The Winter of the Robots (14 page)

“What happened?”

“I don’t even know.” He took another draw on his cigarette and coughed. “Or I do know, but if I told anyone, I’d be put right into a rubber room.”

I remembered the original sign for Sidney’s and had a hunch. “Did you go to the junkyard? The one on Half Street?”

“Hey, you seem to know something about this,” he said.

“Practically nothing,” I admitted. “I’ve heard things, is all.”

“I was here really early this morning and decided to go take a look. Man, that place is freaky. It’s like the elephants’ graveyard for appliances. Anyway, I saw the sign, right by the fence. I went in, slid it out under the gate, and brought it back here. Thought I’d hang it on the wall, then call Dad and tell him to bring Grandpa for lunch. I’d surprise ’em both. But before I even got the drill, I glanced up and out the window and saw—”

He stopped to drag on his cigarette. “This is the part you won’t believe.” He let loose with a cloud of cigarette smoke.

“I believe in lots of crazy stuff,” I told him.

“OK. I saw this thing. It looked like something a kid made from an Erector set, zipping across the street toward me.”

“A robot,” I said.

“Like a cross between a robot and a dinosaur,” he said.

“A robot dinosaur,” I echoed. Penny said the robot she’d
seen at Nomicon—the robot that didn’t exist—looked “lizardy.”

“I thought it was a pretty cool gizmo until it shot up my place and jumped in the window,” said Sid. “It aimed its beak at me and started clicking and squeaking at me. I thought, Is this the new thing, people committing robberies with robots? I started emptying the cash register, but the thing flashed its light at the old sign. So, I grabbed the thing and hauled it back. I didn’t even bother with my jacket and gloves. Look at my hands.” He held them up so I could see the red creases slashing across his fingers. “I slid the sign back under the fence and said no hard feelings and the thing left me alone.” He tossed his cigarette into a mound of snow by the Dumpster. “Why does it care about an old sign?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“But you believe me?”

“Yeah. Sure. You don’t seem crazy.” Penny had seen something, and so had the guy at the Laundromat. Then there was Dmitri, who’d been tased and left for dead. Maybe he’d seen more than he admitted.

“Well, I guess I’ll stay away from now on,” said Sid. “Plus quit smoking again. First pack I’ve bought in six years.” He dropped the cigarette into a pile of snow and immediately lit another.

When I got home, I searched the top of my dresser and found a Post-it note with a phone number scribbled on it. I
dialed the number, halfway hoping for voice mail, but the woman answered.

On TV, cops always answer with their last name: “Walsh!” but she answered like a customer-service person. “You’ve called the fourth precinct detective line; this is Officer Walsh. How may I assist you?”

“This is Jim Knox,” I told her. “We talked about Dmitri Volkov? The missing teenager who isn’t missing anymore?”

“Sure, sure,” she said. I heard computer keys clacking and knew she was looking it up and refreshing her memory. “He was released from the hospital and seems to be doing fine. Do you have any additional information you’d like to share?”

“Well, yeah. That’s why I called.” I decided I couldn’t come right out with robot dinosaurs firing ray guns. If I could get the police there, they would see them for themselves. “I know that it happened on the site of the old Nomicon campus. There’s a bunch of junk there, somebody seems to be living there. Hoboes, maybe.” I gritted my teeth. Hoboes? Where did I come up with that?

“Sir, the former Nomicon site is considered a hazardous area. It’s fenced off for a reason. Did you breach the fence and trespass?”

“Sort of.”

“Well, don’t let it happen again,” she said.

“But there’s somebody
there
. Somebody dangerous. They busted the windows at Sidney’s Diner.… ”

“I’ll add these notes to the report,” she said. “You, stay clear of the area.” She hung up.

I knew it. If I was going to get the police there, I had to come up with something better than hoboes breaking windows. I went to my sock drawer and dug out the roll of bills Sergei had given me. There was just enough to fund my terrible idea that would probably get me killed.

I needed to skip school. Since Mom and Dad both worked from home, I couldn’t fake sickness and split the moment they left, like a lot of kids could. I didn’t think I could go to school first and slip away without being seen, either. I needed somebody who knew how to pull it off, somebody who’d probably done it before. So I sent Dmitri a message. We hadn’t spoken since the robot competition, but if anyone could forgive me for cheating, it would have to be him.

On Tuesday morning I left home like I was catching the school bus, went around the corner, and hopped on a city bus headed downtown. I got off at Nicollet Avenue and went to the Barnes & Noble coffee shop. Dmitri was already there, reading a newspaper and drinking a cup of tea and looking forty years old.

“What now?” he asked.

“There’s a Target across the street,” I told him. “It opens at eight.” In addition to Target Field, the Target Center, and the Target corporate headquarters, there was an actual Target store in downtown Minneapolis.

We had a few minutes to kill. I explained what happened at the robot competition.

“I just wish we hadn’t dropped out,” he said. “Rocky said you needed the money, and that neither of us would beat that other guy if we fought each other first.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” I said. “But thanks.”

“It’s done,” he said. “That egg would have won anyway.” He checked a clock on the wall. “Two minutes to. Let’s go.”

We crossed the street, went into the store, and headed straight for the electronics department.

The clerk raised his eyebrow when I paid for a video camera in cash.

“Birthday money,” I said, even though he hadn’t asked.

“We’re going to make a zombie movie,” Dmitri added. “Do you have fake blood?”

“Only during Halloween season,” he said. “There’s a costume shop a few blocks west of here.”

“Thanks. That’s very helpful. Hey, do you want to be in the movie? We need extras. You just need to stagger around and drool.”

“I get plenty of practice working here, but I’ll pass.” He gave me my change. I could feel him rolling his eyes at us as we left the store.

We got on the bus, heading back north. I took the camera out of the box and put in a tape and the battery. It came with a rechargeable battery pack, and I was glad to see it had an initial charge.

“It’s a nice camera,” said Dmitri. “Can I see?” He reached out for it.

“I’ll hold on to my cameras around you,” I said.

“I guess I deserve that,” he said.

“Hey, I was just kidding.” I let him take the camera. He peered at me through the viewer.

“I never stole anything before that,” he told me. “I just wanted to prove I could.”

“To Sergei?”

“Yeah, he’s always saying I’m such a goody-goody.”

“He doesn’t mean it as an insult,” I told him. “He’s proud of you.”

“Maybe so, but it comes off like he knows so much more about the world, just because he’s been to jail.”

“He’s been to jail?” I pretended to be surprised. I knew he was on probation.

“Three months,” said Dmitri. “He stole a car.”

“Wow.”

“It’s where he first got to work on cars,” said Dmitri, “so I guess it was a good experience.”

Was Sergei still a car thief? I wondered. What would he do to me if I told anyone about that Audi in his backyard?

We came to our stop. I filled my backpack with camera cables and instructions and left the box on the bus. We walked through the park, past the usual businesses.

“This is where you hid?” I asked as we passed the Laundromat.

“I don’t remember it well,” he admitted. “My memory’s hazy, after the attack.”

Sidney’s had new panes of glass in front, but no kangaroo. I missed the kangaroo. We marched down the road to Half Street.

The sun glared from across the river, melting the snow, making the usual crawl space wet and slushy. I slung my backpack on the fence and went through first, wetting my knees and elbows. Dmitri passed me the camera and came through himself. He was bigger, and it was a tighter squeeze.

Rivulets of water ran every which way, meeting up to form tiny rivers and ponds. Slippery ones—Dmitri found himself doing a two-step, landed on his bottom.

“It’s treacherous,” he said.

“Seriously.” I helped him up, and we walked slowly down the winding path to the riverbank.

“So let me ask you something,” I said. “When you were here before, did you see anything? Something you didn’t tell anyone about?”

“Like what?” he said. He looked at me intently. He wants me to say it first, I realized.

“I haven’t seen anything myself,” I admitted. “But Sid at the restaurant says he saw a kind of—robot dinosaur? And my sister said something similar. She saw something that’s still giving her nightmares.”

“I don’t know what I saw,” said Dmitri. “A flash of something, then I got tased. But I see them in my sleep. Didn’t know if it was a memory or just a nightmare.”

“I wonder why they only go on attack some of the time,” I said. “I’ve been here four times now and haven’t even seen one. The one time a robot zapped at me, I didn’t even go past the fence.”

“I don’t know,” said Dmitri. “Maybe sometimes they’re asleep.”

“Yeah, right.” Robots didn’t need to sleep.

“Let’s go down to the buildings.”

“All right.”

We headed down the path, Dmitri’s limp more noticeable as he tried to keep up. We stopped at the front of the crumbling building that used to be Nomicon. There was no junk here. People had spared the ruins, either out of respect or because it was too far to go.

The metal doors were locked, but a corner of the building had disintegrated. Dmitri leaped over the crumbled cement. I started to set the camera down so I could climb in.

“Don’t put it down,” said Dmitri. He reached out to take the camera.

“What?”

“I have a theory,” he said. He held the camera while I climbed in. We were in a sloped, skewed hallway.

“This isn’t safe.” Dmitri hopped a couple of times, making the floor vibrate.

“Yeah, especially when you do that.”

He stopped.

I started the camera and left it rolling, scanning the hallway.

“The explosion must have been downstairs.” I swung open a fire door, guessing there was a stairwell. There was, but it was pitch black.

“We should have brought a flashlight,” he said.

“The camera has one.” I turned it on. It was pretty pathetic, a tiny beam of light that only went about twenty-five feet, but it was better than nothing. I wondered how much life the camera battery had.

“So people died here?” Dmitri asked.

“Oliver’s dad did.”

“Wow. I did not know that.”

“Now you know.”

The fire door at the bottom of the stairs was blown off the hinges. We walked across debris into a big, charred room with the twisted shells of computer towers, caved-in monitors, and melted glass spilled across the floor. The desks and chairs had been reduced to ashes.

I stooped to pick up a lump of smoky glass in the shape of a tear. It was peculiar and beautiful, something ordinary transformed by the effects of extreme physics.

“They never cleaned this place up,” said Dmitri. “I wonder why not?”

“I don’t know.” I realized that Oliver’s dad must have
died in this room. I turned off the camera. The presence of death and destruction overwhelmed me.

“I need to get out of here,” he said.

“Me too. Let’s go.”

We walked slowly, like cars in a funeral procession, up the steps and down the creaking hallway. I heard a cracking sound behind me and felt a sudden surge of panic: I needed to get out of that place, and
now
. I sprinted down the hall, feeling the floor shudder with every step, and climbed through the hole so quickly I ripped a hole in my pants on the ragged cement.

Dmitri was right behind me, but climbed out more slowly. I helped pull him out into the sunshine.

“Everything all right?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just got the willies, I guess.” I’d probably just heard Dmitri’s heavy boots on the floor behind me. I took a few deep breaths, tried to slow my heartbeat by sheer will.

“You could have made the floor collapse,” he said.

“Sorry.”

“It’s all good,” he said. “Let’s go.”

We started back up the zigzag path to the embankment. When I reached the first bend, I realized Dmitri wasn’t with me. I couldn’t even see him.

“Dmitri?”

There was no answer. My heart pounded. Had they gotten him?

“DMITRI!”

“Here!” a calm voice shouted back, from way off to the right. I saw Dmitri’s flat boot prints veering off the trail, and there he was—behind some bushes, using his arm to sweep the snow off a lime-green hulk of an old car. The car was half buried in snow, tangled up with weeds and sprouting trees.

“It’s a Superbird!” he shouted. “Get this on video!”

Seriously? Suddenly we were just looking at cars?

“I want to show this to Sergei,” he explained.