Bad Habits
The call came at midnight, waking Len Woods from a sound sleep. Moaning, he plucked the heavy phone off its receiver. "Yeah?"
"Mister Woods?" That voice belonged, he knew even in his confused state, to the night watchman, Dennis Hartford. The nineteen-year-old high school graduate called almost every other night to ask for advice. He was a decent employee, though everyone among the Fazbear Entertainment higher-ups knew the night watchman was just a honeypot anyway. They went through between four and eleven in a month, and the survival rate had actually risen to an admirable sixty percent. The only one to survive an entire month and leave with her life had been the Snipes girl. Len, who had picked up a rather gruesome talent of choosing night watchmen, was deeply ambivalent about the boy. He had good reflexes and pattern recognition, but the constant calls seemed to speak to a lack of confidence that had not been present during his interview. Tonight, his typical nervousness had escalated—his trembling voice sounded mere inches from tears.
"Dennis?" Len sat up in bed. The heart beating beneath his massive left breast suddenly clenched. Sweat broke out along his forehead and the hollows of his temples. "Dennis, what's up? Did—did one of them get out?"
"No." His voice broke. Len's heart jumped. "It's so much worse." And Dennis Hartford, the pinnacle of nineteen-year-old male humanity, broke down and began to cry.
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In the end it was Len, with his little black book, who had to make all the calls. First to Dominique and Richie, the cleaning staff. He gave them the day off, no big deal, no fucking problem. He had been fine through both of those calls, but after hanging up with an irate but grateful Dominique, a sudden fit of shivering overtook him. He sat on the edge of the bed with the phone in his lap, waiting for his shakes to subside. Oh, this was bad. This was so, so bad. He had told them, each and every one of them, but did any of the employees ever listen?
He called Jack Dixon, the early-morning security guard.
"Yeah?" Jack yawned thickly into the phone. "Who the fuck is this?"
"It's Len Woods."
"What?! It's… 1:02 in the morning, Len!"
"Is it?" He glanced at the sunburst clock on the wall. Had it really only been an hour since the call? "Look, Jack, I need you to come in this morning."
It's Saturday, Len! I—"
"I know what goddamn day it is!" he snapped, silencing all further protests.
There was a pause. "…. How bad is it, Len?" Jack asked him.
His heart jolted again; he grunted, thumping his chest with a clammy, clenched fist. The world swam in front of his vision; the corners of the furniture around the room seemed to be melting into smeary shades of black and gray. His pulse thudded heavily in his temples like the world's biggest bass drum. How bad? How bad? It was a nightmare, a nightmare he could not wake up from, and the sweat pooling around him in his deep bed stung like acid—
"Len? Len!" Jack's voice echoed to him from the end of a long tunnel. "Jesus! How. Bad. Is it?!"
"It's bad." His voice was weak and fainting. He renewed his grip on the phone, so tight his jagged fingernails dug into the sensitive meat of his hand, and the world abruptly snapped back into focus. No time to panic right now until the business had been solved. "It's two, this time."
Another pause, the space of five heavy heartbeats. "Two? How?"
Len closed his eyes. Strange patterns swam behind his eyelids, black on black. "Just get over there at six."
"Will do." He hung up.
Len, knowing that Jack would not sleep again that night and not caring, went to take a pill and find a pack of cigarettes.
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At 6:02 AM, Jack's aged Buick pulled up into the Fazbear Pizzeria parking lot. Besides Len's Corvette, there was only one other car in the lot: a white coupe with a pink crystal hanging from the rearview mirror. The seat covers were pink and monogramed with giant silver C's. Jack glanced at it as he got out. "Whose is that?"
"No idea."" He gritted his teeth. "Let's find the kid." He walked up to the front doors and hauled them open.
A body collapsed into Len's arms. He bellowed with surprise as he lifted the dead weight. The body wore a Freddy Fazbear head and a security badge. Sweat had darkened the back of his blue shirt all the way down to his belt, though frost touched the windows and coated the parking lot. "Dennis!" he roared.
It was then that Len realized the kid was alive, sobbing as he clung to Len's arms. "Oh Jesus Len!" he babbled. His body felt feverishly warm even through Len's jacket. When he tried to find his feet, he only succeeded in slipping on the slick pavement. Twin trails of white steamed from the nose-holes like smoke. Len hauled him up. "Oh Jesus oh God oh—"
He gave the boy a shake. "Take that fucking thing off." Looking at his scared, glistening blue eyes through the eyeholes of the mask made him feel ill.
The boy took off the head and grabbed Len again. His own hair stood up in wild, sweaty blond spikes. "Thank God you're here!" he cried in a shrill voice that echoed through the early-morning stillness of the parking lot.
"Yeah. I'm so fucking excited to be here." He peeled the boy's hands off his arms while Jack watched in bemusement. "Come on, let's go see the damage."
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Dennis was right. It was bad.
There was blood grimed into the carpet, blood splashed on the thin vinyl tablecloths, blood splattered on the wall in wavery fan shapes. Clots of something that looked like oatmeal but wasn't covered the floor. His helpless eye roved over it all. New carpet for sure, again, oh, that would cost a fortune. As for the bodies, well…
He looked at one of the corpses lying on the floor. Oh, fuck. She was gorgeous, or had been. Now her face was a swollen mass of purpling meat covered in drying gore. Her chest was sunken in like a bowl, shattered ribs tearing through the thin fabric of her shirt. Her legs were twisted into inhuman contortions, and shards of bone pierced the skin. Some titanic force had crushed her body and snapped her legs as easily as twigs. Disturbingly, he could still see that they had once been long and shapely. She wore a skirt that cost more than Len cared to imagine. It was hiked up around her thighs in a torrent of pink fabric. One of her heels had fallen off; it lay beside the stage like discarded trash. The toe of the shoe was red with dried blood.
"Jesus," said Jack softly. "It's a slaughterhouse."
Dennis hastily covered his mouth and ran off to the bathroom. Len resisted the urge to join him. He had seen a few bodies here like this, though none this extreme.
"Len."
He looked up. The dayshift guard had arrived—Malkovich, or Berkowitz, or some fucking thing. He stood looking at the wreckage with his hands on his slim hips. "Jesus, what are you doing here?!"
"You asked me to come out, Mister Woods." His features assumed a puzzled expression.
"Did I?" He could not remember doing so. Strange… Malkovich-or-Berkowitz always seemed to be around during disasters. He had his own gruesome talent: knowing when the pizzeria turned into the sight of a massacre.
"You woke me up at two, told me to get my butt down here. This is one heck of a situation, Mister Woods."
"Tell me about it, Manischewitz."
Malkovich-or-Berkowitz blinked. "Manischewitz, sir?"
Len waved a dismissive hand, grunting. This guy gave him the fucking creeps, whatever his fucking name was. He always seemed so… cheerful and innocent. No one should be this chipper at the scene of a double homicide… though he couldn't exactly say it was homicide. Animatronics could not commit murder. His eyes roved to the animatronics onstage. The blood was there, too, along with some blonde hairs and something that might have been a smashed eyeball ground into hamburger meat. Oh, fuck. His stomach lurched.
"Are you all right, Sir?"
"Fine, fine." He could not tear his eyes from the sight of the dead girl's blonde hair and brains clotted and dried onto the hands of one of the animatronics… the chicken, creepy little thing. "Let's go find out what happened."
"Does it really matter, Sir?" Malkovich-or-Berkowitz asked nervously, following in Len's wake. He delicately skirted the corpse dressed in a security guard uniform. The remains of a badge still glinted on his shattered chest. "Poor Kyle."
Len grunted and ducked into the dim security room. It had not been disturbed. Kyle's jacket was not slung over the chair. He had probably not even stepped foot in here… meaning he would be on the security cameras. Len rewound the tape in the VCR, turned on the monitor, and hit the playback button. The screen flickered on. Malkovich-or-Berkowitz leaned close, his eyes intent on the scene that unfolded.