Kingdom Keepers IV(46)

“That’ll work,” said Finn. “We need you to stand guard. We all have our phones.”

“I wouldn’t count on ours working down there,” Philby cautioned.

“Macbeth,” Finn said, trying to get back at Maybeck for all the nicknames he called him, “will stay up here to keep an eye on the pirates. You’ll text us if you see any change in them, because it may mean trouble for us. Philby and I will try to get to the server room.”

Maybeck said, “So I text if I see something awkward up here. Is that all?”

“No,” said Philby. “You see this red stop button?”

“Kind of hard to miss,” Maybeck said. The plastic emergency button was huge.

“If you hear the system restart, then you hit that button.”

Finn added, “We’d rather not get sucked through the system and spit out into the compactor. It’s up to you to see that doesn’t happen.”

“Could be bad for our health,” said Philby. “As in, fatal. The wind generated to suck the trash out of the Park reaches sixty miles an hour in the pipe. That’s almost hurricane speed.”

“Got it,” said Maybeck. “Hit the red button. Kill the wind.”

“Seriously,” Philby said.

“Red button. Easy enough.”

“Okay then,” Finn said to Philby. “Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be,” said Philby.

Finn punched the red button. The roar ground to a stop.

Philby lifted the heavy lid and the smell intensified.

“Glad it’s you guys going down there and not me,” Maybeck said, pinching his nose.

“We won’t have long,” Philby warned. “Engineering Base over in the Studios will see a warning that the system’s down. They’ll try a restart before anything else.”

“So…I’ll go first.” Finn’s only other time in the trash system had been a long time ago. Maleficent had been chasing him. He’d been terrified.

He climbed over the sticky edge into the steel pipe, while Philby and Maybeck held open the lid. Maybeck’s face was puckered in disgust as the putrid odors of rotting trash wafted up.

Finn let go and dropped. He fell a few feet, landing in some wet slop at the bottom of a similar-size steel pipe that ran parallel with the surface. A tunnel within the tunnel.

“Out of the way!” Philby said.

The pipe was too small to crouch and stay on two feet. Finn was forced to drop to hands and knees amid the sticky, disgusting goo of old garbage.

He called back coarsely, “You might want to get your flashlight out before you put your hands in this stuff.”

Philby dropped in behind him, flashlight on. Finn’s shadow spread before him amid the garbage and debris that adhered to every inch of the pipe—wrappers, crushed cups and cans, chewing gum, rubber bands, grotesque rotting remnants of former meals, banana peels, turkey leg bones, and every kind of plastic container ever made, most of them unrecognizable. The smell only grew worse the farther they crawled. Finn held his breath for as long as possible, but an inhale was inevitable, and when it came, it tasted like he was eating trash.

“I think I’m going to puke,” Philby said from behind him.

“Go ahead. It might improve the smell.”

“By now Base has tried to reset. That’ll take a couple of minutes to be in effect. When Maybeck pulls a second emergency stop they’ll send a team to investigate. We need to be out of here by then. This thing is basically a wind tunnel.”

Philby could recite the statistics, but Finn had experienced the trash pipe. What Philby didn’t seem to grasp was the power of that suction. If the trash bags were moving at sixty miles an hour, the two of them would be also. Some things were better left unsaid. He picked up the pace, though it wasn’t exactly fast going. The slime coating the tube was the consistency of tar. His knees and the palms of his hands stuck to it like a fly to flypaper. Each movement made a sucking and slurping noise.

“Hurry it up!” Philby said.

“I’m trying.”

“It smells like my father’s beef-jerky farts.”

“TMI.”

Finn paused at the first intersection—a pipe ran off to the left. Professor Philby had to take a closer look himself. He shined the flashlight at the walls of the connecting pipe.

“Hair,” he said, pointing out clumps of what looked like steel wool stuck to the surface. “The beauty parlor is close by. The server room is up ahead at the next intersection. It should be a recycling station.”

Finn was going to ask why a recycling station would be connected to a trash system, but he knew better than to challenge Philby. For one thing, Philby’s explanations could run on the long side. Finn slogged ahead, so disgusted with the ooze that he began walking on his elbows rather than sinking his hands into it.