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Bobby was bored.

He easily slipped away from his mother when they arrived at the zoo. She was too busy queueing up at the beer stand to notice when he disappeared.

It wasn't the first time he wandered off at the zoo. An energetic, easily bored and not too bright nine year old, he was almost more than an attentive single mother could handle. He was definitely more than Karen could.

Left to his own devices he darted from animal enclosure to animal enclosure. A few people opened their mouths to comment on the unaccompanied child but Bobby had a keen sense of being watched and always vanished into some side walkway or nook before anything could be done behind it.

He spent a few minutes admiring the tiger at the big cat pavilion and laughed out loud when a lion, as bored as he was, decided to pass the time by doing something quite naughty with a lioness. Then he saw an adult staring at him and realized they were about to ask where his parents were. Before the words could come out he'd slipped away once more.

The elephants and rhinos in their bare habitats bored him. The wolverines were fuzzy, sleeping brown shapes barely visible behind logs and rocks. The reptile house was full of snakes and snakes and lizards who barely moved. Increasingly bored, Bobby looked for a distraction.

When he arrived at the giant anteater pen he stopped and stared. RUDY, the plaque said. GIANT ANTEATER. MYRMECOPHAGA LINNEAUS.

Rudy was a ridiculous looking animal, Bobby thought. Long tube snout, tiny eyes, massive clawed forelegs and a huge brush of dark furry tail as big as the rest of him put together.

Rudy was asleep on a concrete mockup of a termite mound, tail hanging down one side and tube nose hanging off the other.

Bobby looked around, discovered no one was in sight, and scrambled over the guardrail. Bobby was not very smart but he was quite strong and athletic and he slid down the concrete wall into the anteater enclosure without so much as scraping his knee. He was too fixated on the odd animal in front of him to realize he'd just slid down a six foot wall with a screened railing on top and that he was only four feet tall.

Bobby was bored. He walked up to the anteater's dangling snout and slapped it.

"C'mon," he said as the thing's little ink-dark eyes blinked open. "Do something."

Rudy blinked awake and found himself looking down at a human. He himself was three or four times the size of this boy and with powerful forelegs and long, sharp claws built for digging into concrete-hard termite mounts he was at no risk.

Bobby, though, was at considerable risk. Not only was the anteater perfectly capable of killing even an adult human with his claws, assuming one was foolish enough to come within reach, but Rudy was no ordinary anteater. In the anteater's stomach along with the food pellets and insects the zoo provided was a whole, now half digested rabbit that arrived in the gut quite alive. Rabbits often hopped into "harmless" Rudy's pen. They didn't hop far once they did.

The blame for it all could be traced back to a Bolivian shaman who liked to bet on his tribe's dog-fighting competitions. Instead of raising and training a vicious dog he turned his talents to altering a young giant anteater. The other villagers laughed when he brought the anteater to a dogfight. They stopped laughing when the beast sucked the dog into its long snout and swallowed it whole.

The whole episode would have vanished into history had that beast been killed in one of the many dogfights the shaman planned. Instead, a moment of carelessness during a storm led the shaman himself to be sucked up and swallowed. With its former master now making his way through its bowels the animal returned to the rainforest. Bigger and stronger than its rivals due to its diet of larger animals, it fathered many offspring.

A hundred and fifty years later a wide swath of jungle now has far fewer humans than it used to due to several each year disappearing down the gullets of what they thought were nearly harmless game animals. Even the occasional anaconda or jaguar learned to its dismay that some anteaters were much more dangerous that others. The ability sometimes skipped generations, and Rudy, child of normal anteaters, was thought to be normal himself until a zoo intern was sent to feed him and ended up doing exactly that.

The zoo now knew about his freakish abilities, but his oddness made him a valuable specimen and so they merely put up a protective railing and wall. There were warning signs, too. Bobby had bypassed them all and now beady anteater eyes followed the boy as he wandered around the pen.

Dangerous as Rudy was he was slow moving. Knowing that a human was too fast to catch he sat still and did his best to look harmless. It worked with rabbits. It worked with Bobby, too.

"Stupid anteater," Bobby said. He returned to the base of the false termite mound were Rudy sat. "Aren't you going to do anything?"

And as the boy moved directly beneath the anteater's snout, it did. Bobby didn't notice the beady eyes focusing on him, judging the distance, until a lick of pink tongue suddenly shot forth from its snout and wrapped around him.

"Hey! Leggo!" Bobby kicked as he was hoisted from the ground and dragged upward. The tongue wrapped around his upper arms was only as thick as a finger but it was strong and very sticky. Bobby kicked at the fake termite mound in an effort to push loose from the clinging tongue but he didn't realize he was in actual danger until the anteater's soft tube mouth expanded over the top of his head.

He sucked in a breath to scream for help, but it was too late. The anteater lowered its head and long snout at the same time the tongue retracted, and with a swift slide of wet flesh over dry human skin Bobby was reduced to a long wriggling bulge in its snout.

This was one of the creature's mutations. Normal giant anteaters have a rigid bony snout and can't ingest prey larger than a cockroach. Rudy, of course, was no normal anteater. With a toss of his long snout and a last pull of his tongue Bobby's shoes became part of the swelling in its long tube mouth.

It was over quickly. No one saw Bobby jump the railing, and in the few minutes he was along in the pen with Rudy no one happened by. No one saw the anteater lift its snout and swallow and no one saw the frantic struggle under the fur as the lumpy bulge moved from the snout and into the beast's long neck.

One gulp and the bulge was half gone, the internal musculature of the tube mouth squeezing Bobby into the waiting gullet. A second gulp and only a modest bulge at the base of the tube and a swelling in the neck revealed anything odd was going on. The anteater swallowed Bobby easily. One last gulp with the strong throat muscles wrapped all around him and the boy slid heavily into Rudy's stomach.

A giant anteater's gut is a muscular gizzard built to crush ants for easier digestion. So specialized is the beast that it relies on the pulverized prey's own defensive sting acids to digest them. By all rights a human that somehow arrived in an anteater's stomach should lie there for days, barely affected by its juices.

But Rudy was not a normal anteater here, either. The muscular sac stretched just enough to let eighty pounds of nine-year old in, then clenched down and began to knead. In the hot darkness Bobby tried to squirm to freedom, tried to scream, tried to breathe. He failed at all three. Even as he kicked his last the freely flowing stomach juices were beginning to dissolve his skin. Rudy had digested an entire human once before. Bobby's fate would be no different.

Rudy had barely moved in the course of his meal. He moved one hindpaw now a bit to accommodate the new bulge in his middle, and no more. By the time he spat out the shoe the undulations of his snout had pulled from Bobby's foot the struggle in his gut was all but over. Its stomach seemed bent on crushing Bobby as it would an ant. In this it would fail. It would have to settle for digesting him.

Rudy lay there peacefully for several minutes, drifting back into the nap its meal had interrupted, and then his small ears perked up once more. A half-shouted curse came from the platform behind the railing.

"Damn it!" Bobby's mother was so angered at the sight of the shoe near Rudy's perch that she dropped her beer. Once she realized Bobby was gone she ran from animal enclosure to animal enclosure, sure she'd find him staring at some beast. It had happened before. When she saw the distinctive blue and white shoe she knew what had happened at once. Bobby had thrown his shoe at the anteater because it wasn't doing anything interesting. This had happened before, too. Two months ago he'd thrown a shoe into the tiger enclosure and they never did get it back. Last she saw the big cat was chewing on it.

Proving that the apple does not fall far from the tree she clambered over the railing and slid down the angled wall. Those shoes were a birthday gift from her ex-husband and he'd ask awkward questions if Bobby weren't wearing them when next he came to visit. Just as well the anteater, though large and odd looking, was no threat. She could just go get the shoe.

Cursing under her breath she made her way to the fake termite mound where the shoe lay. As she bent down to pick it up she paused. If he'd thrown the shoe, why were there Bobby-sized footprints here?

Karen, besides being slightly drunk, was no smarter than than her son. Rather than realizing with alarm the footprints simply stopped directly in front of the anteater rather than doubling back or going around the concrete termite mound, she stood up and scratched her head. She looked up just in time for the beast's tube mouth to stick to her face like a suction cup.

Karen was a foot taller than her son and just tall enough for Rudy's snout to reach without the trouble of pulling her in with his tongue. It did dart out and wrap around her, incidentally pinning her arms to her sides, but by the time that happened a long slurp had pulled her in to the elbows. Once more a lumpy bulge formed in the anteater's long snout. Another slurp and it was stretched around her hips.

Half a woman made a ponderous bulge in Rudy's long snout and this meal took long enough to suck in that she had time to struggle. Just as Bobby had, she kicked blindly at the fake termite mount and Rudy reached out a claw and hooked it between her legs. The anteater's sharp claws scratched her cruelly but she had bigger problems as the powerful grip helped push her into the waiting maw. Suddenly there was nothing left of Karen but a kicking set of legs.

Another family chose that moment to arrive at the viewing platform over Rudy's enclosure. They were just too late to see what was happening. A brief argument over whether one child had received a larger ice cream cone than the other distracted them and in that moment Rudy lifted his long snout and swallowed. His powerful throat muscles took hold of Karen's hips and the bulge drained out of his snout as she was swallowed whole.

The good news was that Karen found her son. The bad was that he was squeezed in the folds of the same muscular stomach she arrived in. Thickly lubricated with saliva from the walls of the anteater's throat she slipped easily in to join him and the pair of shoes was reunited, one in her hand and swallowed with her and one still on his foot, protecting it at least briefly from the stomach acids that had already rendered his skin slimy to the touch.

Just as Bobby had, she squirmed, tried to scream, tried to breathe. She too failed as the powerful gizzard squeezed in on her, doing its best to crush this giant ant but spreading its acids thickly over her. The second and last bit of good news in Karen's horrible morning was that at least the undulations of the gizzard squeezed out all the air and lessened her suffering.

The child with the fractionally smaller ice cream stopped crying and laughed as the funny looking animal on the rock pillar let out a long, surprisingly high pitched belch. The parents and other child lingered briefly to look at the strange furry creature, hoping it would do something interesting.

Unfamiliar with Rudy, they didn't see that he now sported a ponderous bulge in his middle. One nine year old boy hadn't swollen him much, but adding the woman tripled the contents of his gut. In a looser stomach she might have lived long enough for them to see the struggle and call for help, but Rudy's muscular gizzard squeezed her into submission too quickly. With everything they carried swallowed with them, there was simply no sign to an untrained eye that anything had happened except the dropped beer. That was too common an event at any public place to arouse interest.

When Rudy failed to do anything more interesting than burp repeatedly, the family went on its way. Over the course of the day many others followed, all equally uninterested in the odd looking but boring animal sleeping on the rock. Digesting almost his weight in humans was a lot of work and Rudy barely moved for hours. It wasn't until the zoo closed for the evening that anyone noticed something was awry.

"Hey," said a docent. "That new people counting system says two less people left the zoo than bought tickets today."

"Double check," said the shift supervisor. "It gets confused by people getting hand stamps and coming back in."

"I did check," said the docent. "The numbers don't add up."

"All right," said the supervisor with a long-suffering sigh. "Everybody, we have a couple of people hiding somewhere. Again. Probably college students who want to make out in front of the tigers or something. Check everywhere, even the animal pens. Especially the pens."

There was much muttered complaining as the staff broke up to search. Finding people who don't want to be found in an area with this many nooks and crannies was a lot of work. This happened at least once a month and everyone was tired of it.

The good news was twenty minutes in, two different docents worked out what had happened. The bad news was that they worked out what had happened.

"Rudy's stuffed," said the first after running back from the anteater's pen. "I've never seen him so full. Bigger than when he ate that intern last year."

At that moment the docent assigned to review the security camera footage stuck his head out the door. "Chief, you gotta see this footage. Some kid and his mother jumped into Rudy's pen and -"

He stopped at the sight of the supervisor pinching the bridge of his nose. "Well, he ate them," the docent said apologetically.

A few minutes later the supervisor and three senior staff were at the overlook. Rudy blinked quizzically back at them. Somehow the anteater managed to look smug, and it was hard to blame him.

"All right, how much trouble is this?" That was the supervisor.

"Rudy's stomach handled that intern just fine," said the resident vet. "It rolled all his clothes up in a ball and he coughed it up the next day. His gizzard kneads his prey all the time. Wads stuff like clothes up and keeps it from going on through with the digestible stuff. We keep him in his pen out of sight for a day, he'll barf up the clothes and shit out the rest. No evidence if we burn it all like last time."

The supervisor nodded. Even if they'd gotten to Rudy right after it happened they'd be having the same discussion. The zoo's rule was don't do anything that might endanger an animal unless you were sure you could save the person. With Rudy's remorseless gizzard squeezing away a person wouldn't survive long in there at all. There just wouldn't be time to get them out without killing the anteater and even then they might end up dead. "If a visitor gets himself in trouble," the saying went, "he can find his own way out." These two would have to find their own way out of Rudy's guts.

"How do we keep this from happening again? Sooner or later it's going to get out."

"Signs," said the least senior docent.

"We already have signs," said another, and pointed to the DO NOT FEED OR ANNOY THE ANIMALS sign bolted to the handrail between them and Rudy.

"We may not be able to stop it from happening," said the vet. "But the right signs may make us less legally liable."

It wasn't a solution that made anyone happy. But barring getting rid of most of the animals - even the herbivores could hurt or kill someone, much less the polar bears or Rudy - all they could do was try to make it less likely that idiots would jump into the pens.

And so shortly thereafter two new types of signs showed up around the zoo. The first was a smug looking lion licking its chops with the caption DON'T LET YOUR CHILDREN WANDER. THERE'S NO TELLING WHERE THEY MIGHT END UP.

And the second, partly inspired by Bobby's antics on the now-erased tape, replaced the existing ones by moving the words around:

DO NOT ANNOY THE ANIMALS, the new signs read. OR YOU WILL FEED THEM.