Fazbear Frights #2: Fetch

Stitchwraith Stingers #2

The second Stitchwraith Stingers epilogue.

Grim wasn't always lucid.

Well now, it wasn't good to fib. The truth was that Grim was rarely lucid. Being lucid made his teeth hurt. His teeth hurt when his eyes and his ears hurt. When he was lucid, the world had this way of assaulting his eyes and his ears. Everything was too intense, too much. Grim preferred to hang out in his own crazy world where the voices in his head ruled, even when he knew they were crazy.

Grim's teeth hurt tonight.

In the shadows, pressed against the corrugated metal sides of a storage shed near the train tracks, Grim pulled his dirty pink acrylic blanket tighter around his body. Though the blanket was damp and provided no warmth, it comforted him.

Also, because it wasn't just dirty—it was so filthy you had to pry at the blanket fibers with a fingernail to find a hint of pink—it gave him camouflage.

Camouflage was good. Ever since he'd walked away from his life, he'd done everything he could to be invisible: he hunched his five feet eight inches into several inches less than that; he ate just enough to keep skin hanging on his bones; he covered his long stringy brown hair with a floppy gray hat; he hid his long face under a matted beard. And he gave up his name for the nickname he'd been given. He made it his goal to be unseen.

He especially did not want to be seen right now. No way. No how.

He didn't want to be seen because he didn't like the pounding and clanking.

And he didn't like what he was seeing. He was seeing ominous things, things that hurt his teeth.

For the last five minutes, Grim's gaze had been riveted on the railroad tracks.

Or again—truth was important—not on the tracks themselves but rather what was on the tracks. What was on the tracks was disturbing him greatly.

On the tracks, illuminated by the peripheral glow of a security light, a cloaked figure was prying bizarre items from the rails. The figure was slightly hunched and moving in an awkward pitch-and-roll gait that reminded Grim of the way people walked after coming off a boat. Grim was only twenty feet or so from the hooded person, but he could clearly see both the figure and what it was collecting.

The person appeared to be unaware of Grim, and Grim intended to keep it that way. Grim's teeth wanted to chatter, and his body wanted to shake, but he willed himself still as he watched the mysterious figure pound at the end of what looked like a foot-long pry bar with a bright yellow end. The yellow end kept

wriggling free pieces of something Grim couldn't identify. So far he'd seen it collect a hinged jaw, a jagged row of what looked like bloody human teeth, mutilated human eyes, several bolts, a computer port, and chunks of metal with tufts of dark green fur.

Now he continued to watch while the figure pried up one and then two green oblong objects. What were those?

As if answering Grim's inner question, the figure held up the pieces. Even in the muted light, Grim could immediately discern what they were. In his previous life, he'd been a professor, and even at the rate he'd been pickling his brain cells, he still had many at his disposal.

Green rabbit ears.

Oh, his teeth.

The figure went back to prying, and it worked free of the tracks a large metal rabbit foot.

Grim had to admit to himself a modicum of curiosity about what the figure was doing. But his sense of self-preservation was stronger. So he sat, with aching teeth, as still as the bits of detritus the figure was collecting, until the figure put all the pried-up parts in a bag and disappeared into the darkness.