Author's Note

Welp, here we go again. I'm glad it didn't take me as long to write this chapter as it did last time. Though I'm going to stay adamant about not committing to release dates, I'd feel safe expecting a new chapter every 2-4 days.

Before we begin, I'd like to give a shoutout to TheWorstWriter21 (who I sincerely doubt is the worst writer) for being the first person to favorite this fan-fiction. That really means a lot to me, so thanks a bunch. I don't plan on giving many shoutouts, but I felt like this was a special enough moment to justify it.

Also, yes, I realize that this fan-fiction is similar to The Park, a spin-off of the MMORPG The Secret World. While the basic premise is the same (mom loses son in dangerous, potentially haunted park, and has to go find him before its too late), I assure you that the way the plot progresses will be very different. By the way, I would recommend playing The Park, or at least watching a Let's Play of it, for the voice acting alone. Fryda Wolff really knocked it out of the park as the mom who's worried sick.

Anyways, enough of my rambling. On with the chapter!

- KromeDome97

Chapter Two: Runaway

R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-RING!

The clock struck three-thirty, and the bell at Hurricane Elementary sounded its final toll for the year. Three months of freedom from the brick-enclosed world of pencils and papers had just begun. A clear, sunny sky brought visions of hammocks, barbecues, and poolside fun to the hollering schoolchildren who scurried into buses, and chatter of playdates and impending vacations blended into white noise. Caleb, who graduated from little overalls and baby shoes to graphic tees and khaki cargo shorts in the six years that passed, just finished his third-grade year. However, he was in no mood for hollering, scurrying, or chatting. Instead, he opted to trudge into his bus, flop into the nearest empty seat, lean against the scorching window, and stare blankly into the asphalt horizon. Everyone else was going to be out having fun this summer, but all he had to look forward to was bouncing off the walls of his house, and maybe, if he was lucky, a closely-supervised playdate. He wallowed in self-pity for a while until a pair of hands gripped his shoulders and jostled him back to reality. A girl with straight, black hair down to her torso, a Nirvana tee-shirt, and jeans torn at the knees sat beside him, giggling like a maniac.

"Yo, Caleb! How's the weather up in La La Land?"

"Hey, Mei," Caleb forced out a smirk. This madwoman had taken him under her wing on the first day of kindergarten, when she frazzled the teacher and his mother by giving him a peck on the cheek during recess. Of course, this meant they had to stay friends for as long as possible.

"It's cloudy, humid, and raining cats and dogs."

"Well, you're in luck! I got something that'll blow the rainclouds away," Mei dug out a brochure from her backpack and waved it in his face. Caleb had to swipe it from her to be able to read it, but his guts tied into a knot as soon as he did.

Cottontail Camp: Treat your kids to a week of wilderness exploration and outdoor fun!

"I told my mom and dad I thought it would be fun, and that Jody, Felix, and Lewis were going, and that it..." she pulled Caleb's hand to her face and skimmed the brochure, "'...promotes fitness, teamwork, and critical thinking skills', and they said I could go!"

Caleb snorted and placed the brochure on Mei's lap, "There ain't a chance in H-E-double toothpicks my mom'll let me go. You wanna hear what I had to go through for her to let me ride the bus instead of picking me up herself?"

"For the ga-zillionth time?" Mei chuckled, "No thanks." This laugh was a lot more hesitant than the last. Was she feeling sorry for him?

"Well, give it a shot anyways," she suggested, slipping the brochure back to him, "You can't win if you don't play, right?"

Yeah, Caleb scoffed in his head, but I could be in for a world of hassle if I do.

The bus started moving with a jolt and a grumble, but the rest of the ride to their stop dragged on uneventfully. Mei went on and on about her plans for the summer, carefully sidestepping the topic of summer camp. Caleb occasionally glanced her way to make it seem like he was listening to her, and he really did try to, but the brochure resting on his bouncing knee kept goading him, drawing his thoughts to places that made his stomach flutter like mad. Was he really going to do it? Was he going to risk getting a crash course on all the potential dangers of summer camp? The idea made him queasy. Still, the more he pondered it, the more he realized that his sanity was at stake. He needed a change of pace this summer, a break from the monotony of exploring the same few rooms over and over again, or the next walls he'd be bouncing off of would be made of rubber. With that, his mind was made up. He psyched himself up as the bus pulled up to his street corner, and he gave Mei a cordial goodbye before stepping out to meet his mother, who stood at the ready on the sidewalk. Maybe, with the right arguments and enough perseverance, he could get to Cottontail Camp after all.

"Absolutely not," Candace declared, even though she hadn't read a fraction of the brochure she was flipping up and down on her lap. She sat on a stool next to the kitchen counter, for her legs were far too weary from the day's work to stand on. Her stern expression accentuated the bags under her eyes, and the light of the plain, round ceiling lamp did the same to the flecks of gray in her curls.

"Mom," Caleb whined, "All of my friends are going! Mei told me that Lewis, Jody, and Felix were going, and she's going too!"

"I knew that girl had a hand in this," Candace clenched her fist around the paper, "She's probably trying to get alone with you. If she were to use her charms, dig her claws into you, then..."

"Mom, she's eight! I'm eight!"

"Fine, but that still begs the question: if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it?"

Caleb winced. He hated that cliche.

"No, but going to a summer camp isn't like that. It's not dangerous."

"So you think! What if you forget to bring sunscreen, and you get sunburned? You'll get skin cancer if you get sunburned too many times, you know."

"I won't forget, Mom. It'll be the first thing on my list."

"Okay, but what if you get bitten by a tick while you're out there? You could get Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Colorado tick fever..."

"I'll wear long-legged pants and pull my socks over the pant legs, just like you taught me."

"Okay, but what about the camp counselors? Most of them are good, but what if you get some creep who wants to...wants to...?"

"Then I'll get away from them and tell another adult about it, again, just like you taught me."

Back and forth, on and on, their argument continued for what felt like hours to Caleb. Would the chain of what-ifs ever end? Why did Caleb have to deal with this every time he wanted to try something new? Did she think he was dense? Did she think he was incapable of absorbing the most basic safety lessons that she loved to apply with a sledgehammer? Couldn't she see that he was just as conscientious as she wanted him to be, that he wasn't a little kid anymore? The longer the argument dragged on, the less Caleb cared about the answer to any of those questions. He was sick and tired of this war of attrition with his mother, and he was about to let her know just how sick and tired he was.

Caleb cut Candace off mid-lecture, "Oh, shut the hell up!"

A tidal wave of regret hit Caleb the instant he said that, and he cupped his hands over his mouth almost as quickly as Candace did hers. It was too late, though. The damage was done. Candace pointed straight to the kitchen exit, and the glare she gave Caleb could have withered a flower garden to dust.

"Go to your room."

"Mom, I - "

"Go to your room!"

Defeated, Caleb marched out of the kitchen and down the small corridor to his room as ordered. He felt another wave of guilt when he passed the locked door to DiDi's room, now an empty shrine to her memory. It remained as untouched as an unknown pharaoh's tomb, with all her golden treasures collecting dust in darkness and silence.

I bet DiDi wouldn't have exploded like I did, so Caleb believed. I bet she wouldn't have asked for anything in the first place.

Caleb didn't remember much about that day at Freddy's, when he and his mom lost DiDi, and the cops, the press, and everyone they knew wouldn't let them grieve in peace. However, there was one picture that couldn't be scrubbed out of his head, no matter how hard he tried. It lurked in the deepest folds of his brain, only to jump out during the darkest nights and catapult him from bed in a cold sweat. It was a set of claws, sharp, metal claws, and they snapped DiDi's arm like a twig before dragging her into the endless blackness. To this day, he didn't know what the thing bearing those claws had wanted with his sister, or what it had done to her before it finished her off. He wasn't even sure if it was real, or if it was just a figment of his imagination, his mind's way of explaining the inexplicable horror that befell his family and others. Whatever that thing was, Caleb found himself wishing it had taken him instead. His mom would have been better off for it.

So he dragged himself into his room, lay himself face-up on the bed, and found himself disgusted by everything around him. The stupid miniature planets hanging from the ceiling, the stupid dresser that he threw his stupid clothes in, the stupid plastic desk that he did his stupid homework and made his stupid drawings on, the stupid poster next to his stupid bed of a stupid band that he didn't even like that much, but he thought the lead singer was pretty, it was all stupid, stupid, stupid. He would've rather been in an asylum at this point. In fact, he would've rather been anywhere but in his godforsaken room. His mind was made up. He had to get out.

Meanwhile, Candace was still sitting on the kitchen stool, sobbing into her hands. Here she was, doing everything in her power to keep her son out of harm's way, but all that made him do was want to jump back into it. What was she doing wrong? How else could she impress how dangerous the world was to a kid like him? How could she make her little boy realize she only wanted him to be safe?

I bet you would've known, Jeb, Candace realized in between sobs. I bet you wouldn't have needed to ask these questions. If it had been you back at that park instead of me, our girl would probably still be alive, and you wouldn't have to watch our boy slip away.

Her weeps turned into bawls.

God, why do I have to do this all by myself?

A few ounces of saline later, it dawned on her that sitting there, feeling sorry for herself wasn't going to solve anything. So, reluctant as she was, she raised herself from the stool and headed to Caleb's room. Maybe, if they could talk things through with cooler heads, they could come to some sort of understanding. Anything to keep him from hating her guts for the rest of his life. She tapped on his door and leaned close to it.

"Caleb?" she called.

There was no response.

"Caleb, please. I just want to talk."

Again, there was no response. That was odd. Caleb wasn't one to use the silent treatment.

"Okay, Caleb. I'm coming in."

She creaked the door open, and felt a warm breeze come through. Once she entered the room, she let out a noise that was somewhere between a gasp and a scream. Caleb was nowhere in sight. A slip of notebook paper had taken his place on the bed. His window was half-open. Without a second's delay, she rushed to the front door, slipped on her gym shoes, and sprinted to her car.

How long had Caleb been running? Where had he run off to? The boy himself could not be sure of either. He was originally going to sneak into Mei's place and cool off for a few hours; her parents would have been cool with it, but on second thought, he wasn't really sure of that. It didn't matter anyways, because once he made it to her house, he just kept on going. Even as the sunlight faded from the sky, and the navy night replaced it, he kept going. Streets, sidewalks, houses, trees, they all blended together until he found himself jogging through what he could only describe as pure, dense forest. He should have turned back ages ago. In fact, he probably shouldn't have run off at all. His only supplies were a wind-up flashlight, a stale water-bottle, and a backpack full of single-serve bags of El Chip's tortilla chips that he had stashed in his room, which was hardly enough to live on. Everything inside of him said that he was making a mistake, that he was going to get himself killed, but some perverse force that he couldn't explain compelled him to go further. Maybe he really had gone crazy.

The only thing that broke Caleb's trance, that finally convinced him to stop in his tracks, was the sight of a gravel path, weaving through the grass.

What's this? Caleb wondered. I didn't think there'd be a hiking trail this close to town.

Curiosity got the better of him, so he strolled down the path to see where it would lead. After all, it wasn't like he had anywhere to be. He kept a leisurely pace and scanned the wilderness around him for any cool, odd, or slightly interesting sights. A few minutes later, he found what he was looking for, when he came across a massive, wooden gate. The wood was rotted and damp, and Caleb couldn't decipher the color of the few chips of paint that still hung on for dear life to it. Looking straight in front of him and side to side only brought Caleb mild confusion, but his stomach dropped as soon as he looked up.

Staring down at him was the outline of a bear, it's arms spread almost as wide as it was tall, and an oddly tiny hat resting slightly off-center on its bulbous head. Caleb whipped his flashlight from his side pocket and shone it on the beast, only to reveal that it was merely a wooden carving, a construct overlooking the gate to greet all who went through it. This did little to ease Caleb. For one, time and neglect stripped much of the paint from the bear, making it resemble a flayed corpse more than it did a welcoming mascot. Furthermore, Caleb realized that the image of a bear wearing a hat, over a gate, in the middle of nowhere, could only mean one thing: by fate or blind luck, Caleb found his way to Freddy's Fantasy Park.

He knew he had to turn back. If five children could have died in this place while it was open and crowded, one kid waltzing in there by himself would be an instant midnight snack. However, his body ignored his mind, just like it did when he ran past Mei's house and came all the way out here. He brushed off the flashing images of the metal claw, of DiDi being pulled to her doom. Though he knew the danger he was about to put himself in, something about walking through those gates felt right. This was the change of pace he wanted, was it not? In fact, he found himself craving the danger. It would be the first time he was truly risking something, the first time that he could fend for himself, far away from his mother's shielding embrace. The thought was intoxicating.

Yup, he admitted to himself, I really have gone crazy.

With that realization, Caleb was set. He took a deep breath, rested his hands on the splintery gate, and plunged into the world he had long abandoned to his nightmares.

He didn't even make it to Fazbear Plaza before he noticed a yellow twinkle in the corner of his eye.

Closing Note

Before you ask: yes, Hurricane Elementary School is a real place, and no, Cottontail Camp is not (at least, not that I know of). The name of Cottontail Camp was made up on the spot as a veiled reference to Ralpho: the rabbit from the titular story of Fazbear Frights #5: Bunny Call, which, you guessed it, is located in a camp.

Again, I hope you enjoyed the chapter, and I also hope you stick around. Things start getting real in Chapter 3. Make sure to leave a review, and have a wonderful day!

- KromeDome97