Bandits, Dirt Bikes & Trash


 
 
 
 Contents
 The Story So Far . . .
 1. Zander the Zit
 2. The Return of Alan Adale
 3. Calculated Risk
 4. Caddy Shack
 5. Chocolate Cream
 6. Sweet Little Lies
 7. Environmental Excellence
 8. Heirani Stone
 9. That Awkward Age
 10. Passing Gas
 11. The Homework Factory
 12. Sausage Dog Limbo
 13. Orange Overalls
 14. Employee of the Month
 15. Monday Morning Blues
 16. School Zone
 17. Flying Gnome
 18. Charging Point
 19. I Hope You’re Proud of Yourself
 20. A Million Things at Once
 21. It’s a Trap
 22. Hanging Basket Cases
 23. Worlds Collide
 24. It Was Mud, Dammit
 25. Sign Here
 26. Brain Ache
 27. Thunderbird Chicken
 Four Weeks Later
 28. Chicken Time
 29. Celebrity Mash-Up
 30. Turn Me Upside Down
 31. Exceptional Circumstances
 32. Olympic Style
 33. It’s All Fake on TV
 34. A Minor Glitch
 35. The View from Above
 36. A Robin Hood Production
 37. Open Sesame
 38. Chocolate Digestive Kind of Guy
 39. Black Bess II
 40. Darrell the Magnificent
 41. The New Presenter
 42. Back in Fashion
 43. Vile Little Hooligan
 44. The Candidate
 
 Extract from Parties, Prisons & Powerboats
 Robert Muchamore’s Robin Hood series
 Copyright
 
 THE STORY SO FAR . . .
 Once upon a time, Robin Hood lived with his dad, Ardagh, and half-brother, Little John. He was a regular kid, spending his days battling boredom in school and his free time practising archery or hanging with his bestie, Alan Adale.
 
 Everything changed when Robin’s dad got sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
 
 Robin’s half-brother discovered that his mum was the super wealthy Marjorie, Sheriff of Nottingham, and went to live with her, while Robin shot local gangster Guy Gisborne in the nuts, forcing Robin to hide out in Sherwood Forest and join a gang of righteous rebels led by Emma and Will Scarlock.
 
 With his new rebel pals, Robin blew up cash machines, hacked computers, caused a massive flood, flipped a police car, rescued an old lady from a fire, crashed several motorbikes and became a social media sensation, with footage of his daring robberies getting millions of views.
 
 1. ZANDER THE ZIT
 Josie Longshanks and Robin Hood stood just inside the chunky wire fence that separated Sherwood Castle from its disused hunting grounds. Thunder drummed to the south and it was cold enough to see the two thirteen-year-olds’ curling breath as they hacked at grass and weeds with machetes, then dumped the cuttings in a wheelie bin.
 ‘How much more?’ Josie asked, eyeing ominous clouds as she scooped up an armful of fresh-cut grass.
 ‘Until the bin is full,’ Robin said. ‘You’d be amazed how much Sheila’s chickens eat.’
 ‘Those birds get treated better than us,’ Josie complained.
 ‘Until we marinade them in peri-peri sauce and eat them . . .’ Robin pointed out.
 Josie laughed. ‘True, dat.’
 Her expression changed to shock as her boot caught a hole hidden by the long grass. Her jeans and the back of her heavy coat got soaked as her bum hit the damp ground.
 Josie peeled wet denim away from her skin as Robin gave her a hand up. ‘And now my arse is freezing!’
 Josie and Robin wound up staring at each other, their noses only centimetres apart. Their plumes of breath merged as Robin admired Josie’s dark eyes and the tiny, near-translucent hairs on her cheeks.
 They’d been together for a couple of months. It wasn’t super serious, but Robin still found having a girlfriend weird. It felt like he was wobbling along the tightrope to adulthood, half excited and half wanting to go back to being a kid.
 Robin thought he might get a thanks for helping me up kiss, but Josie took him by surprise, whipping her hand up and trying to squish the zit on his chin.
 ‘Bog off!’ Robin yelped as he stumbled back, almost catching the hole that had taken Josie down.
 ‘You’ve got the biggest zit I’ve ever seen,’ Josie teased, playfully grabbing the hood of Robin’s winter coat to stop his escape. ‘As your girlfriend, I have the right to explode it.’
 ‘Weirdo!’ Robin said, as he wriggled free and bounced against the wire fence. ‘Why would you want to burst someone else’s zit?’
 ‘You’re practically growing a second head,’ Josie said, then hooked her foot around Robin’s ankle, trying to trip him. ‘Since you won’t let me pop it, I’m going to name it Zander.’
 ‘Zander the Zit,’ Robin said, staggering away, smirking and remembering that his favourite thing about Josie was that she was unpredictable and always made him laugh.
 As their laughter died off, they heard more thunder and a growing buzz from a quad bike approaching the castle on a track that ran parallel with the opposite side of the fence.
 The main road through the forest between Route 24 and the rebels’ Sherwood Castle stronghold was barricaded and heavily patrolled by police and Forest Rangers. This meant a safe journey to the castle from the nearby town of Locksley involved a lengthy detour on narrow forest tracks before entering castle grounds from the rear and crossing an abandoned hunting zone.
 ‘That’s Marion’s Aunt Lucy,’ Robin said, as a quad with a huge pink box on the back skimmed by beyond the fence. ‘She’s made the cake for the naming ceremony.’
 Robin liked Lucy, and considered jogging to the gate a few hundred metres away to say hi, but the storm was closing in and Sheila would moan if they didn’t return to the chicken sheds with plenty of green stuff.
 ‘I think naming ceremonies are—’ Josie began, as Robin resumed slashing at long grass.
 Her opinion went unaired as a massive crash sounded nearby. Metal tore, branches cracked, then there were shouts. Three or four voices.
 ‘That’s not good,’ Robin blurted, dropping his machete and turning to look through the fence.
 The trees in the hunting grounds were too dense to see