Clean Up

Keeping up your morale was hard when you knew every morning, there could be a new mess for you to clean up from the night before. However, you were the only one that could do it. While hiring a crew just for that specific task would indeed be helpful and probably far less pricy than the methods you were using, you couldn’t risk exposing any of this to anyone outside of those who already knew.

There was a particular shiver in your hands as you unlocked the back door to the kitchen that morning. Your star employee had been working the night shift before. He swore to you, after this week, he would move on. He had been with your company for a few years. Through every terrible scandal, every bad bit of press, he remained cheery and absolutely dedicated to the brand. Sure, he had a few loose screws, but he was nice enough. You’d come to think of him like your own son, and he told you many times he felt the same. When you saw that his car was still in the parking lot long after his shift had ended, you feared only for the worst.

You wished he wasn’t so calm whenever he talked about them, but he was. He knew all their names (of course you did as well, you created them after all) and any little fact about their characters and personalities that he could pull out of you. Admittedly, for the first few months it was kind of nice to have someone so passionate about your brain children, but after that honeymoon, you admit, you just started making things up on the spot to appease him. But he ate it up anyways. Foxy was his favorite, and the one he asked the most about. He was obsessed, but he was still a kid in your eyes, so it was a tad endearing. But when things started to happen, you became a little weary of his trusting behavior.

When the first guard, a twerpy kid named Jeremy, was found mangled and torn apart inside one of the characters, you were beside yourself. He wasn’t the first bodies you had to scrape out of those monsters, but he was certainly the largest and most curious. The other, smaller cases had clearly been at the hands of another human. But this level of shredded flesh, forced in past metal beams and wiring, by sheer insurmountable mechanical force, was not the work of a man. The blood coated on the hands of one of the beasts made it very clear what had happened. You had learned through experience how to dispose of a body, and that guard was only the first in a long, gruesome chain. After an extensive cleaning, you brought in every repair guy you could find, every programmer, every specialist, but they found nothing wrong in them.

Week by week, it was another corpse to extract. The character who got filled, and the one doing the stuffing, was different every week, but the method the same. The stink of sweet rotting flesh in that hot backroom hung constantly, even with all the bleach and simple green you could buy. It had sunk into the walls themselves. You had to have spare cosmetics made for the monsters. They could only stand up to so many bleachings before falling to pieces. Anything to keep the media away, anything to keep the place open.

You hid it so well, that your favorite employee didn’t find out about the killings for a few years, but the day he did, you lost your cool. You shouldn’t have pulled your gun on him, but you did. You told him he wouldn’t be the first body or the last that you’d dispose of if he so much as breathed a word of this. He agreed so honestly, and really, became a great asset. Having a cleaning buddy was great, and the whole experience only brought you two closer. But even with knowing the nature of the incidents, he never put the blame on his favorite characters. At first he said someone broke in, but as he became more aware, he seemed to always tack on comments about them ‘just being grumpy’ or ‘just acting quirky’. He had become more numb than you did by sinking into that fantasy world. The more guards he helped you clean up, the more he loved them. When he gladly took over the night shift, you could do nothing but fear for the worst.

You opened the door and called his name into the dark, windowless building. Silence was all that came back. You flicked on the lights. The kitchen remained normal. Taking a deep breath you ventured into the main dining room. They were standing on the stage, in their normal positions. This was usually the first place you’d find signs of viscera, but they looked perfectly clean. Your heart loosened. Maybe he made it. Maybe he just had car trouble and walked home. You opened the door to the backstage room, and everything appeared to be in order. No blood spatters, no stuffed suits. You were so relieved. You shot your glance down the hall, still dark. The light was on in the office at the far end. You briskly walked over to the light. As you approached, the smell hit you. When you got to the door, you knew it was too late.

Seated at the desk was his favorite, Foxy. Blood was pooled on the floor and soaked into the chair cushion, turning it a hot crimson color. The whole figure was a mess, his fur matted with gore, the holes in his costume stuffed and spilling out with skin and bone and muscle. You saw a patch of dark, blooded hair sticking out from behind one of the creature’s eyeballs, mingling with the soft pink of what you had come to learn was brain. You had never seen this happen. All the other times, the suit was empty before being filled with a corpse, but this time, man and endoskeleton were both within the same fiberglass and fur confines, though the former had been reduced to mush and large chunks for the most part.

You stood in silence, but something started to grow in your throat. Laughter. You were laughing. It started as a chuckle, then became a belly laugh. Becoming so jaded meant you could at least see the beautiful irony in the situation. Foxy was always his favorite after all. Now they were one in the same. You gasped for air and coughed from the laughing fit, hunching over until you gained control. You wiped the tears from your eyes, then immediately clammed up. It was looking at you. While you had been laughing, it had turned its head, and was staring at you with those lifeless, blood-smeared eyes. If a man who loved the characters so much and so honestly wasn’t exempt from that treatment, who’s to say a child murderer like you wasn’t?