Ridley Pearson - Power Play

“Children in peril

Children in fright-”

But she stopped before completing it.

Willa had disappeared.

Finn watched as Maybeck sparkled, became transparent, and vanished.

Finn sat bolt upright in bed. His own bed, at home. Maybeck blinked furiously from his air mattress.

Finn felt something on his leg and threw back the covers.

A rattlesnake.

He screamed a bad word loud enough to be heard two blocks away.

He shook his leg like a maniac. The snake flew up and was caught, dangling from one of the paddles on his ceiling fan.

His father threw open his bedroom door and switched on the light, his mother craning over her husband’s shoulder.

When Finn’s ceiling light switched on, so did the fan.

The snake began circling overhead. The fan gained speed.

“FINN WHITMAN!” his father thundered, glaring at him. His father had run out of patience for the Kingdom Keepers after their earliest adventure. Wanting his son to focus on academics first and sports second, he had little tolerance for Finn’s claims of saving Disney from its villains. Although he appreciated the college money that resulted from his son’s participation in the program, and even secretly enjoyed some of the attention and fame that rubbed off on him for being Finn’s father, this kind of nighttime interruption to his family was exactly what he objected to and found so offensive.

He didn’t need a manual to understand why his son and Maybeck were fully clothed in black, wearing shoes, and sweating profusely while in air conditioning.

“I had a nightmare,” Finn said.

“Lying will only make it worse for you.”

The rattlesnake was currently rotating at warp speed, wrapped around the fan blade.

“Mom? Please?” he said, flicking his eyes to the ceiling fan.

His mother spotted the snake and went ashen white.

“Sweetie,” she said to her husband, “come on back to bed. Let’s deal with this in the morning. Nothing to be done now.”

Mr. Whitman seemed unmovable. “Terry,” he said, “do I have your word you two will go back to sleep? No shenanigans?”

The rattlesnake was losing its hold. Six inches of the snake was now sticking off the end of the fan’s paddle.

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Whitman trusted Finn’s friends more than he did his own son.

Mr. Whitman made a grunting sound of disapproval, allowing his wife to pull him out of the doorway. She stepped forward, made a face of pure horror, and reached for the light switch. As she shut off the light, she closed the door.

Finn heard a thump, but couldn’t see in the darkness. His father opened the door again and peered inside. “What was that?” he said. “Are you testing me, son?”

“No, sir!” Finn answered.

The rattlesnake had hit the door. It was hanging in a coil from the pair of hooks on the back of the door, its tongue flicking in the direction of his father’s head.

Finn sprang out of bed. “Sorry, Dad. Won’t happen again. Good night.” He toed the door and shut it in his father’s face.

His father called softly through the door: “We’ll discuss this in the morning, young man!”

The snake turned toward Finn.

“Whitman!” Maybeck hissed, having backed up to the wall.

Finn dove into his closet and grabbed his laundry bag and a hanger. He’d seen this on the Discovery Channel.

“You gotta help me!” Finn whispered.

“Oh, yeah, as if that’s going to happen.”

“I need you to hold the bag open.”

“Pass.”

“I can’t do both at once.”

“No way!”

“Maybeck!”

Maybeck approached cautiously and held the bag. “This feels like the losing end of this deal.”

“You want to handle the snake? Be my guest.”

The snake’s rattle was going strongly, raising every hair on Finn’s body. If his father heard it, he might as well let the snake just bite him now.

Maybeck held open the laundry bag, his arms extended supernaturally. He was basically a ZIP code away. Finn hooked the snake with the hanger and lifted it carefully from the door’s twin clothes hooks. The snake hung heavily from the Uof the hanger.

Finn lowered it slowly and Maybeck caught the snake in the bag.

“Window!” Finn hissed.

Maybeck moved that direction. Finn opened the window and Maybeck extended the bag outside.

“Okay,” Finn said, “let go.”

“I can’t,” Maybeck said. “My fingers are frozen.”

“Let…go…” Finn said, uncurling Maybeck’s fingers one by one.

The bag crashed down in the plants.

Shutting the window, Finn heaved a sigh of relief. Maybeck hadn’t moved. He looked like a statue.

“It’s out,” Finn said.

Maybeck shook his head and finally managed to step away from the window.

“We’ll have to check the bag in the morning and make sure the snake is gone,” Finn said.

“You can if you want,” Maybeck said.

Finn texted Willa and Philby.

Willa texted back immediately, thanking all three boys. Philby texted a few minutes later:

trouble here. group skype b4 skool @ 7:45

Reading the text over Finn’s shoulder, Maybeck whispered, “He thinks he had troubles. I gotta hear this.”

THE KEEPERS MET ON VIDEO conference fifteen minutes before buses and parental rides departed for school.

Finn: “We had a tricky situation last night.”

Willa: “As in, Maybeck and Finn saved me.”

Finn: “And Philby.”

Maybeck, looking over Finn’s shoulder, said, “It was the Evil Queen and Cruella.”

Charlene: “Same as Downtown Disney.”

Charlene was using her own video image as a mirror while applying mascara.

Willa: “The fob was missing.”

Charlene: “Did you check-”

Willa: “The Lost and Found? Yes. Not there. Gone. It’s got to be why they crossed you, Charlene. Finn and Philby come into the Park and the three of you lead them to the fob. You Returned and they stole it. None of us saw that coming.”

Maybeck: “Whoa.”

Charlene: “They stole it, because…?”

Maybeck: “We become stuck in the Syndrome, for one thing.”

Philby: “First the server, then the fob. If we hadn’t managed to hack back into the server last night, Willa would still be stuck there.”

Finn: “I guess I can see how that helps them break out Maleficent-I mean, it takes us out of the picture-but it’s sure a lot of planning, a lot of work, if you ask me.”

Philby: “Which means we’re missing something. The bigger picture.”

He then described his fight with Hugo.

Philby: “Obviously, they knew I would try to Return you three. They sent Hugo to stop me. Hugo must be the one we can’t see in the photo. I still can’t believe he’d do this to me.”

Maybeck: “To us.”

Charlene: “This just gets creepier and creepier.”

She applied one last stroke of mascara and twisted the tube shut.

Willa: “But the real reason they wanted me was for me to describe Jess’s sketch. The one she showed me at school.”

Finn: “We need to see that up close.”

Philby: “Question-how did the Evil Queen know you’d seen the sketch?”

A general silence.