Kingdom Keepers III(3)

He kept running.

“Dude,” Maybeck said. “Your arm is like, gushing blood.”

Finn looked down. He’d been caught by the tip of a pirate’s sword. It was a nasty cut, but he wouldn’t have called it “gushing.”

Whoosh! Whoosh! Finn heard the sword slicing the air just behind him.

“Slowpoke!” Maybeck chided. Maybeck ducked to his right and went down onto his hands and knees, tumbling over. He tripped up three of the pirates, sending them flying. He jumped to his feet and caught back up to Finn.

“You do make yourself handy,” Finn said.

“What are friends for?” Maybeck asked.

“Here’s the plan…” Finn said at last. “How are you at swimming underwater?”





2


AT FIRST, FINN ASSUMED THE alligator was a Disney prop. But then a flicker of doubt crossed his mind: Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were Mark Twain Mississippi River characters. Alligators and the Mississippi River didn’t fit.

Swiss Family Robinson, maybe. Or the Jungle Cruise. The doubt—the fear—made him less DHI and more human, less pure light and more flesh and blood. Swimming underwater, glowing slightly, his eyes wide open, with Maybeck swimming to his left, Finn came to a major realization: the alligator was for real. It was swimming right at them, its mouth wide open.

He didn’t know much about alligators, but this one looked hungry. And big.

Finn reached over, grabbed Maybeck by the hand, and pulled him lower. The alligator misjudged and swam above them. It turned with a flick of its massive tail and came at them again.

At that same instant, the pirates or Stitch must have stepped into the river water that surrounded Tom Sawyer Island. A splashing sound was familiar to any alligator—it often signaled an animal’s arrival at the water’s edge for a drink. To an alligator that sound meant a chance at a meal, and for this particular alligator the instinct proved too strong to resist. Only a foot or two from being able to bite off Maybeck’s feet, the beast reversed course with another fierce lash of its tail and headed for shore.

As Finn and Maybeck scrambled up the muddy bank on the far side, winded and spitting out river water, there came a cry of terror from across the way: one of the pirates had nearly lost his leg to the alligator. He and the others and Stitch were in full retreat, running as fast as they could in the opposite direction.

“You’re late,” Philby said. Philby was maybe the biggest techno-geek Finn had ever met, but he looked more like a soccer player than a nerd. Finn supposed that all the DHI models had been chosen for their “average” looks, their “all-American” qualities; all but Charlene, who was anything but average. She stood just behind Philby in front of one of the teepees, and looked more like a teenage movie star. She had blond hair and a cheerleader’s body, but she didn’t fit the stereotype of what all that implied. She was smart and athletic, cautious and curious.

“We were worried about you,” she said. She pointed across the river. “Looks like for good reason.”

“Yeah,” Finn said, “you might say we were delayed.”

“You might say the pirates were waiting for us,” Maybeck said. “Waiting to grab us. To trap us in the Syndrome. They chased us onto the island and Whitman figured a way off, but it was close.”

“Waiting,” Philby said, “as if they knew you were coming?”

“That’s the way I read it,” Finn admitted. “Someone had spotted us in the park and alerted the pirates. Maybeck’s right: it was a close call.”

“Come on!” Charlene said. “Before they come back.”

The way the DHIs crossed over into the park was to go to sleep in their beds at home. Once asleep, they “woke up” inside the Magic Kingdom; but that meant that whatever they wore to sleep was what they were wearing when they appeared as DHIs in the park. Knowing this, Finn always dressed in normal clothes before going to bed. He pulled the covers up so his mother didn’t see what he was wearing as she said good-night. Charlene, on the other hand, had a mother who insisted on rubbing her back and talking to her each night before bed, so Charlene always arrived in the park wearing a nightgown, as she wore tonight. The boys had a hard time keeping their eyes off her.

Willa, on the other hand, who looked Native American or Asian with her hooded, inquisitive eyes and dark braided hair, wore cargo pants and a T-shirt that read: BITE ME. On the back it had the picture of a shark—some kind of promotion for a seafood restaurant.

Once inside the nearest of the six teepees, the Kingdom Keepers were in an electronic shadow, an area where the DHI projection system could not reach. They became invisible once they moved a few feet from the teepee’s door. Only impressions in the sand showed where any of them were sitting. Though their DHI projections sometimes did not project in certain locations, they remained in the park, just as when light is showered onto a shadow, the shadow disappears but the object that was casting the shadow remains. In projection shadow the DHIs could still touch, feel, talk, smell, and hear; they left footprints. Invisible to the eye, they were not beyond detection, and therefore had to be careful. Now inside the teepee, their four voices rang out from the darkness. To anyone looking inside, it would have appeared that no one was there. The only thing that seemed out of place was a small black plastic fob that looked like a garage door opener, hanging from a nail in a pole by the teepee’s open door.