Kingdom Keepers VII (7 page)

A
LL THE
K
EEPERS AWAKE
almost simultaneously in the back of the van, which is parked alone in the hotel parking lot. Maybeck sits up with a start, looks around for Charlene, then sinks back down and lies with his eyes open, staring up at the van’s ceiling.

“It’s going on four in the morning,” Brad says from the front seat. “Your parents have been notified and are on their way.”

“Wait…what?” says a groggy Willa. Fatigue remains a challenge for all the Keepers. Their activity while DHIs hardly counts as rest. On nights like this they must get by on three or four hours’ sleep if they’re lucky.

“The Archives are compromised,” Brad says. “We need you in Burbank.”

“What about graduation?” Philby says. He sounds perfectly Philby—alert, awake, ready for a physics quiz. The others look at him inquisitively. “What?” he says, seeming honestly to have no idea how he’s coming off. “I’m not missing my graduation. I’m summa cum laude. I’m giving a speech.”

“It’s been taken care of. You’re going to Burbank. That is, unless you want to drop out of the group and leave Wayne in the hands of the Overtakers.”

“He—” Finn blurts out. “We—The thing is, we don’t even know if that was him, right? It could have been a DHI.”

“The security cameras…we watched it all. You were all terrific, by the way. But listen, there are so many reasons Wayne couldn’t have been a DHI. First, you destroyed the OTs’ only server during the cruise. Second, they stole
your
data, not Wayne’s. Third: Why hasn’t he come forward to warn us that they might have his data?” Brad asks.

“You’ve never been in DHI state,” Philby answers. “It’s not that simple. Servers can be programmed. Data can be compromised. A little thing called identity theft.” Philby becomes belligerent when he knows he’s right—and he’s right most of the time. “He may think he had a horrible nightmare or something; he may not realize the breach at the Archives even happened. Not until he hears about it and it matches his dream. The same thing has happened to all of us before. Crossing over…you don’t know what it’s like until it happens.”

Brad has known Philby for many years now. He respects the Keepers individually and as a group. That respect is reflected in his level tone. “Wayne has a pattern of dropping off the grid. He was in the company of the Overtakers. But Wayne…the old man was directing things.”

“Possibly his DHI,” Philby said.

“Not projected from our servers. And this was
inside
the Disney local area network, don’t forget. Our LAN is behind a dozen firewalls. If that old man was a DHI, then we’ve got an insider working for the OTs.”

“Don’t call him an old man,” Finn says testily. “He’s a legend. A genius. And that wasn’t him!”

“You have to distance yourselves from your emotions, Finn. All of you have to. The evil is out and among us, okay? This was a violent, destructive breach at the heart of the company. The Archives are like our bank vault. They hold all our knowledge—our institutional knowledge—of how we got to where we are. Our history. We can’t have the OTs picking things off the shelves like it’s a grocery store.”

“Wayne had to be a DHI,” Philby repeats, but it sounds as if he’s trying to convince himself, not the others.

“And when you can prove that, we’ll be happy to review your evidence,” Brad says.

Silence.

“In the meantime,” he continues, “your parents are on the way with a suitcase for each of you. You will say your good-byes. We’re off to Burbank before sunrise.”

“Why can’t we just work from here?” Willa proposes. “I mean, sleep is sleep. We can be DHIs from wherever we go to bed. I’d rather stay home, if it’s all the same to you. Graduation’s important to me. I worked hard for this.”

“Exactly,” Philby says.

Brad glances back and forth among them. “It isn’t ‘all the same to me.’ This is Wayne. You were there, boots on the ground. You tell me: You think this can wait a week?”

“I’m just saying we don’t need to be out in Burbank. We can do this from here.” Willa checks out the other Keepers to make sure they understand her position. “I’m not wimping out. I just don’t see the point in physically traveling out there when we can be DHIs from here.”

“Willa, right now the facts say that Wayne has betrayed us. I don’t believe that. You don’t believe that,” Brad says, working his smartphone. “You did not see this. You understand? I never showed you this. Neither I nor the company has access to military satellite imagery. Is that clear?”

Heads nod.

“Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir!” the Keepers say, nearly in unison.

All but Maybeck, who rolls his eyes and says, “Crystal.”

Brad turns his phone to face them. The images run as a slide show. From above, a jungle. The next slide zooms in lower, showing more detail: rocks, rubble, jungle floor.

Finn sees it first. “That’s the sacrificial table. That’s where…” His voice trails off. Willa places her hand on his shoulder affectionately.

“You didn’t know, Finn. None of us knew,” she says. Then through the dark she stabs Brad with her eyes, furious at him for raising memories of Dillard’s death.

“The temple grounds,” Brad says.

Professor Philby speaks up. “But they’re—It’s destroyed. Most of it anyway.”

The slides keep moving in tighter on the temple grounds.

“You can see the signs of an earthquake,” Maybeck says. “Those black slashes in the ground are where the tunnels caved in.”

“The tunnels?” Philby sounds panicked.

“The labyrinth?” Finn says. “But if the labyrinth caved in, if those are the tunnels—”

Brad stops the slide show and pockets the phone. “If you don’t come with us,” he says to Willa, “no one’s going to fault you. We all have lives to live. I’m the first to acknowledge that. You can go home with your parents when they arrive. Whoever’s with me”—he glances at his watch—“we’re out of here in fifteen minutes. Say your good-byes.”

Headlights stream into the parking lot from several entrances, aiming at the white van.

The Keepers exchange glances. In their eyes are fear, grief, confusion, worry. Philby looks stunned. Willa looks sad. Finn’s face is a mask of pain; he can’t let go of what happened to Dillard. Three years have passed, but to look at him, anyone would think it had been only a matter of days.

“It’s Wayne,” Finn whispers harshly, sounding ready to cry.

“It’s happening,” says Philby.

T
HREE FIGURES SKIRT THE LIGHTS
, moving between the eighteen-wheel trucks parked side by side, backed into the shipping docks. Heard over the groan of straining gears and hissing air brakes, cicadas shrill in the damp night air. Trucks come and go at a rate of more than one a minute. Weary drivers stroll to and from the dispatcher’s office, some smoking, some yammering in Spanish into cell phones. Nearly all sport tattoos or a potbelly or both.

The smallest of the three figures, a female form, stops the others, peering out into the painful glare of the bluish arc lights, which blast the loading dock with artificial daylight. The woman shields her eyes from the brilliance as she squints to read the paperwork clipped to the wall behind the open truck. A pair of black leather boots appears from within the truck trailer, shocking her back into the shadows. As the booted man exits into the warehouse through a doorway of hanging plastic slats, another takes his place, pushing a trolley loaded with wire baskets stuffed full of live chickens. The worker is just a boy, seventeen at the oldest, covered in sweat. Stuck to the sweat are chicken feathers. There are more feathers in his black hair; one appears glued to one earlobe like an earring.

“Boy!” the woman calls softly. The light reveals her skin as dark cocoa, her hair as matted dreadlocks. Tattoos of tears and ancient pictographs adorn her rounded cheeks. As the boy looks around distractedly and spots her, the woman focuses on him intensely.

Like the twisted, gnarled roots ofAt first he looks confused. He stands still like a doll waiting to be played with. The woman calls him to her with a curling finger. He walks toward her.
⁴
He moves reluctantly, straining with each step as he abandons his cart of clucking fowl. His hands fly to his throat and begin clawing at his flesh, as if trying to eradicate an impossibly stubborn itch—or to get at some unwanted force within. Suddenly, he collapses. The woman admires her work, and then, with a sharp hiss, extends her hand toward the sufferer. He falls eerily still as she speaks through her cupped hand into his ear. The woman raises her victim to his feet, where he stands, somewhat at attention. His eyes are devoid of any human life or expression.
⁵

The boy-doll nods into space like an obedient child, a boy soldier. He returns to the milky plastic curtain that screens the loading dock from the warehouse and pokes his head inside. He comes back out, looking left and right. He nods again.

The woman struggles to climb up onto the high dock, but the biggest of the three figures hoists her effortlessly, like a mother cat with a kitten. Behind her follows a robed woman, and finally a creature—neither man nor ape. More a bull with giant wings and a gorilla’s body. They hurry into the truck trailer and the boy follows behind with the trolley.

“The manifest,” says a man’s voice, “lists the destination as Long Beach, south of Los Angeles.”

* * *

The voice snaps Finn’s attention away from the flat-panel screen, away from the events on the loading dock that he’s been watching, and back into the luxurious private jet carrying him and the other Keepers from Orlando to Burbank.

“So, let’s talk about what we know and don’t know,” Brad says.

“Let’s,” Maybeck quips. Of all the Keepers, Maybeck has the most difficulty with Brad—and the feeling is obviously mutual. Brad tolerates Maybeck’s sarcasm and cynicism for the sake of team harmony and because his bravado at times provides the leadership necessary for the group to tackle dangerous situations. Youthful arrogance has its place.

“What we know is this: the Evil Queen and Chernabog survived the tunnels. Obviously, Tia Dalma is present as well. Three years ago she performed a ceremony at the temple that may have restored Chernabog to his former…
glory
’s not the right word, but you get the point. A ceremony you, the Keepers, interrupted. Now they’re on the move. Eleven hundred trucks pass through that depot every day. So, do we know their intended final destination? No. But Long Beach is nearly due west of Anaheim. Any guesses?”

“Ha-ha.” Maybeck sounds just too bored.

“Something else we don’t know,” Brad adds, “is what they have planned, what resources they possess.”

“This is like tracking terrorists,” Philby says, a little too eagerly.

“Down, boy,” Maybeck says.

“We don’t know what shape they’re in,” Willa says. “Three years underground, eating what, bugs? Worms? Rats? Living in filth, surviving on whatever water trickles through the rocks…”

“It does more than trickle,” Finn says, speaking from experience. “But yeah, you’re right. They can’t be in great shape.”

Brad says, “You know how to start a riot? Starve the population.”

He lets the words sit there, filling the air.

“So,” Maybeck says, “they’ve got a jacked-up monster beast and a ticked-off evil queen.”

“We also know,” Willa says, addressing Brad, “that Maleficent is dead. One of their strongest, most active leaders is gone. Some of us saw her struggle to hold the OTs together. They’ve lost her. And we all know Chernabog’s not a candidate for the debate team. So it’s going to fall on one of the ladies to try to unify the OTs.”

“We know,” Philby says, picking up on Willa’s line of thinking, “that they got on the Disney
Dream
for a reason. They didn’t just want to jump-start the Beast; they wanted to get to Disneyland.”

“Exactly,” Brad says. He’s awkward as usual, uncomfortable treating kids so much younger than he is with respect, but clearly he values their opinions, understands that this is how they operate. Without them, he’s got nothing. “We don’t know what it is that they’re planning.”

“Our destruction,” Maybeck says, instantly sobering the group, “for one thing.”

The jet engines whine outside the windows. Blue sky. Brown terrain forty thousand feet below.

“The end,” Finn says softly. “They’re planning the end. Of us. The parks. The magic. They have Tia Dalma’s black arts, the Evil Queen’s conjuring, and Chernabog’s evil. We’ve got…Without Wayne, what have we got?”

No one dares answer, not even Brad. “We’ve got to get to Wayne. Figure this out.”

“No movement relies on any one individual.”

“Since when do five people make up a movement?” Willa asks.

“A basketball team,” Maybeck says. “Enough for a basketball team. Barely. We can’t even field a baseball team. We’re pathetic.”

The conversation has gotten away from Brad. He drags a wrist across his lips as he tries to sort out how to herd the Keepers back into positive territory. His eyes are bloodshot from fatigue.

The pilot instructs his passengers over the intercom to prepare the cabin for landing. The private plane’s one flight attendant, a wiry but small man with a bad toupee, collects drinking glasses and plates, returns backpacks to storage. A moment later, they experience the smoothest landing in aviation history. Through it all, Maybeck looks terrified.

“You’ve never flown before,” Brad says, challenging him. They can’t avoid picking on one another.

“I—it’s—” Maybeck stutters.

“Everyone’s first time flying on a private jet,” Finn says, coming to Maybeck’s defense. “And it’s very cool.”

“Very!” Philby chimes in.

Maybeck shoots Finn and Philby a look of thanks. Finn’s expression says,
I’ve got your back.
The plane taxis and slows. Maybeck peers out the window.

“Charlene!”

* * *

The air tastes different. Willa hadn’t noticed it as a DHI the night before. Her attention had been on things flying. It’s fresh. Brown hills rise out of the green of palm trees. All that talk of Los Angeles smog, and yet even at the Bob Hope Airport there’s a hint of citrus and sea in the breeze.

Or maybe the hint of lemon and sea salt is Charlene’s perfume. She seems to float across the tarmac to greet Maybeck with a hug. He picks her up and twirls her off her feet. Her giggles carry over the roar of a jet taxiing in the distance. Finn and Philby close in to welcome her as well, leaving Willa to deal with the backpacks being handed down the plane’s collapsible stairs by the flight attendant. Willa is transformed into a Sherpa: two backpacks slung over her right shoulder, another clutched in her left hand, her purse somewhere she can’t see it.

A white extended SUV waits to pick them up. Its driver’s door is embossed with an image of a red-robed Mickey wearing the sorcerer’s cap and waving his magic wand over the words
WALT DISNEY IMAGINEERING
.

Willa feels chills, despite the afternoon heat. She’s always wanted to be an Imagineer, ever since she learned about the creative team responsible for the attractions in the park. It was seventh grade—some book she read, or maybe a documentary, or maybe someone just told her. But that had been the dream. Now here she is, stepping off a private plane and being chauffeured by the very same people. Pinch me.

Philby glances back. It takes him longer than she would have wanted, but at least at some point in that boy’s brain of his, it occurs to him he’s a jerk for forgetting about her.

He tries to make up for it by helping her with the backpacks, but he just makes a mess of things. All the bags tumble to the tarmac; he and Willa bang heads as they bend to retrieve them. And it hurts. Really hurts. The tears that threaten to spill from Willa’s eyes have little to do with the collision, but Philby would never consider the alternative.

“Sorry, sorry!” he says. “I’ve hurt you! I’m so sorry!”

He doesn’t understand what he’s saying.

Yes, you’ve hurt me, Willa thinks, but hears herself say, “You can be such a blunt instrument sometimes.”

That stops him. She has two of the backpacks now and she’s headed for the SUV’s open hatchback. The man waiting there wears the offbeat outfit of a creative type: sandals, cargo shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, extremely cool eyeglasses, a French beret. But he has the leathery skin of someone older than her parents, and the long hair of someone from another era.

Philby is trying to catch up as Willa shakes the man’s hand.

“Joe,” the man says. He has a smile that makes her relax. He’s intense, but laid-back. Probably brilliant, but dude-who-lives-next-door normal.

“You surf?” Willa asks, having no idea why and wanting to hide.

His smile is so genuine she relaxes yet again.

“The web,” he answers, “but not the ocean.”

She giggles. He joins her with a chuckle. “You’re Willa.”

She nods.

“This whole thing. What you’ve got going,” he nods toward the others. “It’s awesome.”

“It is,” she says.

“It’s important.”

She doesn’t know what to say.

“We’re at a moment of critical mass.”

“Brad was telling us.”

“Yeah, but now I’m telling you.”

She nods.

“Critical mass,” he repeats.

“Hi! I’m—”

“Philby,” Joe says.

“Right.”

Joe studies Philby. Sizes him up as they shake hands.

“You’re smaller than I thought,” Joe says.

“Am I?”

“Your voice is higher.”

“They made it lower for my DHI. A Disney host thing.”

“I’m a fan,” Joe says.

Philby blushes.

“Of all of you.”