Prints in the Dust
By Litmauthor
The building had been gutted, by at least one fire and several demolition crews, though none of them had managed to complete the task as more than half of it was still standing, including much of the roof. The back door had been taken down by one of them though and someone, possibly any of the street people in the area or local kids involved with what many of the much older types liked to call ``wayward youth,'' had removed the plywood which had replaced the door. The streetlights didn't reach to the back of the building, all the more ideal as it would make any surveillance of the night's activities a bit more difficult, so the only reason she found out was because she'd stepped on the plywood, missing a bent and rusted nail by inches. It had prompted her to turn on the flashlight in her phone and the cone had illuminated the downpouring rain and the gaping entrance to the disheveled building.
Candace, Candy to her friends and coworkers with the later outnumbering the former for the light blue cat, inhaled the cold damp air and braced herself for the first inspection she'd made of the pizzeria in years. The last inspection had seen the place in much better shape, or at least much better shape on the outside, but that had been before the place had become a crime scene. The time had not been kind, one side of the door was covered in carpenter's plastic sheeting, the other with what remained of the original brick walls which was now held together mostly with graffiti.
The next step forward didn't land on wood or nails but one of the puddles now flooding the back alley and would've been wholly unremarkable if not for the now decaying flier soaking in the water. Candy reached down and used a pen to fish out the flier. The words ``--remy Human's Pi--a'' were barely legible over the distorted face of the titular humanitronic and the bleached-out pizza slice he was presenting. She flicked it aside into another virtually identical puddle and walked up close enough to investigate the doorway, casting the flashlight beam about inside.
There was a harsh contrast between the kitchen the backdoor lead into and the back alley that was more the result of the weather than of any greater effort in cleanliness or maintenance. The rain was washing away dust and grime into gutters but inside it had been preserved by the plastic and what remained of the roof. Thus, the kitchen she walked into was coated in a thick layer of dust on most surfaces and other less knowable mess or debris everywhere else.
Or almost everywhere else, her sight and the light fixated on the first oddity, a set of footprints clearly visible in the dust. A few steps inside got her out of the rain and into a place where she could crouch and look at the footprints. There was something strange about them that was nagging at the edge of her mind, something her instincts had clued in on early and that had caught her attention to begin with. The prints weren't alone in the dust, work crews, police, and random vagrants had doubtless been here over quite some time, but this set was much fresher and much deeper. They were also a little odd in shape, did one of the workers have some odd boots? The instep seemed blockier than normal and the toes nowhere near as round as it should. Seconds passed before things finally clicked, there was no set of entry prints, just the one set heading out the backdoor.
The realization made her heart start racing for a few seconds before rationality settled over the whole thing. There was a front door too, probably a contractor or inspector in big stompy boots had come in the front and passed out to the back on their inspection, or maybe a police officer who was investigating whoever tore down the plywood over the door. Candy let out a tense breath in relief, but it was forced and artificial, her instincts were still on edge and they didn't seem to buy into that same explanation. But her forebrain was fine with that answer, she stood up and looked around the kitchen, any equipment had been removed first, if you didn't know the original layout of the place then you'd be left to guess off the dust coated tiles and countertops. She couldn't see anything else of interest, though her leak had said there had been some sort of an accident in that last crime scene, someone fighting the humanitronic in the kitchen.
``Well,'' her voice was unintentionally hushed and barely cut through the sound of the rain outside ``If there's anything good it's not here.'' Having announced that she turned to the doorway deeper into the pizzeria and made her way into the dust smattered hallway. In the process she noted that doing so was putting her in line with following the footprints.
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``Miss May is not pressing charges and you should be grateful about that,'' The white tomcat police officer said as he took the handcuffs off of Candy ``She had you solidly on breaking and entering.'' As he put the handcuffs away, he closed the folder on his desk, covering up a mugshot of Candy taken earlier that night. ``And given that she's already filed a complaint of harassment on you before I'd say she could get you in trouble with a lot less than that.'' He hadn't gotten a response to any of this, so he added ``And it's the same place, it's not like you're stalking her, what aren't you letting go here?''
Candy offered an irritated snort in answer, picking up her hat from the police desk and yanking it onto her head to cover up the scar. She had talked to the tom before, as part of trying to pump the police for information and she knew he was too straight to be trusted. The owner of the pizzeria not pressing charges wasn't going to prevent him from using anything she said against her in a court of law. Still, her pride was aching more than the wrist sprain she took trying break open that window, so a dig wouldn't feel out of place. ``Gee, maybe all the dead and injured people that place keeps churning out? Dismemberment seems like some sort of crime doesn't it officer? Maybe I should be asking why you're so eager to let it go. Someone been padding your wallet?'' She shot back as she snatched up the press pass and the wallet, he handed to her.
``Those were all industrial accidents ma'am,'' The officer rolled his eyes as he responded, ``And I'd rather not see you in here again if it's over something as stupid as an urban legend.'' He sat back down behind the desk, flicking a pen idly in his hands as he continued ``Which I will if you don't give up on this obsessive muckraking, May may not be pressing charges this time, but she says if you so much as set a toe inside that restaurant again that she'll have a restraining order up on you fast as a wink.''
Between everything that had happened last night before the arrest and her own frustration with a lack of progress Candy was running short on patience, fortunately she was also running short on sarcasm. ``Look,'' she took a deep breath as she pocketed her belongings ``I trust my hunches for a living, I've seen industrial accidents before.'' She leaned onto his desk with both hands ``Hell, I spent weeks researching them when I started looking into that place, they have more and more dangerous `accidents' than any logging camp. April isn't running a pizzeria, she's running a goddamn slaughterhouse.'' She pulled back from the table when the officer stared at her hands with an irritated look to his eyes.
``Miss Macko,'' He sighed ``I don't know where to begin with something like that, suffice to say if Miss May's attorney was in here I'm sure he'd press that as slander and that from the tone I'm guessing I will need to keep a close eye on that area and I will be seeing you again.''
A moment of silence passed, before she broke it with an annoyed tone ``So am I free to go now?''
``Well, nothing I can really do to stop you at the moment, but consider yourself warned,'' He looked back at the computer on his desk and set the pen down to begin clicking away at the keyboard.
``I've already had a pretty good warning,'' She tapped her hat, just above the scar it covered ``But whatever.''
Candy was reaching for the door when he responded, ``I know, I talked to Officer Kestrel.''
``Who?''
``Yeah, you wouldn't have actually met her,'' He wasn't looking at her and seemed fully engrossed in his computer ``She was the officer who responded when the staff found you unconscious at Jeremy's a few months ago.'' His fingers waltzed across the keys at a slow tempo ``Honestly, she says you made it by only a few minutes, any later and we wouldn't be having this discussion.'' There was a note of worry in his voice ``I've read your articles, I don't necessarily agree with your claims but either way that place is still dangerous, especially for someone who isn't supposed to be there, I'd much rather see you back here in a cell than in a cooler down at the morgue and I'm sure that's your preference as well. So, if you do something stupid and end up in danger there again, make sure you, or a friend calls us, ok?''
She tightened her grip on the doorknob, that hadn't been something she was expecting, but it wasn't too surprising, someone as straight-laced as this probably did genuinely care and would probably be more concerned about saving her than arresting her. ``Right, I'll keep that in mind,'' She opened the door, letting in the crisp morning air ``Have a good day.''
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The hallway was on the side of the building that was mostly intact instead of that portion covered by plastic and temporary framing. Though the walls were still structurally sound they had been rendered devoid of nearly any decoration as most of the posters or paper dolls had been replaced with the continued patina of dirt and grime. Candy ran a finger along the wall and inspected the dirt on her fingertip which seemed to be almost as thick as it was on the floor. Last anyone had heard, and the reporter was better than most at tracking that, the contractors in last summer were the most recent people working in the building. It was now almost spring, and the layer of mess did seem to bear that up, but it brought the footprints into more question, it was getting down to the point where a junkie breaking in for a place to get wasted and collapse was the most reasonable.
She cast the flashlight beam back and forth along the hallway, the prints continued towards the front of the building but the lure of what lay at the other end was a little more appealing. She walked towards the back of the hallway to a small turn up to a cramped flight of stairs that should've led up to the manager?s office area. ``Should've'' was accurate ``flight of stairs'' was somewhat less so. The stairs had clearly been a priority for demolition and it didn't help that they seemed to be the old-fashioned plank stairs which lacked really solid support. Almost all of them had been broken or removed but as Candy crept carefully over the few splinters and bits of wood to look up at where a door had once been, she could see enough of the supports to the second floor that climbing wasn't impossible.
Possible didn't mean safe and the light blue cat had already had enough bad falls or broken glass in her career that she knew to come prepared. Candy slipped the thick work gloves onto her hand and slipped the phone with its flashlight into her breast pocket before attempting to climb what was almost certainly rotted wood.
In this case the abandonment of the building worked in her favor, she had the whole night to work on this and could take her sweet time making sure the climb was careful, checking for week wood and jutting nails before settling her weight onto any of the beams. When she finally pulled herself onto the second floor, she was relieved to see that the floor at least was mostly intact and there was a chance to lay the on the dusty floor to catch her breath. After a few deep gulps of air, she rose to a sitting position, fumbling the gloves off and her phone out to take a look around the room.
It was empty and adding to the emptiness was the fact that a huge hole dominated the side of the room opposite the stairwell. It wasn't accidental, or at least the final state wasn't, the edges were cut smoothly into the wall and the floor. Candy worked to remember the layout of the building, she'd only been up in this room once back just after the founder of the pizzeria had been killed, and that had been more than a few years and a good head injury back. It had been some sort of arcade, a spare lounge added on for adults complete with more violent videogames and a proper bar. There weren't any games or a bar so presumably the hole had been cut to make removal easier. The hole looked out over the main stage area which looked especially empty with any and all tables or chairs removed. Candy swept the light briefly out over the abyss, her imagination treating her to sinister glints and shadows that her eyes failed to spot. Turning away from it she saw the first intact barrier so far; the door had led to an office as well as she could recall, and it was still blocked off with a nailed-on piece of plywood.
Candy slid her bag off her shoulders and opened it up, beneath the laptop, the camera, some zipper bags, and a half empty bag of chips was the small pry bar she'd brought along. It wasn't the first time she had broken into somewhere while investigating and the removal of the thin nails holding on the plywood was simple enough, though she almost missed catching the plank when it fell, and the sudden jerking motion sent a painful twinge along her back. Once it had been set aside, she stepped into the office and looked at yet another emptied room.
``Crap,'' she muttered to herself as the beam of light revealed yet more undisturbed dust coating an empty floor that probably had once contained a desk or cabinet. The lack of anything helpful shouldn't have been a surprise but she'd thought that if anywhere might contain some clue that it would be here. The reporter had given up on what seemed like a cold trail and was turning away when something flashed back at her out of one corner of the room.
She had to crouch and lean down to see the source of the reflected light which seemed to be coming from a small piece of brass jammed in a crevice between the floorboards and the wall paneling. The pry bar came out again and between some grunted exertion and another probing with a pen she pulled a small cylinder of metal out from the crack. Looking at the shell a satisfied smile crept across her face, she slid the casing into one of the zippered bags and sealed it, humming faintly as she did. ``So, just another accident huh?''
On paper, and in most of what people called more legitimate newspapers, the restaurant manager had been engaged in no small amount of embezzlement and when she was confronted by the owner, whom she was attempting to edge out, an accident with malfunctioning equipment had caused a fire and gotten the embezzler and a few of the other involved parties hurt. No mention had been made of a gun being fired, and if one thing got covered up, then something else had gotten covered up, she was sure of that. A quick survey along the edges of the room showed no other shining clues, but there was a plywood piece nailed over a section of the floor. Once removed it was shown that someone had at some point wanted an exit from this office that others wouldn't spot. The shaft went straight down and since it seemed a bit easier than climbing down a partially destroyed stairwell Candy climbed down the shaft back into the kitchen and from there to the same hallway where she'd abandoned the tracks before.
This time she walked down the hall in the direction of the prints past the door to the main stage, the kitchen, and the arcade until they turned off onto a much larger doorway. It was gone now but she could remember the large metal door that had once stood there, it had once housed an interactive play area, but then it was closed down. According to the owners the maintenance and insurance costs of the room were outweighing revenue from it and they planned to replace it with something else. Candy had found out that it was actually the result of a child being injured, though when she tracked them down both the parents and the child were keeping their lips sealed and were living in a much nicer neighborhood with all their kids' medical bills being covered. More importantly she remembered this spot, this doorway, and seeing it by night before.
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She was standing in a puddle of something, it was dark and the hall reeked of the coppery tang of blood, and she was sure the strangle cream had come from this room It wasn't the first time she'd seen a bloody crime scene, but every other time it had been something known, something already under investigation by the police. Being the one who had discovered the crime and the one stuck in a dark building with whoever did the crime changed things. Candy looked at the puddle and the drag marks leading out of it into the Bot Bay as a strange sound crept out, something unsettling and vaguely moist. The reporter swallowed and began to step forward her reflexes stepping in at the last moment to pull her into a slow crouch and to peak cautiously around the corner.
Like most of the building there was some low safety lighting around the floor. The lighting was installed to keep people from tripping and breaking their necks in the dark, that it cast rooms in possibly the most unsettling shadows possible was perhaps just a happy byproduct for whatever maniac had designed the chamber of horrors she saw before her eyes. Some time ago the bay had been added to the building as part of some interactive robot themed room for the kids, to let them play at creating their own robots or reassembling them. Now the shelves that probably had held robot parts held jars and the jars held parts of something considerably more organic. Some of them were far too bloody to make the contents visible and the pieces of anatomy in the others made her grateful for that.
Tools had once hung about the walls on hooks hanging below the shelves. The tools hadn't been removed though, they remained and in the low light and macabre surroundings they glinted with some sort of ominous nature that emphasized their ability to do harm. This was hints of future menace because with one exception the tools were completely clean and well maintained.
The one exception was next to the table, which must have been used in the past for working on the humanitronics and was equipped with thick cloth straps to hold the robot stable while undergoing repair. The table and the straps were now being used to hold the security guard, a rat who had once been a dusty brown color, both of which were things she only knew because she had seen him exit his car almost six hours ago. Now he was almost unrecognizable, something had torn apart his muzzle and ears, and there were disquieting deformities under his clothes that suggest bones had been broken in the process. Blood was pooling around him and dripping slowly onto the floor.
Candy found herself freezing up, her heart had gone into a crazy mix, trying to stall out and hammer into a frenzy at the same time. Her breath had tried to escape as a scream but was strangled into a set of panicked gasps as her eye fixed on the one tool in the room that hadn't been cleaned and the one, she guessed was responsible for the mutilated body on the table.
The guess had a lot to do with the state of the tool as well as its location. The tool was a set of large pliers and their tips were smeared in ragged blood and what looked like torn bits of flesh. However, the tool was located in a hand built to scale with the attached seven-foot humanitronic. Blood splattered about the smooth yellow plastic covering on the robot the dark red reduced to a pitch black in the low lighting. The robot turned its head with a slow soft whirring sound until the narrow glowing pinpricks of light burned their way through the darkness and into her own eyes.
Fritzine took a step towards Candy, the sudden motion breaking the moment of frozen terror and causing the cat to turn and try to step away. Unfortunately, that step and movement were both brought up short when she backed into something solid enough not to be budged. She twisted her gaze over her shoulder to see a wall of red plastic, glowing red eyes, and the swinging weight of a heavy music box descending at her head.
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The loud clang of metal bolted her out of her reverie, the memory had been filling her with rising dread and the sound had shattered that into panic. Hurling herself to the ground she curled up with her arms over her head and her breath coming only in shattered sobbing gasps. The scar on her head was suddenly flaring in phantom pain and a faint whimper crept out. She shuddered there on the dust covered floor beside the footprints until her rational mind managed to wrangle the other parts of her and point out that there had only been one clang and it had stopped. Desperate gasps for breath escaped her as she slowly stood up, she started to move towards the doorway and stopped when she saw her hand shaking. Candy couldn't force herself to go into that room, not when there were other options.
She turned away from the door and looked back the way she'd come in the direction of the clang, ``the stage, let's check the stage,'' somewhere she acknowledged that she was just putting the moment of truth off. But at the moment her head hurt too much for her to listen. Besides, something made that noise and even if it was just a rodent scurrying around something metal, she still had to check. Like the other rooms she walked into a black hole to an empty room, this time it was much more massive than any of the others. There was a way to gut a building more than fire or demolition, the feeling of a building that made it seem occupied was mostly emotion. Rumor could gut even that; the rumors of death and injury had gutted this place to Candy years ago and it lent the room a sense of not only emptiness but also of menace.
A few steps in, eyes turned briefly up to the open area that had emptied the adult lounge, she found the source of the sound when she kicked a bucket with her foot. The clang rang out over the sound of the rain and made her freeze up. When nothing responded she righted the bucket with the same foot to find that it was a perfectly normal and slightly rusted old bucket. She cast around for the source of the bucket falling and saw a spot of disturbed dust on the stage in the shape of a bucket. As the reporter approached it, she felt a fait breeze from the direction of the carpenter plastic on the far wall and the mystery was solved. She sighed in relief and sat down on the spot that once housed the bucket. From there she could see the whole room, a large empty rectangle, once it had housed a bunch of tables and chairs, cheap paper decorations and confetti, and it had been thick with the smell of pizza. Her eyes roved over to a spot that had once had a large trash can shaped like the lead character animatronic, his music box the opening for kids to shove their trash through. It had a sign on it saying, ``Jeremy thanks you for keeping his home clean'' and it had a large section of chipped paint on the left leg. She knew that last part only because she'd once spent a few adrenaline pumping tense minutes crammed behind it in hiding.
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There were security cameras in here, she'd spotted them on the last day trip just before interview when the manager kicked her out, there was also a night security guard. That was actually part of the reason for breaking in to snoop about, a kid's pizzeria with a night guard was strange, what would he be guarding and from who? Candy couldn't imagine there was a large black market for stolen arcade cabinets and paper birthday hats. Getting this far had been easy, the cameras were the large blocky type with an easy to spot field of vision and the window over the back door had been easy to jimmy open while standing on the dumpster. But shortly after getting past the hallway camera she'd found herself stuck here, behind the obnoxious red garbage can, waiting for the camera to pan away.
The stage itself was as dark as the rest of the room, only having a faint glow from some low night lighting system presumably there to keep the guard from stubbing their toe when going to the bathroom. As a nice side benefit it lit the three figures on the stage in the most menacing way possible.
Jeremy was easy to recognize, both by design and placement, his tall marching band hat gave him a unique profile and his central position meant that he was most heavily lit by the low place lighting. It cast unsettling shadows over his red face and hollow eyes. Though the light was giving more or less the same features to his two counterparts, their green and yellow colorations were a little less menacing. It didn't help that the red color was reflecting a bit and caused a brief flicker that made it seem as though Jeremy's eyes were glowing red pinpricks.
Observation was stopped by a sudden flash of light from the camera as a flashlight mounted on top of it clicked on and bathed the stage briefly in light before turning back off less than a second later. ``Ok,'' she thought ``that's bizarre note number five, why focus the light on the stage?'' Candy leaned out to stare harder at the stage to see if there was some other intruder or movement that would have attracted the notice of someone on the other end of the camera. But the stage was still and lifeless, the room dead silent and filled with nothing livelier than the smell of pizza's past and maybe an old ventilation system.
However, the same could not be said of the rest of the building and the silence was abruptly broken with the sound of rapid footsteps slapping through the halls running alongside the room. For a quick heart pounding second, she thought she'd been caught or that the guard had spotted her but then the footsteps continued slapping along the hall past the dining room and her hiding place. She glanced in their direction in complete confusion until the sound of a door opening and closing conjured up a mental map and an idea so ridiculous that the cat only barely stifled a full-bodied laugh. The bathroom was only a few yards past this room and the guard had been on shift for at least three hours by estimation from her stake out. Relief flooded her mind along with a rush of confidence that she had overestimated the security of the restaurant.
The relief came crashing down as she looked around the side of the trashcan and saw that the scene had changed. Candy blinked rapidly in an attempt to clear away what had to have been a hallucination, the animatronics had moved. All three of them had turned their heads towards the door closest to the security office, the turn had left their eyes shrouded in shadow and amplified that feeling she had before that there was a sharp glow of light flickering in their eyes. The blinking did nothing to remove the scene she saw before her and she barely had the composure to react and pull herself back into her hiding spot as Jeremy began to turn back towards her hiding spot.
Even as a flood of questions besieged her brain over the humanimatronics being active during the night and a racing fire of panic crept up her spine she heard the steady whirring of servos and the stomping tread of something walking towards her hiding spot. Candy clamped a hand over her mouth and stifled a whimper of fear as the steps reached a few feet away from the trash and, after the noise of mechanized joints in motion, the trashcan bumped briefly against her from the other side. One of the humanimatronics had walked down off the stage and was leaning against the same trashcan as her. If the thing had been alive then the sound of its breathing would be driving her further over the edge, instead her emotions plateaued at a panicking confused high as silence filled the room, broken only by the faint whisper of the camera moving.
Candy looked up at the camera and a nervous laugh bubbled up against her muffling hand at the realization that the robotic performer was doing the same thing she was, hiding from the camera by crouching in the shadows around the trash can. Maybe this was a practical joke then? Had another employee set the animatronics up to mess with the security guard? As she wondered that she also wondered how she could move from here, would the humanimatronic notice her and how would it react? Almost anything short of ignoring her would only draw the attention of the guard and unless it moved then she wouldn't be able to leave her hiding spot without being caught.
The few minutes of painful tension seemed to drag on for hours but was broken by another out of place sound. Somewhere behind her a toilet flushed and became briefly louder with the sound of a door opening and more rushing footsteps. It cut down on some of the tension and the criticizing thought that the guard had clearly not bothered to wash their hands cut it down further. Finally, the fact that when the footsteps passed her the noise of more mechanical movement came about from opposite the trash can cut down almost all of her tension. Candy listened to a second set of footsteps, heavy and mechanical, walking towards the exit and the sounds of the guard's footsteps.
When the steps finally left the room, she cast a glance out around the can and at the stage to confirm that there were indeed only two robots still up there. The red band outfit still cut through the low lights from the center of the stage and the ``security guard'' humanimatronic was still there, but the yellow mechanic was missing. ``Well, if it is a prank then it doesn't matter,'' came the first of a balance pair of thoughts ``But if it isn't then this is a great chance to get a peek at and maybe some pictures of some the so-called malfunctions in action.'' The later prospect grew quickly to unbalance the two and she stood up as soon as the camera had passed by her hiding spot again.
She had barely gotten to the front door of the room when she pulled herself to a deal halt and hurled into one of the shadows beneath a table as a sudden sharp scream shot out from the direction of the security room. The scream was pure terror, the sort that drives a voice beyond any identifying traits and that taps into some deep primal point in the body to compel action before the mind has a chance to slow you down. The scream was also cut off just as suddenly as it had let out, and Candy couldn't be sure if she hadn?t imagined the wet blunt noise accompanying the cessation. While it had caught her up short the noise also dropped the already heavy end of the unbalanced thoughts all the way through the floor in favor of investigation, after all they might need help. So, a combination of good Samaritan and professional busybody began swiftly moving towards the location of the scream.
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Candy didn?t actually know how much of that combination she?d kept around. On some level she was growing increasingly worried that the part of her who had wanted to get information out for the purpose of helping people by keeping them informed had slowly fell by the wayside in exchange for her own rock curiosity and a degree of vindictiveness over her previous failure to expose truth behind the pizzeria. After all, the place had shut down and given the imprisonment of its, at the time, manager for embezzlement and corporate malfeasance surely any dangerous wrongdoing had been caught and was no longer a threat to others. She could feel a small flicker of doubt beginning to twist up inside of her as to whether or not it still mattered if some of the small stuff had been covered up.
She reached down into a pocket where she'd stuck the bag with the bullet casing inside and pulled it out, staring intensely at the small bit of metal. Even that wasn't doing much now, the crash of older and more accurate memories had whittled away at her own constructs, the memories as perceived by a mind willing to twist and assume in order to create certainty, and this left more room for doubt. She didn't know how much this could help either, the most a good investigation could pull would be the owner and the model of the gun used. Nothing could really tell when the bullet had been fired, if it had been fired during the accident it also wouldn't tell her, or anyone who listened to her, who had fired it and who it had been fired out. It would take a witness, and the former employees were even more tight lipped than they had been before the accident. That had been part of why she was certain there was some lie going around about the incident, that sort of intense closing up was usually the indication that someone, or a group of someone, was working together to cover up someone over something big.
Candy sighed and was about to put the casing back in her pocket when a stabbing pain lanced through her head and caused her to drop the bag. Her hand stroked over her head and across the still barely visible scar at the epicenter of the pain as she bent down and picked up the bag. She hadn't felt anything more than the occasional pang for that past few months, which was good given the doctor's view that she might have to be on the lookout for some seizures. She picked up the bag on the second try because her hand was shaking a bit on the first grab. When she put it back in her pocket, she found the doubt winning over a sense that this might be wasted effort, but not enough to convince her that it wouldn't be worthwhile to keep looking. She was already here, at the least she could finish looking around. Candy sighed as she walked towards the door nearer the entrance and muttered to herself ``In for a penny in for a pound.''
This way lead past a set of what had once been bathrooms but were now just some open doorways leading into some scaffolding and mostly demolished walls. There weren't even any plumbing pieces left and Candy searched the combined space to the soft patter of rain on the carpenter's plastic set over the open area. She didn't find anything with her flashlight rolling over debris and dust, no footprints in here either. Nothing about that really surprised her, between the long time, the constructive and destructive work, and the fact that there had never actually been any rumors or accidents regarding the bathrooms in the pizzeria. Candy counted that as a good thing, since she didn't like the idea of what sort of equipment ``accidents'' could happen in a bathroom, and she walked back out into the hallway. At this point she was running low on spots to investigate, but virtue of fear pushed the ``Bot Bay'' down to the bottom, underneath the entrance, the arcade, and the security room. Since the first two were both close to the bathrooms and further from the bay she chose to head towards the entrance.
When the restaurant had been open the front had consisted of a desk and podium with the cash register that was angled to face both the front door and the area filled with both various electronic games and another array of tables and booths. Now the walls were one of the few remaining in place for either area but nothing else remained above the layer of dust coating the floor. In justification to her future self's probable demands Candy still walked over the area looking about and letting the beam of her flashlight roam over the vacated room. When she was turning around it flicked over her footprints and a small flicker of faded pink paper which turned out to be an ancient game ticket with Jeremy's more cartoonish face, the one used for ads and at least one short-lived cartoon show, smiling underneath the text telling kids to ``have fun, win prizes, only at Jeremy Human's.'' The fact that she pocketed the ticked had more to do with a long-standing habit of carrying the small detritus of the day around in a back pocket than the investigation. If there was some way for the ticket to be redeemed for a clue, then she would have to find the weirdest prize counter in the world. Though, unless it was also the cheapest having only one wouldn't help there either, ``one ticket can get you a vague nostalgic odor or an ambiguous low-resolution picture of a silhouette'' the thought gave her a nervous laugh.
Returning to where the doors had been, the cat shook her head, that had been a waste, the restaurant had put down a good amount of money towards that end, buying a bullet-proof and impact resistant door attached to the electronic security system. Candy was extra appreciative of that fact since she was reasonably sure that she was the one to blame for the first part.
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She'd gotten lucky, sometimes a stakeout was a miserable thing, you'd wait all night in the freezing snow hoping to catch a useful photo or learn something important and get nothing more than a small blurry photo of a politician creeping out of a dive bar. This time it was a late summer evening that was barely reaching crisp and gave a nice and clear view of Jeremy's doors across the street. Five hours ago, a fox in a purple security uniform had opened those doors, with a bear in similar uniform leaving shortly after them. On the surface, any change in security could be laughed off as a simple result of keeping someone like her from sneaking in again and the guards had been there before. What hadn?t been there before, was the electrical security system whose softly flashing green lights could be seen even from this angle. They'd also gone the extra mile and replaced the easily opened window above the rear exit with a non-opening window made of bulletproof glass. Candy wasn?t exactly sure that she?d be able to find a way to break in move out immediately getting cops called, but she was taking her night off to watch the place and see if any new idea presented itself. That particular well had been dry so far but between a hot cup of coffee and a reasonably fresh danish she wasn?t feeling either too resentful or too despondent.
Despite the combination of pastry and stimulant she was beginning to feel somewhat less hopeful when the small clock on her dashboard clicked over to a half past five. That would only leave about a half hour before the day shift staff started showing up. Between the larger numbers and the fact that more of the day staff had already gone to the point of labeling her as a nuisance any chance no matter how Slim of finding actual information would be gone about then. In fact, her hand with the key was, at the most, half an inch from the ignition when a client back up at the door stole her attention.
Eyes were glaring out of the dark beyond the door, someone with a more skeptical nature, or one who?s personal experience with the restaurant had left them with a more charitable view, might instead have seen just a pair of red lights, such as might be found on the top of an electrical panel. However, at this time candy didn?t fall into either of those two categories and those two points of red light were disturbingly familiar to her. Seeing them was bringing up tingling pain along the scar in her head, annunciating sense of dread in her gut, and an overwhelming sense of curiosity to her soul. She?d be hard-pressed to say which one of them made her open the car door and step out into the early dawn light. Though she?d be certain that if her mind had been any of the parts making that decision then she wouldn?t have left her camera on the passenger car seat.
But she did leave the camera behind as she crept closer, also forgetting to look both ways before crossing the street and getting lucky that the early hour meant that there wasn?t enough traffic for her to get run over, squinting at the darkness long before she was close enough for that to have done any good. Just before she would have been close enough and just before she would have been able to make out details around the two pinpricks of light, the two lights moved in a quick Bob as if their owner had taken a brief step. That event repeated itself a few feet later and a few feet after that, which was enough for her to tell that if there were steps being taken, they were steps backwards away from her. When she had gotten up to the door, she could see them in the hallway, or perhaps one of the doorways leading out into the hallway near the entrance.
No candy was not close enough to make out a few small details to the hallway's layout, it took her pressing her face against the glass and shielding her eyes with her hands to make out enough details to spot that the eyes were glaring out of the darkness from some spot within the game rooms. The lights silhouetted the figure they were set into but were too dim and their color too intense two letter c details of shape or the color of the plastic.
She was trying to squint out the shape of the head, and whether or not it was wearing a chapeau, mechanical pigtails, or a security guard hat when a combination of blinding white light and a sharp rapping against the glass door made her jump back with a short yelp of surprise. The light and presumably the rapping had to come from the hands and in the case of the former the flashlight of the figure that had walked up to the door from the other side while she had been staring fixedly at the two red lights. When she got a better look, she could make out details of the figure, he looked like a youngish primate, possibly chimpanzee, and was wearing purple button-down shirt with a black tie and two little tags on a shirt. The left tag said ``security'' in large white block letters on a black background well the other used those same letters and background to identify him as ``Chester.''
She might have gone in more details, but in life very few people sit there and say nothing while you stare at then. The chimpanzee pushed the door open slightly and continued shining the flashlight in her face.
``Can I help you miss?'' the question was asked in a tone that suggested that not only was it not an actual question but that it was also a clear expression of his annoyance.
Candy wasn?t often this short for an answer, but it was a little hard to think when someone had caught you off-guard and was shining a bright flashlight in your face. All she could have managed before being cut off again was the sort of leading ``uhhhh" that made one sound far more confused than they actually were.
``Look, we're closed right now, so if you're looking for a bathroom or something, you'll have to wait till we open,'' the guard began to turn away and shut the door.
``No! Wait! I ju-'' Blinking away the flashing dots from the recent flashlight induced blindness Candy tried to motion for the guard to stop. She actually managed to get a grip on the door and stop it closing, but she let go almost immediately to avoid her fingers getting clipped when it kept moving. To her surprise it did stop at just a crack and the light flickered up high enough to give him a look at her face without the unnecessary blinding.
``Hold up, you look familiar,'' the chimpanzee's eyes narrowed in consideration ``What's your name?''
She sighed in relief ``My name's Candace Macko, and look there's something weird right be-''
A thousand horror movie cliches descended to sing a chorus as he cut her off at the worst possible point ``Oh shit, you're that nosey reporter, management told us not to talk to you. Get out of here before you get anyone hurt again.'' With that he shut the door the rest of the way, mouthed something that must have been similar to ``get a life'' at her, and began walking away back into the restaurant, his flashlight covering some of the areas the nighttime lighting didn't reach. She could have sworn that the flicker of light revealed some Technicolor red plastic in the brief turn over the floor in the gaming area, but it had been too fast and too low to the ground for her to catch anything. In any case she wasn?t at that moment quite together in the sense needed to make smooth detailed examination of her environment.
She was in fact busy pounding her hands against the door and shouting ``look out!'', ``one of them's behind you'' and a few more expletive intensive variants. The shouting mostly died off in response to the guard walking away but the last drop off was directly in response to him casually extending a single-digit over his shoulder at her. She ended up standing there, and still pressed against the door, and feeling like a complete buffoon. Normally those feelings are only erased after time or justification have performed some internal therapy to make the associated actions seem more Justified. In her case those feelings were washed away when the two red pin pricks started moving again.
That same wave of sickly fear trickled down her back as they moved again in that faint bobbing motion towards the door. This time they stopped in front of the door and in the dim, light afforded by the creeping dawn she could make out the bright crimson skin of Jeremy Human himself. Just as it had the last time, she seen it, when she?d been breaking into the place the smile that someone had intended to be delightful and heartwarming to children instead lent it a dull sense of menace and sadism. Though that may have been helped along by the proximity of a corpse, a brutal assault, and several disembodied body parts the last time she seen the grin.
It occurred to Candy, in one of those unnecessarily unpleasant thoughts the hindbrain gives as some left over from the days when it was a necessary part of assessing danger, that a robot larger than 6 feet likely wouldn?t be inconvenienced by the glass of the door if it decided to reach through the door and throttle her. She took a few steps back on legs that were now shakier than she would like. That was when someone put the lit candle of bizarre on top of the triple layer birthday cake of insanity that was this whole mess and started singing some litigation free variant of happy birthday because one of the two lights that were Jeremy?s eyes briefly turned off and then back on and for all that she was worth candy would swear that the damn machine had just winked at her. It goes without saying that at this point with all the backpedaling on shaky legs candy had ended up planted firmly on her buttocks in the parking lot.
Fortunately for her sanity as she sat there sprawled in the parking lot with her gaze fixed on the two points of light shining through the glass Jeremy did not seem inclined to add to the insanity of the situation by doing something even more bizarre such as blowing a kiss or doing a jig. Instead the robot just turned around and began marching down the hall. A less shaking Candy would have caught on to the fact that he was also marching relatively quickly after the retreating guard much quicker than the one who was even now beginning to stand. When she did catch on that realization was the prompt that caused her to bolt from a standing position back to her previous one of pounding against the door, this time in wordless panic, as images of the lifeless body of the last security guard with Jeremy standing over them flashed through her mind.
It wasn?t until exhaustion had slowed her motions down on its own and she had lost sight of the faint glow from the eyes that she stopped pounding against the door with her hands. Now she was leaning against the door with her head pressed to it and staring at the ground as she raced desperately to figure out a way to get inside or to at least try warning the guard again. As her mind raced about those concepts her gaze happened to fall upon a sizable lump of concrete broken off from one of the stops on the nearby parking space. Acting on inspiration and a swift rush of fresh adrenaline she snatched up the lump in both hands and smashed it as hard as she could into the door next to the handle. A large crack in both the audible and visual theater was the result and a second blow shattered a hole next to the door large enough for her to fit her hand. The slump of concrete with immediately discarded with one hand as the other reached through the hole to begin operating the lock. The door was barely open a crack before she was squeezing her way through and patting down the hallway in an awkward combination of the fastest and quietest movement she could manage.
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Now she was standing in a different sort of Darkness and staring at the doorway from the other side. Candy reached down and rubbed at the hand which had smashed the glass, and which had operated a lock. The cuts from the glass had been smaller and shallower than the injury to her head and the fur had long since grown over them. Nevertheless, a faint combination of phantom pain and itchiness trickled over the hand, it seemed this night was as much one for memories haunting the body as a mind. ``maybe that?s what this is about,'' she thought in a grim mutter and she stopped to take a glance behind the area where the cash register and countertop had once stood ``maybe this is just some bizarre and expensive form of therapy.''
As she continued walking down the hall, turning to avoid looking at Bot Bay when she passed by in a manner that, for anyone not possessed of her memories for the horrible things that have been found inside, might have seemed comically exaggerated internal monologue began to get closer to an external one. ``is that it?'' it was difficult to determine, and some rhetorical question was being asked in her mind or in actual words ``am I just here to see that it?s dead? To prove to myself that this thing won?t be getting back up to end anyone else?s life?'' when she got next to the security office the short stream of internal questions broke out briefly in a whisper that sounded far too loud in the empty space `` am I just here to make my own nightmares end?'' while the empty security room sucked at the answer it didn?t provide any response.
She was looking at another mostly emptied room, this time slightly less so then the previous rooms. The main reason for the difference was that it seems that somebody had been using this space as storage for some of the contractor's tools and supplies. The past tense was appropriate because it looks like someone had taken the time to go through the assortment of toolbox, paper bags, and cardboard boxes for anything small and hockable enough to be spirited away without being noticed. Someone else had taken the time to spray paint a rude description of someone by the name ``Scott" on the side of the large tool box. This was actually a much more positive result for any attempt at an investigation. Paperwork provided information without being a sort of valuable thing a junkie would steal to pawn for a quick fix. A thorough examination of the drawers revealed that there was a clipboard, one of the cheap hollow plastic ones with an internal storage area for documents, that had a few pieces of paper still inside. The first two were just internal memos, the first one about some other project for a fast food restaurant being built a few streets over and the second one an email from someone by the name of Hemily@CBPW.com, since that second one referred to the restaurant, she set it aside while she continued looking through the pile. The next paper had some form of building diagram on it, though Candy wasn?t sure what stage of development it was planned for since full-scale blueprints we?re usually larger and more detailed. It looked like a comparison between the planned building and the old one and giving only a rough layout of rooms and size. That too was set aside for later observation and as was the document underneath it which contained another building diagram. The last two pieces were both printed out emails one to ``Hemily" and the other from some Law Firm.
No construction has been going on for at least a month and judging by the dust no one had been in here frequently during that length of time. Well, nobody except whoever had left those mysterious Footprints from before, someone might forget their toolbox behind, but they?d come back for it the next day what do they? Especially if they left behind any paperwork, the bullet casing had been the kind of small trace evidence she would have believed possible to find, but this was too excessive and obvious.
Or was it, candy sat down cross-legged and began to scan over the paperwork, it was entirely possible that it had been left behind because it was useless or unimportant. The first email about the site was stated 5 weeks ago. In it the sender, whoever that email address belong to, was warning the contractor that one of the previous owners had gotten a hold of some leaked information. Apparently, that information had clued them into the new construction and they were now putting some form of legal lock on the place and the contractors were to get out of there as soon as possible and not set foot on the property until the matter was resolved. It ended with a more detailed warning that a lawyer was going to be down there that afternoon so the getting out of there had to be done immediately.
That explained some of the things she?d seen left behind, when something became a legal battle all sorts of things that seems like common sense, such as coming back to recover some paperwork or a large tool box before somebody snatched them, tended to be pushed to the side. That would be especially true if the previous owners they were referring to were the same ones she was familiar with, for someone as nice as some of them had seemed to be, all of them had hair trigger lawyers where reporters were concerned. The second email, the one sent to ``Hemily,'' was from the contractor and had been sent out the day after the other one had been sent.
That one was pretty predictable, the majority of it was an array of angry complaints about being forced to pull out of the location mid- contract on such short notice, bizarre instructions, and legal red tape on the end of the client. More interesting was that there was some report of strange wiring added in almost as an afterthought. The last part of the note mentioned that something was weird about the wiring running from the arcade center and that it made the contractor think there might be some crawl space intended to make access easier, but that there hadn?t been any space like that noted on any of the plans they?d been provided.That added another curious point to the whole situation, it wouldn?t really come as a surprise to her that there was another hidden space inside of the restaurant.
The email from the lawyer confirmed what the first email had said, that the construction crew was being removed from the grounds while the legal dispute was being resolved. Candy understood some of the legal language, enough to get a general sense of the threat being made, but not quite enough to make out the basis for the dispute. Luckily, she knew someone from college good gone on to work as a paralegal and was usually willing to help decipher things with her. When she began looking over the two drawings, she made a mental note to also visit one or two of the contractors who she knew were open to bribery in the form of bar tabs. The images weren?t entirely an indecipherable mess but enough of it was using some form of symbol or shorthand that she couldn?t tell exactly what it was planning. The most interesting part on the first drawing was the fact that the building it proposed was if anything a major downgrade from the old place. It made up less than half the size and didn?t seem to consist of much more than one large room with half a dozen rooms attached. Since of that half a dozen most seem to be on a scale with bedroom closets it wasn?t quite clear what use they had.
The second drawing was more confusing. It was of the same overall size and shape as the previous one and could be overlaid perfectly on top of the other drawing. But instead of showing number of neat squared rooms it consisted of a tangled spaghetti mess of rectangular passages that formed a confusing Labyrinth on the page. She neatly folded the papers and slipped them into her backpack.
Sitting there she could hear the rain pattering down on the roof slowing and lessening somewhat. As it did her thoughts, initially running over the clues a few times to get them good and tamped down in her mind, began to drift in the same backwards Direction they?ve been doing all night. She?d never actually been inside this room. She had glanced inside of it both times she?d broken into the Pizzeria. But generally, you tried to avoid security personnel when you were in the process of breaking and entering.
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The first thought of any sort of rationality that made it through the adrenaline and the panic was something along the lines of ``isn?t it kind of weird that I just broke into a building but I?m rushing to the security office.'' the small hole that made in the fog over the rest of her mind let several others shoulder their way to the forefront. Among these ideas was the fact that between her and the guard she was hoping to rescue was one very large and Powerful humanitronic that she knew had killed at least one person already. Arm in arm with that fact was that she was unarmed and realistically did not know any simple way to disable a large and powerful humanitronic. These thoughts did quite a bit and slow her down but we?re nothing compared to the dead stop brought about by the fact that she could hear two voices engaged in conversation.
Instincts almost as old as those which had compelled her to break down the door compelled her to creep closer and her ears to strain for every bit of information they could pick out of the conversation. She couldn?t make too many words out until she got within sight of the doorway to the security room. The doorway was currently filled with the silhouette of Jeremy, and the silhouette blocked out most of the light coming from the room.
``Pretty late for you to be up and about,'' said a voice that she was pretty confident was Chester.
When the other part of the conversation responded Candy nearly jumped out of her own skin. The voice had a strange crackle to it that she normally associated with low quality speakers and it seemed to be coming from the humanitronic blocking the doorway. ``Oh, well you know, I thought you were having a special guest, I heard the door open and everything.'' The idea that Jeremy had spoken should not have been so unsettling given that the entire point of him was to talk and sing for the entertainment of children. In this case though the speech sounded wrong, it was still the same jolly and friendly voice that normally warbled cheap and cheesy show tunes from the stage, but there was some strange added level of menace to the noise. The whole was like hearing any of the comforting nursery songs some in a low pitch and slow pace coming out of the darkness. There was no single factor to it that could be nailed down as terrifying but the whole twisted something that should feel innocent into something filled with menace and bereft of comfort.
``That was just someone snooping around, I told them to beat it.'' The sentence was punctuated with a derisive snort and that same tone filled the next statement ``If she?s still there come 6am then I?ll leave it to the supervisor to call the cops on her.''
Candy was torn between trying to process two large concepts, that Jeremy and the guard seems to be having a civil conversation and that the security guard hadn?t notice the sound of the breaking glass, so she wasn?t aware of a new sound until it became excessively pressing. The sound was the footsteps of another of the large bots moving towards her from the direction of the kitchen.
Faint pinpricks of light shown around the corner as it exited into the hall and she suddenly tried to press herself against the wall and into as small a space as possible. Her heart couldn?t sleep much further up into her throat after the previous adrenaline session, but it made a spirited and ever nonetheless. She was fairly certain that her adrenaline gland was feeling severely disappointed with the night when the eyes stopped directly behind Jeremy without seeming to even notice her.
From the light that manage to flicker around the blocking figure of Jeremy she could see that the newcomer had a bright green coating and a makeshift uniform. Shortly after I took up that position Jeremy seems to take notice of his company turned around to look at him and then stepped further into the security office allowing the green one to enter into the position, he had previously occupied. Candy was already getting close to a gibbering freak out and while the second humanitronic talking did not add nearly as much to that as the first had, it certainly wasn?t helping.
``What?s this about calling the police? Is something wrong?'' part of the reason that this voice didn?t add as much to the crazy Factor was that it seems to have much less menace to it than Jeremy?s. In fact, it almost seemed to have a note of genuine concern to it.
``Jeremy here,'' said the Jeremy humanitronic ``Says that he saw someone snooping around the front door.'' Either Jeremy was speaking in the third person or the conversation had some extra dimension that she was missing because she couldn?t explain why the guard was being called Jeremy.
``It?s no big deal Mike,'' Chester (Jeremy?) explained.
``Really? Because I think I heard some glass breaking in that direction not too long ago'' Candy's imminent heart attack began to approach as the green robot spoke.
While both of the individuals he was talking to responded with ``What!?'' it seemed there was some note of insincerity to the surprise in Jeremy?s response. It was followed by the sound of someone scrambling in a chair and then Chester moaning ``Oh shit, he?s right she?s broken the glass on the door and opened it.''
She could hear Jeremy?s loud footsteps as he moved about in the office ``Well can you see her on the cameras?''
There was a moment where the guard responded to the question and likely there was a moment when he turned to whatever security system he had and began cycling through the cameras. Before either of those moment there was the moment where Candy?s eyes darted to the camera on the ceiling at the end of the hall. Between that moment and the other two was another moment where, as quickly and quietly as she could move, she bolted to the space just under the camera and out of its line of vision.
After all of those moments she could hear Chester?s complaint ``No good, she must be in a blind spot.''
``Well, then we should see if we can find her for you and you should try calling the police.'' the matter of fact tone that Jeremy used covered the underlying Menace about as well as napkin covered a full grown elephant, especially when he added ``After all, we wouldn?t want any more `accidents' here would we?''
``Of course,'' Mike replied as the sound of heavy steps began to move away ``I?ll check by the arcade and the stage''
It was at this point that Candy, who had in fact started leaning against the wall, finally noticed a damp sensation along one side of her shirt. She looked down to see that the hand which had smashed the rock through the glass door was covered in large, and probably quite deep, gashes that had by this point gotten quite serious about bleeding enough to soak for clothing and leave a small puddle next to the wall. In excitement and rushing wounds like that often get noted by the body on some sort of memo pad for later use and can get completely ignored by the brain as a result. As is also usual looking at the injury prompted the body to conclude that later has in fact occurred and to begin sending loud notices of hideous pain back up the arm. She clenched the hand in reaction and buried it against her side even as a pained gasp began to escape her mouth. This caused her other hand to clamp itself over her mouth in an effort to stifle the noise.
She was scared she had given herself away and didn?t know how successful her efforts to cover up the noise had been until the voices in the other room came back into Focus. ``Well I think I will head into Bot Bay, she broke into there last time and if she surprises Fritzine again, well,'' there was some sort of pause to his dialogue that suggested Jeremy was doing something dramatic to accentuate his speech ``that was how we got an accident less time wasn?t it? We need to keep this place nice and `safe' after all.'' Candy was impressed, she never actually heard someone incorporate that degree of venom and disgust into the word safe before.
As another set of heavy footprints began to walk out into the hallway, she was already beginning to form what was probably the first functional plan she'd had in a little bit. All she would need to do is slip out of the place the same way she snuck in the first time. She could slip out the back door and get to her car. If questioned later by the police, she could makeup some statement about seeing someone vandalize the door and just leaving after the rough interaction with the guard. It was occurring to her as she looked down that the evidence of her own blood all over the kitchen floor might invalidate that kind of story when another problem occurred to her. She had heard the footsteps heading towards the hall but after that point they hadn?t gotten quieter as the bot walked away but louder and now, they had just gone silent.
When Candy turned it was with the slowness normally associated with nightmares. Jeremy was standing in front of the doorway his red eyes glaring down at her and his face fixed in a grain of sadistic delight. As he bent to get his chapeau clear of the doorway and stepped inside, he remarked in a voice that seem to the bordering on maniacal laughter ``Well then, so glad to see you again, I?m actually quite surprised by that. I thought you?d learned a lesson about curiosity after last time.'' he was looming over her as candy began to take faint shaking steps back ``But I guess there must have been something deeply satisfying about it to bring you back here so soon.''
The shaky steps abruptly shifted into a higher gear as Parts more concerned with survival slapped control of the legs out of the brain that was currently Paralyzed by fear. She turned and began to bolt away, rounding the kitchen island counter and aiming for the door. It was the same door she broken into before and the outside security had definitely stepped up with a better lock and improvements to the window, but from the inside it was still just a simple push bar mechanism. Amazement that she might actually make it outside, as her arm stretch towards the door, vanished in a sudden brutal Flash of stars across her vision. The Flash was followed an instant later by a sense of two heavy impacts the first against her head and the second against her and the floor. She hit the ground reeling and rolled onto her back as the scar across her head erupted into a fresh and hellish pain and something hollow and metal spun to a stop on the floor next to her. She could barely make out the pot that had been thrown at her through the cloud of pain when an insanely heavy red foot planted itself on top of her chest.
She tried to resist, mostly out of reflex since there wasn?t anything resembling Consciousness left inside her at the moment, but her movements were weak and clumsy in the dazed state. Her hands couldn?t so much as budge the heavy metal limb and it was pinning her too closely for her to slip out from under. As our brain begin to try and piece things together in all the pain, she could feel something wet trickling across her face and forcing her to shut one of her eyes. All of the resistance was crushed along with the shreds of reason and thought when the foot pushed down less than an inch, blasting the air from her lungs and reducing her struggle down to weak and pathetic scrambling at the plastic coating.
``Oh my,'' he gloated ``It looks like that green pest was right about safety. People running around in the dark, us running about trying to find them, can?t really see it if you happen to trip, fall, and end up under foot.'' On the last word, said foot ground down a fraction further and Candy screamed as well as someone can without any air in their lungs which isn?t nearly loud enough to cover the sickening crack she heard coming from her chest. ``We just have so many accidents around here you know? It?s actually driving that old bear crazy at this point.'' He didn?t shove the foot down further at that, but instead twisted the foot back and forth on her chest, grinding the damaged area about. At this point the pain alone had long since surpassed the threshold she could deal with and she was already on her way out. A few things slipped through to her but just as input since there wasn?t enough of a mind there at the moment to turn them into information.
The first was that as Jeremy?s eyelights narrowed and the foot began what would likely be the final press downward his whole body made one loud click and stopped moving. The second thing was that the small digital clock on the wall over the stove had just clicked over to 6 a.m. The third thing was the sound of voices shouting somewhere distant. The final thing that came through as the doors we?re closing on her mind was turning around and walking away while muttering ``Well aren?t you just a luckiest person who ever walked in here, you get saved by the bell twice. Oh well, tomorrow is a new day.''
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Then she?d woken up in the hospital again, with six broken ribs, ten stitches on her hand, three of them on the side of her head, and both the stitches and the crack on her skull reopened. Oh, and a restraining order, that had been fun. Technically she was still under the restraining order, but the restaurant was gone so it didn?t matter for much anymore. Between her injuries and the restraining order that had been the end of her investigation into the place for a while.
Until now at least, she was sitting there in the routine ``lost in your thoughts'' position of staring at the floor between the knees. She had actually been brought out of her reverie buy her phone, add given the faint tweeting and vibrating that indicated a text had been received.
``you said to check in at 5, are you still breathing?'' ~ Rolfe
That was actually a relief, in accordance with one of the basic rules for investigating abandoned buildings Candy had made sure at least someone knew where she would be tonight. And she told Rolfe, her old college roommate and current drinking buddy, to check in with her and make sure she hadn?t gotten injured or stuck somewhere.
``I?m ok, place is empty, found some stuff though.''~Candy
``Oh, that?s good, don?t get your head cracked again ;) I?ll text you again at 8. Don?t forget you owe me for this one.''~Rolfe
``Right, right, and thanks again.''~Candy
She put the phone back to use as a flashlight without bothering to check if there was another goodbye on there. It wouldn?t be the first time she had ended up in a long series of goodbyes as each person competed to see who could get the last message. Besides the message had already had an unintended benefit, the reminder that she wasn?t going through this as stupidly as she had in the past, sure the building was abandoned, strange footprints notwithstanding, but every other time she had been in here had been motivated by reflex and instinct which had not gone well. If she had done this the first time she probably wouldn?t have been lying in a pool of blood for a few hours and she probably wouldn?t have crushing headaches every time a cold front came through. Of course, prompt help didn?t solve too much wear the second visit had been concerned but then that also would have been resolved if she had just taking the time to grab her phone and call the cops instead of smashing a door open. She repeated the phrase ``stay calm, don?t panic" in her head a few times until it sounded believable to her.
When she stood back up, putting the paperwork in her backpack as she did, she knew exactly where she had to investigate next. Not only was the Bot Bay one of the few places she hadn't investigated yet, most of the other rooms had only ever been storage or private party rooms and where on the side of the building that had been completely demolished, but it was also probably the only place you could think of where a door to the crawl space might be hiding. Assuming it was there, the entrance couldn?t be in any of the demolished areas or it would have been discovered when they took out the tiles and it couldn?t be in any of the Normal public areas or else, they'd have to pull children out of it on a daily basis. But the bay has been closed to the public for at least the last five years that the restaurant had been in operation, and Fritzine more than a few body parts in there without the police ever finding them. The idea of going back there was still dragging Inky black nightmares into her mind but for now they were mostly being pushed back by a belief that she was a rational and reasonable person who had learned her lessons and planned ahead. That the footprints have been something abnormal she didn?t plan for and seem to come directly from the bay did not help and managed to creep in around that believe but it was small compared to the actual dangers she had seen in there before.
Candy slung the backpack over one shoulder and took the precaution of dialing the first two digits for emergency services before walking back out into the hallway. Judging by the sound of it, the rain had picked up a little again and a brief crack of thunder told her that the storm was at least nowhere near planning to end right now. Once more candy followed the footprints down the hall and stopped when it walked into, or rather out of, the door into the bay.
When her light crept over the room it found the sides empty in the light but in her mind, it was filled with the same gruesome collection of shredded body parts that had been there the last time she?d seen inside. The shelves then had been filled with an equal mixture of mechanical parts and organic ones, each of them neatly labeled as though by an extremely anal-retentive clerk who had finally succumbed to the frustration of their profession and decided to take that out on every person and appliance they encountered. There had also been pieces of the robots partially assembled on the floor and counters, many in varying stages of repair or dress, in fact the room have been so crowded with this sort of thing that it had been hard to see the floor. Now it was hard to see anything else.
That was very much a relief, because the first time she had entered that room it had been to find the security guard dead and thoroughly mutilated. Fritzine had been standing beside him holding a freshly bloodied pair of pliers in a mechanical grip. Blood had actually been a pretty aggressive theme to that experience. She could still remember almost slipping in the large puddle of it in the hallway and even these paint brushes of memory we?re filling her head with the coppery reek of blood. The guard had been strapped down to a large table, which was now missing, next to a jar containing the removed ``parts" and labeled in the same neat script as the jars on the shelves lining the room.
She shook her head to chase away the mental additions to the empty room and stuck to keeping the light on the footprints as she walked into the room. As she did this, she focused more on keeping her breath steady and telling herself to stay calm then she did on her surroundings. For this reason, she was taken by surprise when she found the footprints exiting out of a neat square hole in the floor. It had been cut with perfect mechanical Precision out of the tiles and look like it could have set perfectly flush into the tiles. As long as the backside of it matched up with a floor a door like that would have been all but impossible to find when shut, no wonder they hadn?t found the trap door before.
Even if the rest of the room hadn?t been empty and even with more than one past trauma associated with the place no one with as much curiosity as her, and having that much curiosity was more or less a prerequisite for being an investigative reporter, could have resisted investigating the hole. Especially when she shined her light down the hole and saw that crawl space was nowhere near adequate to describe the space. There was a small ladder set into the side of the hole and it led down at least ten feet before ending on a floor of what looked like concrete. There looked like a tunnel ran off from the bottom, at least tall enough for one of those robotic monstrosities to walk comfortably through, but she couldn?t get the light to go more than a few feet into it from this angle.
