Prologue – A Bad Night
Overconfidence was a slow and insidious killer. Mike Schmidt was vaguely aware of it, but didn't remind himself of it nearly as often as he should. Especially in this line of work.
It wasn't like the job hadn't been plastered with red flags even before his first night. Freddy's was infamous wherever it opened up shop, and here in Hurricane was no exception. A series of missing children, several further children's bodies being found, and since then a steady stream of... well, management insisted on calling them "incidents".
He made it a point of personal pride that he'd lasted a lot longer than just about any other night guard on record, even if the previous record was a little over a week. This, however, was the fourth week he'd been employed here, and coming toward the end at that. After you'd survived your first Saturday night, everything short of Wednesday was almost comically easy to deal with, so he could at least be somewhat certain that the guards who quit after their second Monday were still alive and had chickened out. Not that he could really blame them for doing so.
As always, he'd arrived a good quarter of an hour before midnight, giving him the leeway he needed to get everything set up and check on the power. It wasn't strictly speaking necessary, but peace of mind was a valuable thing and often in short supply. Nothing in Freddy's seemed to work properly except for the backup power used during the night. Hell, the backup might be more reliable than the mains.
The rest of the setup – if he could even call it that – consisted mostly of pointless busywork. Get a sandwich and a couple of energy drinks out of his bag so he didn't have to waste time doing so mid-shift, shift the crap on the desk around a bit so it was a little less cluttered. Do a quick lap of the pizzeria, officially to check nobody had snuck in after hours but in practice just to be sure all the animatronics were on stage and (probably) in working order. It never hurt to know ahead of time if you didn't need to worry about one of them. Last of all, check the doors, front and back, were locked. The most pointless task of all, admittedly. He always locked the back one after coming in, and the ghoul of a janitor was similarly reliable in locking the front upon leaving.
All that was left now was to wait for a few minutes. To enjoy the quiet while it lasted, before all hell broke loose. This was a Friday, after all.
His alarm went off a minute before midnight struck, jolting the guard back into a proper amount of awareness. It was only now that he switched on the security system, a variety of mismatched cameras connected up to a state-of-the-art tablet computer sitting on the office desk. Very much jury-rigged, and Mike knew that better than most, having had to do some of the jury-rigging himself.
Then came midnight. Nothing tangible changed, no outward indicator beside the half-busted clock on the table ticking over, but the tension arrived in full force.
Popping open the camera panel, he checked on the show stage for a few seconds, then shut it again. No sense wasting power, after all. The main three were still on the stage, and as for the fourth... The fourth he didn't need to worry about just yet.
There was a routine to all of this. Each animatronic had their pattern, and stuck to it. Bonnie moved first, always, and favoured the corridor to Mike's left, Chica wandered back and forth to his right. Foxy was his favourite for no other reason than that stalling him only required checking the cameras regularly. He only got antsy when the cameras weren't active, slowly emerging from behind the curtain of his largely abandoned corner of the pizzeria, before making a mad dash down the left corridor, only to stalk off when the security door was slammed in his mangy face.
Could a possibly haunted robot be considered mangy? The thought gave him pause, and not for the first time he considered taking the time to fix the pirate up a bit. Attempted murder aside, it was hard not to feel sorry for the fox, rotting away behind a curtain while the few visitors the pizzeria still received went about their business right under his nose. Besides, if Foxy's leg came off during one of his little sprints it would probably come out of his paycheck. Again.
He shook himself out of the contemplation quickly. This was a Friday, after all. On Friday, either you brought your A-game or you didn't come in at all.
Another quick flip on the camera panel, just looking at the Cove and the stage. If any of them had moved, he'd use the other cameras, but for now...
Ah, no. Bonnie was always the first to move, and he'd started wandering already. Freddy and Chica were staying put for now at least, and the curtains on the Cove remained fully closed. Just the rabbit for now, then.
Mike generally didn't bother looking for Bonnie on the cameras any more. The animatronic's movement was erratic, practically random, to the point that knowing where he was now meant very little. Hell, sometimes he managed to turn up in the storage closet opposite the office's left door without being noticed by the guard, which was concerning on a few levels. Not least because as loud as the fan was, the heavy footsteps of the animatronics could clearly be heard when they were more than halfway along the corridor to him.
Sure enough, less than five minutes later, the closet door creaked open and the rabbit stomped out, pausing by the now closed security door before wandering back toward the main dining room.
Checking the cameras again showed Chica to be absent from the stage now. Not something to worry about, not yet. She usually went to the kitchen first before heading for the office, making a racket with the pots and pans that carried exceptionally well to where he was sitting, and it wasn't exactly difficult to tell when she was near. Anyone with a functioning sense of smell could do so. Freddy was still there, though, so that was well under control.
Two hours in, and the night was in full swing. Chica was heading back and forth from kitchen to office at irregular intervals, sporting a different arrangement of stray pepperoni pieces and half-chewed bits of dough on every visit. He had no idea where Bonnie was when he wasn't staring through the office's window, which was most of the time, but all things considered that didn't really matter. Freddy had made it to the bathrooms. Why it was part of his route was a mystery to Mike, but whatever. It meant he took longer to reach the office, if nothing else. As for the curtain in Pirate Cove, that hadn't moved in the slightest.
Either Foxy was particularly sluggish tonight, or something in the machine's dilapidated circuitry had finally given up the ghost. That was really something, considering that not even having a leg fall off had deterred the vulpine pirate before now. Not that that had stuck – Foxy routinely visited the backstage areas for half-hearted repairs, probably just to reassure management that he would be back in service Soon™.
Giving the bathroom corridor camera another quick glance and the windows a look, he risked poking his head out of the door to his left, just in case. The cameras did go on the blink from time to time after all.
Even with the awkward angle it was clear the cameras weren't misleading him. The curtain was still closed.
Mike pulled back into the fleeting safety of the office quickly, flipped the camera panel up, down, shut the door to his right as Chica's indescribable stench tipped him off to her presence, and shot the clock a death glare. The hour display remained resolutely on 02, while the latter two digits of the digital display, damaged beyond repair, flickered in a near-random mess of lines.
Much as he hated to admit it, this was starting to gnaw at him, putting him off his game. He found himself checking the cove camera more and more often, each time seeing no change whatsoever, and focusing far less than he should on the animatronics that were actually active.
Knowing it was a seriously bad idea, Mike went for his hip flask. He'd probably regret it later, but right now a little bit of the mix of whiskey and the dregs of several other things he'd stored in there over the last week would calm his nerves. Not enough to get violent or woozy, just put myself a little bit out of it.
For what it was worth, it worked. Mostly. With focusing on one specific thing that little bit harder, he could more effectively divide his attention between the machines metaphorically banging on the doors and the mysterious absence of Foxy. He'd just have to hope he didn't get pulled over driving home come the morning, that was all.
He briefly had second thoughts when he remembered he hadn't checked on Freddy half an hour later, and found the bear had advanced two cameras toward him.
It was some time after 5am that three things went wrong.
The first thing was the realisation that despite everything, Freddy had made it to the blind spot outside the office's right door and was giving the camera a sideways look that toed the line between dead-eyed and smug. Usually that would mean Chica easing up on the door on that side, but tonight she seemed to get even more pushy about getting into the office.
The second thing was Bonnie seemingly giving up on making serious attempts to murder the night guard, swinging by the left-hand door far less frequently. Just enough that Mike had to spin around every so often to shut the door for the brief, precious moment it took for the rabbit to leave.
Between these two things, the night guard's attention was almost entirely on the right door, trying to shut it only as much as was absolutely necessary and claw as much use out of his dwindling power supply as possible, with only gut feeling born of experience to keep his back safe.
As a result of this, the third thing was that he'd stopped checking on Foxy under the assumption that the pirate was completely inactive.
He wasn't.
Perhaps he had been biding his time, waiting for just this moment, or perhaps his internal clock was wildly out of sync with everything else. All Mike knew was that he could hear rapid, metallic footfalls approaching down the corridor, and that he had a lot less leeway to shut the door than he did with Bonnie, who would linger at the window habitually before trying anything. Slamming the door in Chica's face for safety's sake, he leapt out of the office chair and more or less hurled himself at the door switch on the office's left. Haste led to his foot snagging slightly on the chair's spokes – not enough to throw him off that much, he thought. It was a very large button he was aiming for, after all.
Unfortunately, all his wild dive achieved was illuminating Foxy's tatty red fabric outside his door for the brief moment before the machine was through the doorway, enough that it wouldn't close. He'd missed and hit the light instead.
Regardless, he tried it anyway, only to find that Foxy's dull hook had pinned his hand to the doorway. It took him a moment to realise he was bleeding, that the blunt tip had been slammed home with enough force to break through his skin. Through his entire hand, if the blood dripping down the wall below was anything to go by.
There was a brief moment of stillness as the animatronic stared him down with impassive glass eyes and the night guard glared back, getting his balance back. Then, with adrenaline kicking in, Mike began throwing punches, aiming for Foxy's eyes, hoping against all odds that doing so would be unexpected enough to buy him some breathing room and inwardly cursing his lack of any kind of weapon.
It didn't work out quite as he'd hoped – while the machine drew back, pulling Mike back with him until the hook came free of where it had been lodged in his palm, showing that it had indeed pierced all the way through, it clearly hadn't deterred him in the slightest. Instead, Foxy brought his arm around, forcing the night guard to duck back, and charged forward again, slamming Mike heavily against the wall with both arms pinned awkwardly between his body and the animatronic's arm.
Despite feeling what might have been one of his ribs breaking, Mike got the impression Foxy had been holding back. He still had enough breath left in him to scream wordless defiance and headbutt the machine once, twice, hoping to provoke him enough to kill him quickly rather than put him through the ordeal of being jammed into a spare suit. For good measure, he made a spirited attempt at biting the fox, managing to catch some of his external fabric with his teeth but not achieving anything more than pulling at it ineffectually.
For his trouble, he was rewarded with a single, brutal blow from Foxy's endoskeleton hand to his gut, driving the breath from his lungs and sending some of his half-digested lunch splattering across the pirate's impassive mask. This time he knew some of his lower ribs had been broken. He could feel them crumple upward, grating against the mostly intact ones above, among all the other alcohol-dulled pain.
In a single strike all the fight had been driven from him. He couldn't do much more than splutter and reel as Foxy backed up just enough to release his arms, and bent double as he was the fox didn't even have to try to grab him roughly by the scruff of the neck with inhuman strength. It wasn't even as if he was being roughly guided toward the backstage area – losing his footing brought new pain and made it abundantly clear he was being carried, giving him ample motivation to try and support his own weight. Somehow Mike doubted that getting his neck broken would spare him the pain that was surely coming.
He was dimly aware of the other animatronics converging on the door to the backroom, waiting patiently as Foxy dragged his prey closer. No doubt they would be helping him "suit up". Manoeuvring the pieces into position with only one hand seemed like it would be difficult, if not outright impossible. Right now, for whatever reason, he wished there was some kind of malice apparent in their blank, dead stares. It would have made him feel a little better about the whole ordeal – laid low by cruel strategy rather than simply being another chump who walked into an abattoir and fell into a meat grinder.
It was hard to pretend otherwise, though. Looking back over the last couple of minutes, he could tell that was exactly what had happened. He'd whaled on an unfeeling machine trying to get a reaction and been subdued with brutal efficiency. He might as well have stuck his hand into a blender, and quite frankly, as embarrassing as that would have been, it would have been better than this. Anything would be.
Between the alcohol in his system dulling the pain and his own abnormal resilience, Mike didn't have the luxury of losing consciousness as he was propped up on the table, Foxy's hand still gripping his neck like a vice. And with his burning lungs struggling to pull in air, the closest to a scream he could manage as Bonnie and Chica began to force his legs into the lower sections of the suit with practised ease was a strangled croak. Throughout it all Freddy stood impassively by the door, overseeing the whole thing.
Damn it all.