It was starting to rain when the purple sedan pulled up in front of the Shady Oaks Elementary School. At first, Maria Lopez didn't look up. Instead she continued running her fingers over the beads of the rosary her mother had given her. Every bead was made with olive wood, and there was a cross at the very end. Every night before her mother went to work her second job and before Maria herself went to sleep, they would pray on it. But now Maria was holding it as some sort of talisman, hoping to summon her mother there by sheer willpower.
Instead she got the man with a purple tie. He smiled - a big, white, toothy smile - at her. "You must be Maria!"
Maria didn't say anything. She just looked up at him.
He continued smiling even as he crouched down to get on her level. "Don't worry, I'm not a stranger. Your momma sent me over here to pick you up. You can trust me. See? I've got a badge and everything." He pulled at his shirt where the security guard badge gleamed.
Still, Maria was quiet. His badge was very shiny, and her mother was late. But this wasn't her mother. And that made her nervous.
"My name's Wayne Laroche," he said cheerfully. "I work with your momma. She makes the best pizza in the entire world for Freddy Fazbear's, and since she's late, she wanted me to come pick you up. She's gonna make you your favourite kind of pizza and you can come have a party with Freddy. Ain't that great?"
Maria thought hard for a long second. On one hand, a strange man. On the other… well, she did know that one of the places her mother worked was Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. But that was a place for rich kids. That was a place for kids who had both mommies and daddies, and whose mommies didn't have to work three jobs just to feed her peanut butter sandwiches for dinner and nothing for mommy. And she was hungry. Pizza sounded good. All of it sounded good.
So Maria put the wooden rosary in her bag and stood up. "Okay, Mr. Laroche."
He laughed a great big booming laugh. "Wayne, please! You don't have to call me Mister anything. Here, I'll let you sit up front. You can probably guess, Maria, that my favourite color's purple. What's your favourite color, Maria…?"
Twenty-four hours later, Maria Lopez sighed out her last rattling breath.
"Maria?" Lauren Hunter warbled out, her voice muffled from the Bonnie suit. "Oh God, oh my God, I think she's dead. She's dead and I can't - I can't feel my legs, I can't…"
The Foxy suit, with Isaac Hunter inside it, shook. And shook. And then something sprung out, and there was an awful wet, slick gurgle, and a new bloodstain blooming around the middle.
"You need to get out," Isaac rasped. Blood ended up on Foxy's back teeth as he spoke to the Golden Freddy suit. "You need to get out, and get help, all right?"
The small boy in the Golden Freddy suit gave a pathetic whine. "But… but if I move, things are gonna spring into place, and…"
"And you'll die. So what? We're already dead."
"Oh God, Isaac, oh my God, don't say that, don't…"
"We're dying. I'm dying. You can get out," he rasped. "You can get out if you're careful." Another awful cough. Then another something ratcheted into place, this time in the head; Foxy's leg gave an awful twitch, and then Isaac was silent and still.
Lauren sobbed weakly against Bonnie's fur, but the boy in the Golden Freddy suit said nothing. Instead he wiggled around to knock the top off of the suit, and Freddy's head rolled along the floor. A few minutes later the boy was halfway out of the suit, and then all of it.
"Go," Lauren sobbed. "Go! Run before he gets back."
And so the boy ran. Out of the back rooms, into the bright light of the main building full of party-goers, each of them stuffing their faces with cheap pizza around plastic masks. Bloodstrained, bruised and scraped, but nothing worse, he did the only thing he could think to do.
Little Mike Schmidt opened his mouth and screamed, and screamed, and screamed.