By the time that Epson Moore and Bae had achieved escape velocity from the campus, the high street had unaccountably filled with bystanders. Certainly the high street all the way up to the Hexagon Centre was usually busy on a week day, but that was with shoppers, moving pedestrians. This afternoon, the crowd had lost almost all of their momentum, forming clumps and eddies.
The densest point was in a circle around their goal: WHSmiths. Something had happened to the upper floor and a cordon had been thrown up around the immediate surrounding area. Jinge and Sparrar gestured as they approached.
“You missed all the excitement!” said Jinge.
“Fucking blinding!” said Sparrar. An aromatic zone of bong hits emanated from the two of them for several metres in every direction.
“What’s happened to Smiths?” Moore enquired.
“Reasonable question,” said Jinge. “This fucking ginormous robot landed on top of the building.”
“It was fucking ginormous,” added Sparrar.
“Like a fucking…” Jinge waved his arms around in search of the bot mot, “Sherman tank, but with fucking legs.”
“Then the filth turned up!” said Sparrar.
“Fucking loads of them,” said Jinge, “but not like normal fuzz. They all had these fucking semiautomatic machine guns. Heavy squad.”
“Fucking automatic assault submachine fucking rifles,” Sparrar added usefully, before the two of them mimed large weapons and started to make noises like “BOOSH BOOSH BOOSH!” and “AKAKAKAKAKAKAKADOOOF!”
“They were shooting at the robot?” said Bae.
“Yeah well no,” said Jinge, “but they were all proper tooled up.”
“So where is the robot now?” said Bae.
“Flew away!” Sparrar dramatically looked around in the air, as if searching for any sign of the intruder.
“Flew off, mate,” said Jinge, “but it kinda turned as it did so, and those big robot boots, with a kinda axial skew, tore off most of the roof of the fucking joint.” He indicated the damage to the roof as evidence.
“But all of the fax ribbon is upstairs!” Moore observed, although the immediate consequence of his observation wasn’t necessarily apparent to either Jinge or Sparrar.
“No-one was hurt,” said Jinge, before had added in a moment of uncharacteristic lucidity, “there’s a Smiths at the station though. That should be open.”
“And there’s a machine outside it that sells the cheapest Diet Coke in town,” Sparrar advised in a sudden light of revelation.
“Thanks,” said Bae.
“D’you want to meet up for a drink later?” said Jinge. “Like if you’re not too…”
“In a bit of a rush right now,” said Bae, “and washing my hair after that, and then I gotta revise, because it’s never too late to…”
“‘Maybe later’ would have been enough,” said Jinge.