The Return: Disney Lands (21 page)

F
INN AND
M
AYBECK RETURNED
as a pair
onto the rump of Jingles, just behind a young boy dressed as Woody.
Breathless, Finn pulled Maybeck off the horse and, amid shouting from the ride operator, off the carousel itself.

As they ran, Finn marveled at how, this time, he remembered everything. He knew they’d been in Disneyland of old; he knew the date they’d been there, the weather; that a television
crew had been setting up
for the historic opening of the park. He knew who had arranged it all, too, but he had yet to allow the name to leave his lips. It filled the hollow spot in his chest,
though; it swelled with warmth and happiness and excitement. He felt teased by possibility. He wanted to jump back onto Jingles and take another ride.

“What the hey?” Maybeck said. “Why’d you pull me off like that?”

Finn,
about to rip him, recalled his own first ride on Jingles and softened. Still, he rushed his words. “I know you don’t remember anything, Maybeck, but you gotta trust me. We have
to get to Central Plaza. We’re gonna return.” He and Maybeck were three-dimensional, full-color holograms once more, to Finn’s delight. “Stay all clear,” he added.
“Version 1.6, remember? We can’t afford fear.”

“Got it.”

“Are you sure? Can you rise above it?”

“It’s Disneyland, man. Check it out.”

Finn did. The lights were bright and high, the sounds of traffic pronounced. The guests wore normal clothes. It was night, not day, as it had been in the other Disneyland. Men and
women—there were women everywhere—carried smartphones, and the only hats the men wore were baseball caps. A child slurped
loudly on a plastic straw in a disposable cup, and Finn
blinked, realizing he hadn’t seen a single piece of plastic on “the other side” (as he was now thinking of it).

Maybeck was still looking too relaxed. The hazards of forgetting everything.

“You remember what Willa told us about Mr. Toad?” Finn said pointedly.

“Yeah, there is that. I hear you, man.”

“Good,” Finn said, glad
that Maybeck could recall the recent past on this side. “If we’re seen in the parks, the Imagineers are going to freak. They’ll ground us.
We have to reach the plaza as quickly as possible! Keep your eyes peeled. We stay in crowds, hang close with our heads down. And we move fast.”

“Aye, aye.”

“I’m serious.”

“I can tell.”

To their left a group of five life-size playing cards
materialized—four Jacks and a Queen. They were from the Mad Tea Party attraction. They turned to face the boys and, as they did, a
crowd immediately formed as if this was a street show.

“Bad news,” Finn said, sticking his arm out to stop Maybeck as he put on the brakes. “If they’re interested in us, they’re OTs.”

“It’s worse than you think,” Maybeck said. “How much do you know about
Jacks?”

“Zero.”

“I studied this stuff in a figure drawing class, and if these boys are from a French card deck, we’re in trouble. The four Jacks represented Europe’s greatest warriors, knights
like Lancelot and the dude from the
Iliad
.”

“I hated that book.”

“Whatever. Hector was willing to die for anything he deemed right.”

“They’re armed. They want to kill us.” Finn’s voice
was flat, certain.

“Or die trying,” said Maybeck. “You recognize the fifth.”

“Is that—?”

“The Queen of Hearts. Who, in my opinion, is just plain deranged.”

Behind the boys another line of cards arrived, mostly clubs and spades with lower numbers.

“What can
they
do?” Finn asked, pointing them out to Maybeck, who hadn’t seen them, his attention absorbed by the royal suits ahead.

“Dude.” It came out:
Doooood
. Finn didn’t hear that tone from Maybeck often. It meant he didn’t like what he saw. It meant he was
scared
. “How can
the OTs be back?”

“Don’t allow the fear!” Finn said. “Do not let them pull you out of all clear.”

“No one has to do that, man. I did it all by myself.”

“Recover.”

“As if. The OTs are dead!”

APPARENTLY NOT
, Finn wanted to scream.
“I don’t think they’re organized. They’re like terrorists with no leader.” He hoped to sound bold and brave, but he
knew the truth: he’d lost some of his all clear as well. This round to the cards, to their slow, ominous show of force. “I suppose,” he said, swiveling from front to back, trying
to keep the enemy in full sight, “that the clubs can club us. And spades are shovels, so that’s
not good, either.”

“Don’t look now, but they’re forming a card house,” Maybeck muttered uncomfortably. “They look pretty organized to me!”

On all sides, park guests stepped out of the way, enthralled with the cards’ lockstep movements, which were reminiscent of a marching band formation. The cards lined up, edge-to-edge and
edge-to-face, in an octagon shape, the circumference of which
was ever shrinking.

“They’re boxing us in,” Maybeck said, spinning one way, then another.

“Duh! I got that.”

“Any ideas, Einstein?”

Making the boys’ situation all the more dangerous, the cards morphed into three dimensions, horses growing forward out of the four Jacks, their hooves impacting hard on the ground. It
looked as if the giant cards had cut the horses in half, leaving
only the front of their bodies. Next, the Jacks’ arms lifted up and off the face of the cards. One held a mace, another a
sword, a third a battle-ax, and the last a halberd. The crowd went wild.

“Slice and dice,” Maybeck groaned.

The guests cleared a wide space around the boys; they seemed to be expecting a show. When Maybeck or Finn tried to take so much as a step forward, the cards
closed the gap. The boys were penned
in on all sides, surrounded by a crazed Queen, four weapon-wielding warriors, and four additional six-foot-tall cards with three-dimensional clubs and spades waving.

“We’re about to get hammered.”

Finn barely heard Maybeck’s joke, his focus on how to survive in the face of such odds. “If we can all clear,” he whispered, the cards’ edges sliding on
the card faces
before them, the octagon shrinking, collapsing inward, “we can walk right through them.”

“And if we could fly, we could fly over them,
Peter
.” Maybeck spun in a full circle, desperate. “I’m so far from all clear that I might as well not be a
hologram.”

“Yeah. What about going under them?”

“Hey, I missed that,” Maybeck said, and there was sudden hope in his voice.

The cards stood on their corners, raised up on a fold of paper that functioned as an ankle. The process of lifting bent the card slightly, creating a small gap beneath the bottom edge and the
asphalt.

“We’re thicker than that, though,” Maybeck said.

“We’ll never budge a horse, but the others...” Finn spun to face the spades and clubs. Nines and tens mostly. Clubs flailing. Spades
swinging.

“We’ll get beaten to high heaven,” Maybeck said.

The space narrowed again. If they didn’t do
something
, the boys were going to suffer.

“No, look! There’s a pattern. Ten of clubs!” The spiky weapons struck out from the face of the card in two columns of four and a middle column of two. The top five lifted and
fell in unison, their motion opposite that of the bottom five,
which also rose and fell as one.

“Got it!” Maybeck said. “We go on the next lift.”

As the top five clubs lowered, the bottom group rose. The boys dove. Maybeck, who was taller, arrived first, thrusting his arm through the gap beneath the card. The card moved, but proved too
heavy for a partial hologram.

An instant later, Finn joined him, thrusting up with both arms. He slid his knees
under him, and lifted with the full strength of his back. Together, he and Maybeck threw the card into the
air.

As it rose, the boys rolled, came to their feet and—

—ran smack into a thick crowd of park guests.

The cards were not pleased. They pivoted, producing a strong wind that swept hats off heads and sent stuff flying in all directions, and
ran
for the two boys. A spade caught
Finn on the
shoulder and dropped him to the pavement. Another smacked his head. Maybeck called out in pain as two clubs hammered his arms and shoulders with blows.

The crowd cheered. As he struggled to sort out why any group would celebrate violence being done to a pair of boys, the spades rained down upon him. Shoulder. Forearm. Several blows to the head.
He was losing consciousness.

“Not...good...” he mumbled, having no idea if Maybeck could hear him.

His vision blurry, Finn looked up and saw another spade, aiming directly at the top of his head. He knew he wouldn’t survive, not with his all clear spent, his body solid. He reflected on
how many such battles he’d made it through in the past, how lucky he’d been, how he and his friends had been so sure the Overtakers
were done, broken. Finished.

They were wrong. At the very moment in which he and Maybeck had accomplished something fantastic and impossible—it was all about to end. And all before he could explore the new
realm—the realm of the past.

If he were to die anywhere, Finn thought, watching the spade descend upon him, then Disneyland or the Magic Kingdom was the most fitting of places. He
braced himself for the final blow.

I
T STRUCK LIKE A GUST OF WIND
. Not
wind generated by the cards. A ferocious gale-force blow, the kind that
topples a beach house caught by the leading edge of a hurricane.

Yet, it wasn’t wind. It was a force, like magnetism or gravity. The cards lifted like kites, flying horses, swinging clubs, and all. They crashed onto the roof of Mr. Toad’s Wild
Ride, the crowd erupting at the sight in shouts, whistles, and cheers.

Finn skidded across the asphalt, caught up as inexorably as the cards. If he hadn’t been a partial hologram, his pants might have shredded at the knees. Oddly, his hair never waved; his
shirt never ruffled. So if it wasn’t wind, what was it? he wondered.

Maybeck, still standing, skated the same distance as Finn. The crowd parted, not impeding their travel. Finn spun around into the direction
of the dying wind, and he saw her. His earlier text,
suggesting they might have a moment to meet, hadn’t been ignored. He had not expected it to be like this.

A girl. A girl that made his chest tight and his voice catch. She stood out from the crowd, a few kids just behind her fading from Finn’s vision as if they were nothing.

“Amanda?” That was Maybeck.

It was Amanda—and Jess. And
beside them, a tall kid with crazy black hair.

“Look out!” the tall boy shouted.

Two of the horses and their cards jumped from the roof and landed effortlessly on the ground. The Jack of Hearts raised his sword, drawing it back over his shoulder.

But as he raked his arm forward, preparing to cleave Maybeck’s head in half, the sword stayed behind. His chain mail glove swung down, empty-handed.
The sword, its sharpened tip pointing
toward the sky, floated off the horse and stopped some four feet from the ground.

“Knaves!” the Jack of Hearts cried, his horse rearing up and neighing. “My sword is possessed! Cursed! These lads are of the black magic. It’s the work of the
Magi.” He pointed to Maybeck. “You will die, sorcerer! But another day!”

He continued to back away; the other
cards slipped off the roof and gathered about him. As one, they turned and ran; the Jacks rode, the Queen of Hearts trailed.

Once they were a safe distance away, she waved her scepter in a broad sweep. She led the other cards in the direction of their attraction. As they ran, they dissolved, like ash.

The air seemed to move; some people in the crowd lost their balance, as if they’d been
shoved aside. The Jack’s sword flew toward Finn and clanked to the pavement at the last second,
skidding within inches of his feet.

Thunderous applause sounded. Amanda rushed to Finn and Maybeck, apologizing as she ran. “I’m so sorry!”

“Sorry?” Maybeck said incredulously.

“You
saved
us,” Finn said, throwing his hologram arms around her. He squeezed, but his hologram arms passed through
her body—he’d returned to all clear. Jess and
the tall boy laughed. The crowd oohed.