was strolling along the sidewalk. He had red hair and a splash of ugly freckles.

“That's Charlie Red!” said Richie. “The guy from Creepy Critters!”

“Hide!” Ella said.

The two of them swung around a tree trunk and peered out.

“Ugh,” Ella moaned. “I knew we'd see more of that jerk.”

Charlie Red checked his watch and seemed to become angry with himself, as if he'd suddenly remembered something important. He leaped over a line of rabbits and wove through a group of peacocks—a variety of obstacles on a motley challenge course. He disappeared behind a pink curtain dangling under a wooden sign marked
SECTOR
17.

As the two of them stepped away from the tree, a gorilla swung off an overhead branch and landed in front of Richie and Ella with a ground-shaking thud. Massive and muscular, he was covered in shiny black fur. As he eyed the children, he cocked his head back and forth, raised his huge, hairy arms, and grunted five times in quick succession. Then, emitting a long, low rumble, he pounded his fists against his chest. When he finally dropped his arms and stopped his noise, he headed straight for Richie, swinging his immense shoulders and dragging his knuckles on the street.

“Um…Ella?” said Richie.

“Don't sweat it. He's not gonna hurt you.”

“Easy for you to say—I'm the one he's staring at.”

When the gorilla reached Richie, he leaned in so closely that his breath blew back the hair on the boy's forehead. Ella caught a whiff of the beast's breath from where she stood. It smelled like rotten bananas.

“Hey, Richie,” Ella said. “We finally found someone with breath worse than yours.”

The gorilla snorted and wriggled his flat nose. He opened his mouth, proudly revealing his collection of yellow teeth.

Richie took a step back, causing his running shoes to reflect the sunlight. The gorilla saw the sparkle, squatted, and stared at the glittery footwear. He poked the heel with his thick finger and flinched. He looked apprehensively from Richie's face to his shoes. Suddenly he lurched forward, seized the boy by the waist, and threw him over his shoulder. Grunting loudly, he stripped off the shoes. Then he dropped the shoeless boy on the ground, whirled around, and bolted off. The scouts caught their last glimpse of him tearing through a crowd of ostriches, waving the glittery sneakers in the air.

Richie sat up and looked around with a stunned expression on his pale face.

“What happened?” he mumbled. He stuck out his feet and wiggled his toes. “My shoes!”

Ella giggled. “I've heard of a purse snatcher, but never a sneaker snatcher.”

The prairie dogs gathered around Richie and balanced on their rear ends with their small paws dangling in front of them. They glanced from his face to his feet, confused and slightly forlorn.

“Sorry, guys,” Richie said as he rummaged through his backpack for his boots. “I've been robbed.”

Most of the prairie dogs turned and marched back toward Sector 62, disappointed. The ones that stayed—about a dozen—scurried forward and sniffed Richie's feet.

“Careful, gophers!” Ella warned the prairie dogs. She pinched her nose to elaborate.

“I can't believe it—robbed by a gorilla,” Richie whimpered as he laced his boots. “It doesn't make any—”

A voice rang out. “That's them!”

Standing in front of the Sector 17 curtain and pointing a trembling finger at the scouts was Charlie Red. He raised a walkie-talkie to his big lips and shouted, “I've got a code red at Seventeen Sector! Repeat! I've got a security breach in the city at Seventeen Sector! All available police-monkeys, please report!”

In response to his words, dozens of monkeys darted out of a dark alley behind Sector 17. Some charged across the street, while others raced from tree branch to tree branch. Unlike the monkeys the scouts had seen earlier, these looked menacing—even deadly. They had their mouths open wide and their fangs drawn back like blades. Their stares were piercing. They were howling, screeching, or chanting,
“Oou! Oou! Oou!”

“Richie! RUN!” Ella shouted.

Richie jumped to his feet, and the scouts dashed down the street.

Charlie Red continued to call for help into his walkie-talkie. “I repeat! We have a security breach near One-Seven Sector. All available units, report now!”

As the scouts ran, Ella noticed something peculiar. Off to the side a polar bear was walking in the same direction. On his back were a penguin and a strange-looking kid dressed in purple snow pants and a red cap. For a second, she thought the boy looked familiar.