How to Outsmart a Billion Robot Bees

by Paul Tobin

  Also by Paul Tobin

  How to Capture an Invisible Cat

  Dedicated to Mom and Dad, and all the

  shoulders of the giants I’ve ever stood on

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Acknowledgments

  I do not know how the bumblebee got in.

  It was Saturday.

  This, of course, means it was time for my weekly Cake vs. Pie club meeting, where I get together at my house with Liz Morris, Wendy Kamoss, Buenaventura “Ventura” León, and Christine Keykendall. The purpose of this weekly meeting is simple: we debate which is better, cake or pie. I personally believe that cake is superior, but I remain open to the discussion, and to pie.

  “Cake is moist,” Wendy argued, as if that settled the matter.

  “You think this isn’t moist?” Liz said. She was holding up her fork to showcase an impressively balanced wedge of cherry pie, which was dripping off the edges and falling more or less onto her plate. Plus a bit on the table. And some onto her hand.

  I said, “It does look moist.” I was trying not to take sides, even though I am secretly on the side of cake. Well, somewhat secretly. Okay . . . not at all secretly, because I was in fact wearing my “Cake is better than pie, dummies!” shirt. Still, my job as hostess was to foster the debate, not settle it.

  “Cake!” Ventura said. The word was partially mumbled. She was positively munching on cake at the time. Since I believe in committing to your opinion, you are only allowed to eat one thing during our meetings. You have to choose pie or cake. No lines can be straddled!

  “Pie!” Liz said. She pointed to the cherry pie on the table between her and Christine, or Stine, as we call her.

  “Don’t just yell,” I encouraged. “Debate!”

  “Cake!” Wendy yelled. Voices were rising. I secretly love it when our meetings become boisterous.

  “Pie!”

  “Cake!”

  “That’s absurd! Pie!”

  “Pie doesn’t have frosting! Idiot!”

  “Yeah, well . . . cake doesn’t have pie!”

  “Cake is best!”

  “Pie forever!”

  “Cake!”

  “Pie!”

  “Bumblebee!” Wendy said. It was the loudest yell so far.

  I said, “Huh?” I admit that, at first, I was trying to put the word into context, as if “bumblebee” was slang for pie or cake. But it simply didn’t make sense.

  “Bumblebee!” Wendy yelled again. I moved on to wondering if either cakes or pies could be made out of bumblebees. Neither of them sounded delicious. Or particularly safe.

  Ventura said, “Bumblebee!” So . . . it was catching. Everyone was yelling “bumblebee.” We were in my basement with the steep stairway and the posters of glittering unicorns being attacked by monsters. My brother, Steve, bought the unicorn posters at the mall and painted the monsters on them. They were very well done and my friends loved them, but since my brother painted them I couldn’t admit that I liked them.

  “Bumblebee!” Stine yelled. She leaped over the back of the couch, shrieking in an amazingly loud fashion, reaching up and over and grabbing a pillow that she then attempted to throw either across the room at something, or else straight into my face. If she was trying to throw it into my face, then her aim was excellent. I tumbled out of my chair and fell to the floor. From this new position, on my back, I looked up at the table, to where the cherry pie plate was teetering on the edge, threatening to fall. I could almost hear it saying, “Delphine Cooper, remember how many times you’ve said that you love cake more than pie? I’m quite sure you do. Prepare for our revenge.”

  Luckily, I’ve been honing my reflexes ever since the day I was attacked by a giant cat during the first of what will assuredly be only the start of the adventures I’ll be sharing with the genius, Nate Bannister. In the long weeks since then, in the months since we’d not only shrunk the cat but also defeated the Red Death Tea Society, I’ve been honing myself, training for hours and hours every single day, and learning to expect the unexpected. So, drawing on the magnificent results of those countless days of training, I rolled to one side with my phenomenal speed, straight into a table leg, jarring the pie off the table and down onto my head.

  So I had pie in my eyes and my friends were running around screaming, “Bumblebee,” and it was only then, a bit late, that it began to occur to me that there could be a bumblebee in the room. No problem. I know a lot about bumblebees.

  “Don’t provoke it!” I yelled out to my four best friends, all of them obscured by a veil of cherry pie over my eyes. “Don’t, uhh, make any sudden moves or call it any nasty names.”

  “Are you serious?” Stine said. Her voice doubted that I could be serious. In her defense, it’s seriously hard to look serious when you’re covered in pie. I grabbed a towel (we keep several towels handy during Cake vs. Pie meetings, because we’ve learned that accidents will happen, if you count picking up handfuls of pie or cake and throwing them at each other as accidents), and I cleaned myself off and said, “Bumblebees really only sting you when they feel threatened.”

  The bee flew over and stung me on my forehead.

  “Gasp!” I yelled. I could already feel my forehead turning into a melon. This is something that happens when a bee stings you. You balloon into something many times your previous size. Don’t be alarmed by this. It’s normal. Be alarmed by the intense pain, though.

  “Gaaargh!” I yelled. I picked up a pillow and bit into it, because I’ve seen in television shows that people bite things in order to help them withstand pain. The pillow, unfortunately, didn’t do me any good. So I picked up a piece of cake and bit into that. It didn’t help with the pain, either, but it tasted better than the pillow.

  I told everyone, “Don’t worry about, uhh, aaargh, so much pain, don’t worry about the . . . uhh, this cake is SO good, uh, but seriously . . . don’t worry about the bumblebee. It can only sting once. We’re safe now.”

  It was at this point that the bumblebee landed on my arm. And it stung me. Then it flew down onto my butt. And stung me. And then it landed on the back of my neck. And stung me. And then it returned to my butt. And stung me.

  I made all the sorts of noises you might imagine, if you have a particularly vivid imagination.

  “Grun!” I finally yelled, when the bumblebee barrage was temporarily over.

  “What?” Stine said. She was frantically dancing back and forth. The bumblebee was buzzing in the air, cackling.

  “Hrun!” I said. I wasn’t speaking very well, probably because of the agony and the horror.

  Ventura said, “I think she’s telling us to run!” She’d grabbed up a quilt from the back of the couch, holding it in front of her like a matador facing a bull, if bulls were rude enough to fly and to sting you several times on the butt.

  “Whatever,” Wendy said. “Let’s run!” I appreciated how she didn’t care what I was trying to say. The important thing was the part about running.

  We ran up the steps. Or they did. I was stumbling. As it turns out, having multiple bee stings on my butt does nothing for my foot speed. In mere seconds, I was alone with the bee, crawling up the stairs. I mean that I was crawling up the stairs. The bee was flying. Like they do.

  My phone rang.

  It was back on the table.

  In the Bee Room.

  No
w, you might think I should’ve ignored my phone, but the particular ringtone meant that Nathan Bannister was calling (the ring is Godzilla’s roar), and Nate is the smartest person in the world (I’m not kidding), and I had some questions I wanted to ask him about bees. I couldn’t exactly ask the bee, after all, because it clearly didn’t know anything about bees. Plus, I knew it would lie. Seriously, bees are liars. So I called the bee an unkind name, turned back for my phone, grabbed it, and then scrambled up the stairs. The bee zoomed over to me and became stuck in my hair (which is curly, and red, and does not frequently harbor bees), and I want to say that I am normally very brave, but I was considering screaming.

  I made it up the stairs.

  Through the kitchen.

  Out onto the sidewalk.

  Where I found Wendy and Liz, Ventura and Stine, all of them standing very still, looking at six rows of at least a hundred bumblebees that were hovering in precise military formation.

  “Guh,” Stine said.

  “They normally do that?” Liz asked, pointing to the bees. She sounded skeptical.

  “Wow, Delphine,” Ventura said. “Your forehead looks like a melon.” I nodded at this. It was true and there was little sense in denying it. Also, my head even felt like a melon. My butt, I might note, felt like I’d sat in a fire. In two fires, in fact. As for the lines of bees, they sounded like a titanic rattlesnake. The bee in my hair was positively enraged. The message on my phone, the one from Nate, the text from the smartest boy on earth, said, Hey, this might sound strange, but watch out for bumblebees.

  Too late, I texted back.

  The lines of bees moved closer.

  We ran.

  Our plan was to outrun the bees, but this did not prove successful. Our other plan was to scream. This secondary plan was wholeheartedly successful, but it did little (meaning, nothing) to stop the bees. Our third plan was to beg the bees not to sting us, but either they didn’t understand English (which is likely) or else they were having too much fun to stop, which was even more likely.

  As a final plan, I decided to call Nate, because he is very smart. By then I’d become separated from the others because I run faster, and also because the bees seemed to be following only me, meaning that whenever my friends took evasive maneuvers, they actually evaded, while I was only giving the bees a decent workout. So I just kept running. Occasionally cursing. Also that thing with the screaming.

  Nate answered after the first ring, undoubtedly because he has a mathematical formula for when I’m going to call. He says that it has to do with prevailing weather patterns, the chemical makeup of the air at any given time, and lunar cycles. I have no idea what he means, but I rarely have any idea what he means and so that doesn’t bother me. I like it, actually. Mysterious and incomprehensible friends are the best.

  “Hey, Delphine,” he said. “Are you being chased by bees?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I am being chased by bees.” I’ll admit that it came out a bit rushed and garbled, more like, “Yzzbeenchassbees!”

  “I was afraid of that,” he said.

  “I am also afraid of it,” I noted.

  “Let me see where you are on the GPS tracker I have in your hair.”

  “Huh? I have a GPS tracker in my hair? What do you mean? It’s not this bee, is it? Because I have a bee in my hair! You’d better not have put a bee in my hair!” At that point the bees were chasing me around and around the hedge in the Bellinghams’ yard. I was hoping the bees weren’t smart enough to understand that they could fly over the hedge, or that they could break off from their precise formation and surround me from all sides.

  “Why would I put a bee in your hair?” Nate said, apparently thinking that he normally does things for a reason, which I can assure you is not true.

  I said, “Grgargh!” because a bee had just stung my left arm, just above the bicep. It had, to my dismay, flown over the hedge after breaking off formation with the other bees. In other words, the bee had cheated. Never trust a bee. They are liars, cheaters, and stingers. It is an unfortunate combination.

  “Ooo!” Nate said. “A bee just stung your left arm, huh?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Because you said, ‘Grgargh,’ and that’s the noise someone makes when a bee stings their left arm, just above the bicep.”

  “It is?” This was news to me. I suspect it would’ve been news to anyone on earth but Nate.

  “It is,” Nate said. “Have you tried running away?”

  “Flargrah!” I screamed.

  “Ouch,” Nate said. “Stung you on the right leg, did it? Anyway, I was saying, don’t try running away. A bee can fly at twenty miles per hour, and you can’t.”

  “I can’t,” I admitted. “I can’t even fly at all. Definitely not at twenty miles per hour. And how can these bees sting more than once? Isn’t that cheating?”

  “You’re thinking of honeybees. They have barbed stingers, so they can only sting you once. Bumblebees can sting you as many times as they want.”

  “Piffle,” I said. It’s a word I use. In fact it’s a curse word I use. One that doesn’t get me in trouble.

  “You’ll be fine,” Nate said. “No reason to curse like that. Except I suppose for how you keep getting stung by bees. Anyway, I’m tracking your location, and Sir William is almost there.”

  “Sir William?” I said. I was running across the lawn toward a sprinkler that was sending sprays of water all over the grass. To me, the water would be nothing but a chilling spray, but to the bees (ha ha ha!) the water droplets would be like a barrage of cannon fire.

  Nate said, “Sir William Gull. He’s my robot gull.”

  “I know who and what he is. I’m wondering how he’s going to help.” The spray from the water sprinkler was constantly rotating, so I had to keep leaping to the left and the right so that the bees couldn’t sting me. Some of them tried, and the water brought them down, so that they were crawling on the grass, too wet to fly, buzzing and furious.

  “Sir William can eat the bees,” Nate said.

  “Send him. Send that robot gull to me.”

  “You should see him by now. Look around.” I did look around. I looked at the angry bees flying in the air and the furious bees crawling on the ground, scrambling like insect zombies across the grass, still trying to get to me. I saw Wendy, Ventura, Stine, and Liz, all of them inside a car, waving for me to come and join them, but they were too far away, and if I left the safety of the sprinkler the bees would either sting me to death or carry me off to their hive. I saw Kip Luppert . . . our classmate who often acts in the plays that Liz and I put on . . . riding by on a bicycle, practicing his lines for something I didn’t recognize, talking about submarines and commando units, entirely oblivious to the bumblebee tragedy that was unfolding on the nearby lawn. I saw the Bellinghams’ cat warming herself in the window. Her name is Pony. I think that’s a good name for a cat. At one point a bee landed on the window, and Pony batted at it through the glass, but she did so in a particularly languid fashion, as if she couldn’t care less what was happening outside.

  So I saw a lot of things, but I did not see a robot gull.

  “Where is he?” I asked Nate.

  “Did you look up?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Duh.” I hadn’t actually looked up but decided against telling that to Nate.

  I looked up. There was a speck in the sky. It grew larger. Soon, it was a gull, an entirely lifelike robot gull, only giving away its “not a real bird” identity by the speed it was flying. At probably a hundred miles per hour, it swept down on the bees.

  “Sir William!” I yelled. “Over here!”

  “Screech!” the gull yelled back. Sir William doesn’t make the distinctive shrieking caw of an actual living seagull. Instead, he just pronounces “Screech!” like a word. In Nate’s voice. I probably don’t have to mention this, but it’s disconcerting.

  Sir William whooshed through the bees at high speed, opening his mouth, scooping up
bumblebees as he sped through them. He landed on the side of the Bellinghams’ house and stuck there like a spider for a few seconds (I suppose this would also be considered strange behavior from an actual living seagull) and swallowed the insects with a loud mechanical gulp. Then he sprang out from the house, taking to the air again, whooshing all around in a complicated series of aerial maneuvers that left me dizzy to witness. There were circles, ovals, rectangles, and slashes through the air, all of them faster than I could really see. Much too fast for the bees.

  “How’s that top speed of twenty miles per hour working out for you now?” I taunted the bees. The ones on the lawn grumbled angrily. The ones in the air had no time to spare for grumbling, because Sir William was coming for them, hunting them, swallowing them.

  It was over in moments. I found it all marvelous, though it was still of no interest to Pony, the cat in the window. Nate and I once had an argument about cats. I claimed that the only things that ever interest a cat are naps and food, while he claimed that it was only food that truly interests a cat, because once you fall asleep you technically lose interest in a nap. After that, you’re just napping.

  Well, I wasn’t going to be caught napping. I waved to get Sir William’s attention, pointing to the bumblebees on the lawn, which I bet were really hoping I would forget about them.

  “There’s more bumblebees down here!” I said.

  “Screech!” the robot said in what I assume was appreciation. He certainly did enjoy his bees. He’d already swallowed all the bees that had been in the air. Nearly a hundred of them. That’s a lot of bees to have in your stomach. Far too many, from my viewpoint, because zero is my limit when it comes to swallowing bees.

  Sir William landed in the grass and then skipped and darted all over the yard, plucking up bumblebees and swallowing them whole. I could hear the buzz of the bees inside him, making him sound like a bad connection, or a rattlesnake, or a mechanical bird full of irritated bumblebees.

  “Screech!” he said when the last of the bumblebees had been swallowed. At that moment my phone buzzed, vibrating, and of course I thought it was a bee (they’d been buzzing, which is the same thing as vibrating: making this an entirely understandable mistake) so I flung my phone quickly away from me, wary of adding to my collection of horribly distorted bee stings that had turned my forehead into a melon, my legs and arms into what appeared to be the first stages of a zombie plague, and my butt into something that looked like two butts.