by Justin D'Ath
And that was when she saw it – an enormous paw print in the mud.
Birdy’s scalp prickled beneath her frizzy green wig as she turned a slow circle, checking all the big cats’ trailers. None of their doors were open, and she already knew that the biggest of them, Mwangi, was safely locked away . . . but what about The Jungle?
Birdy crept past the wrecked flamingos’ pool to get a clear view of the shipping container four exhibits further down.
OMG!
The huge, armoured-glass viewing window had been smashed to smithereens.
Walking backwards, eyes darting left and right, Birdy nervously retraced her steps down the middle of The Menagerie. Now she knew why nobody else was about. The big cat in The Jungle – whichever one it had been today – had escaped.
She had to go back and warn Colt.
Birdy nearly jumped out of her skin when something tapped her on the shoulder.
‘Oh!’ she gasped, weak with relief. ‘It’s only you.’
Lucy, the world’s last elephant, had come silently to the front of her enclosure as Birdy went past. She was stretching out her trunk for the carrots. Birdy stepped out of range.
‘Sorry, Lucy, these aren’t for you,’ she said. ‘They’re for Colt.’
Behind her, one of the horses nickered. It wanted a carrot, too. Birdy apologised to it as well. Then she noticed a coil of rope hanging on the side of the horses’ pen. She grabbed it and hurried out of The Menagerie.
A rope was one of the things Colt wanted. He’d asked her to get Captain Noah and a truck, too, but who knew where everyone was. He would just have to make do with a rope and some carrots. He was Superclown, after all. Birdy wasn’t going to hang around if one of the big cats was on the loose. Which one? she wondered, as she hurried back across the wide, empty sports fields towards the gate where Colt was waiting.
But when she got there, both he and the rhino were gone.
Colt had had no choice. He’d left Assam and gone after the flamingo. With any luck, the exhausted rhino would stay where he was. But Colt closed the gate behind him, just in case.
Catching a flamingo shouldn’t have been hard. But the traffic complicated things.
Colt followed the tall pink bird along the footpath, staying a dozen paces behind so it wouldn’t panic and do something stupid – like step out into the traffic that blasted past less than a metre to its left. The flamingo knew Colt was there. It kept looking back nervously. Please don’t go on the road! Colt thought. Even a glancing blow from a car would kill something as light and frail as a flamingo. Or injure it so badly that even his mum couldn’t fix it.
And to make matters worse, daylight was fading rapidly and some of the drivers had turned on their headlights. The dazzling glare might easily confuse the bird.
One wrong step, and flamingos were history – along with budgies, canaries, seagulls, penguins and about 10,000 other bird species made extinct by rat flu. There was one other flamingo left on the planet (Colt and Birdy had helped rescue it twenty minutes ago), but on its own it couldn’t breed.
So far, Flamingo Number Two was keeping off the road. It went striding up the footpath on its long pink legs like someone late for an appointment.
Colt hoped it wasn’t an appointment with death.
There was something ahead – a small, wobbling light that wasn’t part of the traffic. It was a cyclist. On the footpath. Coming in their direction!
The flamingo had seen the approaching cyclist, too. It slowed down, head swivelling nervously from side to side as it sought an escape route. The school sports fields were on one side, but a three-metre-high chain-link fence stood in the way. On the flamingo’s other side was a procession of blinding headlights.
The flamingo chose the headlights.
Before rat flu, in the time known as the Animal Days, wild flamingos could fly. But this flamingo had spent all its life in captivity and had never needed to get off the ground. It stepped straight into the path of an oncoming car.
The driver saw it, slammed on his brakes, and swerved.
Back in the Animal Days, drivers were told not to swerve when animals or birds ran in front of them. It was too dangerous. More often than not, the car would have an accident and the animal or bird got killed anyway.
This time, the bird survived. Colt got to it just before the swerving car. In the blink of an eye, he grabbed the flamingo and leapt high into the air. The car shot beneath him, so close its wind flapped his baggy clown suit and ruffled the flamingo’s feathers. Tyres turned sideways – the car was completely out-of-control. It hit the gutter doing nearly sixty kilometres per hour, flipped over, and landed roof-down on the footpath.
CRASH!
Colt landed on the footpath, too, ten metres behind the crashed car, with the flamingo safe in his arms.
He could smell petrol.
WHOOSH!
The front of the car – where the now upside-down engine was – burst into flames.
Colt tucked the startled flamingo under his arm and raced over to the burning car. Someone was calling out to him from inside but he couldn’t hear what they were saying. Desperately he tried to wrench the driver’s door open with his free hand, but it was stuck! A hand banged on the inside of the glass. Colt gave a mighty heave. The door handle ripped off! Shashlik! He dropped it on the footpath and tried the rear door. It was jammed, too. The flamingo struggled and flapped to get free.
‘Settle down!’ Colt told it.
Now he could hear two voices inside the car – a man’s and a woman’s. Both were calling for help. Then he heard a baby crying. This was getting worse and worse!
Other cars were stopping. The leaping yellow flames reflected on their dark windows. A woman got out of a white hatchback, talking on her wrist-phone. Colt hoped she was calling the fire department. But they’d never get here in time. The fire was spreading. There was smoke everywhere. One of the tyres caught alight. Colt raced around the other side of the burning vehicle. Glass crunched under his feet. The doors on this side were squashed down to half their original size. Glass lay everywhere.
‘Help my baby! Help my baby!’ screamed the woman trapped inside.
A man wearing a bicycle helmet came running to lend a hand. Colt thrust the flamingo into his arms. ‘Look after this.’
‘But there are people in the car!’ cried the cyclist.
‘I’ll take care of it,’ Colt said.
He bent down, gripped the car’s upside-down roof with both hands and lifted with every kilojoule of strength in his body. And that was a lot of kilojoules – the food had done its work. Slowly the car rose onto its side, teetered for a moment on the point of balance, then tipped over onto its wheels with a bounce and bump.
Nice one, Superclown, Colt thought.
But his job wasn’t over yet. The family was still trapped inside. And the flames were growing larger and hotter. Smoke filled the air. The baby was howling, its parents were screaming.
A taxi driver came running to help. He and Colt tried the doors again, but all four were jammed. Not even Colt’s superpowers could wrench them open. Bright flames danced two metres into the air. The taxi driver was forced back by the heat, shielding his face with his arms. The cyclist stood further back, holding the struggling flamingo. There was a wail of sirens in the distance.
‘Someone save my baby!’ screamed the trapped woman.
Colt made a fist. The driver’s window was the only one not broken. That was about to change
SMASH!
Colt reached in and dragged the driver out through the shattered window. The man had a few small cuts and grazes, but he seemed okay. He turned and tried to wrench open the car door. Colt grabbed him, turned him around and pushed him firmly away from the burning car.
‘My wife and baby are still in there!’ he screamed as the taxi driver and the woman from the hatchback led him away.
‘I’ll get them out,’ Superclown promised.
He leaned in through the broken
window and tried to free the man’s wife. The car’s roof was squashed right down, trapping her in her seat. Colt climbed in, snapped off the gearstick and used it like a hammer to bash the roof back into shape. Then he undid the woman’s seatbelt and dragged her across to the broken window on the other side of the car. She struggled and fought every centimetre of the way – she didn’t want to leave her baby behind.
‘Don’t worry,’ Colt said, giving her a boost from behind as the taxi driver and another man lifted her clear. ‘I’ll have your baby out in a jiffy.’
Colt tried to sound confident, but he didn’t feel it. The fire had really taken hold now. He could feel the heat through the shattered windscreen as hungry yellow flames enveloped the front of the car. Wisps of foul-smelling black smoke curled up from beneath the dashboard. The air was almost too hot to breathe. Colt squeezed between the seats into the back of the car. It felt slightly cooler, but there wasn’t much room because the roof was still caved-in where he hadn’t been able to reach it with his gearstick-hammer. And he’d left it in the front somewhere.
‘Hey, little guy,’ Colt said.
The baby didn’t seem hurt. But meeting its first clown at such close quarters did nothing to cheer it up. It opened its mouth and bellowed. What a racket!
The baby was strapped securely into a baby-pod on the left side of the rear seat. There seemed to be about a hundred buckles and straps. Colt didn’t have time to work it all out. He put both arms around the pod and pulled. The buckles and straps were really strong, but not as strong as Superclown. Snap! Snap! Snap! The baby was free. But it was still strapped into its large, moulded-plastic pod, which was much too large to fit through the narrow gap between the seats.
BOOM!
The car rocked as a huge explosion ripped through the engine compartment. The bonnet flew high into the air and a wave of heat passed through the car. The baby looked at Colt with wet, scared eyes. For a moment it stopped crying as it struggled for its next breath.
‘Time to skedaddle, bubs,’ Colt said.
Cradling the pod and its precious human cargo against his chest, Colt lay lengthwise along the back seat. He pulled his knees up, flexed his thigh muscles and kicked the rear passenger-side door with both feet. The door didn’t just open, it flew six or seven metres, bounced along the footpath in a trail of sparks, and narrowly missed the cyclist holding the flamingo.
Fifteen seconds later, Colt handed the baby, still crying, still in its pod, to its relieved parents.
‘Thank you so so much!’ said the father.
The mother didn’t say anything, she just reached for her baby, the flames from the burning car glistening on her tear-streaked face.
There were tears in the taxi driver’s eyes, too. ‘Whoever you are, kid,’ he said, ‘you deserve a medal.’
A police car, its lights flashing, its siren wailing, did a careful U-turn in the traffic. As its headlights swept across the accident scene, they briefly lit up the fence, the trees and the sports field behind it. But only Colt was facing that way. Only he saw the large pale shape moving like a dinosaur through the shadows of the trees.
‘Shashlik!’ he muttered.
He hurried off along the fence line in the same direction as the rhino.
‘Hey!’ the cyclist called. ‘You forgot your bird!’
‘It belongs to the circus,’ Colt called back. ‘Take it there and ask for Mrs Lawless.’
Birdy picked up Colt’s backpack. Apart from the bag and a large area of flattened grass, there was no evidence that anything unusual had happened here ten minutes ago. And what could be more unusual than a boy dressed in a clown suit fighting a Lost World rhinoceros? Then Birdy noticed that the gate was no longer open. Colt must have closed it. Which meant Assam hadn’t gone out onto the road. Yay!
So where were they?
Birdy looked back towards the circus. She had just come from there and hadn’t seen Colt or the rhino, so they must have gone somewhere else.
There was only one other place they could have gone. Birdy turned towards the school, a big cluster of buildings on the other side of the sports fields. The nearest one looked like a gymnasium. It was lit up in a blaze of lights against the darkening evening sky. A group of kids were playing some sort of chasey game next to the tennis courts in front of it. Birdy checked her watch. It was nearly seven-thirty. What were they doing still at school? And what were they wearing? It looked like fancy dress.
Then she saw Colt.
What was he doing playing chasey with a bunch of kids in fancy dress? And why were some of them waving sticks around?
Birdy stuffed the carrots and the coil of rope into the backpack, then thrust her arms through its shoulder straps. She set off diagonally across a grass hockey field on a line that would take her around the end of the tennis courts.
BANG!
Birdy stopped and spun around. The noise had come from the road. It had sounded like a car crash!
She couldn’t see much because of the trees, but something was on fire. For a couple of seconds, Birdy considered going over to see if anyone needed help. Then she remembered the three-metre-high fence on the other side of the trees. Anyway, other cars were stopping. Birdy would only be a spectator.
‘KILL THE RAT!’ screamed one of Colt’s stick-waving friends.
That’s why they’ve got sticks, Birdy realised, setting off towards the kids again. It wasn’t a game of chasey after all. She broke into a run.
People hated rats. And they were terrified of them. Rats were the only animals that didn’t die from rat flu. They carried it; they spread it; they were the reason nearly all the other animals on the planet had died.
Rats were vermin.
But Birdy didn’t understand why Colt was chasing one. Shouldn’t he be saving his energy for more important things? Like finding Assam? Because if Colt was up near the school tennis courts chasing a rat, the rhino could be anywhere.
Birdy’s reasoning was half right: had she looked over her shoulder one more time, she might have seen the missing rhino emerge cautiously from the trees about fifty metres along from the car accident and go trotting along the edge of the hockey field towards the main school buildings.
And Birdy’s reasoning was half wrong: the boy in the clown suit wasn’t Colt.
Colt was pooped. He could barely stay on his feet, let alone scale the three-metre-high school fence. The best he could do was stagger along the shadowy footpath next to it, trying not to lose sight of the rhino on the other side of the trees. Assam was making his way up the slight slope towards the school buildings. The gate was in the other direction. But Colt knew there’d be other gates. He just had to keep up with the rhino until they reached one. Luckily Assam wasn’t in any hurry. He even stopped occasionally to graze, giving Colt a chance to take a badly needed rest.
But Colt didn’t dare sit down. If he sat down, he might not be able to get up again.
It was almost fully dark now. The streetlights had come on. Colt stayed as far from the flow of traffic as the fence would allow. A clown walking up the footpath might distract the drivers. He didn’t want to cause another accident.
It felt good to have rescued those people and their baby. The taxi driver reckoned Colt deserved a medal. But how many other people had seen what he’d done? There was the cyclist, the hatchback woman, that other man who’d come to help, and who knew how many passing motorists? It was just as well he was in disguise.
Where was Birdy? She should have come back by now. She should have brought help.
Colt wished he had his wrist-phone, but he’d taken it off when he tried on his ridiculous clown suit. The suit’s cuffs were elasticised and had snagged on his phone band, so he’d left it on Birdy’s dressing table.
Colt yawned suddenly.
Uh-oh.
His eyelids drooped and his legs wobbled. He needed more food, and soon. Otherwise he was going to pass out. The first time he’d used his superpower, Colt had slept for three whole days! He
couldn’t afford to let that happen now – not with Assam on the loose.
Colt shuffled along the swaying footpath (well, it seemed to be swaying) like a sleepwalker, desperately trying to stay upright. If he listened to what his body was telling him – if he sat down on the footpath with his back against the fence just for half a minute – Assam would get away.
There were traffic lights ahead. Colt had nearly reached the end of the block. There must be a gate soon, he thought. On the other side of the fence, the sports fields had been replaced by buildings. Some looked ancient – like the buildings in those old movies about wizard schools and dragons.
Only instead of dragons, this school had a rhinoceros.
But where was it?
Colt stopped. He could no longer see Assam. Some time over the past couple of minutes, while Colt’s mind had been wandering, he’d lost sight of the rhino. There was only one place it could be – somewhere among those school buildings.
And there were people there! Strains of music and children’s voices came floating through the fence. What were kids doing at school so late in the day? Whatever the reason, Colt had to get in there and find Assam before somebody got hurt. But he was hardly strong enough to walk, let alone tangle with a three-and-a-half tonne rhinoceros.
He leaned against the fence, forehead pressed up against the wire, hands hooked through the mesh to keep upright, and wondered what to do.
Then he smelled something wonderful.
Colt’s superpower didn’t just affect his muscles, it affected his senses, too. Particularly his sense of smell. And even when his super muscle-power was spent, his super smelling-power remained as strong as ever. He sniffed the air.
Pizza!
Colt pushed himself back from the fence and his feet started moving again. He shuffled along in a semi-conscious daze. The smell of food drew him like a magnet. His mouth filled with saliva.
