Kingdom Keepers VII

by Pearson, Ridley

  “And if he gives you any trouble, I’ll run circles around him and climb him like a tree. He won’t forget that, believe me!” Timon proudly displays the razor-sharp claws on his forepaws, which he waves around like hands.

  The DHIs climb aboard and Pumbaa proves as good as his word, taking off so quickly that Finn, in the lead, has to grab the warthog’s mane to keep from falling off. Amanda grips Finn around the waist, then Jess, with Maybeck sitting astride near the point where Pumbaa’s mane ends. Timon, down on all fours, circles them playfully.

  “That old goat stayed back with the bird!” Timon hollers.

  Pumbaa skids to a halt. “First stop, Casey Jr.! Will you be needing a return fare?”

  “How do we find you?” Amanda asks.

  “We’re always up for a good laugh!” The two chuckle and bound away, gone in seconds.

  “Whatever that means,” Maybeck says.

  “Quick,” Finn says. “Before we’re seen.”

  “We’re the size of clothespins. Who’s going to see us?” Maybeck asks.

  “Shrinking us is part of Philby’s plan,” says Jess, “to avoid our being seen by the security cameras. That’s why he was testing it out on Charlene in the first place.”

  “Is that what he told you?” asks Maybeck. “You gotta watch out for that kid. The Professor is prone to exaggeration.”

  “Look who’s talking!” Finn hollers.

  “Hey! Are you all coming or not?” Jess has a lead on them.

  The perspective of his newly massive surroundings overwhelms Finn. For a moment, he loses his balance to vertigo. It takes him twenty paces to cover the distance of a full-size human stride. He feels as if he’s walked miles by the time Jess leads them onto a paved path; they pass a blue-roofed structure that looks like part of a fruit stand. Jess climbs over some pieces of gravel that resemble giant boulders; it looks like she’s mountaineering. Finn follows, careful of every hand and toe-hold. Once up, he leans back to help Amanda but lets Maybeck take care of himself, a gesture he knows the other boy appreciates.

  Jess leads the way through dense planting; they pause at a railroad track that to creatures their size looks as wide as a twelve-lane highway. There’s a solid steel wall to cross over, supported by inordinately large wooden beams—the railroad ties, Finn realizes.

  “This will not be easy,” Jess says. “The metal is superslick.”

  Maybeck lays his hand on the rail. “It’s vibrating. News alert: the train is running.”

  The Keepers have encountered such unexpected anomalies many times before: segments of an attraction operating after hours. The train running implies the work of the Overtakers. Finn and Maybeck understand this fact and acknowledge it with an exchange of glances; for now they keep it from the two Fairlies. No reason to scare them if their fears are unfounded.

  “Heads up! Stay alert!” cautions Finn, as close as he’ll get to an all-out warning.

  They stand in front of the steel rail, their DHIs shimmering.

  “In my dream,” Jess says, “we climbed over. It was hard.”

  “You sketched a locomotive,” Amanda reminds her.

  “Yes.”

  “Not good,” Amanda says, “if it happens to be coming right at us.”

  “That occurred to me. Yes.”

  “Occurred to us all,” Maybeck says. As an artist, he clearly grasped more of the meaning of Jess’s sketch than Finn, who barely remembers more than the lamp in the middle of the confusion.

  Jess removes the sheet of paper from her back pocket. Again, it sticks to her fingers like flypaper, but remains a projection. She unfolds it, and they study the locomotive.

  “It’s coming right at you. That does not look so good,” Finn says.

  “It looks fatal,” Maybeck agrees.

  “So we walk through it,” says Amanda. “Right?” she asks Finn, turning to him and meeting his eyes.

  “Absolutely.” The connection between them intensifies. For a moment, there is only this girl, a castle rising up behind her. She is the princess of that castle. She is everything.

  “So…” Maybeck is clearly about to complain.

  “Company!” Jess cries.

  Two scruffy feral cats, one a tailless Manx, have spotted the four chipmunk-size DHIs. Lowering their heads, bodies frozen in place, the cats sense a late-night snack.

  The train rail’s vibration intensifies, approaching a clatter.

  “Push all thought away. Focus instead on blank nothingness. Close your eyes if you have to. Here we go. Jess, you first. Then Terry. Amanda and I’ll go last.”

  Amanda keeps her eyes locked with Finn’s. She looks frightened. He shakes his head and forces a caring smile.

  Jess turns toward the rail. Her eyelids flutter shut, and her DHI’s blue outline appears to shimmer. She steps forward and passes through the metal barrier.

  The Manx cat stalks toward them, seeming seductively motionless, and yet somehow moving. Finn edges away from the others as Maybeck follows Jess. He vanishes. The metal rail is jumping as the locomotive approaches.

  “Made it!” shouts Jess, excitedly.

  The Manx focuses on Finn, lowering its massive head to the concrete.

  “Go!” Finn tells Amanda without taking his eyes off the Manx.

  “No. Back up toward the rail. We go together.”

  “Since when do you give the orders?” Finn asks, still enmeshed in a stare-down with his would-be attacker.

  The cat springs. Its outstretched paw, claws extended, aims for Finn’s face. Finn’s feet betray him, unwilling to move. Five claws like sharpened meat hooks whir through the air; Finn is about to have the flesh of his fear-frozen face ripped from the bone.

  He’s struck by a ferocious wind. The paw moves up as if yanked hard by a rope.

  Finn cocks his head to see Amanda, arms outstretched. She has pushed, throwing Finn over and altering the course of the cat’s paw.

  “We…go…now!” she shouts. She takes a step forward.

  Finn rolls, passing through the rail. Sits up. He can see the train coming at him.

  No Amanda.

  A few feet away, Amanda bangs into the rail, unable to get through. Her strength has lessened because of her telekinetic push, limiting the power and clarity of her DHI. She’s disoriented; Finn rolled and disappeared, but she can’t follow. The cat with no tail turns its attention on her. She senses she’s about to be lunch meat. She bangs her balled fists against the metal.

  The cat takes a step toward her. Another.

  Her ability to push something so big is lost; she used everything she had to save Finn. “Finn!” she hollers.

  * * *

  Finn moves well before he hears her call his name. Forcing his mind—and his pounding heart—to still, he dives at the rail, arms out, head first, and passes through it, arriving at Amanda’s feet.

  He catches the movement of the cat out of the corner of his eye, somehow knowing there’s no time to think or calculate or plan. He wraps his arms around Amanda’s knees and lifts, pushing her from below up and over the rail.

  As the cat strikes out, Finn somersaults. With a whoosh, he finds himself on the other side of the rail, nearly on top of Amanda.

  The train is bearing down on them. Twenty yards…Fifteen…

  Finn grabs Amanda by the hands and swings her around; once—twice—and he releases her, sending her over the far rail.…But not quite. She lands on the rail and stands. The train is a only a few yards away.

  “Fi-i-i-i-inn!”

  Finn sees he’s taken too long. He looks toward the rail, thinking: Never gonna make it. He closes his eyes, imagining a pinprick of light. Amanda jumps to safety. Finn turns to the train and opens his arms wide.

  It runs him over.

  * * *

  Responding to an urgency fueled by Amanda’s hysteria, Maybeck is the first to vault atop the rail to look for Finn.

  Nothing.

  Reluctant to tell the others, he calls back, “Just a seco
nd—still looking!”

  “What’s wrong?” Amanda calls out.

  His tight voice has belied his confidence. “I…ah…Just a minute.” He jumps over the rail, landing on a railroad tie, unable to face telling them the truth.

  Maybeck wonders what he’s looking for. What happens when a partial hologram is struck by a moving locomotive? Your pixels are scattered, he answers himself. Your projection stops and your human self is trapped in SBS for eternity. He hopes that for once he’s wrong about something.

  Idly, brain whirring with shock, he wonders at all the thousands of people who have fallen into comas over the centuries, never to wake up again. Is this strictly a medical condition, or does it have something to do with a similar phenomenon? How long have groups of determined individuals battled the supernatural villains of the world? In Europe, such folklore stretches back for centuries. In China, for millennia.

  He searches the tracks for bits and pieces—a sparkle, a jewel of fading color, evidence he has no desire to discover. He wonders if Philby can possibly reconstruct what was once a compromised DHI. No person could face an oncoming train without fear—to do so would be superhuman—so what happened to the human percentage of Finn when the train hit?

  The thought of telling the girls is devastating. But not knowing will hurt them even more. He hears Amanda’s sobs, hears Jess comforting her, and realizes he is in charge. He wonders what he’s supposed to do.

  Lead.

  It’s not something Maybeck’s comfortable with; at times, he can barely keep himself together, much less others. He hears his snide remarks to Finn and Philby replay in his head, sees himself as an idiot for making them. How’s he supposed to comfort Amanda? Shouldn’t he get word to Philby? What’s next in the quest for the lamp? He’s overwhelmed.

  For a moment he wishes it had been him and the train instead of Finn, but only for a moment, as again he ponders Finn’s fate and a lump lodges in his throat. He wishes he could take back a lot of things he’s said to his friend over the years. The thought, friend, overwhelms him with grief.

  Until the Keepers came along he was a loner, limiting his time at school and spending every other minute with his aunt in her pottery shop, Crazy Glaze. He only auditioned to be a Disney Host Interactive because his aunt needed help with building his college fund, and the winners of the audition were being offered college tuition. Now, years later, he has more than friends. He has a family. And though his natural inclinations tend toward sarcasm and cynicism, Charlene has explained to him that this is anything but natural; instead, it is a kind of defense, a wall he put up to avoid being hurt by other people’s comments.

  Family. And in a weird way, for all his faults, Finn was the head of the family, the older-brother figure, while Wayne served as grandfather.

  Maybeck drops to his knees. He doesn’t know a lot about prayer. His aunt takes him to church, but it’s mostly singing. He doesn’t believe, but he doesn’t disbelieve, either. He’s still waiting for some kind of message, one he suspects will never come. His aunt says faith is a decision. A person must decide if he or she is the end all or if there might be something bigger at work, that belonging and standing on one’s own are not incompatible ideas. He raises his eyes to the sky and pleads with whatever is out there to throw a thunderbolt or set a bush on fire, send him some signal or give him a random thought of what he’s supposed to do. “Bring Finn back!” He finds himself mumbling repeatedly. “And if you can’t do that, tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

  He catches himself kneeling and jumps to his feet. Has no idea where that came from, why that, of all things, was his first reaction. He feels foolish and is glad no one saw. He’s got to get the girls to the lamp. He’s got to continue what they started. A flicker of realization flutters in his mind—I know what I’m supposed to do! He takes another glance at the night sky. Says, “Nah…” And passes to the other side of the rail to meet the crying girls.

  “We can’t assume the worst,” he says, having just done precisely that himself, and wondering if this is what Finn and Philby do on a daily basis. “The good news is: he’s not spread all over the place.”

  He regrets phrasing it like that, realizing there are some adjustments he needs to make—fast. He marvels at this moment of insight, wondering if he knows the real Finn and Philby, if their Keeper selves might be entirely different from their normal selves.

  “But—” Amanda starts.

  “You don’t want to go there,” Maybeck says, cutting her off. “It serves no purpose. ‘A lazy mind assumes the worst. Optimism fuels possibility.’” He has no idea—none!—where this comes from; he must have picked it up from his aunt. She’s constantly laying out aphorisms for him, maybe hoping they’ll rub off. And they have, he supposes, because here he is, regurgitating them.

  “We keep going. We follow Jess’s sketch—get to the lamp. The train was there, in her drawing. The lamp’s in the center. The lamp’s important. It’s why you crossed over in the first place. Finn—”

  At the mention of Finn’s name, Amanda breaks down sobbing again.

  “Okay. My mistake! No more mentioning…him. Okay? By any of us. We’re going to ‘fuel possibility,’ right? We’re going to make this happen. We need to get to the lamp and do whatever it is you do with a lamp like that and then get back to the—”

  It dawns on him that he has no idea what to wish for. Finn was going to do the wishing. A new pair of running shoes won’t do the trick. They’d be nice, but they won’t exactly help the Keepers. Kill Maleficent? That’s been handled. What was Finn going to ask?

  “You okay?” Jess asks. Except for a few snail trails left down her cheeks by digital tears, she has remained remarkably composed.

  “I…yeah…the lamp,” he says.

  “This way.” Jess pulls Amanda to her feet and leads them down an embankment to the edge of a manmade waterway. The canal looks as wide as the Mississippi River to the group of shrunken DHIs. She points out the waterfall on their side of the Storybook Land canal. “Through that and into the cave.”

  “A shortcut!” Maybeck cries, realizing they’ve bypassed a mountain village, the Sultan’s palace, and a half dozen other obstacles. “If we can max out the v1.6, we won’t have to get wet in the waterfall.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Amanda groans, sorrow weighing down her words like stones.

  Jess is careful with her footing, testing both the substance of her DHI and how stable the rocks are underfoot.

  The girls are hardly DHI novices, Maybeck remembers, though they lack the crossover experience of the Keepers. In any other setting, Jess’s tentativeness would be cute, but Maybeck is on edge, worried for the three of them as he’s never worried before. This leadership stuff isn’t so great, he thinks.

  As Jess hesitates before the waterfall, Maybeck’s unease demands he look behind them. His heart sinks as he spies a pack of dogs cresting a hill from the direction of the Alpine Village. Big, angry dogs, running extremely fast. It takes him a fraction of a second to realize that the dogs are scaled to his size, not monster dogs of the real world, but dogs that live in Storybook Land. And not dogs at all: wolves. Big, black wolves.

  A shot rings out. A gunshot. Amanda and Jess spin to take in what Maybeck’s witnessing: a miniature man in lederhosen and knee socks brandishing a musket. He stands on the ridge, reloading his single-shot musket. A wolf has fallen behind the pack, hit by the bullet. The animal rolls and the pack turns instantly, retreating to feed on the fallen animal.

  “Go!” Maybeck says, pushing Amanda in the back and shoving her into Jess, who is forced through the waterfall. Amanda is next.

  The clatter of an approaching train rises. It has lapped the circuit and is approaching again.

  Maybeck can’t keep his eyes off the pack. It devours the fallen wolf in seconds. Musket Man has the gun raised up to his shoulder. Maybeck sees a puff of smoke; hears the dull report a fraction of a second later because of the distance. Something tells him to drop;
he falls like a marionette with its strings cut. A chip flies out of the rock behind him: Musket Man is aiming at him. He’s not on their side. Maybeck scrambles backward as Musket Man stands the gun up on the stock to reload. The wolves are far faster than anything Maybeck has seen. They’re nearly upon him. He’s not going to make it.

  The sound of the train grows louder, deafening Maybeck. The train passes. A blur of color tumbles from his right. It’s like a wheel or a rock or a…person doing somersaults.

  “Finn!” Maybeck screams at the top of his lungs.

  The girls jump back through the waterfall, nearly stepping on Maybeck’s head.

  “No!” he says to them, grabbing Amanda by the ankle. “Go!”

  So much for his leadership qualities. Neither girl moves—they’re transfixed by the sight of the approaching wolves.

  A tumbling Finn somersaults directly across the path of the wolves, distracting them. The pack turns toward him.

  Amanda drops to her knees in tears.

  Musket Man pulls a long rod back out from his gun and hoists the weapon to his shoulder.

  Finn reaches the edge of the canal, the lead wolf nearly upon him. He stands up. “Come and get it!” he says, opening his arms invitingly. He steps back and falls.

  Maybeck scoops Amanda up under the arms and drags her forcibly toward the waterfall as a shot rings out. A musket ball penetrates the dirt where Amanda was kneeling.

  Finn hangs from the ledge by his fingers. He taunts the lead wolf. “Tasty young boy!”

  The lead wolf loses control on the slick concrete. Trying to slow, he instead slides off the ledge and into the water; the other wolves follow their leader. Paddling wildly, the wolves are carried off by the current.

  Finn’s ability to maintain his DHI state makes pulling himself up nearly effortless. He hurries through the waterfall and into the dark cave.

  Maybeck and the girls rush forward to meet him. When all the hugging and gushing settle down, Finn explains that he managed to fully control his DHI. His hologram never moved; it was absorbed by the locomotive as he maintained his clarity of purpose. As the first tingles of compromise teased his fingertips, “I jumped up and grabbed some piece of the undercarriage. In seconds I was too far away, so I spent a lap inching to the outside of the train car. When we got here, I swung off, spotted the wolves, and…well, I improvised.”