CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
Ana dreamed she grew up and went to live at a Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. It was a good dream, because Foxy was there and he took her onto his ship and made her part of the crew. It was a bad dream too, because he sometimes killed people, but David was there with her, eleven years old in a torn shirt and stained Freddy mask. They sat together in the captain's cabin while Foxy told them stories—strange and new and hard to hear, like he was whispering from another room even while he paced the boards in front of them waving his hook and splattering them both with blood. But it was just a dream, good parts and bad, and when she woke up, she was still Ana, locked in the closet, which she knew even before her eyes opened because closets have a smell that is equal parts musty fabric and lost time and old blood. She could smell that smell now, lying on her side with her legs drawn up, her feet resting on the wall and her hair just brushing against the other wall, her breath wafting back at her because it was too close to the door, and all the other junk that shared the closet with her pressed up firmly against her backside. She was safe. She was trapped, but trapped was safe. She was Ana and she could feel the salty crust of old tears on her cheeks, but she was safe now and everything was all right.
But wait.
That was no winter coat or umbrella that had fallen over her. It was furry and hard, full of angles and blocky edges. It was also heavy and seemed to be fixed behind her, anchoring her to this place and to it. Puzzling over this pushed back the fog a little more, and suddenly she was thirty, yanked into adult dimensions and adult thought with a ruthlessness that left her more exhausted than if she hadn't slept at all. She was still Ana, but Ana with a brain-blistering headache and eyelids that had been replaced in the night by sandpaper, not to mention the pain filling her up like hot lead, heaviest in her head and shoulder, but everywhere. She tried to move, just to stretch out her aching limbs a little, and couldn't. There was a wall in front of her, a wall under her feet, a wall just over her head. She was trapped in a closet only a little larger than her curled-small self and worse, something else was trapped in it with her, responding to her little movements by tightening around her, holding her in place.
Ana tried to open her eyes, but only one of them managed, tearing up at even this weak, yellowish light so that at first, she couldn't see anything. Slowly, she realized it wasn't a wall in front of her after all, but wooden boards, flush together and slightly bowed outward. Was she in a crate? A coffin? Her grandfather's clock? She pushed back against whatever unyielding thing was behind her, fighting for a few extra inches of perspective, and her one working eye slowly dragged a window into focus. Yellow glass, opaque even when new and old now, filmed with dust, with dark scales of grime collecting at the corners, rounding out all the sharp edges. She could see smudges of recent touches here and there, and one distinct handprint, fingers splayed and slightly smeared. She stared at it, feeling the tumbling blur of her memory trying to come together, because although she did not know where she was, some still sleeping part of herself remembered that handprint. Remembered seeing it…and making it.
Wait…
Ana gathered up all there was of her strength and heaved herself over as far as she could go, then turned her throbbing head as far as it would go and there, at the very edge of the whole world, through a haze of yellow lamp light and blurring agony, there was Foxy.
"Huh?" she said, which summed everything up quite succinctly, she thought.
He took his arm off her and scooted back from where he had been lying spooned up against her on the padded bench that was meant to be the captain's bed here in his cabin. "Ye kept trying to get up," he explained, rubbing at the side of his muzzle with his hook. "It was the only way I could keep ye quiet."
"Keep me quiet? What was I doing?" Freed at last to do so, Ana wiggled stiffly around and sat up, uncurling her stiff limbs and wincing at the pain that seemed to pour into them, filling her arms and legs up heavily with hurt. The bandages were not immediately apparent and when she finally noticed them, she could not at once remember why she had them.
It came back by degrees: Mangle's eyeless sockets first, then her teeth. The hospital, more a sense of smell than any real memory. Stitches. So many stitches, mostly on her head…they cut her hair, but lucky her, she could just comb it over…and then she'd had to get a rabies shot, which explained the enormous snake of pain squeezing her arm off at the moment. They'd wanted to admit her last night and although she couldn't quite remember the details, she was reasonably sure that when she'd left the hospital, she'd been on her way home.
"What the hell am I even doing here? How long have I been…oh shit," she said with sudden, splintering sobriety. "What time is it?"
Without waiting for an answer—he couldn't have known anyway—Ana sprang up and promptly folded up and went over on her face. The cabin spun. Her vision tipped to one side and washed out to an alarming shade of pale, then came swirling back in. She tried to push herself up and couldn't. Her left arm was useless below the shoulder Mangle had bitten; her right, useless below the place they'd given her the rabies shot. Her fingers groped stupidly at the floorboards, but she could not get her stupid self up.
Foxy's hands slipped under her arms.
"I'm okay," she mumbled, squirming. "I don't need your help. I'm fine."
He backed off, but not far, and when she only lay there on the floor for another minute or two, he came back. Over her embarrassed protests, he picked her up and set her on her feet again, leaned up against the wall with his hand still to support her. "Get yer head on, lass," he said, reaching past her to open the door. "We'll go when you're ready. No rush."
Easy for him to say no rush. He hadn't worked in years.
Bracing herself on whatever she could reach, Ana staggered out onto the bow of the ship and sagged against the control panel, waiting for Foxy and the light of his eyes before she attempted to go any further. Through the curtain, she could hear the crows in the crow's nest beginning their obnoxious nonsense. "How much did the pirate pay for his earrings?" "A buccaneer!" Caw caw caw. "How much did the pirate pay for his hook and his peg?" "An arm and a leg!" Caw caw caw. "How much did the pirate pay for his ship?" "Not much, he gets all his ships on sails!" Caw caw caw. She listened with half an ear to their tired jokes and hoarse laughter, only gradually realizing what should have been obvious as soon as the cabin door had opened.
"What happened to the octopus?" she asked.
Foxy looked down, illuminating a very dead silicone cephalopod splayed over the deck before he swung his foot and booted it over the side of the ship onto the stage below. "I had a bad night," he muttered, moving to the gangplank.
Because of her. He didn't say that part. He might not even be thinking it, but it was true. She'd killed Foxanne. All the years they'd shared, all the hurts and secrets, the private parties and Metzger's games…and good times, too, there had to be some of those mixed in, even if they were only the two of them talking in the night, behind the curtain of Pirate's Cove, long after the kids went home and before the hunt began…or after it had ended. She'd been made for him, after all. No matter what else had happened, there had to have been a moment, right at the start, when he'd looked at her and seen a friend. And maybe that part hadn't lasted, but he had to have had some hope he could bring it back, because he'd lived with her haunting him all these years. He'd tried to save her, even if he must have known she couldn't be saved. He'd put her someplace quiet and still and tried to keep her safe…and Ana had killed her.
She wanted to say something. What was there to say? I'm sorry? Sorry was for broken plates and eating the last slice of someone else's birthday cake. There was no word sorry enough for this.
He was looking at her now, halfway down the gangplank, probably wondering why she wasn't following. If she gave him a reason, he'd come back to carry her. She didn't think she could stand to have him touch her right now. She could barely stand to have him look at her.
"I'll leave if you want me to," she heard herself say and felt a great ripping wound open up in her heart. "I'll leave and I'll never come back."
His ears twitched up. He came a step toward her, stopping short when she flinched back. He looked at her a long time in the stifling stage area while the crows outside cawed their hoarse laughter, and finally, softly, said, "No one wants that, lass."
"Why not?"
His ears lowered again.
"Why not?" she asked again. Her voice cracked. "How can you possibly still want me around after what I did?"
"That wasn't yer fault."
"Of course it was! Of course! What the hell else am I but a living reminder of everything that was ever wrong with this place?" Her voice broke again and this time, would not come back. She clapped both hands to her face and made herself breathe until her throat opened up again. "I keep thinking things can't get any worse, but the bar keeps moving," she whispered. Her heart tore wider. She could feel it bleeding. "And I'm the one moving it. I'm making this happen. I don't know how, but I know I am. Please…I'm going to hurt you if I stay."
"Stay." He held up his hand, flexed his fingers and letting her hear the pistons at work. He said, "Nothing hurts me anymore."
She looked at his hand, wiping at her dry eyes.
He lowered his arm, then held it out to her. "Come on, lass. We can talk about this later if ye still want to, but ye don't know half what ye're saying right now. Let's pour a pot of coffee in ye, and if ye still want to run away, I'll deal with ye then."
"Deal with me," she muttered and would have rolled her eyes, but they hurt too much.
"I told ye once before, ye don't get to run away from me," he said archly. "So aye, I'll probably not deal with ye in a manner ye'll be liking, but ye'll know ye were dealt with when I'm done. Think about that while ye're drinking yer coffee."
She sighed, surrendering. "Okay, fine."
"There's me girl. Come on."
He offered his hand again and this time, she took it.
She needed it. She was shaking before she got off the stage, sweating as she climbed the stairs out of the amphitheater. The kitchen was at the other end of the building, which she knew intellectually was not a long walk, but it felt endless today. The thought of warm coffee for her dry mouth and sore throat quickly became supplanted by the thought of a stainless steel surface to lean and/or throw up on, and she couldn't even care about needing to hold Foxy's hand when it took all her concentration to keep from collapsing at his feet.
"Ye need me to carry ye?" Foxy asked, eerily prescient.
"No."
"Ye look a bit green around the gills there, lass."
"I love it when you talk like a pirate, but I'm fine," she said dully, even as she thought she'd never felt sicker in her damn life. Fuck rabies—no. Fuck the rabies vaccine. And fuck it twice over for having to get it when she didn't even have rabies. If only she could have thought of a different story.
Finally, the kitchen. Letting go of Foxy's hand, she staggered the last few steps and fell gratefully against the sink, hanging her head until the walls grew solid around her once more and the nausea faded to tolerable levels.
"Hi."
"Hey, Chica," said Ana, neither knowing nor caring when she'd walked in, or even if she'd been there the whole time. "How's it going?"
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah, sure." Groping for a bottle of water, Ana gave in to the inevitable, retched up a sour mouthful of bile and spat it into the sink, grimacing as she rinsed. "Don't I look okay?"
"No," said Chica seriously as Foxy rubbed Ana's back and used his hook to keep her hair back. "You look terrible."
"Thanks. Would you happen to know where I dropped my pack last night? I need my pills."
"Um," said Chica, which was an odd answer.
When Ana lifted her head and blinked blearily around at her, Chica fled, which was even odder.
"Do I seriously look that bad?" she asked Foxy.
"Lass," he said gently, still rubbing her back, "If'n I want to frisk around with ye later, I ain't about to give ye an honest answer now."
She laughed, groaned, puked, and hung her head over the sink some more.
Eventually, the kitchen door swung open, but it was not Chica returning. It was Bonnie, ears up too straight and smiling too wide. He did have her pack, but he made no effort to hand it over. Instead, he cleared the doorway, stepped aside and folded his arms with her pack still dangling from his wrist. "Are you ready for Freddy?" he asked.
"Huh?"
Bam, went the door, bouncing first off Freddy's open palm and then off the wall. He came through with his eyes in angry mode, already lit up, but silent. No Toreador March. Not a word of any kind. He stood in the doorway and looked at her with a kind of dark expectation, charging the air between them until she could feel the fine hairs at the back of her neck bristling.
"Intervention?" Ana guessed. "Where's Chica?"
"In her room," Freddy replied with a distinct growl under his words. "She doesn't like confrontations, however necessary, but if you'd like her here for moral support, I'm sure she'll come and hold your hand."
"I don't need my fucking hand held," Ana replied automatically, then frowned. "Moral support for what?"
"For the conversation we're about to have."
"About what?" she asked, knowing perfectly well.
"Last night."
She shrugged, holding his stare. "What about it?"
He glared at her for the longest ten seconds of her life and then he started toward her.
Ana backed up, but he kept coming, ominously silent, until she bumped up against the corner. Then and only then did he stop. He put out his hand. Bonnie tossed Ana's pack. Freddy caught it and set it down hard on the counter without ever taking his eyes off Ana. He opened the front flap, shoved his oversized paw inside and came out with a bottle of whiskey, half-gone.
She opened her mouth to explain, or at least to sound like she was explaining while in actuality telling him to keep his hands off her damn stuff, only to close it again fast when he crushed the bottle in his fist. It popped like a firecracker, the sound flat but unexpected and very loud as it bounced off all these metal surfaces, followed by the splash of good whiskey, wasted on the floor.
Ana winced, then sighed. "Okay," she said. "I may have taken it too far last night, but in my defense—"
"I am not interested in listening to you defend this," Freddy snapped, shaking shards of glass down the sink. "Whatever it is you think excuses or explains your behavior, I don't care. At the moment, I don't even want to hear you apologize. I better hear one hell of a good apology eventually, but right now, all I want you to do is listen, because your life is about to change."
Ana looked at Foxy.
He looked back at her, so fantastically of no help at all that he didn't even need to say anything.
She sighed and rolled her eyes at Freddy, who was already pulling another bottle out of her pack. Pop and it, too, was raining good times down the drain. "Fine. What are we up to? Rule number forty-what, do not mix pills and booze?"
He banged his hand down on the side of the sink and looked at her. "Do you really think it's wise to push my buttons right now?"
She did not, but this was Freddy freakin' Fazbear lecturing her while he dumped out her stash, and if there was a tipping point between the serious and the surreal, that was so far over it she couldn't help herself. "You think it's wise to push mine? We've been over this. You don't tell me how to live my life."
"Fred—" began Foxy, but stopped when Freddy pointed at him. Shaking his head, he retreated several paces and left Ana alone with the DARE bear.
"Look, my head is killing me," she said. "So do you think we could just skip ahead to the scene where you tell me you're not angry, just disappointed and we'll pick it up from there?"
"Oh, I'm angry," he said, his eyes flickering as if to prove it. "I am extremely angry. I haven't begun to explore the depths of my disappointment, but I have had all last night and all this morning to fully embrace my anger."
"Okay, just stop. I fucked up and I know it, but we both know this act of yours isn't going anywhere. You're not my father and I can't deal with the shouting, so please, drop it."
Freddy's head cocked. The lenses of his eyes flexed slightly wider open. "First of all, I am the head of this household and you are a member of this household, so for all intents and purposes, I am your father. Secondly," he continued with an unnerving lack of emphasis, "I'm not shouting. It is my intention to have this out at a reasonable volume like reasonable adults, but if you insist on acting like a child, I will reluctantly set my intentions aside and treat you like one."
"What do you want from me? I said I fucked up! I'm genuinely sorry, but if you want me to say it won't happen again—"
"Oh, I know it won't," he shot back. "Because I'll make sure of it. You have lost your recreational intoxicant privileges. You want your bag so badly? Go get it."
She frowned at him suspiciously, but he didn't explain, so she eased out from under his paw and went to her bag. She opened it, feeling inside, reluctant to take her eyes off Freddy, but she couldn't find the pills or the pharmacy bag they'd been in, so ultimately she had to look for them. And look again. And open every pocket and pull out her spare clothes, her wallet, all the old receipts and loose junk, and do everything but crawl inside it, but she couldn't find the pills.
"What did you do with them?" she asked, lunging for the cupboard where she kept her stash on the off-chance that he'd put them away. To her shock and dismay, the cupboard was, like Old Mother's Hubbard's, bare as bones. Nothing in there now but food. "What did you do?" she asked in a high scratchy voice. A panicked voice. "Those are mine, damn it! That's my medication! I need those pills!"
"Yes, and the ones for which you have a prescription are safe with me. Everything else is gone."
She spun around, gaping at him in something like true horror. "What do you mean, 'gone'? Gone where?"
His answer was to put one hand on the side of the sink and drum his fingers once.
"You did not," she said hoarsely.
"You are entitled to one or two Percocet every six hours as needed for pain, and Augmentin every twelve hours." He popped open his abdominal cavity and brought out the plastic bag from the pharmacy. When she moved toward it, he sent her back with nothing but a hard stare, and while she restlessly watched, he measured out a dose of the antibiotic into the little plastic cup and held it out to her.
"Oh, you are not appointing yourself my dispenser, bear. Hand it over, hand it all over, right now!"
"Ana—"
"Right now!" she shouted and slapped the nearest countertop for emphasis.
Freddy glanced at the counter, then turned that same level stare on her, unimpressed. "You're going to hurt your hand."
"Fuck you!"
"You know the rules, Ana. You can swear in front of me, not at me."
"Or what?" she challenged.
"Or what, indeed," he replied mildly. "I've established a precedent, after all."
Ana looked at the puddle of whisky on the floor, then at the sink, then shut her stupid trouble-making mouth.
Freddy nodded once and held the little cup of useless antibiotics out a little higher. "Behave yourself and drink it."
She did, angrily.
He rinsed the cup, dried it, put it and the bottle away and only then brought out the damned Percocet. "Against my better judgment, I'm giving you two of these," he told her. "Because although I'm very aware that you took a heavy dose last night—I counted the pills—I'm also aware that you're in a great deal of pain. I'm willing to leave the past behind us, but going forward, do not expect to receive the maximum dose simply because you're allowed it. I'll use my judgment."
"Your judgment? Yours?! You don't even know what pain is!"
Freddy paused, closing his hand around the pills he'd just shaken into his palm, and fixed her with a stare so severe it almost looped all the way around into amusement. "I was dismembered once, reduced in a conscious state to over a hundred separate components held in different rooms for three days before being slapped back together in the same clumsy, brutal manner as I was torn apart. And Father didn't know they'd done it and I didn't know how to tell him, so I had to live with not only the memory of experiencing my own autopsy, but the static in all my improperly realigned joints and sensors for well over a year. I may not bleed, I may not bruise, but I assure you, Ana, I know what pain is."
"I didn't mean it like that," she mumbled, avoiding his eyes. "I just meant…I don't know what the fuck I meant."
"I understand. You just woke up, you've had a traumatic experience and you're no doubt significantly hungover. We'll move on." He opened his hand and offered the pills. As she snatched them away and swallowed them dry, he continued: "As I was saying, you'll receive your medications at six and twelve. I will make sure you get them in the appropriate dose and on time. You will not be permitted alcohol in any form while you are taking medications. Once your doctor decides you no longer require the Percocet, I will allow you over the counter painkillers only, in accordance with their approved use. After your prescriptions have run their course," Freddy continued calmly, "and presuming you give me no cause to do otherwise, I will permit you moderate recreational access to alcohol. Taking into consideration your age and weight, do not expect that to exceed two beers or one ounce of spirits a night. And yes, I'm perfectly well aware that you can go get whatever you want and do whatever you want with it at that other house you have, which is why you are staying here for at least the next ten days, excluding work hours."
"Ten…Am I grounded?" Ana asked, dumbfounded. "Are you grounding me? Who…? I'm sorry, no disrespect, bear, but who in the crispy batter-fried fuck do you think you are?!"
His head tipped, like he needed a better angle to fully absorb those words. He opened his abdominal compartment, put her pills away and shut himself up with as much of a slam as his new padding made possible. "I'm Freddy Fazbear," he growled, "and you're damn right you're grounded. You're lucky that's all I'm doing to you. Do you have any idea the condition you were in last night?"
She didn't, but damned if she was going to tell him that. "Quit over-reacting. I was a bit off, but it wasn't that bad."
"Off?" he echoed, not shouting yet, but loud enough to make his speakers reverberate. "You were off? You could barely string two words together! You were falling over on your feet!"
Her cheeks burned. Was she blushing? She was. Damn it.
"You can't hold that against me," she mumbled. "I was…hurt."
"Hurt." The pupils of his eyes snapped open, filling his sockets with black as he roared, "You were high! You were so fucking high, you had no idea where you were or how you got here, but you still got behind the wheel of that truck and drove, and the Ana I know would never, never do something so stupid and suicidal! You could have killed yourself! You could have killed someone else! Don't you dare talk to me about how I'm over-reacting!"
Freddy said fuck. Of all the things he had said, that was the one that drove the spike of absolute awe into her heart. She stared at him, silent. Freddy said fuck.
"I have trusted you until now to know your limits," he was saying, still right up in her face, "but it's clear you don't know where the line is anymore, so now that line belongs to me. Do. Not. Cross it." He picked up the clutter of her life, threw it all back in her pack and shoved it into her arms. "Get your phone, call your employer and tell him you are taking the rest of the week off."
"The hell I will!" she gasped.
"It's Thursday, Ana. 'The rest of the week' is today and tomorrow. No reasonable person would begrudge you two extra days to recover from injuries like yours. If he does, then he is a man unworthy of your service and loyalty, and you might as well quit."
"I can't! How many times do you think I can do that and get away with it?"
"When we needed more time for repairs, you had no trouble asking for it and would have quit on the spot if he refused to give it. But now you won't?" His head cocked, feigning curiosity while his fingers flexed on his folded arms. "Tell me exactly why it is that you believe your life is worth so much less than ours."
"I…" She backed up a step and rallied. "That's not what I'm saying!"
"Then we'll talk about it later. We'll have plenty of time over the next ten days. As for now, you should know that your state of employment is not a major concern of mine at this moment."
"It sure as hell should be! I don't have Rider to fall back on anymore," she told him and, hearing it out loud for the first time, faltered. The pause could not have been longer than a second, maybe as much as two, but it was long enough for the whole of her bleak future to pan out in front of her and it shook her voice slightly when she finally went on. "I have a bag full of money, sure, in a small town where the sheriff is actively looking for a reason to fuck me over, and spending money I'm not making is a great goddamn reason. I need this job! I need it! And whether you realize it or not, you need me to have it as much as I do, if not more so! So no, Freddy. No, I am not telling my boss to suck it while I take more time off to make you feel better!"
"I'm sorry, does it say 'Ana Stark's Pizzeria' on the sign above this building? It does not, so let's get one thing straight right now, because there seems to be some confusion." Freddy stalked forward as she backed up until he had her wedged into the corner and still he leaned in, filling her horizons with his scowling face. "You are not in your house, little girl, you're in mine. And you had better adjust your attitude accordingly or you're going to gain a whole new appreciation for what a Puritanical pain in the ass I can really be."
"Hey now, I never said that! Out loud." She shot Bonnie a look of horror, mouthing, Did I?
"You totally did," said Bonnie, folding his arms and leaning against the wall. "Something you maybe ought to know about yourself is that you get real mouthy when you get drunk. You say—" His ears shifted and came stiffly up, faking that easy good cheer he was trying to pull off. His smile strained a little wider. "You say all sorts of things you probably didn't mean to."
Freddy caught her by the shoulder and squeezed to make her look at him. "I spent rather a large portion of last night figuring out how to navigate the internet on the phone you gave me," he told her, his plastic eyes narrowing. "Among other things, I've done some research on what the side effects of a rabies vaccination are and it's obvious you're feeling them, in addition to whatever else you might be feeling. I won't speculate. That doesn't matter at the moment. What does matter is that you are not driving anywhere right now. If I like what I see in a few hours, if, I may allow you to go and get something decent to eat, otherwise you can stay here and eat this garbage. And it should go without saying, but just to be crystal clear, if you try to sneak out past me—" He showed her his open hands, closed them, reached into one with the other and pulled out her keys. "—you won't get very far. And I will turn ten days into twenty—" He clapped his hands with the keys between them and showed them to her again, empty. "—like magic. Get your phone. Call your employer. Or so help me, Ana, I will."
He meant it. Ana yanked her pack open again and found her phone. She went through her short contact list, intensely aware of her audience, and put the call through. Shelly picked up on the second ring and she knew just from the tone of his harrumph that the good times were only beginning. She muted the call with her thumb and made one attempt to hold onto a shred of dignity.
"You don't need to be here for this," she said.
None of them moved, not even Bonnie, and there was Shelly in her ear, losing patience by the second.
Shaking her head, Ana started talking, beginning with an apology and an acknowledgement of the time before giving a much abridged account of the story she'd told at the hospital.
"Bit by a dog, huh?" Shelly did not sound impressed. "Whose dog?"
"I didn't exactly see it."
"Uh huh. You're just like my wife, bless her. Couldn't lie worth a nickel."
"It's the truth," she said, and it was (sort of), but she knew it wasn't going to do any good. "It got me pretty good. I had to get sewn up and get a rabies shot, and it's the shot that's messing me up this morning. I'm sorry about that, but—"
"Pardon my French, but cut the shit," Shelly interrupted. "Nearest thing we ever had to rabies in this town was the time ol' Doc Haver's mutt got into the Burma-shave down at the barber shop. Now what's the real story here, missy? Celebrated your homecoming a little too hard, did you? Well, that's just too damn bad. You said you'd be back Monday—"
"I told you—"
"—and you weren't," he went on loudly. "You said you'd be here this morning and you're not. And this is how it is with you since the very beginning. I give you an inch, you take a mile. You want to give me one good reason I shouldn't shit-can you on the spot?"
"Hang on." She turned the phone around, took a snapshot of her head with her face turned to show off her stitches (and nothing behind her but a dirty white wall), then loosened the bandages on her left arm and got a picture of that, too. "Check your email," she said, sending them, and waited.
A long pause, punctuated by keyboard taps, then: "Dang, woman. What got at you?"
"A dog, like I said. Maybe a pack of dogs. And then a pack of doctors, and with God as my witness, I don't know which was worse."
"Well, I don't know," Shelly said slowly. "The more I look at this, the more I get to thinking it looks like one of them photo filters, like they do with the cat ears and mustaches and such. Maybe I should just take a drive out your way and make sure you're not pulling my leg."
"Save yourself the gas and call the sheriff. He took my report last night at Mercy General, while I was still hooked up to the damn IV getting a blood transfusion. That's a hell of a filter."
Shelly audibly thought that over. "So…you really got the rabies."
"No I don't have rabies," Ana said crossly. "I have to get rabies shots. I got mauled by a strange animal. It's a precaution, that's all. I got one yesterday and I…I have to get another one tomorrow." She glanced at Freddy, who was watching her too damned close. "And then there's two more, if, you know, they become necessary, but I can schedule them on the weekend so that won't affect you."
"So what are you saying to me?" he demanded, beginning to slide back into his blustering-bossman persona. "You get a little poke with a needle and can't work for a week?"
"Not a week, just a day or two. And I just said I'll get the other shots on the weekend—"
"You told me when you went prancing off on your little Las Vegas 'vacation' that you'd work weekends to make up the time. Now you're telling me you won't."
"I will," Ana said. "Just not yet. In a few weeks—"
"Christmas tree lighting ceremony is in less than two weeks, missy. Thirty years, I have had the job of making sure the halls are decked and the star lights up, and that is one streak I will not see broken because you lost a wrestling match with a couple stray dogs."
Ana stifled a sigh.
"It's not that I got no sympathy for your situation. I put a nail through my hand just last year and do you know what I did? I pulled it out and kept on nailing, because that's what it means to work in the real world, missy. Sometimes, you just got to push through the pain. Now I'm sure you're hurting, and I'll give you the lightest load I got, but you've taken all the time I can afford to give you and then some. So tell you what," Shelly said, accompanied by the muted jingle of his hanging keys as he hitched at his belt. "You be here in twenty minutes and give me a solid six…hell, four hours of your time slinging holiday spirit around town and I'll see if I can work around your little needle jabs. What do you say to that?"
Ana looked at Freddy.
One single note of the March dropped. He shook his head.
"I don't think that's going to happen today," she said. "But look, I'll be there tomorrow until I have to go in for the shot and I don't mind working double-shifts at regular pay between now and Christmas to make up the time I owe you."
"Whoa there," said Shelly, loudly enough to cover Freddy's equally arresting growl. "This is not a negotiation, missy! You come in when I tell you to come and you do the work I set you to do, or I put you on the curb!"
"Oh, come on! This is only the second time I've tapped out in the whole time you've known me!"
"That's not how I count it."
Ana's temper rose a little higher and burned a little hotter. "Oh really? Are you also counting the time when you called me a whore and I quit?"
"I don't remember it happening that way," he said with a special kind of infuriating wounded dignity. "What I remember is you flaking off on me right when you knew I was in a bind so you could negotiate yourself a promotion you hadn't earned."
"A promotion? From crew work to mowing lawns? The hell kind of bizzaro world promotional track is that?"
Shelly harrumphed in her ear. "I gave you a chance with this company, missy. I gave you the benefit of my doubt when no one else would and no matter how you want to remember it, you threw that away and then came crying to me to take you back."
"Isn't this the guy who called you like a thousand times that one day to get you to meet him for dinner?" Bonnie asked as Ana tapped the Mute icon with her thumb to send a few choice words at the ceiling.
"Yeah," she said through clenched jaws. "It's not going to make sense, Bon. He's pissed, and since he's the one with the jobs and I'm the one who needs one, history is what he says it was. I hope you're happy, bear."
Freddy grunted.
"Which I did," Shelly was saying, loudly, warming to his sense of righteous indignation. "Against my better judgment and the advice of everyone around me, I gave you a second chance, only for you to have your little 'family emergency' and take off for two weeks on no notice, leaving me high and dry at the start of the holiday season. The only reason I'm willing to take you on again is because when you bother to show up, you usually put in a decent amount of effort in-between jiggling around—"
Ana had to mute the call again.
"—but now here we are again, the very next day after you beg me for your job back, and you're flaking off on me again. Are you coming in today or not?"
Ana looked at Freddy again.
He lost three notes this time. He still shook his head.
"Apparently not," she sighed. "Listen—"
"No, you listen! As of this moment, you are fired!"
Ana shook her head, stared at the ceiling and said, "Yup."
The placidity of her response was clearly not what Shelly was looking for. He said, with even more self-righteous fire, "The world does not owe you a living and neither do I!"
"Uh-huh."
"What are you going to do, run crying to your sugar daddy? Go ahead. Oh, you may buy me a few months, maybe a year of inconvenience, but after that? Make no mistake, the day is coming when you are going to need someone to stand up for you if you want to stay in this town. I am from this town, missy. I am one of the pillars of this community and you are nothing. Nothing but the last mistake your mama made before Joe Stark put her on the curb!"
Ana tried to rub her eyes, only to yank her hand back with a wince as she gave herself a fresh reminder that her head had damn near been bitten in half the night before.
"Do you hear me?" Shelly wanted to know.
"Yeah, yeah, I hear you," Ana snapped, now carefully massaging around the edge of her left eye's bandages. "I don't care, but I hear you."
"Don't you backtalk me, missy. You're worse than your mama ever dreamed of being. At least she settled for ruining just one man's life. You've done nothing but cause trouble since you showed up, sniffing around after Moorehead, dressing like a hooker, spending way more money than I been paying you up at the Warren Ranch and the whole town knows what you've been getting up to with that old man. I'd say you ought to be ashamed, but there's never been any shame in your family, so I'll just say that if you lip off to me again, I can guarantee the only place you'd be working from now on is at The Wagon Wheel with your top off, and judging by that photo you sent me, a bag over your head." He gave her one of his patent-pending pauses while she clapped a hand to the least-bitten half of her face and tried to rub the I-told-you-so out before she could yell it at Freddy. "Is that what you want?"
"No," she said sourly.
"Then you better start showing me some respect. And if you want a job, you get your lazy ass down here and convince me to give you another shot. And afterwards…" Another long look at lines in the sand. "Afterwards, you and me can have a nice long talk about your future with my company. Make a couple things official, so to speak."
Ana didn't answer. She liked to think her answer would have been a resounding 'Fuck you' once she got around to it, but at the moment, she was struck unironically speechless by the fact that now, after half a year of angling mirrors and standing behind her so he could see down her shirt and brushing up against her in narrow hallways and that that one drunken attempt at a sloppy kiss the night Big Paulie died, now he was going for it. Now. He'd looked right at that stupid picture of her in the hospital with her hair half-gone and her face swelled up and barely stitched together, and he was giving her the 'let's talk about your future' line now.
Freddy misinterpreted her dumbfounded silence. "I've had enough," he growled. "Give me that phone."
Shelly dropped the phone on his end and picked it up with a fumbling rustle, stammering, "Who's there? Who is that?"
"He thinks he's my conscience," Ana said, eyeing him.
Freddy did not ask again. He took the phone out of her oddly slack hand and brought it up to his mouth. It looked like a toy in his grip. It should have been funny. It wasn't. "This is Ana's conscience," he said, deceptively quiet and calm. "And this is Ana's conscience punching an industrial oven."
WHAM!
Ana jumped back, forgetting she was already in the corner so that she skidded sideways and fell against Foxy. The steel panel he'd hit had buckled in around his fist. As he withdrew, it popped off and clattered to the floor, making a sound like movie-thunder as it wobbled on the tiles until Bonnie reached out a foot and nudged it quiet.
"The next sound you need to worry about is the sound of Ana's conscience kicking your door in and coming at you, because I absolutely will, Mr.—What is this dead man's name?" Freddy demanded, turning to Ana.
"Um…"
"Never mind, it's on your phone. Mr. Shelly, you might want to reconsider your attitude toward rabid animal attacks, because I," snarled Freddy, his voice taking on more and more of those scary undergrowls, "am the biggest rabid animal you will ever meet. I am seven feet tall and I can honestly say I can tear you in half like you were a phone book and eat the fucking pieces. She will not be coming into work today," said Freddy without a pause, just like he said fuck every day. "She will not be coming back to your office after hours tonight or any other night. Ana Stark no longer works for you. One moment," he concluded as Ana grabbed ineffectually at his wrist in a futile effort to pry her phone out of his mechanical grip. He frowned at the screen for a few seconds before carefully tapping the Mute icon as he'd seen her do, then turned that same frown on her. "Make it quick, I'm on the phone."
"I need that job, damn it!"
"No, you don't. In your own words, you need the appearance of a job. I've seen the internet and you're a smart woman. You can come up with something plausible to sell online to account for what you spend, provided you're prudent about it. If you want to look for some other employment after you're done being grounded, I'll allow it, but you are entirely done with this man."
"Freddy—"
"Entirely," Freddy said, leaning into her face. "Done."
With that settled, he held the phone up again and unmuted the call. "Mr. Shelly? Good. No, shut up. I'm not interested in hearing anything you have to say. You seem to enjoy threatening people, so you might appreciate this. If you attempt to withhold her final paycheck, if you malign her or in any way take retaliatory action, so will I. Am I understood?"
Silence.
Freddy waited, drumming the fingers of his free hand hard on the countertop with a great deal of obvious restraint, and growled, "I can't hear a nod. Do we need to have this conversation in person?"
More fumbling. "No, sir," Shelly rasped. "Yes, sir! I mean, understood!"
"Good. Now I have only one more thing to say to you and I suggest you write it down and read it carefully because it is the last, the very last, warning you're going to get out of me. Are you ready? You have a pen? Here it is." Freddy's eyes lit up, glowing briefly before the lenses irised fully open, turning his eyes to sockets with pinpoints of shimmering silver reflected at their centers. "Do. Not. Fuck. With my family."
Without another word or a pause to listen to someone else's words, Freddy ended the call and handed the phone back to Ana. "If that man ever attempts to contact you again, I want to hear about it."
"You have no idea how hard you just made things for me."
"I'm beginning to think you have no idea how hard you make things for yourself," he retorted.
"You get taller every time someone asks," Bonnie remarked.
"Not now, Bonnie. Ana, look at me."
"He's right, though," Foxy said, inspecting his hook. "I do recall Yoshi adding some extra inches on ye somewhere, but it sure weren't on the outside. The only way yer seven feet tall be in that hat and a pair of heels."
"Have you scheduled your follow-up shots?" Freddy asked, ignoring him.
"I'm well over seven feet tall," said Bonnie. "I know what it looks like."
"Not yet."
"Do it."
"I'm eight-foot-four, actually," said Bonnie.
"With yer ears up," Foxy inserted. "Ye can't be more than seven-even without them."
"Maybe so, but it's all Bonnie, is what I'm saying, and not Bonnie-in-a-hat. And what are you, six-two? You're practically man-sized."
"I prefer fun-sized."
"I'll bet you do."
Freddy smacked his hand down on the counter and swung around. "Both of you, shut up!"
"Fair's fair, man," Bonnie said calmly. "You got to threaten him and you didn't even mention me. Or Foxy, for that matter, and I'm sure he had a few choice words queued up for the fella who threatened to fire her and in the same breath, tried to muscle her into bed."
"I never use words when a sword'll do."
"Oh, stop!" Ana snapped, her stomach churning with that special kind of humiliation that turns so easily to anger. "He didn't mean it like that!"
And she knew better, of course. She'd heard him, and that was why she had to say it, because they'd all heard him. Three of her closest friends had all heard her boss bend her over the job-barrel, and worse than that, they hadn't heard her tell him to fuck off (although she would have, she was pretty sure she would have), so the only thing left for her to do was deny everything.
Bonnie turned his head and looked at her. The green of his eyes was noticeably thinner than usual. "Oh yes," he said evenly, "he did."
Freddy grunted agreement, his head cocked to turn his inflexible mouth into a scowl. "If you're lying because you don't want me turning your boss inside out, that's one thing, but if you honestly couldn't tell what he was threatening just now, I'm suddenly a lot less comfortable letting you work for him as long as I did."
"Letting me?" Ana made herself stop there and start over. "I don't actually have rabies. Why should I have to go back and get shots I know I don't need? Not to mention pay for them. I don't have a job now. That means I don't have insurance, right where I've got one hell of a bill about to land on me. You have no idea how the fucking world works outside of this restaurant, do you?"
"I know you'll have plenty of money now that you're not buying drugs," Freddy told her.
"Well, I have to buy them now, because Rider's sure not giving me any more for free!"
"Hm," said Freddy, leaning in close as he stared her down. "Sounds like you'll be needing a new M, doesn't it? May I suggest Magic Acts? I'll be happy to teach you."
"I'm just saying, there's three of us," Bonnie muttered, pretending he had fingernails that needed inspecting. "Four, if Chica wants in on the action and you know how she gets about men who push women around. You could have threatened him with a gang of oven-punching badasses, one of whom is actually over seven feet tall instead of one guy who just says he is."
"Can we stay on point here?" Ana said loudly. "I don't need gang of badasses and I don't need a goddamn rabies vaccine!"
"Why did you get one then?" Freddy demanded.
"Well…come on, because I told them I got jumped by a stray dog pack! The animal control guy mentioned rabies and the doctor kind of pushed the issue and I…I don't know. It would have looked weird if I didn't go along with it."
"And how is it going to look when you never go back?"
Ana managed half a shrug.
"I understand that you don't like the way you feel this morning," said Freddy, still glaring. "But you made a choice and that choice has consequences."
Ana did not quite dare to sigh, but she did breathe a little extra hard. "You're not just talking about the shots now, are you?"
"That, ye pick up on," said Foxy curiously, "but not Mr. How-Badly-Do-Ye-Want-This-Job?"
"She picked up on it just fine," Bonnie muttered.
"Make the appointments," Freddy ordered. "And when do, you plan not to go home afterwards. I want you here, where I can take care of you."
Ana could take care of herself. If ever there was a single unifying mantra over her life, it was that: She took care of herself. She didn't need help. She didn't want help. She didn't get hurt. Her resistance to outside interference was such that she had quit jobs, severed relationships, ended friendships. Concern was fine, but it happened on her terms. Ana took care of herself.
Freddy was waiting for an answer, his eyes slanting down angrier with every silent second that passed.
"Okay," she said.
"And no working until I tell you you can work. You don't touch a tool or climb a ladder or so much as change a lightbulb without my permission. Understood?"
What the hell was she supposed to do with herself for ten whole days if she couldn't work? But she didn't argue. Even the thought was not rebellious as much as desolate, already defeated. She nodded.
His irises shrank, swallowed up again by white, but still angry and still watchful. He stared her down for a while and then he seized her.
A part of her must have known it was coming, because she didn't flinch away as he pulled her against him and into an unasked-for embrace. She knew she was safe, she knew it was love, but she didn't know what to do about it. She only stood there, rigid and unblinking and fighting the most bizarre tears of panic, as he held her tight and she whispered, "I'm sorry," over and over into his fur.
It didn't last forever, although it felt like it, and when he released her at last, that strange panic got worse before it got better. But his eyes when he looked at her were Freddy's eyes, the lids heavy and just a bit exasperated, and his hand when he reached up to cup the side of her head was gentle. He patted her like she was a child, the child so unhappy and desperate to be loved that she used to pretend a singing bear at a pizza parlor could save her, and then he let her go. He handed her a towel and got her a bottle of water from the cooler while she wiped her face.
"Make your appointments. Then drink this and go back to bed," he told her, pressing the bottle into her hands until she took it. His tone was considerably harder when he turned to the others, somehow managing take in both Foxy and Bonnie with a single glance, even though they were at opposite corners of the kitchen with the hulking pizza oven between them. "And you're letting her rest," he warned them. "I won't tell you to leave her alone—yet—but you let her rest. If I have to make it an order, I won't be nice about it."
Then he was gone, leaving Ana to play awkwardly with the cap of her water bottle while Foxy and Bonnie looked at each other.
At last, Bonnie pushed himself off the wall. "Kay, this is weird and I'm a little pissed off at your ex-boss still, so I'm going to pull Street Fighter II out of the game box and beat up a car. I'm glad you're here," he added, coming over to offer a one-armed hug, avoiding every hurt place without even looking like he was trying. She leaned into it gratefully and didn't even think how wrong it was with Foxy watching until it was over. "I know you probably think it sucks, but I'm really glad."
"I'm fine."
"If you say so. Oh," he said, turning back after only one step toward the door. "Before I forget, did you get your keys last night?"
Ana stared at him blankly for a beat or two, then remembered, like a scene from a movie, flinging her keys and spare change and crumpled receipts out into the parking lot, desperately giving Mangle something else to chase…to bite…
"Oh," she said. "No. I didn't."
"Don't worry about it," Bonnie said, bringing her out of the parking lot and back into the kitchen with him. With both of them. "Foxy can show you where they are."
"I can, can I?" Foxy's ears pricked up curiously. "Fred has 'em. Ye saw that."
"Not those keys," Bonnie said. "The other ones. The—" He flinched, ears slapping flat and eyes flashing black for the briefest of moments. "The other ones," he said again, rubbing at his head like it hurt.
"The ones attached to the little Frankenstein string doll," Ana added. "Is…Is it easier to think about them if we make it about the doll?"
Foxy's puzzled expression deepened to a squint before he laughed it off. "I know which ones ye mean now, luv, but how the hell should I know where they be?" he asked, turning his attention to Bonnie. "Since when did I ever have the keeping o' them?"
"Don't tell me you didn't see them. Out in the parking lot? I made a little flag so you'd be sure to see them."
"I didn't. Don't look at me like that," he added with a barking laugh belied by the fresh edge in his tone. "If I were supposed to have the minding of them, ye should have told me."
"You weren't there." Bonnie stopped, vented his cooling system, and glanced at Ana. "You sure you didn't grab them last night on your way out?"
She shook her head uncertainly, but thought about it, and shook her head with more confidence. "I've got some big, big empty spots where last night is concerned and I got to admit, I was focusing pretty much everything I had on just getting into the truck and driving, but…I don't think I picked them up. I don't even think I saw them. You made a flag?"
"Bit o' yellow tied to a stick," said Foxy.
"So you did see it!"
"I saw a stick laying on the ice with a rag tied to it, that's what I saw. Half o' what were out there was bits tied to other bits with whatever would work to tie 'em. How was I supposed to know it were marking sommat?"
"What, should I have made an X? Drawn you a little map?"
"No," Ana interrupted loudly. "I didn't see a flag and I don't remember stopping to pick anything up. All I remember…"
Teeth. The heat and stink crushing down on her. Foxy, where are you? Oh it hurts! I think I'm bleeding…
Something moved on her peripheral vision and she swung at it without thinking—a stupid plan made even stupider by having nothing in her hand but an open water bottle, so that she didn't even hit anything, just splashed Foxy in the face. He looked at her while she stared at the water running down his new fur like beads, only seeming to turn liquid again when they reached the floor and became a puddle. And for a second—a bad second—she could almost remember splashing down into a puddle of her own making, not clear and cold, but red and thick and hot and sticky as it dried on her face and in her hair and between her fingers…
"I didn't see it," she said hoarsely, dragging herself back to the point, but still staring at the puddle around Foxy's dry feet. "I was trying not to look at her. I was just…um…looking at the ground? So I didn't step on her." Her voice broke. She drank whatever was left in the bottle, like the problem was her throat being too dry, and shook her head. "I'm sure I didn't pick anything up."
"All right," Bonnie said after a moment. "I guess the wind knocked the bottle over or something. We'll go find them. Come on, Foxy."
Foxy didn't move.
"Go on," said Ana, crumpling the empty bottle to hide her suddenly shaking hands. "I've got to make some phone calls and I'll be right there."
He still didn't move, so she got her phone and stubbornly ignored him while she hunted out the right number to call to make another stupid appointment to get another unnecessary rabies shot. It took longer than she thought it would, owing both to her trembling fingers and spending most of the time on hold, and when she finally did get through to someone, it wasn't even the scheduling department, but someone from admissions who had things to say about her ducking out the night before. But at last it was all sorted and she was able to trudge outside, only to find Bonnie on his hands and knees poking through the weeds while Foxy stood off to one side with his arms folded.
The first thing she saw, although she didn't even mean to look, was the claw marks cut into the concrete loading dock. Then she saw that it was clean, not just of the blood she knew she'd left behind, but of a decade's worth of grime. The trace remnants of safety paint were bright yellow again and could even be read: Keep Clear. The door, the frame, the walls, the flydock, the steps, and a great uneven patch of the parking lot just below—all scrubbed clean. Most of the ice was gone, except where the fall had been thickest, and that had melted down into a blobbish slide instead of the spiky, sinister tumble it had been just the night before. If she looked, she'd probably be able to find a few small spatters or the reddish ripples frozen into the far ice where the wash-water had refrozen, so she didn't look. She didn't need any more reminders than the ones carved into her.
But really, the only thing necessary for her to see was that the parking lot was clean and bare down to the pavement, and even beyond where the potholes were concerned. No pebbles, no trash, no ice…and no keys.
"Don't bother yerself," Foxy told her when she made a move toward the steps to come down and help search the weeds. "They ain't here."
"They have to be," said Bonnie, ears flat. He bounded up with the kind of ease only well-built machines and very small children of capable of and stomped over to point with authority at an empty piece of ground. "They were right there! Between that pothole and that little crack that looks like a guitar!"
Foxy leaned over to peer at the pavement. "Looks nothing like yer guitar."
"Not the one I've got now, the Gibson I had at High Street."
"I ain't seeing it. Looks more like a fish to me."
"The hell do you know about guitars anyway? The point is, they're not there anymore, so I'm hoping they just got kicked out of the way—"
"I didn't kick 'em. They weren't there."
"I'm not saying you did it on purpose," Bonnie said and even if the words themselves were coming out of his speaker, he said it through clenched jaws. "I'm just saying, it was dark. It's easy to overlook things in the dark."
"Me eyes were on. Had to be, to do the job right. I saw everything there was to see out here. Find me a bit o' broken glass or chunk o' metal says I weren't looking."
"I didn't say you weren't looking, I said overlooked. You want me to get Chica out here to explain the difference?"
"Chill," said Ana and to Foxy, said, "There was a lot of…"
The garbage, raining down on her, crushing her. The hot, sour stink of it, like the breath of a dragon, as her teeth came closer…
"There was a lot," said Ana. "You don't think there's any chance at all the doll or the ring could have gotten snagged—"
"Without me seeing? Listen up, girl. Them keys—" Now Foxy flinched, his irritated ears snapping flat to his head as he shook it off. "Them things be restricted on every level he could think of. And these things ye call 'eyes'," he said, tapping a claw on the glass lens of his left pupil, "be cameras, constantly scanning and running the visual information through me processor. I wouldn't have to notice the bloody things. If me eyes had registered the shape of 'em, I'd have received an alert, whether I saw them or not!"
"Yeah," Bonnie muttered. "He's right. That's how I found them in the first place. I saw the alert before I saw the…the doll."
"And if yer sure about where ye left 'em—"
"Right there!" Bonnie insisted, again pointing and even stomping once, for emphasis.
"Well, there weren't much else over there, now were there? Most of her was here or there…some up there," he added, thumbing up at the eaves while scowling at the ground.
Ana looked, and for a moment, thought she saw a black shape silhouetted against the grey morning sky. Adrenaline fired through her veins and she jumped, twisting and kicking in the air, trying to scream and producing only a strangled cough as she fell backwards—
—into Bonnie's arms. Her weight and the force of her impact would have almost certainly sent them both tumbling to crack their skulls on the icy pavement, but Bonnie didn't even stagger. He just caught her and held her until she quit trying to climb over or into him and just clutched him, shivering and pressing her face into his fur, afraid to look and see it again, afraid to look and see nothing. It was there anyway, burned into her mind: A head, faceless but looking down at her, seeing her, and the upper part of some kind of torso, both of somewhat human proportions, but connected by an unnaturally long thin neck. A ghost, maybe, who had forgotten how to be a person. The ghost of the ghost that had powered a broken robot. The Mangle had come back for her, as all ghosts do, reliving the moment of death—hers and Ana's.
"Ye all right, luv? Give her to me. Did she faint?"
"What the hell is that?" Bonnie asked, his grip tightening around her.
Ana risked another look and got hit by twin hammers of relief and confusion. There was something up there after all, so she hadn't just flipped out over nothing. On the other hand, maybe the Percocet was kicking in, because it definitely wasn't a black, faceless, long-necked, robot ghost. Whatever she'd seen…thought she'd seen…imagined was gone, but there was still something perched right on the edge of the eave, almost falling over. Just a little thing, the size and general shape of two fists joined together, with two bright eyes staring down…
"Is that…Babycakes?" Bonnie asked.
Foxy's answer was to leap up onto the dock, then to one of the standing posts of the safety rail, and from there, jump and catch the eave with his hook. He chinned up to the level of the roof, looked around, then picked the thing up and looked at it, too.
"Hi there!" said that hated sugar-frosted giggling shitcake. "I think I'm lost. Can you help me find Chica?"
"Where the bloody hell did ye come from?" Foxy marveled, dropping back onto the dock with the cupcake still in hand. "It were in the Lost box in the office, weren't it?"
"No," sighed Ana. "I threw it out in the parking lot weeks ago. I guess she found it and ate it. Put me down," she added, blushing.
Bonnie did, although he kept a hand close as she limped closer to the dock and took the cupcake from Foxy.
"I swear I cleared them eaves. I swept the bloody roof. There ain't so much as a screw up there, how could I miss bloody Babycakes?"
"You overlooked something small. Imagine that."
The argument, rekindled, went on. Ana tuned it all out and looked into Babycakes' eyes.
It looked into hers.
Creepy eyes. Even now, scuffed and filmed as they were by a trip through Mangle's digestive system, they were eerily human. She had that prickling feeling again that she was being seen, studied. If she looked close enough, she could see her own face reflected, floating and ghostlike, less alive than this plastic toy. She could see her death in its eyes. What was it seeing in hers?
"Fine," she told it after a tense, silent staredown. "You can stay."
"Are you sure?" Bonnie asked, interrupting a string of nautical insults. "Why the hell would you want that creepy-ass thing around?"
She didn't really, but she felt an uncomfortable kinship with the thing nonetheless. Ana had been bitten, but Babycakes had actually been eaten, and yet they'd both survived. It was a little broken, maybe, but still happy, and right now, some small part of her needed to see that. Silly thought. Still, it persisted. Probably shouldn't have taken Percocet on an empty stomach. She was beginning to feel a little dizzy.
She shrugged, touching the rough stump that used to be the toy's candle. "I just do."
"Okay, well…don't let Chica see it. She hates that thing." Bonnie looked around the parking lot with a return of his frustrated scowl. "I don't know what to say about the stupid k—ugh! The doll. Are you sure you didn't pick them up?"
Ana checked her pockets, but there was nothing in them except her phone and last night's receipt from the liquor store. She shook her head, thumbing at her phone one-handed.
"If you didn't pick them up…and for damn sure none of us did…I don't know. I guess a packrat could have carried them off. Or a raccoon. Or a crow," Bonnie added, looking over at the woods as a well-timed volley of caws sounded in the trees. "Crows like shiny things. We see them fighting over foil wrappers sometimes. I mean, I don't want to say they're gone, but—"
"What are ye doing?" Foxy asked.
"Ordering a metal detector," said Ana, still focused on her screen. "If they're still out here, we'll find them." And if they weren't, there was another set of keys out in the world still. The old man might even give them to her if she asked, although he might want to know why wanted them and she wasn't sure she was ready to have that conversation yet. In any case, did she really need them anymore? Maybe it was even for the best. Without the keys, their settings could never be changed. They were their own people, now and forever, and if there was no hope of ever changing their programming without the keys…well, without the Hand Unit, there was never any hope of that.
She thumbed once more at the screen and put her phone away. "Two-day shipping in Mammon means it might be here as early as next Tuesday. You think Freddy will let me go home to pick it up?"
"Freddy doesn't even want you outside," Freddy's voice boomed warningly right before he walked into the storage room and got a good look at them. "What do you think you're doing? And you two, what are you doing letting her do it? She's not even wearing a jacket! What is that?" he asked suddenly, focusing in on the cupcake toy in Ana's hand. "Is that Babycakes?" Without waiting for an answer his eyes flared black and he stomped closer, trailing the Toreador March behind him. "Where did you find that? It was in the office!"
"I threw it away," Ana said again. "Sorry. I…stole it. A while back. And threw it outside."
"Oh." The dark energy faded out of Freddy, but left behind a frustrated, wary residue. "Don't throw it away again in front of me, or any of us, for that matter. It's unlawful to remove Fazbear Property from the premises. But if it were to disappear when I wasn't watching, I certainly wouldn't complain. And Chica would probably thank you if she could. And now answer the first question, what are you doing out here?"
"Looking for my other keys. You know the ones."
Freddy looked at Bonnie, who shrugged and kicked at the ground where the keys weren't. He looked at Foxy, who shook his head. He looked back over his shoulder into the building, tension rising out of him like steam in the winter air. "I don't like that," he said distantly. "I felt very safe while they were in your possession. Although, to be fair, they were lost for years and we all survived. I don't suppose anything has really changed, and yet…I don't like that."
"They turned up once," Foxy said. "They might turn up again, particularly with the help of the what-ye-kennit." He nodded toward Ana.
"Metal detector," she supplied.
"Ah. Yes. That would do it, if anything would. When will you have it?"
"A few days."
Freddy grunted. "That will have to do, I suppose. Keep me informed." He turned away, grumbling, and headed down the back hall toward the employee lounge. A few seconds later, his voice came bellowing back to them: "And get back inside before you catch your death of cold!"
"Yeah, yeah. I'm going to bed," Ana announced, climbing the steps back onto the dock (deliberately avoiding stepping on the marks of Mangle's claws. She would have to fill those. It was going to bother her every time she saw them). "I'll try this whole 'living' thing again in a few hours."
She left them muttering at each other out in the parking lot, took another bottle of water from the cooler and went to her room. The camera wasn't around, which was almost a disappointment. As the only human in the building, it was usually obnoxiously fixated on her, but she guessed it was following Freddy on his patrol right now.
The Party Room was one of the few rooms where the lights didn't come on just because the restaurant was 'open'. There wasn't always a party going on, after all. Babycakes' eyes glowed a little, though. Not a lot, but enough to make her way to her bed without stubbing her toe. Funny, the cupcake should have 'gone to sleep' by now, shouldn't it? Or maybe it was asleep and its eye-closing animations had just been broken at some point in its adventures, because it was being uncharacteristically quiet. No giggles, no songs, no yawning. It just sat on her dresser where she put it and watched her with its faintly glowing eyes as she peeled off her stained, stiff clothes, scratched under some of her bandages, and climbed into bed. She thought she would lie awake for a while, too much had happened, but she fell asleep almost immediately.
Freddy came by at regular intervals, moving the curtain to look in on her, and once coming all the way up onto the stage to adjust her restless limbs and pull the blanket up around her shoulders again. Whenever he was in the room, the cupcake's eyes closed. The rest of the time, they were open, reflecting two tiny Anas in the black centers of its eyes, while down in the basement, the same picture flickered on the monitors so the dead man could watch over her in her sleep while he idly picked dried flesh out from between the suit's finger-joints with the flat end of a certain star-shaped key.
"No," he said, when the Puppet tried once, half-heartedly, to reach for it. "I say when we walk out of here and I say we're waiting."
The Puppet's hands splayed plaintively.
"Because I said so, Mary-Mary Quite Contrary. Because my toys are spread out all over the floor up there and if I can't get them all at once, I risk one of them getting away. What am I going to do, run after them? I can barely move."
If the Puppet could have laughed aloud, it might have. Its shrug conveyed some of that, along with a wave to indicate the emptiness of the desert that surrounded them and the futility of an animatronic on the run in a human world.
"They don't have to get that far," the dead man said. "They just have to get to Ana. You might want to remember that that poor little beat-up sleeping baby killed the killingest animatronic I ever built, and she apparently did it with her bare hands. And if she can kill the Mangle, she can certainly kill you." He glanced up, silver eyes shining through a film of dried grime. "Or me."
The Puppet gestured expressively at the screens.
The dead man shook his head. "Yeah, she can sleep through a stampede, but I bet your life she wakes up fast if someone beats down her door and hollers there's someone in the building. See, that's the thing, Mare. They don't have to tell her it's us, they just have to wind her up to come out fighting and if they can do that, I guarantee the only way to stop her is to kill her and—No, no, I know you don't want to. No one wants that, I'm just explaining some facts of life to you, because I don't think you've thought this through. The only way you could kill her is if you did it right now, while she's sleeping, and even if you managed that, then what? She'd be dead! We need her, remember? Because I want out of this," he said, knocking his exposed metal knuckles on his cracked chest case. "And you want to get out of that." He watched her rub self-consciously at her flat wooden chest and snorted dust through his speaker. "I want you out of that, too, believe me. I never even wanted you in it. But…come here."
The Puppet crawled onto his lap and he put his arm around her, bumping the torn muzzle of the rabbit's face against her inhumanly long, slender neck.
"We have to be smart about this," he said tenderly. "That's all I'm saying. That girl will give no quarter in a fight. Death before defeat, that's my Ana, and I don't want to kill her," the man in the suit said, rusty pins groaning as his ears lowered. "I can wait as long as it takes to be sure I don't have to kill my baby. And you're going to be my good little girl and wait with me, aren't you?"
The Puppet, thoroughly reprimanded, poked a long finger through one of the many holes in the rabbit's suit to caress the ragged purple uniform beneath. It nodded.
"And she'll come around. Don't worry. She's a fighter," he said admiringly, leaning out to see the monitors where Ana fitfully slept, "but she's my little fighter and she'll come around…when she has no other choice. We're almost at the finish-line, Mare. Don't you fucking trip now."