Charlie jumped backward, but it was too late: the thing had her in its grip and lifted her high into the air. It was pulling her toward it. She beat against its bent and damaged arm, but the other arm steadily forced her closer to the chest cavity. John stumbled backward for a moment, bending forward with one hand over his mouth, as if struck by a wave of nausea.
Charlie struggled to break free, but her strength was no match for the creature. Out of the corner of her eye she could see John lunging toward the beast. He grabbed its head, wrenching at it, trying to force it sideways. Beneath Charlie, the animatronic began to spasm, a stuttering, uncontrolled movement. The creature’s grip came loose and its arms swung around wildly. Charlie struggled to get to her feet, but her legs slid in the dirt. The creature seized her again, and its cold fingers drew her closer.
Charlie braced her shoe against the ground, trying to give herself leverage, but she was being pulled down by an overwhelming force. Suddenly she was face-to-face with the beast, her shoulder already inside its chest cavity. The thing pressed her closer, then suddenly it jerked and released her. She rolled away and heard the sound of snapping spring locks. The creature convulsed on the ground in front of her, headless. Charlie looked at John. He was holding the thing’s head in his hands, his eyes wide with shock. He dropped it and kicked it across the floor.
“Are you okay?” John scrambled to her. Charlie nodded, staring at the broken animatronic head. It still seemed alive. Its fur bristled and skin moved, as if there were muscle and sinew underneath.
“What the heck just happened?”
John raised both hands in surrender.
Charlie carefully picked up the massive head and flipped it upside down, peering into it through the base where John had torn it off the neck.
“Ugh.” John bent over, his hands on his knees. His face was pale. He stifled a retching sound.
Charlie started toward him, surprised. “What’s wrong with you? You’ve seen worse than this.”
“No, it’s not that. I don’t know what it is.” He straightened, then stumbled toward the wall, bracing himself. “It’s like there’s some horrible smell in the air, but without the smell.”
Charlie held her finger to her ear, listening. There was a tone in the air, so high-pitched and quiet it was almost imperceptible. “I think something is still … on,” she said. She set the giant head on the ground. John had a hand to his ear, listening, but when she looked at him he shook his head.
“I can’t hear anything.”
Charlie returned to the body of the creature and peered into its gaping chest cavity. “Are you okay?” she asked halfheartedly, not taking her eyes off the robot.
“Yeah, I feel better back here.” He heaved and she turned. John’s face was strained, and his arm was tight across his stomach. “I think it’s passing,” he said, then doubled over, barely getting out the last syllable.
“This thing.” Charlie clenched her teeth and jerked her weight back and forth, trying to wrestle something loose from inside the chest cavity.
“Charlie get away from it!” John took a step toward her, then swayed back, as if he were tethered to the wall. “There is something really wrong with that thing.”
“Now this I’ve seen before,” Charlie said as she pulled the object out at last. It was a flat disc, about the size of a half-dollar coin. She held it up to her ear. “Wow, that’s really high-pitched. I can barely hear it. The sound is why you feel sick.”
Charlie wedged her fingernail into a small groove on the side of the object and flipped a thin switch. John took several deep breaths, then stood upright again slowly, testing himself. He looked at Charlie. “It stopped,” she said.
“Charlie,” John whispered, nodding toward the beast on the ground. Charlie looked, and a shock went through her. The illusion of fur and flesh was gone. It was nothing more than a broken robot with unfinished features.
John picked up the head once again, turning it to face them. “That thing, it did something,” John said, nodding toward the device in Charlie’s hands. “Turn it back on.” He lifted the creature’s head a bit higher and stared into its lifeless round eyes.
Are you sure that’s a good idea? she was about to say, but curiosity got the better of her. John could handle a little more nausea. She slipped her nail back into the groove and flipped the tiny switch. Before their eyes, the fractured and worn face became fluid and smooth, warping into something lifelike. John dropped the head and jumped backward.
“It’s alive!”
“No, it’s not,” Charlie whispered, flipping the switch off again. She cradled the strange device in her hands, gazing down at it, mesmerized. “I want to know more about this. We have to get back to the dorm.” She got to her feet. “I’ve seen something like this. When I came back here for Theodore, I grabbed a bunch of stuff and put it in a box to study later. I know I saw something like this.”
For a long moment, John said nothing. Charlie felt a surge of shame. He was looking at her the way Jessica had, the way he had when he first saw her experiment. The little disc in Charlie’s palm felt suddenly like the most vital thing in the world. She closed her hand on it.
“Okay, then,” John said plainly. “Let’s go.” His tone was calm, and it caught Charlie off guard. John was being deliberately agreeable. She wasn’t sure exactly why, but it was reassuring nonetheless.
“Okay.” Charlie smiled.
When they got back to the college, Charlie headed for the dorm.
“Hey, slow down!” John struggled to catch up.
“You have that disc?”
“Of course.” He patted his pocket.
“I know I’ve seen something like this before,” she said. “I’ll show you.” She glanced at John as she let him into the room she shared with Jessica, but his face remained impassive. He’d already seen the mess. But John didn’t look in the direction of Charlie’s desk and the covered faces.
“You can clear off the chair,” Charlie said as she shoved a stack of books out of the way. She crawled under the bed and emerged a moment later with a large cardboard box. John was standing beside the chair, looking perplexed. “I said you can clear it off,” she said.
He laughed. “Clear it off to where?”
“Right.” The chair had a stack of books on the seat, and a stack of T-shirts draped over the back. Charlie grabbed the shirts and threw them onto the bed. She set the box on the bed and settled herself cross-legged behind it, so that John would be able to look through it, too.
“So what is all of this?” He leaned slowly over the box as Charlie rummaged through it, pulling parts out one by one and setting them in a straight line on the bed.
“Stuff from my dad’s house: electronics, mechanical parts. Things from the animatronics, from his work.” She glanced at him nervously. “I know I said that I just went back for Theodore, and I did. But I may have grabbed a few things on the way out. I wanted to learn, and these classes—John, you know some of the tech my father was working with was ancient. It’s practically ridiculous now. But he was making it up as he went along; he thought of stuff that’s still unique, that no one else has thought of yet. I wanted all of it. I wanted to understand it. So, I went back to get what I could.”
“You stripped the house for parts, I get it.” John laughed as he picked up Theodore’s severed paw and considered it for a moment. “Even your favorite toy? Don’t you think that’s a little … heartless?”
“Is it?” Charlie picked up a piece from the box, a metal joint, and weighed it in her hands. “I took Theodore apart because I wanted to understand him, John. Isn’t that the most loving thing there is?”
“Maybe I should reconsider this whole dating thing,” John said, wide-eyed.
“He was important to me because my father made him for me, not because he was stitched up to look like a rabbit.” She discarded the joint, setting it next to her on the bed. She turned her attention to the box, picking up pieces one by one and setting them i
n a row. She was sure she’d recognize what she needed when she saw it.
Charlie looked at circuitry and wires, metal joints and plastic casings, examining each piece carefully. Something would cry out to her, just like the animatronic beast had done, with that raw sense of wrongness. But after a while her neck grew sore from bending over the box. Her eyes were beginning to glaze over. She discarded the piece of metal tubing in her hand, tossing it onto the growing pile on her bed. At the clanking sound, John looked up.
“Where do you even sleep?” he asked, gesturing not only to the growing pile of electronic and mechanical parts, but to the clothing and books, and the smaller piles of electronic and mechanical parts.
Charlie shrugged. “There’s always room for me,” she said mildly. “Even if just barely.”
“Yeah, but what about when you’re married?” John’s face flushed before he’d even finished the sentence. Charlie looked up at him, one eyebrow hinged slightly higher than the other. “Someday,” John said hastily. “To someone. Else.” His face grew grimmer. Charlie felt her eyebrow lift higher of its own volition. “So, what are we looking for again?” John furrowed his brow and scooted his chair closer to the bed, peering into the box.
“This.” Spotting a glimmer in the pile, Charlie took hold of a small disc and carefully placed it in the palm of her hand. She held it out so John could see. It looked just like the metallic disc they’d found in the body of the animatronic, but one side of it had been damaged, revealing a curious metal framework inside. Several wires extended, connecting to a black keypad not much larger than the disc itself.
“Funny.” Charlie chuckled to herself.
“What?”
“The last time I held this, I was more interested in the keypad.” She smiled. “This part is a common diagnostic tool. Someone must have been testing it.”
“Or trying to find out what it was,” John added. “That thing doesn’t look like anything else in the box; just like that monster we found doesn’t look like anything your dad made. I mean, it kind of looked like Foxy, but not the one your dad made. This was some sort of twisted version of Foxy.”
She pulled a heavy metal joint from the box. “This doesn’t belong here, either.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s meant to be an elbow, but look.” She bent the joint all the way over, then all the way back the other way, then looked at John expectantly.
He looked blank. “So?”
“My father wouldn’t have used this. He always put stops so that the joints couldn’t do things humans can’t do.”
“Maybe it’s not finished?”
“It’s finished. It’s not just that, though, it’s … it’s the way the metal is cut, the way it’s put together. It’s like—you write things, right? So, you read other people’s work?” He nodded. “If I ripped up some books and gave you a big pile of pages, and asked you to pick out the ones by your favorite author, could you do that, just based on the style?”
“Yeah, of course. I mean, I might be wrong about a few, but yeah.”
“Well, it’s the same thing here.” She held the heavy piece up again to make her point. “My dad didn’t write this.”
“Okay, but what does it mean?” John asked. He unplugged the broken disc from the diagnostic keypad and took the second disc from the monster out of his pocket. He fiddled with it briefly, then managed to unhinge one side of it. Frowning with concentration, he attached the wires from the keypad to the new disc. When he was finished, he hesitated. “I don’t want to flip any of the switches,” he said. “I don’t think my stomach can take it.”
“Yeah, don’t touch anything yet. After what happened at the house, we shouldn’t assume that we know what any of this does.” Charlie set the box on the floor and started shuffling through the parts again, looking at the patterns, trying to see something in them. “There has to be something else in here that I’m missing.”
“Charlie,” John said. “Sorry to interrupt your conversation with yourself, but look.” He passed her the broken disc he’d just unhooked. “Look on the back.”
The back had once been smooth, but it was scratched a lot since it was first made. Charlie stared at it for a minute, then finally saw it: there was writing along one edge. She had to bring the piece of plastic close to her face to make the letters out. They were tiny, and written in an old-fashioned, flowing script. They read: Afton Robotics, LLC. Charlie dropped the disc immediately.
“Afton? William Afton? That’s my father’s old partner. That’s—”
“That’s Dave’s real name,” John finished. Charlie sat silently for a moment, feeling as if something very large and unwieldy had been shoved into her head.
“I thought he was just a business partner for Freddy’s,” she said slowly.
“I guess he did a bit more than that.”
“He’s dead, though. It’s not like we can ask him questions. We have to figure out what’s happening now.” She grabbed the cardboard box and swept the extraneous pieces—the pieces that had been her father’s—into it, then shoved it back under the bed. John ducked out of her way as she maneuvered around the small space.
“And how do you think we should do that?” he asked. “What is happening now? There have been two bodies so far, both killed by something like what we just found.”
“Three bodies,” Charlie said, flushing slightly. John covered his face with his hands for a moment and took a deep breath.
“Okay, three. Are you sure it’s not four?”
“I didn’t see the third one. Clay just told me about it, after she was found. It had been out for a few days—she was the first one, I think.”
“So why them? Are these robots just going on a killing spree? Why would they do that? Charlie, is there anything else about this that you’re not telling me?” Charlie bit her lip, hesitant. “I’m serious. I’m in this with you, but if I don’t know what’s happening, I can’t help you.”
Charlie nodded. “I don’t know if it means anything. Clay said it was just a coincidence. But the woman I found in the field—John, she looked like me.”
His expression went dark. “What do you mean, looked like you?”
“Not exactly like me. Brown hair, same size, sort of. I don’t know, if you described me to someone and asked them to pick me out of a crowd, they might come back with her. There was just this awful moment when I looked down at her, and it was like looking at me.”
“Clay said it didn’t mean anything?”
“He said it’s a college town; there are a lot of brown-haired girls around. One of the other two victims was a man, so …”
“Probably a coincidence then,” John offered.
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “I guess it was just … unsettling.”
“There must be something else that’s linking them together. Another person, a job, a location maybe.” John looked toward the window. Charlie caught him smiling, and John’s expression sobered, looking suddenly self-conscious.
“You’re enjoying this,” she said.
“No.” He shrugged. “I wouldn’t put it that way. I don’t want any more bodies. But—it’s a mystery, and it’s an excuse to spend some time with you.” He smiled, but quickly made his face serious again. “So what about the bodies? Where were they found?”
“Well.” Charlie brushed the hair off her face, slightly distracted. “They were all found in fields, miles apart. The first one—the one they just found—was over on the far side of Hurricane, and the girl I found today was left by the side of the road between Hurricane and here.”
“Where on the road? How far from here?”
“About halfway …” Suddenly her eyes widened. “Forget the fields. Or don’t forget them, but they’re not the point, or at least not the whole point. The holes were behind the woman’s house. They take them from their homes. That’s where they’re starting; it’s where we should start, too.” She headed for the door, and John followed.
“
Wait, what? Where are we going?”
“My car. I want to look at a map.”
When they got to the car, Charlie pulled a stack of papers out of the glove compartment and rifled through them, then pulled out a map and handed it to John.
“Give me a pen.” She held out her hand, and John pulled two from his front pocket, handing her one. Charlie spread the map out on the hood of the car and they bent over it.
“The woman’s house was here,” she said, circling the spot. “Clay gave me the addresses of the others.” She pulled the now slightly grubby menu from her pocket and handed it to John. “You look for that one,” she said quietly.
Even though they both knew the area, tracing the streets for the victim’s houses took longer than Charlie had expected.
“Found it,” John announced.
“1158 Oak Street is right … there.” She circled the point and stepped back.
“What’s that?” John said, pointing to something scribbled in the margin. Charlie picked up the corner of the map and her heart skipped. It was another drawing of a rectangle. She didn’t remember making it. It’s a door. But what door? She stared down at it. It had no knobs or latches, nothing to indicate how she would get inside. Or where it was. What good is it to know what I’m looking for, if I don’t know why, or how to find it?
“Just a doodle,” she said sternly, to redirect his attention. “Come on, concentrate.”
“Yeah,” John said. At least the pattern was instantly clear; the houses made a crooked line from Hurricane toward St. George, truncated halfway between.
“They’re all about the same distance apart,” Charlie said, a swell of dread rising in her chest. John was nodding as if he understood. “What does it mean?” she asked urgently.
“They’re moving in a specific direction, and traveling roughly the same distance between.” He paused. “Killing.”
“Who’s killing who?” A voice rang out behind them.
The Twisted Ones Page 10
