Kingdom Keepers II: Disney at Dawn

by Ridley Pearson

  [ ]: asia is big.

  philitup: tell me about it. I’m done here, can you show me the security room?

  He felt excited as Wayne led him back out to the caged lift. Wayne directed the cage to the

  SECURITY title, selected the menu, and then navigated to the camera control room. Soon Philby’s

  avatar had again passed through a window in the wal and was standing in front of an enormous

  second wal of TV screens. There had to be hundreds of them. There was a control board here as

  wel . It only took him a few minutes to connect a master cable from the video control board to one of the AnimalCam console inputs. This fed al the security cameras into a single AnimalCam console in the Conservation Station.

  Philby wrote to Amanda on D-Gamer, double-checking his work. Amanda located the

  console and took it over. Thril ed, she wrote back how she now had control of hundreds of cameras. She could view most of the Park now: inside al the attractions, outside walkways, parking lots.

  panda: this is incredible, philby. thank u.

  She waited for Philby to write back. But no message was returned.

  Philby never had a chance to answer her. Once again he’d lost track of himself—so

  engrossed in the virtual worlds of VMK and D-Gamer that he’d forgotten to keep an eye on his

  surroundings.

  But near the end of their discussion, he had final y looked around.

  And found himself face-to-face with a very angry tiger.

  31

  OF COURSE, AT FIRST PHILBY couldn’t believe it.

  A tiger.

  He’d never realized how big they were: the tiger stood as high as Philby’s shoulder. Orange,

  black, and white stripes, like war paint. Its eyes were hypnotic; he couldn’t pry his own away from them. They stared at him like he was… lunch.

  The tiger blocked the door to the smal hut. There was no getting past it, even if Philby’s legs

  had worked, and at that moment he had no sensation in his legs whatsoever. He felt nothing but

  tremendous fear charging his system. It took him over completely. Owned him.

  A tiger loose in the Animal Kingdom! Where were the sirens? Where were the animal police?

  He opened his mouth to scream, but his throat proved too dry, and he croaked out a pathetic

  noise that didn’t even sound close to the “Help!” he’d intended.

  The tiger cocked his head, looking at him from an angle. Sizing him up. Preparing to attack, it

  crouched slowly and silently. As graceful y as a dancer, it squatted onto its haunches, its leg muscles flexing as if there were steel cables beneath the colorful hide.

  Philby couldn’t take it anymore. He squinted his eyes shut and braced himself for the attack.

  When nothing happened, he slowly edged his left eye open slightly, stealing a look.

  At that exact moment, the tiger jumped.

  Philby’s world went dark.

  He felt nothing.

  32

  FINN ARRIVED TO THE RENDEZVOUS at the specified time. There was a tal guy in a Disney cap and

  green coveral s hanging out by the gate to backstage, and it took Finn a moment to realize it was

  Maybeck. With his face in the shadow of the cap, he looked about twenty years old. The two boys

  met up and stood to the side, near the jungle, amazed at the numbers of visitors that now jammed

  the Park.

  Speaking under his breath, Finn explained his encounter with the brooms.

  “Maybe the brooms mean the Overtakers are trying to clean things up,” Maybeck said,

  amused by his own joke. Finn didn’t dignify that with a response. “The DeVine Charlene is over by

  the bat enclosure,” Maybeck continued. “I walked around trying to find stuff from the diary. Ended up back at the Gibbons Temple, and I gotta tel you, Whitman”—Maybeck always cal ed Finn by

  his last name—“there was some serious action over there. Bunch of the rangers al making a stink. From what I overhead, some orangutans pul ed a fast one. One of the apes supposedly stole

  a key, hid it in his upper lip, and then pul ed off a jail break. Some kind of smarts, these apes. Six of them are missing. There’s some serious stuff going down, no doubt about it. And far as I can

  tel , we’re the only ones who have a clue, and not much of a clue at that.”

  Finn checked his watch. “Where’s Philby? And Wil a? Philby’s never late to anything.”

  “Haven’t seen either of them. Amanda’s hanging at the Conservation Station,” Maybeck said.

  “Philby hooked up a bunch of other cameras somehow. So now she can see basical y everything

  going on: the attractions, the paths, and al the buildings, inside and out. But she’s stuck out there.

  She can’t leave her AnimalCam console because she doesn’t want anyone to discover what Philby rigged up for her. What about you?”

  “The thing about the brooms—” Finn said, starting to explain the way he’d felt. But then he cut

  himself off.

  “Yeah?”

  “Doesn’t make any sense.”

  “As if any of this makes sense! Hel o? Try me, Whitman.”

  “Okay. So pretty soon after I arrived at Hol ywood Studios, I thought this crow had spotted me.

  Then the brooms show up. You know? But they didn’t exactly come after me. They just kind of followed me there. At Voyage of the Little Mermaid it was almost like they were there to watch the show. The way I was.”

  “I don’t get it,” Maybeck said.

  “You see?” Finn said. “When the BlackBerry rang they saw me. Everybody saw me. But I think the brooms were surprised to see me there. Or maybe they didn’t care.”

  “I stil don’t get it,” Maybeck admitted, though somewhat reluctantly. Maybeck prided himself

  on knowing things before others.

  Finn blurted out what he’d been thinking ever since the encounter. “Maybe the brooms were

  at Voyage for the same reason I was: to look for answers. My being there both confirmed they

  were in the right place and threatened them.”

  “Threatened them how?”

  “What if the crow was some kind of spy?”

  “Like the bat,” Maybeck said.

  “Yeah! Exactly! And what if the brooms were sent to fol ow me? So they did. Until The Great

  Movie Ride. They didn’t fol ow me into there. Why?”

  “I hope you’re going to answer that.”

  “Because by my going in there, they were no longer worried about me. And then when I got to

  Voyage, they weren’t even looking for me. It was the show that they were interested in.”

  “The show,” Maybeck said. “Listen, I’m not getting this. What’s up?”

  Finn gathered his courage. “I think the Overtakers heard ‘Under the Sea,’ same as we did.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Think about it,” Finn said.

  He watched as the mental tumblers clicked into place and unlocked Maybeck’s thought.

  Maybeck spoke slowly. “They’re fol owing the music clue the same way we are…because…

  they’re…looking for Jez.”

  “She escaped,” Finn declared. “They had her in the stump on the savannah. We know that

  much. Maybe in transferring her, maybe sometime before they ever moved her, she managed to

  escape. She hid someplace here in AK. And for some reason yet to be determined, she used the

  music as a clue.”

  “She’s stuck in the Park,” Maybeck said, “and she can’t get out without our help. So she played the music to send us a clue.”

  “We heard it,” Finn said, “but so did the Over-takers. We both started looking at anything and

  everything that had to do with ‘Under the Sea.'”

  “It makes sense,” Maybeck agreed.

&
nbsp; Finn tried the D-Gamer chat room again, sending a shout-out to Wil a and Philby. But the screen didn’t change. They weren’t answering.

  “So what do we do now?” he asked.

  “We can’t wait for them any longer. Maybe the dreams in Jez’s journal are supposed to help

  us find her.”

  “We need Wil a and Philby,” Maybeck said. “There are a lot of drawings to make sense of.”

  Finn said what they both were thinking. “What if something’s happened to them?”

  The two boys met eyes with horrified expressions.

  33

  AMANDA PRESSED THE right-hand button on the camera controls, zooming in to get a closer look at

  Finn and Maybeck.

  The AnimalCam stations—four in al —were enough like a video game that she had

  immediately gotten the hang of it: a smal screen to her right displayed rows and columns of thumbnail images, each representing a different camera mounted somewhere in the Park.

  Normal y, there were about a dozen vantage points offered, al of them devoted to the wildlife on

  display in the Park: giraffes, elephants, tigers. Philby had upgraded hers. Scrol ing down the thumbnail screen, she had dozens of views available to her—maybe a hundred or more. Selecting

  a particular camera transferred the view to a much larger television screen mounted at eye level.

  She could then zoom in and out using the two buttons to the right, or maneuver the camera to look

  left or right, up or down, using a joystick. It provided her with a virtual tour of every aspect of the Animal Kingdom.

  At the moment, she was watching Finn and Maybeck as she was writing to Finn on D-Gamer.

  panda: have not seen either wil a or philby on camera

  Finn: can u c the cast member entrances?

  panda: yes. but have not seen them, park is packed, could be here.

  Finn: i think the otakers may have heard the change in music same as us. U watch home base for Phily and Wila. also keep eye on us. watch our backs.

  panda: can do.

  Finn hesitated before writing the next message. But he felt he had to tel her.

  Finn: maybeck and i think there’s a chance jez escaped, it might explain some stuff that’s been happening, if so, she’s prob hiding in park.

  For a long time the screen flickered, but no message appeared. He couldn’t imagine what

  Amanda must have been feeling.

  Finn: we could be total y wrong, maybeck and i are going 2 track down each of the diary drawings, maybe her escape was part of her dreams. ????? r u ok?

  panda: scared 4 jez

  Finn: my dad’s crackberry does the internet, i wil go onto vmk and try 2 find wayne. maybe he

  can help us find philby.

  panda: i’l watch 4 them and i’l watch u and maybeck too…

  The cursor hesitated. She wasn’t done typing.

  …but if she escaped, why haven’t we heard from her?

  Finn didn’t have an answer for that.

  Finn: ????? don’t know.

  Amanda zoomed the camera back and tried to stay with Finn and Maybeck as they headed

  off. It took her a minute to figure out how to fol ow them, one camera to the next—she lost them

  twice—but not long after, she pul ed up their images as they moved from camera to camera. She

  pieced together the route they were taking to Discovery Island. At the same time, she studied the

  tiny thumbnail views, hoping beyond hope to catch a glimpse of her missing sister.

  * * *

  Finn and Maybeck walked the Jungle Trek in a hurry, though not so fast as to stick out. They kept

  about ten yards apart; if one of them was spotted, maybe the other wouldn’t be. The Trek had an

  occasional park ranger at an education station—there to give hands-on demonstrations to the curious—any one of whom might be an Overtaker. Finn paid particular attention to each of these

  rangers as Maybeck passed, glad to see that none seemed to take any particular interest in him.

  Soon, they reached the tiger-viewing yards, where they stood among the ruins of an Indian

  temple—the jungle and buildings so authentic that, although he’d never been there, Finn could imagine himself halfway around the world. The footpath rose here to where it was fifteen or twenty feet off the ground, the wal s of the crumbling temple holding in the Park guests, offering views to either side, down into grassy knol s and fields. In the heat of the day, the tigers had taken to the shade at the edge of the wal that contained them. People crowded the temple’s viewing windows

  to get a decent look at the wild cats. The arching windows held no glass but were divided into

  smal squares as if they did, or once had. And while there was no pushing or shoving to win the

  best view, there was some seriously competitive leaning going on.

  But before Finn ever reached the clot of guests at the windows, Maybeck stopped and pul ed

  him aside.

  “Check it out!”

  Just Maybeck’s tone of voice told Finn it was something important. Typical y, Maybeck was

  much too cool to get excited about anything. “Son of a ______.” Maybeck said a word that would

  have once again gotten Finn grounded for a week.

  “Oh…man,” he said, while Maybeck was busy unfolding his copy of the page from Jez’s diary.

  The temple’s stone wal held a series of stone carvings, four feet by four feet pictographs showing different scenes. The primitive carvings were beautiful. One showed a person with his or

  her arms in the air, and an eagle flying overhead. Another had a fruit tree at its center, with birds in the branches and deer surrounding it. A monkey sat at the base of the tree holding a piece of the

  fruit. There were two others, both depicting a weird-looking guy with a mustache dancing around

  and doing strange things. But it was the image of the monkey that captured and held Finn’s attention.

  Maybeck pointed to the monkey. “That’s the monkey she drew,” he said. “It wasn’t a live monkey, it was this one.”

  “Agreed.”

  panda: finn, check out the diary page.

  He quickly texted back to her.

  Finn: the monkey? can u c what we c?

  panda: check out the window, my angle matches the diary exactly.

  “The windows,” Finn told Maybeck, pointing to the knot of visitors straining for a look. He then

  found the incredibly similar drawing on the photocopy of the diary and pointed this out to Maybeck as wel .

  He and Maybeck moved toward the crowd.

  “I gotta tel you,” Maybeck said, “until now, I wasn’t buying that Jez could dream the future.”

  “And now?” Finn asked.

  “Yeah, wel . A person’s got a right to be wrong.”

  34

  FINN AND MAYBECK steadily pushed to the front of the throng gathered at the windows overlooking

  the tiger yards, where a blanket of green grass was interrupted by some trees and rocks. A huge

  tigress slumbered in the thick shade of a bamboo stand, her back against the tal rock wal that

  contained her. Jez had sketched both this window and the sculpture reliefs they’d just been studying, meaning this location had played a significant role in her dreams.

  But what role? Finn wondered.

  “It could be she’s hiding in the tiger yards,” Finn said quietly to Maybeck.

  “You see her out there, do you?” Maybeck asked.

  “No. But—”

  “That’s because she isn’t there.”

  “But it makes sense. She wouldn’t exactly be able to move if she was stuck in there. Not with

  tigers roaming the place.”

  “Whitman, look around.”

  Finn moved to the opposite side of the wal ed bridge dividing the two tiger yards. He didn’t

  ha
ve to chal enge any crowds, because there weren’t any. There weren’t any tigers seen from this

  side.

  “Convinced?” Maybeck said from behind him. He, too, had switched sides.

  “But why would she have drawn both the window and the monkey? Can you explain that?”

  Finn asked anxiously. “They have to mean something.”

  “She drew a lot of stuff: a dinosaur, the monkey, the window, a bat, some old dude. How are

  we supposed to know what it al means?”

  “That’s just the point,” Finn said. “We are supposed to know what it means. We’re supposed to figure it out. We’re supposed to help her.”

  “Maybe it’s about the animals, not the locations,” Maybeck suggested. “Something to do with

  monkeys, tigers, and dinosaurs. What do they have in common?”

  “Nothing,” Finn said, “except that they’re al part of the AK.”

  “The server!” Maybeck said excitedly. “The second server. Didn’t Wayne tel you the plan was

  to—”

  “Make animals into DHIs!” Finn shouted a little too loudly. “You’re right.” He pul ed out the page of Jez’s diary and studied it again. “What if these animals are the ones they’re turning into DHIs? Jez saw them in her dreams. They meant something to her, something important.”

  Maybeck wrote to Amanda on the DS.

  mybest: amanda. how many tigers u c?