by Jon Land
Stacy wasn’t crazy about unveiling the first of the creatures so early, especially in the limited confines of the Magic Kingdom. The park had no open stretch of land big enough for the T. rex and the Steg to really do anything big, just move around a little, do some roaring and make eye contact with the patrons. The site they’d settled on was a barely wide-enough strip of grass on the lagoon bank to the left of Cinderella’s Castle. Not a whole lot of room for viewing, but then the creatures were just going to be standing there on display for most of the day. She intended to run a few simple programs at regular intervals; that was it.
The row of television monitors immediately above Stacy allowed her to follow every programmed move the creatures made and to make the called-for adjustments. Another pair of monitors featured the view from the creatures’ perspectives, thanks to minicams that had been positioned behind their eyes.
“Okay,” she said, zooming in on the T. rex, “let’s try one more runthrough before we give the world its first peek.”
The bearded man pushed the woman’s wheelchair closer to the fence as the Tyrannosaurus rex’s jaws widened for another gurgly roar.
“Is that what they really looked like?” Blaine McCracken asked Susan Lyle.
“Dinosaurs were never my specialty but, yes, I think this is pretty damn close.”
The T. rex sank back to its time-honored hunker and, stretching its neck, scanned its huge head across the gallery viewing it. A few of the kids shrank from their perches. Adults laughed. Fifty feet away, on the opposite bank of the lagoon, the Stegosaurus gazed up from its make-believe munching of grass.
“We’d better have a look around the rest of the park,” Blaine suggested, and pulled Susan’s chair backwards, their cherished fence-front spots gobbled up instantly.
The Magic Kingdom’s official opening time was nine A.M. But guests at Disney resorts could enter an hour before that and so, Blaine learned, could the handicapped. By using the wheelchair he hoped that he and Susan could remain together without attracting undue attention. The remainder of her disguise consisted of sunglasses and a soft, wide-brimmed straw hat that slouched low over her brow. She had also trimmed and colored her hair during a brief stop in a motel room thirty minutes from the park.
Blaine’s disguise was equally effective. His goal was simply to mix in amongst the other thousands of park patrons and toward this end he, too, had donned a sun hat. But that was where the obvious ended. McCracken hoped to draw attention to certain features of his disguise, including a belly hanging well over his waist courtesy of a thick motel-room pillow. He had used paste and talcum powder to color his beard gray and then let Susan cut his thick wavy hair short enough to brush straight back. Finally he had added attention-getting sunglasses to the mix, featuring one colored lens and one clear lens, evidence of an eye disorder. Anyone looking at him would take note of his glasses and likely stop there.
“Where to now?” Susan asked Blaine, after they had extricated themselves from the crowd struggling for a glimpse of the first exhibits from Dinoworld.
“A spin around the park. I need to catch my bearings.”
McCracken eased her chair along the road that curved left from Cinderella’s Castle and banked toward Frontierland. He had never been to the Magic Kingdom before and could only imagine what it would be like jammed with people milling everywhere. Not ready to consider the prospects of that yet, he busied himself with an analytical consideration of the logistics they were facing.
The Magic Kingdom was divided into seven different theme parks he preferred to think of in terms of grids. As such, Sal Belamo had been assigned several in the north and east, including Mickey’s Starland and Tomorrowland, while Blaine made himself responsible for the four concentrated to the south and west. They would continue to make sweeps throughout the day in search of Joshua Wolfe, maintaining contact with each other as well as with Johnny Wareagle, who would confine himself to the labyrinth of tunnels that ran beneath Disney World until his services were required. No disguise, it was deemed, would be enough to hide Johnny from Fuchs’s troops.
From the moment Blaine eased Susan off the Disney monorail and down the ramp for the entrance onto Main Street U.S.A., the scope of the Magic Kingdom—the countless roads which weaved and sliced through it—left him awestruck. On the one hand he took solace in the fact that such a massive facility would make it all the harder for Fuchs’s men to find him. On the other, it would be equally hard for him to find Joshua Wolfe. A barbershop quartet had greeted their entry and now he could hear a marching band approaching.
“Do you think he’s here now?” Susan asked as Blaine kept sweeping and cataloguing with his eyes.
“I wouldn’t be. Not enough people to use for cover yet.”
“When would you come?”
“Late this afternoon, when the really big crowds arrive. Maybe even tonight, when darkness makes it all the harder to find me.”
“And yet you wanted to be here as early as possible.”
“Because I can’t be sure, and because I wanted to get the lay of the land.”
She could feel McCracken’s hands suddenly tighten on the handles as the chair rolled slowly across the litter-free road. Two men ambled by, looking from side to side, and kept going even after their eyes had crossed Blaine and his wheelchair-bound charge.
“Another pair of Colonel Fuchs’s men,” he said after they were well past.
“How many does that make?”
“Enough to make the odds of us finding Josh before they do lousy at best.”
“You on today?”
Johnny Wareagle looked quizzically at the man wearing the cowboy outfit.
“Injun Joe, right?” the cowboy continued. “Tom Sawyer’s Island. Live characters today.”
“Oh,” Johnny said softly. “Yes.”
“Should be fun.”
Wareagle had crossed paths with the cowboy at a bend in one of the corridors that ran beneath the Magic Kingdom. Located beneath the glitter and crowds, this subterranean maze contained the bulk of the park offices, storage areas and its electronic nerve center as well as access points to virtually all the rides’ movable parts. No gears or grease, in fact, were ever glimpsed because they were all contained in “the tunnels,” as they were commonly referred to. Problems were accordingly often repaired before anyone noticed anything amiss. Ride stoppages were unheard of at Disney. Nothing slowed the constant flow of people determined to have a good time.
So, too, security guards were a rare sight in the Magic Kingdom. If any needed to get from one spot to another in a hurry, they almost invariably used the park’s subterranean world to reach hot points whenever trouble arose. There was no place in the park that could not be reached via these tunnels, which were often used by Disney characters to delight kids by seeming to pop up anywhere without warning.
Johnny Wareagle had been waiting in the darkness for Blaine McCracken to tell him where to go, when a high school band being given a tour forced him to move on. There were plenty of places for him to hide, in the form of storerooms, staff changing and locker rooms, lounges and closets. Each hallway featured clear markings indicating what lay ahead in all directions, both here in the tunnels as well as aboveground in the park itself. Johnny hadn’t been paying much attention because it didn’t seem to matter. He’d put plenty of distance between himself and the high school band when he had run into the cowboy stuck before him now.
“Well, I got the first stunt show in Frontierland,” he said finally. “Good luck.”
“Good luck,” Johnny returned.
The cowboy started to move on, then changed his mind. “Ran into another big guy not long before you, you know.”
Johnny felt his spine quiver, thinking of the monstrous thing Blaine McCracken had encountered in the New York Public Library and then again inside Group Six.
“Somebody did a great makeup job on him, let me tell you. I figured he was heading for the Haunted Mansion, ’cept I didn’t know we we
re adding live figures there, too.” He seemed to think of something. “Come to think of it, he was heading in the wrong direction.”
“Which direction?”
The cowboy pointed back, slid easily into his performance drawl. “He went thata way, off to the right. Hey, you know him?”
“Maybe.”
The cowboy tipped his cap. “Have a good day, pardner. Don’t scare too many kids in that cave of yours.”
“No.”
“Happy Fourth of July!”
FORTY
Joshua Wolfe reached the Magic Kingdom at dusk, covering the last stretch of the ride in a shuttle bus boarded in front of the local plaza hotels. The Magic Kingdom was the third stop after Disney-MGM Studios and Epcot, and the four-mile trek took a choking, churning forty minutes. Traffic was backed up for miles, everyone coming and nobody, it seemed, going. The parking lots, especially the Magic Kingdom’s, had turned into obstacle courses with buses parked anywhere they could steal a place to squeeze into, only to find themselves unable to maneuver in the mounting clutter. The driver of this shuttle repeated the pickup times but cautioned patrons to be patient. A long night was promised. Anyone who wanted to get home sanely, he advised, should leave before the parade and the fireworks got under way.
The driver opened the doors and people crowded into the aisle impatiently. Josh felt his breathing shorten, suddenly claustrophobic. To settle himself, he focused on the task before him: retrieving the vial of CLAIR and retracing his steps out of the park. The front pocket of his jeans held the small vial of the compound he’d created in Group Six to mix with CLAIR, if he had to—if they made him.
Josh barely remembered leaving the bus, getting the admission ticket he had bought earlier in the week ready, and stepping onto the monorail. His life seemed to start again when the monorail doors opened before the entrance to the Magic Kingdom. They stamped his ticket, gave it back and he was through the turnstile onto Main Street U.S.A. This was Disney’s elegant re-creation of a quaint small-town center, complete with horsedrawn carriages, antique car replicas, and old-fashioned trolleys, one of which now featured a barbershop quartet singing in perfect harmony.
Josh moved farther into the world of simulated small-town life. Hair held back by a baseball cap that made him look like every other teenager in the park, Josh ambled dazedly on, lost in the swirl of lights and activity. He smelled fresh popcorn, heard the far-off sounds of a marching band making its way through the park.
And saw the Men. They stood out stiffly, eyes focused nowhere near the attractions. Josh walked toward the grassy, tree-lined park across the square where Disney characters were mugging for photos with speechless children. Nearer to him a group of teenagers in matching navy T-shirts squeezed together for a commemorative picture. Josh approached a boy about his age who was struggling to focus a camera before the group broke apart.
“Hey, want me to take the shot?” he offered. “That way you can be in the picture, too.”
“Good idea, man,” the kid returned, and looped the camera over his neck. “Just press here,” he said, handing it over.
Josh accepted the Minolta and waited for the boy to squeeze in amongst his friends before focusing. They were smiling, laughing, impossible to still. Josh felt the camera tremble in his hand. He didn’t want to be taking the picture—he wanted to be in it, too, wanted to be part of something.
“Whenever you’re ready,” one of them yelled out.
He pushed the button, snapped off a few more and then left them to their clowning. A sea of dark blue shirts, making the kids anonymous amidst the crowd.
“Hey, thanks, man,” said the kid, taking the camera back from him and extending his hand. “I’m Andy.”
Josh took it in the best grip he could manage. “Josh.”
“Hey, you got a camera? How ’bout I take one of you?”
Josh thought of the eyes of Fuchs’s drones relentlessly searching for him.
“I’ve got a better idea,” he told Andy.
McCracken greeted the dark like an old friend for the relative cool it brought. The hours had melted away between iced teas and lemonades purchased during sweep after sweep of the park. He pushed Susan Lyle’s wheelchair toward the Splash Mountain ride from the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, watching a constant procession of jammed cars reach the top only to be jettisoned over a fake waterfall on a seemingly straight drop down. Each landed with a thud and skidded across the water, spraying the gleefully screaming occupants who’d waited two hours for the adventure.
“Hey, boss,” Sal Belamo called.
“Here, Sal,” Blaine returned, pretending to speak toward Susan instead of the jawbone microphone of his wireless communicator. “Where are you?”
“Just went through Alien Encounters in, what the fuck, Tomorrowland. You wouldn’t believe the shit they got inside this thing.”
“Glad you’re enjoying yourself. Our friends still in evidence?”
“Looking a little more nervous now that it’s getting dark.”
After twelve hours in the park, twelve hours of becoming intimately acquainted with the scope and layout of the Magic Kingdom, Blaine could best describe it as deceiving. On the one hand it seemed as if it must be larger than it really was to accommodate the seven different theme parks located within it. On the other, those theme parks had been fitted economically into a manageable but confusing area. It took Blaine several sweeps before he figured out which road went where. He had his bearings now, could recite all the various eating establishments and souvenir specialty shops, in addition to the rides, from memory.
As the day wore on, it had become increasingly difficult to negotiate the roads through the mounting crowds. Numbers had peaked during the last two hours to the point where moving atop the spotless avenues meant standing still much of the time. McCracken checked his watch. In a little over an hour’s time, the Spectromagic Parade would begin, followed immediately by a massive Fourth of July fireworks display in the Disney tradition, the highlight of which was going to be an American flag sewn in the sky by continuous explosions of red, white and blue.
“Fuchs’s people are looking for us as well as the boy, aren’t they?”
“Could be we’ve already been spotted.”
“Even though they haven’t made a move?”
“Insurance. Fuchs isn’t sure his people will be able to find Josh, so he’s hoping we do it for him. Remember, he doesn’t know the kid slipped away from us. Figures we’re all still together.”
“Like one big, happy family,” said Susan.
Everything considered, this last day had been one of the worst in Turk Wills’s life. The Magic Kingdom was breaking attendance records every time somebody new came through a turnstile and, in between dispatching his men to hot sites spotted by his plainclothes detail, he had to deal with Mr. Washington. What he would have liked to do was take Colonel Asshole and string him up from the wire running from Cinderella’s Castle for Tinkerbell’s Flight. See if it would hold his weight.
Mr. Washington had been watching the closed-circuit monitors and nothing else. He was soaked with sweat even though the air-conditioning was cranking as high as it would go. He spoke suddenly now, though his eyes never left the screens.
“I told you he’d be coming in after dusk. I told you to put your people on the alert.”
“We got a hundred thousand people in the park right now. My people been on the alert all day.”
The man from Washington swung his chair toward him stiffly, neck locked to his shoulders from staring at the screens too long. “I’d like to sympathize with your problem—”
“Thanks.”
“—but I need to remind you the matter that brought me here is one of national security.”
Fuchs started to come up out of his chair, but Wills spun it around so they were both facing the bank of monitors again. “See that?” he said, gesturing to a quartet of screens picturing different parts of Main Street U.S.A., stretching all the way to Cind
erella’s Castle. “They’re setting up for the parade right now. In an hour I’m gonna have maybe sixty thousand people jammed along that route you see up there. Now, I’m figuring whatever’s going to go down here is likely to put plenty of them in danger. So what I can do, I can either pull my men to help you cause it, or I can keep them on watch to protect those sixty thousand from whatever might happen.” Wills turned the chair again and looked Fuchs right in the eye. “I choose option two.”
“I’ll have your job for this,” the colonel promised.
“Come midnight tonight, it’s all yours, Mr. Washington.”
The group in navy T-shirts was part of a teen tour that had originated in the Northeast ten days earlier. They had been working their way south through historical Philadelphia, Washington, Williamsburg, Gettysburg, reaching Disney World as planned on the Fourth of July. The boy whose camera Josh had taken the picture with—Andy—had given him one of the blue shirts and that made him, for all intents and purposes, one of them.
The large group splintered off into several smaller ones, Josh trailing along with a dozen or so who opted to head for the Haunted Mansion. They halted just past Liberty Square when they saw how long the line was.
“Shit,” a girl named Wendy muttered.
“What about Splash Mountain?” a boy named David asked.
“Worse,” a gum-chewing girl replied.
“Tom Sawyer’s Island,” Josh suggested a bit nervously, realizing he was running out of time.
“What?” from Wendy.
“No line for the raft over. Entrance is right there and it’s closing at dark.”
“What the hell?” responded another of the kids. “It’s better than nothing.”
Josh counted his blessings, concentrating on the matter at hand. He knew the Men would be riding the rafts one after the other. All those potential hiding places in the caves and mines on the island wouldn’t have been lost on them. Linking up with these kids was his only hope for safe passage over there.
