TRIGGER WARNING! This book contains strong adult themes, including adult language, drug and alcohol references, sexual themes, violence, and scenes of child abuse. Future episodes will contain graphic depictions of child abduction, violence towards children and adults, graphic gore violence and explicit sexual content. I am not kidding. This book should probably not be read by anyone.

Five Nights At Freddy's is the creation of Scott Cawthon. The characters of Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, Mangle, Toy Freddy, Toy Bonnie, Toy Chica, Mike Schmidt, Jeremy Fitzgerald, Fredbear, Springtrap, Plushtrap, the Puppet, Balloon Boy, and the Purple Guy, as well as Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria, belong to him. Everything else is a product of my own imagination and no similarity to actual events, locations, or people is intended or should be inferred. Do not reproduce, repost or copy any part of this story without my permission.

I've hopefully fixed the formatting issues that were causing my scene breaks to not show up, so future chapters shouldn't be as confusing when the Point of View seems to suddenly change. As always, a sincere thank you to all those who took the time to rate and review if you liked it (or even if you didn't like it). If you are interested in my non-fanfiction work, feel free to check out my blog (the address keeps disappearing when I type it here. It's rleesmith dot wordpress dot com) or look me up on Amazon.


CHAPTER SEVEN

Ana had always been a heavy sleeper, even when pot wasn't involved, let alone little pink pills. When she closed her eyes on Freddy in the night, she did not open them again until morning, which she knew because she could see. Just enough sunlight found a way through the boarded-up foyer and past the barricade at the cashier's station to show her the entire dining room, all the rot and ruin, everything broken, everything decayed, right up to the three animatronics on stage.

On stage?

Ana pushed herself up on her elbow, garbage bags crinkling beneath her as she shifted, and leaned out from under the table just like that slight change of angle would somehow alter the view. But no, there they were. Bonnie on the left with his cracked, stringless guitar in his hands; Chica on the right, arms up and fingers splayed over empty space where her keyboard ought to be; Freddy in the middle, microphone in hand and raised to his mouth. All three had their eyes closed and their heads tipped forward, as if sleeping on their feet. In the grey, uneven light, with water from the leaking roof dripping down their bodies and dirt showing black in every crease and crack, they looked like they'd been standing there for years.

Had they?

No. The empty stage had been the first thing she'd seen when she broke in. She'd been high, but not that high. They'd been out and about, all three of them, and Bonnie…Bonnie especially.

Had she really kissed him? Probably. Spider and all. She'd been high, but even stone-cold sober as she was this morning, she'd be happy to kiss him again.

But it was eerie, seeing him like this. Motionless. Silent. Like a…well, like an inanimate object.

"Bonnie?" Ana ventured.

No response. Not so much as a twitch.

"Bonnie? My man?"

Nothing.

Ana felt at her pocket and yes, there were a handful of screws. And there, her screwdriver, lying next to her day pack. She had no doubt if she looked in the kitchen, she'd see that big steel spoon on the prep counter where she'd left it after shaping the end of the broken spring she'd used to rig Bonnie's jaw into place.

And yet, there they were. Wind-up toys no one had wound up, not for years. Looking around the dining room, it was hard to believe that, even as high as she'd apparently been, she ever could have thought they'd still be in any kind of working order.

It was too early to think about it. Groaning, Ana dropped back atop her day pack and shut her eyes. Another hour's sleep and she'd try again to sort out last night's events. But for right now, nothing mattered more than—

"Narwhals, narwhals, swimming in the ocean, causing a commotion, cuz they are so awesome!"

Ana pried her eyes open and pinched her brows together. "The fuck?"

But she heard it again, so close it may as well be emanating from her own head: "Narwhals, narwhals, swimming in the ocean, causing a commotion, cuz they are so awesome!"

Not in her head. Under it. From her pack, which she was using as a pillow.

Ana struggled the flaps open and groped inside until her fingers found the familiar shape of her phone. Rider. At some point during her last night in California, she'd changed Rider's ringtone to the narwhal song. Because, she supposed, he was so awesome. And she'd been high.

She accepted the call, put it on speaker so she wouldn't have to find her ear, and let her hand drop with a smack to the wet floor. "Morning," she said.

Rider's voice grated out through the phone into the empty room like the echoing voice of God Himself: "Woman, you better be dying in a motherfucking ditch somewhere, because if you ain't, you will be when I get my fucking hands on you."

On stage, Freddy opened his eyes.

Startled, Ana sat all the way up and as a consequence, whacked her head on the table. By the time she'd scooted out from underneath it and could get another look, the animatronic's eyes were shut again. If they'd ever opened.

"—looked me right in the eye and promised you would call when you got there and what do you do? You think I got a habit of letting my ponies lie to me, is that what you think? You think just because you're in fucking Mormon country, I won't roll out there and find you? There ain't no one nowhere I can't find if I want to and no fucking hole too deep I won't dig it out and put a lying bitch in it!"

"Calm your tits, Rider," Ana said crossly, rolling onto her knees and then to her feet. She picked her way across the floor, squinting up at Freddy's shadowed face, silently daring him to move. He did not. "I told you I'd text or something when I got to the house and the only reason I never did it is because I'm not there yet."

Rider gave that a moment's consideration and said, somewhat coolly but at least leaning towards reason, "Car break down?"

"No, it just took longer than I expected to do the driving. Hell, it took four hours just to get through the pass. It's still winter in the mountains, you know."

"I smell horseshit. What route did you take?"

"I-5 to I-80 and over." Ana reached out and touched Freddy's knee. Whatever brittle plastic fuzz they'd used to put fur on him came off on her finger in a gritty brown-black sludge and left a denuded stripe on his casing, but he did nothing.

"I-80? Woman, I'm looking at Mammon right this instant and 80 don't go anywhere near it."

"I didn't go to Mammon."

"You said the house—"

"The house is in Mammon," she said. "The debt collecting assholes were in Salt Lake City. I told you this."

"Salt Lake…?" A pause, during which Rider presumably adjusted his map. "You had to go all the fucking way up there just to—"

"Just to come all the way back down. Yeah. Anyway, I didn't even talk to the guy until yesterday morning and dealing with him took all day, plus the drive down, and then talking to the people down here, and then it rained like a mad bastard and flooded out the road."

"There you go again, lying to me. You get a lot of flash floods in fucking Utah?"

"More than you'd think." Ana turned her back on Freddy and went to the door that opened on the windowed West Hall, trying to see something of the outside world through the dirty glass and broken boards. "The ground out here is all hardpan. It rains and the water can't soak in, so it washes out in sheets toward the lowest point, which just happens to be an old quarry, presently hundreds of feet deep in toxic sludge. I was literally five minutes away from the house and couldn't get home. I mean, maybe I could have, but it was definitely one of those 'On the one hand, I'm pretty sure I can make it, but on the other hand, if I'm wrong, I'm going to die horribly' situations."

"I'm talking to you, so I assume you finally unlocked your common sense achievement and found a hotel."

"Couldn't get to the hotel either." Ana went into the gift shop next and leaned out through the broken window. The foyer floor was covered with a fresh layer of that greyish-red mud unique to Mammon's mountains. It was still dark toward the barricade, where it was deepest, but had dried and cracked at the edges. A promising omen of what awaited her on the road. "Fortunately, I met up with some old friends for the first time and they let me crash at their place."

"Jesus tap-dancing Christ, girl. You don't see someone for twenty years and you just follow her the fuck home?"

"Them," said Ana, prying a loose chunk of glass out of the window and tossing it onto the mud in the foyer. It bounced on the dry end and got mired in the wet. She turned away and went back into the dining room, heading first for her day pack under the table, but drawn instead back to the stage. She stopped in front of Bonnie, staring up into his faceless face, and said, "I followed them home. Although, strictly speaking, I didn't do that either. I broke into their house."

"Say that again? I couldn't hear you over the sound of the stupid."

"They were cool about it."

"You keep saying that word. They. How many we talking about?"

"Three. Wait, four," she amended, curling her lip at the thought of Foxy, but more from embarrassment than anything. "But he stayed in his room the whole night, so it's fine."

"He? You crashed with a bunch of guys you ain't seen for twenty years?"

"One of them's a girl."

"One of them." The phone brought her the meaty smacking sound of Rider clapping a hand to his shaved head. "You stayed straight at least, right?"

Ana laughed.

"Can you name one thing you could have done to make that situation worse? I mean, can you even?"

"I hooked up with one of them."

"You what? What the fuck is wrong with you?"

"You don't want to ask me that unless you're ready for me to point out how many of the items on that list are your fault."

Although plainly still annoyed, Rider huffed out a laugh. "Fair point. You didn't really, though. Hook up with the guy whose house you broke into?"

"I totally did."

"Girl, I'm feeling like I don't even know you."

"Yeah, yeah, save your lecture, 'cause I'm not sorry. I couldn't help it. He was the perfect guy. Tall. Strong. Great sense of humor. Plays guitar in a band." She reached out, just able to brush her fingertips along the cracked casing of his leg, the one that dragged when he walked. If he walked. "A little damaged, but handsome as hell. Just a sexy beast. I couldn't resist."

Bonnie did not move. None of them did.

"Yeah? And how'd that work out for you?"

"Woke up alone on a dirty floor in a cold puddle on a bed made of garbage bags."

"Ouch." A pause. "You okay?"

"Yeah, sure. I'm fine." Ana leaned in, searching the dark cameras of Bonnie's 'eyes' and finding nothing, not even her own reflection. With a sigh, she dropped her arm and turned away. "Look, my battery is on its last gasp, so consider this your I'm-alive phone call."

"And when am I gonna hear from you again?"

"Fifth of Never, mid-afternoon," Ana replied, wandering over to the door to the West Hall again. "Where the hell is this attitude coming from? I must have left you a hundred times. Since when do I need constant checking up on?"

"I just thought it might be nice to know when or if I'm ever going to see you again."

"I can't even begin to answer that until I've seen the house." With a last glance toward the stage and the three animatronics still frozen in their places and waiting to perform, Ana pulled the groaning door as far open as it would go and squeezed through into the hall. "So far, all I've seen are a few photos, and I have to tell you, from what I've seen in those, I'm going to need every minute of the ninety days I've been given to pass an inspection before the city has the place condemned."

"No shit. They tell you that before or after you bought the place?"

"What do you think?"

"I think you should have told me the son of a bitch's name. In my experience, folks is a lot less inclined to rook someone over like that after they've gone ass to mouth with the barrel of a gun."

"Live and learn, right?"

"So how deep are you?"

"Forty-two to buy the house, another twelve owing on penalties and shit now that it's mine, plus inspection costs in ninety days, not to mention what it'll take to do the repairs, if it can even be repaired. I don't know, Rider," sighed Ana, picking her way down the hall toward Tux, who was just as she remembered leaving him: draped all over in last night's clothes. "That house holds the only good memories I have of family or friends or anything else about this toilet of a town, but I just don't know. I mean, best case scenario here—I fix the place up, get on the city's good side and then what? Move in? This is not where I want to spend the rest of my life. Sell it? The debt guy seemed pretty damn confident I'd never turn a profit and this is what he does for a living."

"At what point do you just cut your losses and come home?"

"That's what I'm wondering." Ana glanced at the bathroom doors as she passed them. Bonnie on the Boys. Lala on the Girls. Lala Loppette, if she was remembering that right. But how could she be unless Bonnie had been with her in the break room, looking at the poster with her? She could remember everything so clearly. How could she have been so high that she just…just hallucinated a giant purple bunny following her around all night? And here was the corridor to Pirate Cove. The daylight streaming in through the boarded windows was not enough to reach the end of the corridor, but she was dead sure if she went in, she'd find the front half of a pirate ship sticking out of the wall and, beyond it, a foam cave with a maze leading to a wind-up mermaid's hidden grotto.

And here, here was the side door she'd come through last night. Bonnie may not have opened it the way she remembered, but someone had. The chain that had secured it lay coiled around Tux's plastic feet, the broken link not cut but twisted and snapped.

"You still there?"

"Yeah," Ana said uncertainly, nudging at that chain with her foot. The broken ends of the rusted link were still shiny. A fresh break. "Yeah, I'm here, but I really do have to get going. Look, as soon as I have some idea how long all this is going to take, I'll call you again, okay? Just don't expect daily check-ins, because that's not happening."

Rider gave her one of his non-committal grunts (with last night's non-events still heavy in her thoughts, it reminded her of Freddy). "You know, I could buy the place from you. Get you your money back and flip it like we always do. Hell, I don't care if I have to take a loss on the house. I'll turn a profit anyway."

"You're not turning my aunt's house into a meth lab, Rider."

"That ain't all I do, you know."

"Or a pot farm or a…whatever the fuck you're thinking, the answer is no! Now I need to get out of here, pour some coffee in me and see just how bad things are at the house. You talked to me, I'm alive, now kindly fuck off, please. I've got a lot to do today."

"Okay, okay. Just putting the offer out there. Do what you want with it. You need anything, you know how to reach me."

He hung up before she could. Ana took a minute to adjust his contact info and set the ringtone back to the standard warble. The narwhal song was going to be creeping back on her for days, she just knew it. And that was what she did when she was high—she got tattoos and played with her phone, and most importantly, she either remembered all the stupid shit she did or she couldn't remember anything at all. She did not and never had spun fantasy-time adventurers out of thin air and slapped them down over the blank spots.

Still, hadn't Rider said something about the pills being a new formula? She thought the pink ones were just regular old Lexotan and it was the blue capsules she had to go easy on, but maybe the pink ones were the new stuff and the blues were just Adderall? It probably hadn't helped that she'd taken two of them and washed it down with pot. Extenuating circumstances and all that, but in the light of day, she knew it hadn't been smart.

Oh well. Ana put the phone in her pocket and pushed the door open as far as it would go, crawling under the loosened boards with a little effort and out into the morning air. If she thought her first breath would be an improvement on the mildewing rot inside Freddy's, she was soon corrected. The wind was coming in from the quarry, like breathing in a fart directly from the devil's ass. Even twenty years ago, that stink had been beyond rank, and it had only grown stronger with time. And yet, someone somewhere had thought this was the perfect place to put a restaurant. One with an outdoor playground, no less. That was even more mind-boggling when she was sober than it had been last night.

Ana walked out to the edge of the lot and down the steep slope to the road, hidden now beneath a fresh shell of red mud streaked with grey silt. A few thick branches and smallish boulders washed off the mountainside during the storm still stood where they had mired. No tire-tracks cut across the mud to prove it was traversable, but she was able to kick through to the asphalt and it looked to be only four or five inches deep. Wet, that could still present a problem and she supposed the thing to do would be to wait a few hours for the mud to firm up, but she didn't want to wait and anyway, what if it started raining again?

Fuck it, she had four-wheel drive. She'd take it slow and she'd be fine. She only had to mush through it another half-mile or so and she'd be up and out of the mess, winding her way through the forested foothills to Aunt Easter's house, and a whole new mess.

Ana made her way back up the incline (after a quick stop at the thickest stand of trees and bushes bordering the lot, which, being comprised of sandbrush and Joshua trees, was not thick enough to conceal her lily-white ass; fortunately, the roads remained deserted) and back in through the side door. It was much easier getting in this way than to do battle with the barricade and sliding doors of the main entrance, even more so now that it was day and she was more or less sober, but she still managed to snag her shirt on the underside of the loose boards. She heard it tear and swore even before she felt the burn of pain and itch of blood on her back. She wasn't overly fond of the shirt—plain grey, with F U Athletics Dept stenciled in navy blue on the front—but she didn't have so many she could afford to lose one.

Once inside, she anchored herself to Tux with an arm around his neck, trying to determine whether the damage was worth buying a needle and thread, since her meager supply of sewing materials had not been deemed necessary to move with, and it was with all her concentration diverted and her balance in question, that she suddenly heard singing in the dining room.

The sound was so unexpected that, even though she recognized Freddy's voice—hell, she recognized the song—she attempted to leap away anyway, to the effect that she crashed up hard against Tux's angular body and bounced off it into the wall.

Over the sound of her heart pounding on her eardrums, Freddy sang on, his big-bear voice growling but good-natured: "GOOD MORNING, GOOD MORNING, GOOD MORNING TO YOU! OUR DAY IS BEGINNING, THERE'S SO MUCH TO DO!"

"WE'RE ALL IN OUR PLACES," sang Bonnie.

Chica chimed in, "WITH CLEAN HANDS AND FACES! OH, GOOD MORNING!"

"GOOD MORNING!"

"GOOD MORNING!" sang Freddy and they all finished together: "GOOD MORNING TO YOU!"

Ana pushed herself off the wall and took a step forward, her head cocked and ears straining. She could hear Freddy's voice, no longer singing, but rising and falling in familiar rhythm as he went through the second part of his morning spiel—yadda yadda yadda, welcome to Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria, it's great to see you, looking at all your smiling faces reminds me of the time, blah blah, bad joke, blah.

But the animatronics didn't work anymore. The building was closed, abandoned. They couldn't possibly still be working.

They'd been working last night.

That was her imagination.

"I don't have that much imagination," Ana whispered, taking another step toward the sound of Freddy's monologue.

True, under normal circumstances, but she'd been high. She'd seen the animatronics frozen on stage and the little pink pills had done the rest.

She was stone sober now, though.

'Flashback,' her rational mind insisted.

"From Lexotan? Give me a fucking break." Having an argument, even if it was just with herself, made her feel more secure. She took a third step and might have taken a fourth and fifth and on all the way down the hall to see with her own eyes either the Fazbear Band in their opening hour routine or frozen and silent on stage once more, when out from the black pit that was Pirate Cove, she heard, "AHOY MATEYS!"

She froze, not knowing which way to run or even really why she should, and after a few seconds, she heard him again:

"AYE, IT'S ME, YER OLD SHIPMATE, CAPTAIN FOX. YAR, IT DOES AN OLD SALT GOOD TO SEE ALL YER WEE FACES SO BRIGHT AND EARLY. YE'LL MAKE FINE PIRATES, THE LOT O' YE." He paused, as if listening to some reply unheard by Ana, then said, "OF COURSE THEY'RE GOING TO BE PIRATES! JUST LOOK AT 'EM!" Another pause. "WHAT DO YE MEAN, TOO SOON TO TELL? I ALWAYS KNEW I'D BE A PIRATE, EVER SINCE I WERE A PUP! AND AS SOON AS I STARTED, YE COULD SAY I WERE HOOKED!"

During the lengthy pause that followed this punchline, Ana moved out of the hall and into the short corridor that led to Pirate Cove. What little light worked through the boards did not follow her and within a few cautious steps, she was enclosed by the black, feeling her way along the wall until she came to the corner. She could feel the openness of the room beyond, its breeze like breath on her face, but she could see nothing at all.

"AIN'T THAT THE TRUTH," Foxy said suddenly. The curious acoustics of this room bounced his disembodied voice off the walls, making it seem as though he were simultaneously behind her, in front of her, across the room and right against her ear. "WHEN I WERE FIRST TRAINING UP TO BE A PIRATE, IT WERE SERIOUS BUSINESS. I HAD TO SWAB THE DECKS, HOIST THE SAILS, AND WALK THE PLANK EVERY DAY." Another pause. Who was he supposed to be talking to? Ana couldn't remember Foxy's act ever including a straightman, but she was obviously missing half of his routine. "WELL, IT WERE A SMALL SHIP. WE COULDN'T AFFORD A DOG."

After a short mental debate, she fished out her phone and tapped on its flashlight app, aiming the screen down into the auditorium surrounding the stage. In the few seconds before her battery failed and threw her back into the black, she could see that not only was Foxy performing to empty seats in an empty room, but he was doing it from behind the curtain.

"OH AYE, ANYONE CAN BE A PIRATE THESE DAYS, AS LONG AS YE PAY THE UNION FEES," he was saying.

"What kind of fee?" Ana guessed, just mouthing the words with a ghost of breath beneath them, but her whisper echoed in the empty auditorium.

And he answered, "WHY, AN ARM AND A LEG, O' COURSE."

Shivering, Ana retreated to the hall and the light. She huddled by Tux, gripping at his head and rubbing compulsively at the place where his ear used to be, although she was scarcely aware of him and would not have chosen one of the fake new faces of Freddy's to comfort her if she'd thought about it. She could still hear Foxy telling his jokes, as well as Freddy down in the dining room, now singing The Inchworm Song, with Bonnie and Chica on backup math-vocals.

Was Brewster strumming on his banjo in the foyer? Were Millie, Tillie and Hillie doing the can-can in their shadowbox by the south bathrooms? Somehow, she thought not. No, Peggy wasn't waving and Swampy wasn't stealing nips of moonshine from his jug and tapping his tail along with the beat, and wherever and whatever the last two things were, they were still and silent. The power was out; they were just machines.

What did that make Freddy and the others, then?

Machines. Just…slower to power down.

By years.

Hardly aware that she had begun walking, Ana found herself at the door to the dining room. Through the film of dirt and black lacy blooms of mold, she could see the table with her day pack underneath it, but of the stage itself, she could catch occasional glimpses of Freddy's arm as he gestured out at the otherwise empty room. As she watched, his song ended. He went through another of his MC monologues, fielding interruptions now and then from silent Swampy, and ending by asking the empty room to give Bonnie a big hand as he invited him to step up and play some songs. From this angle, Ana could see nothing but his hand waving to keep applause only he could hear coming…

…and then his arm dropped. He moved aside as Bonnie stepped into the center stage position, but did not clear the stage, as Ana knew damned well he should and always had in the tapes she'd seen. Instead, he leaned out over the foot of the stage and, as Bonnie's fingers moved over the broken strings of his guitar, Freddy's head swept slowly left to right.

"ANY REQUESTS?" Bonnie asked the empty room and after a suitable pause, said, "IN THAT CASE, LET'S START OFF WITH ONE OF MY FAVORITE SONGS! SING ALONG IF YOU KNOW THE WORDS! OVER IN THE MEADOW IN THE SAND IN THE SUN, LIVED AN OLD MOTHER FROGGIE AND HER LITTLE FROGGIE ONE. WINK!' SAID THE MOTHER."

"'WE WINK,' SAID THE ONE!" Chica replied and joined Bonnie on the last line, "AND THEY WINKED ALL DAY IN THE SAND IN THE SUN!"

"SOUNDS LIKE AN EXCITING TIME, HUH, KIDS?" Bonnie interjected dryly. "JUST A'SITTING AND A'WINKING ALL DAY. YUP, THAT'S THE LIFE. YEE HAW. OVER IN THE MEADOW WHERE THE STREAM RUNS BLUE—"

Freddy glanced back at them, then turned back to the dining room. His eyes lit up, shining like flashlights as he searched the shadows under the table, lingering on her pack before moving on to the south corridor and the doorway to the kitchen.

"—AND THEY SWAM ALL DAY WHERE THE STREAM RUNS BLUE! NOW THAT'S MORE LIKE IT. I COULD SWIM ALL DAY IF I HAD THE CHANCE, TOO," Bonnie interjected. "WHAT ABOUT YOU, CHICA?"

"WHAT DO I LOOK LIKE, A DUCK?"

"YEAH, A LITTLE." Pause for laughter and then straight back into the song: "OVER IN THE MEADOW IN A HOLE IN A TREE, LIVED AN OLD MOTHER BLUEBIRD—"

Freddy finally got off the stage and started across the room, but he did it in a weird way, taking a few steps at a time and stopping to look around. Looking for kids to entertain, Ana told herself, but she didn't believe it even when she thought it and didn't believe it any better when he reached the table across the room and picked up her day pack.

He was looking for her.

Ana pushed the door open.

Freddy turned at once.

They stared at each other. It shouldn't have felt like that. It should have felt like…like staring at a doll. It didn't. She looked at Freddy; he looked at her. In the meadow, the mother turtle and her little turtles four dug all day in the mud by the shore.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

Freddy looked at her pack in his hands and put it down on the table. "THE RESTAURANT IS CLOSED. IT'S TIME TO SAY GOODBYE."

Ana looked at the stage where Bonnie and Chica sure seemed to think they had an audience as they counted their way through the meadow's resident wildlife, trading quips back and forth between verses. Their movements were not smooth as they performed. Bonnie in particular twitched and shuddered as he 'played' his guitar, especially whenever he turned to the right. She thought at first these spasms were connected in some way with her, that seeing her there was somehow provoking him to glitch out, but the longer she watched, the more he twitched, whether he was looking at her or not.

And his jaw was already loose, she saw. With every hard jerk that shook through him, it flopped wildly, tapping at his chest on the worst shudders. Whether because of this or just another glitch in his mechanisms, he had begun to stutter as he sang, and by the time he reached the bit about the old mother lizard and her little lizards eight, Chica was ahead of him by several words. This made their exchange mid-verse difficult to follow, with Chica responding to dry banter Bonnie hadn't even made yet.

But if it was hard to hear, it was downright painful to watch. Bonnie seemed to be aware of the growing schism in their routine; at least, his glitches became more and more pronounced, which made the gulf widen that much faster. Keeping one eye on Freddy (who had begun to circle around and behind her in a not-at-all predatory or ominous fashion), Ana moved closer to him.

"PLEASE KEEP CLEAR OF THE STAGE," said Freddy behind her. "FOR YOUR CHILDREN'S SAFETY, PLEASE DO NOT ALLOW THEM TO PULL ON THE ANIMATRONICS."

Bonnie's head turned hard, shuddering as it stopped. He looked down at her, right at her, all the exposed rods and springs that worked his muzzle flapping around as he sang on about the mothers in the meadow and their numerous offspring, in a happier time and place where everyone knew their place in the world and did just what they were made to do all day in the sun.

Freddy's hand dropped over Ana's shoulder and closed. Not a painful grip by any means, but at the same time, one that made it clear it could be, and with damned little effort. "KEEP CLEAR OF THE STAGE," he said again, omitting the 'please'. "RULE NUMBER ELEVEN, DO NOT CLIMB OR PULL ON THE ANIMATRONICS. SERIOUS INJURY CAN RESULT. FAZBEAR ENTERTAINMENT IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR INJURIES THAT MAY OCCUR WHEN THE RULES FOR SAFETY ARE IGNORED."

Ana reached out and touched Bonnie's hand.

Bonnie jerked violently, his arm flailing out and smacking her hand away as a consequence. He staggered one step back, then two forward, bending over so suddenly and so far she thought he was going to topple right off the stage; so did Freddy, whose grip on her shoulder made the leap from firm to painful in a split-second before he yanked her back against the hard bow of his bear-belly, his other hand snapped straight up and out like an over-enthusiastic seig heil, slapping up against Bonnie's chest.

For a while, Bonnie only stood there like that, bent at the waist, leaned up against Freddy's hand, ears flopping comically on the top of his head, while the pins and gears supporting them could be seen twitching and grinding through the crater where his face used to be. Then: "IT'S G-G-GREAT TO SEE-E-E YOU, LITTLE F-FR-FRIEND, BUT P-PLEASE DO NOT INTERRUPT THE B-B-BAND DURING A PERFORMANCE. I'LL C-C-COME SEE YOU WHEN THE SET IS OVER, OK-K-KAY?"

"Little friend, huh?" She had to laugh, less at the words themselves than at the very real and very deep pang of hurt that came with them. "Yeah, sure. Every other guy I ever spent the night with pretended he didn't know me in the morning. Why should you be any different?"

His head began to shake back and forth like a man saying 'No' over and over and over as his muzzle mechanisms trembled and shivered and if that weren't answer enough, he said, "I C-C-CAN'T T-T-TALK NOW. G-G-GO SIT D-D-DOWN AND I'LL S-S-SEE YOU S-S-SOON."

"Yeah, sure." Smiling, shaking her head, Ana looked around the dining room, forcing herself to see it the way it was and not the way she remembered it from her pill-colored dreams of last night, then back up at him. "I thought we had something special, Bon. I really did. How sad is that?"

His hands clenched, cracking the neck of his guitar where he still held it. The tremors became more violent, rattling the looser components of his casing and making his ears jitter in their sockets. "D-D-D-DO NOT-T-T T-T-TOUCH-CH TH-THE NO D-D-DO NOT T-T-TOUCH-THE D-DO NOT-T-T PLEASE NO DO NOT-T-T TOUCH-CH-CH D-D-DO NOT TOUCH-CH-CH THE ANAMAT-T-TRONICS FREDDY P-PLEASE. YOU M-M-MAY B-B-BE ASKED-D-D T-T-TO LEAVE."

"DON'T FIGHT," said Freddy. She could feel the vibrations of his deep voice, not just against the back of her head where she touched the part of his casing covering his speaker, but all down her back.

"I'm not fighting," said Ana. She pushed at the arm that held her pinned against him, but couldn't budge it. Finding herself trapped was not alarming, but it did put more of an edge in her voice than either she meant or he deserved when she said, "There's nothing to fight about. Apparently, nothing even happened."

Still bent at the waist, Bonnie's upper body nevertheless managed to yank itself back to a spine-snapping degree. He righted himself, still contorting and now smoking a little from his neck and shoulder joints. The smell was rancid, not just hot machine grease and dust, but almost like burning hair. "I'LL C-C-C-OME SEE-EE-EEEEE YOU AFT-T-TER THE SET-T-T," he said, his voice alternately slowing or washing out to static through his speakers. "O-K-K-KAY?"

"No, it's fine," said Ana, still tugging at Freddy's immoveable arm. "I'm leaving. Go on with your show."

Chica had finished the song alone and she must have known it, because rather than stumble through half of a double-routine, she had gone into a solo closing act, chatting on about all the animals of the meadow and asking all the phantom children how lucky they were to live in a place like Mammon, where they could see froggies and lizards and bluebirds every day. But they should never forget it was everyone's job to take care of those animals by taking care of their homes. "SWAMPY," she concluded, turning toward the motionless, eyeless alligator in the back of the room. "WHAT ARE SOME OF THE WAYS OUR FRIENDS CAN HELP PROTECT NATURE?" Then she fell silent, ostensibly to listen as Swampy lectured the room on recycling or composting or planting trees or whatever he was programmed to say, although her eyes darted back now and then to Bonnie beside her.

"I'LL C-C-COME SEE-E-EEEE YOU IN THE MEADOW P-P-PLEASE D-D-DON'T GO T-T-TOUCH THE ANIMAT-T-T-T-TRONICS P-P-PLEASE NO. I W-W-WANT TO I WANT-T-T TO SEE YOU IN THE MEADOW MEADOW MEADOW AFTER TH-TH-THE SET-T-T."

Ana felt a wheeze of engine-hot air stir the hairs on the back of her head like a short sigh. Freddy moved her aside as impersonally as a chair that happened to be in his way and took a step toward the stage, catching Bonnie's free-flailing hand in one of his and reaching up to grip the broken edge of Bonnie's head in the other. "DON'T FIGHT," he said again. "BONNIE. LOOK AT ME. OPEN YOUR EYES. DON'T FIGHT."

Bonnie shook his head again, but this time, it seemed less like a seizure and more like anyone shaking his head just to say no. He grabbed at Freddy's supporting arm, missed, and grabbed again, twitching and spitting out random sound-bites of static, words and song.

"Are you okay?" asked Ana stupidly. "Bonnie?"

Bonnie shook. Something inside him popped and he collapsed onto his knees on the padded stage, sending out foul plumes of mold spores from every joint. His head went back in fits until the tips of his ears were scratching at his own ass. The guitar slipped from his hand and landed beside him; with every spastic rise and fall of his arm, he hit it.

When Ana bent over the stage to take his guitar and move it out of Bonnie's reach, Freddy turned his head toward her.

"WE ARE EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES," he said heartily after a few random clicks. "WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE. PLEASE LEAVE."

Bonnie's speakers let out a high, harsh screech.

"PLEASE WAIT OUTSIDE," said Freddy. "THE ARCADE, PIRATE'S COVE AND THE PLAY AREAS ARE STILL OPEN AND AVAILABLE FOR YOUR USE. WE ARE EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES. BE CALM. DON'T FIGHT. PLEASE WAIT OUTSIDE UNTIL THE DINING ROOM IS RE-OPENED. WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE."

Ana backed away, feeling that special kind of anger that only comes from guilt burning a hole in her heart. Bonnie was old and Bonnie was breaking, but he'd been fine—relatively—until Ana started talking to him. Now here he was, shaking himself apart right in front of her eyes while Freddy did his best to hold him together until a repairman arrived, which would be right around the fifth of Never, mid-afternoon.

It was Foxy all over again, blaming him for something he'd never done, only this time, she'd done it dead sober. What was wrong with her?

Ana backed up some more, but Bonnie's convulsions were too hard to watch. Doing her best to ignore the awful sounds of mechanical failure behind her, she retrieved her pack from under the table. She left the garbage bags that had been her bed, but took the roll and stuffed that in her pack, too. Waste not, want not.

She should have left then, straight out the West Hall to the side door next to Tux, but she didn't. She went out the T-section at the back of the room instead, pulling apart the interlocking mash of tables, chairs and shelves that blocked the door to the playground. The door was locked when she reached it, but it was just one of those push-bar doors and the jamb was rotted out, so a few good kicks were enough to 'unlock' it. Opening it was still difficult, however; most of the sand that had once softened the ground had blown away, piling up in a thick drift against this side of the building. It came spilling in over the toes of her boots as she stepped out, so that the door dragged and could not close again, despite its considerable weight.

Ana lingered under the eaves where it was shadier as her eyes adjusted to the morning light, then moved out onto the playground. The further she went, the thinner the sand beneath her became. By the time she was past the swings and the spring-rockers, she was clumping across exposed concrete. Anyone reckless enough to attempt the climb to the crow's nest of the pirate ship was guaranteed a broken bone at the first bad fall, which was itself guaranteed, given the degree of rot, rust and weathering in every rope, chain and board.

Ana stopped to peer through the clouded portholes of the ship, but that was the limit of her curiosity and it was not rewarded, so she moved on. When she reached the fence, she set her pack down, hooked her fingers through the chain links, and leaned into it.

She could see the quarry, just a shadow on the ground between the trees, and beyond it, the red hills and grey slopes of Coldslip Mountain. Midway up the winding road she could not see would be Aunt Easter's house. If it were dark and if it the porch light were lit, she'd be able to see it from here, shining through the pines. That was where she should be now, not here. She should toss her pack and climb this fence, sparing herself the sight of Bonnie as she'd left him, thrashing on the show-stage with Freddy holding his hand and waiting, waiting, waiting for repairs. In time, with, as Rider would say, the proper application of some common household chemicals in the correct proportions, she could convince herself she'd never been here at all, just spent the night stoned to the stars in the parking lot. She could pretend until she believed it, and maybe eventually laugh about the time she'd been so high, she dreamed she'd spent one night at Freddy's.

She could…but she didn't. Her clothes were still hanging over Tux at the end of the hall, but that wasn't why she didn't leave. She held on to the fence and watched the quarry and did not think at all about how she was waiting or what she was waiting for.

The wind gusted. The rusty chains supporting the two surviving swings creaked. The smell of sage grew stronger; the stink of the quarry did too, becoming something that was nearly a taste. If she'd had anything in her stomach, it might have come up. She didn't, so she turned her head and spat, then went back to watching and waiting.

Behind her, somewhat muffled but not as much as it would be if the door was all the way closed, she heard the jumble of junk piled up in the hall being shifted. Well, not shifted as much as thrown around. Someone was coming, someone who could lift a cafeteria table and fling it away with a crash further down the hall, not just once but over and over. As someone who had seen the ruin inside the restaurant, she knew the animatronics were not programmed to clean or even care about their environment, but she wouldn't have thought them capable of active destruction. Nevertheless, she felt no apprehension on hearing it. She waited.

The door scraped open on the sand. "HI THERE!"

All this time, she thought she was waiting for Freddy to come tell her either the restaurant was closed or the dining room was open, but she felt no surprise to hear Bonnie's voice.

She turned around and there he was, his lenses catching the sunlight and throwing it out in dazzles. "Hi, Bonnie."

His ears lifted, bumping the door jamb. He looked up at it, then stooped and shuffled out onto the playground. "I'M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY. WHAT'S YOUR NAME?"

"Are you okay?" she asked. "You kind of fell apart in there. I'm sorry if I—"

"HI THERE!

Her smile faded. "Hi?"

"I'M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY. WHAT'S YOUR NAME?"

"Oh."

Bonnie limped closer, one hand reaching out, palm up, to take hers just the way he'd taken her hand last night, the way he'd taken the hands of hundreds of little girls before her. "HI THERE! I'M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY!"

"Wow." And she had to laugh. "Wow, what is wrong with me?"

"WHAT'S YOUR NAME?"

"None of it was real, was it?" she murmured, searching the ruined hollow of his faceless head. "I don't know what the hell was in those little pink pills, but it really did the trick. I can't believe I imagined everything."

His internal gears ground and exposed metal rods jittered as the muzzle he no longer had lifted up for one of his big bunny laughs. He said, "YOU CAN DO ANYTHING IN YOUR IMAGINATION!"

She shook her head a little, laughing at her stupid self while Bonnie's servos loudly spun. "And I can't believe how much it hurts. I am legit devastated here." She touched her eyes and looked with smiling wonder on the moisture she took away. "You broke my heart, Bonnie," she told him. "I finally let myself go and fall in love at first sight and you broke my heart the very next day. Unbelievable."

"LET'S BE FRIENDS," he said. His hands tremored, finger-pins rattling in their sockets with the force of whatever was glitching him out. Some hidden spring let go with a tired twang and his left pinky slipped from its setting and dropped to the ground. "I L-L-LOVE IT WHEN THE WEATHER'S WARM SO I CAN PLAY OUTSIDE. RIGHT, RUMBLE?" he called, twisting at the waist to shove an arm toward the plastic outline of feet bolted to the concrete stand over by the pirate ship. "I LOVE-VE-VE HANGING OUT WITH MY N-N-NEW FRIENDS."

Ana glanced back at the feet through her hair, then looked up again at Bonnie.

His head jerked to one side, ears flopping and exposed parts rattling. "LET'S BE FRIENDS," he said. His cameras tracked her as she picked up his finger and brushed off the stray grains of sand. "LET'S BE FRIENDS. LET'S BE FRIENDS. LET'S BE FRIENDS."

Ana sat down on the dragon's humped back and took Bonnie by the hand. His happy hyucking voice fell silent, but his mechanisms kept humming fast and loud as he watched her peer into his pinky socket and fit his finger back in place. "You need another screw, my man," she told him and waited, but he did not answer, didn't even waggle his ears. His servos spun faster for a second or two and that was all. "But this is the best I can do for now," she finished with a sigh, taking the screwdriver from her pocket and using it to fish out the slipped end of the spring and push it back into place.

"I'M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY! WHAT'S YOUR NAME?"

Ana put the screwdriver back in her pack and took a moment to inventory its contents. Phone, check. Garbage bags, also check. She had everything she she'd come in with and then some. Time was passing. The house was waiting. So why was she still here?

Because there was something else she wanted.

Bonnie followed her down the hall when she walked away from him. Chica came as far as the doorway of the kitchen to watch her pass by, but although she did not greet Ana, something about Bonnie apparently triggered her, because she chirped, "I'M MAKING MY SPECIAL BREAKFAST PIZZA! WANT SOME?"

Bonnie stopped in his tracks. Arms and ears twitching wildly, he turned toward Chica and said, "DO I EVEN WANT TO KNOW WHAT'S ON IT?"

"EGGS, BACON AND BREAKFAST CEREAL, OF COURSE!"

"UH…EGGS?"

"OH RELAX," said Chica, flapping her hand. "THEY'RE LIZARD EGGS."

Swampy must have had a line there, because both Chica and Bonnie turned to look at him, then burst out laughing.

Ana continued on and left them to it. The odd angles and echoing halls had a way of distorting sounds. Their voices seemed to recede much further than she knew she left them behind her. When she turned up the hall that led to the security room, their words were buried beneath the sound of her boots on the broken tiles and soon, she couldn't hear them at all.

Ana made her way to the security office by feel, then brought out her phone and coaxed a few seconds of light from its screen, enough to get her bearings and make sure the room she was in was really the one she remembered. It was. Everything was just the same: the doorless openings on north and south walls leading from this corridor to the employee break room; the closed door on the east wall, still locked; the safety window on the west wall with its inset speaker for communicating with concerned customers and the tiny portal for passing lost or found items back and forth; the desk that made a kind of cubicle within this small space, its drawers on bent runners that wouldn't allow them to close; and the tall cupboards lining the south wall.

It was the cupboard she'd come for, but for now, she groped her way to the lounge door (the jamb was cold under her hand, metal instead of wood), and tapped her phone to life once more. It gave her only a sullen beep and a dim flash of reddish light, then shut itself off again, but it was enough to show her the poster of Freddyland hanging on the wall and the closet where she could have sworn she and Bonnie had hidden from Freddy the night before. He'd played with her hair. She'd sung Mia Rose's If You'll Be My Man until they were singing it together, softly, in the dark.

Seriously, though, what were those little pink pills?

Ana stepped out of the doorway (the odd jamb again snagged her attention; if she had a little more power in her phone, she could have stayed to investigate, but she didn't) and felt her way a few steps aside to the cupboards on the back of this wall. She opened them one by one, feeling at the shelves within until she found the cardboard box she remembered. She couldn't see it, but she knew what it looked like, knew there was writing on its facing side spelling out Lost and Found in black, broad-tipped marker. And on top of the pile of coats, shoes, stuffed animals and dropped toys, she found the plastic lunchbox she'd been looking for. She couldn't see it and didn't need to. It was a Fazbear Band lunchbox, just like those still on the decaying shelves in the gift shop, but cleaner, of course.

She picked it up, opened it, and stirred her fingers once through the plastic pieces filling it. She closed it up again, opened her day pack and put the lunchbox inside.

As she was straightening up, she heard footsteps in the hall. Bonnie's, she was sure. Freddy's stride was similar, but he was heavier and although his toes on one side were bare to the metal bones and loose in their joints so that they scraped along the ground with each step, Bonnie's whole leg dragged when his knee locked up. This was not Freddy's scraaaape-thud scraaaape-thud, but a relatively lighter and quicker whump-ssshhhhhh whump-ssshhhhh.

There was no way she could know any of that, given the unreliability of her memories from last night, but sure enough, it was Bonnie who appeared in the security office window, his camera lights illuminating little apart from the ruin inside his head. He looked in at her, twitched, and continued on his way.

Probably coming to tell her customers shouldn't hang around in the security room without a guard on duty or something like that. Well, she was done here, wasn't she?

Ana stepped out into the hall to meet him and there was Bonnie, limping toward her. She smiled. "Coming to meet me in the closet?"

His servos whirred louder. He said, "HI THERE! I'M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY! WHAT'S YOUR NAME?"

"You don't need to know my name," she said and waited, but he didn't sing. His gears ground and his head jerked to one side a few times, and that was all.

Further down the hall, Freddy lurched by, pausing to look their way before moving on, apparently deciding that one animatronic per customer was enough interaction. He must have gone into Pirate Cove; she heard the gruff rise and fall of Foxy's voice, but not enough of it to tell which story he was telling before the door woofed shut and took it away.

"Come here, my man," said Ana.

Bonnie's ears twitched. He shuffled forward a few steps. "HI THERE," he said. "I'M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE—"

Ana reached out and tugged on his chest. The front panel popped open. His eyes went dark immediately and he sagged on his pins, but didn't fall over. Neither did he go completely quiet, although the mechanisms in his head slowed and stopped. When she opened the panel all the way, releasing a pulse of heat onto her own chest, she could hear his internal systems still working away, doing whatever it was they did.

She needed light for this. Ana brought out her phone, but it wouldn't even tell her the battery was dead anymore. She put it away, thought, then fished around in the side flap of her pack until she found her lighter. Holding it well back, just in case there was something in there that was flammable, Ana struck a flame.

Mechanical things had always held a strong fascination for her, so for a while, she just watched his systems work, hypnotized by the sight of a real, functioning clockwork human right at her fingertips. His endoskeleton did not mimic bones in the sense of individual ribs or vertebrae, but did have the same general structure. Likewise, his cooling system pulled in air with twin bellows, expanding and contracting like lungs. The rubbery funnel of his mouth dropped down through his body to a deflated sac low in his abdomen, with an access port dangling off to one side to aid flushing. At the center of his chest was a transparent casing edged in what sure looked like gold, with a console of some kind set on the left.

There were no buttons on the console, no ports, no switches, nothing that could allow an idle bump to interfere with the animatronic's functions, just three indicators, two dark and one lit, to show her which mode he was on: Day. Ana touched each of the indicators, because of course she did, but touching them did nothing and her attention was already fixed elsewhere. On the other side of the console, behind the glass, a complicated network of gears, tubes and transistors moved together to form a single pulsing artifact, pumping out power through branching cables into the part of his spine enclosed by this box, and from there, presumably, along his endoskeleton to every other part of his body.

She touched the case cautiously, finding it hot but not so much that it burnt her fingers, and so began hunting for some way to open it. There were no catches, no hinges, no buttons. On the other hand, there were no cracks either. Her questing fingers found one small sign of damage—a tiny round hole on the left side of the console, which had perhaps once fitted a screw.

Oh well. If she couldn't get at his actual heart, she'd have to do the best she could with what she had.

Ana opened her pack and found a Sharpie.

A few seconds later, she capped it and tucked it away, then closed Bonnie's chest.

His servos whined to life. His eyes lit. He raised his head and said, "SYSTEM ERROR. CLOCK DISCREPANCY DETECTED. CORRECTING." He clicked. "CORRECTED." He twitched, just once, but violently enough that one of his ears smacked the wall, then focused in on her and started right in again. "HI THERE! I'M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY! WHAT'S YOUR NAME?"

Ana smiled at him. It didn't feel very happy, even on her end, but she couldn't help herself. "I'm glad the road washed out," she told him. "I'm so glad I finally got to meet you. I will always remember this night…even if it never really happened."

"I LOVE MEETING NEW FRIENDS," said Bonnie, twitching. "LET'S ROCK! I LOVE JAMMING WITH MY NEW FRIENDS! LET'S PLAY TOGETHER! I LOVE— " He glitched out on the last word, spitting v-sounds for several seconds before snapping out of it with, "—PIZZA." His ears drooped and shoulders sagged. "WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE KIND OF PIZZA? I LOVE PEPPERONI WITH EXTRA CHEESE."

"Is it okay to touch you?" Ana asked. "Think I can get a hug?"

His muzzle lifted for one of those honking hee-haw laughs, although it cut itself off too soon. "HUGS ARE ALWAYS ON THE MENU AT FREDDY'S," he assured her and opened his arms.

She hugged him, thinking it might feel silly, but it didn't. His arms enfolded her; she could feel a tremor in one of his hands where it lay over her braid. His casing was hard and scratchy where the flocking hadn't rubbed off yet. She stood on her tiptoes to kiss his jaw, then rested her cheek against his grungy chest and closed her eyes. He stank.

"I LOVE MAKING NEW FRIENDS," he told her.

She sighed. "I have to go now."

His arms tightened when she first pulled away, then opened. He watched her as she shouldered her pack once more, his ears twitching and cameras whirring. "YOU CAN'T GO YET. THE FUN'S JUST STARTING! STAY AND PLAY!"

"Goodbye, Bonnie."

"HI THERE! I'M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY!" He turned around to keep her in sight as she walked around him and away. "WHAT'S YOUR NAME? COME B-B-BACK SOON! I L-L-L-LOVE MAKING-ING NEW FRIENDS! HI THERE!"

At the intersection, Ana turned left, back toward the dining room. It would have been quicker to cut across Pirate Cove and go straight out the side door next to Tux, but she didn't want to talk to Foxy, even if all she knew he'd say was Ahoy. She wasn't angry at him, although she could still remember being angry. She was a little afraid the anger would come rushing back if she were face to face with Captain Fox again, but she was more afraid of tears.

"HI THERE!" said Bonnie, falling further and further behind her as she crossed the dining room. "I'M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY!"

"HI BONNIE," said Chica, now on stage with Freddy. She waved and Bonnie jerked around, sputtering and twitching, to wave back.

"HEY, CH-CH-CHICA! WH-WHAT'S UP-P-P?"

"THE CEILING, SILLY. I THOUGHT EVERYBODY KNEW THAT."

Freddy said nothing, but he turned his head to watch as Ana pushed open the door to the hall that led to Tux and the boarded-up exit.

"You're not even going to say goodbye?" she asked, looking back at him.

"THE RESTAURANT IS CLOSED."

"Heartwarming," she said dryly. "You're kind of a jerk. You know that, don't you?"

Freddy grunted and folded his arms.

"LET'S BE FRIENDS," said Bonnie, limping toward Ana again. "LET'S BE FRIENDS. LET'S BE FRIENDS. LET'S BE FRIENDS. LET'S—"

"COME BACK SOON!" Chica called, waving.

"Bye," said Ana and let the door close behind her.

She wasn't far down the hall before she heard it open.

"HI THERE," said Bonnie. "I'M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY! WHAT'S YOUR NAME? WAIT-T-T! HI THERE! I'M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY! WHAT'S YOUR NAME? P-P-PLEASE! COME B-B-B-BACK SOON! HI THERE!"

Ana went to Tux and collected her still-damp clothes, wadding them all together and stuffing them into her pack. Was she stalling just to let Bonnie struggle down the hall? She was not. She was just…doing…something else.

Fuck it. She hunkered down, pushing the door open and shoving her pack through onto the walk.

"I'M YOUR BEST BUDDY, BONNIE THE BUNNY! WHAT'S YOUR NAME? WHAT'S-S-S YOUR NAME? WHAT'S YOUR N-N-NAME? WH-WH-WH-WHAT'S YOUR-R-R-R N-N-N-NAME?"

"You don't need to know my name," Ana told him, smiling back at him over her shoulder. "I wrote it on your heart."

She squeezed through under the loosened boards and out, letting the glass door shut behind her, muffling Bonnie's persistent request to be friends mid-word, but she could still hear him. As she walked along the side of the building on the cracked pavement, he kept pace with her on the other side of the window and she could hear his scratchy, stuttering voice, telling her he loved hanging out with his new friends, he loved rocking out on the guitar, he loved playing with the band, he loved it when the weather was warm enough that he could play outside, and between each effort to engage her in conversation, he reminded her he was her best buddy and what was her name?

Ana went to the rear of the truck, checked and tightened the trailer hitch, then opened up the driver's door and tossed her pack inside. She climbed in after it, shut the door, buckled her belt, started the engine, plugged her phone into the charger, and, against her will, looked back.

She could see hints of purple between the boards—Bonnie, pacing up and down the hall in front of her truck. He'd probably stay there as long as he could see her. And she knew he was just a big toy and had no real feelings about it, but he looked so frantic, so distressed. Who knew how long he'd been here without anyone to entertain? Who knew how long it would be before another one broke in?

Maybe it would have been kinder to leave him shut down. Or sleeping, or whatever it meant when his chest was open.

Maybe she should just leave bad enough alone and stay away.

But as Ana glanced down at her day pack beside her in the passenger seat, she knew she couldn't do that. She'd have to come back, if only once more.


She had told Rider she was five minutes from the house. In reality, it was eleven. The distance between the flat top of Coldslip Mountain and Edge of Nowhere was little more than two miles as the crow flies. If that crow were driving, however, it was closer to five, and this morning, that crow would also be navigating around all the downed branches and boulders the storm had pushed out into the muddy road.

Once out of the red hardpan of the desert and into the foothills, the long, flat, straight road became a series of climbs and falls, each one taller and steeper than the next, until she reached the mountain itself and its many hairpin turns, where the road narrowed to a single lane with a sheer rock face on one side and a sheer drop onto more rocks on the other. Wherever the rockface had cracked, groundsprings that might otherwise be visible only as an incongruous wet shine on dry stone now gushed like miniature Niagaras, overspilling the neglected culverts.

Picturesque, maybe, but it made for treacherous driving and Ana took her time with it until the terrain evened out and the road brought her away from the cliffs to the forests, and from there to the narrow lane with its solitary mailbox standing guard beside it that marked the turn to Aunt Easter's house.

The mailbox was much-battered and the name on the side had weathered away, leaving nothing behind but a few flakes of indecipherable black paint that might have been letters once, or numbers, or little dancing stickmen for all they resembled now, but Ana took it as an encouraging sign that it still stood at all. In the grand hierarchy of vandalism, mailboxes were the lowest rung; if no one had been by to knock it over or blow it up, maybe the debt collector guy was right when he said the local youths were leaving the property alone. Time alone could still do a number on a house, but time didn't use spray paint or cherry bombs.

Ana downshifted into all-wheel drive before turning onto the dirt road and felt all four tires sink and briefly struggle before finding traction in the mud. The way was badly overgrown; branches slapped at the windshield and scraped the side of the truck, making just a godawful noise every second of this last length, until it closed off entirely in a green curtain where Aunt Easter's weeping willows had once flanked the end of the drive.

Ana drove through it and there the house suddenly stood, revealed all at once and in the unflinching light of this miserable Utah morning. She parked in the middle of the unkempt drive that used to circle a flowerbed and fountain and which now housed a thicket of weeds and broken stone basin, and just looked at it for a while.

She decided, objectively speaking, it wasn't that bad. At least not as bad as it could have been, given the extremes of the climate and twelve years abandonment, but even without those qualifiers, it wasn't that bad. The yard was out of control, the house needed paint and the porch would probably have to be completely redone, but the roof was the biggest problem she could see.

The biggest she could see out here, she corrected herself. If the roof was leaking—and those missing shingles on the west end suggested it was—the water damage she might encounter inside could easily force her to reassess her determination to see this through. If it was anywhere near as bad here as it was inside Freddy's, she might as well demolish the whole thing, slap down some pre-fab piece of shit and walk away.

Much as she tried to cling to the second half of that thought—the work, even the hopelessness of the best possible outcome of that work—it was to Freddy's she could feel her mind moving. Not because of the mold or the water stains or the rotting sheetrock, peeling paint and crumbling mortar, either. The remembered stink did try to assert itself, but only as it related to the animatronics themselves. To Bonnie, especially. The smell of him—black mold and plastic—filling her nostrils when she'd kissed him down in the maze and again this morning, when she'd said goodbye. That smell that was Death, so much more than simple rotting meat or burnt bone could be.

She wondered why that was and decided, still gazing up at her aunt's house, that Bonnie's wasn't the smell of Death crawling out from under the bed or up the basement steps in the deep of the night. It wasn't Death when it comes raining down from the sky with bombs or tearing through your flesh with bullets. It wasn't blood and fire and screaming and terror, the way you'd think Death ought to be. It was the quiet Death, the one that follows you when you wander away from the picnic and fall into some forgotten well. It is the Death that finds you lying on a mildewed mattress in the backroom of the flophouse where you take that hot shot, the one that sits up and watches you when you sit on the side of the bathtub and test the edge of the razor with growing confidence on the inside of your arm. It is the smell of the Death that knows you when everyone else has forgotten; it is the Death that comes for the Lost.

Which meant she had to wonder…if she could recognize it when she smelled it, did that make her one of the lost? Or one of the dead?

She thought about it as she and the house took one another's measure, but the only conclusion she reached was that she was probably still high.

Then she pulled up around the fountain-bed and parked close to where she remembered the gate to be, although the pickets that had fenced in the overgrown yard had either collapsed or been overtaken by the jungle of weeds that had choked out her aunt's neat lawn. Those could just come out, the part of her that was still thinking in terms of fixing up and selling the property noted. A fenced yard was pretty to look at, but wasn't as good a selling point as custom shelves, which took the same amount of money and far less muscle, and also could be done indoors and did not depend on good weather.

So thinking, deliberately looking over the grounds rather than the house, with all its unknowns (and memories), Ana took her pack, got out of the truck and went around to the back, squeezing between it and the trailer just long enough to hook an arm in and fetch her machete from its holding place on the dome wall.

She cut her way to the porch steps, following the gentle curve of the flagstone path she could not see, but which she could feel beneath her boots and the thick growth of grassy weeds—the same path she could only now remember running up with her scrawny arms laden with grocery bags, following David as he asked if he could start the fire in the barbeque pit, and Aunt Easter telling him he could, but not yet, to wait for…someone. The name was a black hole in Ana's mind, but it came sort of with a face. With a smile, anyway. A broad smile, all teeth, beneath twin flashes that was sunlight on a pair of glasses.

The image lingered for a moment, struggling to come into sharper focus or at least to tether itself to other memories now rising up from the tar of her forgotten childhood, but Ana pushed it away in the end. She didn't know the man and certainly didn't need to know him any better now. Ana could not remember her aunt ever dating and was confident she'd never been married, but the disparity didn't bother her. Her aunt had always been pretty, with long blonde hair and laughing eyes, not to mention the sort of body a child didn't notice but which grown-Ana looking back could admit had been pretty damned eye-popping. And after all, she hadn't found David under a cabbage leaf. Little Ana might not have attached any significance to the occasional visits of a man-friend, but Aunt Easter must have enjoyed the company of a man from time to time. According to at least one of Mammon's citizens, one of those men had been the Devil, so Aunt Easter had obviously had some wild nights in this quiet little town. God knew, that couldn't have been an easy reputation to drag around in this place. No wonder she chose to live clear out in the ass-end of nowhere, miles from the nearest neighbor, no one looking down on you but the stars.

Ana reached the porch, cut an opening through the dead ivy and creepers that curtained it, and peered inside. When nothing leapt out at her, she left the machete leaning against the side of the house and mounted the steps, testing each one before letting it take her full weight.

It wasn't a warm day, being late February and not even noon, and it was cooler under the covered porch, and darker. It felt more like descending into a crypt than climbing up into a house, and the smell added credence to the illusion—earthy and sour, the stink of dried and decaying vegetation heavy in the air, lessened only when the wind gusted and brought the quarry right into her mouth.

The full windows to either side of the heavy doors were crusted in dirt on the outside and hung with curtains on the inside, making it impossible to see anything, even the smallest clue, of the interior. Ana wasted a little time exploring anyway, but all she found were cobwebs, half a dozen mud dauber nests, and a scattering of feathers, birdshit and pellets made of compressed hair and bones to prove that owls dormed here at least some of the time. And the doors themselves, of course.

Those massive wooden doors with the carved panels and the brass latches swooping out from the center, like something you'd find on a castle. Sometimes, Aunt Easter would seize both latches at once and whoooosh them open in a grand, glorious gesture, crying, "We're home!" like they'd been away for years, questing in the mountains and fighting dragons instead of just at the store or the movies. And David and Ana would shout along with her as they tumbled inside, swept up by her momentum: "Home! Home!"

Home.

There were papers stapled up over those doors now, white and yellow and blue and that unique shade of last-chance pink, all their lawyerly jargon weathered out to a whisper. Shreds of yellow tape fluttered in the breeze. And there was a lock, one of those heavy real-estate tumble boxes, hooked through both latches together and shut tight.

Ana hefted the lock, thinking. It represented no real obstacle, but it annoyed her that neither the debt collector guy in Salt Lake nor Mrs. Rutter right here in Mammon had offered her a key or even warned her of the existence of this lock, when one of them had been responsible for putting it here.

She had bolt cutters in the truck—somewhere—and it wasn't any more or less work to unpack for this reason as for any other, but Ana found herself at that odd junction between reluctance and impatience. She didn't want to shift boxes around, she wanted to get in the damn house. And so, although the 'key' to this lock was right behind her, albeit pinned in and covered over by the hodgepodge pieces of her life, in the end, Ana took last night's still damp hoodie out of her pack, wrapped it around her right fist and forearm, and gave the window next to the door a solid backhanded smack.

It was an old window (the deciding factor on this course of action had been just that, that all the windows would have to be replaced with energy efficient ones anyway), although not a cheap one, and it didn't break on the first blow, only cracked. Still, two or three careful taps did the trick, and once she'd wiggled the shards free of the brittle lead and pulled them from the pane, she reached in to feel around for the latch she knew had to be there, thinking to unlock the window and let herself in that way.

Funny, isn't it? How stubbing a toe is more painful than kicking that selfsame table leg or whathaveyou in a moment of temper, however swiftly regretted. There is something in the element of surprise that so amplifies pain that even the least insult is made instantly fuck-worthy. So it was that Ana, having punched open a window without flinching, now reached that same hand through it, unexpectedly encountered an immoveable object with force enough to stub three fingers, pop two knuckles and break a nail, and sucked in a startled hiss of air around the word, "Fuck!" that would have been a yell if anyone else had been saying it.

What in the hell had she hit? Belatedly cautious, Ana prodded at the curtain and to her amazement, touched the thinnest of thin drapes separating her fingers from what seemed to be a solid sheet of wood.

Well, okay. In retrospect, that was reasonable. The debt guy, or maybe even her aunt, had done this to protect the house against intruders or weather or whatever, just on that side of the glass and with a curtain in between so it didn't look as derelict as it in fact was.

Did that mean all the windows were boarded up? She thought so, but didn't feel like smashing every window on the ground floor just to prove herself right or wrong.

However, just pushing on the obstruction didn't remove it. Whatever this board was, it wasn't the typical quarter-inch sheet of particle plywood. Even with all her weight behind it, it didn't give, didn't even bow out in the middle.

It looked like she'd be unpacking the truck after all.

So she did, keeping one sour eye on the clouds, which seemed to have noticed her and were thickening rapidly. Although the integrity of the porch was by no means assured, it was covered and better defense against the inevitable than open ground. She just tried to spread the weight out over the visibly rotten spots and get to her tools as fast as possible.

In due time, she was back at the window with a crowbar, knocking out all the glass so she could wedge her weapon in around the frame, prying the board up and, with it, pushing the nails out.

It took a lot of work and not just because of the difficult angle. Whoever had done this not only used a solid piece of lumber, but a metric fuckton of nails. Every inch, a new nail. And this wasn't a case of nailgun-itis, because even though Ana couldn't see much from her disadvantaged vantage, she could tell they were any number of sizes and weights. Someone had hammered in each of those nails by hand.

For the moment, she was determined not to care; she could even pretend it was better this way, that the longer nails could continue supporting the board so she wouldn't have to worry about it slipping on her while she was still working her way around at turtle-speed. Once she got the whole thing loose, she could give one almighty shove and slam the thing out of her way.

It was to this goal she worked—the shove, the echoing bang as it hit her aunt's hardwood parlor floor, the anticipation of that first musty smell and the unknown area beyond that would either be not as bad or so much worse than what she had been bracing herself against. She did not allow herself to think of anything else, not the condition of the house or the impending rain or even last night's curious adventures, but just loosening this nail and moving on to the next nail, repeating as necessary until she had pushed them all screaming out of the window frame. She could sense the weight of the board as it sagged on its increasingly fewer and fewer pins, and so it was with great satisfaction that she came to her starting point at last, set aside her crowbar, squared off, and slammed both hands into the exact center of the curtained board.

Later, after half a joint and a lot of deliberation, she would decide that the sensation was a lot like being hit simultaneously in both shoulders with a baseball bat, and she would muse quite a long time on the difference between kicking a table leg and stubbing one's toe on it.

Oh, she knocked the board off, all right. When she hit it, its last few nails either popped right out of their wooden beds or ripped the dry-rotted molding of the frame to pieces, and in either case, it came free. As she stumbled back, both shoulders so alive with shock and pain that she honestly thought she'd dislocated them, the board dropped with a nail-studded shhhhhunk, just like the blade of a guillotine, straight down. It couldn't fly out and belly-flop onto the floor as she'd imagined; when she caught the curtain and pulled it aside, she saw there couldn't have been more than a two-inch gap between the window frame and the wall of boxes filling her view.

Ana stared for a long time, too stunned to process what she was seeing. When at last she pushed at the wall of boxes—first on this one, then on that one—she found it just as immoveable as her still-aching shoulders told her they were. Whoever had stacked them had done so with considerable skill; putting her eye to the cracks between these cardboard bricks, Ana could only make out a narrowing shadowy wedge of depth without real dimension. There was no way of knowing how deeply they were stacked, or how high, beyond the fact that they went higher and wider than the window.

She could have tried another window. She thought about it, but even at its inception, the thought was a queasy one. Later, somewhat less than pleasantly stoned, she could admit the only reason she hadn't was simply that she was afraid to find what she ultimately found anyway. No. She had stubbed her toe twice on the house already; this time, she drew her leg back and kicked.

She reached out, her fingers scratching and prodding at box after box until she found one she could work loose from the wall. It took a lot of wiggling, being pinned in on every other side but this one and weighted, not only by its own contents, but by the other boxes overlying it. Removing it meant destabilizing the entire structure, but although she tensed for an avalanche, she heard none. There were plenty of boxes wedged together above this one, but they were too tightly packed to fall.

When she pulled out the box, there was another behind it. She stared for a moment into the cavity she had created (she was reminded, unwelcomely and uncomfortably, of Bonnie) then set the box in her hands down and tried to open it. The flaps were sealed with so much tape, she gave up and went back to the truck and her tool chest for a utility knife, then cut her way in, already knowing, just by the feel of the thing in her arms, what she would find.

She was sort of right. Her guess had been newspapers—heavy, but solid and quiet. The reality was magazines. Old ones, but new-looking, unread. The titles were eclectic to say the least. Quilters, Field and Stream, The New Yorker, People, Cosmopolitan, Men's Health, Senior Living, Better Homes, Sports Illustrated, as well as a wide assortment of periodicals catering to even more specific tastes, from bow hunting to home canning to gardening to improving your sex life. The one thing they all had in common was that their front covers had all been ripped off. Most issues had multiple copies, although they weren't always grouped together, not by month and not even by title. In fact, there didn't appear to be any rhyme or reason to how they were arranged, beyond filling the box to its maximum capacity.

In mounting disbelief, Ana excised another box and then another and another, until she had hollowed out a space large enough to climb into and still she kept digging, tunneling upward as boxes collapsed on top of her. Magazines predominated, but she also found cases of decades' old baby formula powder, knockoff generic action figures with names like Iron Hero and Superbat, plastic purses shaped like daisies, and cheap decorations to cover every holiday from New Year's Eve to Christmas.

It was too much to sort through, too much to look at. Soon, she wasn't even opening them, just flinging them as they fell or as she pried them loose out onto the porch, until she breached the last layer—

—and touched the ceiling.

Ana pulled a few more boxes down from the side of her excavation, but only a few. She retreated on shaky legs back down and out through the broken window onto the porch. She had to kick boxes out of the way in order to find room enough to stand. There seemed to be so many more of them here than could have fit in the tiny space she had opened.

The rain came. Ana hardly noticed. She was not thinking, exactly, not the kind of thoughts that come with words, but an idea had begun to grow in her at some point during her dig and now that her frenetic activity had ceased, that idea grew larger, swelling to fill the space she'd made.

Before she knew she was going to do it, she'd retreated from the porch and began to circle the house, peering into every window only to find the same dark curtains, hiding, she was sure, the same wooden boards and the same wall of boxes. Room to room, it was all potentially the same, but she didn't break any more glass to see for certain. The debt collector had mentioned seeing broken windows, two broken windows…

And one was there, high in the attic. Impossible to see from here what condition that was in, just that there was no curtain. Ana kept searching and, at the rear of the house, beneath the mudroom, she found the second—a narrow basement window set just a little above ground level.

The basement had been off-limits as a child. Aunt Easter had told her it was because the house was old and not always safe and there were things down there that could hurt little girls. David said it was haunted. Not trying to scare her and not afraid himself, but not kidding either. If it wasn't ghosts, she could sort of recall him telling her one day as they rode their bikes out past Edge of Nowhere, then it might be monsters, but something was down there. He'd never seen them, but he heard them moving behind the walls.

Naturally, he and little Ana had explored it on several occasions and even played Dungeons or Castles in that forbidden territory when Aunt Easter was at work. The lock on the basement door was one of those cartoony keyhole locks and even if Aunt Easter kept the key hidden somewhere, Ana had only needed one look and a paperclip to pop it open. When Aunt Easter wised up and installed the deadbolt at the very top of the door, well, these tiny windows had been plenty big enough back then for her to wriggle through with room to spare. In any case, in all their explorations, neither Ana nor David had ever uncovered the haunted hellportal her aunt guarded or the hungry ghosts of those miners slouching and slobbering among Christmas decorations and bottles of home-canned jam. It was just a basement, full of old basement junk, and if there were monsters, they lived as David had said, behind the walls, out of sight and out of consequence.

Still, grown-up Ana hesitated before she got on her hands and knees in the mud and looked through the little window, hoping against hope that she would see her aunt's kinky sex dungeon or, hell, a meth-lab or anything at all but what she saw: an uneven ocean of boxes, plastic tubs, milk crates, shelves and tables, and all the flotsam and jetsam washing around in it—clothes, camping gear, children's toys, clothes, bicycles, furniture, kitchen appliances, clothes, sporting goods, bundles of newspapers, unopened bags of diapers and other baby paraphernalia, and clothes. And this was just the stuff she could see and identify. Everywhere she looked, she saw black garbage bags bulging with what, to judge by the rancid time-dried stench, might actually be garbage.

She recognized none of it. None. Of. It. Not one article of clothing lying strewn around her now had ever hung in one of this house's closets. Of the seven bicycles she could count from here, none of them had been David's. She had never played on that foosball table or any of those board games. David had never been on a hockey team and would not have needed all those sticks or padding to fit a burly high-schooler anyway. Aunt Easter was a good cook and had her fair share of appliances, but she was not a gadgeter; these unopened boxes of cotton candy makers, pop-up hot dog cookers (with bun toasters!), and milkshake machines were not hers, let alone the dozens of banana slicers, spaghetti twirlers, taco proppers, garlic peelers and other, even more pointless devices.

And it went on and on and on like that, in every direction. It was not a full basement, had perhaps half the footprint of the house, but the hoard made it seem even smaller. She couldn't see the floor. She couldn't get even the most haphazard guess as to how deep the hoard went, except that it was deep enough that there was a sofa upended in it, mired like a stump in a swamp. There was no safe path, only a narrow game-trail of sorts winding through and around the more obvious pitfalls to the stairs at the far end of the basement, of which, only two steps were visible, and even those had been mostly buried in stacks of books and shoeboxes.

But on one count, the debt guy had been wrong: he'd claimed the local kids weren't poking around out here, but the muddy shoeprints in the immediate area on either side of the window proved otherwise. Indeed, the game-trail she had noted leading from this window to the stairs had been made by the regular comings and goings of whoever had been, or perhaps still was, coming and going.

Ana touched the comforting shape of her utility knife through her jeans pocket, then dropped to her belly in the garden bed, shoved her head and one arm through the window, and kick-wriggled her way through, sliding like a graceless otter over smooth-worn boxtops and mud-packed clothes down onto the hoard. She righted herself, knife in hand but not with the blade out, listening.

She heard only her heartbeat in her ears and the dry scuttle of rats somewhere in the stacks. No monsters. No squatters. No ghosts.

Testing her balance and the stability of the hoard at every hand- or foot-hold, Ana made her way across the basement and deeper into shadows. Her eyes were slow to adjust, but she was even slower to move, so it worked out okay and by the time her questing hand touched the cold concrete stair, she could look up and see the door at the top.

And see that it was open.

'The monsters got out,' she thought and, weirdly, she thought of Freddy's again.

Shaking her head as if she could throw the thoughts off like rain, she crawled up the dark stairwell. Two steps. Three. Four and then she was there, somewhere above the buried landing with her back brushing the ceiling and her knees sunk into garbage bags wrapping dubious contents, squeezing between a mountain of pillows shaped like Santa heads on one side and half a dozen steel folding chairs on the other to grip the doorknob. She pushed, but the door didn't open any further. It couldn't.

Her heart sinking, Ana turned off her phone's flashlight, brought the camera app up, stuck her arm through the few inches' gap and snapped a picture. When she looked at it, she could make out the top eight inches or so of her aunt's kitchen cabinets. All the rest—the sink, the stove, the refrigerator, the table, the chairs, the door to the mudroom and the hall that led to the front foyer and those carved castle doors—was buried somewhere beneath a sea of junk.

As she stared, her eyes fixed and unblinking upon the wrapped brass finial of a curtain rod that proved this was in fact her aunt's kitchen and not some horror house she had stumbled into by mistake, Ana heard a low wooden groaning shudder through the timbers, and all of a sudden, she could feel not just the reality of the hoard on which she balanced, but the tremendous weight of the hoard pressing down from the floors above. Because it was there; she knew it without needing to see it. Every room in this goddamned house was filled.

Every room but David's, she thought. When she finally dug her way up to it and down to the door, she had no doubt it would open freely on a room unchanged from the last time she'd seen it. His clothes would still be in the closet, except for the last ones he'd been wearing, which would be dropped on the floor. The last video game he'd been playing would still be plugged into the console and the controller would still be tossed to one side of the beanbag chair where he and she used to sit when they played. His Ninja Turtles and Batman movie posters would still be on the wall, with his pirate sword hanging between them and one of Freddy's hats resting on the bedpost. The room Ana used to stay in when she came for the weekends and summers would be buried, unusable, stinking of rats and trash, but David's room was just fine.

And if her aunt was anywhere in this house, she'd be there. For a moment, a bad moment, Ana could almost see her—a withered mummy dressed in mom-jeans and that deep purple blouse Aunt Easter liked to wear, lying on David's Spiderman sheets with her bony fingers serene, laced over her stomach, just waiting to be found.

The house groaned again, waking her out of that awful daydream, and Ana retreated, nowhere near as cautiously as she had come. If she could have stood up to run, she would have. As it was, she did not stop moving or really breathe again until she was scratching her way back out into the incredibly open air.

There she lay for some time, staring up at the house, propped partway on her elbows, breathing too hard for the little exertion she had undergone and trying to think in words again instead of pulses of grief and panic. What was she doing here? What could anyone do here? This was not a home any longer and the home that it had been was now so deeply buried no one could ever dig it out. All sentiment aside, what in the flaming fuck was she doing here?

The question dropped away inside her like a rock into a well.

After a long, long while, she thought, 'I'm going to need a ladder.'

"Why?" she asked the house warily.

Because when it came to cleaning out the house, she was going to have to start at the top floor and work her way down. Otherwise, it was altogether too easy to imagine her hollowing out the ground floor and the whole house collapsing explosively in on itself.

"I can't worry about that yet," Ana said, gathering herself to stand. She felt better on her feet, as if the horror within the house were a heavy gas she could physically rise above. She collected her thoughts, put them in order, and forced herself to look at the house as if it were one of the many she had flipped for Rider. "First things first, I've got to get a hold of the sanitation department and find out if I can rent a dump trailer from them or if I have to deal with a third-party service. Either way, I need to start by clearing the driveway so they can get in here and that's going to take at least two days. Am I going to need a burn permit?" she asked and immediately answered, "Sure as I start burning without one, Sheriff Fuckabuck will be on my doorstep writing me out a citation. Who do I call for one of those? Well, never mind, I can start by laying some of it down over the driveway, or the guy dropping off the dumpster might get mired."

That sounded like a plan, all right, but the plan sounded wrong. Ana stepped back, her eyes flicking from one waiting repair to another—from loose stones to peeling paint to missing shingles—and still could not find the starting point.

"Because that's not the first thing I do," she realized. "The first thing I do is find that stupid paper with the city contact information on it and stop the sons of bitches who are trying to condemn my aunt's…my house."

Nothing happened. Nothing changed. She felt neither welcome nor warning, only the rain.

"My house," she said again, chewing the words to release their full flavor before swallowing. They were bitter. "Mine."

And if she wanted to keep it longer than the next ninety days, she had a lot of work to do.