Chapter Text
You barrel down the conveyor belt with the monster close behind. It thumps against the vent, metal walls vibrating with force. The sound is all-encompassing. Panic sends you dashing through the interconnected tunnels, helplessly funnelled along like a rat in a maze. You slide down the black tongue of a rubber walkway and then you’re free, slamming into a wall which punches the air from your lungs. The vent shuts, trapping the creature.
There’s no time to think, but you don't know what to do. The vent door shudders, pounded by unimaginable strength. It’s going to break through. The top half bursts outward. You look around, disorientated, wondering if you'll die, and spot a large crate above.
God please work. The Grabpack glove shoots out and grasps the crate's edge, as the monster continues its savage blows. The metal screeches as it's peeled open like a tin can. You pull the crate with everything you’ve got. The door crashes open, and there’s a flash of blue as the gigantic Huggy Wuggy pounces straight for you. A scream rips from your throat. The crate falls and connects with the monster's body. All you have is a second of elation before the walkway collapses. Paralyzing terror fills you, while the monster shrieks like a demon as it falls.
Time slows, and there's an eerie feeling of weightlessness, the rush of air rippling your clothes and hair. On impulse, you aim up and fire. The Grabpack's red glove sails through the air, a long line of loose rope. Nothing catches, and your heart falters. You hold tight, praying, and hope that the device doesn't rip right out of your hands. The monster's unending wail might be the final sound you will ever hear but then the rope snags hard. It jolts you up and you bounce, gasping, then hang in suspension.
Looking down is too terrifying to consider. You need to catch your breath, and then you’ll slowly pull yourself up-
The rope's thin strands tear, and then it snaps.
“Shit!”
This is the fall that kills you, this is it. A fraction of a second in which all your blood seems to freeze. You hit the ground hard.
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The darkness never eases. The only thing that changes is the sensation of pain blossoming from all over, but especially your head. You take slow breaths, and the walls of your lungs ache.
It must have been a dream. There’s no way you came back to the factory. And certainly, you were never hunted through it by the founder's most popular, best-selling toy. It's like being trapped in a fever dream. Pain radiates through your right arm, and you’re made aware of pins and needles flowing as consciousness returns. You flex stiff, cold fingers, and sharp pain tremors up and down the length of your arm. Something is wrong.
“Oh man.” The ground is freezing, and a chill has settled over you. The very air is covered by a cloud of misty vapour. Not a dream, but instead a horrible reality you’d gotten yourself into. Far up above, a red light glows and gives some sense of the space. It’s hard to imagine you were so high up. The collapsed walkway is barely visible, faded behind the haze of red light. Death would’ve been certain without the Grabpack.
You push up, and agony ripples through your arm causing you to cry out and crash to the floor. It's hard to see in the dark, but you need to know how bad it is. You're scared at what you'll discover, but bite your lip. Delicately, you slide a finger over the skin of your arm. There’s a firm bulge. Nausea floods you for a moment. It’s either bruised or broken. You attempt to straighten it out, but that hurts enough to make you sweat and see stars. Broken, then.
“Right,” you grit your teeth as the dull ache beats beneath your skin. “This is so fucking bad.”
You laugh, a hollow sound that’s greeted by silence. With your good arm, you stretch around and find your phone that's somehow still in your back pocket. The screen lights up, covered in cracks. Fortunately, you can still make out the time which reads 2:00 am. The battery is under fifty percent. It's not great, but given the state of everything else, it still provides some comfort to your dampening mood.
The mist seems to be some kind of coolant, as you can see faint outlines of pipes and debris. Toy parts lie discarded, scattered across the floor, jutting from trapped spaces of piping, tattered and broken. You've seen broken toys before, but the Playtime Co's always felt different. Their empty socket eyes seem to stare at you, and you look away.
The crate that fell exploded on impact, panels of wood scattered everywhere. Had you landed first it would have crushed you. Maybe lady luck was on your side just this once. Your arm pulses and you grunt, taking the thought back.
A trail of frayed rope leads back to your Grabpack. It's useless now that it's missing one hand. You wind back the rope. The left blue hand is in working condition, so that’s something to be grateful for. It could be used to climb out, somehow. You pick up the phone and turn on its flashlight.
It’s only just occurred to your frazzled mind that you hadn’t fallen alone. Somewhere, down in the dark, there is another. The hairs on your arm rise, and the light searches fruitlessly for a pair of much large, googly-like eyes. The light passes over piles of smaller toys and parts, each one dead-eyed and mutilated. No experiment. Fear kindles in your stomach, forcing you to stand. A wave of dizziness has you leaning to the side against your good shoulder as you wait for it to pass.
You have to find the monster and make sure it’s dead. The toy known as Huggy Wuggy shouldn't exist. It wasn't supposed to be living, and it certainly wasn't supposed to hunt down people like some sort of natural predator. It's an abomination and a threat to everyone outside of the factory. Though you had come here to find your old work colleagues, it looks like you'll have to take care of this business first. Even if you're terrified.
Everything aches but you keep moving. You take slow steps across the lumpy ground, trying not to trip on any toy parts. It helps hush your footsteps. The tempo of your heart steadily increases, despite your body running on fumes. These reflexes have kept you alive. Tired and overwhelmed, but still breathing.
The possibility that the monster cannot die fills you with unease. A toy is made of soft padding and synthetic fur. A fall wouldn't kill an actual toy, because there was nothing inside it to kill...but toys didn’t have sharp teeth... or superhuman strength...or the ability to move so unnaturally. This thing had the strength to bend metal. If you had survived the fall, even accounting for the Grabpacks help, then surely...
As a child you had once dropped an unwanted plushie out of your mother's third-floor apartment window. She’d discovered it the next day while walking to work, covered in mud and grime. She'd made you wash it, and while never in quite the same condition, it was unbroken. You imagine this monster simply bouncing off the hard ground, unharmed. Getting up with that huge demented grin and coming right for you. The thought makes your legs unsteady, fear wrapping around your cold limbs.
On the other side of the circular pit you find the largest pile of toys. They build upwards on top of one another, the pile getting smaller and smaller at the highest point. It's a strange formation, especially compared to the other toys that are simply scattered about. It gives you a reason to pause, inspecting each toy with the assistance of your phone. The factory had an incinerator for unused parts, and yet these had been tossed down here instead. Many of them were darkened by soot, as if they had been burnt in some other manner.
They couldn't have been placed this way from falling down. Even if each toy was dropped in the same area, they would've spread out. The formation is intentional, as if each was placed on top of the other, in order to...You blink, mouth parting in shock.
In order to get out.
You stagger back in fear. The light crawls over the pile, over the many dead eyes and broken parts until a large red grin greets you. Huggy's massive eyes gleam, reflecting the phone's white light.
You shriek and dart back. Phone shakily aimed as if it were a weapon, you train it on the thing's face. Its eyes are as dead as the rest, and its body is lifeless.
“Idiot.” How had you missed him? His blue limbs lie awkwardly splayed atop the other toys. Little ash covers the freshly fallen monster, and its long, sloth-like arms are peppered with red specks dried into the fur.
Blood. The implications are almost too disturbing to consider. The fur around its head is the worst part, where it seems to have sustained a serious injury. The question of why it bled is less pressing, even if it's intriguing. It must have collided with a metal pipe as it fell. Good. Hopefully, it was instantly fatal.
There's not a single part of you that's willing to approach it. The monster's head is tilted back against the boneless neck, and the plastic rings of its eyes are still swallowed by hungry black, no different to when it had chased you, forever frozen in a state of bloodthirsty hunger.
The longer you stare, the more afraid you feel.
Do something. You stand over it, mouth dry. Some deeper instinct has overridden your bodily functions. You can't move closer, you can't move back.
It must be dead. You were sure that had it been alive it would've attacked by now. It had been rabid in its pursuit. Surely a damaged body wouldn't hold it back. You nudge its foot with your own, and its head drops to the side, cushioned by the other toys which sends a fine film of ash and dust into the air. You take a sharp inhale.
It's strange to think of a toy as dead, but Huggy Wuggy is very much deceased. For every toy in the pile. If true, then you're standing in what amounts to a mass grave. It disturbs you, but at the same time, you weren't sure how you should feel. If every living toy behaved like Huggy...just some ravenous violent creature, then how sorry should you feel for them? In any case, even if they were mindless monsters, it still discomforting. Leaving live creatures in a pit to die isn't something you'd wish on anybody or anything. You move away from the pile. With one eye checking the body every so often, you explore the rest of the pit.
It truly is an abyss with no exit. The air tastes stale, and dust sparkles in the gloom. You find a thick pipe that’s just small enough to wrap your arms and legs around and try climbing, but it’s all but impossible with a broken arm.
You make a strangled noise of frustration, tears falling at the realisation of how bad this is. After everything, escaping a literal monster and getting close to discovery, you were gonna die in some dark, decrepit hole, alongside the very cause of your fall. Your body will rot down here with the monster's own, forever preserved. Or maybe it will just be yours, and someday someone will discover your bones among the pile of toys. God, no. That couldn’t happen.
You pace for an hour, clamouring up different pipes only to end up with further bruising, and further frustration. Huggy’s half-moon smile feels mocking. You circle past it again and again, wracking your brain for some kind of miracle. Aggravated, you kick the toy's outstretched leg as you pass your hundredth lap around the room.
You remember the time you saw an injured deer in your neighbourhood. It was spotted running with an arrow through its thigh, having wandered too close to humans. The animal had zigzagged around trees, trying to squeeze itself through fencing and ending up trapping itself in a delirious panic. You feel a bit like that deer with all this pointless pacing, and so you take a breath and stand still.
The factory groans and rumbles like a living being as you sink to the ground. The darkness eats everything when the phone light switches off. Better to conserve the battery.
It’s too easy to drift off, with strained muscles and a body that desperately needs to heal. You sleep for a time. Like a lapse of memory, there are empty dreams in a void of time, and then you’re awake again, feeling like you have the worst hangover of the century. The cold is worse now and you shiver. It's as if you were slowly being turned into a corpse by its death-like chill, as your body fights to use what little energy it has to create some internal warmth.
You sit up and look towards the giant toy pile. Huggy stares back, its body hunching over. You gaze around the pit, eyes adjusting to the low crimson light. Blinking away sleep, it takes you a moment to comprehend. You snap back to Huggy. The eyes aren't glazed with natural death. They are focused, and its body is tense. It’s watching you. You jump to your feet, only to feel a soft warmth curling around your ankle. By the time you react, it's too late.
Velcro imprisons your leg. Huggy gives a single yank and you’re thrown on your back, a scream rupturing from your lungs.
The long arm loops tight and it’s impossible to break free as you're dragged across the floor. You sink nails deep into its arm, but it's only fur, for fucks sake! Huggy continues to reel you in, mouth twisting into that awful gaping grin, blood dripping freely down its face. It sits upright, towering over you with a look that can only be described as starving.
“Please don’t kill me! Stop!”
You don’t know why you beg. It cannot understand, and surely if it did it would not care. Your broken arm scrapes the ground as you let out a pained cry. When you’re close enough, the monster’s other thick gloved hand springs forward and grabs your upper arm. You howl as it lifts you by the broken bone, dangling you before its face.
The muscles in your face spasm with the onslaught of agony, unable to focus on anything else, other than the wet grin and teeth drawing close. There was nothing you could do to stop this.
The toy’s face freezes, still as a statue. Its chest rises, panting with excitement. Cold, inhuman eyes swallow your cries. It’s not enough for something so hungry. It jerks you forward to its mouth and you throw out your broken arm instinctively.
The mouth closes down with a snap. A resounding crunch, and suddenly your hand comes free, covered in blood. You stare, bewildered. You’re missing three fingers. There’s no sensation for a moment, and then the heaviest throb of pain imaginable. Blood paints your entire hand red, and runs down your forearm into the yellow fabric of Huggy's glove. You wail and lash out with your feet, kicking the monster hard in the chest. It releases its hold and you tumble to the ground, scuttling away like a bug from its reach.
You press your mutilated hand to your chest, wheezing. It’s hard to decide where to focus. Your eyes spring from the monster to your hand. Blood soaks down the middle of your white top, the fabric sticking to your chest. You shake and grip your hand tight. Despite the shock, the importance of stopping it from haemorrhaging comes to mind.
Pale, terrified, all you do is sit there. The monster's jaw works as it finishes your fingers, a tongue slithering out to lick its teeth clean.
“Oh...oh.” it’s all that comes out. You cower there on the ground, and all the while Huggy Wuggy watches with a wicked grin.