Kingdom Keepers V

by Ridley Pearson

  The intercom’s welcome screen displayed the time as 3:13.

  “There won’t be any more action tonight,” he said. Historically, very little happened after 3:00 a.m.

  “Agreed,” she said.

  “What do you suppose they were trying to do?” he asked.

  “Get inside,” she said.

  “Like the Rangers,” Maybeck said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Rangers are an elite team of commandos that leads the way into battle. Black Ops. You know.”

  “They were supposed to burn a hole in the wall for others to follow through.”

  “Maybe you prevented that.”

  “We,” she said.

  “You,” he said.

  That was the thing about Maybeck: just when she thought he was the biggest egomaniac of all time he’d come out with something caring and thoughtful. Completely unpredictable. Somewhere behind all his bold and brash statements was someone with a real heart, and it endeared him to her. Maybe it was the artist in him. Maybe all the blowhard stuff was just a shell he hid behind.

  “We’ll stay until four,” she said.

  “Of course!”

  Philby would manually return them at the appointed time. To leave any earlier would require a phone call, as the Return device wasn’t currently in Hollywood Studios.

  “Let’s patrol,” she said, “in case you’re right and there’s some kind of backup team in place.”

  “Together,” he said. “We’ll patrol together.”

  She thought her near-suicidal fall had affected him. In any case, he was that different Maybeck she liked better. They roamed the area, alert for anything out of place, the slightest movement of a shadow, the tiniest of sounds. Somewhere near the art shop Maybeck took her hand and Charlene let him. It wasn’t possessive or romantic. It was brotherly.

  But it felt good.

  To both of them.

  Second period, Willa and Philby found themselves together in History. Both wanted to discuss Finn’s bedroom attack, having been texted about it, but Mr. E. didn’t appreciate “background noise.”

  Mr. Eisenower consistently won Edgewater High’s annual “Best Teacher Award,” which at least made the class tolerable. Today’s class had been on the origins of mythological creatures, inspired in part by Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, which had swept through middle school like wildfire a few years before.

  Mr. E. narrated a Keynote slide show of all sorts of weird and twisted creatures created in mythologies ranging from Indonesia to the Greeks and Africans. It was one of those blocks where no one fell asleep. Nearing the end of the period he showed a picture of Camazotz, the Mayan bat god. Both Willa and Philby gasped from opposite sides of the room.

  Mr. E., who could put up with all sorts of distractions, did not appreciate being interrupted. Ever.

  “Mr. Philby? Miss Angelo? Something you’d like to share with us?”

  “No, sir!” Philby answered.

  “Let me have both your phones, please.”

  The class oohed and stirred. A teacher reading through one’s texts promised nuclear devastation. Ridicule. Social-life disaster. Romantic embarrassment. Detention.

  “But—”

  “Now!” Mr. E. extended his hand.

  “I wasn’t texting him!” complained Willa, hoping to take the pressure off him. The girls in the class giggled.

  Philby turned to face Willa and clearly mouthed, I don’t need your help!

  “I don’t want to hear it! And if I see your hand anywhere near that keyboard, Mr. Philby, it’s automatic detention.” Another collective gasp from the class. Detention had been moved to Saturdays several months earlier and was a curse of epic proportions.

  Philby dragged himself to the front of class, understanding why some kids deleted their messages each night (to hide them from spying adults). He had never had any reason to do that. His only texts were with Finn and the other Keepers. But now, a few steps from handing over his phone, he was paralyzed by the idea that Mr. E. might intercept those particular texts. They suddenly struck him as top secret. Adding to his paranoia was that Willa’s texts would, in many instances, reference or reply to Philby’s. The existence of a group of teenagers battling the evil forces inside Walt Disney World was rumor compounded by speculation. Newspapers had written about it. A few blogs and Internet radio shows had reported it as if fact. To some, Finn, Philby, Maybeck, Willa, and Charlene were cult heroes. But there had never been any proof. They were stories, and that’s all.

  But Philby’s phone contained a good deal of circumstantial evidence, and he was seriously reluctant to turn it over to Mr. E.

  “I give you my word, Mr. E.: I wasn’t texting anyone. I promise! I was just…scared,” he lied. “That’s all. Camazotz looks way creepy.”

  The class guffawed.

  “Me too,” Willa said from her desk.

  Philby’s phone hovered over Mr. E.’s open palm. He eyed each of his students warily. Perhaps he’d heard the rumors or read the newspaper articles. Perhaps he didn’t want to twist the lid off this particular can of worms.

  “I’m willing to stay after class and discuss it,” Philby said, sensing the man’s reluctance.

  “Me too!” Willa repeated. She won some unappreciated giggles from the others.

  Mr. E. accepted the phone from Philby.

  The class reacted and he shushed them. He placed Philby’s phone on his desk without looking at it.

  Philby breathed for what felt like the first time in the past several minutes.

  Mr. E. continued the class. Philby returned to his seat and waited out the longest twenty minutes in recent memory.

  Once the bell had rung and the students had left, leaving Philby and Willa at the front of the class with their teacher, Mr. E. said, “Don’t you have to be somewhere?”

  “Study hall,” the two said, nearly in unison.

  “If you’re expecting your phone back, Mr. Philby, you can apply for it at the end of school today.”

  “Actually, Mr. E., I was wondering if I could mess with your PowerPoint for a minute.”

  “It’s Keynote. What do you mean by ‘mess with’?”

  “I’d like to combine—”

  “Two of the images,” Willa said, knowing exactly where Philby was going with this.

  Mr. E. smelled a conspiracy. He looked distrustfully between the two.

  “Be my guest,” he said, motioning to his laptop.

  “It’s why we…what caused…I’m sorry I interrupted,” Willa said.

  A straight-A student, Willa wasn’t one Mr. E. could get too upset with. He said nothing.

  “It’s actually something the class may find interesting,” Philby said, sounding like a teacher himself. No stranger to computers, he took over Mr. E.’s laptop, his fingers dancing across the keyboard. Less than a minute later two images appeared on the projected screen.

  “On the left, the Minotaur. On the right, Camazotz. And now…”

  On the screen, the images of the creatures—one, half bull, half man; the other, half man, half bat—centered, overlapped, and dissolved into a single image. For a moment, the level of transparency was off, the Minotaur dominating. But Philby quickly adjusted the images to blend together. The face became a Venn diagram, and yet was unmistakable.

  “O…M…G…” Willa said.

  “What is it?” Mr. E. said.

  “Not what, but who,” Philby said.

  “Okay. I’ll play along. Who is it?”

  Philby looked to Willa, who couldn’t take her eyes off the screen.

  “Who is it?” Philby asked Willa.

  “It’s Chernabog,” she whispered.

  Maybeck lived with his aunt above Crazy Glaze, her paint-your-own-pottery shop. It was old, in need of some repair, and located on a busy street with a fair amount of traffic. As he arrived, he could see through the front windows that business was booming, as was nearly always the case after school got out. He headed arou
nd back and bounded up the stairs and into the kitchen, which was just behind a storage room that held two small kilns and steel shelves of fired and unfired pottery. He yanked open the refrigerator and found the remnants of a cooked chicken that he devoured in minutes. He drank milk directly from the carton because his aunt wasn’t there to scold him and made a peanut butter and banana sandwich—with honey—then strapped on his Crazy Glaze denim apron and prepared to help out front.

  He wouldn’t think about homework until after the shop closed and they cleaned up; after they cooked and ate dinner together. He and Jelly—his aunt’s nickname—were quite the team. While he struggled through geometry, she would watch Jeopardy! in her recliner, beating most contestants to the answers in a loud and enthusiastic voice.

  The storage room had a lot of freshly painted work on the shelves. Before he went any further, he took several minutes to stack the left kiln to the limit, close it, and set its timer. It was going to be a busy night. There were bigger items that would require the outside kiln. Maybeck began making a mental list of all that had to be done, trying to fit his homework into it. He was dog-tired from the Base patrol the night before—when the Keepers crossed over to their holograms, their sleep was so disrupted it barely counted.

  “Bathroom?” he heard a boy’s voice say from the main shop. He experienced a brain fart and forgot what he was doing. The voice had triggered this. A familiar voice, he thought. But familiar in the same way a rattlesnake’s rattle tells you to jump.

  Maybeck didn’t hear Jelly tell the boy that the bathroom was off the storage room because his mind was already engaged—defensively. The small room was wall-to-wall steel shelves, with a big worktable in its center like a kitchen island that left extremely narrow aisles between it and the shelves. Every square inch was stacked with breakable pottery. Maybeck was stuck at the horseshoe end with the kilns. Past the table and to the right was the store. Past the table and to the left was the kitchen, and next to it a door to the small customer bathroom. A primitive instinct surged through him the moment he heard the voice: fight or flight. He knew it was no normal customer. Whoever belonged to the voice was after him.

  Greg Luowski stepped through the curtain, spotted Maybeck, and smiled grimly.

  Maybeck had gotten Finn’s text. This was the same creep that had tried to poison his friend.

  “Hey,” Luowski said. “Bathroom?”

  Every nerve in Maybeck’s body was tingling as a second boy came through behind Luowski—another boy with green eyes, just like Luowski. They meant trouble. He was outnumbered.

  “Right there,” Maybeck said, indicating the door, but never taking his eyes off Luowski.

  Luowski in turn did not take his eyes off Maybeck as he reached out and spun the somewhat smaller boy around in order to access the boy’s backpack. The kid was unfamiliar to Maybeck—small but sturdy with narrow, deep-set eyes. From the backpack, Luowski withdrew what looked like two water guns. He handed one to the other kid.

  “What’s with the water guns?” Maybeck said, thinking he’d misread the situation and that Luowski simply wanted to fill a water pistol in the bathroom. “I don’t think my aunt would appreciate—” He caught himself as Luowski raised the pistol.

  Not a water gun after all.

  * * *

  Maybeck had already taken several steps toward the kitchen door after picking up on the familiar voice. As Luowski reached for the backpack, Maybeck reached for an unfired platter—some kid’s attempt at becoming the next Picasso—and raised it like a shield when the water pistols (that weren’t water pistols) were aimed at him.

  Luowski pulled the trigger and fired.

  Not a normal gun. No sound to speak of. No bullets. A vapor trail flickered, like animation.

  No, not a vapor trail, he realized, but wires.

  The platter broke into colorful pieces that rained down onto the floor along with the projectile: two shiny metal points like the ends of knitting needles. A stun gun, he realized. Luowski had tried to Taser him.

  “Wait!” Luowski shouted at his pal, who was taking aim.

  This, because Maybeck vanished through the kitchen door seemingly at the speed of light.

  At the sound of breaking pottery, Maybeck’s aunt pushed through to the back room.

  “Terry?”

  Luowski’s sidekick turned in that direction a fraction of a second before the door came open. The door hit his arm as Jelly stepped through, and reflexively he pulled the trigger.

  Maybeck’s aunt sank to the floor like a sack of rocks.

  Luowski said a string of words that didn’t bear repeating. The sidekick dropped the Taser like it had just burned his hand.

  Maybeck, two steps into the kitchen, heard his name and felt the floor shake, and he knew Jelly was down. He came back through the door, his engine running on pure adrenaline. He went through Luowski like a Weedwhacker through tall grass, a blaze of arms and fists and legs. Pottery fell off the shelves, striking the floor percussively. Luowski never knew what hit him: one moment he was standing there freaking out that Robbie Barry had dropped the old lady; the next, he felt like he’d been hit and run over by a truck. He found himself lying on the floor fending off plates and mugs that were raining down from the sky.

  Robbie Barry, on the other hand, knew what it was like to be a soda can that someone crushed with their heel before recycling. Maybeck slammed him into the doorjamb, slammed him like he was a housefly.

  Jelly mumbled.

  Maybeck turned to help her. He was pushed from behind and had to dive over his aunt and into the shop to avoid falling onto her.

  Robbie Barry struggled to his knees and stood up. Luowski helped him through the back door. Maybeck rose to chase them, but his aunt mumbled something. She was semiconscious, muttering like someone in a nightmare. Her customers rushed to her side.

  “It’s a heart attack!” “She fainted!” “I hope it’s not a stroke!”

  Maybeck did not object when someone called 911. He wasn’t about to tell anyone she’d been shot by a Taser by two kids under the control of a Disney fairy with green skin; if he did that, it wouldn’t be Jelly taken to a hospital, it would be him!

  He waited by her side. Just before the ambulance arrived she came around. Jelly knew a lot about her nephew’s involvement with the Kingdom Keepers. Not all, by any means, but more than most parents or guardians, because her nephew had been the first to be trapped in the Syndrome—held asleep like he was in a coma. So when he leaned in, he whispered, “Please, Jelly, tell them you fainted. They’ll run some tests. That’s all.”

  She looked up at Maybeck with fire in her eyes. When his aunt got angry it was like a storm. Typically, Maybeck ran for cover. But not now. He held his own, staring right back at her, challenging her. It would help no one to bring the police into this, and they both knew it.

  But deep within Maybeck another storm was brewing: these idiots had brought the fight into his home, had hurt the person closest to him. It aroused a primitive urge in him, one he hadn’t felt to this degree before. An urge for revenge: you have crossed a line you will never cross again.

  With or without his fellow Keepers, Maybeck intended to deliver that message.

  Many of the Keepers were now busier on the weekends than during the school week, trying to balance athletics and social commitments with their Keeper time.

  Charlene—she was at cheerleading practice—missed the meeting in the Magic Kingdom’s Columbia Harbour House. But the rest of the Kingdom Keepers made it, as did six recent recruits to their cause—four boys and two girls. The meeting was held upstairs where the crowds rarely ventured, in a small room that bridged the boundary between Fantasyland and Liberty Square.

  The six newcomers were all Cast Members from the various parks, employees who supported the Kingdom Keepers’ cause and had an allegiance to Disney and were sworn to secrecy by the nature of their employment agreements. It made for a tight group, where trust was never questioned.

&nb
sp; Finn perched on the edge of a table looking at their faces. He felt a sense of pride and encouragement from there being twelve people where only a short time ago there had been seven. The oldest of the group was in her mid-twenties, a looker by the name of Megan Fuchs, a woman who had once helped the Keepers at DisneyQuest. Two boys were interns for an Imagineer named Alex Wright; because of this, they knew more about the Kingdom Keepers and their current activities than most.

  “All of us,” Finn began, “are part of the battle for Base.” Heads nodded. “Some more than others. Some more in support. We all know it’s getting worse there. The other night there was a direct assault. A pair of DHIs turned them back, but the OTs are getting more and more aggressive.”

  “If there was an enemy to fight, we could fight them,” one of the newcomers said.

  “Exactly!” Finn said. “The big problem is we don’t know where they are and we don’t know what they’ll do next. Hard to fight an enemy you can’t see.”

  “We see them by day,” Megan said. She meant the witches and fairies, Audio-Animatronics and Cast Members, who were Overtakers by night. There was a growing sentiment among legitimate Cast Members to take the battle into the day, when the Overtakers were, in some ways, more vulnerable and more easily identified. But the reality was that it was difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between a Cast Member playing a villain and the actual villain. Attacking Cast Members was frowned upon.

  “If we can’t launch our own attacks, then we’re always on the defensive,” said Bart, one of the two interns. He looked like a surfer. Willa couldn’t stop herself from staring at him.

  “That’s how this goes,” Finn said. “We all know the drill. We all know it’s bogus.”

  “If we’re always on the defensive, how can we ever win?” said Megan.

  “We can win…” Finn began. But this was a legitimate issue and one he couldn’t easily answer. He offered the short version: “…by recapturing Maleficent and Chernabog. By taking Cruella and the Evil Queen prisoner.” He thought back to the theft at the library; that had been a missed opportunity. To have seized the three—all the principals but Chernabog—would have set the Overtakers back considerably.