Five Nights at Freddy's Fazbear Frights Collection, page 108
Oh man, Reed thought, I might be truly torturing Julius!
“Reed?”
Reed looked at Pickle. He was suddenly elated that his friend’s genius didn’t extend to reading minds. And he was also glad that Pickle also sucked at deciphering facial expressions, body language, and other social cues. Reed was sure his deliberately blank face wasn’t as effective as he wanted it to be. He was trying for innocent, but he had a feeling he looked like Thales did when the dog stole a cookie and was trying to pretend he didn’t.
“Oh, I was just curious,” Reed said. “It’s impressive. That’s all.”
Pickle raised a thick black eyebrow. “Okay.”
Pickle might not have been able to read interpersonal visual cues, but his brain was like an audio recorder. He remembered everything he’d ever read or heard. He was now going through that database and contrasting everything Reed had ever said to him before today with what Reed had just said.
Reed had never before told Pickle that something he’d done was impressive. He was so used to Pickle outperforming everyone around him that praising Pickle for doing something well was sort of like praising him for breathing. Pickle definitely found Reed’s last comment strange.
Pickle opened his mouth as if he was going to ask a question, but Ory saved Reed. He plowed Pickle’s exoskeleton into the side of Shelly’s miniature house.
The metal hit the wood siding with a thud, and Shelly sat up on the sofa. She stuck a bookmark in her book, clearly ready to confront her little brother. Before she could do or say anything, though, Ory backed up the robotic skeleton and ran it forward again. He giggled and repeated the action, bumping the little robot into the miniature house over and over.
Shelly jumped up. “Hey! Ory, stop it!”
“He’s not going to hurt it,” Pickle said. “Let him play with it.”
“I’m not worried about your robot,” Shelly said. “He’s going to hurt my house. He’s going to mess up my project.” Shelly started toward Ory, who giggled and darted away from her. Shelly chased Ory, but he easily stayed ahead of her. He continued to play with the remote at the same time, so the little robot kept butting at the house.
“Ory, you little twerp,” Shelly said, “I’m going to break our sibling vinculum if you don’t cut that out.”
Vinculum was one of the daily words from the previous week. It meant “bond.” That one stuck in Reed’s head because he thought, when Shelly defined the word, that he’d like a deeper vinculum with her.
“Ory! If you ruin my project …”
“What project?” Reed asked. He didn’t care. He was trying to distract himself from thoughts about Julius, who, if he was being controlled by Pickle’s remote, was probably being slammed into a wall in the classroom right now.
Or what if he was being slammed into something sharp, like one of Ms. Billings’s robotic arms? Could Julius get impaled?
“It’s a project for psychology class, about family dynamics,” Shelly said, panting and lunging for her little brother.
“Seriously, Shel, it’s okay,” Pickle said. “The robot isn’t going to hurt the house. It doesn’t have any sharp edges.” Pickle set aside his book and scrambled out of his dad’s chair. He went over to where his robot was attacking the house over and over. Leaning forward and pointing at the tiny rough pieces of overlapping wood that looked like the gray shingled siding on the real house, he said, “See? Not a scratch.”
Shelly stopped pursuing Ory. She came back to the miniature house, knelt down, and examined it. “Oh.” She shrugged and returned to the sofa. “Okay.” She picked up her book and presumably returned to medieval torture.
Torture.
What if Julius was being tortured right now? He had to be battered pretty badly if he’d been forced to do everything Pickle’s robot was doing.
Pickle sat down on the floor in front of Shelly’s house. He reached out and snatched up his robot. “Ory, desist for a second.”
Ory shoved out his lower lip. “But, I wanna … ,” he began to whine.
“I’m not going to take it away from you,” Pickle assured his brother. “I’m going to make it more fun.” Pickle held up his metal skeleton, which was still whirring in an effort to respond to the remote’s commands.
Ory’s lower lip returned to its normal position. He stopped playing with the remote, and his face brightened. “Yeah? What’re you going to do?” He came over and sat down next to Pickle.
“I’ve got something cool to show you,” Pickle said. “It’s something else you can do with this.”
Pickle put down the robot. He nudged Ory. “So, watch this,” Pickle whispered. Pickle flipped a switch on the little robot.
“Now, try it,” Pickle said to Ory.
Ory grinned and pushed a button on the remote. The robot stood on its blockish head.
“What’d you just do?” Reed asked Pickle.
“Oh, I just turned off the joint constraints. So now, my robot can go against logical joint directions, too. Like yours, only on purpose.”
Ory gleefully pushed buttons and toggled the joystick on the remote, and the little robot flipped off its head and turned into a metal contortionist. It started crawling across the floor like an octopus, its joints warping into impossible pretzel-like shapes. Looking at once like it was turning itself inside out and like it was expanding and contracting the way a beating heart did, the robot became so fluid it resembled a snake.
Ory directed the robot into the entry area, and it clicked and clacked over the slate as it undulated across the floor. Reed stared at it, his throat constricting.
In his head, instead of the sound of the robot’s metal limbs contacting the hard floor, Reed could hear the snaps and pops of breaking bones … Julius’s breaking bones. The sounds were in his head, weren’t they? He was imagining it and not hearing it, right?
No, of course he wasn’t hearing it. How could he hear it? Pickle said the remote’s range wouldn’t reach much beyond the Girards’ house, and even if it was happening, Reed wouldn’t be able to hear it. His ears weren’t superhuman. They were miles from the school. If his mind was telling him he could hear Julius’s bones break, his mind was lying.
Reed’s fears were so stupid. He couldn’t believe his mind was coming up with this stuff. It was asinine. There was no way Pickle’s remote could have any impact on Julius’s framework. Therefore, it was having no impact on Julius.
So why did Reed feel so rotten? Why was his stomach in his throat? Why did he feel like he might throw up all the great food he’d eaten?
Did he intuitively know something? Was his intuition right and his logic wrong?
Reed took a deep breath and looked at his exoskeleton. Focus, he told himself. Stop imagining all that stupid stuff.
Reed leaned over his project. He tried to concentrate on his exoskeleton’s joints.
But he couldn’t. Ory was having just too much fun with Pickle’s robot. Now that the boy could make the thing writhe all over the place, he was practically dancing with glee.
Pickle returned to his dad’s easy chair and picked up his book. Shelly was still lost in her own reading.
Ory started making the robot assault Shelly’s house again. Shelly glanced up, but apparently comforted by Pickle’s assurances, she placidly returned to her book.
Reed scrambled off the floor. He’d had enough.
“I’ll be back,” he said. “I have to do something.”
Ory ignored him, continuing to aim the flopping robot at the side of Shelly’s house. Pickle looked up from his book. “Where are you going?”
“I have to do something,” Reed repeated.
“What?” Pickle asked.
What could Reed say?
He couldn’t say, “I have to go to the school and free Julius,” even though that was exactly what he had to do. He had to run the three blocks to his house, get his bike, and pedal back to the school. Then he had to get in the locked school without setting off an alarm … thankfully he’d overheard a senior talking about a basement door that wasn’t wired into the school’s security system, and a key ring the janitor kept in a fake rock. Then he had to go through the darkened school without wetting his pants like a scared little kid, and then he had to unlock Julius and run for his life.
No, wait. Should he check on Julius before running?
What if his worst fears were true?
If Julius was badly injured, wouldn’t Reed have to call an ambulance?
He almost groaned out loud, but he stopped himself.
And what if Julius was dead?
“Reed?”
Reed blinked when he realized Pickle had said his name.
“What?” he said.
“You said you had to do something,” Pickle reminded him. “I asked what you had to do. Then your brain took a vacation and you turned into a weird statue.”
“Statue?” Reed was stalling.
He tried to think of a reasonable story. What would he have to do right now? Other than go save Julius from a modern-day version of the Wheel?
“Shelly?” Pickle said. “I think something’s wrong with Reed.”
Shelly looked up from her book. “Of course something’s wrong with Reed,” she said. “He doesn’t engage in enough intellection, and he lacks the appropriate nisus when it comes to schoolwork.”
Oh snap, Reed thought. Even in his agitated state, he recognized that Shelly had just used two words of the day. However, he was far too distracted to care about what they meant.
“I’m not talking about Reed’s commonplace imperfections,” Pickle said. “I’m referring to the fact that he’s currently making no sense and his body keeps forgetting how to remain animated.”
“Well, see, that’s what I like about Reed,” Shelly said.
Reed perked up, momentarily forgetting everything but finding out what Shelly liked about him.
“What’s that?” Pickle asked.
Reed was relieved he didn’t have to be the one who asked.
“He rarely makes sense. I like that. It gives me a challenge and keeps me interested.”
Reed couldn’t stop himself. He grinned like a maniac.
Thankfully, no one was looking at him. Pickle and Shelly were looking at each other. Ory’s gaze was on the little robot, whose metal limbs were now so distorted they looked elastic.
“I can see your point,” Pickle said to Shelly. “But my original question remains.” Pickle returned his attention to Reed. “What do you have to do?”
Before Reed could come up with something lame, the little robot hit the side of the miniature house again. And when it did, something large hit the outside of the Girards’ house.
Shelly looked at the French doors, then put her attention back on her book. “Wind must have come up.”
“We probably lost another branch off the big fir tree,” Pickle said.
Reed looked at the window.
In the short time since Mrs. Girard had left, night had slipped in around the house. Now blackness clung to the windows like a fungus. Reed couldn’t see anything in the framed glass of the French doors except the reflection of the room he was in. In that reflection, he watched Ory aim the robot at the house again. He watched it hit the miniature house.
In the same instant, something hit the side of the house again with a reverberating thump. Reed tensed. He looked at his friends.
Neither Pickle nor Shelly reacted to the latest sound. They were apparently satisfied with the wind-and-fallen-branch explanation for the second thump. Or, since they were reading again, they may not have even heard it.
Well, Reed heard it, and the wind explanation didn’t cut it.
He was listening intently now, and even though he’d heard those impacts against the house, what he didn’t hear was wind strong enough to blow a branch at the house that could make noise. He should’ve been hearing a whistling, whooshing sound if the wind was blowing that hard. And except for the continued crackle in the fireplace, and the sound of the robot hitting Shelly’s little house, the only other things Reed could hear were the impacts on the side of the house … every time the robotic skeleton hit the model house.
What if it was Julius out there?
What if he truly had been manipulated by Pickle’s remote all this time? By now, what condition would Julius be in?
What Reed lacked in “intellection” he made up for in imagination. He could easily envision a body covered in swelling, blackened contusions. He could see limbs as limp as rubber with bone fragments poking through the skin. He could see a battered face, a bleeding skull, and a spine warped into something sickeningly abnormal.
If, in his exoskeleton, Julius had been spun, then bashed into things over and over, and if he’d been twisted and contorted the way Pickle’s robot had been, would Julius even be human anymore? He’d be a mutilated mass of broken bones and torn flesh. What was it Shelly’s history book had said about the victims of the Wheel?
A victim of the wheel ended up looking like a moaning monster with bloody tentacles.
Yep. That’s what Julius would have become if everything Ory had done to Pickle’s robot had also been done to Julius’s exoskeleton.
Ory rammed the churning robot into the miniature house again. And again, outside, something hit the real house with similar force.
Reed couldn’t believe Shelly and her brothers were ignoring the sounds. How could they not hear them?
“You never said where you’re going,” Pickle said.
Another robot impact on the model house. Another whump outside.
Pickle didn’t mention the mimicking sound.
Reed’s legs gave out, and he dropped to the ground. He wasn’t so eager to go outside anymore. No. He now wanted more than anything to stay inside … maybe forever.
He looked around. Were all the windows and doors locked?
What if they weren’t?
No, of course they were. Mrs. Girard wouldn’t forget to lock up. She was as fanatical about safety as she was about keeping her children well fed.
“Reed?”
Reed looked at Pickle. “Oh, I forgot what I was thinking of.”
“You forgot you wanted to leave a few seconds ago?” Pickle asked.
Reed nodded. “I think I ate too much. My brain is drowning in buffalo sauce.”
Pickle came up with a partial smile. “Mom does make great chicken wings.” He leaned forward. “Hey, I wonder if there are more. Or more of those popper things.” He looked at his sister. “Hey, Shel, do you know if Mom put away any extra chicken wings or those popper things?”
Shelly looked up from her book. “Huh?”
“Chicken wings. Poppers.”
“Oh, no. They’re all gone,” Shelly said. “And you can’t be hungry already! How is it fair you get to eat so much and stay so skinny? My life would be paradisiacal if I could eat like you with no consequences.”
Like paradise, Reed thought, in spite of himself.
Ory had stopped plowing the robot into the miniature house. Now he was circling the robot around the house at a dizzying speed.
“I can’t help it if I’m hungry,” Pickle told his sister.
“Well, you can’t be hungry. Maybe you’re just thirsty.”
“I want a soda,” Ory called out. It was the first thing he’d said since he’d returned to playing with Pickle’s robot.
“Hey, that sounds good,” Pickle said.
“We don’t have any,” Shelly said.
“Why?” Pickle asked.
“Remember? Mom read some article about the combination of carbonation and sugar? She discovered that our bodies process the mixture as if it was a poison in the system.”
“Right. I do remember that.” Pickle sighed. “We shouldn’t let her read. All she seems to read are things that make our lives suck.”
Reed, who by now had wound himself tighter than Pickle’s grasp of basic math, blurted, “Your lives don’t suck!”
Pickle, with an open mouth, turned to look at Reed.
“Sorry,” Reed said. “Sorry.”
Pickle said nothing, but Shelly put down her book and looked at Reed with one eyebrow raised.
Reed shrugged. “It’s just that you’re so lucky to live in this nice house and have a mother who always makes good food for you and loves you and …” He stopped because he felt like he was going to cry. And he did not want to do that.
It was the stress. He was making himself crazy with his panic.
The little robot started climbing up the side of Shelly’s miniature house. It looked like it had somehow grown suction cups on its legs. It scaled the side of the toy house as if it was a spider.
For a moment, Reed was mesmerized by the robot’s functionality, but then he realized he was hearing something outside the Girards’ house. Something new. Something majorly disturbing.
Something was crawling up the outside wall of the family room.
No, that couldn’t be. Could it?
Reed tried to block out the sound of the little robot’s clicks and drone. He listened hard beyond that. Wasn’t that distant shuffling sound something on the house?
Yes. There. He could hear a sort of scrabbling, similar to what it sounded like when he once saw a raccoon climb up the side of his own house.
Maybe it was a raccoon out there now.
Maybe he was literally going insane and he was imagining all of this.
He had to be going insane. What he was hearing wasn’t possible.
But then, why would he suddenly be going loopy? Was it guilt?
Was he such an unadulterated wuss that the second he did something a little gutsy, his brain lost its grip on reality? Was he going crazy just because he’d locked Julius into the exoskeleton?
“You’re right,” Pickle said.
Reed almost jumped out of his skin. “What?!”
Pickle cocked his head at Reed’s peculiar behavior. “I said, you’re right. We are lucky. It was illogical of me to have allowed that to escape my awareness. Perhaps my blood sugar is low. If I had a soda—”
