CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Ana must have opened her eyes a dozen times after that—every time the crows went off, in fact—but she couldn't seem to stay awake. Her sleep was both thin and deep, like ice over rushing water. She fell through it, drowned, was dragged by the current along the jagged rocks, and ejected only to fall through again. Memories masqueraded as dreams, and vice versa, until at last she broke free and woke up for good.
She did not, could not, immediately move. Her body's hurts were so many and so overwhelming that in those first few moments, she could not tell what hurt at all. As reality asserted itself, the boundaries of pain were illuminated and eventually, she could take honest stock of herself and decide she was not actually dying after all, just beat on damned good. She could still taste the blood in her mouth, feel the heat of the bruise over the side of her face, and there was a knot the size of an egg on the back of her head where she supposed she'd been slammed into the floor, although she couldn't remember it happening. A knock on the head would do that, she knew. Make you forget things. Make you imagine things. Make you dream with your eyes open and doubt you'd ever come all the way awake. This was not her first beating, not even her worst.
Although it could have been. Should have been. She could not remember it, beyond a vague impression of Mason's face above her. And his fists. Had he been alone? She had the idea that there had been others. Just the idea, not a memory, unless it were several steps removed, like a memory of a picture of a page of a diary from a blurry copy of a video tape. Perhaps it was only the fact that she had rarely if ever seen Mason do anything alone. He liked to have his boys around him, especially when it came to teaching them an object lesson about power and control. So there had to have been more of them, whether she remembered it or not.
Where were they now? Gone to find her tools and get a handsaw to make the job of transporting her body easier, she supposed. But if so, why was she even still alive right now? And for that matter, her shirt was gone and she seemed to be missing her left boot, but her bra was still on and so were her jeans. What self-respecting group of armed thugs didn't at least take turns at the girl they'd come to beat to death?
She thought about it, and while she was thinking about it, the plastic clams along the wall suddenly popped open and started singing. Then the fish. And then the crows. Familiar song, familiar sequence. But when it came to the end, the curtain did not go up. Foxy did not appear on the deck of his ship where she could sort of almost maybe remember hiding. The crows ahoyed and told their half of the jokes that opened his act, but Foxy wasn't there.
Ana sat up. It hurt her arms, her head, her ribs—her everything. She forced herself to take a deep breath and called, as loud as she could make herself speak, "Foxy?"
Nothing. No answer. No opening door, no thump of metal feet on wooden boards. He wasn't there.
Or couldn't answer.
She climbed to her feet, staggered to the wall and held up her watch to the faint silvery shine of an animatronic fish. Five o'clock. It was a testament to Ana's state of mind that she had to stand there under the glowing fish, listening to the crows, knowing that the source of the dread knotting up her guts stemmed from the fact that Foxy was not putting on his scheduled show, and still had no way of knowing if that meant five in the afternoon or five in the morning.
She limped out into the West Hall, pulling the black plastic away from the windows as Tux complimented her ass on its intelligent and inquisitive demeanor. Sunlight, the pale, piercing sort of sunlight that only follows one hell of a storm. Afternoon, then. Slower to sink in but more important to take note of, the parking lot was empty.
She knew that didn't necessarily mean that Mason and his boys were gone, but she believed it at once anyway. The building just felt empty.
…the building felt really empty.
She looked at Tux, but it wasn't Tux she was thinking of.
Keeping one hand to her head to hold the headache in, Ana staggered down the East Hall, checking every door she passed along the way. All empty. Her stuff in the party room had once again been thrown around, but it all seemed to be there. Even her tablet was still on its charger and there was no way Mason would have left that behind. Although robbery might not have been his priority when he came here, he would have considered it his due reward for the thankless task of killing her. But it was still here, untouched, and the job of killing her, unfinished.
Not unfinished. Interrupted. And not by local law enforcement. Sheriff Zabrinsky didn't like her, but he wouldn't have left Ana lying on the floor in Pirate Cove after she'd taken a beating as bad as this one felt like. If nothing else, he would have arrested her, too. So that meant someone else had interrupted them…
"Freddy?" she called.
Silence.
Ana continued on the last length to the dining room. The new doors in the lobby had been broken open and could not fully close again. So it was dim, but not dark. And not quiet. Through hidden speakers on the wall, happy music played at a background volume, accompanying the joke-segment of the scheduled act, but no one was onstage.
They had to be here. They had to be.
"Bonnie?"
Something in the kitchen rattled. Then eyes, blessed eyes, glowing at her from the doorway. "IT SURE IS GREAT TO SEE YOU!" Chica said. "ARE YOU OKAY?"
"Oh wow, it's great to see you, too!" Ana crashed across the empty room and finally fell against the animatronic, who in turn fell back against the wall. Chica grabbed her as much as Ana grabbed Chica; they steadied each other, neither one secure on their own feet. "Where is everyone? Where's Bonnie?"
"DON'T WORRY, KIDS! BONNIE THE BUNNY WILL BE RIGHT BACK!"
"But where is he?" Ana pulled away in the faint hope that making eye contact would help Chica stay on target, only to lose the question herself. She did not exactly forget Bonnie, but the importance of finding him was hooked violently to one side as she got a good look at Chica's bib.
Whatever those reddish-brown smears across the playful letters spelling LET'S EAT were, they were not pizza sauce.
"What is this?" she asked shakily. Her mind's wheels, toothless and unoiled, tried to present options. She refused to look at them. "What…What have you been eating, Chica?"
"WHO, ME? PIZZA IS MY FAVORITE FOOD! I LIKE LOTS OF HEALTHY VEGGIES ON MINE!" The last few words distorted as Chica twitched and shook her head, then looked down at herself. She touched her bib, hesitated, then reached out and gently touched Ana's chest. When she took her hand away and held it up before Ana's eyes, her yellow fingers were stained with red.
Ana stared at that, then looked down and for the first time noticed she was covered in blood.
Holding out her arms, she stared at herself in owl-eyed confusion, unable to comprehend what she was seeing or how she had managed to not see it all this time. She could distinctly remember looking right at her chest, seeing the bra but not this…this fucking gorefest. Where had it all come from? She touched her nose; it didn't feel broken. Her teeth were all there. She had small cuts everywhere, but no real wounds. And yet, she had been soaked in blood.
"ARE YOU OKAY?" Chica asked.
"I'm fine," said Ana, baffled. "I think so, anyway. Are you?"
Chica nodded.
"Why aren't you onstage? It's showtime, right? Where is everyone?"
Chica tapped her fingertips and did not answer.
"Foxy's not in the Cove, either. I don't think he is…I don't know. I called. He didn't answer…but he can't leave," she recalled, pressing her hands over her aching eyes. "He can't leave the Cove during the daytime. And you aren't onstage. Where's Freddy? Where's Bonnie?"
"HEY, KIDS! LOOKS LIKE FREDDY IS ON HIS WAY TO THE MAIN STAGE AND YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS!" Chica chirped, nodding reassuringly, because she was a robot and what in God's name did Ana think she was going to get out of her?
"Can you go get him? Get Freddy? And Bonnie. I need Bonnie." Her voice cracked. She wiped at her eyes, but they only stung worse. She'd just wiped blood into them instead of wiping tears away. "Chica, I want to see Bonnie, okay? Right now!"
Chica took her hand, but only led her to the sink. There was a plastic bucket in it, upside-down to dry. Chica removed it, turned on the water, took off her bib and ran it under the tap, then used it to gently wash Ana's face. "IT'LL BE OKAY," she said as blood swirled away down the drain. "COME BACK SOON!"
"What? Who? You mean Mason?"
Chica shook her head, making gentle hushing sounds, as if she were soothing a cranky child to sleep. She rinsed her bib, wrung it out, wet it and washed Ana's face again. So much blood…
"Is he still here? Him and…the other guests? The people? Chica, did you see them?"
"I GUESS IT'S JUST YOU AND ME."
"But where are the others? Where's Bonnie? And Freddy and Foxy?" Ana caught Chica's hand and pushed the bib away. "What happened? I don't remember anything."
"SOMEONE NEEDS A NAP!"
"No, I don't, I need to know what the hell happened here!"
As if in answer, she heard a high metallic groan, followed by a heavy crash and rattle in the storeroom—a familiar sound in its own way. She had heard it before, when pulling the old loading dock door down. She half-turned, half-leapt, her only thought that Mason had come back, or worse, never left, and now he had the drop on her, but it wasn't Mason. She knew the heavy drag of those footsteps, knew that low wordless grumble. Even if the silhouette that lurched into view was different—amazing the difference one missing hat could make—she knew who it was.
Freddy stopped in the doorway, his ears shivering upright when he saw her. His fan revved. He didn't look happy to see her. She wasn't sure she was happy to see him.
His legs from the knees down and arms up to the elbows were darker than the rest of him, the surviving fur matted and black. Her eyes tried first to see blood, because fuck Mike Schmidt and his ghost stories, but after that first terrible second or two, the rest of her perceptions weighed in and informed her it was merely mud. Nasty mud, the thick, putrid kind that slimes up the bottom of still ponds and culverts, except on his feet, where he'd picked up a heavy coat of red desert earth. There had been a hell of a storm raging earlier, but even if Freddy had been gaily splashing through every puddle in the parking lot, he couldn't have gotten that muddy. Where the hell had he been?
"HI FREDDY," said Chica finally. "IT SURE IS GREAT TO SEE YOU."
"Will ye-e-e not move?" said Foxy waspishly, squeezing in under Freddy's arm without giving the other animatronic a chance to comply. "I've g-got to get back to the C-Cove before—ah. Sh-SHIVER ME TIM—shit."
His feet were also muddy, Ana saw, although not as bad as Freddy's, maybe because he had no fur left to get clotted up. She felt a distant sort of worry for his exposed endoskeleton, which had not been built to withstand mudding even when they had a protective carapace, and as long as she was focused on the potential damage this had caused, she did not have to get too good a look at what was staining his hook. Red desert earth, surely. What else would it be?
Like a memory of a picture from a book in a dream, she heard herself say, 'Are you going to kill him?' and the cheerful growl of Foxy's gunpowder-and-rum reply, 'Oh aye. We're all going to try, luv, but it's going to be me.'
And that had happened. That had really happened, because as crazy and impossible as it was, if it hadn't happened, Mason would still be here. He'd be here and she'd be dead. But he was gone and she was covered in blood.
…she was covered in someone else's blood.
And then she heard and saw something that knocked all the horror out of her before it could take on a cohesive form. What she heard were footsteps—heavier even than Freddy's, slow and lurching—a wet, sucking, swampy stride that came ponderously in from the loading dock door, through the blackness and into the kitchen. What she saw was a figure, inhumanly tall, with dangling arms and long, drooping ears, his entire body slumped as if with exhaustion and coated in black ooze.
"Bonnie?"
The head turned, ears straining to rise against the tremendous weight of whatever he'd been dipped in.
"Oh, Bonnie," she said, too stunned to even move yet. "What did they do to you?"
Her first thought, as ridiculous as it was, was that Mason and his boys had tried to tar and feather him, but forgot the feathers. Then the smell hit and she knew. They'd stolen the animatronics, dragged them out to the quarry and dumped them. Bonnie, it seemed, had gone all the way over into the flooded pit.
"Those sons of bitches!" she spat, outrage flooding all the hollow places inside her. "I'll kill them!"
Freddy and Foxy exchanged a glance. Freddy moved out of the doorway at last to let Ana through, going over to stand next to Chica. Foxy stayed where he was, watching Ana circle Bonnie.
"How am I going to get this shit off you?" Ana muttered, swiping her hands across his chest and sending a deluge of slime to the kitchen floor. It just kept dripping out of him, forming a lake of dark water around him that spread and spread and spread without stopping. Her shop vac could only suck up the worst of the wet stuff and only on the flatter areas of his body. She had a pressure washer, although his casing was in such poor condition that she was as likely to break him completely open as to clean him off, but what were her options? The sprayer on the kitchen sink would be about as effective against this tarry sludge as a squirt gun.
"I need a handheld steamer," she said out loud, picking matted grass clotted up with indescribable gunk out of his shoulder joint. "And a power scrubber. And a hair drier." She offered him her best we're-both-going-to-be-fine smile. "Get it? A hare drier?"
He rolled his eyes, but when his mouth moved, what came out was a wordless gronk of electronic noise, so low in pitch it barely registered to the ear but so loud, it hurt to hear it.
Bonnie pulled back, gripping at his throat, and looked at Freddy, who looked back at him in alarm.
"HI BONNIE," said Chica, her eyes wide. "HI BONNIE! HI BONNIE! HI BONNIE!"
"What was that?" Ana asked, easily the stupidest thing on a long list of stupid things she'd said since waking up on the floor of Pirate's Cove. And because she really wasn't that stupid, no matter what she said, instead of waiting for an answer, she grabbed his mouth and pried it open.
At first, she saw nothing unusual. His teeth. His sculpted, inflexible tongue. His other set of teeth. The dark opening at the back dropping down into his stomach. It took a moment for her to see the slight bulging along the top and sides where it seemed the silicone was coming away from the frame and blistering inward. Hesitantly, she reached in and prodded at the biggest blister with her fingertip. It gave easily, but there was a weight behind it. Almost like a real blister. And it was wet. Wet and cold and slimy.
Because there was water coming in, streaming almost invisibly in around his teeth and the front end where his muzzle met the silicone sleeve of his mouth. Water, pouring in and down his dark throat. So much water. Where was it coming from?
Ana felt her breath catch, although her mind remained stubbornly, defensively blank. She did not know what she was thinking, but her hands knew what they were doing as she stepped back, closed his mouth, then took careful hold of Bonnie's muzzle and lifted it up and off his cracked face.
Easily half a gallon of brackish water puked out of him and onto the floor between them.
She could see it everywhere now, beading up around his shoulder and hip joints and trickling down his sides, but almost every seam was sealed with thick, tarry mud that let nothing through. He was full up to the top of his neck with quarry-water.
'He said he was water-resistant,' she thought, so clearly it almost seemed to be the voice of another person, the angel on her shoulder, perhaps.
And the devil replied, 'Water-resistant doesn't mean water-proof. You can wear a watch in the rain, but that doesn't always mean you can take it in the pool.'
She stared for the longest second of her life and then she was on her knees and yanking at the hard plates that cased his legs all the way down from his hips until she found one on his left ankle that would open. Water poured out, thick and reeking as rotten blood, washing black blades of grass and slimy leaves out over the kitchen floor.
"You'll be okay," said Ana. Her eyes felt as big as Chica's, but she tried to smile as her numb hands pulled futilely at his other ankle. "You'll be fine. I spilled a cup of coffee on my keyboard once and it locked up, but as soon as I got it drained and dried, it worked just fine. You're okay. I'm going to the store. I'm going to get some stuff—fuck me," she interrupted, looking down at herself.
Bonnie gronked again, and again, looked surprised.
"I've got to get cleaned up first," said Ana, already on her feet and heading for the door, slipping in the sludge with every step. "At home. Shower and soap. Then to the store. I'll be back. Don't move. You're okay. I'll be right back."
She ran for her room, throwing things around worse than Mason's boys ever had as she dressed and found her keys. Then she ran back through the kitchen, hardly seeing the animatronics even though she banged into both Foxy and Freddy as she flew by. She got into her truck and drove away, cutting across fresh tracks in the wet sand beds that had formed over the asphalt without ever seeing them. The sun was shining at the moment, but the rainbow it threw across the sky was a lie; it would be raining again by the time she returned, erasing animatronic footprints, splatters of blood and the tire tracks of one powder blue Crown Victoria as if they had never been.
Bonnie didn't follow Ana, but only because it was so difficult to keep his balance. He had to stand there, one hand still clutching his speaker like his voice was a physical thing that could fall out and roll away if he let it, and watch her run through the kitchen and out again. He tried to say goodbye and only made another of those awful sounds. Error messages had once again formed a solid bar of red light across his vision. He tried to clear it, but the same errors kept popping up again faster than he could close them, and the one that popped up the most was the one that said CRITICAL SYSTEM FAILURE IMMINENT.
What did that mean anyway? Which system? Or did that mean all of them? And how soon was imminent? Was…Was he dying? He didn't feel very different, except that his joints were gummed up and it was hard to move. Would he be dead when Ana got back?
'I'm not dying,' he told himself, but only in his head, because his voice was gone.
Freddy went to the storeroom to watch Ana leave. His thick fingers scraped and drummed restlessly at the doorjamb until the truck's engine started up, and then he turned around to survey the kitchen, paying particular attention to the corner where one of the bodies had been. Chica had cleaned up the blood, but it definitely looked like someone had been mopping and kind of sloppily at that. When he came back, he brought the paper towels with him.
"LEAVE. THAT. FOR. AN-N-A," Freddy ordered, drawing Bonnie's attention to the fact that Chica was picking matted grass out of his joints. Bubbles swelled around her fingers and burst with wet farting sounds as his cooling system struggled to vent. He was probably overheating.
Mindful of the whole 'Critical system failure' thing, Bonnie continued clearing his joints after Chica reluctantly backed off. He thought it helped—at least his internal error message read like a bunch of overlapping text and not an unbroken bar of red light—but the word 'imminent' didn't go away.
"WHAT'S WRONG?" Chica asked, wiping the countertop dry. "AND THEN WHAT HAPPENED? IS EVERYTHING ALL RIGHT IN HERE?"
"What happened is, Bon g-g-got his ar-r-r—ARR, ME HEARTIES!—arm caught on the fend-d-der and fell—OVERBOARD—fell in," Foxy told her, then turned on Bonnie with his hook raised, snarling, "And if he's faking a b-b-busted speaker to gain his lady-love's sympathies, he's p-p-picked a piss-poor t-t-time for it!"
Bonnie threw out both his arms, splattering the oven, the walls and Freddy with clots of unspeakable black filth. "Why the fuck would I be faking this?" came out as tortured mechanical noise and he grabbed at his throat again, glaring. Greyish foam began to build up around his shoulder joints, dripping down his chest and plopping onto the floor, thick as cupcake batter.
"Like we ain't got-t-t enough to do that we got to clean yer mess, too," Foxy muttered and paced over to the other door to steal a peek in at the dining room.
"FOXY. KNOCK. IT. OFF," said Freddy. "WE'RE. ALL. UPSET. BUT. THAT. ISN'T. HELPING. CHICA. DID. YOU. GET. EVERYTHING."
Chica shook her head. "I'LL SEE YOU IN THE ARCADE! MEET ME IN THE READING ROOM FOR STORY-TIME! LOOKS LIKE FREDDY'S HEADING FOR THE STAGE AND YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS!"
"And that's it?" Foxy asked incredulously. "Woman, it's b-b-been hours!"
Chica spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness, twitching. "I DID MY BEST! YOU GO AHEAD. I'LL STAY HERE."
"YOUR. PATHING. PROTOCOLS. RESET," guessed Freddy and growled in frustration when she nodded. "HOW. DID. I. KNOW. THAT. WAS. GOING. TO. HAPPY."
"Because it's the worst possible time," Bonnie tried to say. His speaker translated that as the lowing of a demonic cow.
"BONNIE. STOP. TALKING. BEFORE. YOU. BREAK. SOME. THING." Freddy found the mop bucket next to the sink and put it under the faucet to fill. Ana hadn't worked on the plumbing yet, so the water wasn't terribly clean, but even dirty water was better than blood. "CHICA. WAKE UP. THAT'S AN ORDER. WE'VE. GOT. A. LOT. TO. DO. THERE'S. STILL." He clicked through some soundfiles and settled on, "WHEELS. TO. THROW. AWAY."
"I'll g-g-get 'em," said Foxy, already walking.
Freddy caught him and shoved a bottle of cleanser against his chest. "NO. YOU. AND. CHICA. CLEAN. UP."
"It's b-b-bold daylight out there, Fred, and I'm the fastest."
"YOU. ALSO. GET. UP. AND. DOWN. OFF. THE. FLOOR. EASIEST. HELP. CHICA. CLEAN. IT'S. JUST. ONE. MORE. TRIP. I. THINK," he added with a growing frown. "I. LOST. COUNT. DID. WE. GET. ALL. THE. PEOPLE."
"Aye, I think-k-k so. Let's see, we p-p-put three in the trunk and four in the seat-t-t…or was it four in the trunk…?" Foxy trailed off, counting silently on his fingers (and on the air all around his hook), and finally shook his head. "We're missing one. No, wait-t-t! I forgot, I put that'n in the b-b-ball-pit."
Again? Bonnie blurted, or would have if his speaker was working.
"BONNIE. I. SAID. DON'T. TALK." Freddy gave him a point to emphasize the command, then looked at Foxy. "AGAIN."
"It were only t-t-temporary. Hell, ye stuffed-d-d one in a locker and I didn't bitch on at ye about-t-t that, did I?"
"ALL. RIGHT. HERE." Freddy handed Foxy the bucket and a roll of paper towels. "TAKE. CHICA. AND. TAKE. CARE. OF. IT. REMEMBER. THERE'S. A. MESS. IN. THE. THEATER. AND. THE. ART. ROOM. TOO." He grumbled to himself. "AND. THAT. ONE. LOCKER. AND. THE. ONE. BENEATH. IT. HE. WAS." Click-click-click. "CHEESY."
"Aye, on it."
"AND. MAKE. SURE. YOU. CHECK. ALL. THE. HALLS."
"Aye."
"AND. PAY. SPECIAL. ATTENTION. TO. THE. WALLS. THEY. LEAN. ON. THINGS. MORE. OFTEN. WHEN. THEY'RE. HURT."
"G-G—GREAT NEPTUNE'S GHOST—man! This ain't-t-t me first mop-up!"
"IF. YOU. WANT. ME. TO. BELIEVE. YOU. KNOW. WHAT. YOU'RE. DOING. THEN. STOP. THROWING. THEM. IN. THE. BALL. PIT." Freddy's gaze shifted to Chica. "KEEP. HIM. ON. TRACK. I'LL. GET. THE. WHEELS. AND. BE. BACK. TO. HELP. AS. SOON. AS. I. CAN."
"OKAY, FREDDY." Chica took the bucket from Foxy and waddled off.
Freddy glanced at the storeroom door, clearly anxious to get the last of the bikes dumped, then at Bonnie. "I. DON'T. KNOW. HOW. LONG. AN-N-A. WILL. BE. GONE. IF. SHE. COMES. BACK. BEFORE. WE'RE. DONE. KEEP. HER. BUSY. HERE."
Bonnie looked down at himself—plenty of work there—and nodded dispiritedly.
Freddy started to move away, but stopped and looked back. "YOU'LL. BE. OKAY," he told him. "YOU. JUST. NEED. TO. BE. CLEANED. UP. AND. DRIED. OUT."
Bonnie nodded again, but not right away and not with the same surety.
"AN-N-A. WILL. TAKE. CARE. OF. YOU," Freddy declared and headed out.
Sure, she would. At least, she'd try, but Bonnie was beginning to think something in there was broken. Not loose, not cracked, not slipping its screw. Broken. Without new parts, Bonnie was afraid that, well, that a critical systems failure was imminent. Where was Ana supposed to get parts? It wasn't like she could just make what she needed. She was a lot of things, a lot of good things…but she was not a fabricator.
Chica had already left, but Foxy was still standing there, looking at him. "It is just yer speaker, ain't-t-t it?" he asked suddenly.
'How the hell should I know?' Bonnie thought. His shrug brought out another of those farty bubbles, this time with a little puff of dark smoke.
Foxy came over, using his hook to dig out the worst of the clots, opening his joints so that they could at least vent his cooling system. More of that greasy-looking smoke came out. Hopefully, that was just garbage-water cooking off as his battery case dried. More importantly, the red bar of alert text thinned out some more, scaling down from a critical systems failure to an all-systems warning and then to a cooling system error and finally to the usual malfunction codes that he could minimize, but never completely clear. So he was fine…which was to say he wasn't fine, but at least he wasn't dying.
Hopefully.
"I knew ye d-d-didn't do it on purpose, mate," Foxy said, scraping around the base of his ears now. "I weren't t-tr-truly suggesting otherwise, just full o' nerves and spitting nettles. Guilty-ty-ty conscience, eh?"
Bonnie opened his mouth, remembered his speaker, and had to settle for squinting extra suspiciously. Guilty about what?
Foxy saw, although he didn't look Bonnie in the eye. One might even say he was avoiding Bonnie's direct gaze. "Had to leave her. Didn't-t-t want to. Hope ye believe that."
Oh. Well…yeah. When it came right down to it, without Foxy to do the running, this whole mess would have been a lot worse. Bonnie let his resentment run out like the water from the quarry and tried to nod like he meant it.
"This?" said Foxy, hooking a snotty clump of weeds and mud out of Bonnie's mouth and flicking it with a splat into the sink. "Bad-d-d luck, is all. Could have happened to any one of us."
Bad luck, right. Bonnie rubbed a hand down his chest, pushing a thick fall of foul water off his casing and onto the floor. The fur he exposed was slick and shiny, as if he'd slathered it in grease, and stained grey, maybe permanently. And that stuff, those chunky plops of quarry-shit, that was inside him, too. God only knew what he had to smell like.
"There ye are," said Foxy, popping his arm- and leg-casings open one at a time. "Air ye out-t-t, that'll help. Soon as Ana's back, she'll swab ye d-d-d—DOWN TO THE DEPTHS—down and put ye right in no t-t-time. Ye know sh-sh—SHIVER ME—she will."
Bonnie nodded again, but he could feel his ears straining to push forward in mounting distrust. In all fairness, Foxy probably wasn't as much of an asshole as Bonnie liked to think he was, but he sure wasn't in the habit of showering other people in sympathy and encouragement either. What the hell was this really about?
Still, Foxy didn't look him in the eye, but he looked him in the ears, and Bonnie's big bunny ears said enough. "Ease yerself," he said, not without a toothy smile. "Ain't burdened me c-c-conscience so much as all that. I was a right-t-t proper gentleman, I was. And she hardly even knew I was there. I was…I was the d-dr-dream she was dreaming in yer arms, that's all. And when she c-c-comes flying back through that door, I can be beside ye or in me cabin or on the bloody-dy-dy moon for all she'll take notice. I asks ye, is that fair?"
Now he looked at Bonnie. He was smiling, but his ears were flat. Ears couldn't lie. "I killed-d-d five men tonight," Foxy said. "A personal b-b-best and no easy feat, let me t-t-t—TELL TALES OF THE SEA—tell ye, but if I went to her with blood on me blade and offered up the bloke's head by the hair, she c-c-couldn't shoulder me aside fast enough to get to ye, even as ye ar-r—ARR! It ain't so much that I'm…"
Bonnie waited, ears cocked forward, dripping black sludge all over the floor to swirl away down the open drain under the sink.
Foxy left that thought unfinished and said instead, "Ye think-k-k that's funny, don't ye?"
Bonnie shrugged and nodded. He did think it was funny, although maybe not for the same reasons Foxy did. For him, it wasn't so much about finally getting to see Foxy experience first-hand how it felt to see someone right run past you to heap undeserved attention on a clearly inferior act—and even if Bonnie had killed four guys in the onslaught, a personal best of his own, he could admit he probably hadn't done it with Foxy's finesse and he hadn't been the one to take out Mason and actually save Ana when saving her had been necessary, so…credit where it's due and all that, Foxy was once again the star attraction. But this little nugget of dark humor in Bonnie's mechanical heart wasn't even about that. It had more to do with the whole imminent systems failure thing, and how even if the alert had switched off, he must actually still be dying, because that was the only reason Foxy would ever almost say the words I'm jealous to him and mean it.
'I guess now I can die happy,' Bonnie thought sourly, but when he tried to say it, all that came out through his speaker was a blat of noise, terminating in a disturbing pop and sudden silence.
"I gots to g-g-get on with the mopping," Foxy said, casting a troubled sort of glance at Bonnie's neck, although he did not comment on his voice. "Later, mate."
Bonnie waved at Foxy's back and settled himself against the counter to wait for Ana, clearing his error log whenever the alerts blotted out too much of his vision, but trying not to think about it too much. The critical failure warning hadn't reappeared, so maybe he'd just been overheating and the situation would resolve with some extra venting now followed by a good cleaning. Or, you know, he'd burned something out and was just dying quietly. Either way, he couldn't do much about it.
He just hoped…if this really was it…that it happened before she came back. He wanted to see her again, especially if it was the last time, but…not if it meant her watching him die. For that…For that, he really ought to be alone.