Fazbear Frights #6: Blackbird

Blackbird

To avoid confronting an ugly truth, Nole falls prey to a monster that punishes past transgressions

It needs to be bloody." Nole sat backward on his chair, its straight back between his splayed legs. In spite of the chair's cheap tan plastic and the rest of the room's less-than-upscale ambiance, Nole managed to look cool and confident. Sam wondered how he pulled that off so easily.

Feeling like the nerd that he was, Sam tried to adjust his long legs to fit another of the cheap plastic chairs. He disagreed with Nole: "Horror's not in the blood. It's in the creep factor."

"Creep factor," Nole repeated.

"It's a technical term."

Nole nodded. "I must've dozed off when Grimmly was talking about that."

"More likely you were staring at Darla Stewart."

"You make a point."

"And we're not getting anywhere." Sam sighed and shifted in his seat again. His legs were cramping. He was hungry. And he was pretty sure he and Nole were the only pair in the room who hadn't come up with an idea yet.

Although Sam's back was to the rest of the space, he could hear the jumble of eight hushed conversations going on all over the gray-walled room. The classroom had little to muffle the intense babble: a few folding tables, some plastic chairs, a portable closet packed with sound equipment, and a viewing screen. Through an open door behind Nole, Sam could see the project room, which had open space for filming scenes, a green screen, and several shelves stuffed full of more AV equipment. The conversations between Sam's classmates were mostly incomprehensible because they were taking place in cautious whispers and mumbles, lest a brilliant idea get stolen. Occasionally, though, someone would get excited, and Sam could

make out a word: serial killer, zombie, vampire, demon. The words he heard drained some of the tension from his shoulders. If those were the other teams' ideas, maybe he and Nole still had a chance. They didn't have an idea yet, but at least they didn't have a done-to-death idea.

"You have to admit she has a fine caboose," Nole said.

Sam stretched all 37 inches of his legs and stared at his huge feet. Both Sam's legs and his feet defied the normal proportions that should have gone with his six-foot-five body. According to a chart his doctor showed him once, his legs should have been about 34½ inches long. You wouldn't think 2½ extra inches would be much, but apparently they were enough to make Sam look like a stork or a heron or a crane (he'd heard all three from various unkind kids). And those inches were enough to make him prone to grand displays of ungainly clumsiness, which prevented him from turning his height into something useful like, say, on a basketball court. All Sam's legs did, as far as he could tell, was get in his way.

"Earth to Sam."

"Huh?"

"Looks like we're lagging here, dude." Nole gestured out into the room behind Sam's shoulders. Sam looked around. Four teams were leaving the room. Two were getting ready to leave. Only two other teams were still talking. Great.

Actually, it was kind of great. Sam thought better in silence. He looked at his watch. The classroom was open for another half hour. They had thirty minutes to come up with something.

"Would you get out of that chair?" Nole flung his foot out and kicked the side of Sam's seat. "You're squirming so much you remind me of my nephew when he needs to take a piss."

"I can't get comfortable."

"My heart bleeds."

"There you go with the blood again."