Chapter 12
Just a couple steps from the service door that separated the kitchen from the back hallway, Joe was readying his bat when he heard a shriek that stopped him in his tracks. The shriek was so loud it felt like it radiated right through Joe's skin and drilled into his veins, congealing the blood that was trying to flow through them.
The sound very clearly came from the other side of the door Joe was approaching. His whole body was quivering in response to the chilling sound. The shriek had been so piercing that it hadn't sounded human.
But if the shriek was human, it had to have come from…his brother.
Joe stepped forward and cautiously peered through the round window set in the service door. Tense, ready to react…and hanging back a couple feet from the door…Joe looked through the dirty glass.
Because the kitchen's lights were so lame, Joe couldn't see much of anything through the glass. He had to get closer.
The music box having come to a screeching stop…and the tinkling sounds in the arcade having ended a few minutes before…Joe shook off the sudden grim silence that pressed in around him. He put his face up to the door's glass.
The silence gave way to another crescendo of noise. This time, screams intertwined with heavy gasps and a clamorous chaos of taps and clangs and thunks.
Joe's gaze looked toward the sounds and he saw…
He let out a mewl of surprise and horror. His breath - caught half-in and half-out - threatened to choke him.
He gasped at the prone body of his brother. Starting at Chuck's flopping feet and moving up to his writhing body, Joe's gaze landed on something that just…couldn't…be…possible. But it was.
A small, plastic pizza slice with a toothy mouth was chewing its way through Chuck's bloody, eviscerated face…or what was left of it.
"Chuck…no," Joe breathed.
The truth was, Chuck no longer had a face. The pizza slice was burrowed halfway into Chuck's head, spilling blood and bits of skull across the floor. The bone structure of Chuck's face was completely obliterated, and now, a part of his brain became visible. But the pizza slice was still relentlessly chomping down on him, the sickening sounds of crunching bones and leaking blood echoing through the walls, mixed in with Chuck's agonized screaming.
Too stunned to even begin to process what he was seeing, Joe yanked his gaze upward. It tracked along strips of fuzzy white-and-blue material clinging to exposed metal. It ran over the bulge of fuzzy white, past a dirty bib with the word PIZZA, and it landed on an open orange beak revealing two rows of vicious-looking teeth. Above the teeth and the beak, irradiant white eyes were staring directly back at Joe.
Then, the beak began moving up and down, and Joe heard a booming voice come from within. It sounded pre-recorded with a southern accent, but it was clear enough for Joe to hear what it was saying.
"OH LOO-OK! WE-E-E GOT ANOT-OTHER FRIEND-D TO PLAY-AY WITH US-S!"
Joe screamed.
Once he'd emptied all the coin vaults of their booty, Edgar had lifted his duffle bag with his loot and slung it over his shoulder. Straining, happily, he had headed toward the front of the restaurant.
Edgar had seen Joe heading toward the back hallway. He didn't know where Chuck was, and at that moment, he hadn't cared. He was in search of more spoils.
Doing a quick exploration of the front hallway, poking his head briefly behind each of the closed doors, Edgar had found the security office at the end of the hall. When he'd spotted the old security camera equipment, he knew he could do some real damage in that room.
He had smiled wildly as he stepped into the unlit room - its only light came from the security monitors. Eager to lay waste to the equipment, Edgar hadn't bothered swiping at the light switch. He'd dropped his duffle bag on the floor; it had landed with a satisfying rush of clinks and a few tinkles as a handful of coins escaped from the canvas carrier.
Edgar had started toward the desk that held the monitors. He'd raised his crowbar in preparation for some more body-buzzing vandalism.
Stepping behind the desk, he had taken aim at the monitors…
And that was when he heard the screams.
It started with a screech that didn't even sound like it had come from a person's mouth. A stretch of silence. And then another set of screams. More silence. Then one long, drawn out scream.
Instead of laying waste to them with his crowbar, Edgar looked at the monitors. His gaze whipped from one to the next.
The last long scream had been deep and uneven. Edgar was sure it had come from Joe.
"Joe?" Edgar leaned forward and looked at the monitors. He scanned all the interior views.
There!
On the dining room camera feed, Edgar saw Joe sprinting through the wide-open space. He was running flat-out, as if being chased by a whole horde of ghouls.
Rapt, Edgar watched until Joe disappeared from the dining room feed. Edgar's gaze shifted to the adjoining monitor, and sure enough, there was Joe pounding down the main hallway. He was coming toward the office.
But wait…
On the monitor, Joe stopped and looked back over his shoulder. His movements were spasmodic. He was clearly scared out of his mind.
As Edgar continued watching the monitor, Joe flung open one of the doors that lined the hall, one about midway down, Joe dashed through the door and disappeared from view.
Edgar frowned and looked at the other monitors. None of them provided a view of what was behind the door Joe had gone through. It was a supply closet; Edgar knew this from his cursory check of the area.
"What the fuck are you doing?" he asked a Joe who couldn't see or hear him.
When he'd broken out all the poster-frame glass, Joe hadn't thought to destroy the frosted glass set into all the doors. He wasn't sure why he hadn't, but now he was glad he had left the doors alone. He was hoping this one was going to prevent him from having his face eaten…or something much worse.
He wasn't sure what kind of enclosure he was in. A closet? A room? The most teensy-weensy bit of light from the hallway seeped through the frosted glass in the door, and that light revealed little more than the doorframe and the doorknob. Everything else around Joe was so black that it was like the void of light had mass and substance. It felt like that mass was crowding in around Joe, attempting to wrap him in a less-than-friendly hug.
The sounds of his wheezing breaths filled the darkness. He could smell the reek of his own sweat and the stink of his breath - it smelled like the stale coffee he'd swilled before coming to the pizzeria.
Outside the door, a shout reached down the hall. "Joe!"
It was Edgar's voice…and the guy didn't sound particularly scared. His voice was laced with more curiosity than fear.
Joe exhaled in relief. If Edgar was coming down the hall calling out Joe's name, the big Quaxly thing couldn't have been nearby. Edgar wasn't the sharpest tool in the toolbox, but he wasn't stupid enough to be calling out like that if he was facing a threat.
"Edgar?" Joe murmured.
"Joe!" Edgar shouted. "Where the hell are you?!" His voice was a little faint. He was still a ways down the hall.
A force of two was better than a force of one. Together, they could get out of the building. Joe grabbed the doorknob and tried turning it.
It didn't budge.
Joe jiggled the knob…forcefully. It held fast.
He threw his entire bulk against the door. It held up to his weight.
No longer thinking about Edgar, or anything else, Joe was now single-mindedly intent on getting out of the room he was stuck in. He tried battering the door with his body again, but that got him nothing but a sore shoulder.
He turned and looked into the outer space-like vacuum behind him. He quailed and turned back to the door. He began swiping at the wall with the flat of his hand.
"C'mon," Joe muttered. There had to be a light switch.
But there wasn't. Joe's groping hands found nothing but rough walls. Even when he stepped into the left and the right…
A telltale jingling came from above Joe's head. Not a switch, he thought. A pull cord!
Joe reached up and felt around. His hand encountered the end of a heavy string. He grasped it and pulled.
Nothing.
"C'mon you stupid…" Joe began as he yanked again.
This time, the cord did its job.
A single, bare lightbulb came on.
Joe blew out a pent-up breath. "Yeah, good," he said.
Now, all he had to do was find something in the room that could break the doorknob or the door's glass. He turned…
…and looked right into a pair of glowing eyes…
These eyes didn't belong to the ugly, lethal-looking Quaxly. But they didn't belong to anything cuddly, either. Joe was looking up into another tooth-filled face. This face, topped by a faded-yellow bow tie, was topped with dusty red fur. Its bright white eyes were set above a long snout filled with razor-sharp teeth and plastic. Joe screamed yet again.
"WELL-ELL HI THERE-ERE! YOU-U-U WAN-NA BE MY-Y FRIEND-END-END?"
Just a few feet from the closet Joe's calls had come from, Edgar, who was walking slowly - lugging the heavy duffle bag - froze when he heard Joe's scream. Edgar looked toward the door.
The first scream was followed by a second one. Then a third.
The sounds of whipping and crunching, like the cracking of bones…and the tearing of meat…these sounds wrapped around the screams and reached out from behind the door. The door rattled. Then…smack.
A silhouetted hand hit the door's frosted glass. Edgar's breathing caught in his throat when he watched the hand leave an opaque, bloody smear across the glass. The smear streaked downward above the hand, and the hand dropped from view.
Joe wasn't screaming anymore, Edgar realized.
When the hand disappeared from the glass, all Edgar could hear was a faint gurgle. Then silence.
Edgar's crowbar slipped from his hand. It hit the linoleum with a clang that rebounded down the hall and then seemed to boomerang back to Edgar.
His gaze still riveted on the door, Edgar adjusted the duffle bag strap that cut into his shoulder. It felt like the bag was getting heavier by the minute.
Edgar took a tentative step toward the closed door. "Joe?" he whispered. He wasn't sure why he said Joe's name. He didn't know what had happened to him, but he knew it wasn't good. Still, maybe Joe was injured and needed help. Edgar shuffled forward another half-step, but he stopped when the door shimmied ever so slightly.
Edgar locked his gaze on the door. He looked back down the hallway toward the office. Should he retreat and lock himself in that room?
His brain was chained by the blood-engorged veins that pulsed madly in time with his heart's clacketing pace. He couldn't think.
The door began to open. Inch by excruciating inch, more and more mysterious murk was revealed.
"Joe?" Edgar called.
Then, Joe appeared, and Edgar put his hands over his mouth.
Joe fell to the floor, his arms spread out and his chest and torso violently torn open, exposing his muscles and ribcage. It looked as though he had been eviscerated, mauled to death by some wild, feral Pokémon. His throat had been slashed multiple times, leaking copious amounts of blood on the floor. And oh, his face. His poor face had been bashed in, his eyes dangling from tendons out of their sockets.
Edgar felt the floor beneath him turn into the yawing deck of a boat caught in a hurricane when he saw something else emerge out of the closet and into the hallway. Reality folded in on itself.
Edgar was looking at the oversized, blood-stained mass of a…robotic Fuecoco. Edgar tried to process the mottled red fur, the bright-teal shoulder pauldrons, and the yellow bow tie atop its head. And as Edgar looked at the Fuecoco, it turned toward him. The Fuecoco had blazing-white eyes set in the face of a long Fuecoco snout. Those eyes were looking right at Edgar.
And then, the Fuecoco's horrible-toothed jaws flapped open and shut as it spoke to Edgar in a distorted girlish voice.
"HI! YOU-OU WANN-A COME-OME IN AND-D PLAY-AY-AY WITH-TH US-S?"
Edgar's brain, overcome as it was, managed to get a message to his feet. "Run!" his brain commanded.
Edgar spun around and shot like a rocket down the hall, back toward the office. The heavy duffle bag slammed against his hip over and over as he ran. The pounding hurt, but Edgar couldn't bring himself to drop the bag. He kept hugging it with him as he galloped down the hall.
He could hear the tinkling clink of coins hitting the floor behind him, but that didn't discourage him from hanging on to the bag.
The sound of heavy stomping coming from right behind him. He looked over his shoulder once, briefly seeing the deranged Fuecoco charging after him, snapping its jaws close to his face. The sight had given his legs an extra burst of speed, and before he knew it, he was back in the office, and he slammed the door behind him.
Edgar fumbled with the door lock, eventually clicking it into place. Seconds later, heavy pounding came from the other side. Edgar propped his back up to the door, struggling with all his might to keep that monstrous Fuecoco out of the office. It was only about a minute of banging before the sound of metallic footsteps stomped away from the door.
Feeling it safe to move away from the door, Edgar finally dropped the duffle bag. More coins spilled over the floor with a clatter, but Edgar didn't care.
Looking wildly around him, he spotted the landline phone on the shelf behind the desk. He dashed over to it and snatched up the receiver. He immediately started punching in 911 as he put the phone to his…
Edgar suddenly pulled the phone from his ear. He winced and stared at the receiver.
A nightmarish clamor of children's laughter was blasting from the phone. The laughter was high-pitched and frenzied.
Edgar dropped the receiver back into its cradle. He looked over at the door. It was still closed, and he couldn't see anything through the glass.
He turned his attention to the CCTV monitors. His gaze immediately landing on the exterior feed that was focused on the back of the building, Edgar saw his truck still sitting next to the loading dock. Ann remained in the cab with Snowdrop.
For an instant, Edgar's heart rate slowed. That truck was safety. All he had to do was get…
Movement on another monitor caught Edgar's attention. He looked at it.
Glaring directly back at him - or rather, at the camera that fed this monitor - were the red Fuecoco and…a Quaxly with a large yellow beak. Although the Quaxly's face was in better shape than the Fuecoco's, it didn't look any less threatening.
Both of the robotic Pokémon continued to study the camera. Edgar could feel them looking past the lens, down the wires, and directly into his eyes. He took a step back from the monitors.
At the same time, the Quaxly on the monitor moved. Edgar stepped forward again, leaning in to see the monitor more directly.
He watched the Quaxly bend over and crouch down. It was right in front of a vent cover low down on the wall.
Edgar felt his brows bunch as he tried to figure out what the Quaxly was doing…
The Quaxly wrenched the vent cover off the wall. Then he held something out in front of him. Edgar blinked. He hadn't even noticed…until a plastic pizza slice with buck teeth hopped off the Quaxly's hand and disappeared into the now-open vent.
"What the shit…?" Edgar began.
Metallic banging and clanging resounded through the building. It was muffled and distant, but it stretched out and reached, like fingers, into the office.
Edgar looked at the walls around him. The sound was coming from within them.
He returned his attention to the monitors, urging his brain to help him out. What was going…?
He looked at the wall again as the banging continued. And then he got it.
"No," Edgar said.
The banging getting louder meant that the pizza slice was moving fast. Edgar stepped away from the desk and quickly scanned the room, his gaze going left and right, up and down. Was there a…"
His gaze landed on a vent cover on the wall. Edgar stared at it as the volume of the banging went up another couple notches.
Getting close, Edgar thought. He immediately dropped to his knees. He ducked under the credenza and looked at the vent cover. He had to find a way to block…
A noisy, clinking bang…Edgar spotted bright yellow on the other side of the vent cover. Instantaneously, he braced himself against the slatted metal. It thrashed against his shoulder. He yelped and looked down between the slats. He could see a fury of bright yellow-and-red through the dark gray openings. The office's fluorescent bulbs caught the white of gnashing, razor-sharp teeth snapping viciously at the slatted metal.
Edgar hiccupped several panicked breaths. Trying to brace his rubber-soled hiking boots against the dusty linoleum, he attempted to press harder against the vent cover. The dust, however, created a surface as slick as ice, and Edgar's feet slipped away from him.
The teeth against the metal slats sounded like metal meeting a power saw - the high, tinny sound was drilling into Edgar's eardrums. Whimpering, he tried to replant his feet, but they once again slid across the floor.
The vent cover shuddered, and a corner of it popped loose from the wall. Edgar wailed and squeezed his eyes shut and shifted his shoulder to press against the loose edge. Another clamorous slam and…
Silence.
Edgar's breathing still ragged, his pulse pounding, he opened one eye and looked through the slats. He saw…
…nothing.
He tilted his head and looked hard into the air shaft's gloom. The chute behind the vent cover was empty.
Edgar exhaled loudly. He pulled his shoulder from the vent cover and brought a shaky hand to his face, wiping away the sweat that matted his hair to his skin and ran down his neck. Weakly, he levered himself to his feet. He took another deep breath. As he started to exhale, he turned back toward the desk.
He froze.
His breathing stopped mid-exhale.
The office door was open.
Feeling like his eyeballs were vibrating in his head, he strained to look through the open doorway. At the same time, he tried to reason out why the door was open.
He had locked it, hadn't he?
And even if he hadn't, who had opened it?
His gaze whipped around the office. He was the only one in it, but…
His attention snapped to the filing cabinets on the opposite wall and to the single upright locker next to a breaker box on the wall opposite the door. Could something small have gotten into…?
That disturbing thought lit a fire under Edgar's feet. He hustled toward the open door.
Hesitating next to the door jamb, equally afraid of what might be hiding in the office and what might be lurking outside of it, he inched his head through the door opening. Once he had his head far enough out into the hall to see, he looked along the length of the hall in both directions. He saw nothing.
He couldn't believe his luck. And he wasn't going to waste it. He immediately dashed out into the hallway and started toward the…
"Da dum dum dum diddly-dum."
Edgar turned into a statue. What was that?
The voice, which seemed to be bouncing every which way at once, was a cross between a chant and a monotonous song. It was a teasing voice, but not a nice teasing. The tone was one a bully would use…taunting, torturing.
Edgar rethought his action plan. Maybe running through the hall wasn't such a great idea at the moment. He turned and started back toward the office.
As soon as he took a step, though, the office door whipped shut with a resounding wham. Edgar recoiled but he recovered quickly. Rushing forward, he grabbed the doorknob and tried to turn it.
The knob wouldn't move.
Edgar shook it. The knob didn't give at all. It was locked.
And worse, from down the hall toward the lobby, a tinkling skittering sound was heading in Edgar's direction. A scrape and a clink. A cascade of clinks.
Edgar knew exactly what that sound was. He was hearing the coins that had leaked from his duffle bag when he was running. They were strewn through the hallway, and now they were being moved by…
…footsteps.
Shuffle. Clink. Scrape. Clatter.
Something was moving the coins across the linoleum.
"Diddly dum dum diddly da…"
Each note of the jeering little ditty drilled into Edgar's body, like each tone was one of a billion nanobots boring in through his pores. Edgar's whole body began to tremble. He could even hear his teeth chattering.
He whipped away from the office door and took off down the hall, away from the lobby, toward the red EXIT sign at the hallway's end.
In full gallop when he reached the emergency exit door, he slammed into the crash bar…and bounced back. As he shifted his feet to keep his balance, he heard a rapid rush of footsteps whizzing toward him.
"AHOY-OY!"
Edgar turned…just in time to see the flash of a pirate's hook arcing through the air, heading directly at his exposed neck. He opened his mouth to scream…
…but the sound was cut off before it could begin.
The hook swiftly sliced through Edgar's neck, taking a chunk of skin with it. Thick blood sprayed out of the open wound like a fountain, and Edgar felt his hands instinctively grasp at his throat as he gurgled like a Magikarp out of water, coughing up even more blood as he fell over backward, seizing on the linoleum floor. Just before his eyes dilated, they glanced up at the attacker.
All he saw was a dark-brown head with two oval-shaped ears and one glowing eye, the other eye blocked behind an eyepatch, and a pirate's hat on top. Then, a glitchy pirate voice.
"TI-IME'S ALMO-OST UP-P!"
And then, the face lunged for Edgar's head. A crunch…
…Edgar was dead.
