Larson heard it before he saw it.
And when he did hear it, he couldn’t believe how it had managed to form behind him without him hearing it.
The sounds were ear-splitting.
Larson’s initial thought was that a train was barreling down on him. The clatter, rumble, blast, and shriek that now made him whirl around defied his ability to process the noise.
He had no better success with what he was seeing.
But he couldn’t even try to process that. He just ran.
Barreling out of the shelter of the factory, leaving his sedan and the garbage bag behind, Larson raced toward the dock. Realizing it provided no cover, he veered back toward the building, to the overhang that sheltered an old forklift. Crouching next to the forklift, he peeked into the factory.
Yep. He wasn’t going mad—he’d seen what he thought he’d seen. But it hadn’t started chasing him yet. It seemed to still be deciding what form to take. It continued to coalesce into the most abominable thing Larson had ever encountered.
Transfixed by the strange mass consolidating in front of him, Larson’s feet were rooted to the ground. His awareness, however—honed by years of detective work—reached out beyond the scrap-metal beast. He spotted subtle movement near the trash compactor. It was little more than a twitch at first, but then the twitch turned into a vibration … and the Stitchwraith climbed out of the tight wad of trash.
Still a little disoriented from his battle with the rabbit creature and his temporarily compressed state, Jake wanted only to curl up and sleep someplace safe. He was so tired.
But he couldn’t rest yet. The man Jake had seen earlier—the detective—was nearby, and he was in trouble.
As soon as Jake climbed out of the trash compactor, he had full awareness of what was going on in the factory. Part of his awareness came from “normal” senses—he could see the trash monster building itself up larger and larger. He could hear the clanking, thumping, and clattering of metal latching onto metal. The rest of his awareness, however, came from something he didn’t understand. He just knew the detective was nearby and was in terrible danger.
Jake also knew something else. He knew he was in danger, too.
Completely against his will, Jake’s metal body began to skim across the concrete toward the trash-being. It felt like Jake was caught in an alien spaceship’s tractor beam … except he wasn’t being towed into the sky; he was being sucked into the horrible metal man-thing.
Jake immediately put all his strength into fighting the pull. After just a few seconds, he was able to stop his forward motion. Around him, animatronic parts and trash whizzed past and glommed onto the massive body forming from the garbage. Jake, though, stayed fast, committing himself to remaining separate from the evil entity. And because he was Jake—a boy who tried to help anyone who needed it—he also extended his intention to the other animatronic debris being vacuumed up by the junkyard fiend. He did all he could to save the other parts from falling under the thing’s control.
He’d managed to hold back a few arms and legs and joints and screws, but suddenly he felt the resistance of mangled, metallic skeletal remains. Something was fighting against him; it wanted to be absorbed by the whole.
Jake managed to keep himself planted as he turned to see what had enough self-awareness that it could choose to join the bulging trash being. For a few seconds, the debris roiling around him remained locked in chaotic movement, but then he spied a battered, rusting, vaguely female-shaped endoskeleton with a long neck crawling away from the other rubbish.
Jake immediately tried to reach whatever was controlling the girl-endoskeleton. Let me save you, he called to her with his mind.
At first, he got no response, but then his mind was filled with the sound of high-pitched laughter. It was a creepy cackling that skittered through his whole being.
Before Jake could react to the sound—and whatever it meant—the girl-endoskeleton’s crawl turned into a disturbingly quick slither. Scraping across the floor, the girl-endoskeleton shot toward Jake.
Jake’s inner resources were a little played-out, given that he was still fighting the tug of the trash monster. So he could do little to resist when the girl-endoskeleton suddenly sprang off the ground and hit him full-on, knocking him to the ground.
Jake couldn’t feel the impact, of course, but it still stunned him. For a few seconds, he couldn’t move. He found himself eye-to-eye with a corroded face whose mouth was stretched into a poisonous smile that looked anything but friendly.
The smile supercharged Jake’s need to get free. He immediately tried to throw off his attacker.
But she didn’t budge. Instead, she pinned him with extraordinary strength, and her round, animatronic eyes started to glow white-hot. The glaring light began to bore through Jake’s doll eyes, searing into him, reaching deep inside.
The moment the light drilled into him, Jake felt the same evil he’d fought in the trash compactor. Only this evil felt stronger, like it was the core of what Jake had sensed in the things Andrew had infected.
Jake also felt something else; some of that badness was inside of him! He hadn’t noticed it before, but now it was unmistakable. A piece of the evil he’d battled—cold and cruel—had been hiding in Jake’s spirit. Just as it had hitched a ride in Andrew, it had apparently burrowed its way into Jake as well.
Jake didn’t like having the nasty girl-endoskeleton so close to him, but he was happy for her to take away the yuck he could feel within him. It was leaving now, returning to its source; the girl-thing drawing the energy out of him with her burning gaze.
Jake felt it the instant the evil left him, but even if he hadn’t felt it, he’d have known. The girl-endoskeleton looked somehow brighter now, less rusty. Taking back that part of her had made her stronger.
As if acknowledging Jake’s awareness, the girl-thing cocked her metal skull and winked at him. It was a slow-motion wink filled with what looked like gleeful triumph. Then the girl-endoskeleton let go of Jake and flew backward, allowing herself to be absorbed into the horrid metal giant.
Mesmerized by the bizarre osmosis of robotic parts—including one full female-shaped endoskeleton that had attacked the Stitchwraith before releasing itself to the trash amalgamation—Larson hadn’t managed to move from where he hid. Now, however, the trash-thing took a step forward … and it stared right at Larson.
The moment the rabbit-shaped fusion of trash met Larson’s gaze, Larson was able to accept what he’d known when he’d first watched the monster put itself together. The thing was Afton.
Even though the rabbit was made up of disturbingly arranged animatronic parts and was twice a normal man’s size, it exuded William Afton’s unmistakable energy. In a way, the patchwork face resembled photos Larson had seen of the serial killer, as if Afton had the power to shape other material into his own countenance.
Afton’s Amalgamation took another step forward.
Larson, appalled by his stupid inaction, muttered, “Crap.” He looked around. If he ran now, he could slip between the next building to the north and get away.
But …
He looked beyond the immediate buildings and the lake. This district was surrounded by old neighborhoods, the kind of neighborhoods with two-story houses, gnarled oak trees … and children.
Ryan’s voice spoke in his head: “Teacher says dads are like superheroes. But you’re not. Superheroes don’t break promises.”
Ryan was right. Superheroes didn’t break promises, and Larson wanted to be Ryan’s superhero. Today, he could do that by keeping his promise to the city, his promise to protect and serve. He was not going to run away.
He had to stop this thing before it got out.
But how?
Larson looked around. He catalogued what he saw: The factory currently incubating a creature from the underworld. Dock and lake behind the factory. An empty field to the left of the factory, beyond which lay houses in which little boys like his Ryan were playing video games, building forts, doing homework, or wishing their dads were at home.
How could he fight something powered by such evil?
Before he could answer that question, the creature that looked like both a man-shaped pile of junk and a deformed rabbit turned and went deeper into the factory. What was it doing?
Larson crept out from behind the forklift and sidled through the entryway. Reaching his sedan, he crouched and listened. He noticed the bag of parts he’d left on the ground by his open driver’s side door. He grabbed the bag. He had a feeling he might need it.
Inside the building, the thing crunched and huffed. Looping the bag around his wrist as he’d done earlier, Larson ran toward the sound.
Although following the sound was easy, understanding it was harder. The noises Larson was hearing kept changing. Maybe they shifted when the thing’s parts shifted.
Sometimes the sound was a chittering noise. Sometimes it was a crackle. Sometimes it was the fingernails-on-a-chalkboard caterwaul of metal being torn from metal. It was always something that made Larson forget to breathe.
But he didn’t stop moving. He couldn’t.
Following the sounds, he went past the trash compacting room and found himself in a wide hallway. A series of what looked like storage rooms or equipment rooms opened up off the hallway. From the now squalling and skidding sounds ahead of him, he knew he was going in the right direction. The skidding devolved into a snarling wet popping sound. It reminded Larson of the autopsies he sometimes had to attend. A corpse made a similar sound when its ribcage was being parted and its organs were being removed. Larson felt his stomach turn against the roast beef sandwich he’d had for lunch, but he commanded the sandwich to stay where it was.
The hallway turned a corner, and Larson hesitated. He waited until the squishy taps moved farther away from him. Then he sidled around the corner.
The second he looked ahead, he almost turned and ran.
Hulking shadows skated along the walls of the hallway in front of him. The shadows, like the rabbit monster, were in perpetual motion. They rose and fell, billowed and contracted. They looked alive, and for all Larson knew, they were.
No matter. He had to go on.
Larson took another step.
And another.
Afton’s Amalgamation crashed through the interior wall of the hallway.
Larson attempted to leap forward to clear the thing’s line of sight, but he wasn’t fast enough. He had just a second, if that, to register the appalling composite of animatronic body parts and faces that came at him with the speed of a race car and the force of a battering ram. Did he just see an eye on a kneecap? And was that kneecap where a shoulder should have been? Had feet been protruding from the thing’s neck? And did the feet have mouths? How many mouths had he just seen? Dozens?
He didn’t have time to answer any of these questions before he was hurled not just into, but through the other hallway wall. Aware of only pain as he flew through the air, he collided with something hard, and then he felt nothing.
As soon as the trash monster had integrated the girl-endoskeleton, it had turned away and clomped into the factory’s interior. It hadn’t given Jake even a glance as it had passed him. It apparently had enough parts to be satisfied.
For a few seconds after the metal man-thing had disappeared from Jake’s view, Jake considered running away. But he couldn’t. The detective was still here. And he was still in danger. Jake had to help.
So Jake made himself get up and follow the monster. It wasn’t hard to do. It was making a racket. Jake ran toward the sound.
Piercing jabs of light stabbed at the blackness that surrounded Larson. He squeezed his eyes shut and moaned. Why couldn’t he be left in peace?
His head pounded. Touching his forehead, he felt a knot above his left eyebrow, and his fingers came away wet. His chest and his side throbbed, too. He was sure he’d cracked a rib or two, maybe more. He felt warm wetness at his side. Maybe he did more than crack a rib. Maybe he broke one and it pierced his skin. Or maybe something sharp had cut him. He was barely aware of leaning against something jagged and hard. Some kind of equipment? Maybe he’d been cut on that.
Voices whispered at him in the dark. Their words capered around the flashes of light in his head. He screwed up his forehead, both to combat the throbbing pain in his skull and to help him focus on what the words meant.
He suddenly remembered how he got into this place of darkness and light, of pain and whispering voices. Afton’s Amalgamation.
He stiffened. Where was it?
“Hurry.” That was one of the words in his head.
Or were the words in his head? Were they outside his head? If they were outside his head, where were they coming from?
It sounded like children whispering. Or did it? His left ear burned like he’d been slapped hard on the side of the head. His right ear felt like it was filled with cotton. The whispers rose and fell. He could see the words in his mind like ballet dancers spinning and leaping and dipping.
Then three words joined together in perfect choreography. “Open your eyes,” they said.
Larson did.
Afton was standing over him. So close. Too close.
Larson looked into the enormous face hovering above his own. It was a face of nightmares. With eyes made of metal sockets and spark plugs, a mouth formed from long pistons, and cheekbones composed of large gears and bolts, the face seemed to be held together with bits of pointed metal, rusted pipes, and what appeared to be actual bone … but not the bones one would expect to see in a face. An animatronic elbow acting as a chin was attached with a rat skeleton, and a brow made from part of a motor was affixed by a bird’s foot.
As repulsive as all of this was, though, it wasn’t the metal junk that sent chills skittering down Larson’s spine. The truly repugnant thing about Afton’s new face was that it was … in motion. Tucked in and around the metal scrap and bone, animatronic parts wriggled and writhed. And they were singing, or at least that’s what it sounded like. Larson could hear a harmonized chorus; various parts of it seemed to be coming from Afton’s spinning ankle-joint nose, shimmying shoulder-socket forehead, and tapping metal-footed jaws.
Each of Afton’s ears was made of a different animatronic part. One ear was three-quarters of a metal hand, and the other ear was a metal jaw. Both the hand and the jaw were moving in time to the music, which seemed to be snippets from the old floor shows the Freddy’s animatronics used to do.
Thankfully, Larson didn’t have time to examine Afton’s makeshift face any further, because Afton’s Amalgamation raised a hand that was actually a foot and a hip joint. Larson lunged to his right, but he wasn’t fast enough. The sharp metal toes of the foot Afton was using as a hand impaled Larson’s belly.
Larson cried out when hot pain shot through his gut and radiated across his entire torso, but he was able to jerk free and stagger out of the hideous thing’s reach. Grabbing his lower belly, Larson felt warmth flow from between his fingers, down over his right hipbone as he busted out of the room he’d been thrown into and ran down the hall to the south exit of the warehouse.
Jake watched the detective flee down the hall. He called out, but the detective didn’t hear him.
Jake was mad at himself. If he hadn’t hesitated after the girl-endoskeleton attacked him, he could have gotten to the detective in time to prevent what had just happened. But Jake had been weak and selfish. As a result, he’d been too late.
The detective would know, of course, that he’d been stabbed, but he’d think that was all that had happened. He would think the injury was bad, but what he didn’t know was that the injury itself wasn’t the problem. The problem was that when the trash monster stabbed the detective, it infected him with the spirit of the horrible man who animated it.
Jake had known that the evil junk demon was controlled by the awful thing that had wanted Andrew. Spirits, Jake had discovered, possessed something that was similar to a smell. Each one was distinct.
This particular spirit smelled really, really bad. And when it had stabbed the detective, the smell had gone into the detective’s body. Jake was afraid the detective had been infected, and he didn’t know exactly how bad the infection would be. Pretty bad, was his guess. For sure, Afton’s spirit would fill the detective with evil. But what if it did more than that? What if it killed him? Jake had to get the infection out.
The metal monster thundered past Jake, again paying no attention to him. The monster was intent on catching the detective, so Jake chased after it.
Behind Larson, Afton’s Amalgamation howled like a demented hound from hell. Larson could hear its ponderous steps pursing him as he ran, each footfall sounding like a thunderclap, each thunderclap louder than the last.
If Afton had been breathing, Larson would have felt that breath on his neck as he threw his shoulder into the closed door and fell out into the dwindling daylight. He turned and ran north along the side of the factory. He knew where he needed to go next, but he might or might not make it.
He ignored his pain and ran as fast as he could.
The second after Larson got where he was going, Afton ripped a hole in the side of the building to pursue the detective. Larson heard the clamorous rending of metal and Afton’s bawling shout. Then he heard the singing he’d heard earlier. It was louder now, almost frantic, as if the cannibalized animatronic parts were trying to comfort themselves with music.
Larson imagined the amalgamation’s unholy head rotating this way and that, looking for Larson. As Larson did what he needed to do next, he hoped Afton’s current form had no supernatural powers other than its ability to animate junk. If Afton was telepathic, Larson was screwed. But he had to try.
To Larson’s amazement, he was able to get to the forklift without Afton being aware of it. As he climbed onto the driver’s seat, Larson hefted the bag of parts he’d been carrying around. He started to tuck the bag onto the floorboard by his feet, but suddenly, its contents started moving.
For a moment, Larson forgot all about the trash rabbit because not only was the bag moving, but voices were coming from inside it, too. Holding his breath, Larson gingerly opened the bag.
As soon as the bag opened, the voices got louder. Larson gasped and jerked his hand back.
The last thing Larson had put in this bag was a mask. The mask was cracked and muddied, but its features were clear. With rosy red cheeks and purple stripes that stretched from the bottom of its hollow black eyes to the top of its wide-open mouth, red lipstick highlighting an amplified pucker, the mask could have been amusing. But it wasn’t—especially now, because now the mask had come alive. Its mouth was wide open, and it was wailing something unintelligible.
Larson didn’t need to understand its cries, though. Disturbingly, he could hear the mask’s intent in his head. It felt like he was receiving the download of a single thought: “Take me to him.”
Not far away, a crash resounded. It spurred Larson into action.
Grabbing the bag, Larson hung it on the forklift’s prongs. Then he got back into the driver’s seat and started up the forklift’s engine.
The sounds of Afton’s Amalgamation were getting closer. They were coming from right on the other side of the wall!
Larson put the forklift in gear and drove it into the wall, shearing through the metal and impaling Afton in his hip-shaped gut. The bag containing the mask led the way. When the forklift impacted Afton, Larson saw the bag open; he got a glimpse of black-and-white stripes.
But Larson didn’t care about the bag now. He cared about driving Afton into the lake.
With one hand on his wound and the other on the wheel, Larson kept his foot smashed against the forklift’s accelerator.
Afton, however, wasn’t going into the lake without a fight. He planted his hand/jaw/joint–constructed feet and leaned into the forklift. Larson’s forward progress slowed. But it didn’t stop. He dug in. “Come on,” he urged the machine. “Come on.”
The machine gave a great grumble and surged forward. Afton was pushed to the very edge of the dock.
“Go, go, go, go,” Larson muttered, his gaze locked on Afton’s soul-freezing eye sockets.
Afton was almost at the edge. He was going to …
Pieces of the forklift began peeling away and flying through the air toward Afton. First the mast, then the lift cylinder, then the backrest. One after the other, parts of the forklift disconnected from the whole and swept toward Afton’s Amalgamation.
The tilt cylinder, the wheels, the overhead guard—they went in quick succession, followed by the fork’s prongs. Everything was being absorbed into Afton’s merger of metal, plastic, and wire.
Larson watched in frightened awe when even the evidence he’d hung on the front of the forklift got slurped into Afton’s continually evolving construction. He thought he saw one black-and-white-striped arm get siphoned up into Afton’s left leg. Then the steering wheel was snatched from his grasp, and he felt the operator’s seat gyrate under him.
Larson jumped off the forklift, and fell to the dock. Holding his gut again, he began crawling backward, away from Afton’s macabre evolution. It continued to consume the forklift.
Within seconds, the forklift was nearly gone. Just a few pieces of battered yellow metal remained. The rest was wriggling through Afton’s crevices, joining with a jaw here, a gear there.
The monster lifted its face to Larson. The detective had nowhere to hide now, and he wouldn’t make it far with his injuries. He had one trick left: stalling.
“Afton?” Larson asked. “That is you in there, isn’t it? Though I’m not even sure what to call you now.”
Afton’s Amalgamation glared back at the detective. Repositioning his pieces so he stood taller and broader on the end of the dock, the loathsome atrocity that was William Afton announced in such sonorous tones that the dock juddered, “I am Agony.”
Larson felt his lip curl. He said nothing. But his mouth dropped open when all the faces and mouths on Afton’s trash-body began talking at once. No, not talking. It was the singing again.
Larson hadn’t had time to examine all of the Afton behemoth when he got up-close-and-personal with Afton’s jigsaw-puzzle face, so Larson hadn’t noticed then whether the totality of Afton’s junk had been part of the mutant stage show he’d glimpsed. But now he could see that every animatronic part crammed into Afton’s warped configuration was doing its best to sing and dance. All over Afton, animatronic arms and legs, hands and feet, and fingers and toes were swaying and bopping to the music the mouths were attempting to perform.
Goosebumps erupted on Larson’s skin. He covered his ears, then, disgusted with himself for letting the creep-show unnerve him. He groaned, got up on one knee, and then pushed himself into an upright, standing position. He faced Afton.
“Enough!” Larson shouted.
The voices stopped. The animatronic parts went still.
Larson closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He was preparing himself for what he thought might be his final battle.
Jake had caught up with the rabbit-shaped trash monster just as the detective had attacked it with the forklift. Not sure how to help at that point, Jake had just hung back and watched as the forklift had driven the monster closer and closer to the lake.
When the forklift began coming apart, Jake still wasn’t sure what to do. He was thinking hard, though. He figured that at the very least, if the trash rabbit got the upper hand, Jake could charge over and pick up the detective. Maybe he could carry the man to safety before the monster could catch them.
While Jake was thinking this through, though, something strange happened. The instant the detective closed his eyes, the girl-endoskeleton separated herself from the rest of the trash rabbit’s parts.
Undulating past an arm, a leg, and a hip joint, the girl-endoskeleton wormed her way to the outer layer of the trash rabbit, and she leaped away from him. As soon as she launched herself free, Jake pressed back into the shadows. He didn’t want another encounter with the girl-thing. She was scary.
Tense enough that he’d have been holding his breath if he actually breathed, Jake watched the girl-endoskeleton wriggle across the dock. He kept his gaze riveted on her until he saw her slink toward a gaping vent opening in the side of the factory.
When Larson opened his eyes, he expected Afton would still be glaring at him. But Afton wasn’t looking at Larson at all. He was staring past Larson intently, almost pleadingly.
Larson turned to see what Afton was looking at, and he saw what appeared to be a female-shaped metal endoskeleton disappearing into a vent opening—it seemed to be the same endoskeleton he’d seen before. Larson frowned. He returned his gaze to Afton … and he saw the plea dissolve into despair. Afton was still a horrifying synthesis of scrap, but he’d taken on an eerily human-looking demeanor. In spite of its size, Afton’s mountain of metal seemed to shrink inward, as if becoming weak and frail. Afton’s visage now looked lost and defeated. Afton’s Amalgamation dropped its head, and then Afton’s expression shifted into what could have been puzzlement.
Larson refocused, and he immediately could see what Afton was looking at. Afton was staring at his right side, where the purple-striped mask from the bag was congealed to the animatronic parts. The mask was no longer wailing as it had been when Larson had last seen it. It’s white face now looked satisfied, victorious.
Larson watched, amazed, as Afton’s Amalgamation started to pull itself apart. Or, at least, that’s what appeared to be happening.
The destruction started with an arm embedded in the animated junk heap’s shoulder. The arm reached out and grabbed a gear-shaped cheekbone. Wrenching the cheekbone from the face, the arm moved on to the ear made from a jaw.
Another arm came loose from what was a thigh. It reached for the gear that made up a kneecap. It unscrewed it then flung it into the lake.
Now another two arms reached out. One grabbed the piston-constructed lips. The other removed an ear-shaped elbow.
And more arms began to move. They seemed to spout from every part of Afton’s metal jumble like oil gushers shoving through the earth’s surface. Every arm that came out grabbed something. One piece after the other was plucked by reaching fingers. It took only a minute before Afton’s Amalgamation was a roiling lump of body parts and connective pieces.
Then unidentifiable fluids begin spilling from the deconstructing trash. As they flowed, Afton stumbled backward, one short step from the end of the dock.
Larson’s legs gave out. He dropped to the deck and sat with both hands pressed to his lower stomach, his eyes wide and staring as blood started pouring from the trash rabbit’s mouth.
The blood sluiced over the plastic, metal, bone, and wire, and it mixed with the other fluids to flow like hot tar onto the warped planks of the dock. The once-identifiable, though grotesque, rabbit was becoming a decomposing trash heap, a frail pile of disparate bits, weak and struggling.
When the last piece fell onto the pyramid of waste, Afton screamed, and the entire tower of worthlessness fell back off the dock.
For at least a minute, Larson sat and stared, trying to figure out if he could ever put words to what had just happened. Then, painfully, he stood. On unsteady legs, he took short, slow steps toward the edge of the dock. Taking a deep breath, he looked down at the water.
He’d been prepared to jump back if he had to. But he didn’t have to. What remained of Afton wasn’t a threat.
Afton was nothing but a floating stain of insignificant parts bobbing on the surface of the lake. Larson relaxed his muscles, but he covered his nose with his hand. The air was heavy with the smells of acid and decomposition. Oily lather skimmed over the water.
Feeling dizzy, Larson leaned against a post at the corner of the dock. He listened to the water fizz and burble. And he watched the parts begin to sink. A leg. An arm. A foot. Gears. Joints. Mouths. The lake swallowed piece after piece until, finally, only one thing remained.
The last piece of Afton’s trash-self that the lake slipped down its liquid gullet was the purple-striped mask of the marionette.
Larson crumpled to the dock. And that’s when he spotted the Stitchwraith again.
He could feel blood seeping from his wounds, but he ignored it. His vision was becoming blurry; he had to strain to watch the Stitchwraith. As the Stitchwraith stepped out of the shadows and onto the dock, Larson tried to push himself back up onto his feet. He couldn’t let Afton walk away from this factory … in any form.
Jake knew the detective thought that Jake was as bad as the trash rabbit. He could feel the detective’s anger and fear.
But that didn’t matter. The detective’s infection was already starting to spread. Jake had to stop it.
Thankfully, the detective didn’t have the strength to get up. Not only had he lost a lot of blood, but the stinky spirit that had been in the trash rabbit was taking its toll. The detective could do nothing but stare wide-eyed as Jake approached him.
Jake knelt by the detective’s side. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.”
The detective didn’t seem to hear Jake’s words. The man’s gaze was losing focus, and he was terribly pale.
Jake looked at the wound in the detective’s belly. It was swollen and inflamed, and its edges had a sickening greenish tint. How could Jake get the contamination out?
Jake looked down at his metal hands. Concentrating, he sent energy from the battery pack he knew powered his endoskeleton. He funneled as much of its charge as he could into one of his hands.
And it worked! Jake’s metal hand began to glow red with heat. As soon as the glow began to radiate outward, Jake held his hand over the detective’s wound.
The detective was barely aware of what was happening, but he cried out and tried to writhe away from Jake’s hand. Jake used his other hand to hold the detective in place.
As soon as the detective was still, Jake lowered his glowing hand. The detective screamed in pain, but Jake, wincing, ignored the sound. He had to burn the infection away … even if it hurt the detective. As soon as the heat met the detective’s skin, a greenish gunk that looked like a revolting cross between spoiled cottage cheese and pistachio pudding bubbled up to the surface. It immediately began sizzling, which created a nasty reek of putrid, decaying flesh. Jake would have wrinkled his nose if his nose could have wrinkled. But he stayed where he was, and he kept his hand in place until the last of the repulsive glop was gone.
By then, the detective had passed out. Jake was happy about that.
Jake looked around. What should he do now?
The shriek of sirens answered that question. He had to leave. Help was coming, and that help wouldn’t see Jake as a good guy.
Jake straightened and ran toward the factory. He figured he could wind his way through its interior and escape out the other side. As Jake ducked into a narrow hall, though, his footsteps faltered. He’d just had a horrible realization.
Jake forced himself to keep going as he thought about the trash rabbit and the way it had come apart. Jake’s own spirit had been close enough to the awful man controlling the trash rabbit—the detective had called him Afton—to know that the awful man’s spirit wasn’t as powerful as it had pretended to be. Jake had felt that Afton’s spirit was barely hanging onto this reality. So how would Afton have been able to battle the detective the way he did?
Jake reached the far side of the factory. He poked his head out a small door and looked around.
Twilight had given way to darkness. The moon was bright enough to light up the area, but the night created enough shadows for Jake to stay out of sight.
As he fled the factory, Jake faced the truth that he’d just uncovered: Something besides Afton had been controlling the trash rabbit. And whatever it was, it was worse.