Assignment: Sunflower Valley

part of the BobsWorld universe

by Setcheti

Disclaimer: I do not own Bob the Builder. I just love him a whole lot and want him to be happy – isn’t that how fic usually happens?

About BobsWorld: The BobsWorld universe is based on the premise that the Bob the Builder characters are real people, living in a real world. To find out more about BobsWorld, please go here.

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Bob woke up out of a sound sleep knowing something was wrong. He sat up in bed, listened but didn’t hear anything, then slid out from under his blankets and into his slippers and headed downstairs into the living room. The small house, even in the dark with only the silver moonlight shining through the curtains, looked perfectly normal. Pilchard was asleep in Bob’s chair, curled up into a furry little ball of unconcern. Bob frowned and went into the kitchen to make sure the cat flap was latched, then opened the door and looked out into the building yard.

Outside, the moonlight was much stronger, but instead of the roaming machine Bob had half expected to see occupying the empty yard, there was instead a man-shape in black creeping across the hard-packed ground in the direction of the machine sheds. Bob came the rest of the way out onto his small front step, squinting. “Hey!” he yelled. “Who’s out there?”

The man-shape crouched and spun toward the sound of his voice, and a dark arm swung up and around to point at him. Bob saw moonlight glint off black metal and ducked just as a loud report shattered the night’s silence. A faint curse followed, the dark arm swung again, and then the rumblings of awakening engines filled the yard and headlights began to flicker on, searching for the source of the disturbance. The black form crouched again and ran, disappearing back into the darkness.

Bob started to follow and then thought better of it. The man had a gun, going after him unarmed in the dark wouldn’t be a very smart thing to do. And he also had the machines to consider; on top of whatever else was going on, they didn’t need panicking machines. Bob ran down into the yard and got right in the middle of them, swinging up onto the nearest riding platform – Roley’s – to protect his slipper-clad feet from too-close heavy tires. “Calm down!” he yelled. “Everyone stop! Stop right where you are!”

The five agitated machines ground to a halt. Scoop’s bucket was all the way up, and he peered at Bob from underneath it. “What was that noise?”

“I saw a person!” Muck cried, while Roley beside her rocked back and forth in agitation. “Who was it, Bob? Why did they run away?”

“Why were you y-yelling at him?” came from Lofty. His crane arm was shaking. “Why was he h-here?”

“And why was he wearing a mask?” Dizzy wailed, bucket spinning wildly. “Bob, I’m scared!”

Bob pitched his voice to be heard over them, although he wasn’t yelling any more. “You all need to calm down,” he insisted. “I don’t know who it was, or why he was here, and the noise you heard was…something bad, something to hurt people with. I need to go call Constable Rickey, all right? I have to tell him about the bad man, and I need all of you to watch the yard while I go get my phone. Can you watch the yard, Scoop?”

Scoop was still looking up at him, wide-eyed, from under the bucket. “Will he come back?”

“I hope not. But even if he did, he can’t hurt you.”

Bob realized his mistake the moment the words left his mouth. Five sets of already wide eyes got even wider, and the machines moved closer together. “Was he trying to hurt you?” Roley wanted to know.

“He tried, but he was frightened when all of you woke up and he ran away,” Bob answered quickly. He gave Roley’s frame a reassuring squeeze and then hopped off the platform. “I’ll be right back, just stay where you are! He won’t come in the yard if you’re watching!”

He ran for the house, flew inside and snatched his cell phone off the table by his chair. Pilchard woke up and meowed a complaint, but Bob didn’t have time to pet her before he ran back outside to make his call from the cluster of frightened machines who were waiting for him.

He also didn’t have time to look at the round, splinter-edged hole that now decorated the framing of his kitchen door.

When Wendy arrived at the construction yard, every light was blazing and the enclosed space seemed to be swarming with people. She found Bob near the center of it all, still in his sweatpants and slippers, talking to Constable Rickey and leaning against Scoop’s bucket while absently stroking Roley’s frame with his other hand. Dizzy was crouched near his feet like a frightened dog, and Lofty left the spot he’d been cringing in just behind Muck to glue himself to Wendy’s side the minute he saw her. “Weren’t you afraid of the bad man, Wendy?” the crane wanted to know. “They don’t know where he went!”

“I came over with Mr. Dixon,” she reassured him – not to mention Bob and the constable, who had looked equally alarmed when they saw her. Both men relaxed; although he’d never actually had to perform any duties before now, the former Mountie turned postmaster was down on the books as Constable Rickey’s part-time deputy. “What happened?”

Bob shrugged. “Something woke me up, and when I checked the yard I saw someone sneaking around in the dark. I yelled at him, he shot at me, and then everybody woke up and that frightened him away. We’re not sure where he went.”

He said it so casually that Wendy almost didn’t catch the most important part, but when the words registered she sucked in an involuntary gasp. Constable Rickey stepped in at once, before she could say anything else. “Bob, why don’t you go show Wendy…the house. I’ll stay here until you get back.”

“Thanks.” Bob stepped away from the machines with a quiet reassurance that he’d be right back, and took Wendy’s arm as the constable stepped in to stop Dizzy from following him. “Stay with the others, Lofty,” he told the hovering crane. “I need to show Wendy something in the house, we’ll be right back.”

Loft reluctantly did as he was told, and Bob led Wendy away toward the house. He still had his arm linked through hers, something he usually didn’t do in front of the machines, and that worried her even more. “Bob…”

“I don’t know what woke me up, Wendy.” Bob’s voice was low, but not quite as even as he probably wanted it to be. “I checked the house, then I went to the front door to check the yard. I saw someone moving toward the sheds, I yelled, and he raised his arm and took a shot at me.” He drew in a deep, shaky breath. “If the machines hadn’t woken up when they did and started turning on their lights…he was trying for a second shot when they startled him, and that’s when he ran.”

Wendy felt all the blood drain out of her face, understanding now why Bob hadn’t called to tell her what was going on; it was John Dixon who’d woken her up, checking to make sure she was all right, and she’d insisted on coming to the yard with him. There were no guns on the island except for the one Constable Rickey kept locked in his office – and she knew he was wearing that one right now, because she’d seen the bulge of a shoulder holster under his uniform jacket. “What…what about the first shot?” she asked.

They’d reached the house, and Bob actually shuddered when he nodded toward the hole in his kitchen doorframe that several people were clustering around with cameras and other equipment. He swallowed hard, his grip on her arm tightening. “I’m not sure whether I should use wood filler on that or just put on a new frame.”

“I’ll help you reframe it,” Wendy told him. No way did she want to walk through that door every day of the week knowing a bullet hole was hiding in it. She didn’t really want to walk past it though the office door either, but they needed to be in the house. “Where’s Pilchard?”

“Under my bed upstairs – the gunfire and yelling didn’t bother her, but she really didn’t like it when all the people started to show up.” Bob chuckled without much real humor. “I think she’s upset with me for interrupting her sleep. I’ll have to give her some tuna tomorrow or she’ll sulk for the rest of the week.” They crossed through the office and into the living room, and Bob sat down in his chair – but when Wendy tried to sit on the footstool, he pulled her down next to him and into a tight embrace. “Decency clause be damned,” he murmured. “It’s my house and I’m a grown man, I can hug you if I want to.”

“I’m glad you want to, because I really need a hug myself.” She wrapped her arms around him and hung on, taking comfort from the soft-strong warmth of him radiating through the thin t-shirt he’d worn to bed. “That bullet hole…he was aiming…”

“I know.” Wendy felt his wince. “I didn’t even notice the hole until after the constable got here, I was too busy trying to keep everyone calm.” He paused, tensed a little. “Whoever it was, they had to have snuck onto the island. And they were after the machines.”

Wendy thought about it. “A security leak?”

“It has to be. But I don’t understand why they’d go after the machines here, especially not these particular ones. It’s not like you could get one of them off the island.” He sighed, held on a moment more, and then they separated – although he took hold of her hand and held it. A half-smile quirked up one corner of his mouth. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but about half an hour ago I was really glad you weren’t here.”

She dredged up a half-smile of her own to match his. “And I’m really sorry I wasn’t. I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.”

Bob chuckled. “I think I can live with that.” He cocked his head at her. “But you know, I think maybe we could keep from having this disagreement again…if I built a bigger house.” There was a hopeful hesitancy about his expression. “What…what do you think?”

Had he just…? He had, she was sure of it; and while Wendy understood why Bob felt like bringing the next step in their relationship up now, they just couldn’t discuss it further right at this moment. What she could do, however…Wendy leaned forward and kissed his cheek, then stood up out of the chair and pulled him up with her. “I think we need to build a bigger house,” she corrected. “But not until we’ve found out who put the hole in this one. Are you going back to bed tonight?”

“I think I need to stay out in the shed with the machines.” Bob’s shy, delighted smile at her in-kind response faded, and he shook his head. “They don’t really understand what happened, all they know is that someone bad was in their yard and he tried to hurt me. But if I take a blanket and pillow out and pretend to sleep in Scoop’s bucket, they might just calm down enough to get some rest themselves.”

“Hmm.” Wendy nodded. “In that case, I should probably do the same thing in Muck’s shovel, don’t you think?”

Bob was still disagreeing with that idea when they walked back outside, but Wendy wasn’t budging. Constable Rickey just shook his cropped gray-brown head when he heard the argument and then settled it himself. “You’re going home,” he told Wendy in his gruff voice. “I’m sending someone to take you home, and they’re going to check your house from top to bottom before they leave you in it for the rest of the night. And you,” he rounded on Bob before the younger man could say anything. “You’re going back to bed – to your real bed, inside the house, got it? There is nothing more you can do out here tonight, and I’m going to need you alert tomorrow, not stumbling around like a zombie. And before you say it,” he held up a hand when Bob started to protest, “I already talked to the machines, and they’re going to take turns keeping watch on the house and yard for the rest of the night while you sleep. You said it yourself, the shooter can’t hurt them. And then tomorrow we’re all going to figure out what’s going on.”

Constable Rickey didn’t give orders often, but when he did, people followed them. Within an hour everyone was gone from the yard, all the evidence had gone with them – including the bullet-holed part of Bob’s kitchen doorframe, permanently solving the question of whether or not to reframe the door – and Rickey had escorted Wendy back home himself after telling the machines that Scoop needed to come get him if they saw Bob get up again that night. He’d used a different threat to keep Wendy in her house; he just reminded her that if she were to fall afoul of the shooter, Bob would come running to her rescue and probably get himself killed doing it.

Wendy stayed in all night.

Bob was up early – or rather, he’d finally decided just to get up for good after he’d woken up for the fifth or sixth time. His dreams had been full of men with guns. And Wendy. In the last dream, Wendy had been with him in the kitchen and she hadn’t ducked fast enough.

He hadn’t been able to stay in bed after that. He’d put on real coffee and taken a shower while it was brewing, then puttered around in the kitchen for a while with the end result being a coffee cake. He didn’t eat it, though; he was too busy pacing. Thinking about gunmen, and machines…and Wendy.

Constable Rickey showed up around that time, his knock at the kitchen door almost startling Bob right out of his skin. Rickey took one look at him and shook his head. “Couldn’t sleep?” he asked.

“Would you have been able to?” Bob ran a hand through his dark hair, which was showing the effects of having his hand run through it multiple times already. “Did you…”

“Find him? No, not yet.” Rickey sat down at the kitchen table, watching while the younger man got him a cup of coffee and a plate for the untouched cake that was sitting in the middle of the table. His blue eyes narrowed; he had never seen Bob so jittery. “Talk to me, Bob.”

Bob dropped down into the chair across from him with a sigh. “I just couldn’t sleep, I’m okay. Have you called the mainland yet?”

“Yeah. And we’re in lockdown, just so you know.” Bob just nodded; he’d expected that. Lockdown meant no off-island phones and no ferry, Sol would be completely cut off from the mainland until it was lifted. Rickey took a sip of his coffee. “John’s spreading the word in town, and I called Fred so he could tell all of his neighbors to keep their eyes open.”

“Good.” Bob nodded again. “I’ll make sure everyone knows about it while I’m out today, too.”

“You won’t be going out today, Bob.” The look on his face stopped the younger man’s automatic protest cold. “That guy didn’t bring a gun with him to shoot machines. If I thought I could get you to go, I’d be sending you over to the labs until we catch him.”

The lab compound had its own security, and a strictly controlled single entrance; it was one of the most secure spots on the island. Bob shook his head. “The machines need me. And I have work to do…”

“You have to be alive to do it.” Rickey’s blue eyes fixed on the stubborn brown ones across the table and held them. “I repeat, Bob: he didn’t bring that gun for shooting machines. What’s to stop him from shooting you in the back while you’re out on the job?”

“But I can’t...I mean, people count on me!”

“And again, you have to be alive for that.” Rickey glanced across the kitchen to the bullet-holed doorway. It had been a perfect head shot – or it would have been, if Bob hadn’t ducked. “And if you won’t keep yourself safe for your own sake, do it for Wendy’s. Because if you’re out working, she’s gonna be out working too.”

Bob blanched, shaking his head. “I was going to have her stay in the office today.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you were,” the constable snorted. “The same way you were going to make her go home last night.” The younger man went from worried white to embarrassed red but he didn’t deny it, and Rickey pressed his point home. “If you go out, she’ll go out – at the very least she’d end up following you, Bob, you know she would. She’s not going to stay here unless you do.”

“You’re right.” Bob sighed. “All right, we’ll stay put. For today, anyway.”

Constable Rickey knew that was the best he was going to get. He stayed at the yard another half hour until John Dixon showed up with Wendy, then reiterated his instructions about staying in the yard before taking his deputy and heading back out to start warning people. They still had an armed intruder on the loose.

Eleven o’clock and all the paperwork was done. All the filing was done. The office had been dusted, the floor vacuumed, and the computer defragmented. Wendy had even cleaned out the desk drawers and restacked the pile of recycling boxes in the corner.

And it was still only eleven o’clock. She played a game of solitaire on the computer, lost, played again until she won, and then checked the clock again. Eleven fifteen. The phone rang and made her jump, but she still picked up before it had a chance to ring again. “Bob’s Building Yard!” she greeted the unknown caller just a little too cheerfully – the phone hadn’t been ringing much this morning, once the constable and John Dixon had started making their rounds.

It was Fred Pickles, wanting to know what was going on and if everyone was okay. He’d been confined to his farm the way Bob and Wendy had been restricted to the building yard – the way Pickles’ neighbor Kenny, JJ at the lumber yard, and Jack and Lucy at the recycling center had been restricted too, just in case the island’s intruder made a try for one of their machines the way he had for Bob’s. Wendy thought they were probably all going just as stir crazy as she was. Fred had actually reached that point before she had; he was alone up at his farmhouse, she at least had Bob.

She managed to waste twenty minutes talking to Fred about everything except the shooting incident from the night before, and five more sitting by the phone wondering if she should start calling around to check on their friends too. She decided against it; it was almost lunchtime, calling around would give her something to fill up part of her afternoon.

Two more games of solitaire later Wendy abandoned the office for the kitchen and started rummaging for ingredients. She wasn’t really hungry, but cooking would take up some time. Not to mention that if she cooked, Bob would eat. Wendy was certain he hadn’t eaten that morning, cake or no cake, and she was equally certain that he’d polished off at least half a pot of non-decaf coffee before she got there. Dr. Johnson was going to kill him…

She backtracked over that thought and deleted it, doing her best to stamp the ‘k’ word out of her mind. No k…nothing like that, nobody was going to k…hurt Bob. She’d make him eat lunch – she’d make him eat dinner too, and she was going to come early and make him eat breakfast in the morning. And she was going to fill his coffeepot up with decaf so he’d have to drink it – he wouldn’t throw it out, Bob didn’t waste things if he could help it.

Once she had things started there wasn’t anything else to do at the stove, so she went to the kitchen window and looked out. Bob had completely cleared out his workshop and was moving everything back in one piece at a time. Wendy had to smile; there were a lot of pieces, he was going to be busy for a while. The machines were playing a halfhearted game of soccer on the other side of the yard, halfhearted because they were trying to watch Bob and play at the same time.

Bob, of course, was completely aware of this, and Wendy could tell that he was watching the machines too. The next time the ball got close, he jumped over a box of tools and kicked the ball back into play. He played with them for a few minutes, doing a convincing imitation of a man having fun, and then went back to work on his shed – but not before he’d looked up, looked right at her there in the window, and waved, grinning.

Wendy waved back, then sat down at the kitchen table and tried to decide whether or not she wanted to cry. He’d done a convincing imitation for her, too.

It had been a long day, John Dixon reflected as he walked up the street to the building yard. A long day for he and Constable Rickey as they put the whole town on alert and tried to find some clue that would lead them to the previous night’s shooter. An even longer day for Fred, Kenny, JJ, Jack and Lucy, and Bob and Wendy, who had all been forced to stay at home and mostly indoors – not that everyone else hadn’t been encouraged to stay indoors too, but that particular bunch were used to being out and about and busy all day.

They’d all found ways to deal with it – different ways. Fred had spent most of the day on the phone or on his computer; he’d managed to keep a game of chess going online with Todd Johnson for the better part of the afternoon. Kenny had watched movies all day and napped on the couch. JJ had reorganized and re-inventoried his yard while his daughter Molly, home from college for the summer, had worked on a sculpture that was eventually going to be displayed in the town’s park. And Jack and Lucy had claimed they were putting together puzzles every time someone checked on them…but they were a younger couple who had been talking about starting a family, so no one actually believed that puzzle pieces were the only things they were putting together.

John only wished that Bob and Wendy had been similarly occupied. Bob had spent most of the day cleaning out his workshop while Wendy stayed in the office, although she had come out for part of the afternoon on the pretext of doing ‘a real inventory’ as opposed to relying on the one Bob kept in his head. But Bob had been so jumpy with her outside that John had finally had to call Rickey, who had come to the yard and stayed there while John kept patrolling around town and delivered some mail – luckily for him, being the constable’s sometime deputy dovetailed pretty neatly with his job as Sunflower Valley’s postmaster.

And now he was on his way back to the building yard to pick up Wendy and take her home for the night. The yard was quiet when he walked in, most of the machines in their shed except for Roley, who was near the fence talking to Bird. The green steamroller spotted John and greeted him with enthusiasm. “Hi Mr. Dixon. I was just telling Bird to watch out for the bad man with the gun.” He gave a little twist to his front end that was equivalent to a human cocking their head. “Do you think the bad man would shoot at Bird?”

Great, just great. “No, Roley, I don’t think he would,” the postmaster told him, and hoped he wasn’t lying. Mr. Beasley’s free-flying tropical bird was quite a fixture in Sunflower Valley, it wouldn’t only be the machines who would take it hard if something happened to it. “Bird should be just fine. Are Bob and Wendy in the office?”

“Yeah, I think so. Constable Rickey is there too.” The steamroller blinked at him. “Did you catch the bad man yet?”

John patted the green frame and shook his head. “No, Roley, we haven’t. But we will, and then he’ll be gone and he won’t come back.”

“I don’t want him to come back,” Roley said, and then he trundled back to the shed and backed into it, Bird riding on top of his cab. “I hope he never comes back.”

“That makes two of us,” John muttered under his breath, and headed for the house. He knocked on the office door, then pushed it open and stuck his head around the corner. The office was empty. “Hey, where is everybody?” he called out.

“In the kitchen!” Wendy’s voice came floating out. “Come on in!”

John backed out of the office, stamped his feet on the mat and then went in the kitchen door instead. Constable Rickey and Bob were drinking iced tea at Bob’s small kitchen table while Wendy fussed over something on the stove. “Does this mean it’s quitting time?” John asked the room at large.

Bob gave a halfhearted grin and waved him to a vacant chair, standing up as he did so. “It can only be quitting time if we’d been working to begin with,” he said, getting out a glass and pouring tea into it from the pitcher on the table. “You and Mike are the ones who’ve been working.”

The constable sipped his tea and deadpanned, “Oh, I think Jack and Lucy were pretty hard at it too.” One of Wendy’s pans clattered against the stovetop, and Rickey ducked his head over his tea. “Sorry, Wendy.”

“Get the soap,” John advised her with a grin. “It’s what his mother would have done.”

Rickey snorted. “My mother would have gotten Dad’s belt – but then, back then I didn’t know what ‘innuendo’ meant. Your mother used to wash your mouth out for swearing, huh?”

“My grandmother, and yeah, religiously.” The postmaster chuckled. “She got Dad with it once when he let fly, now that was a sight to see.”

“I bet. My mom would just take stuff away from us,” Bob told them. “Tom lost his baseball glove for a whole week once.”

“And what did you lose?” John wanted to know.

Bob suddenly decided that the melting ice in his tea was very interesting – probably because his face was so red and hot. “Baseball glove, same as Tom.”

Rickey smacked him on the shoulder, laughing. “I knew it! Bet it was good practice for this place, though, wasn’t it?”

That got him a shadow of the builder’s usual grin. “I’d lose a heck of a lot more than a baseball glove for swearing here, Mike.” It was true. Bob’s version of the contractual decency clause was a lot stricter than the one most of the Project’s employees had to sign, because he lived and worked so closely with so many of the machines. Swearing, or even the kind of innuendo the constable had just let slip, would both be serious infractions of the clause for Bob – serious enough to see him fired, in fact. “Are you sure you don’t want me to help with anything, Wendy?”

Wendy shook her head, blond ponytail swinging back and forth. “I’ve got it under control, thanks.” She glanced over her shoulder. “You are staying for supper, aren’t you, John? We’ve got plenty.”

Rickey gave John a look, and the postmaster nodded. “I would never turn down your cooking, Wendy,” he answered her. “I don’t suppose either of you found time to bake while you weren’t working today, did you?”

Bob started to get back up. “I made coffee cake this morning…”

“Which you aren’t going to get out right before supper!” Wendy shot back, and John caught a glimpse of her smile when Bob immediately dropped back into his chair. “Everything will be done in a minute, you can all just wait.”

“Yes ma’am,” John said, and winked at the embarrassed builder. “You are so whipped.”

The only thing better than Bob’s blush, he decided, was Wendy’s giggle.

They lingered a little over supper, but eventually it was time to go. John walked Wendy home and checked all the doors and windows for her before he left her for the night. “No signs of forced entry, nothing out of place, no sign of any intruder,” he told her, coming down the stairs from the second floor to where she was waiting near the open front door. He’d insisted that she wait there, near enough to the door to get out if someone did happen to be in the house. “Unless you need anything else, I’ll be back in the morning to walk you to work, okay?”

She nodded, but when he went to move past her she grabbed his arm and he found himself on the receiving end of an almost desperate hug. John hugged back, mentally cursing the decency clause; it should have been Bob giving this comfort to her, and he was sure it was actually Bob she wanted it from, but at the building yard that just wasn’t possible. “It’ll be okay, Wendy,” he murmured reassuringly. “We’ll catch this guy, it’ll be okay. You just try to get some sleep tonight, all right?”

Wendy pulled back, wiping her eyes. “Bob won’t be. Sleeping, that is.”

John wiped away a tear she’d missed. “Nope, so I figure one of you should be alert tomorrow, right? Maybe you can get him to take a nap or something.” He gave her his best confident smile. “It’ll be okay, really.”

She smiled back, even if it was a little watery. “I can’t lose him, John. Not…not now.”

So that was it; the two of them had finally figured it out. “You’re not going to lose Bob,” he reassured her. “He ducked, remember? And he’s staying inside, Mike made him promise.”

“Bob always keeps his promises,” Wendy agreed. She swiped at her eyes again. “Thanks, John. I’m sorry…”

“Don’t worry about it. I’d be more worried if you hadn’t needed a hug,” he told her, and then moved to the door and let himself out. “Everything seems quiet, but if you hear anything, see anything, call Mike or I and we’ll be here in a heartbeat, okay? Other than that, I’ll be seeing you in the morning.”

“Okay,” she agreed, and then he was gone. She locked the door, feeling strange to be doing it, then went to the kitchen and made herself a cup of cocoa and tried to find something to watch on television. She wasted half an hour flipping channels and not finding anything, and finally decided to take a fresh cup of cocoa upstairs and read in bed until she got tired. It was still too early to go to bed, but she was hoping that after a while the previous night’s lack of sleep would catch up with her.

Wendy checked the downstairs doors and windows one last time…and then she remembered her plants. Bob had redone her tiny, barren backyard as a birthday surprise the year before, and although the spring weather so far hadn’t been too warm, it also hadn’t been too wet; the flowers and potted trees needed daily watering. Which she’d forgotten to give them this morning before she’d left with Mr. Dixon. And some of them were budding…

She went to the kitchen window and looked out. Nothing was out of place – and it wasn’t like the yard or anything in it was big enough to hide anybody anyway. Still, she waited a moment to unlatch the screen after she’d opened the back door. Nothing moved. Wendy sighed and shook her head, feeling silly. She went outside and watered her plants in the growing dark, then coiled the hose around its rack again and went back inside, careful to latch the screen and lock the door again behind her. Maybe she would make some cinnamon toast to go with her cocoa, since she didn’t have any cookies baked…

A black-gloved hand clamped over her mouth, stifling her automatic scream at the feel of cold metal pressing against the side of her neck, and a hoarse voice whispered, “You just became my ticket off this island, lady. Now let’s get moving…”

Pounding on his office door woke Bob up with a jump. He pulled himself out of his chair, which he’d gone to sleep in, and grabbed the pipe wrench that was sitting on his end table before the voice that went with the pounding registered. John Dixon’s voice. “Bob, open up!”

Bob rushed into the office and threw the door open, blinking against the too-bright morning sunlight. How long had he been asleep? Dixon had on his uniform jacket again, just like he had the night before. “John, what…”

The older man looked grim. “Last night, did you see anything, hear anything?”

“No.” And Bob would have, since he once again hadn’t been able to sleep – for most of the night, anyway. “What…”

“Your shooter came back, or someone did.” Dixon put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Bob, he took Wendy.”

All the color drained out of Bob’s face. “She’s…she went home!” he protested. “You checked last night, and Mike said he’d checked earlier – the house was clear! Did they break in?”

“Yeah, the house was clear – or at least we thought it was. And there’s no sign of forced entry.” John shook his head. “But somehow, he got past us; we think he might have been hiding out in the crawlspace up under the eaves. Mike saw Wendy’s front door standing wide open when he was on his way over here this morning. There aren’t really signs of a struggle…”

“There wouldn’t be – he had a gun.” The builder’s voice was flat and empty, and the brown eyes that fixed on John were bleak. “Is there any sign…”

“No.”

Bob made to push past him. “I have to…”

John pushed him back. “No, you don’t – you can’t.” There was a wealth of sympathy in his face and voice. “You have to stay in the yard, Bob.”

“I have to find Wendy!”

John heard a motor rumble behind him as one of the machines reacted to the sound of Bob’s raised voice. He pushed the younger man back into the office and followed him in, pulling the door shut behind him. “You’re staying in the yard, with the machines,” he insisted, making his voice hard. “We’re looking for Wendy; we don’t need to be looking for both of you, and we don’t need to give this bastard two hostages instead of one.” Bob dropped into Wendy’s desk chair and buried his face in his hands. John stayed where he was, in front of the door; if he went over there to comfort his friend, he wasn’t going to be able to do this. “We’ll keep you posted, Bob, and we’ll find her. Just stay put and keep your eyes open. Call Mike or I if you see anything out of the ordinary, okay?”

Bob didn’t answer, and after waiting a moment to see if he would, John left.

Half an hour later, Bob turned on the computer and then got up and went back to the living room to get his cell phone. If Wendy had her phone, she might get a chance to use it, or the shooter might try to use it himself. And since the phone had a GPS locator chip that enabled when it was turned on…when that happened he’d be able to find them.

Wendy had been thinking the same thing. Her captor had used duct tape to bind her wrists together and had tied a bandana on as a gag until he’d managed to get her out of town. He’d cursed the town, the constable, Bob and the machines roundly under his breath the entire time; apparently, nothing was the way he’d been expecting it to be and he resented that. He hadn’t wanted to have to hide out in someone’s attic crawlspace for a whole day, hadn’t wanted to take a hostage, hadn’t wanted to drag said hostage through the countryside in the dark trying to get ahead of the local law. And he wasn’t too happy that his cell phone didn’t work on the island; that, apparently, was something someone should have warned him about beforehand.

Wondering about it did finally make him take off Wendy’s gag, though. He even gave her some water, although he wasn’t very nice about it, and then he started demanding answers. Wendy didn’t want to tell him anything, but when he pointed his gun at her and suggested that another hostage probably wouldn’t be too hard to find, she started talking – but she only answered the questions he asked. Yes, there were only two law officers in town; she didn’t mention that one of those was the postmaster, or that said postmaster was a former RMCP officer. No, they did not have machines that worked for the law, machines with guns, or machines with any other kind of offensive capabilities; it wasn’t necessary to mention that just about any piece of angry heavy equipment could be offensive if it felt like it. Yes, they did have some sort of signal blocking device that kept anyone from using an unapproved cell phone on the island; Wendy didn’t tell him that the cell phone he’d taken from her house wasn’t working because of a broken antenna, or that it had a GPS tracking chip in it in case it got lost.

She also didn’t tell him that since Bob was always misplacing his cell phone, he had the tracking software installed on the computer at the building yard. Or that once someone thought to look for her phone, the constable, the postman, and possibly several machines would be coming to rescue her. If she couldn’t manage to rescue herself first, that was. Her kidnapper had to sleep sometime, didn’t he?

As it turned out, once the eastern sky started to lighten toward dawn, he did. He also had more duct tape, which he used to make it impossible for her to do much of anything while he slept, so after some fruitless, frustrated tugging at the tape on her wrists, Wendy ended up sleeping too.

Constable Rickey was sitting at his desk late that afternoon, trying to work out where to send which searchers and knowing he couldn’t afford to take too much time doing it. The shooter and his hostage were nowhere in town, they’d checked every house. Ditto for the surrounding farms, and the recycling center, and every barn, shed or silo in between. They’d even checked under bridges and inside drainage culverts – nothing. Which meant now it was time to start combing the farther-out woods and hills for any trace of them. He didn’t think they could be too far away, not yet, but given much more of a head start…

The door swung open, startling him even though he’d been expecting John Dixon to be back any time, but it wasn’t his temporary deputy who walked into the jailhouse. Rickey wasn’t really surprised to see Bob, but he didn’t like it either. “Bob, I told you…”

“I am not staying in the yard,” Bob interrupted him firmly. “Not for another minute, not while Wendy is still missing. If you’re so afraid this guy will shoot me from cover, then let me borrow your bulletproof vest – he’ll shoot at me first anyway. Because I need to find Wendy, and I can’t do that from inside the yard.”

Rickey tried to stare the younger man down, and failed. Shaking his head, he stomped over to the locked gun safe and got out the Kevlar vest that was still in its plastic bag because he’d never actually put on. It wasn’t like he’d ever needed it on the island, but it had come with the high-powered rifle they’d given him – which he’d also never needed on the island, much the same way he’d never needed his sidearm for anything but target practice until two days ago. He ripped off the bag and dropped the vest on his desk. “Get that coverall off, I’ll have to help you adjust it – unless you’ve worn one of these before?”

“No, never.” Bob unzipped the blue coverall and shrugged out of the upper half of it. The worn white t-shirt he had on underneath was damp with sweat, clinging to his arms and chest, and Rickey experienced a moment of doubt about getting the vest adjusted to fit him the way it was supposed to; Bob wasn’t a big man, but years of construction work had layered some respectable muscle onto his upper body that the particular vest they had might not be able to accommodate.

Still, Bob had been right about the shooter probably targeting him first, so Rickey let out all the straps as far as they would go and managed to get the vest to fit. Barely. “I don’t want you counting on this thing to protect you and doing something stupid,” he cautioned, tugging at a protesting strap. “There are some bullets it won’t stop, especially at close range, and even if it does stop one it’s still going to hurt like hell, okay? This vest is not a license to play hero.” He tugged another strap tight, patting it into place, feeling the muscles underneath flex against the tension. “This is insurance, because you’re too stupid to stay safe in your yard where I put you.”

The muscles flexed again in silent protest against that idea. “He has Wendy.”

“Yeah, he does.” Rickey moved around him, taking in the fit of the vest and deciding it would do. “And that’s the only reason I’m going along with this instead of locking you up right now, because it’s Wendy. But Wendy or no Wendy, if you do something stupid out there you’re going to be spending the night in my jail, got it?”

“I understand.” Brown eyes met his blue ones, and Rickey saw the understanding in them. “He’ll be expecting us, you know.”

“Yeah, probably,” the constable admitted. “A showdown is really his only way off the island. But that works in our favor, because he needs Wendy alive for that. She’s about as safe as a hostage can get right now.” He slapped Bob’s shoulder, careful not to hit the vest, which would have hurt his hand. “We’ll get her back, don’t you worry. Now what about the machines I can hear outside?”

“Scoop, Muck and Dizzy,” Bob informed him, shrugging back into his coverall and zipping it up. His hand was shaking, Rickey noticed. “I made Roley and Lofty stay in the yard. But Scoop and Muck could be useful; a bullet can’t punch through an inch-thick steel shovel. And Dizzy is good at running messages, and carrying things.”

Rickey cocked his head at him. “They wouldn’t stay in the yard either, huh?”

Bob didn’t quite grin, ducking his head and shaking it, fussing with his zipper. “It was mutiny, let me tell you.” His grin disappeared, his brown eyes flickering back up. “Mike…we may have a problem there. The machines want to go after this guy, they…they aren’t happy about what he’s done.”

“You don’t mean…” Bob clearly did; Rickey suppressed a shudder. “I thought the AI was programmed to prevent that kind of thing.”

“It is, but they…learned.” The builder’s eyes got even darker, the worry in them deepening. “I’d seen the possibility this could happen over a year ago, when they started wanting to pay Spud back for his pranks. This shooter, all that he’s done…he taught them to want revenge. I might be able to fix that, but only if we can avoid as much violence in front of them as possible when we get to this guy. They need to take their cue from us, so the cue we give them has to be that we don’t punish people who make us scared or angry by hurting them.”

Rickey looked doubtful. “I don’t know if we can do that, Bob. That ball’s kind of in the shooter’s court, you know.”

“I know.” Bob abruptly turned away, back toward the door. “I’m going to go have a talk with the machines. I need to give them…instructions.”

“Okay.” Rickey was already moving in the opposite direction, back to his desk. “I’ll need to have a talk with them too, before we leave.”

“I’ll tell them.” And Bob was gone. The constable started going through his list again, making sure he’d called everyone he was supposed to call, and that he’d marked off the ones who would be out looking as opposed to the ones who would be staying at home. An engine revved outside, and with a grimace he marked off Bob’s name.

He was just about ready to go outside again when John Dixon walked in, already dressed for searching the wilder parts of the island in his jacket and hiking boots. “Mike, what are the machines doing out there?” he wanted to know. “I thought Bob…”

“He insisted on going with us to find Wendy.” Rickey sighed. “I don’t like it, but I understand how he feels. And anyway, I’d rather have him with us and not sneaking off on his own. I gave him my Kevlar vest, and he’s out there talking to the machines …”

“No, he’s not.” Dixon shook his head at the other man’s startled look. “I can’t believe you fell for that, Mike – especially not from Bob. He can’t lie to save his life!”

“He’s not…!” Rickey pushed past him and rushed outside. Two of the machines were still there, but Bob and Scoop were nowhere to be seen. “Oh no…”

“Bob said to tell you he’d call when he got close to where Wendy is, or he’d send Scoop back to find you,” Dizzy piped, rolling up to him. “He said we should wait here until you were ready to go.”

Rickey didn’t respond to her, staring up the short street but not seeing it; his gaze was turned inward, seeing an unusually jittery young builder flexing tense muscles against the restraint of a too-small Kevlar vest in his office and then zipping up his coverall to hide it. His thick winter construction coverall, in April. I need to find Wendy…he’ll shoot at me first…he’ll be expecting us… “Yeah, I fell for it,” he muttered, jaw setting. “Because he didn’t lie. Son of a…”

“Of a what, Constable Rickey?”

Oops. Rickey shook his head. “Of a really stubborn guy,” he told the little cement mixer, and then pushed past Dixon again – the postmaster had followed him out of the building – and stomped back into his office. He still had a search party to finish organizing.

Only now they were looking for two people, not one.

Bob was relieved to have gotten away from the constable without getting caught. He directed Scoop to the one place in the rolling hills outside of town where he knew their cell coverage was spotty – Wendy’s GPS tracking signal had finally come on, but it had been flickering so she and her kidnapper had to be there. He’d forgotten his hard hat, and the feel of the wind blowing through his dark hair added to his feeling of desperation. He had to find Wendy, he could not let anything happen to Wendy. Because if something did happen to Wendy…

Bob put the brakes on that thought each time it came up. Nothing was going to happen to Wendy, nothing. He knew where she was, he was going to get her and bring her home safe and sound.

Scoop was startled when Bob yelled for him to stop, and even more startled when Bob jumped off and got in front of him to keep him from going any farther. His engine growled, front bucket going up and down in agitation. “We need to…”

“You need to go back and get the constable,” Bob told him, buckling on the loaded tool belt that had been in the backhoe’s rear bucket. “I’ll have Wendy by the time you get back with him.”

The growl got a little deeper, the backhoe’s movements more agitated. “He can hurt you!”

“I won’t let him.” Bob put both hands on the upper edge of the front bucket, gripping the steel tightly and locking eyes with the backhoe. “Listen to me, Scoop. I can…I will fix this, but I have to do it by myself. Now do what I told you, go to Constable Rickey so you can show him where I went.”

His voice had taken on a hard, commanding edge, and Scoop’s eyes widened; they widened even more when Bob pushed on his bucket as though shoving him back. “But Bob…!”

Bob took a step back, but didn’t break eye contact with him. “Do what I told you, Scoop. Do it right now!”

The backhoe shifted into reverse, rumbling backward himself a foot or so in shock. Bob had never raised his voice to any of them like that, never. Logic circuits shifted, trying and failing to make sense of it. He retreated another foot, backing down from the unfamiliar look in the familiar brown eyes. “O-okay, Bob, I’m going.” He rocked a little on his wheels. “Be…be careful?”

Bob nodded. “I always am,” he said. “Safety first, Scoop, always.”

Scoop’s bucket bobbed in response…and then he executed a quick three-point turn and rumbled back down the road the way they’d come. He did not see the utter relief that flooded Bob’s face before the builder turned and disappeared into the trees.

Wendy didn’t know whether to be relieved or even more frightened that her captor was so obviously lost. He’d woken up in the middle of the afternoon, tried both cell phones again, and then headed even farther out into the hills; she thought he was trying to make it to the coast, but they’d kept going in circles. Finally, at the point where Wendy had thought she might not be able to take one more step, he’d stopped and shoved her down on the ground to one side of a little hilltop clearing, and he’d been pacing back and forth ever since. Wendy watched him warily, made even more afraid by his increasing agitation even though physically he wasn’t very intimidating. He was very young, probably barely into his twenties, with a runner’s thin build, cropped light brown hair and washed-out gray-blue eyes. At the moment those eyes were turned inward and he wasn’t really watching her, so she started tugging at the duct tape on her wrists again, sure she’d felt it stretch this time. If she could just get it a little looser…at just the wrong moment, though, he turned and saw what she was doing. “Stop pulling on that tape!” he ordered, waving the gun. “You’re going to make me hurt you!”

“That isn’t going to happen.”

Wendy was sure she felt her heart skip a beat. Bob was standing just inside the clearing, looking windblown and grim. The gunman jumped back a step but kept his weapon trained on Wendy. “Look, you…put down your gun!”

“I don’t have a gun. Nobody on the island does, except the constable. And you, of course.” Bob took another step, further into the fading light; evening came on quickly in the hills outside of town. “See? No gun.”

That shook the man, but he recovered quickly. “You have…other things! Drop them, or I’ll…”

“I’ll drop them.” Bob’s tool belt hit the ground; he stepped over it without even looking down, his brown eyes fixed on the blue-gray ones behind the gun. “And you won’t be doing anything else. You’ve done enough.”

The gunman laughed, high and nervous. “I’m getting the hell off this island! And I’m using her,” he gestured at Wendy with the gun, “to do it. No one’s getting anywhere near me as long as I have her, right? Not you, not those small-town cops. You want her alive, you’ll let me go!”

“You forgot the machines,” Bob told him. He moved forward again. “Even if we let you go, the machines wouldn’t. I wouldn’t be able to stop them from coming after you. And your weapon there,” he waved at the gun, which immediately switched its aim from Wendy back to himself, “does not impress a two-ton backhoe. You’d never get a second shot.”

A sneer. “Don’t tell me you couldn’t stop them. They’re machines, they’ll do exactly what you tell them.”

Bob’s response was a short, humorless laugh. “You didn’t just see me almost get run down by that backhoe when I told him he couldn’t come with me. I don’t control the machines, all I can do is reason with them …and when they’re upset, reason doesn’t always work. They have minds of their own, and free will, just like anyone else. No one controls the machines.”

Wendy suddenly realized that Bob was putting himself between her and the gun, and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. The black-clad gunman didn’t seem to have noticed that he was being deprived of his first target. “No, it’s not like that…”

“Yes, it is.” Bob, it seemed, was more than ready to argue with him. “Why do you think the government isn’t using machines like the ones we have here in Sunflower Valley? It’s because they know the machines can’t work for them the way they wanted them to.” He actually took a step forward, towards the man. “The government – all the governments, actually – abandoned their AI programs six years ago, and the Sol Foundation picked up where they left off and developed the technology for other uses that it was better suited to. Which is what we have here, in Sunflower Valley.”

The gunman wasn’t ready to let it go. “What you have here could be developed more, exploited for other uses! What right do you have to sit here on your private island with sentient machines that do all your work for you while everyone who doesn’t have the privilege of living here busts their ass getting the job done?” He pointed with the gun, demanding an answer. “Who do you think you are?”

“I think I’m a guy who was able to pass the screening that proved I was able to work with these machines,” Bob told him, ignoring the gun. “I think I’m a guy who busts my ass every day, seven days a week, because I’m the only contractor in the Valley. And I know I’m a guy who doesn’t think a ten-year-old should be ‘exploited’ for anything – which is exactly what whoever hired you plans to do.”

“And you aren’t exploiting them?!” The man’s voice cracked. “You use the machines to work for you!”

“I don’t ‘use’ the machines for anything – they work with me!” Bob yelled back, his hold on his temper slipping. “I’m like their foster parent, I am responsible for them. And you come sneaking onto our island with your gun and your misinformed ideas about the Project, and you taught my machines to hate someone – you! You taught them to want revenge, to want to hurt someone – you!” Another step forward, putting him just inches in front of the gun barrel; Wendy’s heart was in her throat. Bob’s voice dropped to a growl. “You snuck in here, frightened them, frightened everyone in town, and you threatened Wendy…if Scoop wasn’t out here somewhere you’d better believe I’d be showing you exactly how I feel about that instead of just telling you about it.” His hands were clenched into fists; he deliberately uncurled them. “But if I attack you, I’d be teaching a ten-year-old that it’s okay to hurt someone because you’re mad at them…and I am not going to do that.”

Silence. Wendy held her breath. Then after a moment the gunman said, in a completely different tone of voice, “Why do you keep comparing that backhoe to a ten-year-old?”

“His name is Scoop.” Bob’s voice cracked like a whip. “He’s an individual, not an object. And the AI matrices level off developmentally at a point equivalent to the emotional capacity of a ten-year-old human child. Scoop has reached that point already; he can still learn things, but he won’t be ‘maturing’ any further.” He was staring the man right in the eye, challenging. “Do you get it now? Do you understand now?”

By the silence that followed, Wendy would say that he did. Or if nothing else, the gunman understood that this mild-mannered, unarmed builder he was facing who wasn’t supposed to have given him any trouble…this man wasn’t afraid of him, or of his gun. That gun was already starting to lower, pointing more at the ground than at the builder, when Constable Rickey’s voice boomed out from the other side of the clearing. “He gets it,” the constable said, his voice underscored by the harsh metal click of the only authorized gun on the island being cocked. “Drop your weapon!”

There was the briefest moment of hesitation…and the gun dropped from the gunman’s grasp, tumbling over on the grass for John Dixon to pick up. Wendy buried her face in her hands. It was over. She didn’t look up when strong, familiar hands ever-so gently pulled hers down, knowledgeable fingers probing the layered tape before severing it and then painstakingly peeling it away from her skin. Wendy kept her eyes closed, even when those same hands pushed the loose hair back away from her face and a callused thumb wiped away one tear she wasn’t able to hold back; she knew if she looked at him, one would become a flood she wouldn’t be able to stop.

As though reading her mind, Bob pulled her close, hiding her face against his chest. “It’s okay, Wendy,” he said. “You can let go now, it’s okay.”

And suddenly she knew it was, so she did. The arms around her were like an impenetrable wall, holding back anything that might intrude, and within their safe shelter she cried out all the fear she’d been holding back. It took a while, and when the flood of tears finally stopped she felt almost too empty and shaky to move. Bob didn’t ask her to, he just held her. Which, Wendy decided, was what she’d needed most of all.

But once she’d started to feel better, that was when Wendy noticed something odd about Bob, about the way he felt against her. His embrace was strong but not soft like she would have expected, instead in spots it was strong and…she opened her eyes and tried to pull back out of his arms. “You’re…”

Bob didn’t loosen his hold. “You didn’t think I’d come out here without some kind of protection, did you?” he murmured, his warm breath stirring her hair. “I borrowed a bulletproof vest from Mike. Safety first, right?”

Wendy pushed at him again, although not as determinedly. “But what if he’d tried to shoot you in the head again?”

His hold on her became almost crushing, and she felt a shudder ripple up the entire length of his spine. “I couldn’t think about that,” Bob whispered. “Because that would have meant he was going to kill you.”

She shuddered in response, feeling the tears threaten again. “I…I was trying not to think about that too.” Wendy sniffed the tears back and pushed again until she was able to look up at him. “We kept going around in circles, and then he…he got lost. He just kept getting more and more upset…and then he saw me pulling on the tape…and…and…and then you…”

Bob pulled her back into his arms and held on. “It’s okay, Wendy. It’s okay.”

“It’s not!” She hit his chest with a balled up fist but didn’t look up at him again. “You got between me and the gun!”

“That was the idea,” he told her, and she felt him chuckle when she hit him again. “You’re going to hurt your hand if you keep that up.”

“Don’t laugh.” She swiped at another rush of hot tears impatiently, feeling the sticky residue of the tape on her hand. “You…what you did…it was idiotic and stupid!”

“You’re not the only one who thinks so,” Bob said, and Wendy realized he had lifted his head and wasn’t talking directly to her any more. “Right, Mike?”

“You’d better believe it.” Wendy jumped, violently, at the new voice. Constable Rickey dropped to a squat so she didn’t have to look up at him, but he didn’t try to get any closer. “Wendy, I know this is the $10,000 dumb question…but are you okay?”

“He didn’t hurt me,” she said, trying to look like she was handling the situation and knowing from the tightening of Bob’s arms and the look on Rickey’s face that she wasn’t succeeding. She swiped at her eyes once more. “It was just…he scared me, that was all.”

“I’d say that was enough,” was Rickey’s reply. “We should get down off this hill before the machines decide to come up after us. Think you can make it down to the road, kid?”

Wendy scowled at him. “I just said he didn’t hurt me,” she snapped…and then immediately covered her mouth with her hand and shrank back against Bob. “Oh, Constable Rickey, I’m…”

“No apologies necessary,” the older man said kindly. There was a wealth of sympathy in his light blue eyes as he stood up. “Come on. Todd’s waiting with the machines – and he’s got his truck. He’ll give you a ride back to town.”

Bob got to his feet, pulling Wendy up with him. “We’re coming,” he said. “Mike, you guys should probably follow us down, instead of the other way around. It might be…safer.”

“Yeah, you might be right.” Wendy didn’t understand the look that passed between the two men. “In that case, then, we’re waiting on you.”

“Good – stay back.” Bob slid his arm around Wendy’s waist and they started down out of the hills, with the other men and their prisoner bringing up the rear by several yards. No one said anything, and in the lengthening shadows crickets and night bugs started to sing their songs to the rising moon. It all seemed so unreal…

Caught up in that feeling, Wendy stumbled, and suddenly she wasn’t walking any more; two strong arms had scooped her up off her feet and were carrying her along. Wendy started to protest that she’d only briefly lost her balance on the uneven ground in the dark…but the complaint died in her mouth before ever reaching her lips when she felt the near-continuous shiver going through the arms that held her. She let Bob carry her down to the road, past three alarmed machines to Dr. Johnson’s truck, and had trouble letting go when he tried to put her down. “I know,” he said, just loud enough for her to hear. “But Todd is going to take you home, and I have to get the machines home and get them settled. And then I have to go over to the jail with Mike and John. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

Wendy sniffed and nodded against his neck. “No,” she told him. “It’s not okay.” She pulled back to look him in the eye. “But that’s how it has to be, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, it does. I’m sorry.” He kissed her forehead, stroked her hair one last time…and then let go and stepped back, looking as unhappy as Wendy felt. “Todd, please take Wendy home for me.”

Dr. Johnson, to Wendy’s surprise, did not seem happy about that, but he still nodded. “Will do, Bob,” he said, and then added, “I’ll be by the jail later.”

“Then I guess I’ll be seeing you there.” Bob didn’t seem happy either, and the look he was giving his friend had a flare of warning in it. “Or I’ll see you tomorrow, whichever.”

The doctor’s jaw set, but he nodded again. “Whichever,” he agreed, not sounding like he meant it. He forced on a smile, putting his truck in gear. “Come on, Wendy, I bet you’re more than ready to get home.”

Wendy didn’t answer him. She was looking back out the window, watching Bob walk away toward the machines.

Bob thought turning his back on Wendy and walking away might have been the hardest thing he’d ever had to do – almost as hard as leaving his parents five years ago had been. But he’d heard the exclamations of alarm coming from the machines when he’d walked past them carrying Wendy, and he knew he had to deal with the problem the past two days had created before it spawned a bigger one.

Scoop’s engine rumbled when he approached, and Bob stopped in his tracks. “Guys,” he said, seeing Constable Rickey and John Dixon hanging back in the trees with their prisoner. “Is everyone ready to get back to the yard?”

Another rumble instead of an answer – this time from both Scoop and Muck. Dizzy was spinning her bucket fretfully and rolling back and forth in little jerks. “Did you…did you catch the bad man, Bob?”

Bob smiled at her. “Yeah, we caught him,” he told her, careful to make eye contact. “And he didn’t hurt Wendy, or anyone else. Everything is okay.”

Muck’s engine ratcheted down into a lower gear. “But you were carrying Wendy…”

“Because she was tired, and she tripped while we were walking down the hill,” Bob said. “She’s fine. Dr. Johnson is taking her home, and you’ll get to see her tomorrow.”

The dumptruck wasn’t quite satisfied with that. “Had she been crying?”

Bob sighed. “Yes, she had. She was scared, Muck, and then she was really, really glad to see me. But I wouldn’t lie to you, she really is okay. She just needed to go home and get some sleep.”

Dizzy looked unsure. “But won’t she still be scared, like she was yesterday? Shouldn’t you stay with her so she won’t be scared, Bob?”

“I can’t, Dizzy.” Bob didn’t quite flinch. “I need to take all of you back to the yard, and then I need to go with Constable Rickey for a while.” He glanced back at the trees, where the constable was slowly moving out into the road with his prisoner. “We have…things to take care of.”

Bob wasn’t the only one who had seen the three men leaving the foot of the hill, though. Scoop’s engine made a sound that made everyone jump, and his bucket went all the way up. “That’s HIM, the man who took Wendy and tried to hurt Bob!”

“The bad man, the bad man!” Dizzy shrieked. “It’s him, it’s him!”

Bob correctly guessed the backhoe’s intention when he heard its engine rev, and he jumped in front of it with his hands held high. “No, Scoop! Stop that, right now!”

“But Bob…!” The steel bucket was trembling with agitation. “He tried to hurt…”

“We don’t hurt people who try to hurt us!” Bob insisted over the noise; Muck had added her own growl to Scoop’s. “That isn’t right, Scoop!”

Scoop looked confused. “But he…”

“I know what he did.” Bob didn’t back down. “But that doesn’t mean that we should hurt him – because if we do that, then we’re the kind of people who hurt other people too, right?”

Three sets of eyes widened, and Bob could almost hear the logic circuits click as the machines integrated that into their thought matrices. It was all he could do not to cheer when Scoop slowly lowered his bucket toward the ground. “I would…feel bad if I hurt someone,” the backhoe said slowly. “But I’m still mad at him, Bob.”

“We’re all mad at him,” Constable Rickey broke in. Taking a chance, he pulled his prisoner forward – although not too close, just in case. “He did some very bad things, and he’ll be punished for what he did. But Bob is right, we don’t punish people by hurting them.”

“Then how do we punish them?” Dizzy wanted to know. She scowled at the startled kidnapper. “He needs to be punished. He’s bad.”

“No, he did something bad,” Bob corrected. “Just because you do something wrong doesn’t make you a bad person.” He turned to the prisoner, whose eyes were as round as saucers. “What’s your name?”

The young man blinked at him. “Um…Matt.”

Bob turned back to the machines. “This is Matt,” he introduced. “He’s a person with thoughts and feelings, just like all of us. Doing something bad doesn’t change that. Being punished doesn’t either. People aren’t all bad just because they do bad things.”

Dizzy dared to roll a little closer, although she kept Bob between herself and Matt. She cocked her head, looking at him, then stood up on her back wheels to see better; startled, the gunman jerked back a step, and an equally startled Dizzy dropped back to all fours with a surprised exclamation. “I didn’t mean to frighten you, Matt. I just wanted to see.”

“Uh, that’s okay.” Matt recovered himself quickly. “I just didn’t…I didn’t know you could stand up like that.”

“You didn’t know a lot of things – not like that’s an excuse,” Constable Rickey told him. “Are we all about ready to head back to town now?”

“I think so.” Bob sounded certain enough about it to reassure the other two residents of the valley. “I’ll meet you at the jail after I get everyone settled for the night.”

Muck rumbled a little. “What are you going to do with Matt, Constable Rickey?”

“I’m going to lock him up in jail,” the constable told her. “And he has to wear these,” he gave his prisoner’s arm a yank, so that the handcuffs around his wrists were visible to all three machines, “until we get there.”

Muck cocked a puzzled eye at him. “His punishment is having to wear shiny jewelry?”

Rickey wasn’t quite able to choke out an answer to that, trying to stifle the laugh that wanted to break out from behind his hastily raised hand, so John Dixon answered the dumptruck’s question for him. “Those aren’t jewelry, they’re handcuffs,” the postmaster explained, containing his own amusement with some difficulty. “They may look pretty and silvery, but they’re made out of steel. Policemen use them to keep someone from doing anything else that’s bad after they’ve been caught and before they go to jail.”

Dizzy rolled closer again. “Do they hurt?”

“No.” Matt answered that one himself, after a hard nudge from Rickey. “No, they don’t hurt. They’re not tight, see?” He held his wrists up and shook them, and the cuffs jangled. “They’re just too small to get my hands through.”

The two larger machines rolled closer to get a look, and this time the constable didn’t let his prisoner step back. He wanted to, though; he wanted to grab the man and sprint for his truck instead of facing down a two-ton backhoe that was still rumbling a faint growl from somewhere in its engine casing. And the only reason he wasn’t doing that was standing between them and said backhoe with one hand resting reassuringly on its yellow frame.

Scoop looked intently at the handcuffs, then even more intently at the man wearing them. He shook his bucket from side to side, and the growl rose in pitch. “I don’t like you. You tried to hurt Bob, you took Wendy, and you scared everyone. Why did you do those things? We hadn’t done anything to you!”

Matt wasn’t the only one who jumped when the backhoe’s voice rose, and Bob immediately stepped in. “No, Scoop. Matt here did what he did…because he was confused. He thought we were hurting all of you and maybe some other people too, he didn’t understand. Now he does, and he’s sorry for making such a big mistake.”

Scoop looked suspicious. “Is he really sorry, or is he like Spud?”

“He’s really sorry, and he won’t do it again,” Bob reassured him. “Matt can learn from his mistakes, just like you or I could.”

Scoop hesitated…and then the yellow bucket bobbed a nod. “Spud can’t do that.”

“No, Spud can’t do that.” Bob locked eyes with him. “I’m sorry I scared you earlier, Scoop, when I yelled at you. I hope you can forgive me for frightening you that way.”

“You were worried about Wendy, and you didn’t have time for me to argue with you.” Scoop’s bucket bobbed again. “Constable Rickey and Mr. Dixon explained it to me. They said if I hadn’t left when you told me to, we might not have gotten here in time to help.”

Bob smiled, stroking the backhoe’s frame. “They were right. But I’m still sorry I yelled at you.”

Scoop smiled back at him. “I accept your apology, Bob.” A question came into his eyes. “You were scary.”

“I was scared,” Bob corrected. “Sometimes people act mad when what they really are is afraid. I was afraid you weren’t going to listen to me, and I was afraid that if I didn’t get to Wendy, Matt might make a mistake we wouldn’t be able to fix. But neither of those things happened.”

“No, they didn’t. So everything is all right now, right Bob?”

“It’s getting there, Scoop.” Bob turned his attention to Rickey. “Constable Rickey, I’m going to take the machines home and get someone to stay with them, and then I’ll come to the jail, all right?”

Rickey nodded, although he didn’t look happy about it. “We’ll see you there.”

“I’ll be there.”

The intensity behind the words widened John Dixon’s eyes, but before he could say anything Bob had jumped onto Scoop’s riding platform and called the machines to follow him. So he said it to Rickey instead. “What was that about, Mike?”

The constable looked at him, then shook his head and pulled his prisoner over to the waiting truck. “You’ll find out soon enough,” he said. “Come on, let’s get back to town.”

Bob made a phone call as soon as he and the machines were out of the hills, and when they arrived at the yard Lucas Lewis was there waiting for them. “Hi Mr. Luigi!” Dizzy called out when she saw him. “Did Bob order pizza?”

The owner of Luigi’s Cafe laughed. “No, Dizzy – but I probably should have brought one anyway; from what I hear Bob probably hasn’t had time to eat today.”

“I’ve had time,” Bob replied, but he didn’t quite meet the other man’s eyes when he said it. And then the other machines were clustering around, all wanting to know what had happened, and he started shooing them back to their shed. “I’ll answer all your questions as soon as you’re all ready for bed,” he told them, raising his voice to be heard over the clamor. “And then Mr. Luigi is going to be staying here with you while I go over to the jail.”

The machines dutifully took their places in the open shed, and five sets of expectant eyes pinned themselves to the builder where he stood waiting for them to settle in. “Wendy stopped to tell us she was all right,” Lofty told him. “I was s-scared.”

“Wendy said you caught the bad man, Bob,” Roley added. “Where is he?”

“He’s with Constable Rickey,” Scoop told the other two machines. “His name is Matt. And he’s not a bad man, he just made a mistake and did some bad things.”

“That’s right, Scoop,” Bob said approvingly. “Matt is at the jail,” he told Roley and Lofty. “That’s one way we punish people for doing a bad thing, we lock them inside the jail for a while.” He took a deep breath. “Guys, there’s something I need to explain to you about that.”

“About the jail?” Muck wanted to know. “Does more punishment happen once you’re inside it?”

“No, just being inside it is the punishment,” Bob confirmed. “And depending on how bad whatever you did was, that’s how they decide how long you have to stay.” Another deep breath. “For example, I’ll probably have to stay there until sometime tomorrow because of what I did.”

The five machines froze, and Lucas was hard pressed not to let his jaw hit the ground. Lofty was the one who broke the silence. “Bob, I…I don’t understand. You did something bad?”

“Yes, I did,” was Bob’s answer. He sighed, running a hand through his hair. “You see, when someone like Constable Rickey tells you to do something, what he says is the law. So if you don’t do what he says, you’re breaking the law and you’ll have to be punished. He told me not to go looking for Wendy by myself – as a matter of fact, he told me to not even leave the yard. I disobeyed him. And now I have to go take my punishment for doing that. Do you all understand?”

It was obvious even to Lucas that they did, and even more obvious that they didn’t like it. “But Bob!” came from Scoop. “You had to find Wendy!”

“Yes, I did,” Bob’s voice was level and calm. “But I broke the law to do it, and now I have to accept the consequences. I’ll be back s