The Winter of the Robots (16 page)

The entire room bristled.

“Dinosaurs have been extinct for fifty million years,” a man offered.

“Not these. They’re machines,” said Ted. “I’ve been watching them. One of ’em zapped me. Still got the scar.” He planted a foot on the armrest and started to roll up his pants leg.

“That’s not necessary,” said Anna. “Ted, I’m sure if you wanted to wait until after the meeting, Bob would be happy to talk to you.” Bob’s face said otherwise.

“Look, Ted,” he said, “we have your report, and we have
the DVD you sent. Be assured that we’re doing the best we can to ascertain the problem and resolve it.”

“You couldn’t ascertain your own behind if you had an anatomy chart and a flashlight!” Ted said. I laughed. I was the only one who did, so I cut it short.

“Ted, if you don’t settle down, we’ll have to ask you to leave,” said Anna. Rocky’s dad and a couple of other men started to stand up, ready to bounce him out of there. Ted sat down and fumed.

“They aren’t doing anything,” he muttered. “Fools. And I never sent no DVD neither. Do they think I have a DVD recorder? Ha.” He saw me looking at him. “You don’t have to believe me, kid. You’ll believe soon enough. When the dinos finish their golem, you’ll believe.”

“I already believe,” I whispered. “I’ve seen one of the dinobots myself.” But what was a golem?

Anna was calling for the vote—someone was ripping sheets of notepaper into strips for a silent ballot.

“How many of the dinobots are there?” I asked Ted.

“Five or eleven,” he said.

“And what’s the golem?”

“It’s a big one. Reckon it’ll lay waste to the neighborhood,” he said.

I gulped.

The pieces of paper went around. I wasn’t sure I was allowed to vote, but I took one anyway and wrote down Dad’s name.

He lost the election, 34–3.

“Blankenship never even comes to meetings,” Dad grumbled on the walk home.

“It’s just a popularity contest,” I said.

“I’m plenty popular,” he said. I remembered him working the room, telling jokes and shaking hands. Now I saw the people’s smiles as frozen, their laughter as forced. Had he ever gone on one of his rants in a meeting? Or maybe they saw him as a pushy salesman. It was hard to know.

“Do you know the dinosaur guy?” I asked my dad.

“Ted? Yeah, he’s a real piece of work. He’s at every meeting, talking about some made-up nonsense. What were you two talking about?”

“He asked me who to vote for, and I said you,” I said. That wasn’t true, but I’d seen Ted write Dad’s name on the sheet.

“Great. Me, you, and the crazy guy. That’s my voting bloc,” said Dad. “You voted for me, right?”

“Of course.”

“At least somebody voted for me who isn’t crazy,” he said.

I tried talking to Oliver the next day at school. I caught him at his locker.

“Hey, man.”

He didn’t even look at me. He traded a few books around and split.

Dmitri waved me over at lunch, encouraging me to sit
with him and Rocky, but Oliver was there. I didn’t feel like eating Tater Tots in front of someone who hated my guts.

What was the big deal? Well, OK, sure. We’d cheated. Cheating was bad. Still, even if Oliver refused to believe I wasn’t in on it, it wasn’t like I’d drowned a bag of kittens. We didn’t even get away with it. Oliver seemed to be taking the whole thing
way
too seriously. I would tell him so, but he wasn’t talking to me.

I finished eating in about five minutes and went to the library. I had some social studies homework and figured I could get ahead on it. We were supposed to find some people in the news talking about the U.S. Constitution. Politicians were always saying stuff wasn’t constitutional, so it would take about five seconds.

I went to the local newspaper website to get started, and a “breaking news” graphic caught my eye. There was a photo of First Street with two police cars, and yellow tape stretched across the shattered windows of the Laundromat.

This is the second reported case of vandalism on the 4700 block of First Street in recent weeks, the first occurring early in the morning last week at Sidney’s Diner.

I printed the article and ran off to the cafeteria. Oliver was still sitting with Dmitri and Rocky.

“They got Ted,” I told them, slamming the paper down on the table.

“Who’s Ted and who got him?” Rocky asked.

“Ted is a guy and the dinobots got him,” I said.

“Dinobots?”

“These robot dinosaur things. They’re at that junkyard on Half Street. They must have been built by Nomicon once, and they’re still there.”

Dmitri grabbed the printout and read it. Oliver munched on his fish sandwich, pretending to ignore me, but I could tell he was listening closely. Rocky just stared at me.

“Dmitri’s seen them, too,” I said.

Dmitri set the pages down. “It’s true,” he said. “I saw one with Jim last week. And one of them zapped me when I tried to steal Jim’s cameras.”

“What? That was you?” Rocky gave him a hard look.

“Yeah.” Dmitri looked helplessly at his scarred fingers. He’d forgotten she didn’t know.

“Look, this is more important.” I pointed at the printout from the newspaper website. “One of these things shot up Sidney’s, and zapped Dmitri, and now they’ve
killed
a guy.” There was a full minute of silence as the words hung heavily in the air. “We have to do something.”

“Even if these things are real—” Rocky started.

“They are,” Dmitri told her.

“Fine! The question is, what
exactly
are we going to do about them?”

Oliver finally spoke up. “That part is obvious.”

“It is?” I asked.

“It is,” he said. “We’ll build our own robot.”

Dad and I went to Ted Whaley’s funeral service on Thursday morning. I wasn’t sure Dad would let me go, since I had to miss half a day of school, but he thought it was a great idea.

“It’s the neighborly thing to do,” he said.

A dozen or so people were at the funeral home, scattered around the back half of the room. Anna from the neighborhood association was there, sitting with Bob the cop.

“Nobody else is here from the committee,” Dad noted.

I did see Sid, sitting quietly with a sunlamp-tanned woman. I found out later she owned the Laundromat. She was one of the few to stand up and speak about Ted, when the funeral director invited people to do so.

The casket was open, and people drifted past to pay their last respects. Dad headed up, and I followed. It was the first time I’d seen a cadaver—Oliver’s dad had had an urn, not a casket. Ted looked rosier and more cheerful than he had a few days ago. I was overwhelmed by it all: the weirdness of laying a dead body out for the world to see, the sadness of Ted’s final moments in the world.

Dad let a hand rest on my shoulder.

“Death is a thing that happens,” he said, grasping for something parental to say.

“I know.”

Dad looked at Ted for a moment, shut his eyes and looked serious, then left me alone with the body.

I looked at his waxy, peaceful face. Based on his health and lifestyle, maybe he wouldn’t have lived much longer. Maybe he wouldn’t have accomplished much, either—a few more years of hard drinking, working a low-end job, showing up unwanted at neighborhood meetings, stealing donuts from the service station. Probably nobody expected Ted to turn his life around. What he’d lost was the chance to prove them wrong.

When I looked up, Dmitri and Sergei were there. They were both wearing black suits.

After the service, we moved to a separate room where there were cheese and crackers and olives on plastic trays.

“Should have had donuts and coffee,” Sergei muttered as he looked at the fare. He fixed a plate, somehow ended up making small talk with Bob the policeman.

“I guess this is lunch,” said Dmitri, making a cheese-and-cracker sandwich. “So, you knew Ted?”

“Barely,” I admitted. “My dad knew him. Neighborhood group.” I wasn’t hungry, but nibbled on crackers for something to do.

“He put me up for a couple of days,” said Dmitri. “After
what happened at the junkyard, he found me wandering around, frostbit and everything. Took me home and made me ramen and let me sleep on the couch. He only called the cops when he realized I had severe frostbite. He knew I needed a doctor.”

“He said he just found you in the Laundromat.”

“He was afraid he’d broken some kind of law,” said Dmitri. “Harboring a fugitive or something. He didn’t trust the police.”

“Why didn’t you just go home? Did you have amnesia or something?”

He looked around, saw that Sergei was safely out of earshot, but leaned in to whisper even more quietly. “At first. Then I was just ashamed to go home.”

Dad pulled himself away from small talk, came and clapped me on the shoulder.

“Ready for school?”

We got to school at the tail end of lunch. Oliver was hanging around by my locker.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” he said back, but he didn’t move. “So, Penny really changed the program without you knowing?” I could hear doubt still simmering beneath the surface.

“Yeah,” I said. “The kid is smart.”

“All right,” he said, his tone of voice saying otherwise. “I guess I believe you.”

“Gee, thanks.” I wondered if he was going to let me get at my locker. “I can’t believe you’d think I’d do something like that. How long have we known each other?”

“I didn’t think you’d dump me as a partner, either. Or steal from your dad and lie about it. Or let Peter bail you out. I didn’t know how far you’d go.”

“What’s funny is you think cheating at robots is worse than all that other stuff.” I finally got past him and opened my locker. “By the way, the funeral was lovely. Thanks for asking.”

“Oh, right.” His voice lost a little of its outrage. “Fine, I’m sorry I didn’t believe you sooner. Even if you did all that other stuff, you never lied to me about any of it.”

“Exactly.” I traded a few books around and slammed the door closed. “Do you want to walk to class?”

“Sure.” We headed down the hallway.

“I was just mad about losing,” he admitted. “I don’t know, maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am. That idea Penny had—I never would have thought of it.”

“That’s because you don’t cheat.”

“I wouldn’t have thought of it, anyway,” he said. “Next year I’m picking Penny for a partner.”

“Hey, you could do a lot worse.”

We went to Dmitri’s after school to watch the video from Half Street. Dmitri had the camera wired up to play directly on the large-screen TV. Alexei stood right in front of the
TV, staring in fascination as Dmitri went back and forth over the same few seconds of footage.

“It looks like the velociraptors in
Jurassic Park
, only smaller,” said Oliver.

“Real velociraptors
were
smaller than the ones in the movie,” said Rocky. “I saw a fossil at the museum in Chicago. That thing is really similar to it.”

“I’ll bet Robbie could take it,” said Oliver.

“It has a Taser,” Dmitri reminded him. “It would toast your robot’s circuits before it could throw one punch.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Also, we don’t know how many there are,” I added.

“Good point again,” said Oliver.

“We need to build a champion robot,” said Dmitri. “One that can steamroll those things, even if there are a hundred of them. One that can take a few hits.”

“Build it out of what?” Oliver asked. “A thousand Lego robot kits?”

“No,” said Dmitri. “I thought we’d start with a car, then add stuff to it. Like I did with Viddy, but full-sized.”

“I’ll ask my Mom if we have any spare cars in the attic,” said Oliver.

“No need.” Dmitri was unfazed by Oliver’s snarkiness. “We’ve got one in the backyard.”

“Yeah, right,” said Rocky. “Because Sergei doesn’t even want that forty-year-old car that he spent every free minute of his life lovingly restoring.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Dmitri. “I have an idea.”

Alexei must have understood what was going on, after all. He looked worried.

We met at the service station after it closed on Friday. I’d told Mom Oliver and I were going to see Sergei work on the Mustang, which was true.

“When did you get so interested in cars?” she asked.

“It’s a ’69 Mustang. It’s awesome. And Sergei is really good.”