Kingdom Keepers IV(3)

She laughed. But not for long. Her amusement was cut short as the roller coaster car began to move forward on the tracks in front of them. A light flashed in their eyes. Sound effects roared from unseen speakers and the car banked sharply left. Finn clutched the safety harness and shut his eyes.

“I hate this already,” he said.

The capsule banked left, did a complete flip in that direction, and then lifted into a double loop, dumping them upside down twice in a row. Amanda’s hair fell like a curtain. Finn squinted open his eyes: the track dropped straight down, about a thousand feet. They plummeted down, like on the Tower of Terror.

Finn screamed a word that would have gotten him grounded for a week if his mother had heard it. It just flew out of him.

“This…is…not…right!” Amanda cried.

They reached bottom, leaving Finn’s stomach somewhere at his feet. He re-swallowed his dinner. The car shot up like a NASA rocket launch.

He screamed the same word again.

“She…tricked…us!” Amanda hollered. Then she screamed at a pitch so high it should have shattered the flat-panel display.

“Puke alert,” Finn gagged out as they entered a triple loop.

“Please, no!” Amanda said. “Try shutting your eyes.”

“Only makes it worse!” he choked out.

“Tell me this thing can’t actually crash.” She released another shriek at a volume that might have been heard in Miami.

“It can’t actually crash,” he said, though he wasn’t so sure. What if the simulator was put through stuff it wasn’t designed to handle? he wondered. What if its bearings froze or its motor overheated? The thing was, even Charlene’s ride, as crazy as she’d made it, hadn’t seemed this bad. Had she tricked them, in order to sabotage Amanda?

That was the first time he realized that maybe Charlene wasn’t the only one involved. A ride this violent carried the fingerprints of the Overtakers.

Finn remembered Megan telling them about the panic buttons. He reached down to punch the red emergency stop button. Just as he did, the car lurched left, and he leaned so sharply in that direction that his hand missed the button.

“Did you see that?” he hollered. “I think it knew I was trying to stop it!”

“You’re losing more than your cookies,” Amanda said. “So this thing can think?”

The car dropped again. Rose and fell. Leaned ninety degrees left and stayed there. Jerked totally upside down and did three more upside-down loops.

Amanda struggled to reach her stop button. But as she did, the track dropped away. She and Finn were thrown forward against their restraints. She punched down and hit the red plastic button.

“Got it!” she yelled.

The ride continued.

She hit it again.

They were flipped over seven times to their right, like rolling down a steep hill in an oil barrel.

“I swear I pushed it,” she announced. “But nothing happened.”

“Impressive,” he managed to mutter to himself despite all the craziness, no longer thinking it was the work of the Overtakers, but knowing it. Wondering how they might have accomplished such a thing, and what, if anything, Charlene’s role had been in it. She had designed the ride, after all. If it was the OTs, how had they organized any kind of attack given that their two leaders, Maleficent and Chernabog, were currently locked up somewhere in a Disney holding facility? The Kingdom Keepers’ mentor and designer, Wayne Kresky, had believed that “With the head cut off the snake, the body cannot survive.” But someone had clearly taken over leadership of the Overtakers. The ride going out of control could not be considered coincidence. The Keepers were under attack.

Finn reached down, able to press his stop button. Nothing.

“It’s…them…isn’t it?” Amanda was no dummy. She’d figured it out on her own.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s them. By now Megan knows” —he gritted his teeth as the track lifted and fell so hard and so many times in a row that his neck hurt—“something is wrong. She’s working to fix it.”

“You’re dreaming.”

“Probably. But at this point, she’s our only hope.”

* * *

Outside the simulator bay, Megan was in fact hitting every switch and button possible. The system’s mechanicals included a warning-light display used to alert Cast Members to potential simulator hardware failure: a single light that ran a solid green, amber, or red. It was currently flashing red—a warning level never seen before and one that attracted the concern and attention of three other Cast Members, including the ride manager.

“It’s going to come off the gyros!” the manager shouted. “Like a wheel coming off a bike. The thing is going to basically explode if we don’t stop it!” He, too, hit every known control trying to stop the ride. “What the heck?” he asked Megan, as if it were her fault.