Runaway Robot

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

  He took my hand and held it up above my head in a victory salute. Except there was no one to salute. There were no kids left in sight.

  The 81A bus was tootling towards us up Hurricane Way. ‘Eric,’ I said, ‘let’s go home. We can catch the bus.’

  Eric takes things literally. Which is why – about two seconds after I said, ‘Eric, let’s catch the bus’ – there was a squeal of brakes.

  At first, I couldn’t even look. The sound of those brakes set other sounds rushing out of my memory: the sound of a scooter clattering over; a terrible splodge that might have been my old hand slapping to the ground.

  The sounds of The Accident.

  Then someone shouted, and I opened my eyes.

  The bus was in the middle of the road. Eric had grabbed hold of its bumper. He’d stopped it with his bare hands. Now he was crouching down with his head back as if he was trying to lift the bus up.

  ‘Eric, what are you doing?’

  YOU ASKED ME TO CATCH THE BUS. IT TRIED TO ESCAPE BUT I CAUGHT IT. I AM YOUR OBEDIENT SERVANT.

  He yanked on the bus. I swear it jerked forward.

  The next one to speak was the bus. The words came from deep inside its cab. ‘I am a scheduled, driverless service,’ it said. ‘In the interests of passenger safety and schedules, please remove the obstruction.’

  The bus spoke again, but this time its words came out quite hiccoughy because Eric was shaking the whole bus up and down and yanking it from side to side.

  ‘For safety safety reasons reasons,’ it stuttered, ‘all passengers please please please leave leave the bus. Please leave the bus until the bus is returned to the ground.’

  Luckily there were no passengers inside it, but people were coming out of the Co-op to see what the noise was about. The woman from the meat counter strode over, her meat cleaver sticking out of the pocket of her white overalls.

  ‘It’s that robot off the news!’ she growled.

  ‘No! No!’ It was a girl’s voice that said this. Maria-Jaoa had come trotting after her, clutching a fistful of chocolate bars. ‘It’s a suit of armour – isn’t it, Alfie?’

  ‘Yeah, a suit of armour,’ I said. ‘School project. We’ve got to go.’

  ‘It’s only got one leg,’ said the woman with the meat cleaver.

  ‘SO what!’ snarled Maria-Jaoa. ‘Don’t you think there were one-legged knights in days of old? They were in wars, you know. There’s nothing wrong with only having one leg. Or one hand. Or whatever. Is there, Alfie?’

  ‘Errrm. That’s right. Let’s go, Eric.’

  The meat-cleaver woman was still giving us the hard stare.

  ‘Eric is my friend’s name,’ I said. ‘He’s inside the armour. Like a knight.’

  The word ‘knight’ seemed to trip some kind of switch in Eric’s memory. He stood very tall. His head swivelled round to look down on the cleaver woman. His eyes flashed – literally, of course. He said:

  VARLET!

  Varlet is an insult used in days of yore by knights of old. I did not take it as a good sign that Eric was being rude, even in an antique way.

  ‘Got to go,’ I said.

  WE RIDE AT DAWN!

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘So we’re already late. Hurry up.’

  I walked off, trusting that he’d follow me, which he did. As far as the corner of Typhoon Street.

  A Pizzabot was coming the other way.

  Eric stopped right in front of it.

  The Pizzabot said, ‘Scusi, per piacere.’

  STAND ASIDE, VARLET!

  ‘Pizza for thirty-two Typhoon Street, scusi. He’s a-gonna go cold.’

  ASIDE, VARLET!

  ‘Scusi. Pizza for thirty-two Typhoon . . .’

  ASIDE . . .

  ‘He’s a-gonna go cold.’

  It seemed like Eric would be happy to spend the entire day arguing with an oven. I told him to let the Pizzabot get on with his job.

  I STAND ASIDE FOR NO MAN.

  ‘It’s not a man, though, is it? It’s an oven. On wheels.’

  NOR YET FOR ANY UNNATURAL FIEND.

  There really did seem to be a lot of knight-related words hidden in his memory.

  ‘Seriously, it’s an oven. Walk away. If you’re a knight, then surely you’ve got a quest to be getting on with.’

  A KNIGHT DOES NOT RUN FROM HIS FOE.

  Different people have different ideas about how to make the world a better place. You might want to clean up the oceans or stop global warming. Knights of old wanted to kill dragons or find the Holy Grail. It seemed Eric had decided to make the world a better place by fighting a pizza oven.

  ‘I’ve tried asking nicely,’ said the Pizzabot. ‘Now get outta the way.’

  AN INSULT! WITHDRAW OR FIGHT LIKE A GENTLEMAN.

  ‘It’s not a gentleman, Eric,’ I said. ‘It’s a Pizzabot. According to Descartes – who is the main person when it comes to robots – it’s got no free will. How can you insult someone if they’ve got no free will?’

  WITHDRAW THE INSULT OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES.

  Eric reached over and grabbed a garlic baguette from the oven’s side pocket. He held it like a sword, stretching one arm behind his back.

  The oven tried to barge past him.

  GENTLEMEN DO NOT BRAWL. THEY DUEL. FIRST, SALUTE.

  He raised the baguette to his face in a kind of greeting, then pointed it menacingly at the oven’s middle.

  I was feeling sorry for the oven by now. It tried to sidle past him again. Eric whacked it with the garlic bread, and when that broke into a thousand crumbs he crushed the hot little Pizzabot so hard between his mighty hands that the pizza popped out of the top and frisbee’d into my hands.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done!’ I bawled, struggling to balance the pizza. ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’

  It was the first time I’d ever shouted at Eric.

  Eric’s reaction to being shouted at? He tried to tell his fish joke again.

  WHAT KIND OF FISH DOES A SEA MONSTER EAT? NO, THAT JOKE IS INCORRECT.

  Robots can’t cry. I think getting a fish joke wrong is maybe the robot way of saying, ‘I’m sad.’ Eric’s arms hung down at his side, and the blue light of his eyes dimmed.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘You can carry the pizza. Let’s go and deliver it. It’s the least we could do.’

  I pressed the doorbell of number 32. Eric probably thought that if he copied what I did, he would be sure to be doing the right thing. So he pressed the doorbell too. When I touched the doorbell, it chimed. When Eric touched the doorbell, it clanged like a fire alarm. Every light in the house started flashing on and off. Radios and TVs blasted out at full volume. Smoke alarms howled. Eric’s finger seemed to be activating every electrical appliance in the building.

  A teenage boy in a big T-shirt, big earphones and an even bigger state of panic pulled the door open, his eyes bulging with fear.

  ‘What? What’s going on?’ he said, looking up and down the street as if there might be an invasion.

  ‘Pizza!’ I said, as though that explained everything.

  And Eric hurled the pizza through the open door. It flew along the hallway and landed perfectly on the kitchen table.

  ‘Enjoy,’ I said. ‘Good shot, by the way, Eric.’

  THANK YOU.

  ‘Hey!’ yelled the boy as I steered Eric away. ‘I ordered pepperoni! This is tuna!’

  Once we were back on the street, I said, ‘Eric, you’re supposed to be lying low . . .’

  His knees began to bend. I knew what was coming. He was going to lie low – literally.

  I yelled, ‘NO! Don’t lie down. Not here. You’re an outlaw. You’re not supposed to draw attention to yourself.’

  GOOD SHOT.

  ‘Yes, it was a good shot,’ I reassured him. ‘Now let’s go home.’

  There was a high whining sound coming from somewhere overhead.

  A delivery drone was hovering over the rooftops, its spindly body wobbling in the air like a sk
eleton bird of prey. Delivery drones hover for a bit, make sure that no one is in the way, then they swoop down and leave a parcel on your doorstep. Normally.

  That’s not what happened today. The drone swept over the roofs, but it didn’t deliver anything. It swung up and down the street, and each time it passed by, it came nearer.

  ‘Eric,’ I said, ‘I think we’re being watched.’

  GOD SAVE OUR . . .

  ‘No. Don’t do that. Let’s get out of here as quick as we can.’

  I’ve got to admit, he was obedient. When I said that about being quick, he plonked me on his shoulders and hurtled off along the avenue. When I say hurtled, I mean that every rivet in his body was shaking. But the drone came after us, its whine getting higher and higher. We dived into an underpass, scooter wheels thundering. The drone was waiting for us when we shot out of the other side.

  Eric paused and looked up. The drone hovered closer. Eric’s eyes blazed blue. Then he swatted the drone out of the sky like a fly. It tumbled on to the tarmac. The lens of its camera twinkled in the dust.

  ‘Oh!’ I gasped. ‘You should not have done that. You definitely should not have done that.’

  Eric just spread his giant arms wide and aeroplaned off around the traffic island. Sparks flew from his wheels where he clipped the paving stones.

  ‘Eric!’ I yelled. ‘Where are we going?’

  I AM YOUR OBEDIENT SERVANT, he said.

  He curved across the car park of the Community Hub. He sailed past the DustHog enclosure. There’s a low wooden fence behind it. He smashed through that, and then we were thundering through Hangar Wood.

  The only bad thing about the Skyways estate is the possibility that something will fall out of the sky and crush you, or destroy your house. For instance, two brothers from my old school, Christian and Benedict Walker, went out to feed their rabbits one day, and there was this thing sitting there in the yard. A gold cube. The rabbit hutch was in splinters. All the rabbits were in a circle staring at this big shiny gold cube. They were all like, what could that even be? A bit that’s fallen off the sun? Or off the Transformers’ AllSpark?

  They went and got their mum, and by the time they got back in the yard, this thing had started to melt. And it wasn’t a piece of the sun, and it was nothing to do with Transformers. You could tell what it was from the smell.

  It was a massive block of frozen pee. A huge Pee Popsicle that had fallen out of a plane. It purely stank. All his rabbits were twitching their noses. One of them – Billy Bob Bobtail – had literally passed out from the stench.

  Anyway, their mum messaged the airport and, the next thing they knew, some cleaning people turned up

  In special uniform!

  So that’s how often things fall out of the sky around here. There is a dedicated Pee Popsicle Disposal Unit with its own uniform.

  Then there’s the Legend of the Haunted Hangar. Back in the day, there used to be a factory near the airport that made aeroplanes. When it closed down, they turned the site into Hangar Wood. It’s called Hangar Wood because the old hangars are still in there. In the spring, everyone goes there to see the carpet of dazzling bluebells. The rest of the year, people go there so their dogs can poo.

  The story is that one night, years and years back, something fell out of the sky through one of the hangar roofs. Some people say it didn’t even fall off a plane; it just fell out of the sky, like a meteor. The Thing was . . . Well, no one knows what it was. But you can still see the hole.

  That’s where Eric was heading. The Haunted Hangar.

  He went straight there. Like he was looking for something.

  He scooted along the marked paths. When they forked, he always seemed to know which way he was going to turn. When they were overgrown, he smashed through the brambles. When it got muddy, he kicked his way through, until we were standing in front of the ruined hangar.

  The main building was hunched in the undergrowth like a big sleepy beast. Attached to its front – like a head – was something that looked like a little ruined house. It must have been the office one time, or the reception area. The slates were gone from its roof. Its windows were shattered. It was definitely empty. So how come when we walked past it, it made a noise?

  It was probably just the wind rattling the windows, but it sounded like the house had coughed to get my attention.

  The sound came again. It was a sound I’d heard somewhere before – a kind of metal slap – but I couldn’t remember where.

  If I hadn’t had a massive robot bodyguard with me, I would have fled the scene. But Eric kept going. He barged past the house and stopped in front of the hangar itself. Its curved walls were crusted with brambles and ivy and woodbine, like an ancient ruined castle in a fairy story. Eric grabbed a fistful of thorns and yanked them aside. There was an old half-rotten wooden door hanging off its rusted hinges. Through the gaps at the side, you could see into the huge cavern of the hangar.

  ‘That building,’ I said, ‘is unsafe, and possibly haunted by some alien thing.’

  Eric turned his head towards me.

  ‘Which means,’ I went on, ‘it’s exactly the hiding place we’re looking for. Well done, Eric. Only problem is, I’m too scared to go inside.’

  Eric pulled the door off its hinges as easily as you might pull blackberries off brambles. There was a pitter of falling rust. He stepped inside.

  I was about to tread where no one had dared to tread in years.

  This is it, I thought. I am actually going to see the Thing-That-Fell-Out-of-the-Sky.

  What if it’s something terrible?

  What if it was something alive?

  What if it was something dead?

  I snapped back Lefty’s middle finger and opened up its hi-beam torch. The hangar was so vast that the torchlight did not even reach the ceiling. It just melted in a mist of dust and cobwebs. On the floor, a mess of broken wood and paint pots sent their shadows racing round the walls. Directly above the mess was a jagged gap in the roof. The legendary hole in the roof of the hangar. The very spot where the Thing had crashed through back in the day. The mess on the floor must be from where it crash-landed.

  ‘Well,’ I said, trying to sound un-scared, ‘whatever fell through the roof definitely hit the floor hard. And whatever it was has gone now. So that’s good.’

  That’s what I said. But what I was thinking was, What if that’s what’s hiding in the little house?

  Shadows swept past me like ghosts. I swung round. Eric’s eyes were blazing brighter than ever. His head was swinging from side to side, and up and down, like when your dog is trying to follow a smell.

  I’d never seen him act like this before. I said, ‘What’s going on Eric? Are you looking for something? You came straight here as soon as we stepped into the woods. Did you know this place was here?’

  I AM LOST.

  His voice echoed around like a sad bell.

  Just then, a plane thundered past low overhead. Its flashing tail lights lit up the hangar.

  Not going to lie – I ducked. It was so low and loud.

  Eric looked up at it and said:

  I AM LOST.

  ‘Come on, Eric. Let’s go.’

  WHY DO MONSTERS EAT SHIPS?

  ‘Telling jokes isn’t going to help.’

  THE JOKE IS INCORRECT.

  ‘Even if it was a really funny joke, I’d still want to go home. Before it gets dark.’

  I AM LOST.

  He sounded like he really didn’t want to be left on his own.

  ‘I wish I knew how to turn you off or put you into sleep mode, or something. Then you wouldn’t mind—’

  ACTIVATING BATTERY-SAVING MODE.

  His head drooped. He sank to the floor with his leg and his scooter stretched out in front of him. The lights in his eyes and mouth went out.

  Well, I thought, that was easy enough. I found an old tarpaulin and covered him up so that even if anyone did come after him they wouldn’t see him. Then I left.

&nbs
p; It was so good to be back in the fresh air I forgot to worry about the little house, until I was passing it and I heard that slap of metal again.

  This time, I recognized it.

  I don’t know how I didn’t recognize it before. After all, my mum is a postwoman. It was the sound of a letterbox flapping shut.

  At the Limb Lab, they give us lessons about how to deal with fear.

  ‘If you’re scared of something,’ says Dr Shilling, ‘turn round and face it. Imagination magnifies fear Turn round, and you may see that you are being chased by a puppy, not a tiger.’

  This advice turned out to be dead wrong.

  I know because I did turn around. I did walk over to the door. I faced the Letterbox of Fear. I walked right up to it.

  I crouched, lifted open the flap, and looked inside.

  There was an eye.

  A human eye.

  Looking back at me.

  BANG!

  I let the flap fall.

  I ran all the way home.

  My heart was still going like the clappers when I got home. Even the front door noticed it. ‘Come in, Alfie. Your heartbeat is significantly raised. Have you been running? I’ll put the kettle on. Why not sit down and stabilize your metabolism?’

  Mum wasn’t home. Normally I don’t mind that much. After all, the house always says hello, and the DustUrchin tells me the news. And for the last few days Eric had filled the house with tension and thrills.

  But now I really just wanted a human to talk to. Where was Mum? I hadn’t even noticed until then, but she seemed to be home less than ever since my accident.

  I opened one of the kitchen cupboards. It said, ‘Hi Alfie! I’ve got tins of beans, tins of tuna. There’s bread in the bread bin and cheese in the fridge. Serving suggestion: Why not make a delicious tuna melt? If you need recipe help, ask the cooker.’

  I wasn’t going to be bossed around by a cupboard, so I went for beans on toast.

  One good thing is I can use Lefty’s inbuilt can opener to open the tin. I just put my finger on the top, it latches on to the tin, spins it round and there you go – it’s open. It felt so cool I could have opened every tin in the house just for the fun of it. But what was the point when there was no one there to see it.