She couldn’t “creep” between handholds and footholds, so she watched the viewing booths, waited for the attention of the guests to stray to one side or the other, and then made her move.
The doors swung open beneath her, and a worker stepped through.
Only then did she realize that some of the sandy texture was shredding off the wall where her running shoes touched. Painted sand rained down toward the ground, falling right on the head of the man who’d come through the doors. If he looked up, he would see her.
Counting on his entrance to have distracted both the guests and the ranger, Charlene no longer took her time. She gathered her strength, reached out, and moved with accuracy—three handholds, two footholds. She climbed quickly and deliberately, clawing her way up to the very top of the rocks, where, enclosed by the aviary’s netting, she spread herself flat.
The dust sprinkled into the hair of the man below. He turned to look up. But he saw only a wall—an empty wall. He brushed the sand out of his hair and cursed the people who’d built the enclosure. The darned thing was clearly falling apart.
CHARLENE SCOOTED TO the far edge of the top of the wall and peered over the lip. She had a good view through the netting of the backstage area. The enclosure’s wooden doors opened onto a small, courtyardlike area between the fake rock wall and a large garage with a flat roof. The steel wall facing her had been painted as a backdrop to look like rocks and vines.
She could hear a good deal of activity to her left but couldn’t see what was going on. She spotted a camera mounted a few feet directly below her and aimed backstage; she assumed this was the camera that Amanda had mentioned, the one out of commission, an easy assumption, given that the wire running from it was currently unplugged.
She reached under the edge of the netting, almost touching the camera, her fingers grasping for the dangling wire. If she could only reconnect it, Amanda could take over the surveillance. It was no use—she was too far above it, and to move any lower would risk her being discovered. But Charlene was not one to be discouraged. She squirmed her upper body slightly farther off the ledge and stretched out, her fingers now only an inch or two from the wire.
She lunged and grabbed hold of it, the wire firmly in her hand.
The worker who had entered the enclosure only a minute earlier, the man whose hair she had dusted with sand, now came back through the twin doors and shut them. There was no time for Charlene to retreat. Instead, she hung over the wall ledge directly above him, her left hand holding the wire, her right keeping herself from falling.
The man stopped and put down a white bucket.
“Well done.”
Charlene heard the voice—a woman’s sterile voice, uncaring and even rude, if uttering two small words could be made to sound rude.
“Tie him up,” the same voice said.
Immediately three big monkeys appeared from around a corner. Fast as lightning, they swarmed the worker. One tied and knotted a length of rope around the man’s wrists, holding them behind his back. Another secured his ankles. Within seconds, the man was bound. The third monkey leaped at the man and knocked him over. The man fell, and the two monkeys immediately dragged him across the blacktop and propped him up against a metal box, while the third tied a gag around his open mouth.
Only then did Charlene detect movement to her left, from where the voice had been heard: a flash of purple fabric and green skin.
Maleficent.
Charlene didn’t actually see her, but she didn’t have to. Purple and green were like Maleficent’s team colors. Who else could it be?
With the monkeys’ attention on the hostage, Charlene reconnected the camera and wire. The camera immediately sprang to life, tracking left. Charlene quickly retreated back to the top of the wall, flattening herself. She had a choice now: she could leave this to Amanda and the camera or…
She spun around and crawled in the direction of the noises. She had to see for herself. Something prompted her to glance back toward the viewing booth. From this height she could see out to several sections of the Jungle Trek path. It surprised her how much she could see—including Maybeck and Finn, who, standing to the side of the path, were shaking their heads furiously at her.
And then she understood: if she could see so much, then Park guests on the trail—like Maybeck and Finn—could see her as well. But rather than go back, she continued crawling, her curiosity ignited by the flash of green and purple, by the eerie sound of the woman’s voice, and by a trio of large monkeys who had acted on orders. She crawled past a narrow wall that acted like a buttress, supporting the fake rock wall. It also screened the source of the noises, and by leaving it behind, she now saw through the netting what all the commotion was about.
Four hairy orangutans were directing smaller monkeys while Maleficent stood in the shade watching. The monkeys were unloading bags of ice from a large rectangular truck. They were stacking the bags into a heap, and the ice was melting in the sunshine and leaking out into a large puddle that disappeared beneath the truck. The whole operation looked so human—bosses and workers. And yet these weren’t humans at all.
Then she saw the two cages. Big, as Amanda had described. They sat on the pavement, pushed up next to the steel barn. Both were wrapped in canvas tarps, but the canvas was not secured well along the bottom, allowing Charlene to see a slice of forest green fabric inside the cage: a ranger’s uniform.
Willa!
She couldn’t see anything inside the second cage, but she didn’t need to: Philby. She had no doubts.
“Faster,” Maleficent ordered. “We need more room. Bigger! If he’s to fit, it must be bigger!”
Were they taking Philby somewhere? Smuggling him out of the Park in an ice truck? Or was she talking about some other hostage?
She tried to make sense of it all: the monkeys clearly obeying Maleficent’s orders as if they understood her, the cages containing her friends, the melting pile of ice bags, the urgency in Maleficent’s voice.
She knew what had to be done: she had to untie the worker and set him free. But did she dare climb down and attempt that? Wasn’t it wrong not to? And if she messed up, if she got caught, would she end up like Willa and Philby? Where would that leave Maybeck and Finn, except further isolated?
Backing up slowly now, she decided this needed a team effort. She was no match for the power of Maleficent, who had once, with nothing but a wave of her hands and a mumbled incantation, created an electronic fence to surround Charlene’s friends.
The climb back down the wall proved more difficult than her ascent. She had just strapped her feet back into the stilts when she heard: “Look, Mommy! What’s that?”
The “that” was her, of course—the boy was pointing at her.
She stood absolutely still.
It felt like five minutes passed; it was more like thirty seconds.
“What? Where? The big one hanging from the rope?” the mother asked.
“Not the bats! The thingy. The creature. The vine thingy.”
But no one saw her. Charlene had blended into the foliage around her. A few minutes later the unwilling boy was led away, still protesting that he could see the vine lady, and why couldn’t anyone else see her?
It took Charlene fifteen minutes to work her way around the rock wall, and a second distraction—this time executed by Maybeck—to leave the enclosure.
A moment later, Finn and Maybeck joined her.
“So?” Finn asked. “Did you see anything?”
“We’ve got problems,” Charlene answered. “Big…big problems.”
FINN IMMEDIATELY UNDERSTOOD what Charlene and Maybeck did not: it wasn’t Philby and Willa in the cages. Not exactly.
He took off down the jungle path, forcing Maybeck to hurry to keep up with him. Charlene had been asked to blend into the jungle and keep a strict eye on the bat enclosure. He used the DS to tell Amanda the same thing. Now that Charlene had repaired the sabotaged camera, Amanda had more opportunity to monitor event
s backstage.
Though winded, Maybeck kept up. “What’s going on, Whitman?”
“You, of all people, should know,” Finn said.
“Me? Why?”
“Space Mountain.”
Maybeck said, “What about it?”
Finn stopped and pulled Maybeck to the side of the path, out of earshot of the other guests who passed in a steady stream. He spoke in a hush. “When they trapped you in perma-sleep, they put your DHI in—?”
“A maintenance cage!” Maybeck answered. “It wasn’t Willa and Philby Charlene saw. It was their DHIs.”
“Exactly,” Finn agreed. “Even someone as warped as Maleficent wouldn’t put a kid in a cage that small. But a DHI is another story.”
“But if the DHIs are in those cages,” Maybeck said, “then why don’t they just walk out?”
“Why didn’t you just walk out of the maintenance cage in Space Mountain?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It was like I was half asleep or something. Until you showed up, it hadn’t occurred to me.”
“Because we had crossed over, and you had not. With your body in perma-sleep I have a feeling your DHI is kind of in this suspended state. It doesn’t know what’s up. Remember, Wayne programmed the server that controlled our DHIs. Maleficent is running the second server. Who knows how their DHIs are programmed?”
“So we need to cross them back over,” Maybeck said. “That’s the only way to get them out of the control of the second server.”
“Exactly!”
“But why would the Overtakers do this?” Maybeck wondered aloud. “Why trap them in perma-sleep in the first place?”
“There’s only one guy I know who can answer that. And he’s also the guy who holds the button. The remote control that can cross them back over.”
“Wayne!”
“If I can get that remote from him, and we can get close to those cages, we can release the sleeping Willa and Philby—wherever they are. And I happen to think I know where they are.”
Maybeck didn’t dignify that with a question, but he also couldn’t wipe the curiosity off his face.
“Animal Kingdom Lodge,” Finn answered. “Those are the closest beds to the Park. You can reach the lodge from the savannah, and we know the Overtakers are on the savannah.”
“I’ve got to admit: it does make sense,” Maybeck said. “When exactly did you figure all this out?”
“Back there,” Finn said. “When Charlene described the cages, it all fit.”
“And now we’re headed to find Wayne.”
“Yeah. There’s the terminal in Camp Minnie-Mickey. I can access VMK there,” Finn said.
“I thought Philby never came back from that terminal.”
“Which is why we’re doing this together,” Finn said. “Charlene will stay and keep an eye on the enclosure. I’ll use the terminal to try to get to Wayne, and you’ll stand guard. We’ll use the DSs. You see anything weird, you can text me.”
They started walking again.
“But what if we’re wrong about the cages?” Maybeck asked.
“We’re not,” answered Finn.
* * *
Finn’s avatar stood by the bench in the VMK’s central plaza, while Finn himself occupied the small booth near the Lion King pavilion in Camp Minnie-Mickey. The air was burning hot, and he picked up the smell of popcorn, which made him realize how hungry he was. He knew that soon his parents would start to worry. They would expect him home from the water park. But he had things to do.
Knowing it would not print, he typed WAYNE into his dialogue box. Sure enough, it turned red in the text frame and wouldn’t print.
Players’ avatars entered the plaza, pausing below the billboards or circulating while waiting to meet each other. Finn’s patience was wearing thin when a white-haired avatar finally appeared from his right. Wayne’s avatar never stopped moving as Follow me appeared in the dialogue box.
He led Finn to the same room where he had taken Philby. Wayne locked the door with a special code.
[ ]: we’re safe here.
Finn: philby and willa have gone missing, we think their DHIs are being kept in cages behind the bat enclosure, i need the button.
[ ]: I spoke to philby not long ago. right here.
Finn: he never showed up. i think Maleficent is holding them to protect the second server, we can’t crash the server with willa and philby stuck in Sleeping Beauty Syndrome.
[ ]: this is most disturbing.
Finn: can you get me the button—the remote control?
[ ]: yes. of course, though i’ll have to use a messenger….may i suggest the talking recycling bin. a few minutes from now, near the ticket gates, the remote will be taped inside the recycling bin. reach in and feel along the top.
Finn: i’ll be there.
[ ]: if she’s trying to protect the second server, then I fear the worst: she will either turn herself into a DHI to fool us or do harm, or she will compromise the animal DHIs created for Animal Kingdom and use them to her advantage, this is a grave situation, in the magic kingdom she recruited Overtakers from within the attractions, most notably the pirates and the small-world dolls, in animal kingdom there are few, if any, such characters she can recruit for her army, it is our fear she has corrupted the animals themselves, five more orangutans have escaped, along with a half dozen gibbons, several snakes cannot be found, a wildebeest rammed one of the electrical fences attempting to break out. she is clearly gaining strength.
Finn: we want our friends back. Jez drew some things in her diary that have already come true, we think the diary may be—
He stopped typing as Maybeck shouted: “Mayday, dude! Mayday! Mayday!”
MAYBECK KEPT WATCH from the side of a popcorn cart, where a multicolored umbrella was angled to throw shade onto the Cast Member behind the cart. The tilted umbrella offered Maybeck a screen from behind which he peered, spying on Finn and the Park guests milling about Camp Minnie-Mickey, as well as the surrounding jungle. Nearby, a gardener was watering some plants and hosing down the base of two tall trees, allowing the water to pool.
Because of his personal experiences, Maybeck also kept an eye on the sky, alert for any birds. But it was a lizard, not a bird, that caught and held his attention.
Small lizards inhabited most of Florida. He’d grown so accustomed to seeing them zip up trees, across sidewalks, and down the walls of buildings that he almost didn’t notice them at all. His aunt Jelly, who was as close to a mother as Maybeck would ever get, called them “little dragons” and considered them close relatives to the cockroach and mouse. She wasn’t beyond trying to beat them with a broom as she shooed them from the house. He’d been catching them since he was five; if you grabbed one by the tail, the tail came off. For a while he’d kept the tails—he’d had about twenty—but Jelly had found them and thrown them out, never saying a thing about it, then lying to him when he asked.
But the lizard he saw wasn’t like other lizards. For one thing it was fairly big—five or six inches, instead of the typical three or four. It was also some kind of chameleon, quickly changing from the brown of the wood chips in the jungle to the grayish black of the paved path as the reptile emerged into sunlight. But more than anything, it was the way the lizard headed straight into trouble that won Maybeck’s interest. Despite dozens of running shoes and sandals slapping down around it like mallets, the creature never wavered from its mission, dodging this way and that as it risked getting crushed. The lizards that Maybeck lived with spooked easily and skittered away as fast as lightning when approached. He’d never seen a lizard as bold as this one. It headed straight for…
…the Disney Vacation Web terminal.
Maybeck looked back toward the jungle from where the lizard had emerged. From there, in the shaded darkness held in place by tangled vines and leaves the size of tennis rackets, two sets of green glowing eyes stared out. He fixed his attention on them, trying to strip away the camouflage of plants and undergrowth in ord
er to see to what those eyes belonged.
Monkeys…he thought at first. But the eyes were too widely set for a gibbon, and too far off the ground. Orangutans!
It was then that he saw the chameleon stitch its way back through the slalom course of legs and slither into the jungle, heading directly for the green flash of eyes.
As much as he resisted the idea that any of this was actually happening, he sorted it out quickly: the lizard was some kind of messenger; the monkeys were on a mission; Finn was their target.
A moment passed, and he realized he’d almost had it right.
Almost, but not quite. That’s when he saw a lion slink out of the jungle. He fumbled with the DS, but it was going to take too long.
“Mayday, dude! Mayday!” he shouted.
The Park visitors saw the lion as well. A man screamed as a woman grabbed her children by the hands and started to run. The crowd scattered.
Finn turned around and froze.
Maybeck again glanced to his left—the gardener. He knew what to do.
FINN SPUN AROUND to see a lion strolling toward him. A big lion. A lion with a thick collar of fur, a huge head, beady eyes, and glistening white teeth. He instantly knew this was not a case of bad luck: the lion was coming for him just as the bats had come for Maybeck.
The lion lumbered toward him, now only a few yards away. The guests had scattered but now encircled an area about twenty yards across, with the beast at its center.
Heat flashed through him, and all the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck rose with his fright.
He knew what he had to do: he had to cross over. The lion couldn’t hurt a DHI. But as the enormous cat began to flex, as if preparing to strike, Finn’s fear was not to be conquered. The lion opened its mouth and let out a tremendous roar that seemed to come from all around. It surrounded Finn and shook the ground. It didn’t sound natural. Finn threw his hands out, fending off the attack. He swooned, feeling dizzy.
Kingdom Keepers Boxed Set Page 35
