Chapter 1: No More: A Phone Call

23 0 0
                                    

Two AM had only just reached the clock that was hanging over the slightly-soiled wall of the apartment room when the phone started to ring; the owner of the apartment, due to the amount of stationary on his desk he was having to deal with, was still awake when he received the call. His new job as a factory worker in a warehouse only a couple of miles away from his apartment was time-consuming; he spent most of his working hours sorting out the stock throughout the warehouse and his free time was mostly spent on making reports on his findings and the amount of stock they had within, as well as the status of said stock. Sighing, the man stood up slowly and left the desk, his legs slightly aching from the exertion, and rubbed his face before turning towards the kitchen and entered; the one thing he could easily say, however, was that it was astronomically better than his original job...

Only five months before, in the early days of February, he had made the second worst judgement of his life; on the third of February, he had gone to Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria to answer the hiring advertisement he'd found in the newspaper that had arrived earlier that day to sign up for the Night Guard position. It had looked solid on paper; whilst the pay was just on the minimum wage, all he had to do was sit there in a five-by-five meter box, occasionally checking the security cameras in case there were any unsavoury individuals prowling around. Safety, simplicity, sentimentality; it was the perfect combination. With all this, along with the fact that he didn't have many choices job-wise, you could understand why he practically leapt at the chance; he could he know just what dwelled within?

Picking up the phone, Mike braced himself as he pushed the answer button and pressed the white earpiece up against his left ear; hopefully it was simply another over-obnoxious salesman trying to convince-slash-insult him into buying one of their products. Whilst there hadn't been any other incidents since, the day after he had forcefully resigned as Night Guard had led to him answering a call coming from Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. The call had come from the restaurant's assistant phone; something that is only supposed to be called to in the case of an emergency, not from.

This would be unusual on its own, especially considering the fact that the entire point of the specific phone within the pizzeria was for either management to be able to call the Guard if any problems were around, or for messages to be relayed to the Guard; as he had learnt from the fact that a previous Night Guard had sent messages for his replacement about being able to handle the threats that lurked within.

"Hello?" Mike spoke tiredly through the phone, hoping for both his own tolerance and sanity that it wasn't going to be some demonic war chant.

As it turned out-something that he really shouldn't have been surprised about-it wasn't that.

It was even worse.

"Mike Schmidt." Charles Oliver Garfield-Multi-millionaire, entrepreneur, the current CEO of the Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria as well as the overall RoboTech parent company, the biggest scumbag in the world, and Mike's old boss-was the man on the phone. He donned a voice that was powered by an unmerciful version of authority and was laced with a snobbish venom; overall, not the brilliant person the public made him out to be. "It's rather pleasant to speak with you once more."

First lie of the conversation; the last time they had spoken to each other had been on the morning Mike had resigned and the Night Guard hadn't held back; this man had not only lied to him about the murderous animatronics he had been forced to deal with that week, but had known fully what they got up to and had threatened to have Mike arrested and horribly killed if he hadn't come back after the first night. However, Mike knew that if Garfield was calling him about his former employment at Freddy's, he was on thin ice.

Like always.

"Same here. Why are you calling me at this hour? In fact, why are you calling me at all?" The question wasn't able to come out calmly and came out aggressively, much to Mike's regret; simply enough, he simply couldn't help it. "My contract ended months ago, when I quit."

The Shift Must Go OnWhere stories live. Discover now