Riddles and Danger

by Bryan Chick

  “Go!” Noah commanded.

  He tried to stand, but his legs plunged though the lily pads. Crawling was the only way. The scouts moved as fast as they could, their arms and legs pitching wildly beneath them. Frogs continued to leap all around, their panic an echo of the scouts’.

  About thirty yards from the shore, the sasquatch sprang up in front of Noah, who somersaulted onto his back and kicked the soles of his shoes into its chest. The beast splashed backward and became entangled in the long stems of the lily pads. Noah rolled onto his stomach and saw the now-distant portal back to the Grottoes. Just as Noah realized the other sasquatch was gone, a furry hand punched through the lily pads just behind his friends and swung through the air. The second sasquatch’s claws barely missed Ella’s head and sliced through a patch of frog-covered lily pads.

  “We’re cornered!” Richie hollered.

  The sasquatch behind Noah untangled itself and slid back into the water. The scouts swung their heads around, trying to locate their monstrous adversaries in the murky bog. There was no sign of them.

  “Which way?” Ella asked Noah. When he didn’t respond, she barked, “Noah—which portal?”

  “I . . .” Noah looked in front of them, behind them. He stared into the dark water over the ledge of the lily pads. “I don’t know,” he finally admitted.

  “Keep still,” Megan whispered. “If we can get both of them to one side, we can run to the portal in the other direction.”

  The scouts waited. No one moved. Or breathed. Even the frogs were still. Noah wondered how long the sasquatches could hold their breath.

  Ella reached over into Richie’s jacket.

  “What—”

  “Shhh!” Ella said. “Watch this.”

  When she withdrew her hand, she had Richie’s penlight in it. She flicked on the switch and heaved it toward the portal to the Grottoes. It smacked down on the lily pads twenty feet away, its light clouded by a puddle of water.

  “Get ready,” Ella said.

  The scouts braced themselves, suddenly conscious of what Ella was trying to do.

  Both sasquatches sprang up at the same time beside Richie’s penlight and swiped down at it, splashing water and ripping away lily pads. The scouts turned and crawled as fast as they could in the opposite direction.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Ella screamed.

  Noah’s heart pounded. The lily pads continued to swing out in differing directions, their flimsy stems collapsing.

  As the scouts closed to within twenty yards of the shore, Noah was suddenly hoisted into the air. Beneath him was a sasquatch. The beast shoved out its arms, and Noah flew through the air, his limbs flailing, then splashed down about forty feet away.

  As Noah sank, the world went pitch-black and his winter clothes filled with weight. Unable to touch the pond floor, he swam to the surface, gasping for air. On the now-distant stretch of lily pads, his friends had stopped crawling and were staring out at him.

  “Keep going!” Noah yelled.

  He realized the water was churning. All around him, something was swimming; small, flexuous bodies squirming along his arms and legs. They felt like tiny snakes.

  Between Noah and the lily pads, the sasquatch stood, seaweed and muck clinging to its torso. It raised its arms, displayed the piercing points of its long claws, then roared and ran at him through the waist-deep water.

  Noah turned to shore and swam, his arms swinging in wild arcs, his hands swatting through the things in the water. Waves spilled off his face and into his mouth. He understood nothing but to go—to go as fast as he could.

  Something cinched his ankle and pulled him back. His nostrils burned as water was forced into them. Peering over his shoulder, Noah saw the sasquatch looming over him, its arm cocked. Just when he expected its claws to come down and tear into his body, the sasquatch abruptly released his leg and took a frenzied step away, its arms swiping through the water.

  Noah peered into the dirty pond and realized what was happening. The tiny creatures were converging on the sasquatch. As hundreds streamed past Noah, he saw their dark, sinuous shapes.

  The sasquatch rolled its head left and right and turned its body in fitful jerks. The water swirled and splashed as the curvy creatures moved in on it. They began to wriggle up through its mangy hair, rising out of the water along its arms and torso. Noah saw they were four inches long, with tails and bulbous heads. Tadpoles. He saw at least thirty, then forty, then many more. They squirmed up the sasquatch’s arms and back and stomach. The confused beast swiped at its body, tearing out patches of fur. The tadpoles continued up its neck and over its head. Clutching its face, the sasquatch staggered to one side, lost its balance, then toppled into the water. The pond churned violently as a swell of tadpoles plunged after their prey, traces of moonlight gleaming on their slick bodies.

  Noah didn’t wait to see what was to become of the sasquatch. He turned and swam. A minute later, he pulled himself onto shore, muck oozing through his fingertips. As he scrambled to his feet, he saw the other scouts charging away from the lily pads. He merged into his friends, and together they headed for the gateway into the City of Species. Noah glanced around: there was no sign of the second sasquatch.

  “Where is it?” Noah called.

  “We don’t know!” Ella answered.

  The four of them dodged trees and hurtled through a web of exposed roots. They splashed through mossy puddles, ducked drooping vines, and plowed through patches of tall grass. Flying insects buzzed past, some pelting their cheeks and brows. Frogs of all sizes leaped out of the way. When they were twenty feet from the curtain, the second sasquatch jumped out of nowhere to cut them off. Hunched over, it growled, snarled, and spit.

  The scouts stood braced to run in any direction. Nearby, the tall grass shook and something big hopped out, startling them. Noah looked down to see a frog with a body bigger than a football and back legs almost as long as Noah’s arms. Another frog of equal size sprang out of the marshy surroundings. Then another and another. Their giant bodies were slick and green.

  “Richie!” Ella said. “What the heck are these things?”

  “Goliath frogs, I think.” Richie nervously jerked his head left and right. “Biggest frogs in the world.”

  Continuing to leap out, they crowded the space around Noah and his friends and then began to crawl onto one another, their dark, bulging eyes fixed forward. As the sasquatch lowered its head and peered around, drool spilled out from its scowl and plopped into a puddle. A frog jumped forward and landed near it. With a grunt, the monster lifted its big foot and tried to squash the frog, which sprang out of the way just in time. Mud and muck sprayed everywhere. When a second frog hopped forward, the sasquatch tried to kill it, too. A third frog advanced. Then a fourth, a fifth. In the air, their long legs dangled webbed feet as large and flat as flyswatters. One frog drove its snout against the monster’s leg. Another struck its stomach. One jumped down from a low branch and pushed off the side of its head. The sasquatch swung its claws, missing the green aggressors while slicing through low-hanging vines.

  As more and more frogs attacked, the sasquatch stepped back, blindly swinging its arms, batting an occasional frog out of the air. It got to within four feet of the portal, then three. Then it tripped over something and fell through the gateway, scores of goliath frogs pouncing after it. It was gone, and somewhere in the City of Species, it was still under attack.

  “Un-be-liev-a-ble,” Richie said as he watched the frogs launch themselves through the portal.

  Noah took off running back the way they had come. “C’mon,” he said. “We’ve got to find Tank.”

  Back at the pond, the scouts dropped down and crawled across the path of lily pads. As they went, Noah kept an eye out for the other sasquatch. There was no sign of it. Noah suspected the tadpoles—the weight of their unimaginable number—had drowned it.

  At the end of the lily pads, they crawled through the portal and stood up in the Grottoes. Tank was there, bleedi
ng from a cut above his eye and looking confused.

  “Tank!” Megan cried out. “You okay?”

  The big man nodded and forced a deep breath, his body shuddering. “You?” he managed to say.

  They quickly exchanged stories. The scouts learned that Tank had fought off a sasquatch in the Secret Koala Kastle. When a group of koalas got involved, the sasquatch fled across the sector. They chased after it, but it managed to escape.

  “I got to get back to the City of Species,” Tank said. “Can you guys find your way out of here? Just go back to east-northeast and come out through Chinchillavilla.”

  The scouts nodded.

  “Go as fast as you can. There might be others down here.” He glanced around, seeming to consider something. “This is not good. The sasquatches . . . they’re moving on the Grottoes, that’s for sure.” He struggled to catch his breath, then stared at the scouts. “They’re coming for your world.”

  Richie gasped and took a step back. Noah felt his heart sink.

  Without another word, Tank ran through the portal to Koala Kastle and was gone.

  The scouts didn’t hesitate. They hurried down the path that would leave the Grottoes and the increasingly dangerous world of the Secret Zoo behind.

  Chapter 16

  A Gift for Ella

  More than a day passed without contact from the Secret Zoo. At school, the scouts tried to keep engaged in their routines, but elements of English and roles of Congress mattered none to them anymore. They did their best to avoid Wide Walt, which proved easy enough as teachers and parent volunteers were keeping a sharp eye on him after the Monster Dome incident.

  On Thursday and Friday night, the Descenders continued their surveillance from Fort Scout. On both nights, Noah waited for his parents to fall asleep, tiptoed down to the kitchen, and peered out the window at the tree fort, a silhouette blurred by a sprawl of branches. Though he hoped to glimpse a Descender in action, he never did.

  Now, the scouts were lounging in their fort. It was Saturday evening, almost eight o’clock, and the moon had long since replaced the early-to-tire December sun. The only light in Fort Scout came from the colorful Christmas bulbs strung around the place. Outside, a few snowflakes dotted the darkness. They painted the grass white, but amounted to no real accumulation. Richie sat at a table, probing the dissected organs of an electrical part. Noah lay in an oversized beanbag, tossing a tennis ball toward the ceiling again and again. Megan thumbed through one of her schoolbooks, and Ella stared out a window.

  “It doesn’t even feel like Christmas is coming,” Ella complained.

  “Well, there’s the lack-of-snow factor,” Richie pointed out. “But I’d guess it has more to do with the fact that sasquatches are trying to kill us. It’s the kind of thing that can really put a damper on the holiday spirit.”

  Noah watched Ella leave the window and stroll across the fort. She stopped to press the button on a toy snowman sitting on a small table. Each of its three snowballs began to roll independently as a lousy hip-hop song professed he was a “Dancing Snowman! WOO! WOO! . . . Dancing Snowman! WOO! WOO!”

  “I really want to punch this thing,” Ella said.

  “You’re the one that bought it,” Megan reminded her.

  “I did?”

  “Last year, remember? You said you loved it because it was just the right amount of ‘perfectly annoying.’”

  Ella pulled her eyebrows up. “Oh. Right.” She watched the snowman shift its round rump in new directions. “How come now all I want to do is take its batteries out?”

  When no one responded, she trudged over to the giant beanbag and plopped down beside Noah, almost catapulting him off it. As Noah gripped the beanbag, the falling tennis ball bounced off his head and rolled into a corner.

  “And why haven’t we heard from Marlo in so long?” Ella asked.

  “It hasn’t been that long,” Noah answered. “Barely two days.”

  “Yeah, well . . . feels long to me. How am I supposed to get on with life with all this weirdness going on?”

  “I know,” Megan said. “Everything feels so . . . strange, like I’m living in a movie.”

  “A movie in a movie,” Richie added.

  Noah nodded. His old life seemed a distant memory, his old world a faraway place. His new world, the one that involved the Secret Zoo, was unlike anything he could have imagined.

  “Do you think Tank’s okay?” Megan asked. “I mean . . . he got cut pretty bad.”

  “Tank?” Richie said. “That guy could walk away from a nuclear bomb.” He held an electrical piece toward his friends. “Hey, what do you guys know about reading the color band of a resistor?”

  Ella said, “About as much as I know about building a satellite. Or milking a cow.”

  “Don’t ask me,” Megan said. “I don’t do electronics.”

  Noah shrugged.

  The scouts became quiet for a while. Christmas lights blinked on and off, casting shadows in new ways. Noah reached out his arm to reclaim his tennis ball. Megan read her book. Richie paddled his fingertips through his spill of circuitry. Ella rose, walked to the toy snowman, and pressed its button again. The snowman rolled and shimmied as his song played: “Dancing Snowman! WOO! WOO! . . . Dancing Snowman! WOO! WOO!” She turned it upside down and gutted its batteries.

  When the scouts started up conversation again, the topic returned to the Secret Zoo. An hour blurred past as they discussed the Grottoes, the portals, the City of Species, and the sectors. They recalled their adventures in the Wotter Tower, the Secret Metr-APE-olis, the Dark Lands, and the Secret Polliwog Bog. They wondered about the Shadowist, Kavita, the Forbidden Five, and all the Descenders they had yet to meet. There was so much to the Secret Zoo—so much they didn’t understand. Would they ever? Noah hoped they would.

  At some point Ella walked over to the small Christmas tree against one side of the fort. Less than two feet tall, the tree’s sparse limbs held only a few dull ornaments, bulbs that had barely avoided being pitched away several years ago. The tree, dry and frail, seemed to be warning the world that it could topple at any moment.

  “Honestly, Richie . . .” Ella said, knowing he had picked out the tree. “Did you swipe this thing from Charlie Brown, or what?”

  “Show it your love and it’ll show you its beauty,” Richie said. “Just like anything else.”

  Ella touched one of its limbs, and needles rained off her fingertips. “Talk about a fire hazard.” Four presents were tucked beneath the tree. Ella crouched and sifted through them, reading the tags. Then she stood straight, sighed, and again remarked, “It doesn’t even feel like Christmas.”

  A strand of lights flashed, revealing Ella to Noah. Her lips were quivering, her eyes brimming with tears. She wasn’t just being grumpy—she was truly sad. And as Noah abruptly realized why, his heart sank. Several years ago, Ella’s parents had divorced. Her father moved away, and these days Ella almost never saw him. It didn’t feel like Christmas to Ella not because there wasn’t snow, but because it was the time of year for families, and her father was gone. With everything going on with the Secret Zoo, Noah, Megan, and Richie had simply forgotten.

  Noah sprang off the beanbag and rushed over to the tree. “Let’s open the gifts!”

  “Seriously?” Ella asked.

  He scooped up his present. “Seriously.”

  “But we always wait until Christmas Eve,” Ella said. “It’s a tradition.”

  “What’s the value of tradition without the threat of change, huh?” Noah playfully bumped Ella. “This holiday season, I propose we become that threat.”

  “Wow . . .” Ella said. She quickly wiped away a tear before it could fall. “Big words and bigger ideas. You sounded like Richie.”

  As Ella turned to the gifts, Noah peered around her back and mouthed, Her dad to Richie and Megan, who then jumped to their feet and rushed to a spot by the tree.

  Ella said, “I’ve been so grouchy . . . I’m sorry, guys. I just miss . . .
you know . . .” She swallowed back a whimper.

  Megan draped her arm over Ella’s shoulder and pulled her close. “We know,” she said.

  Ella became very quiet for a very long time. The scouts waited for her. Her chest fluttered as she swallowed back a cry, then she said, “Sometimes . . . sometimes I . . . never mind.”

  Megan rested the side of her head against Ella’s. “It’s okay, girlfriend.”

  Everyone became quiet and shared in Ella’s pain. A few minutes passed. Different strands of light blinked on and off, rearranging the shadows. The wind whistled, and a distant car revved.

  “Who wants to go first?” Megan asked.

  Richie didn’t hesitate, and wrapping paper flew through the air. An ultra-sized pack of batteries was quickly revealed.

  “For your nerd-gear,” Noah said with a wink.

  “Thanks, man!”

  Megan went next. Her gift was from Ella. She quickly unwrapped twenty-four glow-in-the-dark Silly Bandz shaped like zoo animals. “Way cool!”

  Noah’s gift was from Megan. A new watch.

  “To replace the one you lost in the Secret Zoo,” she explained, referring to the watch he had ruined in the cold waters of Penguin Palace during his first journey inside.

  Noah smiled and slapped the watch across his wrist.

  Richie shoved the last gift at Ella. “Here. From me.”

  Ella turned the box over in her hands. Her eyes had dried up, and she seemed herself again. “Oh, great. Richie drew my name this year. Can’t wait to see what I got. A girl can never have too many penlights, you know.”

  The scouts chuckled together. Then Ella shredded the wrapping paper, reached into the box, and dangled the gift across her fingers. A charm bracelet. Silver with round links, it had five charms, each with one or more words on it.

  “What do they say?” Megan asked.

  Ella stayed quiet for what seemed a long time. Finally, she read them out loud. “Megan. Noah. Ella. Richie.” She paused for a few seconds then read the last charm. “Best Friends Forever.”