Power Play

“Lay off what, Whitless? My bad for the knockdown. Can’t I help her up?” He faced Charlene. “I really am sorry.”

“No problem,” she said. But Finn was still seething. “As in: we don’t want any problems.” She said this slowly, making sure Finn heard every word.

“I’ll be around, Whitless. If you want me, you can find me.”

“Try some deodorant, Luowski.”

Charlene cupped her mouth, hiding her smile.

Luowski didn’t just smell like a jock, he smelled like an entire team that had been working out in the summer heat for five hours. He smelled like a guy who hadn’t showered since sixth grade.

“Or maybe I’ll find you,” he growled at Finn.

“I’m not worried,” Finn said. “I’ll smell you coming.”

The line moved. Finn and the girls were shown up the stairs. The simulators were designed for a maximum of two people. Charlene lined up in front of door 1, Finn and Amanda, door 3.

“No holding hands, you two, if you get scared,” Charlene called down to them.

Finn faked a grin; he was scared already.

A Cast Member wearing a name tag that said megan accepted Finn’s card from him and chose the only predesigned ride it contained. The door opened and Finn and Amanda were escorted into the simulator chamber. They climbed down into the padded seats of the red metal capsule. The seats faced a large flat-panel screen. Megan directed them to stow anything loose in their pockets. That was when Finn started to worry. She then pointed out the two red stop emergency buttons, one for each rider.

Finn’s stomach turned. He didn’t like the idea of taking a ride that needed panic buttons. He pulled down the black padded chest brace as directed. Amanda did the same. Megan double-checked everything.

“You’re good to go,” she said. She hit a button and the simulator’s lid closed slowly, locking in place. The only light came from the flat-panel display where the ride’s parallel tracks stretched out in front of them.

“This was a stupid idea,” he mumbled.

“You’re telling me,” Amanda said.

“But did you see the course Charlene created for herself? No way I would go on that thing in a million years.”

“She wanted to impress you.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Trust me. She picked the scariest stuff possible. It would terrify the guy who designed it. But she’s going to come out of there and tell us she loved it.”

He wanted to disagree, but thought she was probably right.

The lights dimmed. The ride began.

“If I scream,” Finn said, “it’s just to make it feel all the more real.”

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