Happy Halloween! Hello, everyone! Jack here. Berserker made me come out of my box to actually be the primary writer for something again. See if you can identify what costume each character is wearing. I'll give you… I dunno. Cookies. Internet cookies. You'll have to clean them off your computer. In general, it might be more of a punishment than a reward, since I don't know how to clean cookies off of my computer, and I don't know if you do either.
Anyway, here we go.
Drabble 13: Drabble the 13th
Tundratown
Frost Residence - Jimmy's Bedroom
7:00 AM
Jimmy's alarm clock went off.
"HOWLOWEEN!" the arctic fox cheered as he jumped out of his race car bed. He and Wallace were so excited they had actually slept in their costumes. Jimmy wore a white suit with a red collared undershirt, red fingerless gloves, and held a little toy tommy gun with an orange tip. Wallace wore a black suit with a red bowtie, and lines drawn down the sides of his cheeks from the corners of his mouth, a short-haired black wig on his head. "Hurry up, slowpoke!" Wallace urged. "I've been looking forward to this all year!"
Under the pressure of his plushie, Jimmy moved even quicker than a hyperactive mamchild of his age normally could. Once he'd eaten and brushed his teeth, he rushed outside to hop into the passenger side of a black police cruiser. The inside seemed to be half carefully clean and half lazily sloppy. "Thanks for stopping to pick me up! I didn't want to be late for work today of all days."
Officer Judy Hopps chuckled. She was dressed in a red coat and shirt, brown pants, and a bright orange bow tie, an oversized stopwatch attached to her side. "I figured you'd be excited, so I left a bit early so we can get there ahead of the others."
"I've been looking forward to it all month!" Jimmy admitted. "I didn't even know that the ZPD had a Howloween party until I joined!"
"I've only been to one so far, but it was pretty fun," Judy explained. "Just as long as no one asks you why you didn't dress as the Easter Bunny."
"What?" both Jimmy and Wallace asked in confusion.
Judy sighed, old wounds showing in her hunched-over posture. "Nevermind. Let's just go."
Savannah Central
Zootopia Police Department - Precinct 1
7: 34 AM
With Jimmy tied into Judy's schedule for the morning, they naturally arrived over twenty minutes before the actual start of the work day. Not that most of the mammals involved were planning to do much in the way of working anyway, but they weren't exactly the kind of workplace that could get away with taking entire days off just to party. So most of the officers either wore their uniforms under their costumes or were fully content to go chase down crooks as a police vampire and his mummy sidekick if need be. It was surprisingly effective.
The building itself was decorated with lots of cobwebs, jack-o-lanterns, and little paper streamers in the shape of ghouls and ghosts. "I heard they used to look like little bats," Wallace whispered. "But someone got sued."
Behind the reception desk, Clawhauser was dressed only in a pair of tighty-whities and a red blanket over his shoulders like a cape. "Isn't there some kind of dress code that says you can't just come in your underwear?" Judy asked, averting her eyes.
"Nope!" Clawhauser replied with an excited smile. "Isn't that great? And why aren't you the Easter Bunny, Judy? That'd be like the best costume for you!"
Judy saw red.
"Hey! I'm soft and not very muscular too! I wonder if I can pull that off?" Wallace whispered to Jimmy while Judy proceeded to chew Clawhauser's ears off. Thankfully not literally, as much as that would be in the spirit of the holiday.
They made their way down to the cafeteria, where the room was already packed to the brim with officers in costume. There were a few buffet tables set up with ordered food, and even a few party games scattered around for the officers' visiting families.
Jimmy spotted a familiar hyena dressed in some kind of red martial arts vest and black pants with a white sash and sandals. Jimmy waved as she approached. "Wow, Carla, nice costume! Are you Jenny Horseworth from Flank of Fury?"
Carla blinked. "Uh...noooooooo?"
Chief Bogo, who was standing near the door in a loincloth with a helmet that let his horns through, nodded a greeting to them. "Hopps, Frost. Hyenandez. Good morning."
Judy saluted. "Morning, Chief! Is Nick here yet?"
Bogo opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. He jerked his head off to the side. "See for yourself. It seems that someone learned nothing from last year's incident"
Jimmy turned, and quailed.
"Mierda!" Carla swore.
"Ohhh, that's not good," Wallace said nervously.
Nick was dressed in a baby-blue bunny suit with a pink belly, and carrying a wicker basket full of painted eggs and carrots. "Heya, Hopps," Nick greeted with a teasing smile.
Judy looked over at him almost in slow motion. The room went quiet. Her pupils shrank to pinpricks, and her nostrils flared. Her foot thumped furiously and she stomped over to him.
Then the lights went out.
There was a lot of confused muttering and muffled apologies as mammals milled around and bumped into each other. "No one panic!" Bogo instructed. "It's probably just a power surge!"
The lights came back on after a few moments. Everyone was relieved, and many went back to their conversations.
At least until someone screamed.
It had been Trunkaby who noticed Nick first. Zootopia's first fox cop was very very very very dead. One of the carrots from his basket had apparently been stabbed into his eye with a great amount of force. Judy, of course, was standing right next to him. Her paws were over her mouth, and she was shaking like a leaf. Jimmy couldn't blame her. He was too.
"Hopps!"
"She killed him!"
"What the hell!?"
"Everyone shut your mouths and calm down!" Bogo ordered. "Just because most of us are dressed in silly costumes, that does not mean we have stopped being officers! We are going to figure this out calmly and professionally!"
Slowly, the other officers managed to calm themselves until most of them were only a little hysterical. Jimmy was still shaking up until Wallace comforted him. "Hey, Jimmy, don't worry. Everything's gonna be okay. We're gonna solve this thing. For Nick's sake."
Jimmy took a deep breath and nodded resolutely. He called out to the rest of the room. "Is anyone here wearing a Sherlock Hounds costume?"
The rest of the room stayed silent while a few shook their heads.
"Darn. Then I'll have to do it myself. It's time to solve a muuuuuurdeeeeer!" he said, drawing out the word to sound as "mysterious" as possible. Holding his fingers in a circle in front of his eye, as if he were carrying a magnifying glass, Jimmy headed towards the body to search for clues.
Chief Bogo grabbed him by the back of his collar halfway there. "I appreciate the enthusiasm, Officer Frost, but we have trained professionals for that. This is a police station."
"Oh yeah. Right."
"Skinner! Get out here!" Bogo ordered.
"On it, Chief!" A slightly pudgy furless cat in a black 3-piece suit charged out, holding a black doctor's bag. "Made my bag part of my costume this year!" The ZPD's forensic tech started pulling various tools from her bag to examine the body and set up a crime scene. Bogo dropped Jimmy and grabbed Judy instead. "Hopps, what happened?" he demanded.
"I don't know!" she practically sobbed. "With all the confusion, I couldn't even hear anything!"
"I don't think it was her, Chief!" Skinner called. "I couldn't get any prints off the carrot, and I don't see her wearing gloves."
"I don't see her murdering her partner either," Carla remarked, even she unnerved by the fox's death despite not caring much for him.
"Well yeah, but I'm trying to be professional about this."
The crowd of cops visibly relaxed now that they knew their best cop wasn't a killer, but even Jimmy could tell they were still on-edge. Who wouldn't be?
"Alright, everyone stay calm." Bogo scratched his chin, considering how to proceed. "No one enters or leaves this room. I suspect someone here will have blood on their paws or hooves. Everyone line up and-"
The lights went out again.
"Oh for the love of-!" Bogo began. "Wha-oooaah!"
There was a loud thud, followed by a quiet moan.
When the lights came back on, the change this time was rather obvious. Bogo was on his knees, trying to pull his horns out of what they were now stuck in.
Sadly, what they were now stuck in happened to be Clawhauser's chest. The chubby cheetah had a look of surprise stuck on his face, as a bit of blood dribbled out of his mouth.
The room erupted into chaos. "QUIET!" Bogo roared. "Skinner! Check his pulse!"
She did so, then sighed and shook her head.
Now knowing he could do so without causing further damage, Bogo pulled his horns out of Clawhauser. "I was shoved just as the lights went out, then tripped by something."
"Did you get a feel of who pushed you?" Judy asked with trepidation.
"Sort of. Their touch felt...strange. Definitely seemed like some sort of glove," he said, visibly losing that calm professionalism he was trying to encourage. The deaths of two of his officers was no doubt weighing heavily on him, even though Clawhauser was off of him now.
"Do you think the Count or his goons could be behind all this?" Judy guessed.
"Possibly. That fox would be crazy enough to pull off a stunt like this in the middle of the ZPD." The combination of the words "crazy" and "fox" in the same sentence made several of them flinch.
"Would he really kill his own son though?" asked Officer Wolford from the crowd. "I'm pretty out of the loop with this whole situation, but that kinda sounds like something he wouldn't do."
"He was really losing it when I saw him at the hospital," Judy remarked in a grim, shaky tone. "At this stage, I wouldn't put it past him."
Bogo nodded. "Whoever is responsible, I'm locking down the building until they are found. And if it's Reynard, be extra careful." He spoke the crime lord's name the same way one might refer to a local murderous dictator when out of said dictator's earshot.
The room erupted into more nervous mutterings until Bogo spoke again. "Form teams! No officer is to walk around alone." Bogo turned towards Judy. "Hopps, you're with me. We're gonna tear this place apart to find the culprit."
As the officers milled about, forming various teams, Carla approached Jimmy. "I guess that means you and I are a team?" she asked.
"Looks like it," Jimmy agreed nervously. This was way too much like one of those slasher movies he liked to watch around this time of year. But if he saw anyone surviving one of those, it was someone like Carla.
Someone like himself, not so much.
"Yay! It's a whodunnit!" Wallace cheered. "Only, we kinda already have an idea whodunnit, so I guess that makes it a whereiswhodunnit! Let's give it everything we've got!"
"Let's not be so cheery about it," Jimmy admonished.
Carla stared at him. "Can you… not… do that? Talk to the doll, and make it talk back? I know you do it a lot, but in these circumstances, It's creeping me out."
"Sorry." He wanted to explain it to her, especially with Carla being uncharacteristically vulnerable, but he kept silent anyway.
The sirens went off as shutters dropped down around every window and outside door, putting the station into partial darkness with a bright red tint. The lockdown was in effect.
8: 12 AM
Jimmy and Carla decided to search the north hall on the second floor. Even with the lights on, the ZPD was eerie during a lockdown. No sound filtered in from outside; no motor vehicles, no voices of passerby, not even ambient crickets. Occasionally, they would hear footsteps or muffled conversation from other officers as they searched, but that was about it.
The offices upstairs were all empty. Someone had left a Zoogle search on the price of a wedding ring open, which would have been an appropriate thing to cheer them up, but right now it didn't help. Someone else had seemingly booby trapped their office with a swing-down paint can. "Might have been a leftover from Judy fighting Simon," Wallace theorized after Jimmy barely dodged it in time to avoid getting his skull split.
"What does Bogo even expect us to find?" Carla asked in a whisper. "Our own deaths?"
"Possibly," Wallace whispered to Jimmy. "How do we know it wasn't HIM who killed both of them? All we have is one forensic lady's word."
Jimmy's stomach was already starting to ache. Wallace's theorizing made it give an uncomfortable gurgle. "I think I'm gonna use the bathroom real quick."
"Hurry back," Carla said with a disapproving frown. "I'll guard the door for you."
"Thanks." He slipped inside the nearest bathroom as Carla took up a defensive position in front, scowling at anyone who even dared try to relieve themselves in her presence.
Jimmy felt a bit better after doing his business, and splashing some cold water into his face helped to clear his head. However, when he tried to leave the bathroom, the door wouldn't budge. "Carla? Are you holding the door closed? Even my mom doesn't guard me that closely. Carla, are you there?"
No response.
Incredible dread giving him the strength to batter the door open, he finally made a gap big enough to slip through, and saw what was holding the door shut.
Carla's body, dangling by the neck from her own costume's sash.
Wallace helpfully cleared up any confusion he might have had about this situation. "She's dead, Jim."
Jimmy didn't know how long he fainted for, but when he was back up, he had to go back into the bathroom to stress vomit into the toilet. As soon as he was done with that, he was tearing down the hall, screaming, "CHIEF BOGO! CHIEF BOGO! HELP! HELP!"
He ran all the way back to the cafeteria. On the way, he passed a few other officers. They called out to him, but he didn't hear what they said. He shoved the door to the cafeteria open.
Again, he wasn't sure exactly how long he fainted for. When he sat back up, and looked into the cafeteria again, he promptly fainted again.
When he sat back up, the horror in front of him was simply unbelievable. This isn't happening, this isn't happening!
Literally EVERYONE was dead, even the officers he had just passed on the way here, all killed in various absurd methods. Delgato and Skinner were both impaled on Bogo's horns. Judy appeared to have been crushed by the corpse of Clawhauser. Some of the others were downright creative, but Jimmy got the feeling that describing them would violate some kind of terms of some sort. Most likely the terms of sanity in his head.
He did the only thing his instincts would let him do: he ran.
Where can I go!? Where can I go!? The detention center! I can lock myself in, and stay there til' help comes!
He made his way there as quickly as he could, at times having to step over more slain officers.
Detention Center
8: 48 AM
The holding cells were pitch black, as if the lights had gone out again. That was good. It would be harder for the killer to find him in the dark. Of course, they had killed multiple mammals in the dark already, but that was the best logic Jimmy's frazzled mind could come up with right now.
That same logic also led him to believe the killer would be least likely to check the second cell from the entrance in particular, and he started to open it.
Then he noticed movement inside.
He had to squint to see what it was. At first, he thought the orange-furred shape inside was Nick. But when he spotted a familiar gaudy pirate costume, he jumped back with a yelp, covering his face and trembling.
When no attack came, he slowly lowered his paws. The shape he assumed to be Reynard was lying on the ground, very still. He couldn't tell if there was any breathing due to the darkness. Was he playing possum? That was oddly...quiet of him.
He nervously opened the door, one paw on his tranq gun and desperately wishing he had something stronger for once. He knelt and touched Reynard. The old fox was ice cold. He'd been dead for at least a few hours. His chest was covered in what looked like stab wounds.
Well, that solves one of our problems, but we kinda have bigger ones now. Like… what did I see moving in here?
"I'm sorry, what part of 'I control the freaking universe' did you not understand?!"
Jimmy yelped as he felt a sharp pain in his butt. He jumped back and whirled, seeing Reynard's wallabeanie, RJ, standing on the bench. Standing. Not sitting. The plushie took a menacing step towards him, and he instinctively pulled his gun and emptied it into RJ, screaming at the top of his lungs until it clicked empty.
RJ was now riddled with tranquilizer darts, but that didn't seem to slow him. Being made of cotton, that was kind of obvious in hindsight.
Jimmy took a step back, and uttered the horrifying truth. "Wallabeanies...can kill!"
"Now now, RJ. No need to be so barbaric," said a familiar voice.
It was only then that Jimmy realized he was not holding Wallace anymore.
Wallace stood at the entrance to the cell. Somehow, he had obtained a very evil-looking fu manchu moustache since he'd vanished. "We are plushies, after all. We have to be proper to the ones we love."
"Wallace?!" Jimmy kept stepping back until he found himself pressed up against the wall. Cornered. "Carla was right! You are creepy!"
"Now that's not very nice!" the toy replied. "I did all of this for us, you know!"
"You and RJ?"
"No, silly, you and me! Everyone else was always in the way! Nick, Judy, Carla, even that Reynard fella who kept dragging you out of the office! Now they're all gone and you and me can play together forever! Happy end!"
This was so surreal. Jimmy found himself frozen to the spot, unable to move even if his only exit wasn't being blocked. "B-But, how?! I was holding you for some of those murders! I even took you into the bathroom with me! How could you have killed everyone?!"
"Like many things involving me, Jimmy, it's kind of ambiguous." Wallace began to hop towards him. "But it's not ambiguous how much I love you! Gimmie a hug, Jimmy!" The wallabeanie suddenly leapt at him.
Jimmy tried to catch Wallace as he lunged, but he was too slow. He soon found a tight hug wrapped around his throat, crushing his windpipe as the world slowly started to fade to black.
"Happy Howlobeanie!"
3: 15 AM
Jimmy awoke with a gasp. He wasn't in the hard confines of the ZPD detention center after all. Rather, his surroundings were soft, wet, and dark. He was still in Bella's mouth, having once again fallen asleep on their way to see Piers Narwhalter. The others were taking the time to get some rest themselves.
"Are you okay?" Wallace asked in concern, still clutched tight in Jimmy's arms.
Jimmy let out a sigh of relief. "Y-Yeah. I'm fine. Just an awful nightmare." He told Wallace of the dream, and the absurd notion of wallabeanies being able to kill.
"Oh my! That's awful. You know I'd never do anything like that to you, Jimmy! I love you!"
Jimmy gave Wallace a hug, smiling warmly. "I know, buddy. I love you too."
"Must be how close to Howlobeanie it is."
Jimmy was about to laugh and agree, but the word choice made him freeze.
Wallace's arms wrapped tightly around him.
Jimmy screamed.
I had a lot of fun writing this one. I'm not super used to writing Jimmy, since he's Steve's character. But he really wanted to get a Halloween drabble out in addition to our normal one. I hope you all enjoyed this, and that you have a happy Halloween. Stay safe, and I'll see you next time.