Lion Down

by Stuart Gibbs

Dad slowed down enough for Dash, Ethan, and Violet to leap from the back of the truck. They quickly snatched the Barksdales’ rifles off the ground.

  “That’s mine!” Tim Barksdale shouted, starting to get to his feet.

  “Stay down or you’ll get a swordfish up your butt!” Violet said with menace that surprised me. It was an empty threat—I didn’t have any swordfish—but it worked. Tim lay back on the ground, and all the Barksdales raised their hands in surrender.

  Dad hit the gas again and we sped on after Lincoln and Rocket.

  The lion was now almost out of energy. Her speed was flagging. Even worse, she had run into a dead end.

  She had reached the end of the construction site and arrived at FWAP, the FunJungle Waste Appropriation Plant. The area was bound on three sides by concrete walls to hide it from view, as it was hideously ugly. The factory itself was basically a two-story-tall, foul-smelling metal composter. Dump trucks filled with animal poop would drive up a concrete ramp to drop their loads into the top; the poop would then be combined with other refuse and composted for weeks before coming out the exit chute into other trucks, which would haul it off to local farms. The composter was surrounded by fetid piles of moldering garbage, which reeked so bad we all had to clap our hands over our noses.

  Lincoln followed Rocket into the FWAP, smelling pretty terrible himself. He was limping after wrecking the Rover, but he forced himself onward, clutching the rifle in his poop-smeared hands.

  The smashed-up Rover blocked the entrance to the FWAP, so Dad had to stop the truck. From the flatbed, I could see everything that was happening within the concrete walls.

  Rocket seemed to realize she was cornered. She turned to face Lincoln and backed toward the composter, teeth bared.

  Lincoln cocked his rifle.

  I raised my fish cannon at the same time. “Lincoln!” I yelled. “Drop your gun!”

  Lincoln didn’t even look at me. “This lion’s going down,” he said. “She killed King. She deserves what’s coming to her.”

  “She didn’t kill King!” Summer yelled. “Your neighbor did!”

  “I’m not bluffing!” I warned Lincoln. “I have a fish cannon and I’m not afraid to use it!”

  Next to me, Xavier stood at the ready, his hands full of frozen fish.

  Tommy Lopez was taking aim at Rocket too, only he was using the sedation rifle.

  Lincoln Stone was a lot closer to Rocket than we were, though. The cat was only fifty feet ahead of him.

  Even though Rocket probably could have easily killed Lincoln, she didn’t attack. Instead, she kept backing away, hissing.

  Lincoln raised the rifle and took aim.

  I fired first. After all, I’d warned him, fair and square.

  The first herring nailed him in the right shoulder, spinning him toward us. The next caught him square in the chest. Lincoln staggered backward, but doggedly kept his hands clutched on his rifle.

  Rocket saw her opportunity to escape and ran for the exit behind us.

  Lincoln tried to shoot the lion, even as he was tottering, so I hit him once more.

  The third fish was the largest one yet, a bluefin tuna that appeared to have been tossed in with the other fish by mistake. It caught Lincoln in the face with a wet thwap and sent him reeling onto the loading platform. Lincoln’s gun discharged straight up, blowing out the cap that plugged the compost chute.

  There was an ominous rumble, and then the poop of a thousand different animals, which had been cooking in the hot sun for days, poured down the chute onto Lincoln’s head.

  Lincoln was buried up to his neck in a pile of reeking compost. His arms and legs were pinioned to his sides, so he couldn’t move, and given the way he screamed in disgust, I figured a lot of the stuff had gotten into his mouth as well.

  Rocket was running toward us, using the last of her strength to escape, when Tommy Lopez fired his rifle. The dart caught Rocket in her rear haunch, and the sedative quickly went to work. Rocket yelped and tried to keep running, but her back end quit on her. She wobbled a bit, then sat down, gave a confused whine, and collapsed in the dirt. Within seconds, she was sound asleep.

  “Is she going to be okay?” Xavier asked, concerned.

  “She’ll be fine,” Tommy said. “And she’s a lot safer here than she would be out there.” He nodded toward the woods beyond the construction site. “At least until we can get that permit to kill her revoked.”

  He picked up his radio and called Stephanie Winger. “Boss. This is Lopez. Rocket is neutralized. The lion is down.”

  “Good work, Tommy,” Winger replied. She sounded relieved. “Bring her in.”

  I peered over the edge of the truck at Rocket. She was breathing hard after all her exertion, but she seemed fine otherwise.

  Sanjay Budhiraja whooped with excitement. “That was amazing! I never thought of this possibility for the Zoom! Humane self-defense! It’s a whole new marketing angle!”

  Summer climbed out of the truck and joined me on the flatbed. She took my hand as we looked down at Rocket. “Isn’t she amazing?” she asked.

  “She sure is,” I said, although I wasn’t only talking about Rocket.

  In the FWAP, Lincoln Stone was struggling impotently to get out of the pile of poop. Finally, he screamed with exasperation, “Could you idiots get me out of here?”

  “Sure!” Dad yelled back. “But, being idiots, it might take us a couple hours to figure out how to do that.”

  “That’s not funny!” Lincoln screamed.

  It was funny to everyone else, though. Even to the Barksdales, who Dashiell, Ethan, Violet, and Xavier were marching down the road at gunpoint. Despite their annoyance at being captured, the Barksdales burst into laughter at the sight of Lincoln writhing around in disgust, up to his chin in animal waste.

  “You look like a dinosaur ate you up and pooped you out!” Pa roared.

  Tommy leaped off the flatbed and knelt by Rocket’s side. “C’mon,” he told us. “We can’t leave her here.”

  The rest of us joined him. Even though I had been close to thousands of animals at FunJungle, it felt different to be so close to Rocket, who was still wild. She smelled of musk and grass, and her body was so warm from activity that I could feel the heat just being near her.

  “I’m sorry I called you idiots!” Lincoln wailed in the distance. “Please come help me! This is disgusting! If you don’t get me out of here soon, I’m gonna puke!”

  We ignored him.

  “Anyone know where we can take Rocket so she’ll be protected for the next few days?” I asked.

  “The next few days?” Summer smiled knowingly. “I think I know how to protect her for a lot longer than that.”

  Epilogue

  THE REFUGE

  Two weeks later, I found myself standing by the scrub oak forest at the edge of the FunJungle parking lot. A new stage had been erected, significantly smaller than the one for FunJungle’s anniversary, only big enough for five folding chairs and a podium. J.J., Kandace McCracken, and Summer sat in three of the chairs. Stephanie Wilder sat in the fourth, and our local state congresswoman was in the fifth.

  Despite the McCrackens’ fame, the crowd for the event was the smallest I had ever seen at FunJungle. Xavier, Dash, Ethan, and Violet were there, along with my mother and my father, who was taking photos. Beyond us, there were only a few dozen people, mostly fans of Summer who were there to see her, rather than caring about what the ceremony was for. (Tommy Lopez had wanted to come, but he’d had an emergency at work; someone had tried to smuggle a shipment of elephant ivory through the port at Galveston, and he’d been called in to help make the bust.)

  Pete Thwacker was pacing behind me, putting on a good face, though I knew he was upset. He had invited dozens of news stations, but only the local ones had shown up.

  “We should have promised them an animal,” he muttered under his breath. “If we’d put a panda or a baby tiger on that stage, every major network would be here. We didn’t even get Houst
on, for crying out loud.”

  “This isn’t about pandas or tigers,” I reminded him, echoing what Summer had told him over and over.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Pete groused. “If you want a crowd, you need an animal. If Summer was holding a koala up there, the photos would make the front page of every paper in Texas.”

  I knew Summer didn’t want to do that. In the days leading up to the ceremony, Pete had repeatedly proposed that Summer be cuddling everything from an aardvark to a weasel, but she had refused, not wanting to distract from the point of the ceremony. J.J. had respectfully conceded to her wishes, even though I could tell he was annoyed by the size of the crowd too.

  It was ten minutes past when the ceremony should have begun, and it was hot in the parking lot. Heat rose off the asphalt in waves so thick the main gates of FunJungle shimmered in the distance.

  J.J. looked at Pete impatiently. Pete scanned the parking lot, as if hoping to see news crews from the major networks suddenly arriving, then frowned and nodded to J.J.

  J.J. stood and approached the podium. Most of the small crowd stopped talking to watch him, although a small gaggle of Summer fans continued to take selfies with Summer in the background. “Good afternoon,” J.J. said. “I’d like to welcome everyone here, and the distinguished members of the press, for what I feel is one of the most important announcements I have ever made: the establishment of a new wildlife refuge to protect local species.”

  Summer beamed proudly as her father said this. After all, the refuge had been her idea.

  Starting the day after we’d rescued Rocket, Summer had begun to pressure her father about the huge plot of land he owned around FunJungle. Instead of paving it all to build more theme parks and resorts, she wanted him to simply leave it wild. J.J. wasn’t about to admit this to the crowd, but he had balked at the idea; he still had dreams of an entertainment complex that would rival Disney World.

  Summer had been extremely upset by this. “The whole point of FunJungle isn’t to make money,” she had argued while her family and I were having dinner. “It’s to protect animals and educate people about them, right?”

  “Er . . . sort of,” J.J. had said weakly. It was clear that he really thought it was to make money.

  “Well, we shouldn’t be doing that at the expense of our local animals,” Summer said. “Isn’t it hypocritical to tell our guests that people in India and Africa need to be setting aside more land for tigers and elephants if we’re not doing the same thing for our own mountain lions?”

  “She has a point,” Summer’s mother agreed.

  “Besides,” Summer continued, “you already have one theme park. How many more do you need?”

  “I was kind of thinking four might be nice,” J.J. admitted.

  “And where’s Rocket supposed to live, then?” Summer asked pointedly.

  J.J. couldn’t even meet her gaze and looked down into his mashed potatoes.

  At the time, Rocket was in one of the quarantine areas at the FunJungle veterinary hospital. She was fully recovered from being sedated, but no one had felt it was safe to let her go free again; there had still been too many hunters out there looking for her, hoping to cash in on the reward Lincoln had offered. The quarantine area wasn’t very big, but there was nowhere else to put Rocket. She had paced and yowled incessantly throughout her first day there.

  J.J. McCracken was one of the shrewdest business negotiators on earth, but the one person he couldn’t say no to was his daughter. He had tried. Originally, he’d argued that the whole purpose of buying the land was to develop it, and that making it a protected area would be a serious financial strain for him. So Summer had stopped talking to him. She didn’t say a word to her father for three whole days, and every time he’d texted her, she’d simply responded with: We have plenty of money already.

  On the third day, J.J. had cracked and agreed to the refuge.

  The fact that FunJungle needed some good public relations was an additional factor. Thanks to Rocket’s crashing the party, FunJungle’s anniversary celebration had received far more press than it might have otherwise, but Pete Thwacker had pointed out that this wasn’t exactly the press they had hoped for. “Despite all the hard work everyone at FunJungle does to care for the animals,” he told J.J., “this park is starting to get a reputation as a place where chaos occurs on a regular basis; it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make a big gesture where you put a charitable cause ahead of your ability to earn money.”

  However, the refuge alone wouldn’t have been enough to protect Rocket. There was still a permit for hunting her and a bounty on her head. Luckily, Lincoln Stone’s behavior at the anniversary party had worked against him.

  After all, Lincoln had really been the one to start the panic at the party, not Rocket. (In retrospect, many guests realized they should have been frightened by the unplanned arrival of a mountain lion, but since Rocket was wild and not an escaped animal, most didn’t fault FunJungle for her being in the park.) Lincoln had argued that he had been looking out for the safety of the guests when he’d taken the stage with the rifle. However, an investigation by local law enforcement had revealed that Lincoln had been informed Rocket hadn’t killed King and yet he’d tried to shoot her anyhow. So he had been arrested for reckless endangerment.

  Once he got bailed out of jail, Lincoln had steadfastly defended himself on his radio and TV shows, claiming that Natasha Mason’s story wasn’t true; it was all part of a left-wing conspiracy against him. But there was plenty of evidence to back up Natasha’s claims, and Lincoln had made many enemies among his fellow broadcasters who were thrilled to have a story that made him look foolish and dangerous: Inciting a panic at a popular tourist attraction filled with families was a PR disaster. So was ending up neck-deep in animal poop. Lincoln’s image took another hit when it was revealed that King was actually a bichon frise, not a golden retriever as he’d claimed—and furthermore, a vicious bichon frise that often attacked his neighbors’ small children. Lincoln’s show was yanked off the air on TV and radio networks across the country. He didn’t lose all his stations, but he lost his political clout. Stephanie Winger admitted she had made a mistake in issuing the permit to kill a mountain lion and rescinded it.

  J.J. didn’t mention any of this on the stage, though. Instead, his speech was far more focused on the issues at hand: “Animals need open space,” he was saying. “And they’re running out of it everywhere on earth—even right here. As much as I want people to visit FunJungle, I certainly don’t want that to be the only place anyone can see a mountain lion.”

  Summer grinned as her father said this. She had written those lines for him.

  A pickup truck with FUNJUNGLE VETERINARY HOSPITAL stenciled on the sides pulled up to the edge of the parking lot fifty yards away from us. A large shipping crate sat in the cargo bay. Kevin Wilks guided the truck in with a pair of orange batons.

  Kevin was no longer in FunJungle Security. Hoenekker had planned to fire him, but before he even got the chance, Kevin had walked into his office and surrendered his badge. Kevin felt miserable about poisoning the giraffes and claimed he didn’t deserve to wear the uniform of a FunJungle security guard. He still needed work, though, and promptly asked Hoenekker if there were any other jobs at the park. Hoenekker had directed him to parking lot operations, which was the least popular division at FunJungle; the job entailed standing in the parking lot and directing tourists to spaces. No one liked it because the parking lot was broiling on hot days, and the tourists often got confused and nearly ran over the employees on a regular basis. You did get a free Parking Patrol baseball cap, though. Kevin leaped at the chance and seemed to be enjoying himself. At the very least, he hadn’t accidentally poisoned anything.

  Meanwhile, Marge O’Malley was still bucking to get herself back on the security force. Her manhandling of the poor tourists during Operation Hammerhead was a strike against her, but her assistance in taking out Putterman to help us go after Lincoln Stone—in a wheelchair
, no less—was considered a plus. Hoenekker was still reviewing her case.

  Under Kevin’s guidance, the veterinary truck swung around and backed up to the edge of the parking lot, so the rear gate faced the woods.

  “Habitat loss is the number one threat to wild animals today,” J.J. was saying. “Far more than poaching or hunting, and it is a threat in which all of us are complicit. Every house we build, or farm we get our food from, or road we travel, is on land where wild animals once roamed.”

  Natasha Mason was on the far side of the small crowd, Grayson and Jason by her sides. Lincoln Stone had threatened to sue Natasha for caninicide. But since there was a record of Natasha filing multiple complaints about King, and Lincoln had done nothing to restrain his dog, Lincoln didn’t have much of a case. His lawyers pointed out that suing would only make his bad PR situation even worse, so he had begrudgingly dropped the lawsuit.

  The Mason family had still felt terrible about what Rocket had gone through—and what I had endured as well to protect the lion. As an apology, they had made a donation to the World Wildlife Fund in my honor—and bought us a bug-zapper for our house.

  J.J. was already wrapping up his speech. Pete had advised him to keep it short and sweet, given that it was sweltering in the parking lot and no major news organizations were covering the story anyhow. “I’d like to thank all of you for coming out here today for this special occasion,” J.J. said. “And now I’d like to invite Stephanie Winger from the Department of Fish and Wildlife to do the honors.”

  There was polite applause as Stephanie approached the microphone.

  Down along the parking lot, Doc Deakin climbed out of the passenger side of the veterinary truck, walked to the back, and dropped the tailgate.

  My parents had told me that Doc had posted bail for Lily, who was now awaiting trial at home. Lily was hoping to avoid prison and get mandatory community service instead. Doc hadn’t told my parents any of this; as far as they knew, Doc hadn’t said a thing about his daughter to anyone.

  Doc had a little more to say about the giraffes. Knowing what they had been poisoned with made treatment much easier. Nightshade was bad for them, but it could have been much worse. Charcoal had been mixed into their food for the past two weeks to help them purge the toxins from their systems, and now they seemed to be in perfect health. Daily giraffe feedings for the tourists had resumed. Meanwhile, J.J. McCracken had ordered his grounds crew to eradicate every single bit of deadly nightshade growing on the FunJungle property.