CHAPTER TEN
The next day, fireworks went on sale. Sort of. The real ammunition couldn't be legally sold until the 3rd, but the booths were open and that meant the first kids started trickling into the quarry around noon to throw poppers at lizards and each other. Ana kept working for a while, reminding herself it would get worse before it got better, and this was good practice. And so it was. Slouching along the beams behind the shielding half-wall that ringed in the roof soon became second-nature, so much that when she went down to double-check her figures, she didn't immediately straighten up after ducking under the table for her tablet. It took Freddy asking if she was all right before she realized she was crouch-walking out of the room.
All afternoon, Ana worked and watched kids come and go down at the quarry. The younger ones were soon crowded out by bigger boys, who were themselves displaced by even bigger ones who drove themselves in cars and brought bottles they could drink empty and then blow up. When they ran out of fireworks, they leaned up against the rocks and drank, and God knew, they might be doing that all the rest of the day.
Ana did what she could, well aware that she had only today and tomorrow to finish framing, but the stillness of the desert carried the sounds of male laughter from a quarter-mile away too damn easily for her to risk real work. She holed herself up in the corner of the roof to watch them, but each flash of the sun on a bottle made her paranoid that one of them might spy a similar flash off the lenses of her binoculars and without them, she couldn't see what they were doing well enough to justify the sunburn she was getting. Had she known who they were, she never would have left, sunburn or no, but the faces she saw through the army surplus binoculars were featureless and their voices were not distinct enough to let her hear them when they started talking about Freddy's…and Ana herself…so she left them and went below.
She cleaned for a while, because there was always cleaning to do, but mid-afternoon found Ana in the shade in the security room, relaxing in her canvas camping chair with her legs kicked up on the desk and a penlight between her teeth like a cigar, taking Chica's cupcake apart. She had shade to relax in because, like the parts room backstage, the manager's office, the quiet room, Kiddie Cove and the freezer in the kitchen, the security office was its own self-contained metal box. Of course, after hours exposed to the unrelenting summer sun, the shade wasn't terribly cool, but there was a nice breeze that gusted now and then to whisk the collecting heat away. She'd found an old-school rotary-blade desk fan while cleaning and if she ever got the wiring situation resolved, it would make a big difference, she was sure, but for now, it just sat on one corner of the desk with its cord dangling, standing guard over her half-eaten day-old Betty Burger and a couple empty water bottles. Every now and then, Ana would forget they were empty and reach for one, only to decide she wasn't quite thirsty enough yet to get up and go all the way to the cooler in the kitchen for a full one. She just wanted to sit here in the quiet, cool off a little, and see what flavor of hellcake was hiding under this pink plastic frosting.
It wasn't as simple as just taking out some screws. This deceptively toy-like little cupcake had been built like a damn Russian nesting doll. She had to get the bottom plate off to expose the battery case and the screws that fastened on the outer shell. Once the batteries were removed—plain AAs, surprisingly mainstream for a Fazbear animatronic—and the case cleaned of its corrosion, she slid the pleated-wrapper-shaped shell off the sides to expose a number of pressure plates and sensors nestled in a colorful thicket of wires against an inner shell. After sorting all that out and locating the next set of screws, Ana carefully pulled the inner shell away to see the cupcake's actual mechanisms, no more complicated than those of any other talking, moving toy: a couple simple motors attached to the hinged place where the frosting-cap connected to the cake-base, a simple speakerbox that looked nothing like the one in Bonnie's neck, and a solid mass of multi-colored wires in which computer chips and circuit boards were suspended like dead bugs in a funnel-web. But even this wasn't the end. She followed one wire to another compartment and opened it up to discover the music box component, complete with the broken pins that she'd heard rattling around when she shook the cupcake. When she pulled the spindle out to fix it, she discovered yet another compartment tucked underneath and opened that to find a diminutive spool feeding a perforated ribbon of what she initially assumed were stickers up through a slot and out the cupcake's mouth. She wasted several minutes trying to figure out how to open the mouth before giving up and simply taking the pins out of the hinges. Now she could finally locate the screws holding the frosting-cap on and remove them to see the mechanisms, wires and circuitry that operated the cameras behind those creepy humanoid eyes.
When she was done, she had pieces of cupcake laid out over every inch of the desktop, more wires and parts than she'd had to deal with in Bonnie's whole head. However, her sense of accomplishment as she put it all back together was subdued at best. Some deductions were obvious, but she still couldn't figure out what the cupcake did. Oh, sure, the eyes could blink and move within their sockets, and those cameras indicated it could respond to visual stimuli. The mouth could open and close to simulate talking. If the candle was wound, it played music and could perhaps sing along with itself. It could spit out stickers. Those pressure plates and sensors along its sides suggested it knew when it was being hugged, as opposed to being held, and perhaps also when it was being tipped upside-down. In other words, she saw a toy.
What exactly had she been expecting?
"Teeth," she admitted as she began the tedious process of fitting all those tiny parts back together within the confines of the cupcake, layer by layer by layer. "Big, sharp retractable fangs. Hypodermic needle-teeth, maybe. Full of LSD and spider-venom. Can I help you?" she concluded without looking up.
On the other side of the security window, Freddy stood, silently watching her. He had made no sound creeping up on her. If it weren't for the sunlight pouring down through the roofless top of the building into the hall, he would be all but invisible in the dark.
She thought he'd leave, now that he knew he'd been seen. Indeed, he started to turn away, but stopped and looked back at her. He pointed up. "I. THOUGHT. YOU. WERE. TAKING. THAT. DOWN."
Ana knew what he was pointing at, although she couldn't see it from inside the metal box that was the security office: the air-duct maze. It hadn't just been over the dining room, as she had somehow known it wouldn't be. No, it was the reason the rotten roof had held as long as it had, reaching from Kiddie Cove to the gymnasium and the party room to the security office, and there it was just going to have to stay.
"I'd love to," Ana said now. "But you see all those metal columns poking up through the walls? You know, the ones holding up the building?"
"YES."
"Those ducts are welded to them."
Freddy grunted, looking up.
"So I can't take them down. I'd have to cut them down. Which I could probably still do, since I have a pneumatic arm and some decent scaffolding. Probably, not definitely. I don't know what that stuff is and beyond the fact that it feels really sturdy from the outside, I don't know how much it weighs, but at a guess, I'd say it weighs a lot. More weight means cutting it apart in smaller segments, which in turn means more cutting, which in addition to meaning more juice for the torch also means more time, not just to do the cutting but to work the arm and move the scaffolding and so on and so on. Bottom line, I don't have the time to deal with that mess now and once I get the roof on, it becomes ten thousand times more complicated to deal with it at all. So fuck it. It's not hurting anyone, right?"
Freddy grunted again, his that-settles-that grunt, and turned around.
"It's weird, though."
Again he stopped and looked back.
"More time, planning, effort and above all else, money went into that thing than anything else in this entire building, present company excepted. I've had three days to look at it, up close and personal, and I still cannot figure out what the hell it is or what it's for. I'm a fuck-up in a lot of ways, as I'm sure you'll agree," she added lightly, fitting the inner shell of the cupcake over its interior mechanisms with a playful little slap and screwing it into place. "But when it comes to figuring out how things work or what things do, I'm the best there is, or at least, the best I've met. I may not always know what something's called, but I can take it apart and—" She gestured at the cupcake with her screwdriver. "—put it back together again and make it work. But that thing? I don't get it. More to the point, I can't see it. It's a damn air duct. No moving parts, no circuitry, no functionality beyond the obvious. And yet, here I sit, absolutely fucking confounded. You cannot imagine how that feels. It's like taming lions for a living only to be eaten alive by an anteater. You know?"
"YES."
"Anteaters don't even have teeth, Freddy."
"I KNOW."
"It's frustrating."
"I. SEE. THAT."
"So I can cover it up again, but it's always going to be there and I'm always going to know it's there. I can live with it, because I don't have much of a choice, but I'm never going to like it. You know how that feels—" She looked up at him, still reassembling plates and hooking up wires, smiling. "—don't you?"
He raised one eyebrow, just the one. "YOU. THINK. I. DON'T. HAVE. A. CHOICE."
She laughed and shook her head. "Don't you have a show to do?" she asked, returning her full attention to the cupcake.
He didn't answer, but he did walk away, heading back toward the dining room. Once he was out of her sight, he passed from her mind as well, and all Ana knew for the short time it took to finish reassembling the cupcake was which wire went where. If she had thought about him at all once he'd returned to the stage, she would have only thought he was cueing up for his magic act or a song or whatever came next in the five o'clock set on a Wednesday. Even if she'd seen him put his hand on Chica's shoulder, it might not have given her much pause—the animatronics were a huggy bunch during operating hours—but if she'd heard what he said next, it would have been all the proof she needed, making fixing the cupcake itself entirely unnecessary: "SHE'S. ALMOST. DONE. SHE. HAS. BATTERIES. SHE'S. GOING. TO. TURN. IT. ON. BUT. IT'S OKAY. SHE'S. ALONE. BUT. SHE'S. TOO. BIG. SHE. CAN'T. TRIGGER. YOUR. CAPTURE-MODE. ALL. SHE. CAN. DO. IS. SHOW. IT. TO. YOU. SO. LISTEN. TO. ME. CHICA. HERE AT FREDDY'S, WE HAVE A FEW RULES. FOR YOUR SAFETY, LISTEN CAREFULLY. RULE NUMBER FORTY-THREE, NO ANIMATRONIC IS ALLOWED ONSTAGE DURING ANOTHER ANIMATRONIC'S SCHEDULED PERFORMANCE. RULE FORTY-FOUR, DUETS ARE PROHIBITED UNLESS BOTH ANIMATRONICS ARE ONSTAGE. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?"
But she didn't see and she didn't hear. Ana slid the outer shell over the inner one, locked it down, popped in a couple fresh batteries and closed up the case. As soon as the tab clicked into place and formed that complete seal, she heard tiny motors start to whine and felt a slow spread of warmth between her hands as circuits came to life. She turned the cupcake right-side-up and set it on the desk facing her.
Its eyes lit up. It blinked, looked left, looked right, looked at her. Ana found it difficult to meet its gaze for long. Although the light was not especially bright, it hurt to look directly at it, like looking into a laser pointer. "Well, hi there!" it said.
It sounded exactly like a talking cupcake. Ana had not realized she knew what that would sound like until she heard it, but hearing it, she identified it immediately.
"Hi," she said cautiously.
"I'm Babycakes! What's your name?"
"Ana."
It did not attempt to say her name back at her, but simply giggled and said, "How old are you?"
"A lady doesn't tell and a cupcake doesn't ask," Ana said primly. "Besides, I thought Freddy's was a magical place for kids and grown-ups. What difference does it make how old I am?"
Babycakes waited for her to stop talking, giggled again, and said, "Are you having fun?"
She considered her options and said, "No."
Something in the cupcake ticked and hummed. It said, "Awwww! What's wrong?"
Ana shrugged, feeling a bit silly and unsure why. She was talking and Babycakes was talking back, but it did not feel like a conversation. It wasn't like talking to Bonnie or Foxy or Freddy…or even Chica, whose dialogue paths were the least evolved. This was just a toy.
She didn't know whether she felt relieved or disappointed.
"Don't be shy," said Babycakes. "You can tell me if you're sad. I'm your friend. And friends make friends feel better when they're sad." It clicked and hummed again, then replayed its sympathetic, "Awwww! What's wrong?"
"It's just a sucky sort of day," said Ana. "I've been playing catch-up all week and I'm not there yet. I've only got a few days left before I start the roofing work and I still haven't gotten the transfer box hooked up to the main. If I don't get the lead out in a hurry, I'll be pushing that damn elephant of a generator back and forth through the building on roofing day."
"That's too bad," said Babycakes. "But things will get better. You just have to think positive!"
"Yeah, sure. Think positive. Well, it's hot as hell and I'm under serious water restrictions, so I'm positive I reek, like, all the time. Just between us, I'm positive I've got a pretty good case of sweaty boob rash going on."
"I'm having so much fun," said Babycakes.
"Also, I haven't been laid in almost a year. Which may have something to do with the fact that things are positively heating up between me and the bunny. No lie, if I had some guarantee of getting Freddy out of the room for just twenty minutes, I would jump on that purple bastard and ride until he or I or both of us broke."
"That sounds like fun!"
"It does, doesn't it? Which says something unpleasant about me, I'm sure, since he's only, what? Twelve, thirteen years old? I'm a damn hebephile."
"I like you."
"You don't have the slightest idea what I'm saying, do you?"
"Do you want to be my friend?" asked Babycakes.
"Jesus, I got myself so worked up and you're nothing but a cupcake-shaped version of a Furby. Not even a real Furby, but the fucking lame-ass reboot."
"Do you want to be my friend?" asked Babycakes again.
"Eat shit and die, Frosting-Face," Ana remarked, giving the candle set in the cupcake's head an idle twist. It wound like the key on a music box, just as she'd known it would, and began to tinkle out notes.
Babycakes squinted up its eyes and giggled, but when it had played itself out, it looked at her and said, "I think I'm lost. Can you help me find Chica?"
"Well, I already feel like kind of an idiot, but sure, what the hell. Come on, Sugarbuns."
It was a fairly long walk from the back end of the building where the security office was located to the show stage in the front. Babycakes tried a couple opening lines on her, but Ana didn't respond to its chatter and giggles, and by the time she pushed through the hanging plastic sheets into the dining room, it had begun to yawn. The animatronics were in the middle of their act, so Ana sat down on her table to wait, holding the cupcake where it could see the stage too and occasionally giving it a slap to keep it from going to sleep on her.
Babycakes did not attempt to sing along with any of the songs. And although Chica was a bit twitchy up there as she played her invisible keyboard, Ana couldn't honestly say that meant anything ominous. Sometimes, they just got twitchy.
When the set ended, before Bonnie could get in the way, Ana hopped down from the table and headed for the stage. "Shut up," she said, since Babycakes was giggling, then raised her voice and called out, "Come here, Chica. I have something for you."
Chica looked at her and for half a second or so, all she did was shiver. Then something in her must have clicked over because she clapped her trembling hands and happily chirped, "FOR ME? AWW, THAT'S SO SWEET!"
"Sweet's my middle name," Ana agreed.
"My name is Babycakes!"
"Shut up, I said."
Freddy came to take Chica's arm and help steady her as she descended the three short steps. Chica could sometimes be weird about accepting this kind of help, but today she clutched at him, looking up into his face with an imploring expression.
"REMEMBER. THE. RULES," he told her.
Ana wasn't sure which rule he was referring to in this case, but it might have been the one about not touching Freddy, because Chica nodded, released his arm and climbed down the last step on her own. She waddled over to Ana, tapping her fingertips together and twitching a bit at the neck and shoulder joints.
"I found something," said Ana, holding the cupcake up so the two of them were eye-to-eye. "I think it's yours."
Chica's abdominal plate rattled. She put a hand over it and said, "IS THIS YOUR FAVORITE TOY? IT'S SO CUTE!"
"Well, hi there!" said Babycakes.
"HI THERE, I'M CHICA!" Chica replied, the pupils of her eyes rapidly irising open and shut, over and over.
"My name is Babycakes! What's your name?"
Ana frowned, but Chica appeared undaunted.
"HI THERE," she chirped again, "I'M CHICA!"
"Do you want to be my friend?"
"SURE! LET'S BE FRIENDS! DO YOU WANT TO PLAY A GAME?"
"How old are you?"
Chica twitched hard. "SURE! LET'S SING A SONG!" she chirped and did, launching immediately into The Safety Song while the cupcake blinked and giggled and occasionally yawned.
As they worked it out, Ana glanced over at Bonnie, idly wondering why he wasn't singing along. He was watching, and twitching, but not joining in. Weird. Or not. She was standing awfully close to Chica after all, and the animatronics did a pretty good job of not getting in each other's way when they were talking to guests. Chica had never interrupted when it was Ana and Bonnie going off together.
She had almost convinced herself and then she looked at Freddy.
Freddy was watching her. Not Chica and Babycakes, watching Ana. When their eyes met, he turned around and went over to Bonnie, starting up one of their between-set dialogues, but his gaze kept coming back to her.
'You're getting paranoid,' Ana told herself, watching Freddy sneak peeks at her. 'You're the only guest here. Who the hell else is he going to look at?'
"I think I'm lost," Babycakes said suddenly.
Chica cut herself off mid-verse. "LET'S GO FIND YOUR MOM!"
"Can you help me find Chica?"
"WHAT DOES SHE LOOK LIKE?" Chica asked.
"Oh for fuck's sake," sighed Ana. Catching Chica by the wing, she pushed the cupcake into the animatronic's trembling hand and made her plastic fingers close on it.
Babycakes made a clicking sound. "Hi, Chica!"
Ana stepped back. In spite of everything, she hadn't really believed it…or hadn't wanted to admit she believed it.
"IS THIS YOUR FAVORITE TOY?" Chica asked, shivering. "AWW, IT'S SO CUTE!"
"This is yours," said Ana faintly. "It's really yours."
"ARE YOU SHARING YOUR TOYS WITH ME? THAT'S SO SWEET!"
"Well, hi there!" said Babycakes.
"It's yours," said Ana, refusing to take the cupcake back. And when Chica just kept holding it out, Ana reached and wound the candle.
This time, as soon as she let go and the music began to play, Babycakes opened its eyes and sang. "My best friend's name is Chica and we're always together!"
Chica's head wrenched to a stiff bird-like angle and the few plastic feathers on top of her head jittered with the tremors that ran through her, but she did not join in.
"And that's how you show you've got a friend!" Babycakes concluded after an awkward pause.
"Aren't you going to sing?" asked Ana.
Chica looked at her. "DO YOU WANT TO SING A SONG?"
Ana could only shake her head. Chica could no more not sing along with a song she knew than Ana could not convert oxygen into carbon dioxide. Babycakes was obviously at home in her hand…but Chica barely seemed to know it was even there.
Babycakes opened its eyes and sang, "I can always count on Chica whenever I need a hand!" and looked up and around, waiting out what was now obviously Chica's part of the song, before continuing on, "And that's how you know you've got a friend!"
Chica looked at her, her pupils in constant flux, opening almost wide to enough to fill her sockets, only to snap back to normal in an instant. "ARE YOU SHARING YOUR TOYS WITH ME? THAT'S SO SWEET! BUT YOU CAN HAVE IT BACK NOW."
"I don't want it."
"Time for my big dance number!" Babycakes interjected and its eyes moved back and forth, frosting flipping up and down, punctuated by exclamations of, "Oh yeah! I'm on fire today! Okay, big finish now!" before bursting into song again. "I am always on your side and you always lift me up!" Silence. "And that's how you know, that's how you show, wherever you go, you've got a friend!"
The music ran out.
Ana and Chica stared at each other.
"ARE YOU SHARING YOUR TOYS WITH ME?" Chica asked again. "THAT'S SO SWEET!"
"It's not mine," said Ana and felt her cracked certainty shatter. "It's not yours either, is it?"
Chica stared at the cupcake in her hands until it giggled at her, then twitched hard and said, "IF YOU LOSE SOMETHING OR IF YOU FIND SOMETHING THAT DOESN'T BELONG TO YOU, YOU SHOULD TAKE IT TO THE LOST AND FOUND."
Ana sighed and finally smiled. "And that's it, huh? That's all you've got for me?"
Chica shivered. "IF YOU NEED HELP, YOU SHOULD ASK AN ADULT."
"I am an adult."
Chica held out the cupcake.
"Hoist by my own petard," remarked Ana, but took it. "Thanks, Chica."
"YOU'RE WELCOME! DO YOU WANT TO SING A SONG—" Chica twitched, her eyes filling up with black before slowly shrinking down to their usual soft purple color. "DO YOU WANT TO PLAY A GAME?"
"Maybe later." Ana took the cupcake back to the security office and put it on the desk next to the fan, ignoring its intermittent efforts to engage her as she cleaned up her tools. Soon, it was yawning and soon after that, it shut its eyes and switched itself off, as any toy will do when not in use.
Ana put her belt back on, gathered the empty bottles and the uneaten portion of her burger, dumped them in a box in the breakroom and went on from there through the store room to the kitchen, where she holstered a few fresh bottles of water before climbing back up on the roof. If she had happened to look down through the dining room roof, she would have seen Chica huddled at the foot of the stage, gripping Freddy's hand in both of hers, her face pressed to his round belly. His other hand rested on the top of her bent head, not petting her and not speaking, but only holding her close while Bonnie knelt at his side, rubbing Chica's shoulder to soothe her shivers.
But Ana didn't need to work over the dining room anymore, so she never saw them. She checked once on the quarry, but the fireworks party had fizzled out and the guys still gathered there were just sitting around and talking. If she could have heard them talking—about Freddy's, about her—she would not have dismissed them so easily, but she couldn't hear them, and even through the binoculars, she couldn't get a good enough look at their faces to realize she knew them. All she knew was she still had a few hours of daylight and a lot to do, so she got to work.
As Ana worked on the roof that would be keeping off the rain on that night, less than two weeks away now, that would find her lying on the floor of Pirate Cove in a puddle of cooling blood, Riley Hill, who would also be there on that not-so-distant night, walked with his sort-of-friend down Old Quarry Road right past the pizzeria he thought was abandoned and empty. It was neither, as he would learn. Riley would die in that building, on that night, listening to the rain on the roof and the tinkling notes of the Toreador March. No one would ever find his body. At the time of his death, no one had yet realized he was missing. That he had come to a bad end somewhere seemed obvious as the years passed, but no one could have guessed how. Even Mike Schmidt never put the name of Riley Hill on his list.
The Hill family had moved into town only three years ago after the promise of a job in California had dried up and blown away, leaving them to slink back to Jersey with no home, no income and dwindling credit on their already delinquent cards. After days on the road, Riley's dad had taken a wrong turn off the highway and then a few more and somehow ended up in Mammon, where their van broke down. The guy at the repair shop had not been sympathetic enough to their tale of woe to fix the van for free, but he did have a sister who ran the town's only trailer park and who needed someone to manage it. So they had moved in—two adults and six kids aged four to seventeen in one double-wide trailer. The idea had been for his dad to get a job while his mom managed the paper side of the park and the older kids pitched in on the physical side and took care of the younger ones. It was all temporary, they assured each other, just until they had their financial feet under them. They'd find something better as soon as something better came along.
Something better never did.
Riley had still been in school then, at least in theory. He had given up on education when he was twelve and his teachers followed suit a few years later. By the time he was enrolled in Mammon's Blackwood High, he was contentedly illiterate, attending school only when it was raining and he had nowhere else to go. The only thing he needed to know was where the next high was coming from, and once he'd gained an introduction to Jack Kellar, who at that time was the baddest element Mammon had to offer, Riley's education was complete.
If the loose company that was Jack's clique could be viewed as a ladder, Riley would have been the lowest rung. He knew it, but had no ambition to rise any higher. Everyone needed someone they could step on, after all, and by being the one guy who would always let it happen without resentment or retribution, Riley had made his position in the Kellar gang secure. Even after Mason Kellar got out of prison and came home to show Mammon what a real bad element looked like, Riley felt reasonably safe hanging out with them. He could not read or drive or cook, but he made up for it by doing whatever else he was told to do, regardless of personal threat. He held whatever Mason or Jack told him to hold, delivered whatever he was told to deliver, and could be convincingly ignorant on those rare occasions that the local law tried to question him because he genuinely knew nothing most of the time.
A few months ago, back at the Riley homestead, the bickering had progressed through icy silence to screaming to throwing things to hitting to regular visits from cars with spinning lights, and at last, the family ties snapped. Late one evening as Riley was hanging out at the Kellar house, his mother made good on her longstanding threats, packed a bag, called her boyfriend to come get her, and left. Riley's father very rationally threw every possession she'd left behind into their narrow yard and set it on fire. The wind was blowing strong off the quarry that night. An hour later, as the full force of Mammon's volunteer fire department was putting out the last embers where previously there had been three trailers, the park office and a little playground, Riley's father was arrested. The remainder of their broken family went in the back of the sheriff's car to the government building and phone calls were made. In the morning, the children were driven to the nearest Greyhound station and put on five different buses to meet with extended relatives in five different states. By noon, Riley's father was being transported out to the county jail. And at a little past three in the afternoon, Riley woke up on Jack Kellar's floor and went home to find a lot of ash where he used to sort of live.
Since then, he had been couch-surfing, wearing out the goodwill of the other members of Jack's clique one by one, and sleeping in the park whenever they threw him out. That was fine for now, but every now and then, he found himself wondering what the hell he was going to do when summer ended and Mammon's batshit crazy winter weather rolled in. He had tried to call his mom, but her number wasn't working. The sheriff had given him a bunch of papers, but Riley couldn't read them and eventually had lost them. He knew he'd be okay because he always had been, but it bothered him if he thought about it too hard, so he tried not to do that.
Today was a pretty good day, though. Mason had been in a bad mood the last couple of weeks, and even when Mason was in a good mood, he could be pretty scary, so Riley was staying nights with another of Jack's low-rung lackeys, Bats. Bats was over thirty, looked forty, and lived in the basement at his mom's house, where he had a pretty sweet spread, even if it did share space with the washer and dryer and water heater and stuff. Riley didn't like Bats that much—he did a lot of meth and it made him mean and wild—but he liked Bats's mom, who was a good cook and always set a place at the table for Riley when he stayed over. Bats swore at his mom when he got high and once even shoved her into a wall, but Riley was always nice to her, washing dishes and mowing grass and even going to church if he was there on Sundays (he tried not to be, for this reason). Sometimes, he had daydreams about Bats going away someplace vague and Riley living there instead, and she would call him a nice boy and he would take care of the place and it would be like a family thing.
But not today. Today, Bats and his mom had got into a huge fight over some stuff that had gone missing from her room, so they both had to leave. They went to Jack's house, but Jack was out with his mom someplace and Mason had his guys over, so they left again. They went to the park first, but the park was too full of people all getting ready for the Fourth of July, so they ended up walking all the way out to the quarry, because Bats thought there might be some kids out there. Sometimes kids had money and they'd give it up if you pushed them around a little. Bats said there might even be girls. Riley had not liked the way he said it, but when you hung with Jack and Mason Kellar, you learned to roll with it, no matter what, and keep your mouth shut after.
There were no kids in the quarry when they got there, though, only grown men with jobs and cars who looked at you with their working-man eyes and cracked the knuckles on their working-man hands. Seeing them, Bats didn't want to stay, but Riley recognized one of the men. Will Slater, who, back when they'd both been in high school, had actually been the one who introduced him to Jack Kellar. They hadn't seen each other much since—Slater had managed to knock up a girl two years before Riley had even met him and as much fun as he could be, most of his talk had been bitching about diapers and bottles, so Riley had politely drifted away. Now, however, he could see that Slater and his friends had brought a cooler full of ice and beers and a box of chicken from the gas station, so he ignored Bats plucking at his arm and headed on over.
"Hey," he said as four grown men stood up together to face off against him. "Long time, man. How's the kid?"
Three men scowled but the fourth only frowned. "I know you?"
"Hell yeah, it's me, Riley. We went to high school together. I was the new kid. And you were the fucking boss," he added, because even if Riley had dropped out of formal education with a solid F-average, he was not necessarily stupid all the time. "You could have owned that fucking school if it hadn't been for whatshername."
"Fucking bitch," replied Slater. "She thought she was going to get me to fucking marry her. That was her big plan from the start, you believe it?"
"I sure do," said Riley, who had never met the girl in question. "Everyone fucking knew it. She was after you from the fucking start. She do it?"
"Naw, man. She tried and her folks tried, but fuck that. She squeezes enough blood out of me as it is. Fucking child support. How is that fair? I gave the bitch five hundred dollars for a fucking abortion, you believe that? What the hell did she spend it on?"
"And you know she'll never pay it back," said Riley. "Can't even ask for it back or you're the asshole, right?"
"Right!" cried Slater, flinging his empty bottle at the nearest boulder. "Jesus Christ, you get it! No, I got to pay and pay and pay, and meanwhile, she's just skipping through life like it's a field of fucking daisies. First it's she wants to finish high school and now she's taking these courses out at the community college. She's a fucking mom, that's her fucking job! But oh no, she wants to study hotel management, can you believe it? She spent one lousy summer cleaning sheets at the Sugartree and now she thinks she can run a hotel. Wants to move to Provo with her cousin. I told her go the fuck ahead and move. I'm tired of her dropping the little shit off with me every fucking weekend. Probably not even mine. I ought to get a fucking paternity, that's what I ought to do. Only reason I don't is because it might actually prove he's mine and then she'll dump him on me for good. Everyone always talks about these bitches who want full custody. Why couldn't I have knocked up one of them? Plus, she's getting fat," groused Slater and sat back down, fishing out a fresh bottle from the cooler and tossing it to Riley, at whom Bats was staring with dumbfounded admiration. "Sit down, man. Guys, this is…"
"Riley," said Riley, finding a comfortable rock to sit on and opening his beer. "And this is my buddy, Bats."
"Wyborn," said the man next to Slater, then nodded at the other two. "And that's Taylor and Hageman."
"Wow," said Bats with a laugh. "You know you're sitting at the grown-up's table when nobody uses a fucking first name."
All four working men looked at him, identical stares, unsmiling.
"What the hell kind of name is Bats?" Slater asked and immediately turned to Riley. "Why the hell are you hanging out with a guy who calls himself Bats? What the hell is that about? Is that supposed to be a fucking Batman reference? What is he, fucking ten? Bats," he said again, glaring at Bats, who found enough of a fingernail to pick at. "Who the fuck are you kidding? You're Arnold Campbell, you fucking sketcher."
"Don't mind him," said Taylor, lighting up a cigarette and offering the pack to Riley; he took two and handed one to Bats. "He's just pissy on account of the boss being up his ass lately."
"Fucking belt-hitching motherfucker," Slater muttered, and Wyborn gave him a comradely slap on the back.
"Sucks," said Bats, awkwardly attempting to redeem himself. "What kind of work do you do?"
"Shelton Contractors. Construction. Well, this month," he added with a snort. "Last month, he had me digging ditches like a fucking tool, changing out the old drainage pipes for part-time pay."
"Yeah, I saw you guys doing that," said Bats with cautious enthusiasm. "Closing off a different back road every day. I had to go fucking two miles out of my way just to get around you once."
"You think that was my idea, fucktard?" Slater challenged and gave Riley another incredulous stare. "Why are you with this fucking guy?"
"He's a friend of mine," said Riley and followed up with a wrinkle-smoothing, "Hot as hell out there for that kind of work. Sorry, man. That sucks monster balls."
"You're telling me, man. Working my ass into the fucking ground while Shelly stands there with his thumbs through his belt, all, 'Harrumph harrumph, you boys better get busy!'" he said in a goofy-dumbass voice that would have done any twelve year-old proud. "He can't prove I had anything to do with those other culverts, why's he got to punish me?"
"Because you took them," said Taylor.
"You can't prove that either," said Slater with a hard stare. "And anyway, I wasn't the only one who scrapped those culverts. He's already backed off Wyborn, so why's he still riding me?"
"Ah, he's always on the rag about something," Hageman declared, drinking. "Let it go, man. He'll move on to the next guy who fucks up."
"Easy for you to say. You're about to be the only licensed electrician left on payroll. You could drop trou and take a steamy shit on his desk and he wouldn't say a fucking word about it."
"Stay in school, kids," said this Hageman with a justified smirk.
"Sounds like he's got it out for you," said Riley, pulling the bucket of chicken over to him.
"He's punishing me," Slater insisted, slapping his wounded heart, "because he's running his business into the fucking ground. That's all this is. He likes to strut around talking about the old days, blah blah blah, with Big Paulie and Burtwell and all those other old farts nodding their heads, but the fact of the matter is, he does not know what he's doing anymore. We all know it, but Stark really rubbed his nose in it and now he knows he just looks like a fucking fossil."
Bats looked up from the cigarette he was lighting, twin flames from his Bic reflected in his narrow eyes. "Stark?"
"You know." Slater mimed pulling something out of the back of his head—a braid—and then cupped his hands impressively in front of his chest. "Come on, you've got to know who I'm talking about. She's the hottest piece of ass in this whole fucking town. The Stark kid. Annie."
"Ana," said Bats, the name leaving his mouth as smoke. "Yeah, I know her. Went to school with her back in the day. Don't really remember her."
"Gee, I wonder why?" Hageman said with a snort.
"She was a couple grades below me," Bats told him, wiping defensively at his mouth, like that could hide his yellowed and missing teeth. "Who the fuck notices a third-grader when you're in sixth?"
"She did the remodeling work at my friend's house," Riley piped up. "That's how I know her."
The working men gave Riley another group-stare, this one more cautious.
"You know Mace Kellar?" Slater asked finally.
"Yeah, sure," said Bats, omitting the information that it was mostly Mason's brother, Jack, that they knew. "We hang out all the time."
"And Ana's cool," Riley added. He meant it, too, although he hadn't exchanged more than a dozen words with her in all the time he'd known her. She had brought doughnuts a couple times and had never once yelled at Riley for getting in her way. Beyond that, he genuinely envied the way she talked to Mason, like she wasn't scared of him at all. Jack didn't like her, though, so it was smart to talk shit about her when Jack could hear, but Riley had been a little sorry when she stopped coming around. "She's working for your boss now?"
"Was. She walked on him last week. I don't know the details." Slater had a sip of beer, looking sourly over his shoulder. "What's she need to worry about work for? She's got that big house up there on Coldslip. Probably worth millions."
"Naw. Place is a shithole," said Bats as Riley looked curiously up at the dark, wooded slopes of the mountain. He couldn't see any houses. In the three years he'd been in Mammon, he'd never realized there was anything out here on Old Quarry Road but the old pizza place and the quarry itself. "You may think it's all antiques, but I'm telling you, I've been up there a couple times. Basement's full of shit like you would not believe, and it's all junk. It's like a black hole for fucking yard sale garbage."
"Shows what you know," said Slater. "Besides, it's not the stuff in the house, it's the house itself that's got money in it, if you know where to look. All those old buildings are full of copper wires and pipes, and a place like that, probably the doorknobs are brass and there's maybe a bunch of carved wood trim and stuff that's worth a fucking fortune. I'd have scrapped it out a long time ago if I'd had something decent to haul the goods off in. Now it's too late. I'd give my left nut for just one night alone in that dump. I could fucking retire."
"Don't even think about it," Hageman warned. "Stark won't bother calling the cops if she hears a bump in the night, she'll come at you with a fucking hammer. Besides, I'd be very much surprised if that place still qualifies as a dump. She's been fixing it up, I hear, and she does good work—"
"For a girl," Slater muttered. "Everybody in this fucking town's having screaming chocolate orgasms over that goddamn daycare like it's the only set of shelves anyone ever saw. Hell, I could have built better, if I wasn't busting my ass on culverts."
"How do those grapes taste?" Hageman asked with a crooked smile. "Little sour, you say? Anyway, I'm guessing her house probably looks pretty good by now. I wouldn't say it's worth millions, but she might get her money back out of it when she sells, which is a goddamn miracle in my opinion."
"She's putting it up for sale?" Taylor asked. "First I've heard of it. Who told you?"
"No one, but come on. What the hell else is she going to do?"
"You really think you could get that much for pipes?" Bats pressed, leaning forward slightly to peer at Slater.
"Copper ones, sure. All that old metal shit is worth money, man. Copper, brass, even aluminum and steel goes for something. That place—" Slater pivoted and pointed his beer up at the pizza parlor that squatted, abandoned as long as Riley had lived in Mammon, up on the plateau. "—would be a fucking gold mine if you could get inside it. All I've managed to do so far is get into the lobby, but there's so much fucking shit heaped up, I can't dig past it. Still, last time I was there, I pulled enough crap out of the pile to turn into fifty bucks."
"Big money," drawled Hageman, shaking his head. "Man, that isn't even enough to pay your gas, much less your bail."
"What do I keep telling you? I've got a fucking Fiat! I can barely fit change in my pocket driving that fucking clown car! Let me borrow your truck for one night!"
"So you can break into Freddy's and fill it with stolen property? Fuck that, you're on your own."
"Wyborn—"
"Hey, once was enough, man," said Wyborn, putting up both hands like he was warding off a gun. "I can't do that shit again. I'm a coward. I still about piss myself every time I see Zabrinsky and do you know how often I see that guy? He lives two houses down from me!"
Slater turned to Riley. "What kind of car you got, man?"
"Don't have one," Riley admitted. "Sorry."
"My mom's got a minivan," said Bats. "I could borrow it."
"Okay, if you guys are going to talk crimes, I'm going to hit the road," Hageman announced, heaving himself onto his feet.
"It's not a real crime," Slater said scornfully. "It's recycling. I'm not breaking into anyone's house, for Christ's sake. The building's empty."
"Except for Freddy," Taylor said, also rising to leave. Seeing Riley's confusion, he tipped a wink. "Freddy's always there."
"Who's Freddy?" asked Riley.
The men looked at each other and sat back down. Fresh beers were opened. Stories were told, campfire stories without the campfire, beginning a hundred years ago with miners in this very quarry, a collapse, a cannibal, and so on up through the ages, with hungry ghosts haunting cursed land until they found homes in, of all things, animal-shaped robots at the town pizza parlors. All of which sounded like bullshit, they all solemnly agreed, but people did go missing in Mammon. Everyone knew someone who had disappeared in Freddy's—a cousin, a sister's boyfriend's brother, a babysitter's grandmother's best friend. Everyone had gone to Freddy's when they were kids and seen the animatronics for themselves, and everyone had snuck in after hours to see the way they were when no one was around. And everyone knew they were still there, in that pizza parlor right now, walking the empty halls in search of trespassers to catch and eat.
For Riley, talk of scrapping was utterly forgotten, but not for Bats. As Riley listened with increasing unease, Bats and Slater drew off to one side to talk, occasionally gesturing up at the building they thought was empty as they made plans for Bats's mother's minivan and the Fourth of July.