Five Nights at Freddy's Fazbear Frights Collection, page 15
“Look at this.” Cyril was, surprisingly, now interested in the counter. He picked up a small booklet inside a plastic sheath. “I think it’s the instructions.”
“Let me see.” Greg plucked the booklet from Cyril’s grasp.
“Hey,” Cyril squeaked.
Greg ignored his protests. This could be it.
Putting Fetch back on the counter, he pulled the booklet from the plastic and scanned through the instructions. Hadi read over his shoulder. Cyril stuck his head between Greg’s chest and the booklet, forcing Greg to hold the booklet farther out so they could all read together. Fetch, the instructions explained, was an animatronic dog designed to sync up with your phone and retrieve information and other things for you.
“That’s lit,” Hadi said. “Think it still works?”
“How long has this place been empty?” Greg asked. “Fetch looks like he’s older than my dad, but smartphones haven’t been around that long.”
Hadi shrugged. Greg finally did, too, and he began poking around Fetch to find the control panel. Hadi and Cyril lost interest.
“It isn’t going to work. It’s older tech; it won’t be compatible with our phones,” Cyril said, cringing when the wind surged against the building again.
Greg felt a chill slither down his spine. Whether it was related to the wind’s eerie onslaught or something else, he wasn’t sure.
Greg returned his attention to Fetch. He wanted to see if he could get the dog-thing to do whatever it was supposed to do. He had a hunch this might be what he’d felt in the field, what had called him here.
Cyril’s pessimism about Fetch didn’t surprise Greg. He wouldn’t know an opportunity if it thumped him between the eyes.
Hadi, on the other hand, was relentlessly positive. He had such a sunny disposition he’d pulled off what Greg thought was nothing less than a magic trick: Hadi was accepted by the popular crowd, despite having spent most of his time with Greg and Cyril, two of the nerdiest kids in the school. Maybe it had something to do with his looks. Greg had heard girls talking about Hadi. Hadi was either “fine,” “hot,” “cute,” “sharp,” or just “mmhmm,” depending on the girl who was talking.
Hadi wandered away from the counter, and Cyril plopped down in a chair at the nearest table. “I think we should go,” he said.
“Nah,” Hadi brushed him off. “There’s still a lot to check out.”
Greg ignored them both. He’d picked up Fetch and found a panel under Fetch’s belly. Juggling the instructions, Fetch, and his flashlight, Greg bit his lip and concentrated on hitting the right buttons in the right sequence.
For an instant, the wind and rain let up, leaving the building in a silence that felt almost menacing. Greg glanced up at the ceiling. He noticed a large stain above his head. A water stain? Distracted from his task for a second, he shined his light over the whole ceiling. No other stains. In fact, why wasn’t the whole inside of the restaurant dripping? He thought he’d seen part of the metal roof missing when he’d first looked at the building. Why wasn’t it leaking?
Shrugging, he returned his attention to Fetch. At this point, he was just randomly pushing buttons. None of the sequences laid out in the instructions were doing anything.
As abruptly as it had stopped, the wind and rain started up again in a crescendo of maniacal drumming, pounding, and wailing. That’s when Fetch moved.
Suddenly, with a whirring sound, Fetch’s head raised. Then his gaping, tooth-filled mouth opened. And he growled.
“What the hell!” Greg dropped Fetch on the counter and leaped back. Simultaneously, Cyril erupted from his chair.
“What?” Hadi asked, returning to his friends.
Greg pointed at Fetch, whose head and mouth were in clearly different positions than they had been when they’d found him.
“Sick,” Hadi said.
They all stared at Fetch, edging backward in unspoken agreement that a little distance was a good idea in case Fetch did something else.
They waited.
So did Fetch.
Hadi got bored first. He shined his flashlight in the direction of the stage. “What do you think is behind that curtain?”
“I think I don’t want to know,” Cyril said.
Behind them, a door slammed … inside the building.
As a unit, the boys ran through the dining room and down the hall to the storage room they’d broken into. Even though he was the smallest, Cyril reached the room first. He was out through the narrow gap they’d managed to create in the jammed service door opening before the other boys could squeeze through.
Outside, pelted by rain streaking sideways, they grabbed their bikes. Greg figured the wind was gusting over fifty mph now. No way could they bike home. He looked at Hadi, whose curly black hair was matted against his head. Hadi burst out laughing, and Greg joined in. Cyril hesitated, then started laughing, too.
“Come on,” Hadi shouted over the screaming wind. Without looking back at the restaurant, they put their heads down and pushed their bikes against the storm.
As he trudged beside his friends, Greg thought about why he’d wanted them to come to the abandoned restaurant. They’d left so much of it unexplored … like the area behind the curtain. There’d been three closed doors off the hallway, too. What was behind them? Greg was afraid he might not have gotten what he was there for. Had he done what he was meant to do?
Greg was close to home when a woman called out, “Wet enough for you?”
He stopped, wiped his eyes, and squinted through the rain.
“Hey, Mrs. Peters,” he called when he saw his elderly neighbor standing on her covered front porch.
She threw up her skinny arms. “Love these storms!” she sang out.
He laughed and waved at her. “Enjoy!” he shouted.
She waved too, and he plodded on. When he neared his parents’ tall, modern, oceanfront house, Greg was surprised to see a light in the living room window. The town was still dark. When he’d parted with Cyril and Hadi, the only lights he’d seen were their flashlights bobbing along like disembodied spirits, and the flickers of what looked like candles inside a couple houses. The light in his window, however, was bright and steady.
When he pulled his bike in next to the stilts that raised the house a full story off the ground, he discovered why he’d seen light. At first drowned out by the thunderous sounds of the wind and rain, he hadn’t heard the motor until he practically walked into it. A shiny new generator sat under the house, chugging away, a cord extending past the two-car garage and up the stairs to the front door.
Greg peeled off his dripping rain jacket as he climbed the steps, but before he reached the front door, it opened.
“There you are, boyo!” Greg’s uncle Darrin grinned down at him, his mountainous six-foot-five, broad-shouldered frame filling the doorway. “I was about to mount a search posse. You didn’t answer your phone.”
Greg reached the entry and exchanged his and his uncle’s signature greeting—a half-hug-double-fist-bump. “Sorry, Dare. I didn’t hear it.” He pulled the phone from his pocket and tapped it. Dare had texted and called him multiple times. “Wow. I swear I didn’t hear it.”
“Who could hear anything in this wind? Get inside.”
“Where’d the generator come from?” Greg asked. He didn’t really care. He was trying to distract himself from thinking about why he didn’t hear his phone in the restaurant. It hadn’t been that loud inside. Could it have been because …
“I got it in Olympia. Your dad’s been saying for years you don’t need it, but that’s bullhonky. I told him he’s going to wish he had one. They’ve been saying the storms will be much worse this winter. And wouldn’t you know it, they came early this year. How about that rain we got last week for Halloween?” Dare shook his head. “Of course, your dad won’t listen.”
Greg didn’t remember that argument. But then, Dare and Greg’s dad had so many arguments, how could he remember any specific one?
Uncle Darrin was Greg’s mother’s brother, her only sibling, and they were close; Greg and Dare were even closer. But Greg’s dad hated Dare for the very reasons Greg loved him—because Dare was flamboyant and fun.
“Darrin needs to grow up,” Greg’s dad would say over and over.
With long hair, died purple and worn in a braid, and a wardrobe of bright-colored suits and ties paired with painfully patterned shirts, Dare had his own distinct look. That Dare was also a wealthy, successful inventor of car parts and had the most amazing luck with investments and money in general was the nail in his coffin as far as Greg’s dad was concerned. “People like him don’t deserve success,” he often groused. Greg’s dad was a contractor, and he worked more than he wanted to afford their big house and the expensive cars he liked. The fact that Dare lived on a ten-acre estate and made tons of money from “tinkering” in his workshop was “too much.”
Greg loved Dare the way he wished he could love his dad. Dare had done nothing but accept Greg from the day his squished little head entered the world, despite the fact that Greg was never a cute baby, and he hadn’t turned into a cute kid. His face was too long, his eyes were too close together, and his nose was too small. He compensated for all of that with long, wavy blond hair, a “great smile” (or so a girl in his former eighth-grade class had said), and enough height and muscle to think he might not be a total lost cause after high school. Never drawn to typical boy things like cars and sports—no matter how hard his dad tried to force them down his throat—Greg found an ally in Dare, who didn’t question Greg’s likes or dislikes. He accepted Greg as he was.
“Where’s Mom?” Greg asked Dare.
“Book club.”
Greg didn’t ask about his dad. One, he didn’t care. Two, he knew his dad would be playing poker with his buddies. That was how he spent his Saturday evenings—even if he had to play cards by candlelight.
“Where were you boys in this weather?” Dare asked.
“Um, can I keep that a secret?”
Dare tilted his huge head and stroked his graying goatee. “Sure. I trust you.”
“Thanks.”
“You want to play backgammon?” Dare asked.
“Can I take a rain check?”
“Ha! Good one.” Dare gestured to Greg’s still dripping coat.
Greg shook his head. “Unintentional. Um, I just wanted to do some reading?”
“Sure. No prob. I just came by to set up the generator for you guys. When you weren’t here and I couldn’t get ahold of you, I figured I’d stay until worry fried my circuits and made me phone the police.”
Greg grinned. “I’m glad I made it home before you called the cops.”
“Me too.” Dare started to reach for his magenta raincoat, then hesitated and snapped his fingers. “Oh, by the way, I heard you got your first babysitting gig. Glad you finally brought your old man around.”
“It was really thanks to you. Once you threw your two cents in, it was three against one. I’m sitting for the McNallys’ kid next week—Jake? They need someone to watch him on Saturdays.”
“No way! His mom and I go way back. Maybe I’ll stop by sometime, bring you guys a treat … or bring by my new puppy. I’ve been thinking seriously about getting a dog.”
“Really? Cool!”
“Yeah, a friend has a Shih Tzu that’s going to have puppies soon. I’m thinking I’ve been without a dog long enough. I miss having a dog to cuddle with.”
Greg laughed. “Just be sure it’s a nice Shih Tzu. I think the beast next door is part Shih Tzu.”
“That snaggle-toothed mongrel? Nah, no dog of mine will be like that. Remember,” Dare said, holding up his right index finger, on which he wore his favorite onyx and gold ring, “I have …”
“The Magic Finger of Luck,” Dare and Greg said in unison.
They laughed.
“The Magic Finger of Luck” had been an ongoing joke since Greg was about four years old. One day, Greg was crying because he wanted the stuffed octopus in a claw machine. He hadn’t been able to get it when his mother put money in the machine and he’d tried with the claw. Dare had tapped the glass of the claw machine with his right index finger and had said in a deep voice, “I have the Magic Finger of Luck. I will get you the octopus.” And he had done it on the first try. After that, Dare called on the Magic Finger of Luck to get things to go his way. It pretty much always worked.
Greg stopped laughing, thinking again about the neighbor’s dog.
“Yeah, I still can’t believe that thing bit me.” The neighbors next door had moved in the year before, and two days later, their dog, a small but evil mutt with very sharp teeth and one missing eye, charged out at Greg and bit him on the ankle. He had to have ten stitches.
“Okay, I’ll go and leave you to your reading,” Dare said. “Before I go, though, let’s make sure everything’s working right.”
Fifteen minutes later, Greg was lounging on his double bed reading by the nice bright light of his red pendant reading lamp. Dare had gotten the family a power transfer system for the generator that hooked up to the breaker box. With the flip of a few switches, power was restored to the whole house. “Got this especially for your gaming needs,” Dare said before giving Greg another half-hug-double-fist-bump and leaving.
Even though he really wanted to get to his reading, Greg took the time to do his nightly yoga routine before sliding under the oversize afghan Dare had knitted for him. Dare had also taught him yoga, and Greg loved it. It not only calmed him down before bed, it helped him stay in shape. Not that “good shape” was good enough.
Greg stood in front of the mirror and examined his narrow shoulders and slight chest. Even though he had muscles in his arms and legs, his torso was still too thin. And his face …
Greg’s phone buzzed. He picked it up and looked at a text from Hadi.
U recovered?
Greg snorted. As if he was scared enough to need recovering. From what? he texted back, playing dumb.
U can’t fool me.
OK, Greg responded. Yeah, I’m good. Need more courage I guess.
You need Brian Rhineheart’s brain. He’s not afraid of anything.
Greg laughed. Good point. Brian Rhineheart was the football team’s star running back. He texted, I could use his legs, too. Fast, for running away.
LOL How about Steve Thornton’s shoulders? Powerful enough to thump scary things.
Greg laughed again. But Hadi was onto something. If Greg was going to do what he’d set out to do, why didn’t he pick and choose what he wanted?
Okay, he typed in, but I want Don Warring’s chest, too, then.
Greg grinned at the idea of constructing a body from football players’ parts. He needed a good face, though. Especially if he was going to get a girl to pay attention to him.
I want Ron Fisher’s eyes, he texted.
RGR. How about Neal Manning’s nose?
Greg smiled and typed, OBV.
Mouth?
Greg thought about it. He responded, Zach’s.
BFG.
Greg smiled. He could picture Hadi’s “big freaking grin.”
Hair?
I like my own, Greg replied.
Ego much?
Greg laughed.
GG
Greg typed in, BFN.
Greg flopped onto his bed.
He picked up his journal and the book on the Zero Point Field he needed to check. He glanced over at his plants before he started reading. They were the key to this, weren’t they? They made the exchange he’d just had with Hadi more than just a silly game. Well, they were at least the catalyst. Learning about Cleve Backster’s experiments is what had launched him down the road he was on.
But the plants wouldn’t help him tonight. He needed to review what he knew about Random Event Generators, or REGs. He flipped through his book. Yes, there it was. Machines and consciousness. Cause and effect. He put the book down and skimmed his last journal entry.
He hadn’t misinterpreted what he’d gotten, had he? No. He didn’t think so. He was either on the right track, or he wasn’t. And if he wasn’t, he didn’t think he wanted to know what track he was on. The way he’d been drawn to that place couldn’t have been a coincidence.
The storm hung around another day, but it fizzled out late Sunday night. Power came back on. School was in session as usual Monday morning.
Greg endured the first half of the day and was relieved when 1:10 p.m. finally rolled around and he got to go to Advanced Scientific Theory. Advanced Scientific Theory was an AP class reserved for freshmen who had won science fair prizes in the previous two years. The class had only twelve students. It was taught by a visiting teacher, Mr. Jacoby, who also taught at Grays Harbor Community College.
As always, Greg was the first one in the classroom. He sat in the front. Only Hadi would sit near him.
Mr. Jacoby was practically bouncing at the front of the yellow-walled classroom when the bell rang. Tall and lanky but so full of energy he reminded Greg of a long, coiled spring, Mr. Jacoby was an enthusiastic teacher who was undaunted by disinterested students. Greg loved science, all science, not just tech, and his passion had earned him the title of teacher’s pet.
Mr. Jacoby always lectured while darting around the front of the classroom like he had bugs in his pants. Sometimes he scribbled on the whiteboard. More often, he just rambled. But it was interesting stuff. This small room, filled with tall wooden lab tables and counter-height chairs, was one of Greg’s favorite places in the school. He loved the Periodic Table and the constellation posters on the walls. He loved the smell of the fertilizer that fed the hybrid plants growing at the back of the room, it made him think of science and learning.
Running a hand through unruly red hair, Mr. Jacoby began, “In quantum physics, there is something known as the Zero Point Field. This field is scientific proof that there is no such thing as a vacuum, no such thing as nothingness. If you empty all space of matter and energy, you still find, in subatomic terms, a bunch of activity. This constant activity is a field of energy that is always in motion, subatomic matter constantly interacting with other subatomic matter.” Mr. Jacoby rubbed a freckled nose. “Are you all with me?”
