Belly Up (FunJungle) - Softcover

Large Marge was the one who caught me. No surprise there. Marge O’Malley was a security guard, but all she did most days was follow me around, waiting for me to cause trouble. I saw her slinking after me all the time. She’d always try to hide behind rocks and trees and stuff, but it was never hard to spot her, because Marge was built like a rhinoceros.

“You’re in big trouble this time, Teddy,” she snarled. She was making a big show of apprehending me in front of a crowd of tourists, shoving me up against the rail of the chimp exhibit and frisking me for weapons—like I was a mugger in some urban back alley instead of a twelve-year-old boy at FunJungle, the newest, most family-friendly theme park in the world.

“Why don’t you arrest some real criminals for once?” I asked.

“Right now, you’re the only person I see making trouble.”

“That’s just ’cause you’re not paying attention.” It was true. Half the park guests broke the rules. There were signs posted everywhere telling them not to feed the animals, or bang on the glass of their exhibits, or harass them in any way, but they all did it anyhow. Only ten feet from where Marge was patting me down, an entire family was pelting a baby chimp with peanuts. They weren’t trying to feed it—which would have been bad enough. (The animals had very restricted diets to keep them from getting sick.) They were laughing every time they hit it.

“Watch this,” said the dad. “I’ll bet I can hit him right in the head.”

Right as he was about to let fly, though, a huge red water balloon sailed out of the chimp exhibit and nailed him in the face. It exploded on contact, drenching him.

Before he could recover, another balloon hit him. And another. And another. The chimps were fighting back, just as I’d hoped. That’s why I’d armed them. If the security guards weren’t going to protect the animals, then I figured I ought to help the animals protect themselves. After all, how would you like it if someone banged on your windows and chucked peanuts at you all day?

Within seconds, the whole chimpanzee troop was lobbing balloons, howling with delight as they pelted the family from all sides. The family stumbled about, slipping in the water and spluttering for air—and now everyone was laughing at them.

Well, everyone but Large Marge, who was born without a sense of humor. She whipped out her radio and alerted headquarters. “HQ, this is O’Malley. We have a water-balloon situation at Monkey Mountain. I’ve apprehended the perpetrator, Mr. Theodore Fitzroy, but I need backup.” Marge always spoke like she’d seen way too many cop movies.

“Never mind that,” the dispatcher responded. “Get over to Hippo River. We’re getting reports that something’s wrong there.”

Marge frowned, though not out of concern for the hippos; she was annoyed her request for backup had been ignored. “I don’t think you appreciate the magnitude of the situation here. . . .”

“This is coming straight from Buck,” the dispatcher said, meaning Buck Grassley, the chief of FunJungle’s security. “Hippo River is a Code Red. If you’re at Monkey Mountain, you’re the closest to the scene. So get over there now.”

Marge snapped upright and jammed her radio back in its holster. The idea that there was an actual emergency had stirred something inside her. She grabbed my ear and dragged me toward the exit. “Don’t think this saves your bacon, mister. You’re still in trouble for what you did to that poor family.”

“That family ought to thank me,” I told her. “If I hadn’t given the chimps water balloons, they’d have thrown poop .”

I wasn’t making that up. I’d seen chimps defend themselves in the wild by throwing their own feces. But as usual, trying to explain anything to Marge was useless.

“Watch your language or I’ll wash your mouth with soap,” she snapped.

The family that had been bombarded with balloons stormed out of Monkey Mountain right behind us, so soaked that their shoes sloshed. “See if we ever come to this park again!” the mother announced indignantly.

Good riddance, I thought, stifling a smile.

The truth was, except for Marge’s vice-grip on my ear, I was happy to be heading to Hippo River. I wasn’t sure what a Code Red meant, but it promised to be interesting. Maybe some clumsy tourist had fallen into the exhibit and needed to be rescued. Technically, that was probably a bad thing to hope for: Most people don’t realize that hippos are actually the second most dangerous African animals. (Water buffalo are the first.) They’re mean, they’re unpredictable, and they have razor-sharp teeth a foot long. In the wild, they’ve been known to stomp lions to death and bite crocodiles in half. If someone fell into the hippos’ territory, they’d be screwed. But after a few weeks at FunJungle, I was bored out of my skull and willing to take excitement anywhere I could find it.

That might seem pretty surprising, given that I spent every day at a place that claimed to be “America’s Most Exciting Family Vacation Destination.” FunJungle was the biggest, most elaborate zoo ever built and it had been jam-packed since it had opened two weeks before. But unlike the thousands of other kids who visited every day, I didn’t go home when they closed the park at night. I was home.

Both my parents worked there. My mom was a famous gorilla researcher. My dad was a renowned wildlife photographer. (They’d met when National Geographic had sent him to photograph Mom’s gorillas.) Now Mom oversaw the care and research of all FunJungle’s primates while Dad worked for the publicity department, taking glamour shots of the animals for websites and magazines.

FunJungle had been built way out in Texas Hill Country, where land was cheap; the closest city, San Antonio, was more than half an hour away. So the park had provided housing for my family and a few other animal specialists who’d come to work there: Our mobile homes sat just beyond the back fence. None of the other specialists had children, though, which meant I was the only kid for thirty miles in any direction.

Now, don’t go thinking I was bored because I don’t like animals. I do. In fact, I bet I know more about animals than any twelve-year-old you’ve met. I spent the first decade of my life living in a tent in the African Congo. I didn’t see a TV until I was six; instead, I watched animals—and Mom and Dad taught me everything they knew. I learned how to track elephants, communicate with chimps, and defend myself against a hungry leopard. Heck, I learned about animals you’ve probably never even heard of: bongos, hammerkops, Gaboon vipers, guenons. My first friend was a gorilla my age named Mfuzi. I loved being around animals every day.

I was bored because, until not long before, I’d had an amazingly exciting life. Living in the Congo was one incredible experience after another—and when I did leave the jungle, it was always to visit fascinating places with my father on his assignments. Dad was a real adrenaline junkie and he encouraged me to embrace adventure: We’d rappelled into caves to find giant bats in Mexico, stalked tigers in Uttar Pradesh, and even snorkeled with blue whales off Fiji.

But then, right after I turned ten, a civil war broke out in the Congo and my parents decided it was no longer safe to raise me there. (If not for me, they probably would have risked their lives to stay with the gorillas.) Mom grabbed the first job she could find back in the States, a research position at Emory Primate Labs in Atlanta, but that was a bust. None of us was happy in Georgia; we all missed Africa terribly. So when my folks were offered work at FunJungle, which billed itself as “the closest you can get in America to being on safari,” we figured living there might be more fun for all of us.

And for a while, it was. FunJungle was by far the best zoo in the world. All the reviews said so. It was three times larger than the next biggest zoo, its exhibits were innovative and there was plenty to do. But it still wasn’t the Congo. After a few weeks, to keep myself amused, I’d had to resort to playing practical jokes, like giving the chimps water balloons—or switching the signs on the men’s and women’s restrooms—or replacing all the black jellybeans in Large Marge’s lunch with rabbit poop.

That’s why I was fine with letting myself be dragged along to Hippo River. I was only hoping for a little excitement.

It never occurred to me that Henry would be dead.

It didn’t occur to Marge either. She shoved through the crowd at Mbuko Hippo Overlook, still dragging me by my ear, flashing her little tin badge—and suddenly, there Henry was, lying in the shallow water of his enclosure, all four legs pointing straight at the sky.

Most of Henry—and there was about 4,000 pounds of him—was underwater, resting on the bottom of his pool. I couldn’t see his body, since the water was clouded with hippo poop, as usual. Only his feet were visible, jutting above the surface, pale white now that the blood had drained from them. They were thick and stubby, looking like giant, moldy marshmallows floating in day-old hot chocolate.

“Isn’t that cute?” a mother asked her children. “Henry’s sleeping upside down!”

Marge’s grip finally relaxed on my ear. She was so stunned, she’d forgotten about me. Instead, she stared at...