CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
After taking the cargo truck home, making sure it was locked up and kicking over a few trash cans (partly as scene-dressing for the stupid story she'd come up with on the drive over and mostly just to vent some steam; quite a few kicks were accompanied by Freddy's name and a few other choice words), Ana climbed into her pick-up and drove herself to the goddamn hospital. Although she had at one time been a depressingly regular customer at Mercy General, she had not been there since she was ten years old, and she needed the help of her GPS to even find it. Hurricane had grown up quite a lot and although she had been back in Mammon more than half a year now, she still hadn't explored much of the surrounding area. She knew the way to the Lowe's and the liquor store (she stopped there on her way in, because ER visits always took longer than they had to, and the way her luck was rolling, she wouldn't get out until after closing time), but not the hospital.
Once at Mercy, however, it all came flooding back to her. Same ugly awning over the same squeaky doors. Same dingy walls and pea-soup-puke-colored floor. The magazines in the waiting room might be a little fresher, but the blocky vinyl-covered chairs looked the same. She could almost believe the granite-faced nurse triaging her was the same one who used to impassively write Fell off bike on all of little-Ana's intake forms while her mother watched with narrow eyes and clenched her bruised fists.
She had to tell them what happened. Not once or twice…probably not the hundreds of times it seemed she had to go over it, but so many times. Every doctor, every nurse, every assistant, the little kid who was there to get her chin stitched up after jumping off the couch onto the coffee table—everyone wanted to know. She kept it simple. She said she got bit by a dog or something. The secret to successful lying is to stay as close to the truth as possible and not embellish; the Devil was always in the details and the Devil just loved to fuck your shit up.
They asked questions, of course. She was co-operative without providing particulars she would then have to remember. She apologized a lot for not seeing or noticing or remembering things, and they all told her that was fine. "It all happened so fast," she kept saying, and eventually they eased up on the questions and started in on the recriminations, beginning with telling her she should have called an ambulance. She agreed out loud and kept her eye-rolling to herself. "I didn't think about it," she said meekly. "I don't think I thought at all. I just wanted to get out of there."
She wanted to get out of here, too, but that wasn't happening anytime soon. She took a picture for Freddy the first time she was left alone long enough to do it and sent it off. Not good enough, apparently. He wanted to see the plastic band on her wrist as proof that she was really there and not just in her own home, tricked up to look clinical. Don't give u those unless they admit u, she typed at him, then climbed down from the examination table to steal a shot of the nurses' station and send that, too. Proof, she typed. Now drop it. I don't want 2 b That Girl taking selfies in the fking ER.
Why aren't they admitting you? he wanted to know.
Bcuz I don't need 2B admitted! I just need some stitches & they're going 2 do that any 2nd, so let me go
Let me know when you leave.
K
What does that mean?
It means okay. I abbreviated it bcuz I don't have time 2 sit here texting. Ffs Freddy. Figure that one out urself. I'm going now, Ana typed. She started to put her phone away when it buzzed again.
Let me know when you get home and even before she could reply, another buzz: K?
She had to smile. It hurt, but she couldn't help it. K, she typed. Love you, Big Bear.
After a lot of long pauses interspaced by a lot of ellipses, a red heart appeared. His first emoji. She was proud of him, but she didn't get the chance to say so before the curtain swept back and the doctor appeared with his rolling cart of doctor stuff.
It started with the stitches. Well, maybe not. All her memories had a way of tumbling loose, shifting back and forth and side to side along her mental timeline, but the stitching was what stood out strongest, so maybe not the start, but the center, with everything else in orbit around it, spinning at their own speed.
They had to cut her hair first. Not all of it, but way more than they needed to, in Ana's opinion. The nurse who did it was not unsympathetic. "You have such beautiful hair," she kept saying as she ran her clippers along the side of Ana's head and pulled it away in bloody clumps. "You're so lucky it's so long. You can just comb it over and no one will be able to tell."
'Are you fucking serious?' she thought.
"Right," she said.
Then they did the stitching. It took a long time. She didn't know how long exactly, but she knew how many stitches. She didn't ask; the doctor stitching her up kept count. Thirteen stitches on her left hand, eight on her right, six more higher up on her left arm, eighteen on her right, a whopping thirty-two on her left shoulder where Mangle had grabbed and thrown her, eleven on her neck, twenty-three on the side of her head and eighty-seven on her head and her face, where the stiches were extra-small, "To reduce scarring," said the doctor, and all those teeny-tiny stitches later, he said, "You might see some scarring anyway."
'No shit,' she thought.
"Thanks," she said. "Am I good to go?"
"Oh no," he said and laughed. "No, no, no. We're just getting started."
And the next thing she knew, they were putting an IV line in her. For the medication, they said, but the only medication they gave her came in needles: shots of local anesthetic around the site of the wounds before they stitched her, plus a tetanus booster even though she told them she'd had one six years ago, plus a couple of rabies shots—one in her ass and one in her arm—because the story she told the registering nurse was that she got bit by a feral dog, and apparently there had been some problems with rabid raccoons over the last few years. Only after (she thought it was after) all that was done and Ana was sitting on the bloody examination table waiting for her discharge papers, did someone come in and start hooking baggies up to the IV stand. Antibiotics, they said, to help prevent the massive infection that was coming. That was sensible, so Ana nodded, not that they'd asked for her permission. And an hour later, when the nurse came back and Ana thought he was unplugging her, she instead felt a heaviness seep directly into her brain.
"Something's happening," she said, because even in the extremity of that moment, she couldn't bring herself to say, I think I'm dying.
"It's the morphine," said the nurse, helping her lie down.
"I can't have that," Ana protested, somewhat fuzzily. "I'm driving."
"Not for a while," the nurse said soothingly. "How's your pain level now?"
"Good," said Ana, several seconds before or after he left the room.
And while she was swimmy in the morphine, the asshats went and plugged some blood into her.
'The fuck do you think you're doing?' she thought, rousing from her stupor to watch the nurse hang the little baggie up on her IV stand.
"Is that really necessary?" she asked.
They said it was and she couldn't exactly argue, so chalk another couple hours lost on the old scoreboard.
They wanted X-rays. She said she didn't need any. She was all stitched up, she was fine. They said she might have broken bones. Ana had broken enough bones to know she didn't, but they wouldn't take her word for it and off she went to the Radiology Department. So after taking some pictures on some more outdated machinery and sitting around for way too long waiting for a radiologist to examine the film, her doctor finally showed up and told her that she got lucky, although it looked like she'd cracked her shoulder at some point in the past and that old injury might give her some new trouble in the coming days.
'Just can't admit you're wrong, can you?' she thought.
"I'll keep it in mind," she said.
Then they wanted to admit her, and on that, Ana stood as firm as the morphine would let her. She had work in the morning. She was fine. She was going home.
They didn't argue. Doctors never argue. They just excused themselves and came back an hour later to tell her they wanted to admit her. She said no. They said they needed the bed in the ER for ER patients (there were six empty beds all around her) and they couldn't let her leave until she'd had all the blood and had heard back from the hand specialist (what hand specialist? Her hand was fine. Yes, it looked fine to them too, which is why they needed a hand specialist to look at her films), so why not just go upstairs and wait in one of the rooms?
'Oh, you sons of bitches, I see what you're doing,' she thought.
"Fine," she said.
So here she sat in her stupid room, in a visitor's chair and not the bed. The chair was firm, too wide and too low to the ground. Easier to stand up from, she guessed, but hard to just sit in. The bed looked almost comfortable by comparison, but she refused to lie down or do anything at all to give the impression she was staying. Did she want to order dinner? No, thank you, she had food at home. Did she want a clean hospital gown to wear? No, thank you, she'd change when she was home. Did she need help in the shower? No, thank you, she'd wash up at home. She made sure she was nice about it, however. If they couldn't get her to stay for medical observation, she wouldn't put it past them to try for a mandatory psychiatric hold, so she made damn sure not to give them a reason. No matter what they asked or how often, she was polite, she was co-operative, she was respectful. Manners mattered.
At last, they seemed to leave her alone, which meant that either they were getting ready to release her or they were hoping she'd nod off and win by default. She was tired enough (and had enough morphine in her) that the latter was a real possibility, which was another good reason to avoid the bed. Hence why she was sitting here in this uncomfortable chair, trying to watch some dumb cooking show through the static on the cheap TV.
Through her sluggish thoughts and the scripted drama of competitive cake decorating, Ana vaguely heard her name in the hall. She muted the TV to listen just as a low knock sounded on her door. Without waiting for an answer, it opened on a middle aged man in a rumpled shirt. He looked sort of familiar to her—he ought to, he was the guy who'd done most of the stitching down in the ER. But even before that, he'd looked familiar, like maybe she knew him, although she still couldn't drag up a name.
"S'up," said Ana.
"Hi," he said, faking a smile that somehow only highlighted the nervous, almost guilty energy boiling beneath it. "I've got someone here from Animal Control who wants to talk to you about the incident."
It wasn't a question, but Ana said, "Sure," like he'd asked if that was all right. "Any word on my discharge?"
"I'll ask," he promised, like they all promised, and ducked out.
The next man who walked in was also familiar, although she had no trouble placing his name.
"Sheriff Zabrinsky," she greeted him. "Animal Control?"
"County doesn't seem to think we're in their jurisdiction," he replied. "Town funds are a little too tight and animal attacks a little too scarce to justify a separate office with a separate paycheck, so us civil servants have to wear a lot of hats." He touched the brim of his and pulled the other visitor's chair over to face her in proper interrogative style. He sat, pulling out his handy-dandy notebook and gave his half-sized pen a click to prime it. "Name, date, address of incident… You look a little out of sorts for me putting you through the whole show, so why don't I fill in the bits I know and we can jump to the part where you tell me your version of events?"
"My version? Hey, if that dog told you I bit her first, she's a fucking liar."
He didn't even pretend to smile, just waited.
Ana sighed and rewound her mental tape to the start of the story she'd come up with. "I got back to town this morning. I've been away for a couple weeks and I was maybe a little too focused on just getting home, being home. Once I hit Cawthon, I was pretty much on auto-pilot."
"You went straight home?"
"I stopped at the diner on my way through. After that, yeah, straight home."
He made a note. "Go on."
"Well, I got out of the truck and I saw my trashcans turned on their sides and trash everywhere. And I figured…you know. Kids. Figured I might have some broken windows or spray paint to clean up. And I…I think I went over to pick up the cans? Next thing I know, I'm on the ground. There was a dog or something and it bit me. I don't know how I got away from it or if it just ran off or what. I was bleeding. Seemed serious. I came here. The end. I can't help but notice you didn't write a damn thing down," she remarked.
"About what time did all this happen?"
"I don't know. I didn't look at my watch."
"Gallifreys say you were there about ten and left about ten-fifteen."
"If they say so. I didn't look at my watch then either."
"And you say you went straight home?"
"Yeah."
"So you must have arrived about half-past."
"I guess. I didn't look at my watch."
"And how long did you say it was between the time you arrived home and the time you got bit?"
"Seemed like it happened right away."
"And what did you do afterwards?"
"After I got bit?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"I drove myself to the hospital."
"Straight away?"
"Seemed like a good idea, yeah."
"Desk says you came through the doors here at a couple minutes after noon." He looked at her, pencil poised above the page. "That sound about right?"
"I didn't look at my watch."
"That's a shame, because it's a nice one. Is that a Rolex?"
"What?" she said, not quite laughing. "No. Why?"
"You sure? Looks like a Rolex to me."
"Have you ever seen one? It's a Girard Perregaux." She took it off and passed it over.
He whistled, inspecting it as he examined the face. "How much does something like this run?"
"It was a gift, I didn't ask."
"But if you had to guess?"
"Probably seven or eight grand." She wanted to ask what the hell her watch had to do with a dog bite, but she wouldn't give him the satisfaction of showing him frustration, so she just laughed it off again. Morphine made that easy.
"Looks like it keeps pretty good time."
"Swiss engineering," she agreed. "Seventeen years old now and still runs like a dream. Worth every penny I never spent on it."
"So why is it that you never look at it?"
She shrugged her good shoulder. "Same reason you're not looking at yours right now. Didn't know someone was going to ask."
He handed her watch back. "Reason I ask now is, if the Gallifreys are right about the time when you left and you're right about going straight home and getting bit straight away and the desk is right about when you walked in…I mean to say, even accounting for a little extra drive-time for the weather, there's almost enough extra minutes in there to watch a movie. How do you explain that?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know."
"I don't know."
He waited.
So did she.
At last, he made a note and turned the page. "I took the liberty of stopping by your place on the way," he began.
"On the way to do what?" she asked with a laugh. "Plant a flag on the top of Coldslip Mountain? My house isn't on the way anywhere and it's in the dead-opposite direction of Hurricane."
He gave her a cool approximation of a polite smile. "As I was saying. I stopped by to look around. Noticed your bins were indeed knocked over."
Ana gave herself a silent congratulations for thinking of that.
"Lots of trash about," the sheriff remarked, pulling out his cell phone and tapping at the screen. He showed her a photo of her driveway, zooming in on the trash can. "Chicken bones. Candy wrappers. The sort of thing an animal might be drawn to. However, there is one thing I did not see. What do you suppose that is?"
Ana looked at the photo and at him. "Were you expecting the dog to wait around?"
"No, ma'am. But I was expecting some sign there had been one. Footprints. Fur. Feces." He paused to gauge her lack of reaction, then dropped what he probably thought was a hammer: "Blood. I found it especially curious that I did not see a lot of blood. Oh, there's a little here, there's a little there," he saw, swiping around the photo, then moved on to a new one. "There's a lot here," he drawled and showed her.
Ana stared politely at the picture of the driver's seat of the cargo truck. "Yeah, I started to take that one. I guess just because it was the one I just got out of. I wasn't thinking. I guess I decided to go with the lighter vehicle, one I'm more familiar with on bad roads. It was a bitch of a drive up that mountain."
"Uh huh. Made sure you locked it up tight before you left."
'You're damn right I did,' thought Ana. She said, "I hadn't gotten around to unlocking it. Kind of weird that you apparently tried to get in. What's up with that?"
"What's in the truck, Miss Blaylock?"
"It's Stark, and why do you ask, sheriff? What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?"
"Well, I'm curious why you have it, for one. Small town like ours, everyone knows everyone's vehicle. You got that one right before you slipped out of town. You got that nice pick-up, what do you need a cargo truck for? Isn't the story that you were sitting up with a sick friend?"
"He wasn't sick, he had a bad fall. He needed some renovations to make his house more accessible to his new needs. I got the truck so I could give him some stuff I had cluttering up the house and then haul materials so I could build him what he needed."
"What's your friend's name?"
"That, sir, would be none of your business."
He nodded without surprise and made another note, saying mournfully, "Had to ask."
"No, you didn't. I don't know what the hell you're doing, but it's sure not your job."
He ignored that. "And what did you bring back?"
"Excuse you?"
"Truck had some peepholes, taped over from the inside. I found one with a hole in it—"
"You mean you cut a hole."
"—and took a peep. Lots of boxes, unlabeled."
But no animatronic skins. She'd thrown all those into the garage. Sometimes a little paranoia really paid off.
"What's in them?" the sheriff wanted to know.
"Personal items and building materials. You want to know more than that, you better get a warrant and I guess I better get a lawyer, and I'm telling you right now, if I've got to drag his ass back to Mammon, he's not leaving until I get my retainer's worth out of him."
He tsked, looking wounded. "You don't have to be so defensive. I'm not asking in any professional capacity. Just satisfying my own curiosity."
"Of course. I understand." Ana pulled out her phone, made a point of setting it to record, and pointed it at him like a gun. "Go on. Any more questions?"
He looked at her phone for a long time in thin-lipped silence, then focused on his notebook again. "The doc here says you were down a pint or two when you turned up. They can tell that, you know. They can tell most anything with the right tests. So they ran some of your numbers and come up with the opinion, medically supported, that you had in fact…" He flipped back a few pages in his notebook and frowned at it seriously as he read, "'gone a gusher.' Stop me if I'm getting too technical."
"Stop," said Ana, catching at her shoulder. "It hurts to laugh. What's the point, sheriff? What are you trying to do here?"
"Just clear up some confusion, that's all. If the blood is not on the ground at your house, whose ground did you leave it on?"
Ana did not answer.
Eventually, he made a note and moved on. "Can you describe the animal that you say attacked you?"
"No," said Ana. "I know how it sounds, but I don't remember much."
"You said it was a dog."
"I think it was, but I didn't really see it."
"And you can't describe it."
"No."
"One dog? Two dogs?"
"Red dogs, blue dogs." Ana sighed. "No idea. I assume it was only one."
"Now why is that?"
"Because I'm alive. It got me on the ground and then it got my shoulder and then it got my head, and while it was doing that, I was not being disemboweled. I watch nature shows. When packs attack, one immobilizes and the rest go in for the soft meat."
He tried to keep a stone face, hearing that, and couldn't quite. After a second, he cleared his throat and said, "Did you see the color? Breed? Long ears or short? Collar? Did you see anything at all?"
"I saw teeth."
The sheriff's eye ticced slightly. He tried unsuccessfully to hold her stare, then focused on his notebook as he did some more scribbling.
Ana shifted back in her uncomfortable chair and wished for another dose of morphine. "Anything else?"
"Nope. You've told me everything it appears you're willing to say, although I sure hope you weren't expecting much to happen."
"Ha. No. I'm surprised you're here at all."
"Healthy animals don't tend to attack unprovoked. If what happened to you happened to anyone else, that would be a cause for concern." He put his notebook away, touched the brim of his hat again, and got up. "Miss Blaylock," he said with a nod, and walked out.
"Stark," muttered Ana and put her phone away. She indulged herself in a few uncharitable thoughts, switched her bakery battle back on, then decided she had to pee. She was supposed to ring for a nurse when that happened, but fuck it, she was fine. She got up, using her IV stand as support, and limped over to the restroom, only to stop.
This close to the door, slightly ajar, she could hear the sheriff and the doctor talking in the hall, voices low, not intending to be overheard.
"Confidentiality be damned," the sheriff was saying. "Tomorrow morning, everyone is going to know about this. Everyone is going to have questions and when they don't get answers from me, they're going after anyone they think might have them. You're my brother-in-law and you're a doctor. That's enough right there, but you were her doctor tonight, you are the only one besides the bitch herself with first-hand information, and once that gets out, you will have no peace."
"How would anyone find that out?" A short pause. "You'd seriously do that to me. To Sharon? Her anxiety is already through the roof, you know how hard the pregnancy has been—"
"You think it's bad now, just wait after two hundred panicky mommies call on her, worrying her ear off about wild packs of rabid dogs roaming around their backyards."
"Hey now, she never said the R-word. That was Wilne's suggestion."
"But she jumped on it."
"I wouldn't say that. She agreed to the shots, because it's a sensible precaution under the circumstances, but she sure didn't jump."
"You can't honestly buy this bullshit story. You looked at those wounds and you seriously think it was a dog that did it?"
"Honestly? No."
Ana scowled, moving closer to the door, wondering how much worse this was about to get.
"When I saw those wounds," the doctor went on, "I thought it was a bear."
Ana blinked.
"A bear," the sheriff echoed.
"Not that bear. A bear-bear. A real one. Why? What do you think did it?"
"I see some defensive wounds on her hands that could have been caused by a knife."
"Uh, no. By teeth."
"One of the ladies downstairs said there were metal fragments embedded in the wounds. That would seem to support my theory, although it would sure hold up better if I could find a doctor to agree."
"You're not going to find one here. A knife? No one gets metal fragments stuck in their hands by grabbing at a knife."
"You don't get it by grabbing at a dog either, so how do you explain it?"
"She says she was rolling around the driveway by the trashcans. She probably grabbed at anything she could reach, there's nothing strange about that. And dirty wounds aside, there are clear tooth demarcations on the face and shoulder, clear enough that you can tell the same set of jaws did them both. Something bit her all right. She's saying it was a dog, but it had to have been huge, bigger than yours even. Upper teeth were here, lower teeth were here. The damn thing nearly put its mouth around her entire head. How she's still alive, I have no idea."
"Still, that's the sort of thing you'd think a person would remember."
"Shock can have that effect on memory. You're actually lucky she doesn't remember anything. At times like this, it's not unusual for the brain to fill in its own gaps. She could have come out of this genuinely believing she'd been attacked by Bigfoot. If she's lying about anything, it's because she remembers something she's rational enough to know can't possibly be true."
"Like a bear attack."
"It's not the craziest theory floating around here tonight. Wilne thinks it was a lion. Yeah," the doctor said around a laugh. "Not even a mountain lion, like an actual lion. Ask around, you'll probably find a dozen votes for bear, a couple escaped exotic pets, a wolf pack or two, but you won't find even one person saying it was anything but an animal attack. The tooth marks are too distinct. Come on now. Why are you squinting at her so hard?"
"Story don't add up, that's all. I'm obliged to squint when things look blurry and you have not been any help at all bringing things into focus."
"Like what?"
"Like this."
Silence.
"What about it?" the doctor asked.
"Notice there's no blood on the ground? Hardly any blood at all…except here."
"This is your gotcha? Jeez, John. She probably ran to the truck to slam a door on whatever was out there."
"And no blood fell on the ground, is that it?"
"Oh it did, and then it got licked up. Hot blood is tasty. Next?"
"There are ninety minutes between the time she claims she got bit and the time she turned up here."
"Judging from that other picture, I'm going to go out on a limb and say she spent it sitting in the truck, watching a bear lick up her blood, but she's in shock, so she doesn't remember doing that. To her, she's attacked and then she's here. I doubt she even remembers driving."
"You believe that, do you?"
"Yeah, I do. You know, I've always thought you were a decent man, John. Hard but fair, like some Hollywood sheriff in an Old West movie, but what you're doing right now…it's wrong. I've never understood what you people have against her—"
"You're not from here. You'll never understand."
"I hope you're right. I hope to God I'm never so twisted that I can understand it. I've been looking over her old medical records and you know, she was seen in this ER thirty-seven times by the time she was ten. Thirty-seven times, John. You've got a ten-year-old. How many times has he been to the ER?"
No answer.
"And what I don't understand and hopefully will never understand is that the authorities were only contacted twice. Twice. Not CPS, not the proper channels a mandated reported is supposed to go through. 'Local authorities were consulted.' Consulted? You know who that local authority was? Sheriff Tom Zabrinsky. My father-in-law. The man who has been in my home, eaten my food and held my baby. And he clearly did nothing for that little girl and that's bad enough, but you? You're looking for a way to arrest her. What…What's wrong with you?"
And with that, the door to Ana's room flew open on the doctor's dramatic exit, and there stood Ana on the other side, almost close enough to get hit by it.
The three of them shared an uncomfortable silence until Ana said, "So how are my discharge papers coming along?"
"I'll go check," said the doctor and escaped, leaving Ana and the sheriff alone.
"What are you doing up?" he asked.
Ana gestured at the adjoining room. "Gotta use the bathroom. You want to go first?"
His brows crinkled. "What?"
"Well, I only need to pee," said Ana. "Nothing urgent. But you are apparently just full of shit. So full, it's coming out of your mouth."
He leaned back, thunderous color filling his face, staring at her.
She stood holding her IV stand, weaving on her feet and smiling.
Jaw tightening, he jammed his phone back into his pocket and stormed off.
"So long, John!" Ana called, waving, and went into the bathroom. She peed, washed her hands, looked at herself in the mirror for a few seconds, then dug her own phone out and snapped a picture. She sent it to Freddy with another message—they're getting my discharge papers, won't b long now. call U when I get home—and shuffled back into the other room to watch the next round of epic cake battle.
Foxy had never worked harder in his life than he worked at finding Foxanne that day. Along the road, through the wooded foothills, up the mountain, down and around the quarry, in any crack in the frozen ground wide enough to hold her—if he saw it, he searched it. It started raining and he kept looking. Rain turned to snow and he kept looking. Snow thinned out and turned into hard gusts of wind that froze the moisture to his eye-lenses and kept looking. And if there were really a God in the sky looking down in judgement, surely He'd reward that kind of effort, but there wasn't and Foxy didn't find her. Signs were everywhere—scratches carved in the ice, mangled carcasses of the unlucky animals who'd strayed too near her, bits of trash come loose from her body and left behind—but of Foxanne herself, not a glimpse.
And not a sound either, which was even more disheartening. He blamed the wind, which was forever blowing, but even so, he should have heard something. She could be quiet when she was sleeping or hunting, but never for so long. Even if she could somehow hold her poor broken mind together and keep herself from falling into those fits of mindless rage that so often took her, her failing speaker should have betrayed her by now.
He lost the whole day in looking, from the moment he first found the piece of her chestplate frozen in a puddle until the November sun fell out of the sky—over eight hours, said his internal clock. He kept at it a little while in the dark, searching by the light of his own eyes, but the futility of it overwhelmed him. Although he remained convinced she'd come back on her own, he couldn't keep looking. It was too dark now to see her and the wind had picked up so much that even if she were out there singing to herself, he couldn't trust he'd hear it. She could be ten feet from him right now and he wouldn't know it. Not until she bit.
Maybe she'd fallen into the quarry after all. Maybe she was gone forever. Maybe…
No. There was no help for it, no hope for it. He had to tell Freddy.
Foxy had no heart, but still he felt it heavy in his gut as he climbed the access road back to the top of the bluff. He listened, but heard nothing. Looked and saw nothing.
Wait a minute.
He really did see nothing. Specifically, nothing by the loading dock. There weren't but a sliver of a moon and a spray of stars in the sky, but there was light enough that he should be able to see the pale boxy blob of the truck parked there.
Foxy switched on his eyes, for all the good that did. His eyes were made to glow sinister-like out of dark corridors, not light up parking lots. And now that he'd had a few seconds' worth of second thoughts, he wasn't sure what he'd thought Ana's absence even meant. She'd probably gone home, to change out the big rig for her own truck if nothing else, although he thought it likely she was gone for the night. Maybe a few nights. Solitude was more precious than pearls after two weeks of unrelenting animatronic company, and he hadn't exactly given her a reason to stay, had he? He couldn't even feel bad about that. At least she was safely away for tonight. The real trick would be keeping her away until after Foxanne were found, without telling her why. Ana was no wilting wallflower and she'd likely gone up against all manner of dangerous men, but just the fact that she'd moved herself in here at all proved she had no idea how dangerous an animatronic could be.
Foxy scanned the dead weeds and potholes surrounding him bleakly before switching his eyes off again. He walked, trying to plan out what he was going to say and anticipate the repercussions he knew were coming, but success was limited. His thoughts were like moths tonight, all fluttery and fragile things, easy to swat and kill, but never still long enough to get a clear look at. He should be thinking of Ana and the lies he'd have to tell her if she came back too soon, or Freddy and the truth that Foxy would be forced to cough up, but he wasn't. Couldn't.
Foxanne. He wouldn't have thought he remembered so much, but it was all there tonight, in pieces. He remembered watching her go from paper plans to computerized schematics to a collection of parts that quickly came together on the work-table in their fathers' basement shop, and even knowing how much her impending arrival owed to some poor pretty fool gone missing, Foxy had watched with excitement, because she was for him. For the party, aye, the one their creator was making the Toys for (and adapting Foxy for, although he understood that was more the Purple Man's idea; it was a hard thing to be the favorite child), but also for him, after the party was over. Maybe there'd even be another restaurant, maybe that was what the party was about, a celebration of the grand opening of another Freddy Fazbear's, with another Pirate Cove where he wouldn't have to be alone behind the purple curtain anymore. There'd be Games to play, he wasn't so naïve as to think otherwise, but after the body was dumped and the blood mopped up, at least he wouldn't be alone on his small stage, waiting for morning to take his memories away. He could still remember watching her wake up that first time in the workshop with her skin mostly off, how she'd blinked those yellow eyes (the same model as Foxy's own) in confusion all around before looking down at her metal bones, and how she'd screamed, an awful cry cut short by her creator unplugging her speakerbox so he could keep working without distraction.
Her first day, and it set the tone for all of them to follow. A thousand curtains must have gone up on her in her short time, and every one of them might as well have been the first. The spotlight was always blinding; the crowds, always a terrifying clamor. A thousand times he'd stood beside her, one arm thrown about her shivering shoulders to mimic a careless comraderie for the little'uns shrilling and laughing in their seats, doing all he could to comfort her as she stumbled through the show. And later, in the dark behind the drawn curtain, waiting for the Game to start, he'd hold her while she asked if she'd been all right this time. She could never remember the biting, the screams, the blood…she only knew that sometimes she was bad and she wanted to do better. Somehow, she'd gotten it in her head that if she could just do the show right for one whole day with no mistakes, she could go home and wash herself clean of this never-ending nightmare, wipe the steam from the mirror and see her old face looking back, and he'd be there and he'd call her by that name she'd lost and he'd lay her down in his purple bed and she'd sleep without dreams, so was she all right, Foxy? Was it a good show? And he always told her it was, but she knew he was lying. There was blood in her mouth, she'd say. She could taste it.
Ah, his pretty girl…
Foxy turned his eyes on for one last look around, and there, by the grace of God and the Devil, there she was, huddled up on the corner of the flydock, looking like a lost pup that had exhausted itself scratching at the door.
Relief hit and knocked all the reason from his head so that his first foolish impulse was to shout her name—"Foxanne!"—and never mind provoking her to attack, here in the great wide open without even a box to put her in if he managed against all odds to overpower her alone.
But she didn't rear up and lunge at him. Neither did she call out in her querulous way or start to sing or even raise her wee blind head. The long grass danced and dry leaves spun across the pavement, empty beer bottles rolled and crumpled food wrappers bounced away, but Foxanne lay as still and silent as a gravestone.
In the few fluttering seconds before it all came together, Foxy finally saw how small a heap she made there…too small…much smaller than she'd been when he boxed her up before…because most of her was on the ground below the flydock, scattered around the massive icefall along with a sprawling heap of trash and weeds and rubble. And there was a limb dangling from the eaves overhead where all the icicles weren't, so mayhap there was more of her on the roof.
Foxy's legs carried him the last length across the broken ground independent of his conscious will, as much as if it were some secret code always buried down inside of him. If [Foxanne] dead, go LOC [Foxanne] and run program .
He watched through spectator's eyes as a stranger's hands (too new yet for him to see them as his own, hook or no hook) reached out and touched her pretty, sleeping head. It slid away down the heap of her body, disconnected. So there she lay, his pretty girl, all in pieces.
After a while (how long a while, he didn't know), he tried to untangle her ruined body, to restore it to some semblance of how she used to be. Hopeless. How could he, when her arms and legs hadn't been put on right to begin with? He couldn't help her with that. It was against the rules for animatronics to fix each other. All he could do was neaten her twisted lines, so he did, and then just stood, stroking the scuffed slope of her narrow muzzle, then up and along the brow ridge over her open eyeless sockets, and down again over the chipped rigid point of her tufted plastic cheek. But it wasn't until he actually picked her head up, hollow as his heart, that he saw the last of it, like the tinned laughter at the end of a bad joke.
He saw the blood.
He saw…so much blood.
It splotched the dock, overspilling the ledge, streaking the face of it and pooling on the ground. In his clean, white eyelight, he could see it all, red on the pale door, black on the crumbling cement. Dried, mostly, but still shiny in places. Frozen. Red ice.
"Oh no," he heard someone say, someone so stupid he thought those two words were enough to sum up all the horror washing blood-red out of his heart. Oh no indeed. Oh no, like he'd dropped a cupcake frosting-side down on a dirty floor right in front of the birthday girl. Oh no, too bad, but don't ye cry, luv, we'll soon fetch ye another. What's one cupcake more or less? What's one life, even in a small town? Hundreds more just like her, right? Oh no.
He stumbled back, turning in a wide, uneven circle, shining his weak eyes all around, searching for some sign of life, anything to give him even a glimmer of hope that she'd walked away from the killing place…and saw nothing. Nothing but the blood. Ana's blood.
In his recklessness, his hook snagged at the tangled bits of Foxanne's corpse, half-pushing and half-throwing it onto the ground in a noisy clatter. He scarcely noticed, didn't care, but soon after, he heard something heavy shift inside the building. The lock rattled. The door heaved itself up to three-quarter's mast on a fuzzy brown paw.
Freddy looked down at him in silence for a long, long time. A few notes of his killing song played, one at a time, dropping like blood into a puddle, but Freddy said nothing.
That odd inner distance that made Foxy a witness in his own body left him as suddenly as it had come on and he had to stand there on his own feet, looking up into those cold blue eyes, blue as Ana's own, and say in his own voice, "Is she dead?"
The notes falling out of Freddy into the night sped up, almost a tune, then slowed again, but never quite stopped. He pushed the door all the way up into its mooring and stepped out onto the flydock. He did not attempt to avoid stepping in the blood or onto the scattered remnants of Foxanne's stuffing. He couldn't have avoided it anyway, but he didn't even try.
"Don't draw it out, man, tell me where she is," Foxy pleaded.
"Gone," said Freddy, but what kind of answer was that? Gone where? Gone home to get cleaned up, gone to the liquor store to secure a good stiff drink in celebration of her survival, or gone to the quarry and then on to heaven, or wherever the dead go in a godforsaken town like Mammon?
"Where—" Foxy began, then latched on to a different question. If Freddy wasn't going to give a straight answer, maybe he could get at it by a crooked question. "Where's Bonnie?"
"In the freezer," Freddy replied. "Chica is in Kiddie Cove. It's just you and me."
"Ana—"
"I'm going to say something to you," Freddy interrupted. "You aren't going to want to hear it, but I've had to stand here thinking about it for…eight hours. What in the hell have you been doing for eight hours? Never mind, shut up. I don't want to hear you talk. I want you to listen."
"Just tell me first, is Ana—"
"Shut up, Foxy, and that's an order." Freddy waited, impassive but for the merry tune plinking drop by drop from the secret heart of him, until Foxy's shudders ran their course. "I need to tell you," he began again, "that I owe you an apology."
Foxy couldn't ask questions, not even a broken, baffled, 'What?'
"And I am sorry. I am sorrier that I know how to express. Words," Freddy mused, accompanied by the Toreador March, "are often grossly inadequate modes of expression. The happiest days of this…this miserable life passed as unremarkably as any other because I never found the words to tell those who made them happy how…much they meant to me. Small things, silly things, that perhaps only I remember. David's sixth birthday party, for example. My happiest day. He was so amazed by my act. I think he really thought it was magic, you know, and I've never liked that. Fooling them, I mean. So I took him backstage while Bonnie was playing and taught him the ring trick. It didn't take him long to pick it up. He was so smart, even at six. And when the curtain went up, he went out and performed it flawlessly. I was so proud. His father and mother both cheered for him, but I was the one he hugged. Of all his birthday parties, and we saw them all, that was my favorite…but does he even remember it? Did he, when he lived? Or was it just one more day at Freddy's? I don't know. I had a thousand chances to tell him how much I loved him, but I never did. I'm sure he knew…but I should have told him. Our time is limited and words, however insufficient, are all we may have when that time is ended, so I have vowed in my prayers never to let another chance to speak the words in my heart pass me by. And I have, of course, but not tonight. Tonight, I mean to say it all. I owe you an apology."
Foxy tried with all his might to break the hold of his preprogrammed obedience and managed only a twitch of his ear pins.
"I owe her an apology, too," Freddy continued, gazing down at Foxanne's remains. "Knowing that she was incapable of understanding my words, I doubt I ever would have felt compelled to attempt one, but you are. So in a way, it is doubly imperative that I offer this…inadequate gesture and you receive it on her behalf. It is too little and far too late, but heartfelt nonetheless. I'm sorry."
'For the love of God, man!' Foxy bellowed internally. 'Get to the bloody point!'
"We are a family," Freddy said. "So I have always considered us, from the moment Chica opened her eyes and I ceased to be an only child and became the leader of our small band. We are a family and I am the head of our family. I have strived always—and failed, at times—to hold us together in the face of overwhelming powers intent on breaking us apart. But I never…" Freddy bent and picked up Foxanne's upended head where Foxy had let it fall, and set it carefully back atop her coils. "…never brought her in as I should have. Her and all the others from Mulholland, all of whom desperately needed and surely deserved one voice to speak for them when all the world was made, by their own fathers' deliberate design, to be their tormentors or their prey. I realize now that I am guilty of loving only those I deemed loveable, and of rejecting one I should have made it my mission to protect. She was Foxanne to you, but nothing to me, nothing until she became the Mangle and a danger to the rest of us, and I'm sorry for that. If any of us have a soul, as I believe we do, then I pray hers possesses the clarity in death that was denied her in life, so that she can hear me say I am sorry I failed her. But that is her apology," Freddy said as the March played just a little faster. "Not yours."
Foxy had to listen, but he managed to wrest enough autonomy to glance at the blood on the dock by Freddy's foot.
Freddy looked down too, stone-faced, letting Foxy see him look, letting him know that Freddy saw everything there was to see, and then he looked again into Foxy's imploring face and went mercilessly on with his prattle.
"I'm sorry, Foxy, with all my heart, I am sorry I let you remove her. I'm not sorry she was removed. That needed to be done. I could argue—rightfully, I think—that it should have been done a long time ago, but that is another indulgence for another time, if at all. She had to be removed and I felt as if I'd run out of time to think of other options, not that I'd tried. We needed the roof fixed. Ana—"
Foxy's frozen body twitched.
"—was my only option to fix the roof," Freddy went on, ignoring him, "and Mangle was in the way. If Ana ever went looking for what was making the noise in the crawlway, Mangle would hunt her down and that would be the end of it. I'm not going to stand here and say I cared if Ana died at that point. I didn't want her here. I would have killed her myself without a twinge of conscience the night the storm washed her in if it hadn't been for Bonnie's silly infatuation. And after all, she did fix his jaw. Bonnie was sensitive about his appearance, so for his sake, I let her live, but I wasn't happy about it. You would have killed her that night, too, as I recall, so I'm sure you understand. She came at you with one of your old tokens and some drugged-up rant about how you'd let her drown as a child, and you were ready to split her in half from…how does that line go?"
It was a direct question. Foxy's paralysis released his speaker and pulled an answer out of him: "Lights to liver."
"That's it. Still, it was only the one night. She left in the morning and for a change, she didn't take any souvenirs on her way out…or so I thought. And then I found out she'd drawn on Bonnie and stolen his face, and God help me, I would have killed her the next time she showed up. Never mind Bonnie, I was ready to order him into the freezer just so I could take my time with it. Do you know what that feels like? Don't answer that," Freddy interrupted himself sharply. "You just stand there and stay quiet and that's an order."
He waited, watching, until Foxy's resistance was spent and he locked up again, then went calmly on, "But it's true, you know. I wanted to kill her so much that I didn't even want to kill her right away. I wanted her to know it was coming. I wanted her to know what I was…and she wanted to bring Bonnie's face back. Now that I think about it, I owe her an apology for that night…but I'll never tell her. That one I'll just have to live with. Where was I?" he asked, staring Foxy down. "Oh yes. The roof. She came back and came back and I had to stand aside and watch this strung-out, trespassing, human dumpster-fire move into my house and do nothing because we needed the roof fixed. I chose the roof over my feelings. Bonnie might think I did it for him, but I didn't. If my feelings don't matter, why would his? I did it for the roof. I traded Mangle's life—as much as I considered her to have one—for the roof. And I let you take her out and I never should have done that, and not just because you lied about doing it," he added.
Foxy tried to drop his gaze and couldn't.
"I should have done it because she was supposed to be family, and if I couldn't protect her and I couldn't fix her and I couldn't even keep her safely penned up, then I should have shown her the respect I damn well owed her and carried her out. I should have ended her misery with mercy and with love. I should have put her to rest and said a prayer so God would know to meet her and take her home. If nothing else, I should have known better than to tell the one man who thought well of her to dispose of her as if I thought she was nothing more than the rotting bones I dredged out of the jungle gym, and I'm sorry for that," Freddy said fiercely, each word laced with static and all the spaces between full of music. "I am so sorry. Of all the other thoughts I've suffered tonight, that's the one that keeps coming back and biting deepest. You cared about her and I put you in the position of having to end her…for a roof. I let you do it, not because it should be someone who loved her who laid her to rest, but because I didn't care who did it. It was a job, like fixing a roof, and it was a less important job than cleaning out the gymnasium, and that is monstrous of me. I'm sorry. I don't think I fully grasped just how monstrous I truly was until tonight, and it sickens me."
Freddy tipped his head back and searched the stars pensively. "Ana said something once, in those early days before I loved her. She said we don't turn into monsters, we just look up one day and realize we've already become one. Those may have been the first words she ever said to me that I really, truly heard. The first words that made me see her as something more than a sufferance, although I was quick enough to recover my prejudices whenever I thought I'd been given cause. I still didn't like her. That took time. I was just waiting for her to do her work and leave, or perhaps do her work and die. I didn't yet realize that she was fixing her home as much as mine. I'm not even sure just when that changed. I just looked up one day and realized…she belongs here. She's family. I love her. And, loving her, I took her down into the basement one day, believing I had to end her life…and I didn't. I won't say I couldn't. In all honesty, I could and would have, if things had gone differently down there, but I didn't have to and I thanked God for that, because that moment when I thought I had to was the most painful I have known since I had to pick David up and carry him, broken, into the Purple Man's so-called workshop."
Freddy lapsed into a short silence, his stoicism fractured by deep pain. After a few minutes, he managed to cover them over again and say, more or less steadily, "That must have been how it felt for you, Foxy. I passed you in the desert that day on my way back from the quarry…you on your way to it with the box in your arms. I saw your face and I knew how hard it was for you. And I still let you do it. I'm sorry. My only defense is that we needed the roof fixed. I could not risk Ana fixing the roof with Mangle in the crawlway, or anywhere in the building, because I knew—we all knew…You," said Freddy as the March swept up into a manic tinkle, "knew that if Ana ever met with Mangle, she. Would. Die."
Foxy could do nothing. Even if Freddy's orders hadn't locked up his body, he doubted he'd be able to move or speak. He waited.
"But as I say, I didn't know Ana then," Freddy said while the March skipped and slowed and stretched itself long, but did not stop. It never entirely stopped. "You didn't know her then. You weren't choosing between two women you cared about and I have no right to stand here and judge you for the choice you made. I won't. I won't even say I forgive you, because there is nothing in that act to offend me or demand forgiveness. That act was blameless."
Freddy paused and closed his eyes. The March sped up and slowed, sped up and slowed, like calming breaths. When Freddy's eyes opened, there was a lot more black in their centers and only a thin ring of blue to hold the black at bay.
"But things changed," Freddy said softly, "didn't they?"
This was another direct question if a man were inclined to think of it so. Foxy could have broken the rule of command that bound him. He didn't. He kept silent.
"I don't expect you to care any less for Mangle just because you began to care more for Ana. Love isn't like that. I acknowledge you did not anticipate the conundrum you created around yourself, but you must have known the peace, such as it was, couldn't last. You must have known you had to choose, sooner or later, before the choice was taken out of your hands. You didn't, and while I can almost bring myself to sympathize on that point, I cannot fathom how you could go on doing nothing." Freddy paused again, head tilted, eyes cold. "In fact, against my better judgment, I'm going to give you a chance to explain. Do you have an explanation? Did you think there was going to be a warning? Did you have a plan? Answer me."
There was no answer. Foxy managed a small shake of his head and stared at Ana's blood on the ground.
The March played a little faster. "But you surely knew the situation was unsustainable. Yes? No?"
Foxy nodded without raising his eyes.
"And you didn't do anything to stop it. You didn't tell me. You didn't tell any of us. You didn't even tell her. You were sleeping with her!" Freddy roared suddenly. His fist slammed into the remains of the safety rail, snapping through its rusted supports and sending chunks of metal and ice flying out into the parking lot. "And you didn't even warn her! What did you think was going to happen if she got out? Where did you put her?"
"Buried her," Foxy muttered.
"Not deep enough! Why a shallow grave of all damn things? No, don't you shake your damn head at me, you answer me and that's an order!"
Haltingly, fighting the truth as it pulled free of him against his will, Foxy said, "I wanted her close enough so's I could talk. So's she could hear me voice. I calm her. Sometimes."
"And when you weren't here to 'calm her,' she dug herself out, is that what you think?"
"Seems so, aye."
"When?"
"When we were gone. I don't know more'n that. When we came back, I saw a piece of her out there in the lot."
Freddy leaned back slightly, which somehow only made him seem to loom taller. "So you knew she was loose."
"Aye."
"And instead of letting anyone else know that, you just ran off and left the rest of us, left Ana, to unload with this door—" Freddy struck the jamb beside him with that same fist, crushing the tracklines flat. "—wide open as we went in and out, making all kinds of noise, blissfully unaware of any danger?"
"I don't know what ye want me to say."
"I want you to tell me you did one thing, one!" Freddy thundered. "However ineffective, however poorly planned, one fucking thing intended to prevent this!"
"I can't."
Freddy blew static through his speaker and turned around. He didn't leave, didn't even seem to want to, only stood there with the Toreador March spinning wildly around him, choosing to stare into the shadowed storage room and all the clutter of Ana's unfinished projects rather than look at Foxy.
"Is she dead?" Foxy asked. "Damn it, man, quit twisting the knife and just tell me. Did I kill her?"
Freddy grunted. At first, that was all. Then his head turned, giving Foxy a glimpse of one eyes, mostly black but new enough to reflect a little shine from the light of Foxy's own. After a long considering stare, he looked back into the shadows and said, "At least you take some of the responsibility," before he finally turned all the way around to face him. "Would you like to see how close it came?"
That alone told him enough. A miss was as good as a mile, as the old saying went, and 'came close' was as good as saying Ana got away. Something in him unlocked, and although all his equilibrium sensors and accelerometers reported 100% stability, he felt unsteady on his feet, shivering with relief. He shook his head, already turning away, knowing Ana had to be hurt but was safe at home and he had to go to her.
Before he had taken even a single step, Freddy's massive hand swooped down and closed around his throat, yanking him back and up and slamming him into the wall beside the open door. Ignoring his struggles, Freddy opened his magic prop compartment in his wrist and brought out his phone. He moved it to the hand attached to the arm presently pinning Foxy to the wall and got out his nib, showing all the expression of a man perusing the morning paper while preparing a cup of coffee. He looked like their father, Foxy thought with a distant sense of wonder as he dangled there, kicking and scratching. It was one thing to know Freddy's core personality data had been downloaded from the man, but it was something else to see it like this, stamped across his features just the same as David's wee face had mirrored his own parents.
Freddy tapped around the phone's screen until he found what he was looking for, then turned the phone so Foxy could see. "Look at her," he growled.
Foxy rolled an eye that way, but the glimpse he caught of a dark-haired stranger—not Ana, he refused to let himself see Ana in that bloody mess—was not enough to satisfy Freddy, who shifted his grip from Foxy's throat to the scruff of new fur at the back of his head, shoving the phone right up to his face.
"Open your eyes and that's an order," he snapped. "You made this happen. You look at it."
Rule Twenty-Nine. Freddy's orders were as good as programming. He had to do it. He had to see…
Bloody runnels carved across her pale flesh. Too pale. Bloodless. Her beautiful wild hair shorn to stubble on the left side, thick black stitching like train tracks on a map winding up and down and over her bruised scalp. Notch in her ear as clean as if it had been clipped out with scissors. One hand, bandaged to the shoulder, gripped an IV pole where a half-gone bag of blood hung. And lord, the stitches. Stitches on her cheek. Stiches on her neck. Stitches on her nose and her brow. Stitches, fine as any he'd ever seen on doll's clothes, tip-toeing right up to her eye so that it was hard to know just where they stopped and her lashes began. And that was just what he could see. There was more hidden under bandages, hinting at itself with seeping red stains. But for all that, she was smiling. Not her tight, angry for-fuck's-sake-I'm-fine smile, but a broad, guileless, happy smile…full of bloody teeth.
"They want to keep her for the night, she says," Freddy told him from miles away, his hand still clenched around Foxy's throat. "She's fighting them. She says she has work in the morning and too much to do at home. I suppose she thinks that if she acts enough like it's no big deal, I'll believe it too. She's a lot like you in that regard. But I saw her when all that—" He drew a circle with his nib over Ana's face and it zoomed in. "—was fresh and bleeding. I wasn't even sure she still had that eye. I was afraid to wipe her face and find the socket. I thought her skull had been bitten open…but don't worry, as you can see, she'd just been partially scalped. I thought she was dying. I've seen a lot of people die. I know it isn't always quick. I know they don't always know it's coming, but I've gotten good at seeing it, and I have never seen so much blood come out of a human who lived. So I picked her up and carried her to the sink and she fought me every step of the way. I couldn't comfort her. She couldn't hear me. Even as she cursed me and begged me to let her go, I'm not sure she really knew I was there. So I had Ana deep black in my arms and Bonnie going black behind me and honestly, I didn't know what to do. Throw Ana in the freezer to bleed out and die alone in the dark while I dealt with Bonnie? Send Chica to try and hold him off, perhaps damaging or even killing one or the other or both of them while Ana died in my arms anyway? Let Ana die with Chica while I fought Bonnie? What would you have done, Foxy?"
"I—"
"Oh wait," Freddy interrupted. "You wouldn't have been there at all."
Foxy shut his mouth and waited.
"As it turned out, I didn't have to do anything. Bonnie came back for Ana and Ana came back for him. I saw it happen. I've never seen anything like that. It was…miraculous. Not a word I use lightly. She loves me, you know, but she couldn't come back from the black for me. She did for him. Would she have done it for you, do you think?"
Foxy pushed at the stone wall of Freddy's body. "Let go o' me," he rasped.
Freddy did, surprisingly, and put his phone away while Foxy staggered back, unanchored. "I sent Ana to the hospital," he said coolly. "I put Bonnie in the freezer and Chica in Kiddie Cove, but honestly, they don't need to be there. They're fine. I don't know how fine Bonnie will be when you two meet after this, but he's fine at the moment. I put them away because I needed to know they would be safe if I went black. I might have. I still might. I'm very angry, Foxy."
"I know."
"No, you don't. You may think you do. I've been angry before, but only once like this. Only once…and I couldn't do anything then to the man who caused it. He was purple. You're not."
He was talking about David again. Foxy knew it without needing to ask. But there was one thing he had to know and he braced himself for the answer he suspected was coming. He was almost proud of how calm he sounded, cool as Captain Fox himself facing down a dragon: "Are ye going to kill me, Fred?"
"I thought about it," Freddy replied without a pause, without even a twitch of an ear to show surprise at the question. His blue eyes were ice when he glanced at Foxy, snapping his wrist compartment shut. "Damn you for that, by the way. Damn you. You made me objectively weigh the pros and cons of killing a family member. You made me see a benefit in doing so. Damn you. But I have lost my David. I nearly lost my Ana. I don't think I can survive another loss and still be who I am…monster that I am. Which is how I ended up thinking the thoughts I've had tonight," he mused, looking over at Mangle, "as I waited eight hours for you to decide to show up. I made this happen, in my own way. So no, Foxy, I'm not going to kill you. I'm not yet ready to forgive you, but I'm not sure I'm entitled to bestow any, given that my actions directly led to yours. Instead…"
He left the last word dangling in the air while he ducked back inside to rummage in the store room, emerging shortly with a largish black trunk in his arms, scuffed and dusty, but not unfamiliar. It was Freddy's old magic act trunk, full of all his special tricks, the ones he only pulled out at parties. The levitating light bulb that really lit up, juggling pins that caught fire mid-air, confetti bombs and vanishing prize tokens and all the kid-sized hats, mustaches and capes for his magician's assistants to wear when they stood beside him on the stage. But now it was empty.
"I want her to have this," Freddy said, holding it out. "I realize it won't hold everything, but it should be big enough for her true body. Take it."
Foxy did, reluctantly.
"Coffin your friend," Freddy said, not gently. "Find her someplace good, if there are any good places left in this wasteland. Lay her to rest. Cover her with stones or carve a cross or do whatever you think she'd have you do to be a friend for her, here, at the end. Grieve. And when you come back…"
Again, Freddy ducked inside, this time returning with the mop bucket, dry but with a bottle of cleanser and a roll of trash bags tucked inside.
"When you come back," said Freddy, showing some teeth, "clean up the mess you made."
Foxy was forced to set down the trunk to accept the bucket. Funny. It couldn't have weighed more than a few pounds, to a bloke who could carry hundreds, but it was heavy.
"Let me know when you're done," Freddy said, turning to go. "I want to make sure you're back in your cabin before I let Bonnie out. Oh, and don't worry. The protective coating Yoshi gave us does its job very well. You won't have to worry about Ana's blood staining your hands." He paused at the kitchen doorway and looked back, nothing but a black shape in the shadows with one ice-blue eye staring back at him. "Not that you ever did," he said and walked away.