Robots Go Wild! Read online

“And I sound the alarm!”

  “What?” says Dingaling, our doorbell-bot. “You guys thought you could do this thing without me?”

  “But what if the call comes in the middle of the night?” I ask. “We can’t have you waking up the whole house with your bell.”

  “No worries,” says Dingaling. “I’ll do the silent-alarm routine.”

  “Really? How’s that work?”

  “Electronically, for everybody but you. I just send them a signal.”

  “And for me?”

  “I tiptoe into your room… creep up to your bed…”

  “Yeah?”

  “And silently bop your butt with my bell.”

  I nod. “Works for me.”

  So Drone Malone takes off.

  And the rest of us hurry up and wait.

  We actually don’t have to wait very long.

  The next morning, as I’m climbing aboard my bike to head to school, Dingaling rolls up the driveway and starts swinging his bell.

  I figure he’s trying to tell me that the Ingallses aren’t home.

  I check my watch. “I’m supposed to go to school.”

  Hayseed comes rumbling out of the hedges he’s been trimming. “Dadgum it, Samuel Hayes-Rodriguez! What’s more important? Figuring out how that robo-creep short-circuited E, or your dadburn elementinerary-school edumacation?”

  Well, when Hayseed says it like that, I’m half-tempted to go to school just so I don’t end up sounding like him.

  But then McFetch starts snarling and growling and snapping his metal jaws at me. Mr. Moppenshine flies out of the kitchen, dust mops twirling. He’s itching to go.

  “Okay, okay.” I check my smartphone. Drone Malone is feeding me an overhead image of the Ingallses’ home superimposed over a street map. They only live, like, five minutes away.

  “Let’s roll,” I say.

  “Coach?” asks Blitzen, thundering out of the garage. “Is it okay if, instead of rolling, I use my tank treads? I don’t really have wheels, so rolling is—”

  “Fine! You rumble. We’ll roll. But we need to hurry.”

  Geoffrey the butler brings me a brown paper bag. “I fixed you a peanut-butter-and-banana-sandwich, Mr. Samuel.”

  “That’s what Trip likes, not me.”

  “Oh, bother. Let me pop back into the kitchen and whip up something with bologna and mayonnaise on white bread, no crusts. Won’t be a tick.”

  “That’s okay. I don’t need a sandwich.…”

  “But what’s a stakeout without proper food?”

  “We’re not staking out. Drone Malone already did that. We’re just snooping.”

  And, finally, we take off!

  Turns out Drone Malone was wrong.

  The Ingallses’ SUV is gone, but somebody is home.

  Professor Ignatius Ingalls—ol’ Icky himself. The genius behind SS-10K is stalking around the living room, jabbing a number into his very high-tech-looking smartphone. I’m watching and listening at the window. Hayseed’s in the bushes with me.

  “Reckon ol’ Drone Malone couldn’t see through the roof,” whispers Hayseed. “Need to get him a pair of them X-ray glasses.”

  I put my finger to my lips to shush Hayseed.

  Because it sounds like Dr. Ingalls is talking to someone on the phone about E, and I have a feeling I need to hear everything he’s saying!

  After the mess in the football stadium, E is out of the picture for good. Now we need to focus on stunts that will make the top brass at Notre Dame beg me to take over the department. I don’t know. Something spectacular. Something epic! Something that, once and for all, proves SS-10K’s superiority over anything Dr. Hayes and her associates could ever create. We need to publicly humiliate her!”

  Wow. Dr. Ingalls is doing all this to destroy Mom? He must’ve really wanted to take her to that stupid prom.

  “Once we secure the department head position,” Dr. Ingalls tells his henchman on the phone, “I’ll have the University of Notre Dame’s full resources behind me. Then we move on to phase two. Senator Beauregard and I discussed Department of Defense contracts yesterday. It’ll only take us six months to bamboozle the government out of billions with bogus promises about turning the Substitute Student Ten Thousand into the Substitute Soldier One Hundred. Promises we can’t keep, but the army won’t know it until after we have their money.”

  My whole body is tingling. I wonder if this is how spies feel when they uncover a big enemy secret. Or maybe I’m just allergic to something in the shrubbery.

  “We’ll pull Eddie out of Creekside Elementary the minute I sign my Notre Dame contract. He’s doing a good job, but I don’t know how much longer any of us can keep up this ‘twin brother’ act. If we keep playing that angle, sooner or later some bright young reporter is going to start digging around and discover that there is no brother.”

  I knew it!

  The whole crippled-twin-brother bit was a lie! There is no Freddy, Teddy, or Neddy. That’s why Eddie had so much trouble remembering his twin brother’s name.

  He doesn’t have one!

  I turn to Hayseed. “Did you record all that?”

  “Huh?”

  “Everything Dr. Ingalls just said, did you record it? On, like, a voice memo app?”

  “Nuh-uh. I ain’t got one of them. Besides, it’s illegal to record folks without their permission. Might also be illegal for us to be peeping into windows like this, so if you don’t mind…”

  He stands up from his crouch. I notice red dots on either side of his head. Bells start ringing. Sirens start whooping.

  I guess Dr. Ingalls’s security system triggers were positioned to detect under-window snoopers just a wee bit taller than me.

  We’re caught!

  Okay, SS-10K might be some kind of phony, but Dr. Ingalls does have the best, most incredible robotic security system I’ve ever seen.

  A whole swarm of floating wasp battle-bots surround Hayseed and me. If we make a move, I’m pretty sure we’re in for some nasty stinger action.

  “Shoo-wee,” says Hayseed. “Them battle-bots look tougher than stewed skunk and about as friendly as a bramblebush.”

  “Do not move!” whines the lead battle-wasp as it floats in front of my face. “We have your nose surrounded.”

  Hayseed and I raise our arms in surrender.

  Fortunately, all my other bots make a mad dash away from the house and jump on Blitzen’s back to hightail it home before they can be cornered by the buzzing battle-bot brigade.

  All of a sudden I hear heavy feet crunching leaves.

  Here comes SS-10K. I think.

  The big robot looks like the thing I’ve met at school, but he’s done up in desert-camo colors, and instead of arms with clamper-claw hands, he has a scary-looking machine gun and a rocket launcher.

  “Do not move,” the big thing drones, “or I will be forced to initiate my battlefield protocols.”

  “What the heck does that mean?” asks Hayseed.

  In reply, the giant machine starts ratcheting his arms, spinning his ammunition drums, and aiming his weapons.

  “At ease, soldier,” says Dr. Ingalls, who steps around the giant military robot to glare at us. He waves his hand and the two dozen flying wasp-bots disperse. “What are you doing outside my window?”

  “Um, studying your shrubbery?” I say.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Well, I’m, uh, doing this shrubbery project for the, uh, Creekside Elementary School science fair. And while I was, uh, in the neighborhood, I noticed that these bushes have the most interesting foliage, which, by the way, is a scientific term for leaves.”

  “I know what foliage means, Mr. Hayes-Rodriguez.”

  Oops. He knows who I am.

  Now he’s eyeballing Hayseed. “And why did you feel the need to bring one of your mother’s crude, barely functioning robots with you on this excursion?”

  “Well, sir,” says Hayseed, “I’m what you might call a horticultural expert. See, I done
been programmed to trim hedges, whack weeds, snap beans, and identify foliage—or what you, as a non-horticultural-type person, might call greenery, vegetation, leaves—”

  “I told you, I know what foliage means!”

  “Well, ain’t you just as smart as a hooty owl?”

  Dr. Ingalls glares at me again. “What did you hear while you were spying on me?”

  “Oh, we weren’t spying on you,” I say. “Like I said, we were just—”

  “Studying my shrubbery.” He turns to the warrior robot. “Soldier?”

  “Sir?”

  “Summon the police.”

  “They have already been summoned, sir.”

  “Good job.”

  The robot jumps to attention and salutes. “Yes, sir, Professor Ingalls, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “Keep your eye on these prowlers until the police arrive. I have urgent business to attend to.”

  Dr. Ingalls turns back to me.

  “Say hello to your mother for me, Samuel. Tell her I might consider letting her be my lab assistant when I take over the robotics department at Notre Dame. I hope such a lowly position won’t make her feel too… How shall I put this? Icky.”

  Hayseed and I get our first (and hopefully last) ride together in the backseat of a police car.

  “I tell you what, Officers,” says Hayseed. “That Dr. Ingalls fellow is the one you ought to be hauling away to the hoosegow.”

  “The what?” asks the police officer behind the wheel.

  “The hoosegow! The jail! The pokey! Why, he’s slipperier than butterscotch pudding in your pocket. He’s so dadburn crooked, he has to unscrew his britches at night. He’s—”

  “Kid?” The police officer looks at me in the rearview mirror. “Can you turn that thing off? I’m tired of his southern-fried lip.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I push Hayseed’s power button. “Reckon I’ll take me a little nap,” he says before conking out.

  “We’re not taking you two to jail,” says the other officer. “We’re taking you home. I have a feeling your parents are going to punish you worse than any judge could.”

  Turns out the police officers are right.

  “How could you do such a thing?” Mom asks me after I put Hayseed in his garden shed.

  “Because,” I say excitedly, “I figured out what’s wrong with E!”

  “Really?” she says, sort of sarcastically. “Well, maybe you can figure out what’s wrong with your father next.”

  “Honey,” Dad says. “Honestly, I was going to tell you.”

  “When? After we couldn’t pay our electric bill because you don’t have a job anymore?”

  Oops. Guess Dad finally told Mom the truth.

  You have to believe me when I tell you that my mom and dad don’t fight very often. They don’t even argue. In fact, they’re usually like two goofy, giggly teenagers who just fell in love.

  So this is bad. Superbad.

  Remember when I said E might’ve done some serious damage to our family? I take that back. It’s Dr. Ignatius Ingalls who’s out to wreck our lives, because he wants Mom’s job so he can launch some sort of substitute soldier robot scam on the United States government.

  I guess there’s big money to be made doing that. And his SS-100 warrior robot is extremely fierce-looking. If I was an army general, I’d be pretty impressed by that camo-colored battle-bot with weapons for arms, even if the robo-terror couldn’t actually do anything fierce.

  Mom and Dad walk away from each other in a huff.

  They’re so angry, they don’t even seem to remember that their son (that would be me) came home in a cop car.

  I also figure that this isn’t the best time to tell them about Freddy Teddy Neddy being a fake twin.

  Or SS-10K sabotaging E.

  Or Dr. Ingalls’s big plan to scam the government.

  “Might be best if you just drop it, Samuel,” suggests Geoffrey the butler-bot. “Forget what you think you heard at Dr. Ingalls’s house. Keep calm and carry on, old chap.”

  I’m not crazy about that idea.

  So I go to tell Maddie what I just found out.

  She doesn’t want to hear it, either.

  Outside Maddie’s room, McFetch has his tail tucked between his hind legs.

  I know how he feels.

  And just when I think things can’t get any worse, they do.

  That night, Maddie gets sick.

  We’re talking major-league, serious illness.

  Maybe I picked up some germs or something hiding in the bushes outside Dr. Ingalls’s house. Maybe one of the robots I took there came back to Maddie’s sterile, clean room a little less than sterile or clean. Maybe McFetch stepped in some real dog poop and carried all sorts of bizarro bacteria into Maddie’s bed.

  Whatever the reason, her fever is spiking at 105 again.

  This happens maybe three or four times a year, and it’s incredibly frightening each and every time.

  Mom and Dad are both right there with her. No matter what kind of problems they’re having at work (or with each other), nothing’s more important than taking care of their kids.

  Hey, if I was the one in bed burning up with fever, they’d be holding my hands just like they’re holding Maddie’s.

  It’s a little before midnight when the paramedics arrive to rush Maddie to St. Joseph’s hospital—a place she’s been so many times, she can tell you all the different kinds of balloons and stuffed animals they sell down in their gift shop. And what kind of Jell-O you get for dessert on Tuesdays.

  Luckily, we never have to wait very long for the St. Joe’s ambulance to show up. It comes to our house so often, I think our address is programmed into the top-ten list on its GPS.

  But there’s something different about this emergency run to the hospital.

  Maddie isn’t joking around like she usually does with Dylan and Dave, the two paramedics.

  “This is no biggie, right?” I say to Maddie as I walk alongside the rolling stretcher, because “It’s no biggie” is what she always says to me when I freak out every time she even sneezes.

  Tonight, though, Maddie doesn’t smile or tell me to take it easy. It looks like somebody pulled a plug and drained out all her fighting spirit.

  Maybe this time it really is a biggie.

  So I lean in close and whisper in her ear.

  “You’ve got to hang in there, Maddie. You’ve got to come home. Fast.”

  “W-w-what?” She’s having trouble breathing and more trouble speaking.

  “You need to come back here, ASAP.”

  “W-w-why?”

  “E’s going to need you to tell him what to do at school. He can’t memorize all those state capitals without you. And he’s terrible at math. Especially if those two trains leave Chicago and Indianapolis at different times.”

  “I’m not…”

  “Oh yes, you are. You’re going right back to Ms. Tracey’s class. Just as soon as you’re feeling better. Mom is going to fix E. I promise. Everything is going to be like it was, only better. But you need to get better first.”

  Maddie looks up at me. Her typically bright blue eyes look more like two cloudy swimming pools that need cleaning.

  “Do you promise, Sammy?” Her voice is so weak I can barely hear her.

  I raise my right hand like I’m making a pledge. “I do solemnly swear.”

  Seeing your little sister carted off in the back of a boxy ambulance can make for a pretty sleepless night.

  When your little sister has something as serious as severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), you spend a lot of time hoping for the best but fearing the worst. Plus, I’ve heard Mom and Dad talking about Maddie’s disease when they think I’m not listening.

  For instance, SCID is an inherited disorder. You get it before you’re even born. It’s also three times more common in boys than in girls.

  Which, of course, always makes me wonder: Why didn’t I get it instead of Maddie?

  Someti
mes I wish I would’ve. Then Maddie wouldn’t be the one going through all this.

  But if I can’t take her place in the ambulance, at least I can do everything possible to make her life as happy as it can be.

  Fortunately, Maddie recovers fast. She’s only in St. Joe’s for a day and a half. This makes me happier than cake and ice cream on a day that isn’t my birthday.

  “I missed the Jell-O completely,” she tells me. “It was a rice pudding week.”

  We’re hanging out in her bedroom, first thing in the morning. Instead of our usual cereal, the Breakfastinator is whipping us up some Belgian waffles with real maple syrup to celebrate Maddie’s homecoming.

  “Are you sure Mom can fix E?” she asks me while we wait for our second waffles to be Frisbee’d over to us.

  “Yes,” I say. “If she puts her mind to it.”

  “Is she feeling sorry for herself, too?”

  “I think so.”

  “Waste of time and energy,” says Maddie. “And I should know. I just wasted several days and a ton of energy feeling sorry for myself.”

  “I think I can convince Mom to fix E. But I might have to show the world that SS-10K is a fraud and a hoax first.”

  “I have an idea,” says Maddie. “Maybe you can do both at the same time.”

  “How?”

  Maddie shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m only in the third grade. I don’t think you learn how to be clever until you’re in the fifth.”

  I smile, because she means it’s up to me to figure out the clever solution.

  “You just stay healthy,” I tell her. “And study those state capitals. You and E have your social studies test next week.”

  I head downstairs, hop on my bike, and pedal off to school.

  When I meet up with Trip, he’s wearing a new bicycle helmet.

  “You like my new helmet? My mom bought it for me. All the cool kids are wearing them.”

  “It, uh, looks like SS-10K’s head.”