Lion Down

by Stuart Gibbs

  “Looks like the coast is clear,” Lily observed. “I want you kids to get back to the car right now. I’m serious. If any of my friends show up, tell them where I am.”

  “Lily,” Summer said firmly. “This is a very bad idea.”

  “I’m sure those turkeys would disagree,” Lily said. “If you don’t want to be a part of this, you’d better go right now.” With that, she sprang over the tree trunk and hurried down the hill.

  Summer and I helplessly watched her go. “Think she knows what she’s doing?” I asked.

  “I hope so,” Summer replied. I thought that, given Summer’s impetuous nature, she might run down the hill after Lily, but even this seemed to be too reckless for her. She grabbed my hand and said, “C’mon.”

  Both of us ran back through the woods. We went full-out, not wanting to get caught on the property, and so it didn’t take us too long before we saw the road again and Lily’s beat-up old car sitting on the shoulder. We quickly slipped through the fence and did our best to act as innocent as possible to anyone who might come along.

  None of Lily’s friends were waiting there, whoever they might have been.

  “So what do you think of our new suspects?” Summer asked. She seemed like she was trying to distract herself from worrying about Lily, but it was worth discussing anyhow.

  “I don’t know as much about them as you and Lily do,” I answered. “But it sounds like any of them could have killed King. Seems like all of them hate mountain lions and hunting regulations. . . .”

  “So much that they’d kill Lincoln’s dog?”

  “Maybe it was an accident.” I paced in the shade on the side of the road, laying out what I’d been thinking. “They were all drinking, and they all had guns. What if one of them shot King by mistake? It was dark. King wasn’t that big. Maybe someone thought he was a rabbit or something. And then, they wouldn’t want Lincoln to know they’d killed his dog. Even if it was an accident. But then, they realize there’s a way to shift the blame from themselves and get Lincoln riled up about the mountain lions.”

  “I don’t know,” Summer said skeptically. “How do you shoot someone’s dog without them noticing?”

  “Maybe Lincoln was inside when it happened,” I suggested. “Or maybe he got too drunk to notice. Once, back in Africa, my dad had some friends visit our camp and they drank so much, one of the guys couldn’t get up for an entire day afterward. A whole troop of chimpanzees came right through the camp and he didn’t even have any idea it had happened.”

  “So . . . this person shoots King and then takes off the tail to leave as evidence?”

  “Maybe the tail was all that was left after they shot the dog,” I said. “They might have been using some really big guns, like the kind people use at game ranches to hunt exotic species. Or maybe they accidentally blew the tail off when they shot King and then just left it behind.”

  “What do you think they did with the rest of the dog?”

  “Dumped the body somewhere.”

  “Not outside,” Summer said. “That would have attracted vultures.”

  “Okay. Maybe they put King’s body in their car and drove it to the dump.”

  Summer frowned. “I doubt it.”

  “Really?” I asked. “Because anyone who framed the lion would have had to do something like that with King’s body.”

  “I just find it hard to imagine that a friend would lie like that to another friend.”

  “Maybe they’re not that good friends,” I said.

  “They play poker every few Fridays. They must be pretty close.”

  “Not necessarily. Except for the Mystery Man, we know they all work with Lincoln. Maybe they don’t like him at all, but play poker to stay on his good side. Lincoln’s a jerk.”

  Summer ran her fingers along the wire of the fence, thinking about that, but she still didn’t seem convinced. “What if it was someone else who wanted to hunt Rocket? Like that guy who was lurking around the Wilds last night?”

  “Jerry?” I asked, already feeling nervous about where this was going. Apparently, J.J. McCracken hadn’t told Summer the truth about his hunter.

  “Right,” Summer said. “The guy was already willing to trespass to go after a lion, so he’d probably be willing to commit other crimes as well. Like sneaking onto Lincoln’s property and killing King and framing Rocket for it.”

  “That sounds awfully complicated,” I said. “There’s no way he could have known that Lincoln would go on the warpath to have Rocket delisted.”

  “Really? I think anyone who has ever listened to Lincoln Stone would have a very good idea that he’d do that. Maybe Jerry didn’t know Lincoln would offer a reward for killing Rocket, but to argue that she ought to be killed? Definitely. Lincoln Stone has claimed that people ought to get the death penalty for jaywalking. So he’s certainly going to want the lion that killed his dog dead.”

  “He was exaggerating about the jaywalking,” I said.

  “He still said it. The man says crazy things all the time. And a lot of his listeners believe every last one of them.”

  I sighed, knowing this was true. The jaywalking incident had made national news. Someone had walked in front of Lincoln’s car as he was driving to work, forcing him to slam on his brakes and spill coffee on his lap, and then he’d come into the radio booth and ranted about how that should be a capital offense. A lot of people made fun of him afterward for being hyperbolic, and even Lincoln had admitted later that he’d gone too far, but some of his core listeners had actually taken him seriously.

  This happened with Lincoln a lot. Lincoln spouted off about things all the time; that was his job. Sometimes they were important issues, and sometimes it happened to be whatever had peeved him on the way into work that day. Lincoln had been known to rail against the cost of postage stamps, people who drove too slow in the left lane on the highway, premade guacamole at the supermarket, and the Dewey decimal system (which he had honestly claimed was a government plot to keep anyone from being able to find the books they wanted at the library).

  It was even more unsettling when Lincoln took on serious issues with the same cavalier attitude, shooting his mouth off without thinking about the consequences. For example, he had recently suggested that if illegally crossing into the country was punishable by death, then we’d have much less illegal immigration. Lots of his listeners had really liked that idea, and a few had even gone down to the Rio Grande River with the intent of shooting anyone they presumed to be crossing the border. Lincoln’s rants often had consequences like this, because Lincoln generally argued that the government was always wrong, that all other media sources were corrupt, and that he was the only one telling his listeners the truth, so his devoted fans tended to discount anything they heard from the government or other news sources, if they even bothered listening to them at all. To them, anything Lincoln Stone said was gospel.

  So it wasn’t a stretch to assume that, if Lincoln thought his dog had been killed by a mountain lion, then he would immediately start attacking the Endangered Species Act as a bad idea and claiming the lions ought to be eradicated. J.J. McCracken himself probably knew this, and to me, it seemed more likely that J.J. would think to go after Lincoln Stone’s dog than some random hunter might. After all, if J.J. perceived the lion as a threat to his animals or his business, he would have more of a motive than some hunter who simply wanted to shoot a lion.

  However, I didn’t want to discuss this possibility with Summer. I didn’t want to reveal that her father might have hired Jerry and lied to her about it. But I also didn’t want to be put in a position where I had to keep hiding that truth from her. So I tried to change the subject instead.

  “Who do you think that Mystery Man in the truck was?” I asked. “The fourth suspect?”

  Summer absently plucked the barbed-wire fence. “I don’t have the slightest idea. All we saw was his chin. It might have even been a woman.”

  I considered that. My view of the mystery per
son on the phone had been small and blurry. I had assumed the person was a man, but maybe that was only because they were driving a truck and wearing a cowboy hat. A woman certainly could have done those things. “If that’s the case, do you think it could have been Tommy Lopez’s boss?”

  “You mean the head of the local Fish and Wildlife division?”

  “Yeah. I don’t even know who that is, do you?”

  “I hadn’t thought to look it up.”

  “Tommy’s boss has been trying to stop this investigation all along,” I said. “What if she was doing that because she was the one who killed the dog?”

  For a moment, I thought Summer was going to dismiss this as being stupid, but then she said, “Let’s see who this woman is.” She took out her phone, then frowned at it. “Ugh. I have zero reception out here. How about you?”

  I checked my phone. “Nothing. Maybe I can find some coverage, though.” I started down the road, holding my phone above my head, hoping to pick up some kind of signal.

  I had only gone a few steps before I heard something in the distance, carrying through the hot, still air.

  Sirens. They were far-off, but they seemed to be slowly getting louder, indicating they were coming our way.

  I looked back at the barbed-wire fence surrounding the Connelly farm. The place where we had crossed still looked ridiculously spindly and low-tech.

  Then I looked down the fence. At multiple places, instead of using wooden fence posts, the builders of the fence had used trees. In fact, in many spots, the barbed wire had been strung by the trees for so long that the bark of the trees had grown around it. On one of these trees, there was a small black device mounted right above the top strand of barbed wire.

  I looked in the other direction and saw another such device mounted to another tree in the distance.

  “Summer,” I said nervously, “I think this fence has an alarm system.” I pointed to one of the devices.

  “Crud,” Summer said. “That’s a laser sensor. We have them on our property too.” She looked up into the trees. “They probably have remote cameras out here as well. So if something trips the alarm, they can see if it’s a deer or a trespasser.”

  “We tripped the alarm,” I said.

  “Only because Lily did it first!” Summer exclaimed. “That was her fault, not ours!”

  The sirens were getting louder. And now I heard something else, coming from the other direction—from the farm itself. The same cocktail-party chatter of the birds. Only it was getting louder too. And somehow, it sounded angrier than it had before.

  Lily Deakin suddenly crested the top of the hill, running as fast as she could. She had abandoned her bolt cutters in her haste. “Get in the car!” she shouted. “We need to go!”

  For a moment, I thought she knew the police were coming for us. But then, what she was really running from came over the hill behind her.

  Turkeys.

  There were hundreds of them, and they were coming fast. I had known that wild turkeys could get quite large, but up to that moment, the only domestic turkeys I had ever seen were on the table at Thanksgiving dinner. These turkeys were much bigger than I had expected. (I would find out later that Redwood had pumped them full of hormones and steroids to get them to grow unnaturally large.) They were also highly aggressive, which was a side effect of the steroids. Wild turkeys can be surprisingly combative, and these guys were all suffering from roid rage.

  They came over the hill in a furious, gobbling wave. Their anger wasn’t only directed at Lily; they were taking it out on anything that got in their way—including each other. As they ran, the turkeys pecked and clawed each other, and swatted one another with their wings. Others lashed out at bushes and sticks. One launched itself at a cedar tree with such rage that it actually knocked itself unconscious. (Turkeys aren’t that smart to begin with, and these drug-addled ones appeared to have few functioning brain cells at all.)

  Summer and I raced for the car. We had wandered a ways down the road from it while talking, and while we weren’t that far, it was still a worrying distance given that a horde of psychotic turkeys was descending on us. We reached it only a few seconds before Lily and the turkeys got to the barbed-wire fence.

  I leaped into the back seat while Summer got into the front. Even with the windows down, the interior of the car had been baking in the blazing sun, so the seats were scalding.

  In her haste, Lily tried to jump the barbed-wire fence rather than slipping through it, but her foot caught the top wire and she belly flopped painfully into the grass by the side of the road.

  Luckily, the turkeys were even less graceful than Lily. Several of the leaders didn’t even seem to notice the fence at all and ran right into it, hitting it so hard that they rebounded backward into the flock, taking out several of their brethren. Others attempted to fly over the fence, apparently unaware that domesticated, hormone-bloated turkeys can’t fly. They flapped their wings valiantly, but didn’t leave the ground and ended up thwacking into the fence as well. The next wave of turkeys promptly ran right into them, squashing them up against the wires.

  Lily scrambled back to her feet and ran for the car.

  Behind her, a few turkeys managed to get through the wires of the fence. This was entirely due to luck, rather than any mental acuity or problem-solving skills, but the effect was the same. They were past the barrier and free to attack once again.

  Lily dove into the front seat. She had badly scraped her arms and knees after flopping over the fence, but if she was in pain, she didn’t show it. She might not have even noticed, she was so frightened. Instead, she frantically searched through her pockets for the car keys.

  “What’d you do to those birds?” Summer asked worriedly.

  “Nothing!” Lily exclaimed, sounding very freaked out. “They came out that angry! You’d think they’d have been happy that I freed them, but . . . they don’t seem to like humans at all. I guess they’ve been treated worse than I thought. . . .”

  The turkeys were now bearing down on the car, and our windows were still open.

  “Lily!” I yelled. “Start the car!”

  “I can’t find my keys!” she yelled back.

  “What?” Summer shrieked. “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know!” Lily wailed. “I swear I had them in my pocket!”

  I looked out the window at the point where Lily had fallen. On the ground, amidst a flurry of approaching turkeys, were her car keys. “You dropped them out there!” I said.

  Lily gasped. All the bravado she had shown earlier was gone, erased by the trouble her impetuousness had gotten her into.

  Without the keys, we couldn’t roll up the windows, and the turkeys were now upon us. It was quite likely that none of them had ever seen a car before, but that didn’t stop them from flinging themselves at it furiously. Many clanged harmlessly off the fenders and the doors, but others tried to get at us inside, leaping as high as they could and lashing their heads through the windows. Two managed to somehow clamber up onto the hood and threw themselves against the windshield, making grotesque faces at us as they smeared themselves against the glass.

  It felt somewhat like being in a zombie movie, only instead of our car being attacked by mindless brain-eating humans, we were being attacked by mindless, hostile barnyard animals.

  I grabbed a thick sheaf of animal welfare pamphlets and whacked a turkey with them as it lunged through the window for me. (I was aware of the irony at the time, but I didn’t care; the turkey didn’t seem concerned about my welfare at all.) The bird toppled back to the ground, gobbling angrily.

  The girls didn’t have anything to defend themselves with in the front seat. They could only swat at the turkeys with their hands. Lily already had a gash in her palm where she’d been severely gouged by a beak.

  “Here!” I said, handing them stacks of pamphlets. “Use these on them!”

  “I can’t hit an animal!” Lily cried.

  “They’re trying to peck
us to death!” Summer argued. “This is self-defense!” She eagerly grabbed some pamphlets and swatted a turkey so hard its wattle wrapped around its neck like a tetherball. “You need to get those keys!”

  “No way!” Lily said, paling at the thought. “I’m not going back out there!”

  I brained another turkey with my pamphlets and chanced a look out the window. In the swarm of frenzied birds, I spotted the keys again. But at that very moment, an exceptionally large and moronic turkey plucked them off the ground with its beak—and swallowed them.

  “I don’t think we’re getting the keys back,” I reported. “Not for a few hours, at least.”

  “Oh God,” Lily mewled. “My father’s going to kill me.”

  “Not if the turkeys do it first!” Summer exclaimed.

  At that moment, however, salvation arrived. A police car skidded to a stop in the sea of turkeys. Their sirens had been wailing all along, but we hadn’t been able to hear them over all the outraged gobbling.

  The rear window of our car was now being savaged by two angry turkeys, but between them, I could see the police staring in amazement through their own windshield.

  A dozen turkeys promptly launched themselves at the police car.

  Fortunately, the police had riot gear. While we continued to fend off the turkeys, the police suited up, then emerged ready for battle and armed to the teeth. They didn’t shoot any turkeys, but they did stun quite a few with long tasers that looked like cattle prods. The turkeys squawked in shock as the electricity surged through them, and then passed out.

  Normally, I would have been upset to see any animal jolted this way, but Summer and I—and even Lily—were relieved.

  Eventually, the turkeys seemed to grasp that the police were a more advanced threat than we were and ought to be avoided—or possibly, they were simply exhausted after all their exertion. They fell back, though they still gobbled menacingly, watching us warily with their googly eyes.

  The police cautiously approached our car, helped us out, and made sure we were all right.

  And then they arrested us.