Kingdom Keepers Boxed Set

by Ridley Pearson

  “You’re the one who said she could dream the future.”

  “Sometimes, sure. But this is personal stuff.”

  “You said she wrote in it each morning after waking up.

  “It’s true. She did,” Amanda confirmed.

  “Then maybe, without knowing, she left us clues how to find her. She drew lightning striking a castle. There are drawings of monkeys in there.” He tugged gently on the journal, but Amanda would not let it go.

  “Please,” Finn said to her.

  For a moment the journal connected them. Then Amanda let go.

  “You’re standing guard for us,” Finn reminded her.

  He held up his DS. “Send us a text if you see anyone coming.”

  “Okay,” she said, her eyes filled with concern.

  “All we’re going to do is make copies,” Finn reminded her. “There’s got to be a copy machine or a scanner inside.”

  “And what about bats?” she asked.

  “We’ll be careful. I promise,” Finn said.

  He followed Philby inside to a reception area, where a well-organized desk held a telephone and computer. Some Disney cartoons were taped to the computer monitor, and there were framed pictures of three kids. The few lights that had been left on cast murky shadows and offered a dimly lit corridor running in both directions off this front room. There were two signs, each with an arrow: one read MAINTENANCE and pointed left; the other read ANIMATION TRAINING LAB and pointed right.

  “Cool,” Philby said, turning right. “I’ve got to see this.”

  The animation training lab was a garagelike workshop that reminded Finn of the workshop in his grandfather’s basement. The L-shaped room had countertops that ran along every wall, behind which were pegboards holding every conceivable kind of tool. Computers and hand tools littered the counters. But what made it much different from Grandpop’s basement was its purpose. The room was designed for the repair of the Audio-Animatronics—the talking robots—that were used extensively throughout the Park. The result was the disturbing presence of human torsos, heads, hands, and legs in every stage of creation, from pieces that looked like robots to painted faces dressed in costumes that seemed so real Philby kept spinning in circles, afraid one or more of them might suddenly move or attack. Of equal concern were the dozens of animals under construction, including pieces of tigers, lions, Stitch, Donald Duck, and a fantastic hand—possibly from a gorilla—that was nearly three feet across and supported by a metal superstructure that held it four feet off the floor.

  “Whoa…” Philby said, taking a look around. Both boys spoke in whispers, as if the “body” parts might overhear them.

  “Somehow I don’t think we’ll find a copier in here,” Finn said, holding Jez’s journal.

  “Oh, I bet you’re wrong. Give me a minute.” Philby walked the lines of workbenches. He muttered words like “impressive” and “interesting” and “incredible.” Then he addressed Finn. “Articulated, motor-controlled limb movement—very cutting edge.” He stopped in front of a six-foot tyrannosaur head with wires sticking out of a missing eye.

  “What about a copier?” Finn reminded him, not so impressed.

  “Yeah, okay,” Philby said. “But I could stay here for hours.”

  “Let’s save the extra-credit work for another time.”

  Philby’s curiosity carried him to the far end of the room, where the lab opened out into a large space that appeared to be used for assembly. Most of the robotic dummies stood on their own here—cables and wires running from them—and many were at least partially clothed and had faces. Most of the Audio-Animatronics were of animals in various poses, all of which looked incredibly lifelike. But it was the far end of the room that intrigued Philby.

  “Check it out,” he said, approaching the area somewhat cautiously and with great respect. “Remember this?” he asked.

  The three walls at the end of the room were covered in jungle-green paper, as was the floor. There were stage lights and tripods and cameras and a dozen computers on rolling stands.

  “I do,” said Finn. He and the other DHI kids, upon acceptance by Disney, had been computer-modeled by Disney Imagineers. Their movements were recorded to create the DHIs. The empty cages off to their left suggested the obvious.

  “Animals,” Philby said, immediately understanding the setup. “They motion-modeled animals here to create DHIs.”

  “Wayne told me they were doing that,” Finn said. “Animal hosts.” The cameras were all set low to the ground. Then there were the cages and—he realized as he stepped closer—paw marks seen faintly on the green-paper floor covering.

  “Check it out,” Philby said again, this time directing Finn’s attention to five photographs thumbtacked to the wall nearby. There were several monkeys, a baby elephant, a pair of tigers, and a gorilla.

  “Got it!” Finn said, pointing to a flatbed scanner hooked up to a computer. He touched the computer’s space bar and the machine woke up.

  Philby laid Jez’s diary on the scanner bed and began scanning the pages. As he printed them out, Finn received a text message.

  panda: 2 guys out front!!!

  “Visitors!” Finn whispered to Philby.

  Finn: got it! thanx

  The lab’s only door was a long way away. There was one EMERGENCY ONLY door to the right of the green-screen area, but it had an alarm, and Finn had no desire to draw the wrath of Security upon him and Philby before they managed to even get into the Park.

  “We can hide!” Philby said in a harsh whisper. He pointed to an area where dozens of parts and partial bodies of the Audio-Animatronics figures had been heaped into a kind of junk pile. Many of the human robots had faces that looked phenomenally real.

  Finn grabbed the printouts, and the boys jumped into the junk pile, worming their way down into the parts so that only their shoulders and faces showed. They blended in with the robotic human parts.

  Two men entered the room, both wearing dark blue coveralls. Neither seemed surprised to find the lights turned on—something Philby had done upon entering.

  “It’s always something,” the thinner of the two said. “I could have told you the sound system was going to go out at some point. They should have rewired the Asia system when they installed Expedition Everest. Not my fault.”

  The men scrounged around on the workbenches, apparently looking for parts.

  “Finding the break in the wire, if there is one, is going to be a bear,” said the heavier man.

  “Don’t mention bears,” said the other one. He pointed to an Audio-Animatronics figure of a standing bear cub designed for the Country Bear Jamboree. “This one will get jealous.”

  Both men laughed—harder than the joke deserved.

  The thin one suddenly turned and headed directly for the junk pile where the boys were hidden. “Didn’t we loan these guys our acoustic coupler?”

  “It’s the tester we’re looking for. Forget the coupler.”

  The thin man picked up a piece of one of the robots. He was about two feet away from Finn, who held his breath in an attempt not to be noticed.

  “You know what?” the thin man said, looking right at Finn, then at Philby, then at the stack of robots. “This place gives me the creeps sometimes. Some of these things look so real…I gotta tell you.”

  “Found it!” the bigger man said. He held up a box with a lot of wires running out of it. “I knew the guys had borrowed it.”

  He tucked the box under his arm. The two men reached the door. The thin man stopped at the light switch.

  “Hey,” he said, “did you turn on the lights when we came in? Because I didn’t.”

  “I don’t think I did.”

  Finn felt sweat trickling down his rib cage. He calculated the distance to the emergency door, ready to run for it.

  “Well,” said the big man. He switched off the lights.

  FINN’S FIRST DECENT look at the contents of Jez’s diary came as he, Amanda, and Philby awaited the Park’s
opening. The main parking lot was a steady stream of arriving vehicles. Awning-covered shuttles were used to transport visitors to the Park entrance. The shuttles were stacked up at the back of the lot awaiting use. The three kids sat on a shuttle bench together and reviewed their personal photocopies of Jez’s journal in detail.

  Finn had always pictured a girl’s diary to be line after line of neatly written cursive on well-organized pages, the contents of which held secrets about her love interests. What he saw here surprised him. Jez’s was a stream-of-consciousness collage, a collection of images, sketches of animals, and musings. There were clothing receipts pasted into the pages; pieces of postcards, stapled; a fortune cookie fortune taped to a page; there were recipes, movie ticket stubs, pieces of torn photographs; ribbons and candy wrappers. There was an arch that looked like the letter M, with a blob of ink on the right side. Surrounding and interweaving it all were lines from poems, song lyrics, comments, and what looked like quotes from conversations she’d had. It was all mixed up into a mess of heavily scribbled pen and pencil.

  “Are these supposed to mean something?” Finn asked, fingering the three photocopied pages.

  “They must have meant something to her,” Amanda said. “Jez took her journaling very seriously.”

  “And at what point did she cut off her ear?” asked Philby. “Go van Gogh.” He won a few smiles.

  “Look,” Finn said, indicating the upper right-hand corner of the photocopy. “That’s a castle and a lightning bolt.”

  “That’s what I told you about,” Amanda said. “And look down here.” She pointed to what was obviously a monkey.

  “Yeah, but this could be coincidence, right?” Philby said, sounding somewhat apprehensive. “Are we actually going to believe a person can see into the future?”

  Finn looked over at him with a dumbfounded expression.

  “Okay, okay. But it doesn’t mean everything on this page is significant,” Philby protested.

  “How do we know it isn’t?” Finn asked.

  “This is several nights’ worth of dreams,” Amanda said. “You can tell because some are pencil, some pen. The movie tickets and postcards—that stuff is memories, reminders.”

  “But what about this decal, or whatever it is?” Finn asked.

  “No idea. A stamp, maybe,” Amanda said.

  The letters were reversed, the image backward.

  “There’s a tiger, a gorilla, and…what’s this, a bowling pin?” Finn turned the page upside down, but couldn’t quite tell what he was looking at.

  “I think they’re all clues,” Amanda said.

  Philby exhaled loudly, so as to be noticed. “We all want to find her, Amanda. But if we go chasing down sketches from her diary, then that’s a lot of valuable time that could have been spent looking for her.”

  “I think we can trust this,” she said.

  “We need more proof,” Philby complained.

  “We have a castle and a lightning bolt!” Finn pointed out.

  “On opposite corners of the page. There’s also an aqueduct, some balloons, and a railroad track.”

  “These are dreams, not instant replays,” Amanda told Philby. “She had visions. Glimpses. How much of your dreams, your nightmares, do you remember? Bits and pieces are what I get. Sometimes more than that, a piece of a story, but not that often. Maybe we all dream pieces of the future but just don’t happen to know it. How often do we write them down or make sketches and keep track? She left us clues, Philby.” She waved the photocopy in the air. “This is the map of her dreams. Maybe she didn’t know she was leaving it for us, but there’s no ignoring the castle and the lightning, is there? So maybe not everything on here is helpful. It probably isn’t. But we won’t know that until we check it out. Right? We’ve got to check out each thing on here, because if even one other thing on this page can help us find her—” She covered her mouth with her fist, on the verge of crying.

  “I’m just saying we don’t have much time. I’m nodding out like every other minute. We fall asleep and we may stay asleep forever. That’s what Wayne said. I just want us to use our time efficiently, that’s all.” He studied the sheet. “For instance, who’s Rob?” In several places on the cluttered page Jez had written, Change Rob.

  “Rob Bernowski,” Amanda said. “From school.”

  “A friend? Boyfriend? Or what?” Philby asked.

  “A little of both, I think.”

  “And she wants to change him? And this is relevant to us, how?”

  “I don’t know. Sure, I guess. She put that into the journal in a bunch of places.” Amanda opened up the journal and flipped through several pages around the ones they had copied. “The way she writes it, it’s like she’s really set on it.”

  “So are we supposed to talk to Rob about this?” Philby asked sarcastically. “You think Rob has her?”

  Amanda glared at him.

  Finn asked, “What can it hurt to call him? I don’t see why we don’t follow up on everything we can. Am I missing something? What if this is important, and we ignore it?”

  “That’s why you called the meeting, isn’t it?” Philby asked. “I say we put it to a vote. We could spend all day chasing a bunch of meaningless ramblings, and we haven’t got all day. How much longer can we stay awake?” He yawned, and then Finn and Amanda yawned right along with him.

  “Stop it,” Finn said.

  “We’re out of time here,” Philby complained, “and we haven’t even started. I’m going to have to call my mom at some point, or she’ll have the cops out looking for me.”

  “We’ll put it to a vote,” Finn agreed. “But in the meantime, we’re going to make a list of everything on this page and what it might mean, no matter how far out.” He addressed Philby. “We’ll do it scientifically.” He said this knowing it would appeal to him.

  “I can get behind that,” Philby said.

  Amanda looked over at Finn, her eyes red and shining behind tears she struggled to hold back. But her eyes also had a twinkle in them. She seemed to be thanking him. Finn reached out and took her clenched fist in his hand.

  “We’re going to find her,” he said.

  MAYBECK APPROACHED the bat enclosure from the Maharajah Jungle Trek path. The enclosure was quite large, with colorful prayer flags strung between the facade of a fake building, rock walls, and the large boxlike frame that supported a wall and roof of mesh netting. A three-stage viewing room had been built along the path. A ranger would be on duty once the Park opened at 9 AM, but for now it stood empty. Maybeck avoided the viewing room, just in case, staying outside, moving along the perimeter wall of the netting. He left the path and entered the jungle, keeping close to the enclosure’s netted wall.

  It was only then he saw the birds. His first reaction was one of astonishment. He thought it beautiful in a way—a thousand or more dark birds so crowded into the treetops that large branches bent under their weight. He thought how fortunate he was to see such a phenomenon—that it probably only happened in the early hours before guests arrived and scared away all but the most brazen of the wild creatures that had adopted the Animal Kingdom as their home.

  Then he noticed something strange about the birds: they all seemed to be looking right at him. He knew this was impossible, and yet…The thrill of astonishment gave way to the electric jangle of raw nerves. They were looking right at him.

  Two things happened then: he spotted a door into the enclosure about ten yards farther into the jungle, and the first of the birds left their perches and flew toward him.

  He knew he shouldn’t panic. It was only birds, after all. But the way they surrounded him…the way the jungle went suddenly silent…the way the bats in the enclosure awakened with a start—nocturnal animals—a restless jittering as they hung from their perches sent a spike of terror through him. Birds flew in flocks, certainly. But they didn’t attack as a group. Did they?

  The birds attacked.

  It was as if someone had blotted out the sun. They c
ame at him as a dark cloud of beating wings and unflinching black eyes. Their small bird legs were aimed right at Maybeck. The birds came at him in such numbers that at first it was just plain scary—they landed on his head, his shoulders, his arms, his back. But then it went beyond scary—to dangerous—as the weight of them pushed him down. To an outside eye, it would have appeared as if thousands of birds had landed in the same spot of the jungle at once, but to Maybeck it meant a pitch-black flurry of wings and beaks and scratching claws. He fought them off one-handed—grabbing, poking, sweeping his arm, and knocking the birds away. But back they came.

  He knew he could not sustain the weight of the birds. The pecking.

  Now, crushed by the heaviness, feeling it might break him in two, Maybeck released the pillowcase to defend himself.

  A tiny hand reached out…

  A monkey hand! It snatched up the pillowcase, and the monkey took off running. As it did, the birds flew off. In a flutter of feathers, the sun reappeared, and Maybeck watched as the monkey, pillowcase in hand, hurried down the path.

  Maybeck took off after it.

  He looked himself over as he ran—not a scratch on him. If he were to tell anyone what had happened, they wouldn’t believe him. He had no proof whatsoever. A thousand birds attacked me! It would sound like a lame excuse for his having lost the pillowcase and the captive bat. He had originally thought Finn’s claim that the bat might be Maleficent was a bit of a stretch. But now he reconsidered. Birds didn’t organize like that, he reminded himself. Monkeys were known thieves, but what was a monkey doing loose inside the Animal Kingdom, even if the Park was not yet officially open? He had questions that needed answering.

  He ran as fast as he could.

  When the monkey stole off into the jungle, Maybeck followed.

  WILLA CROSSED DISCOVERY ISLAND, feeling as if everyone were staring at her. Could they tell she was underage? She didn’t think she looked all that much younger than the other girls. The formality of the uniform helped her look older, adding a good three or four years to her fourteen. But what if they were staring because they recognized her face as that of a DHI? If caught, she could lose her family’s Gold Pass, as well as her performance contract. She might no longer be one of the Kingdom Keepers. She kept her head down and wished she’d used more makeup at the costume warehouse. The ID badge Wayne had given her was clipped to her waist, helping to make her look official. With her eyes to the ground, she walked with her back straight and took determined strides, knowing the importance of body language.