Power Play (22 page)

The timing of the effect had been Maybeck’s job: to schedule the pyrotechnics that Professor Philby had discovered on the control booth’s computer when he and Finn had visited two nights earlier. More than a thousand different pieces of ordnance on water barges, and a half-dozen laser projectors mounted on top of pavilions, were all synchronized by the IllumiNations computer. Following their spotting Willa and the Queen on the Security video, Maybeck had scheduled the fire events, giving himself five minutes to leave the control room, climb down the Mayan Temple, and catch up to Finn. With it nearing one am and the scheduled manual Return, maybe the pyrotechnics would offer a needed distraction.

Given that it looked like all of Epcot was on fire, there was no way Philby could miss the signal.

Now all he had to do was remotely tell the DHI server to Return them.

* * *

Philby witnessed the wash of flames engulfing Epcot’s lake and stretched for the computer’s Return/Enter key.

But Hugo held him by the shoulders, struggling to get his arms around Philby’s chest and squeeze the wind out of him. Philby stumbled back, his fingers hitting the spacebar instead of the Return key.

He threw an elbow into Hugo’s stomach, and groaning, Hugo let go. Philby regained his balance…took a step toward his desk…and was tackled to the floor.

He went down hard, face-first. Philby rolled over and kicked out, catching Hugo in the face. But Hugo scrambled on top of Philby, pinning his shoulders and winding up with a balled fist. As Hugo drove the fist toward his face, Philby jerked his head. Hugo punched the floor. Philby’s hand found the wicker trash can; he raked it across Hugo’s face and the boy went off him.

Philby rolled and shoved his hand into Hugo’s face—the fake green eyes staring back, unflinching and terrifying. Philby couldn’t look at those eyes. He turned away.

Hugo grabbed both of Philby’s wrists, pushing up, trying to get Philby off; Philby pushed back, trying to hold Hugo down. Their arms began to tremble, then to shake.

Light flashed from the computer, the lake alive with fire.

Philby managed to pin Hugo’s left arm with his knee and reach for the computer with his right hand. Hugo rocked side to side attempting to free his arm, and making it impossible for Philby to properly aim his fingers. He missed the Return key three times in a row.

Hugo kneed Philby in the back, freeing his hand, which he used to palm Philby below the chin and propel him back toward the bed.

Hugo jumped up and reached for the Escape key, which would close the current window—Philby’s link with the DHI server.

Philby had bit his lip; he tasted the salty tang of blood in his mouth. He was
mad
.

Elvis was just standing there on the bed like a spectator. Philby grabbed him and held him just behind the front legs and lunged for Hugo using the same technique his family members used to train Elvis to use his scratching pole. It forced Elvis to extend his front claws—claws that now tore through Hugo’s shirt, leaving eight narrow tracks of blood behind as Philby dragged him down the boy’s back, and then tossed Elvis back onto the bed as Hugo let out a gut-wrenching scream.

Philby spun Hugo around, tripped him, and dumped him to the floor. He stabbed for the Return key.

THIS ACTION CANNOT BE UNDONE

DO YOU WISH PROCEED? Y/N

He hit
Y
.

The bedroom door burst open. A wrinkly-faced woman with no makeup, an adhesive strip across the bridge of her nose stretching her cheeks, and wearing a pair of pajamas covered with cartoons of Marge Simpson, shouted: “BOYS!”

Both Hugo and Philby stopped cold.

“What in the devil is going on, young man?” Philby’s mom said to him. The next thing she said was, “Elvis?” in a loving and kind voice of pure affection.

Hugo stood up, unlocked the window, threw it open, and dove outside.

Philby watched the bandwidth meter spike in the bottom right corner of the computer screen. The DHI properties of the holograms were being saved back to the DHI server. The Return. The whole process could take anywhere from ten to sixty seconds.

Precious seconds.

“Dell?” his mother said.

“Please, Mom, no!” Philby said, seeing his mother march toward his desk. “Remember what happened to me?” he said in a begging tone. “If you shut my computer, it’ll happen to all three of them—Finn, Willa, and Maybeck. Mom! You don’t want that to happen.”

Shutting the computer, putting it into sleep mode, would send his friends to sleep along with it. Stuck in the Syndrome.

* * *

Finn couldn’t take his eyes off the trembling hands of the Evil Queen held high above her head. She reminded him of a major league pitcher in his windup. She was about to deliver some kind of spitball, sinker spell, that would make the spiders and rattlesnakes look like kids’ stuff. Something nasty.

The flames licked off the lake.

Tears ran down Willa’s face as she mouthed, “Thank you,” to Finn.

The Evil Queen threw her hands at them with a witch’s fury, her lips spouting an incantation.

“Children in peril

Children in fright—”

But she stopped before completing it.

Willa had disappeared.

Finn watched as Maybeck sparkled, became transparent, and vanished.

Finn sat bolt upright in bed. His own bed, at home. Maybeck blinked furiously from his air mattress.

Finn felt something on his leg and threw back the covers.

A rattlesnake.

He screamed a bad word loud enough to be heard two blocks away.

He shook his leg like a maniac. The snake flew up and was caught, dangling from one of the paddles on his ceiling fan.

His father threw open his bedroom door and switched on the light, his mother craning over her husband’s shoulder.

When Finn’s ceiling light switched on, so did the fan.

The snake began circling overhead. The fan gained speed.

“FINN WHITMAN!” his father thundered, glaring at him. His father had run out of patience for the Kingdom Keepers after their earliest adventure. Wanting his son to focus on academics first and sports second, he had little tolerance for Finn’s claims of saving Disney from its villains. Although he appreciated the college money that resulted from his son’s participation in the program, and even secretly enjoyed some of the attention and fame that rubbed off on him for being Finn’s father, this kind of nighttime interruption to his family was exactly what he objected to and found so offensive.

He didn’t need a manual to understand why his son and Maybeck were fully clothed in black, wearing shoes, and sweating profusely while in air conditioning.

“I had a nightmare,” Finn said.

“Lying will only make it worse for you.”

The rattlesnake was currently rotating at warp speed, wrapped around the fan blade.

“Mom? Please?” he said, flicking his eyes to the ceiling fan.

His mother spotted the snake and went ashen white.

“Sweetie,” she said to her husband, “come on back to bed. Let’s deal with this in the morning. Nothing to be done now.”

Mr. Whitman seemed unmovable. “Terry,” he said, “do I have your word you two will go back to sleep? No shenanigans?”

The rattlesnake was losing its hold. Six inches of the snake was now sticking off the end of the fan’s paddle.

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Whitman trusted Finn’s friends more than he did his own son.

Mr. Whitman made a grunting sound of disapproval, allowing his wife to pull him out of the doorway. She stepped forward, made a face of pure horror, and reached for the light switch. As she shut off the light, she closed the door.

Finn heard a thump, but couldn’t see in the darkness. His father opened the door again and peered inside. “What was that?” he said. “Are you testing me, son?”

“No, sir!” Finn answered.

The rattlesnake had hit the door. It was hanging in a coil from the pair of hooks on the back of the door, its tongue flicking in the direction of his father’s head.

Finn sprang out of bed. “Sorry, Dad. Won’t happen again. Good night.” He toed the door and shut it in his father’s face.

His father called softly through the door: “We’ll discuss this in the morning, young man!”

The snake turned toward Finn.

“Whitman!” Maybeck hissed, having backed up to the wall.

Finn dove into his closet and grabbed his laundry bag and a hanger. He’d seen this on the Discovery Channel.

“You gotta help me!” Finn whispered.

“Oh, yeah, as if that’s going to happen.”

“I need you to hold the bag open.”

“Pass.”

“I can’t do both at once.”

“No way!”

“Maybeck!”

Maybeck approached cautiously and held the bag. “This feels like the losing end of this deal.”

“You want to handle the snake? Be my guest.”

The snake’s rattle was going strongly, raising every hair on Finn’s body. If his father heard it, he might as well let the snake just bite him now.

Maybeck held open the laundry bag, his arms extended supernaturally. He was basically a ZIP code away. Finn hooked the snake with the hanger and lifted it carefully from the door’s twin clothes hooks. The snake hung heavily from the
U
of the hanger.

Finn lowered it slowly and Maybeck caught the snake in the bag.

“Window!” Finn hissed.

Maybeck moved that direction. Finn opened the window and Maybeck extended the bag outside.

“Okay,” Finn said, “let go.”

“I can’t,” Maybeck said. “My fingers are frozen.”

“Let…go…” Finn said, uncurling Maybeck’s fingers one by one.

The bag crashed down in the plants.

Shutting the window, Finn heaved a sigh of relief. Maybeck hadn’t moved. He looked like a statue.

“It’s out,” Finn said.

Maybeck shook his head and finally managed to step away from the window.

“We’ll have to check the bag in the morning and make sure the snake is gone,” Finn said.

“You can if you want,” Maybeck said.

Finn texted Willa and Philby.

Willa texted back immediately, thanking all three boys. Philby texted a few minutes later:

trouble here. group skype b4 skool @ 7:45

Reading the text over Finn’s shoulder, Maybeck whispered, “He thinks he had troubles. I gotta hear this.”

T
HE KEEPERS MET ON VIDEO
conference fifteen minutes before buses and parental rides departed for school.

Finn: “We had a tricky situation last night.”

Willa: “As in, Maybeck and Finn saved me.”

Finn: “And Philby.”

Maybeck, looking over Finn’s shoulder, said, “It was the Evil Queen and Cruella.”

Charlene: “Same as Downtown Disney.”

Charlene was using her own video image as a mirror while applying mascara.

Willa: “The fob was missing.”