The Winter of the Robots (3 page)

Penny woke me up by bouncing on the foot of the bed.

“No school! No school!” she said, or rather sang. “It’s a snow day!”

“Great. So let me sleep.”

“But there’s
somebody
at the
door
for you.” From the singsongy way she said it, I knew it wasn’t just anybody. “It’s a
girl
,” she added.

“The one from across the alley?” I guessed.

“Jim’s got a girlfriend!” She bounded down the stairs, whooping it up. I hurriedly got dressed.

Mom was on the phone, so I decided not to bother her. I went downstairs, opened the back door, and saw a clean driveway and a clear sidewalk. Rocky was waiting for me, one hand resting on her dad’s snowblower.

“Wow! Thanks!” I said. “This is huge!”

“I wanted you to be ready, so we can go look for otters. They love snow, and they’ll leave fresh tracks. Let’s go!”

“Right now?”

“They’re more active in the morning,” she said. “Come on.”

“Give me two minutes.”

I ran upstairs and got the cameras from my sock drawer. Penny caught me on the way back down.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m doing something for school,” I told her. “I’ll be back soon. Promise. Tell Mom I’m working on a school assignment.” I flew out the back door before she could stop me.

Rocky had put the blower away and was waiting for me.

“You know how to use a blower,” I said.

“Well, yeah. It’s easy,” she said. “My dad has taught me how to do everything. He says women get cheated out of learning stuff. I’ve changed the oil on a car. I’ve run an electric drill and a power saw. I even welded once.”

“Cool.”
I
hadn’t done any of those things.

“Come on,” she said. “Otters don’t stand around waiting.” We took the footpath that ran alongside Victory Drive. Enough people had already been by to pack down the snow. Rocky walked quickly, her hair swishing back and forth on her collar. I had to hustle to keep up.

“Hey, what’s our hypothesis?” I asked her.

“That this technology can give us a better glimpse into the secret lives of otters,” she said.

“OK.” So she had a hypothesis. That was more than Oliver gave her credit for.

“Hey, can I ask you something?” she said, stopping. I nearly crashed into her.

“What?”

“This is totally cool with your dad, right?”

“Yeah, sure. Of course.”

“I don’t want you to get in trouble. I should have asked before.”

“Thanks, but it’s fine. My dad wants me to do well in school.”

“Great.” She turned back around and started walking. “At the science fair, we can tell everyone about his business, you know? That he sponsored it. So there’s something in it for him. Maybe he’ll get some new customers.”

“Good idea.” It was a good idea, but I’d have to find a way to kill it.

We took a shortcut across the park.

“I miss the trees,” she said sadly.

“Me too.” The park used to be full of maples, but a tornado had ripped right through the city last summer and wiped out most of them.

We crossed First Street. There was a tiny restaurant on the corner with a flashing neon sign of a kangaroo hopping along:
SIDNEY
’
S DINER. HOME OF THE WORLD-FAMOUS POCKET BURGER
! It was next door to a Laundromat.

“I think we can get to the river down this road.” Rocky pointed a mitten down a sloping, slushy street with no sidewalks. I glanced at the street sign:
WEST BANK ROAD
. We took it, still going east, past a service station and a lumberyard and a demolition company. A man drove a small plow across the lot of Leftover Lumber, pushing snow into a hill
that threatened to avalanche onto the lot of Clouts & Sons Excavation and Demolition. A hefty man stood in the doorway of the excavation place, watching. Maybe later he’d shove all the snow back on the lumberyard’s lot. Maybe they went back and forth all winter, playing snow tennis.

We came to a tall wooden fence stretching in both directions.

“Drat,” said Rocky. “We’ll have to go back and find another way.”

A narrow street went to the north, running along the wooden fence. It was blocked off by concrete pylons and hadn’t been cleared all winter. “We can try this road,” I suggested.

“Might as well,” said Rocky.

Just past the pylons there was a street sign covered with snow. I booted the pole a couple of times and sent the snow crashing down.

“Half Street,” I read aloud. “That’s a funny name.”

“It’s parallel to First Street,” Rocky explained. “They needed something lower, because the numbers go up the other way.”

“I guess.” We trudged through the snow, buried up to our knees. It was cold but weirdly fun. We were having an adventure. Rocky and I were officially friends now. Doing a school assignment together didn’t make you friends, but having an adventure together did.

Half Street sloped down and curved east, dipping under
a railroad bridge. We emerged on the other side, in sight of the river, but were stopped by another fence—this one was chain-link topped with barbed wire. Beyond the fence were misshapen piles of snow.

Signs wired to the fence said
PRIVATE PROPERTY
and
TRESPASSERS W
— (half the sign was covered in snow).

“Look!” Rocky pointed a mitten at the fence. I looked and saw a brown blur leaping over one of the mounds of snow. “An otter!”

“Wow.” It could have been a rat, but I hadn’t seen it well, so I decided not to argue.

“What do we do now?” she asked.

“Heck. Go in.” Maybe I liked her and maybe I didn’t, but I wanted her to know I was cool and brave about stuff.

“Go in how?”

“Look over there.” A massive tree limb was poking out of the snow near the fence about twenty feet away. We cleared the snow and saw that the branch had punched a hole right through the fence.

“The tornado must have done this,” Rocky said sadly.

“Yeah,” I agreed. I wondered how far this limb had traveled on the high winds to clear the way. Once again I had the feeling that fate was working to help me out.

Rocky pulled back a flap of the torn fence, and I crawled through. I was probably breaking the law, but I wasn’t going to steal anything.

“Are you coming?” I asked her.

“Um.” She looked at the tiny hole in the fence. “Sure. Of course.”

I pulled the flap up and held it while she clambered through. We stood and brushed the snow off.

“What is this place?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Let’s take a look.”

We walked around the pile the otter or rat had scooted over, which turned out to be a mix of worn lumber and red corrugated roofing tiles. Past that was an assortment of four-foot cubes covered with snow. Rocky swiped some of the snow off one and saw it was an ancient washing machine. There were more snowy cubes, tumbled about like dice in the toy chest of a giant child, and more snow-covered mounds scattered in every direction.

“This place is a dump,” said Rocky. “Like, actually a dump. Not a metaphor.”

“I think you’re right.” That supported my it-was-a-rat theory.

We trod between piles of ancient computer junk and office supplies and leaped over some metal rods, following the trail of whatever animal had scooted by.

“Look.” She pointed at some animal tracks, the first clear prints we’d seen: broad feet with webbed toes. “It’s an otter!” She beamed.

We followed the tracks along a frozen creek to the ledge of the embankment. The creek widened and turned into a waterfall, also frozen, cascading down to a pool of ice.

“It looks like it jumped,” I said. We peered over the edge. The embankment was steep, and it was a long way down.

“I hope it’s not hurt,” said Rocky.

“Maybe it climbed down. Look.” I pointed at horizontal slashes on the embankment. “This looks like a ladder.”

“The otters must have made it,” she said.

“They can do that?”

“They’re really smart,” she said. She softly whacked me in the arm. “They must use this thing all the time. That means they live here! That one we saw wasn’t a fluke.”

“So it’s a great place to set up the ottercams?”

“Exactly.”

It did seem perfect. The place was deserted, except for the otters. I couldn’t believe our luck. We took some of the metal rods we’d already seen, and some cinder blocks to brace them.

“We can use some of that wire to attach the cameras to the poles,” I said. I squeezed past a sun-bleached metal sign leaning against some rotting lumber. My shoulder swept part of it clean, revealing Sid—. I knocked the rest of the snow off.

SIDNEY’S DINER
, it read.
HAMBURGERS AND MALTS
.

“It’s from the restaurant we just saw,” said Rocky. She was right. There was no kangaroo on the sign, but they did have the line on it about Sidney’s being home of the famous pocket burger. “I wonder how old it is?”

“Old,” I said.

“There’s this reality show about guys finding junk and selling it for a lot of money,” she said. “I bet that sign is worth a hundred bucks.”

“American Pickers,”
I said. “I watch it, too.” I felt a little thrill. We had something in common! “I don’t think we could carry that thing home, though.”

“Good point. Let’s just set up the cams.”

We posted a camera by the woodpile, and another by the pool. Rocky started setting one up by the waterfall.

“We have one more camera,” I said.

“How about there?” She pointed at a road zigging and zagging down the embankment to the river, about forty feet from the waterfall. “If you pointed it at the cliff, we could see the otter going up and down the ladder.”

“Perfect.” I headed down the road. As I came around the first bend, I realized there were the ruins of a building at the bottom, with ragged, fire-blackened walls and one corner disintegrating into rubble. There were smaller buildings behind it, run-down and deserted. I felt a chill that wasn’t due to the weather. Something terrible had happened here. I decided not to go any closer. I placed the pole there at the curve and rigged up the camera pointing toward the hollow where the icy waterfall crashed into the pool.

I was startled by a crunch of metal behind me. I whirled around but couldn’t see anything. It was probably a piece of junk shifting in the wind. Still, I was overcome by a panicky feeling and hurried back up the path.

“What’s wrong?” Rocky asked.

“Nothing. I just realized I should get home.”

We took turns crawling under the fence and started back up Half Street, treading in the tracks we’d made earlier.

“That was fun,” said Rocky. “I can’t wait to see the video. It’s going to be awesome.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, but I didn’t mean it. Whatever terrible thing had happened there sucked all the fun out of the adventure.

“You’re in big trouble,” Penny said the moment I walked in. She slouched on the couch while puppets on TV yapped at each other.

“Isn’t this show a little young for you?”

She shrugged. “Everything else is just as dumb. Mom’s mad at you.”

“Great.” At least it wasn’t Dad. I went up the stairs to the office. I could hear her mumbling the way she does when she’s in the middle of a graphic-design project. She heard me and wheeled around in her desk chair.

“There you are. Where did you run off to?” She didn’t sound
that
mad. Penny tended to exaggerate.

“We were looking for otter tracks by the river. We needed to go while the snow was fresh.” I paused, realizing my mom had no idea why I would be chasing otters in the first place. “It’s our science-fair project this year.”

She squinted at me. “Oliver agreed to do something about otters?”

“Not Oliver. Rocky from next door.”

“Really?” she said. “You’re doing something without Oliver?”

“I’m sick of robots.”

“Well, I was supposed to meet a client, but you left me with Penny. Lucky for you the client postponed because of the snow.”

“If there was no snow, we’d both have been in school and you could have gone.”

“Good point. Well, now I need you to stay home with Penny and fix lunch.”

“No problem.”

“I’m glad you made a new friend,” Mom said. “Oliver’s a good kid, but you need a bigger circle.”

“Yeah.” Was Rocky really a friend, though? Where would we be after the science fair? I thought about it as I plodded downstairs. Penny was now sitting upside-down on the coach—legs up on the back, arms sweeping the floor.

“Do you want to build a snowman?” I asked her.

“Hmmm. Can we build a snow
woman
?”

“Of course.”

So we went out and started rolling snow. Penny decided the snow was too full of dirt and leaves for a good snow-person, so we built a fort instead.

“This will protect us,” she said.

“Protect us from what?”

“Extremists,” she said, which made me wonder what was going on in the puppet show she’d been watching. We built three walls, about two feet high. I carved out a hole in the
big pile of snow while Penny rolled snowballs and prepared a pile of ammo. There was enough room for us both to hide if an army of extremists stomped up the lawn.

That evening I checked the camera website for updates. There was only one snippet of video. The footage was a rectangle of darkness, nineteen seconds long. I’d forgotten that you had to put the cameras in well-lit areas if you wanted to see what happened at night. I saw a flash of some bright, silvery dots waving in the darkness. I watched the clip again and again, trying to make sense of it, but couldn’t. Maybe it was moonlight reflecting off some shifting junk? In any case, it wasn’t an otter.

I logged out, then spent a half hour Googling “ruined buildings in North Minneapolis,” with no success—if the information was there at all, it was buried under all the stories about the tornado last summer. I couldn’t ask Mom and Dad without them asking their own questions, like how did I know the ruins were there in the first place.

Rocky was out at the bus stop the next morning.

“I saw you playing with your sister yesterday,” she said. “It was really cute.”