Chapter 1: The Escape 1 THE ESCAPE
I would never have seen the whale explode if a kangaroo hadn’t burned down my house.

The kangaroo was a four-year-old male named Hopalong Cassidy, and the fire wasn’t entirely his fault. It’s not like kangaroos go around plotting arson. All that Hopalong was truly guilty of was trying to escape.

I know this because I witnessed the entire event.

My name is Teddy Fitzroy. I’m fourteen years old, and I live at FunJungle Wild Animal Park.

FunJungle is the most popular tourist attraction in all of Texas, an enormous theme park and zoo featuring many of the finest animal exhibits ever built. Both my parents work there—my mother is the head primatologist, while my father is the official photographer—and because their jobs require them to be at FunJungle at all hours, we have employee housing.

But while FunJungle had spared no expense to create incredible habitats for the animals, with state-of-the-art facilities and innovative designs, the park had really skimped when it came to providing lodging for humans. The public relations department had named the staff housing area Lakeside Estates, but it was merely a group of mobile homes haphazardly arranged in the woods behind the employee parking lot. They were supposed to be deluxe models, but my father suspected they were actually defective merchandise that the dealer hadn’t been able to sell. (J.J. McCracken, the billionaire owner of FunJungle, also owned the mobile home company.) Our home was slightly lopsided, with bargain-basement appliances and walls so thin you could hear what neighbors were watching on television. Even worse, the utilities were barely functional. The septic system often smelled worse than the elephant house, and the electricity conked out on a regular basis.

Which was why I wasn’t home during the fire. The mobile home park had suffered a power failure—on the hottest day of the year, no less.

Central Texas is known for being hot and humid, but that mid-August day was brutal. The state was suffering through its worst heat wave in a decade, and that afternoon it had been 116 degrees in the shade. Even animals that lived in deserts, like the camels and fennec foxes, seemed to think this was too much and refused to go outside. Despite this, the park was still busy; it was the height of tourist season, and parents who had built up the trip for weeks didn’t have the heart to tell their children they weren’t going. (In addition, many guests had prepaid for nonrefundable park admission packages.) But everyone who had dared to venture outdoors looked miserable. They slouched about in the heat, gulping down overpriced sodas to stay hydrated and griping that none of the animals were doing anything but napping. The Polar Pavilion, which was refrigerated to arctic temperatures for the polar bears and penguins, had a two-hour line to get inside.

I had spent most of the day with my best friend, Xavier, and my girlfriend, Summer, trying to find ways to stay cool. Xavier was a junior volunteer at FunJungle, and though his shift at the giraffe feeding station had been canceled due to the heat, he still came to work because he was a wannabe field biologist, and FunJungle was his favorite place on earth. Meanwhile, Summer was the daughter of J.J. McCracken. All three of us had befriended many FunJungle employees over the past year, so we were able to finagle our way into the VIP lane for the Raging Rapids ride, which we went on so many times in a row that I lost count.

After repeated drenching, our clothes were so waterlogged, we thought we might be able to stay cool enough to ride out the rest of the afternoon in my trailer, even with its anemic air-conditioning. Lakeside Estates was located only a short walk from the theme park rides at FunJungle. But as we approached my house, the power blew.

We could tell by the sound. Everyone who was home had their air conditioners going full blast. One second, the machines were all humming so loud, it sounded like we were inside an enormous wasps’ nest—and then, suddenly, everything went silent. Two seconds after that, the profanity began. We could hear everyone through their paper-thin walls as they cursed the lousy power system, the cheap air conditioners, and Summer’s father, who had skimped on building the place.

We happened to be directly outside the trailer of Drew Filus, the chief ornithologist, when he unleashed an extremely long stream of insults about J.J. McCracken, and then made a few shocking suggestions about what J.J. could do with the crummy air conditioners he had bought. It went on for a good three minutes.

“Sorry you had to hear that,” I said to Summer, once it had finally ended.

She shrugged, unconcerned. “I’ve heard far worse than that about Dad.”

Even though it was getting late in the afternoon, it was still miserably hot. My clothes had already dried out, save for my soggy shoes and damp underwear. Evidence of the drought was all around us: the ground was parched, the grass was brown and brittle, and the tiny pond that FunJungle public relations amusingly referred to as a lake had completely evaporated, leaving only a stretch of dried-out mud.

“Guess the trailer is out of commission,” Xavier observed morosely. “Where to now?”

“Maybe my dad’s office?” Summer suggested. “I’m sure the administration building still has air-conditioning. The whole park has backup generators.”

“Except employee housing,” I groused. The administration building was all the way on the other side of FunJungle, a twenty-minute walk through the heat. Standing around and griping wasn’t going to make things any better, though, so we started back through the desiccated woods toward FunJungle’s rear employee entrance.

Our route took us through the staff parking lot, a wide stretch of simmering asphalt that felt like the Sahara as we crossed it. Numerous employees were headed home for the day, but their cars were so hot after baking in the sun for hours that no one could get right in and drive away. Instead, most had started their vehicles and were letting them run with the windows open and the air-conditioning cranked, waiting for them to cool down.

Kevin Wilkes was standing in the shade of his rusted pickup truck, killing time by setting off leftover fireworks from the Fourth of July.

Kevin was one of the dimmer FunJungle employees. He had originally been hired as a security guard but had lost that job after I discovered he’d been unwittingly feeding the giraffes local plants that were making them sick. Now Kevin had been demoted to janitorial work in the FunJungle Emporium, as it was about as far away from the animals as you could get.

In the month before Independence Day, fireworks stands sprouted like weeds along highways all through Texas. Kevin had blown an entire week’s pay on several crates, planning to put on an epic fireworks display to impress a woman he liked at his apartment complex, but the complex had banned him from doing it, rightfully fearing disaster. They also refused to let him store the fireworks in his apartment, as it was a violation of three dozen safety codes. So Kevin had been stuck with several thousand low-quality fireworks, which he kept in the bed of his pickup.

When we came across him, he had just lit a few spinners, which were whirling and sparking on the asphalt. “Hey!” he called out to us. “Want to set off some fireworks?”

“You shouldn’t be doing that,” Summer told him. “The woods around here could catch fire in an instant.”

Kevin frowned, although he appeared more upset that we had rejected his offer than he did about being dressed down by a fifteen-year-old girl. “That’s why I’m only setting off spinners, rather than bottle rockets or fountains. I’m not an idiot, you know.”

Summer and Xavier both looked at me in a way that said they didn’t agree with that statement.

“Even the spinners could start a fire,” I warned Kevin.

“How?” he challenged. “The woods are all the way over there. And I’m being super careful. See?” He lit a string of poppers and made a show of being vigilant in case of trouble.

The poppers were extremely cheap fireworks that were basically just tiny packets of gunpowder. All they did was make a series of loud bangs.

I had to admit the blasts were relatively small and contained and probably not capable of reaching the woods in the distance. However, the sudden noise created its own problems.

Several keepers who were waiting for their cars to cool down mistook the sound for gunfire. They screamed and dropped to the ground.

Hopalong Cassidy was startled by the noise as well.

My friends and I had been too distracted by the heat and Kevin’s fireworks to notice that a kangaroo was being delivered to the park.

Normally, zoos try to time the delivery of animals after official hours, so there aren’t tourists around, but FunJungle stayed open much later than normal zoos, and, while the truck that was delivering Hopalong was air-conditioned, the veterinary staff still didn’t want to keep an animal locked inside a vehicle on a hot day any longer than they had to.

In recent years, zoos across the United States had recognized that kangaroos—and their close relatives, wallabies—were so docile that they could be displayed in a way that most other animals could not: in large enclosures that visitors could actually walk through. FunJungle had quickly jumped on the bandwagon and was modifying its Australian area to feature an exhibit like this. The Land Down Under would allow guests to wander a path right through the marsupial habitat. It was scheduled to open in the fall, and in the meantime, FunJungle was trying to acquire every kangaroo and wallaby it could.

Hopalong was a western gray kangaroo who had been born at the Milwaukee Zoo. At four years old, he was already mature, six and a half feet tall and 120 pounds. He had a reputation for being good-tempered and comfortable around humans, although the FunJungle staff was still taking every precaution to ensure that nothing went wrong. Hopalong had been delivered in a specially designed trailer with plenty of room for him to move about during his long drive from Milwaukee, but the truck was too big to drive through the park to the Land Down Under. So Hopalong was being transferred into a crate on a smaller truck in the employee parking lot, which would then take him through the behind-the-scenes area to his new home. Luring Hopalong from his comfortable, air-conditioned trailer into the crate out in the heat was a delicate process. In their natural habitat in Australia, wild kangaroos could occasionally face temperatures as hot as it was that day, but Hopalong was used to the milder weather of Wisconsin. The keepers were trying to coax him with biscuits that had been developed in the FunJungle kitchens to appeal to kangaroos.

Hopalong had just been edging from the trailer into the crate when the poppers went off.

Not only was the kangaroo startled, but his handlers were too. They quickly took cover, leaving the crate unsecured in the back of the truck. It shifted slightly, so that it was no longer flush with the trailer. Instead, there was a gap of a few inches.

Hopalong immediately took advantage of this.

A kangaroo’s huge hind legs are incredibly strong. The animals can cover twenty-five feet in a single leap, jump six feet vertically, or travel at thirty-five miles per hour for short bursts. Hopalong wedged one of his enormous feet into the gap and, with a quick flex of his leg muscles, sent the crate skidding back into the truck.

Then he dropped to the ground and bounded across the parking lot, fleeing for the woods.

His route took him directly toward me and my friends.

Summer, Xavier, and I scrambled out of his way. You never want to stand in the path of a big animal. An herbivore can really hurt you if it runs into you at full speed.

Kevin, on the other hand, didn’t even see Hopalong coming.

He was busily lighting some sparklers and backed directly into Hopalong’s way. The kangaroo pivoted to avoid a head-on collision, but his powerful tail thwacked Kevin in the chest.

A kangaroo’s tail is almost as powerful as its legs. Hopalong’s was a thick club of taut muscle, and it sent Kevin reeling backward. The sparklers flew from Kevin’s hand and landed in the bed of his truck.…

Right in a crate of unused fireworks.

“Uh-oh,” Kevin said.

“Get away!” I yelled, then grabbed Summer’s hand and raced across the parking lot.

Xavier and Kevin were right on our heels.

Behind us, the crate of fireworks erupted. Hundreds of roman candles, fountains, and aerial repeaters went off at once. Spinners crackled and poppers burst while rockets and colored balls of light blasted into the sky. So many fireworks were detonating that the truck trembled as though it were at ground zero in an earthquake.

All the noise spooked Hopalong even more. The kangaroo bolted out of the parking lot and down the road that led to the park exit.

Kevin had sprung for a few expensive fireworks—the type that professionals would use in their shows—and those now exploded in the air high above, creating floral blooms and starbursts. The sizzling embers rained down around us. A few landed in the drought-parched woods that surrounded employee housing.

Which was how the forest fire began.