Finally able to calm down I sat at my post waiting for the time to pass. Six came around and my phone lit up. A text from Riley.
no spooky robots get ya yet? haha
The words in that text actually sent a shiver up my spine as I quickly flipped through the cameras and pulled up the tablet to check the box. The last three still stood there and from where I could see it looked like the fox hadn't moved. It was still stupid to believe it could have done it on its own. They had all been deactivated already. No power was running through them.
I sighed and replied to her text with a simple 'No.'.
She quickly wrote me back poking fun at me and saying she took off the 'y' in my name on her contacts.
I decided to wait until she got here to show her what had happened.
Half an hour creeped by but finally I heard my watch go off and stepped outside to see Riley coming from the main building. She waved but stopped when I refused to do anything but watch her come closer.
"Aw, what's wrong? Did the big bad robots scare you?" She laughed at me but stopped when I still said nothing. "What?"
"Follow me." I walked away back toward section A. We made our way past the piles of trash and finally to the kennels. I stepped aside and could tell by her sudden short gasp that she could see the thing in the dark.
"How'd you get it over here? Man! That thing must have been a ton!"
"I didn't. Someone did but I don't know who." I stared at the fox leaning lazily on the far wall, almost curled up in the corner like someone scared of sunlight. It was creepy how human it looked tucked away like that.
Riley glared at me. "Come on. I'm not that stupid."
"I'm serious! I've been waiting for you guys to come back so we can check the cameras. Freaked me out last night." She seemed interested now – or more like she wanted to catch me in the act and laugh about it – and we left back toward the main building to catch Joseph before he locked himself in his office.
He got in just as he opened the door and his tiny puppy rushed inside. "Wait Joe!" I pushed the door to keep him from closing it behind him. "We need to look at last night's tapes."
Gray blue eyes looked at me for some moments. "Problems last night?"
"I don't know. Someone moved one of those things and now it's in the kennels. I wanna see what moved it."
He let us in. Joseph sat at his desk, Macey hopping in his lap like it were an everyday thing, and he opened his lap top and flicked on the computer. Up on the computer came cameras of the entire dump. After giving him the tablet, he hooked it up to the lap top and then pulled up the cameras from there. The computer already had all of the video from the night before while the lap top needed to download the videos from the tablet.
"Time?" he then asked.
"I dunno… around ten or eleven?"
He did a time skip, looping through the video until eleven o' clock came around. When nothing looked different, he kept going until they saw me go snooping around like the idiot I was. Feeling embarrassed, I almost couldn't look when suddenly one of the cameras blacked out.
He pressed play.
The camera near the start of section B blacked out, followed by the one near C and then finally the one at the kennels. Meanwhile I stood near the box and vanished from the camera's view for a moment. Then the other cameras came back online and I could be seen running back to the guard house and, a few minutes later, to section D.
"It already moved. This is when I was looking for it." I leaned in, trying to see the kennels. "It moved when the cameras went out."
Joseph grabbed the lap top and skipped to the time that the cameras blacked out. The camera inside the box began to bug out first before blacking out and then the camera on the box blacked out followed a moment later by the camera pointed at the guard house.
They all came back on just in time to see me looking inside the box for the fox and then rushing off to the guard house and leaving to section D.
Riley and I looked at each other while Joseph kept staring at the screen. "Where'd it go?" he asked almost fearful.
"It's in the kennels." The more I watched him replay the videos, the more I couldn't help but think that the animatronic went there on its own. No way could someone move it that fast and without being caught on any of the cameras.
One final time, he went back and replayed the camera inside the box. Hopefully to catch whatever had done this. He moved the frames one at a time and stopped it when the camera glitched. A dark fog appeared to be within the box, but we skipped to the next frame and it was gone. That fog was the only thing we could see different. With how fucked up the stream was though it was easy to overlook and forget about. Point was, there was no one in the frames and no way to know what had moved the fox or know what had turned it back on… if that were the case.
I ran my fingers through my hair feeling very tired. With a sigh I turned away from them. "I've been up for hours freaking about this so… I'm going to go try and get some sleep."
Riley sputtered trying to grab words. "You're just gonna leave me here with them!?"
"Uh… yeah? I spent all night with those things." I didn't feel like dealing with anything. Paranoia along with lack of sleep and activity was really getting to me. I'd never gotten scared on one of my shifts before. This pounding in my head just pleaded for sleep. "You'll be fine. And if they start moving and trying to kill you… don't call me."
I left then out to my car and onward to sleep. In my head I couldn't get the image of the fox to go away. Its almost human way it curled up in the corner of the kennels… the stories Riley had told me about the pizzeria they came from… and even the guard from there that vanished. Something about all of those 'stories' felt all too real now.