Kingdom Keepers II(78)
Struggling to free his hooked belt, he turned and glanced over his shoulder. The dinosaur broke loose from his scene—the thing was definitely alive!—and charged.
With the stopping of the vehicle, an alarm now sounded throughout the building.
Willa’s seat belt released, freeing her.
She leaped from the backseat. “The black door!” Maybeck called out calmly. Again he wrestled with his belt. Now he fiddled to unstrap it: he was stuck.
The dinosaur snorted and charged down the track at him. Only at the last second did Maybeck spot a small pool of oil along the track—one of the vehicles ahead of him was leaking oil. As he noticed it, he elected to stay perfectly still.
“MAYBECK!” Willa cried out.
His belt still caught, Maybeck turned around and faced the charging animal.
His belt buckle came loose and slipped out of the loops on his pants.
He dropped to the floor.
The dinosaur slipped in the oil and crashed into the front of the vehicle, demolishing the rover into a twisted V of bent metal.
Maybeck was lying directly between the dinosaur’s legs.
He scrambled to his feet.
Willa held the black door open.
Maybeck ran like he’d never run. The dinosaur turned and followed, not slowed by the crushing impact with the vehicle.
Maybeck literally dove through the black door. Willa swung it shut. The wall shook as the dinosaur impacted the metal door and concrete fire wall. Willa took Maybeck by the hand and pulled him to his feet.
“You could have been killed.”
“I saw that his legs were like stumps. As long as I stayed between them…”
“That was too big a risk to take.”
“It’s not like I had forever to think about it,” he replied.
He looked around. They were in a long, curving hallway. There were no markings on the gray walls. Overhead, hundreds of wires were carried in a kind of metal ladder that hung from the ceiling; it ran in both directions and out of sight. Among the wires were dozens of blue ones.
“We follow the wires,” Maybeck said.
“But in which direction?”
“This way,” Maybeck said.
“But how do you know?” Willa asked.
“I don’t,” he said. “Some things we’ve just got to take on faith.”
“Faith? This is you speaking? What have you done with the real Maybeck?”
“Give it a rest.”
They were hurrying now, the alarm still sounding. Perhaps employees all rushed to assigned stations in emergencies—or to unload guests. Whatever the case, the hallway was empty.
Maybeck moved not with his eye down the hall, but in the tangle of wires overhead. Willa did much the same.
“There!” she said, pointing out a massive group of blue wires running from the wire carrier through a hole above a door to their right.
Maybeck swung open the door.
Workbenches ran along the far wall, covered with spare parts, soldering guns, tools, and hydraulics. In the middle of the space to their left was a metal rack, floor-to-ceiling shelving holding dozens of computer servers, network hubs, and surge suppressors.
“We’ve got it!” Willa proclaimed.
“No!” Maybeck countered. “It can’t be this easy. Philby said we should look for a closet or a bathroom.”
“But these are computer servers. It could easily be—”
“No, it couldn’t be here. This ride uses all these computers. The nerds that work on them would notice a server that didn’t belong. Philby’s got to be right.”
“Then where?”
“The wires,” Maybeck said, hurrying around the back side of the rack of computers. There had to be several hundred wires—both blue and black—the blue wires interconnecting the servers and the hubs. The black wires ran to power supplies. Some of the groups of wires were well-organized and held together by plastic ties; others had been added hastily and were in a tangled clump of spaghetti.
Maybeck looked this all over and said, “We’re not going to find it here.”
“How can you tell that?” Willa asked.
“Because the same guys that work the computers know the wires. They could spot wires that didn’t belong.”
“In this mess? I don’t think so.” Willa stepped forward and dragged her fingernail along one wire, then another.
“What are you doing?”
“Every girl knows that makeup can hide anything,” she said. “The way you fool the nerds is you paint the blue wires black. Then they don’t notice—” She cut herself off as her thumbnail flaked away some black paint, revealing the blue wire below. “Voilà!”
“If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes,” Maybeck said.
Footsteps… coming fast down the hall.