Kingdom Keepers VI

by Ridley Pearson

  “Borrowing!”

  “—gear that belongs to the crew…they’ll throw you off the ship.”

  “We gotta do what we gotta do,” he said. “If they take Jess into the ship hospital, she’ll end up in SBS, and then we’re all in a big-time jam.”

  “You’re going to look stupid in that suit.”

  “Me? Seriously? I don’t think so.”

  * * *

  The Hit Man’s suit was made of clothlike disposable paper. There were four suits on the mop cart, not the two that Storey had predicted. Paper hoods and heavy-duty gloves as well. Only a single set of goggles. The suits closed up the back with Velcro: they were one-size-fits-all. While Storey was off attempting to collect additional goggles, Charlene and Maybeck arrived at the Deck 4 promenade in the ill-fitting suits.

  “Finn,” Charlene said excitedly. “Willa!”

  The spare protein spill suit went to Jess’s hologram. The group collected around her as a visual barrier while Amanda and Willa helped her into it.

  “She can hang on to the cart,” Maybeck suggested.

  “We’ll get her to one of the empty rooms,” Philby said, “and treat her there.”

  Maybeck worked the gloves awkwardly to get a spray bottle and cloth from the cart. “I’m going after the other wounded.”

  “Someone else was bitten?” Finn said.

  Philby answered. “Maybeck hit a hyena with a javelin. Stuck him pretty good. Left a trail.” He pointed toward the bow.

  “I’m with you,” Finn said, claiming the fourth suit.

  “Then you’ll man the defibrillator,” Maybeck said, indicating the emergency box mounted to the ship’s wall.

  Finn, already on the bench struggling into the last suit, looked puzzled. The girls almost had Jess into hers.

  “We need some kind of weapon,” Maybeck said. “I’m taking the shuffleboard spear, but a homemade Taser wouldn’t hurt.”

  “I’m supposed to paddle them?” Finn said.

  “You’re supposed to shock the one that stole the Return.”

  “It’s not the Return,” Finn said. “It’s a thumb drive from the Overtakers’ server.”

  “Their hologram data,” Philby said as all eyes turned to him for an explanation. “If we can get that drive back, even if the OTs launch another server, I can write a search-and-replace program that will effectively shut down their DHIs. Each time they try to cross over, the network will reject the data. They’ll never get projected.”

  Finn glanced over at the defibrillator. “Philby, you’re going to have to tell me how to work that thing.”

  * * *

  Dressed in the white paper coveralls, hood, and rubber gloves, Finn carried the defib kit with the red broken heart on the side. Maybeck held a spray bottle, rag, and the blood-tipped shuffleboard cue handle. At each spot of spilled blood they paused to spray disinfectant and wipe the area clean. They quickly approached the bow, where the promenade entered a metal tunnel and continued to port, creating a jogging loop used by runners and walkers.

  They worked quickly, not wanting to lose the trail. But at the same time, they had to look the part. They couldn’t pass up blood spills.

  As they entered the tunnel, Finn felt a shiver.

  “You smell that?” he said.

  * * *

  Greg Luowski had done as he’d been told. As the biggest boy in his class since second grade, Greg didn’t take orders easily. They were to him as vinegar was to oil, or water to fire. To say Greg challenged authority was to give him too much credit. He was more of a bumper car at an amusement park; he went in the direction he was pushed, crashing and forcing his way, rarely mindful of the consequences. He’d been recruited by the Overtakers through a YouTube video someone had e-mailed him. He didn’t remember clearly what had happened after that, but his eyes were green now—not that his mother noticed; she didn’t notice anything about her son—and instead of being told not to make trouble for other kids, he was encouraged to do so.

  Ordered, if he was honest about it—which he was not.

  He got cool stuff in return, like a Disney cruise. Even if he’d sneaked aboard and was currently a stowaway. So what? He was still on the ship, wasn’t he?

  So when the order came to stop the hyena, when he was authorized to use the Taser he’d been given, Greg jumped at the opportunity. How cool to shoot off a stun gun! He’d only seen it done once, in the back of a ceramics shop. This big lady had fallen to the floor like the stuffing had come out of her.

  Greg knew there’d be nothing to it. Aim. Fire. Big deal.

  But then things changed. Then this new world of his began to fray at the edges. There were limits, even for Greg Luowski.

  And what these people were asking him—ordering him to do…

  For the first time since becoming an OTK, Greg Luowski felt like a rat in a maze, looking for a way out.

  Any way.

  * * *

  The smell was at once metallic and dangerous; it struck a primeval chord in Finn that told him to run.

  “I’m not liking this,” he said.

  “I hear you.”

  “Maybe we should turn around.”

  “We need that thumb drive,” Maybeck reminded him.

  “I’m the one who got it in the first place,” Finn said, wiping up the spot Maybeck had sprayed. The quantity of spilled blood had increased. Neither boy mentioned it, but neither missed it either.

  “Where’d it go?” Maybeck said, his goggle-covered eyes trained on the deck. The blood trail had been regular and predictable—every eight to ten feet—until here, at the forward section of the jogging track, where it vanished.

  “Weird,” Finn said.

  “You think it was magically healed?”

  “Nah. Maleficent doesn’t have that kind of power.”

  “Tia Dalma might.” Maybeck sounded worried. “I don’t put anything past her.”

  “You think it’s Tia Dalma who’s running the OTs?” Finn asked. For years there had been speculation that Maleficent was not the top Overtaker. “What about Chernabog?”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But if we could capture Tia Dalma…” Maybeck said.

  “Yeah. I’m with you.”

  “Whitman!”

  Maybeck’s shout stopped Finn cold. Finn tugged back the paper hood in order to see where Maybeck was pointing: the jamb of one of the closed doors carried a red smear. Blood.

  The door’s sign warned:

  DANGER:

  CREW MEMBERS ONLY

  BEYOND THIS POINT

  Maybeck muttered a curse word.

  Finn’s family had a rule about not using such language, and though he never admitted it to his friends, he didn’t like hearing them. “You think?” Finn said.

  “I think,” Maybeck answered. He tried the door handle. It moved. The door opened a crack. He reached for the light switch.

  “No lights,” Maybeck said. “You think someone took care of them?”

  “If that was the case, we’d be nuts to go in there.”

  “No doubt.”

  “But we’re going in anyway?” Finn said, tentatively.

  “You’re the leader.”

  It had never been voted on. But Finn didn’t deny it. “We need the thumb drive,” he repeated.

  “No argument from me.”

  Maybeck hungered for such adventure; he listened to jacked-up music and flaunted his independence. The rest of the KKs tolerated conflict; Maybeck seemed to thrive on it. Maybe it had to do with anger over his living situation—none of the Keepers knew whether something had happened to his parents or if they’d bailed on him. Or maybe he was an adrenaline junkie. Finn wasn’t in any hurry to rush into something simply because Maybeck wanted to.

  Through the door, they found themselves in a mostly open area where the anchors and docking lines were neatly stored. The wind carried with it salt and the sweet scent of the sea. But mixed into this were oth
er, disgusting odors, like an outhouse in the sun, like garbage cans set out on the curb, like a mouse that had been under the couch for the past week.

  Something dead.

  Finn faltered. Maybeck cursed under his breath.

  “Whoa,” he muttered.

  “I know,” Finn said.

  There were two inverted rowboats strapped tightly to the deck. A fiberglass rescue launch was slung overhead, looking like a miniature tugboat. Twin spools the size of small cars were loaded to full with twisted steel cable as thick as a man’s forearm. Each played out to a monstrous chain neatly ordered on the deck, leading to one of the ship’s two anchors, weighing four tons—eight thousand pounds of iron. The rowboats and the darkness blocked the sight of the forward deck. Something crunched beneath Finn’s leather deck shoes.

  “Glass,” Finn said.

  “The lights.”

  “We could report the broken lights,” Finn sug- gested. “Whatever we’re smelling…whoever came looking…they’d find it.”

  “And that’s a good thing?”

  Maybeck and Finn stopped at the exact same moment, compelled to do so by the sudden stench.

  “On three,” Maybeck said.

  Finn wasn’t waiting. He used the face of the phone to cast a green pall across the deck.

  He retched.

  Maybeck blew his cookies onto the inverted rowboat. He cursed again.

  Before them, lying on the deck atop the neatly ordered coil of chain, was a hyena, cut open and eviscerated. Maybeck turned away from the gruesome sight. Finn tried to make sense of it. A ritualistic sacrifice. Something a Creole witch doctor would do?

  “Psst!” Finn caught Maybeck’s attention. By moving the light from his phone away from the horror and incrementally to his right—starboard—he illuminated a line of thin S’s on the painted deck.

  Maybeck picked up on it and nodded, wiping spittle from his lips.

  Bloodred S’s, from the edge of a rubber-soled shoe stamping an ever-fainter line of color along the deck. Finn turned away, not wanting to make a big deal out of it.

  The line led into the dark shadows between a pair of steel girders on the outer hull that supported the overhead deck.

  Someone was hiding there.

  Finn suppressed the urge to scream, to charge into the shadows and attack whoever had slain the hyena in this horrid manner. Retribution.

  “We need to tell someone,” Maybeck said, louder than necessary, loud enough to be heard by whoever was lurking a few yards away. He leaned against the opposing rowboat, as did Finn, their backs to the girders.

  Finn took notice of the coveralls, realizing whoever it was would believe them to be crew members, not kids impersonating crew members. For a moment both he and Maybeck had forgotten their roles.

  “You mean to help us clean it up,” Finn said.

  “Ah…yeah. Of course,” Maybeck said, catching on. “Disposal. Easiest thing is to toss it over the side, but they’ll want to incinerate it.”

  “They’ll want to explain it,” Finn said.

  “No joke. Since when are dogs allowed on board?”

  “That’s one ugly dog,” Finn said. “You see the neck on that thing?”

  All the while he’d been unpacking the defibrillator while signaling with his gloved hands, pointing first to the wall behind them, then counting down by putting up one finger at a time.

  When Finn’s third finger lifted, Maybeck spun to the far side of the rowboat; Finn stayed on the bow side and charged the dark, lugging the defibrillator along with him. He dropped the main business of the thing, extending the wired stickers out like a weapon.

  Two guys jumped out of the dark. No matter that Finn had been expecting something like this; he startled and tripped on a deck-mounted cleat and went down hard. Defending himself from the fall, he let go the defibrillator’s electronic stickers. Suddenly defenseless, he rolled into the ankles of the two boys and knocked them down.

  Maybeck took the bigger of the two, while Finn rolled on top of the other one. But Maybeck jumped back as a steel blade flashed in the low light.

  “Back!” Greg Luowski said, lunging with the knife. “Off him!”

  Finn paused, then let go of the other kid.

  The only light—and there wasn’t much of it—came from the open door to the jogging track. The light played across Luowski’s sullen face in patchy scabs. Finn was no stranger to the bully, but he’d never seen him like this. The boy’s dull Cro-Magnon eyes were alight with energy, like the eyes of a guy on a street corner talking loudly to the passing traffic. Luowski looked unsure and unstable. If anything, it made him more dangerous.

  The other boy wasn’t a boy at all. He was in his thirties, maybe, with a bony, pinched face and unfocused eyes set close together. He wore all black, a stagehand’s costume, and a name tag that Finn couldn’t read because of the angle.

  “No problem, Greg.”

  “Shut up, Whitless.”

  Judging by Luowski’s blood-caked clothes and hands, they were looking at the hyena’s killer.

  “He swallowed it,” Maybeck said, figuring it out. “The hyena. They made you go after it.”

  Luowski said nothing, but he didn’t have to: he was horrified by what he’d done.

  “Nice people you’re working with,” Maybeck said.

  “Shut it!”

  “They’re not people,” Finn said.

  Luowski waved the knife in Finn’s direction. “I said—”

  “Yeah, yeah, we got it,” Maybeck said. “Let me ask you this: after what you just did, how can you possibly wave a knife at us? Fellow human beings. You gonna cut us open like that?”

  Luowski’s knife hand lowered. He was breathing hard; he looked sick. “My advice: get off this ship before they carry you off. I’m telling you, she’s not going to let anything stop her.”

  She? Finn thought. Which witch? What woman? What girl?

  “From doing what?” he asked.

  Luowski almost looked ready to tell him. With his hand lowered, Maybeck could have jumped him, but he thought better of it.

  “Tia Dalma? Maleficent? The Evil Queen?”

  “I have no idea,” Luowski whispered. “I don’t want to know.” His body shook from head to toe. Finn sensed that the real Greg Luowski was held in a spell.

  Then it occurred to him: the other guy was likely under some kind of spell, too.

  “We can help you,” Finn told Luowski.

  Maybeck’s questioning look threatened Finn.

  “Get out of here before I hurt you,” Luowski said, brandishing the knife.

  “I’d listen if I were you.” The unnamed man spoke in a gravelly monotone. Definitely drugged, drunk, or under a spell.

  “You’re not us,” Maybeck said.

  Finn stepped back carefully. Maybeck matched him step for step, but reluctantly; he wanted a fight.

  Finn said, “We need the USB drive, Greg. Its contents, at the very least. Make a duplicate. Who’s going to know?”

  “I’ll know,” the man—Dixon—said. Finn could finally make out his full name tag.

  “Who that matters is going to know?” Maybeck said, making sure to direct this at Dixon.

  Luowski spoke in the same grinding whisper. “Get off the ship. All of you. Get off and stay off. I’m telling you: they mean business.”

  “Better listen to him, boys.”

  Finn felt gooseflesh ripple across his skin. He spoke directly to Greg, doing his best to ignore Dixon.

  “Come to us. Anytime. Anywhere. We can help.”

  “Someone will die,” Luowski said. “One of you—you’ll die.”

  He blurted it out like he was divulging a secret. For a moment they all stood still as statues.

  Then Finn stepped back until he reached the door to the promenade. He and Maybeck never took their eyes off the two men as they retreated. Luowski still held the bloody knife.

  Someone will die, Finn thought.

  One of you.

>   IT WAS SOMETHING OF a Keepers convention in stateroom 816. Finn and Maybeck shed their coveralls and joined the other Keepers—Willa, Philby, and Charlene—along with the hologram of Amanda and the real-life Storey Ming. Jess’s sputtering, sparking hologram lay on the bed, the leg wound sometimes bleeding, sometimes not, depending on her current state.

  “What a mess,” Charlene said.

  “Keep calm,” said Philby.

  Finn tried to catch Amanda’s eye, but she wouldn’t look his way. To say they’d been more than friends for the past year was an understatement. It was something special, and they both knew it. But things had noticeably cooled off since Finn had accused her of leading the Overtakers into Typhoon Lagoon, a conflict that had left Finn’s mother under the Overtakers’ power. He’d been stupid. It had come out of his mouth all wrong. He wasn’t sure if Amanda would forgive him. The possibility of that loss left Finn with a sickening feeling in his gut. Only one thing had eclipsed this reaction: that moment when he’d looked at his mother behind the wheel in the Typhoon Lagoon parking lot and had seen his mother’s bright-green eyes.

  She had been born with blue eyes.

  That moment had been paralyzing. Terrifying.

  Finn’s mother was somewhere on the ship now. If he’d been successful in threatening Tia Dalma, she’d be his mother, not some lady under a spell. Finn was itching to find her and make sure she was okay; itching to have Amanda relent and allow him back into her world; itching to get Jess taken care of so he could figure it all out.

  But as leader, he knew he had to stay focused on the task at hand. He knew to put the needs of the group first and his own desires last, no matter how frustrating and painful.

  “We need to fix her leg, make sure Amanda is returned first, and then get Jess safely back,” he said. “Philby, you need to get to the Radio Studio, so only Amanda goes on the first Return.”

  “Why did you come, anyway?” Willa asked Amanda, somewhat accusingly. The question hushed the others.

  “I told you, Wanda. Jess’s dream about Maleficent and the Evil Queen capturing Charlie—Charlene,” Amanda corrected, knowing Charlene only liked the boys to use her masculine nickname. “The bee suits. Her dreams, her visions—whatever—get all tangled. Wanda wanted us here as backup.”