Kingdom Keepers VI

by Ridley Pearson

“Can Storey Ming get up here?”

  “And do what? She thinks Maleficent may have crossed over.”

  Finn looked dumbstruck. “This is not good.”

  “Okay, everyone! This time’s for real!” Andy shouted.

  The makeup artist, Nichole, rushed into frame, touching up hair and patting noses with white sponges.

  “You guys are sweating like you just ran a marathon,” she said.

  “No need for nerves,” Andy said, playing the coach. “You’ve done this dozens of times.”

  If you only knew, Finn thought.

  Philby caught Finn’s attention and pointed to two tripods supporting light panels. His hand signal told Finn to take the panel to the left. But take it where? How? Finn wondered.

  “The blind leading the blind, eh, Andy?” Philby called out to the director while looking at Finn. He was trying to communicate something. Finn shook his head; Philby pantomimed the motion of twisting something. “On the back,” he mouthed, hoping Finn could read his lips.

  “Stand by!” Andy said. “Roll cameras.”

  The two cameramen called back, “Speed!”

  “Action!”

  That word jogged Finn’s thought: Philby hadn’t been clowning around with the lighting crew; he’d been figuring out how to operate their equipment.

  Light panels. Turn knob. Blind leading the blind.

  Finn understood.

  “Action,” Andy called out. Finn faced the camera.

  “Hey, guys! Every day’s a Disney Dream, every meal a banquet when you’re cruising with the Disney Cruise Line!”

  “A Disney Dream?” Charlene said on cue. “It’s Disney Magic.”

  “Or,” said Maybeck, “a Disney Fantasy. From the Caribbean to the Mediterranean, you’ve never cruised like this.”

  “It’s time,” Philby said, checking his watch, “to welcome you aboard!”

  That cued Maleficent to enter the shot. Willa turned simultaneously.

  “Oh, no!” she said, reciting the memorized script. “Look who’s here!”

  The five Keepers looked back at once.

  Maleficent stood at the rail, her black and purple robes swirling in the wind, her green index finger pointing skyward into a stunningly blue, serene sky.

  Finn spotted at once what was missing. Maleficent had no handler. All Cast Members playing Disney characters were accompanied by a fellow Cast Member guide whenever appearing in public. The fact that Maleficent lacked a handler suggested she was not a Cast Member playing her character. She was the real thing. Or a 2.0 hologram of the real thing.

  Willa and Finn took off for the lighting panel nearest the railing. Maybeck and Charlene dove for the tripod closest to them.

  Willa aimed the panel higher while Finn found and twisted two knobs on the back. Light burst from the panel, like a car switching to high beams. Maybeck and Charlene did the same. Maleficent cried out, trying to shield her eyes.

  As much as Philby had annoyed Finn lately, the idea of blinding Maleficent was a stroke of genius. Even holograms had to see.

  “What the—?” Andy managed to say as the Keepers ran toward him. Charlene hooked Andy’s arm and dragged him with her. Each of the Keepers snagged other members of the film crew.

  It sounded like a jet had broken the sound barrier somewhere up in the clear blue sky. Maybeck looked up and over his shoulder.

  He hollered, “Hit the—”

  An explosion rocked the deck as a bolt of lightning struck. Sparks flew from the film crew’s gear.

  Maybeck shoved the cameraman aside to safety, crossed through the smoke, and threw a football block on Charlene and Andy just as a second spike of lightning struck.

  Maybeck screamed and lay flat. Gray smoke swirled.

  Passengers in the ship’s swimming pools cried out. Parents grabbed their children and ran for cover.

  As he was knocked off his feet by the concussion of the lightning strike, Finn looked in the direction of Maleficent. She was gone.

  Returned, he thought.

  His head thumped against the deck, and his eyes found a piece of the staircase that led to the AquaDuck—the world’s first enclosed waterslide on a cruise ship. He saw bare feet running up the stairs. He stared at the steps for a good long time, finally making the connection to the illustration in the journal.

  Something nagged at him: stairs? steps? bare feet? He couldn’t place it.

  He also spotted something else, something more sinister: a black crow on the rail of the upper deck from which the fireworks were launched. Diablo, Maleficent’s sidekick.

  The crow lifted its beak and cawed shrilly.

  What happened next made Finn’s blood run cold. He’d seen such scenes in movies: the boy and girl high on a skyscraper roof, the bad guys coming after them and then, from out of nowhere, helicopters surface from below, rising high, searchlights aimed at the bad guys.

  But this wasn’t helicopters. And no bad guys were chasing the Keepers. It was frigate birds—long-winged black seabirds with white necks and heads. The birds’ five-foot wingspans were oddly angular, like something attached to a stealth fighter. First, there were five or six, then twenty, then fifty or more, rising into view from below the deck.

  Diablo cawed twice, sharply. In unison, like a squadron of aircraft, the frigate birds angled up, catching the ship’s wind and racing skyward.

  Finn called out loudly, “RUN…FOR…IT!”

  The others had rolled and tumbled in reaction to the lightning strikes. Finn spotted and crawled to Maybeck who lay still on the blackened deck. Finn shook Maybeck, but the boy was unconscious––or worse.

  A crew member, a college aged boy, knelt by Finn. “I’m trained in CPR! I’ve got this!”

  “You sure?”

  The boy pointed up. “Take cover!”

  Finn saw the frigate birds poised to strike.

  “FOL—LOW ME!” Finn shouted, rising to his feet as he searched for someplace safe from the birds. The obvious choice was the nearest door—the door through which Maleficent had come—but something told Finn that was what he was supposed to choose, that Maleficent had made sure it would not open, leaving the Keepers exposed as frigate food.

  Instead, Finn crossed the deck toward…the stairs to the AquaDuck. Where better to avoid a bird strike than inside an acrylic tube? He glanced back: others followed, including Andy and his crew.

  The frigate birds dove in concert, as if something—or someone—were controlling them. They tucked their wings back as though they were diving for a fish in the ocean, increasing their speed tenfold, their black, beady eyes trained not on fish, but on the heads of the four teenagers.

  “DOWN!” shouted Philby.

  The kids and the film crew all ducked at once. The first wave of frigates arrived. Several missed their targets, crashing into the deck in an eruption of feathers. A beak grazed Finn’s right shoulder, tearing his shirt, opening up his flesh. He grabbed the bird’s wing and flung the creature away. It spun in a loop and splashed into the pool.

  Charlene was down, a bird tangled in her blond curls. The frigate pecked at her scalp, the blood turning her hair pink. Finn grabbed the flapping bird and choked it with his bare hands until its talons released the knot of blond hair; he threw it into a wall with enough force to send feathers floating in the air. He and Charlene pulled another frigate off Willa, as Andy suddenly turned hero, waving his arms and fending off the next wave of diving birds like a one-man antiaircraft gun.

  “Go!” Andy roared. His arms bled from taking direct hits, but he stood his ground, knocking the birds out of the air like it was a video game.

  “Come on!” Finn hollered. Andy’s crew, Willa, Philby, and Charlene bounded up the stairs. Andy went down behind them. Finn stopped and hurried back. He fought through the flapping wings, found the man’s hand and grabbed hold. Finn pulled Andy out from beneath the cloak of black feathers and sharp beaks.

  Finn took a shot to the head. Another to his shoulder. Andy steadied
him, the man’s face pecked and bleeding. Together they entered the covered part of the stairs that climbed to the starting platform for the AquaDuck waterslide. It sounded as if they were suddenly inside a kettle drum as the birds collided outside. Finn looked back to see scores of the black birds dropping to the stairs and cartwheeling down lifelessly.

  For a moment it felt safe. They caught their collective breath.

  “Thanks,” Andy said, gasping as he bent to grab his knees.

  “You saved us,” Finn said.

  “Not the way it felt when I was under that pile.”

  The lights went out. At least that was how it seemed to both Finn and Andy. But the AquaDuck’s stairway was lit only by natural light. Light now blocked by a thousand beating wings.

  If the first two waves of frigate birds had seemed like an attack, this was an invasion. This was a dam bursting. No longer dozens, but hundreds—thousands!—of the enormous black birds came at Finn and Andy like a wall of white-headed hatred. Beaks outstretched, the flock filled every gap of fresh air.

  “RUN!” the two men cried, taking two stairs at a time.

  They reached a landing that carried a bunch of signs and climbed the next set of stairs, already shouting. “GO! GO! GO!”

  “You can’t do that!” an adult’s voice called out, his words drowned by splashing.

  Finn made the mistake of looking back: ten thousand black eyes coming at him at sixty miles an hour.

  “Dive, man! Dive!” Andy called out to the Cast Member whose job it was to distribute the ride’s inflatable rafts. There was no time for rafts, though, as Willa and the others had demonstrated, entering headfirst into the slide’s acrylic tube. Though completely against the rules—rules the Cast Member was there to enforce—Andy glanced up to see a wall of pointed beaks heading up the stairs at him, and dove into the waiting tube.

  Finn and Andy followed, facedown like they were bodysurfing. The water was warm and moving incredibly fast. They flew out over the ocean, twelve stories below, and then shot in a straight line for the huge screen on Deck 11. Birds collided with the clear plastic wall of the water tube. The wall of frigates behind them hit a dead end on the upper platform, self-destructing as they piled into one another.

  The water course suddenly dropped out from under Finn, then pushed him up an incline and sent him into darkness as he traveled behind the Funnel Vision screen. Another turn. Daylight. A straightaway. Birds dropped from the sky, imploding on the plastic tube and falling dead to the deck below. Finn tucked into a ball and managed to ride feet first the rest of the way. The AquaDuck spit him out into an open trough where Andy’s crew, Willa, Charlene, and Philby were just climbing out, soaking wet.

  “VIPs or not, you’re not going anywhere!” shouted a Cast Member. “You’re all barred from using the AquaDuck for the remainder of the cruise. Hand over your room cards this instant!”

  The water had washed the blood from Finn and Andy. Neither was as badly injured as it had appeared.

  “We’ll have to do that later,” Finn told the man.

  “Back to Maybeck!” he shouted to his fellow Keepers.

  They took off running—also not allowed.

  * * *

  “They’re calling it blue-sky lightning,” Philby said. The Keepers had gathered in the ship’s Health Center––its hospital. Maybeck was stretched out on a table wearing a blood pressure cuff and other sensors. He remained unconscious. The Keepers had been left alone with him. They were supposed to be shooting more footage for the 365, but Andy and his crew were off, trying to pull together their damaged gear and explain to the Disney Channel execs what had happened.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Willa said.

  “It’s a weather phenomenon. Weather clouds just over the horizon. The lightning can travel more than twenty miles—including through clear blue sky.”

  “Come on!” Finn said. “That was no blue-sky lightning. That was Maleficent.”

  Charlene stood off to the side, biting her hand and trying hold back her sobs. Willa wrapped an arm around her shoulders, unsuccessfully attempting to calm her.

  “And they’re calling the frigate bird attack a virus,” Philby said bitterly. “Like when whales get messed up and beach themselves.”

  “I’m sure,” Willa said.

  “They need to explain this, both to themselves and the passengers. They can’t very well say Maleficent is out to kill us and that some raven is using seabirds as its air attack force.”

  “I’ll bet they just happen to mention that this is a Kingdom Keepers cruise,” Willa said. “You watch, they’ll make it sound planned.”

  “Well, it was planned,” said Philby. “Just not by us.”

  Maybeck twitched and shifted on the table.

  Charlene finally spoke, calling for the doctor.

  “Hold that arm!” the doctor directed Finn. Together, they held down the unconscious Maybeck.

  “Hope!” the doctor shouted. “Restraints!”

  Hope, a kind-looking nurse with sandy hair, entered carrying nylon straps. Together, she and the doctor strapped Maybeck down.

  “That’s awful,” Charlene said. “He won’t like that!”

  “This happens,” the doctor explained to the Keepers. “Vivid dreams during a coma. Best if we keep him from rolling off the table and further injuring himself.”

  “How long is he going to be like this?” Charlene blurted out. She broke out sobbing before the doctor could answer.

  “Fifty people die of lightning strikes each year,” Philby said calmly. He won the harsh scrutiny of everyone in the small exam room, including the doctor and nurse.

  “Which is why,” the doctor said, “we should be glad it wasn’t a direct strike. I’m told the lightning hit a tripod next to Terrance. Melted it. The deck being metal…Terrance being so close…but it wasn’t a direct strike. He’s in trauma. His body took a heck of a jolt. People recover from comas every day. Sometimes they’re two minutes, sometimes two days. The body has to convince the mind it’s safe to come out again. You all being here, talking to him, talking near him, that’s got to help. He can hear you—at least we believe he can.”

  “He’s going to come around,” Finn said.

  “We’re not done here,” Willa said. The others nodded.

  The doctor seem poised to say something, but did not speak.

  “He’s going to be okay,” he said finally.

  “You can’t promise that!” Charlene said.

  The doctor eyed her sympathetically.

  “What if he’s not awake by tonight?” Philby asked.

  The doctor considered each of the Keepers individually. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it. The sooner, the better. It gets…more delicate…the longer he stays asleep.”

  “And if he’s not conscious by the time we reach the canal?” Philby said.

  “Let’s take it one step at a time.” The doctor and nurse left the exam room.

  “What was that about?” Charlene asked. “What did he mean?”

  “They’ll take him off the ship if he’s not better.”

  “No way!” Charlene said, her eyes glassy. “What? Some hospital in Panama?”

  “Better than an exam room on a cruise ship.”

  “We are not leaving him behind!” Charlene shuddered. “That is not happening.”

  “We’re going to do what’s best for him,” Finn said. “Whatever gives Terry the best chance.”

  “No…way…” Charlene muttered.

  “Like the doc said,” Philby said, “one step at a time.”

  Charlene grabbed Maybeck’s hand and squeezed. “Wake up, you idiot! Wake up right now!”

  Tears poured down her cheeks.

  * * *

  A day at sea presented Uncle Bob with his first real chance since sailing from Aruba to follow up on what the two Kingdom Keeper boys had told him. He wanted someone held responsible for the damage to the Buzz Lightyear balloon; and he wanted to pursue the stowaway he a
nd his team believed was linked to the trouble on board.

  Determined to get his ship in order, to explain the improbable lightning strike, the bird attack, the reports of a plane on Castaway, he intended to put his security team to the test.

  Having briefed the captain, having put them off to random chance—bad luck, something no captain wanted to hear—Uncle Bob now doubted his own explanations. It was one thing to say that blue-sky lightning had struck the Disney Dream; but combined with the bird attack, the boys’ explanation made more sense than he wanted to admit.

  The DHIs had an underground reputation for trouble—company-wide, the various security heads were regularly updated about their activities. Bob knew that there had been skirmishes of some sort outside the Engineering Base in the Studios; he had been told these involved the DHIs.

  Accepting the reports as factual was another matter.

  And yet, coincidence was no longer a viable explanation. It seemed quite possible, even probable, that the Kingdom Keepers were under attack.

  Bob couldn’t explain it; he didn’t want to think about it. He felt foolish for even considering it. But he had no choice. Maleficent’s video warning on the first day of the cruise seemed to be coming true. Who would have thought?

  The sighting of two Mickeys at once—impossible! The likelihood of a stowaway? It was all fitting together. The duplicate Mickey had been mean to several kids—an attempt to discredit the character.

  As far as Bob was concerned, his ship was not getting taken over by anyone. If he had to give credence to what the boys had told him, then so be it.

  Find the stowaway, interrogate him or her, and maybe, just maybe, he would get his ship in order.

  To this end he dispatched every available member of this team. Bob had far-reaching powers aboard the ship. With the captain’s blessing—and he had it—he could deploy a veritable army.

  Members of his security team were sent to once again search areas of the ship for Chernabog or “anything else of a suspicious nature.” All Cast Members and crew were reminded to keep watch for unusual activities or individuals. No one was beyond reproach. Uncle Bob wanted this trouble over with.

  “What about working with laundry?” Clayton Freeman had come up quickly through the ranks of security. At twenty-four, he was the youngest deputy director in the cruise line’s history. Bob had come to trust the young man’s “out of the box” ideas.