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One Night at Frankie's

By Psion

An Anthracite City Story

All Rights Reserved

The chilling winds of the endless winter had finally abated long enough for the cloaked woman to see more then a few feet in front of her. The weather was horrifying; if she didn't find shelter soon and make a fire she was going to freeze to death. A foot of snow covered the street as the short blond human made her way through the abandoned town. Nothing but empty buildings and burnt out husks remained in this suburban community after the alien Rik-Tah invaded the planet. Elizabeth Summers shook her head and fought to keep the cold from clouding her thoughts. No sense reflecting on how her life got turned upside down like this when she was hours away from freezing. Perhaps that building to her left would provide shelter as she waited out this storm and continued her journey to Anthracite City.

With the exception of a giant ceramic pizza hung on the awning and a single "F" forged in a cartoony style, the sign in front of the building was destroyed beyond recognition. Extending a trembling gloved hand to the door, she gave it an experimental tug and was relieved to find it unlocked. Guess whoever worked the last shift at this place wasn't interested in locking up before fleeing with his life. Opening the door and raising her P90 submachine gun to her shoulder, the petite wastelander switched on the LED flashlight screwed to the sight rail on top of her gun and stepped inside.

Even without a couple broken windows in the main storefront, the cavernous dining area and arcade made for a drafty place to spend the night. Maybe there was a storeroom or an employee lounge in the back that she could board up and make halfway warm for the night. Condensation from her breath hung in the air as she scanned the empty room filled with rows of tables ready to host a birthday party. The cavernous room was as silent as a grave as Elizabeth grumbled under her breath. "Skylights... if I ever get a say in the reconstruction I will push for skylights to be mandatory for the roofs of all large commercial buildings. No power, no lights, no problem." She quietly complained as her eyes finished adjusting to the dark gloom of her surroundings

Away from the fading light of the wintry afternoon sun and the snow blowing through broken windows in the front, the main party hall looked virtually untouched since the day it was abandoned. Chairs were neatly pushed in and a cone-shaped paper party hat was left at each spot. Some employee had just finished hanging up a string of brightly colored letters that read "Happy Birthday Timmy" in one corner of the sprawling room, the ladder still standing as if an employee would come back to fold it up and put it away. And then there was the stage at the opposite end of the room... even at this distance in a darken room, Elizabeth immediately recognized several figures from her childhood...

"This was a Frankie's? I thought the whole chain closed down a decade ago." She exclaimed in disbelief to no one as her flashlight shifted from one deactivated animatronic to the next. "Wow, the gang's all here. Frankie on vocals, Mike on guitar, Gloria on bass, and Rocky the Ninja on the drums. And all of them look pretty good, hardly any wear. A collector would go nuts for these." Elizabeth mused as she looked over the relics from her childhood.

Shaking her head and sighing, she pointed he flashlight towards the far wall to search for the backrooms. Maybe if she was lucky there was a pizza or two in the kitchen that were still somehow edible but at this point she'd be happy to just find a lounge with a door she could barricade before settling in for the night. A chill that didn't feel quite natural started to hang in the air when she heard it, a ringing telephone. That in itself would not have been remarkable if Elizabeth was still in a world where the power grid hadn't either been destroyed or rerouted to serve alien overlords. But now... did it mean this building had electricity? Did it have actual electricity that hadn't been generated by a crank generator or a steam engine Macguyvered out of junk?

Following the persistent ringing into the hallways of the employees-only section, the petite gunwoman entered a room with a reinforced steel door labeled "Security." On a cluttered desk with a phone and a metal-framed fan, the phone continued to ring ominously and filled the blond scavenger with a growing sense of foreboding. With no small amount of reluctance, she picked up the black phone and held it up to her ear.

"Hello?"

"Hello, hello? Is this thing on?" The voice on the other end asked before greeting her with a sinister laugh. "You have fallen into my carefully crafted trap. Soon my mechanical monstrosities will arise and shut you in here with them. Only by managing a limited supply of electricity and a complicated security system can you hope to survive the night and... what was that sound?"

With the receiver nestled between her ear and her shoulder, Elizabeth ejected the magazine of her P90, checked the heft, and popped it back in with a series of clicks that were as distinct as they were audible. The gunwoman remained silent as she abruptly hung up and took another; more detailed look, at her surroundings. Small room, barely bigger then a college dorm or office cubical, with two reinforced metal doors controlled by pushbuttons mounted into the wall. A small puddle of chilled blood seeped under a door in the back wall; opening to a broom closet where the psycho's last victim lay partially exposed to the outside thanks to a fist-sized hole punched in the wall, a lanky, nondescript man in his early twenties with brown hair and a name tag that read "Freddy." While no forensic scientist, Summers quickly visualized how the man died. Unarmed except for a small carpenter's hammer, he tried to lock himself in the closet and chisel a way out through the back of the closet, only getting far enough to smash a small hole before something repeatedly tore into his back with multiple symmetrical blades. A horrible way to go for multiple reasons.

A sudden noise, the sound of metallic claws clicking against cool ceramic tile, forced her to turn around with her gun raised. Two sets of claws, one in each hallway, two targets coming her way and fast. Slamming her fist into the left door button, she pressed her back into the left wall and raised her submachine gun to her shoulder, pointing at the other door.

Rocky the Ninja was first. A nightmarish shriek and a flash of gray fur and black bunraku garb was greeted with the abrupt roar of semi-automatic gunfire. Elizabeth didn't even fully register the animatronic raccoon's appearance until after he fell over in a heap of broken mechanical parts. Even ruined she could tell there was something different about the singing robot, something changed since she saw him on the stage a few minutes ago. Fingers had turned into sharp metal claws and his normally "child friendly" face had grown a menacing set of dentures. A mechanical engineering student in the world before the alien invasion, Elizabeth immediately thought of three different ways these alterations could have been hidden from a casual inspection. And as a survivor of the frozen apocalypse brought about by the dimension-hopping Rik-Tah, she had to reluctantly add things like "wizards" and "magic" into her understanding of the real world which only added so many other ways this twisted fun house could have come into being. Shutting door number one on the shattered anthropomorphic android, the blond gunner opened the other door behind her and readied herself for the next mechanical monstrosity...

Gloria was next, a shapely black-furred vixen that would have generated so many complaints if most of the world thought the way the furry fandom did. Granted, the borderline demonic-looking dentures Elizabeth's mysterious antagonist put on this particular animatronic definitely killed its pinup potential on Fur Affinity but Liz knew that probably wouldn't stop some people. No more then the fact that the short woman vaporized Gloria's head and torso with another burst of weapons fire that is. Pity it had to go this way, the vixen with the beehive hairdo was Elizabeth Summers' first furry crush...

Caught in a lull between rounds, Elizabeth ejected the P90's magazine and switched in a fresh one. Hmm, more ammo then she thought, she mused as she stuck the half-empty magazine in her pocket. Two animatronics down and she only burned through half of a mag, not bad. Unless this nutjob had more hiding in a storeroom somewhere, she might actually get through this without going through too much of her ammunition. Exhaling and doing her best to focus the adrenalin flooding her system, Summers felt time stretch into eternity as her senses sharpened, her mind registering the sound of Mike the green-furred robo-rabbit guitarist puttering around the locked door behind her and Frankie's deep, baritone laugh echoing through the opened door in front of her. Two down and two left to go, time to dance the bullet ballet...

Running out the open door and using the wall to leverage herself into a perfect summersault over the oncoming possessed animatronic, Frankie the lion watched with glowing infernal eyes as his target sailed over his head and sprayed a burst of projectiles into the mechanical vocalist's body. The leader of the band met the same abrupt end as his bandmates, all that was left was Mike...

Letting her P90 dangle by a shoulder strap, the wasteland survivor drew her Gsh-18 handgun from its hip holster and returned to the party hall. 9mm caliber ammunition wasn't perhaps the best choice for a mechanical opponent but hopefully the extended magazine would give her enough time to find a weak point in the endoskeleton. She just needed to destroy one more rogue animatronic and then this was over.

And there he was emerging from the other hallway leading to the security room, wielding his prop guitar like an ancient battle-ax and as disturbingly modified as the rest. Mike let out a high-pitched shriek before charging her, racing towards her with unnatural swiftness. Elizabeth fired twice, staggering her opponent as she shot out his porcelain eyes, then followed up one shot after another to the arms and legs. There was no point in targeting either the torso or the head, it was becoming increasingly apparent whatever was animating these things was not natural. Aim for the limbs, take out the joints, that was where the target was weakest. One good shot to both knees was all she needed, bringing the last machine down and forcing him to flail his limbs on the floor like a turtle turned upside down.

Exhaling, she holstered her pistol and slammed her boot into Mike's head, sending animatronic bits everywhere. As the green bunny stopped twitching, Elizabeth listened for signs of trouble. Nothing, nothing but a short, sweet silence quickly interrupted by another phone call. Sighing and putting a fresh magazine into her pistol, she took her time walking back into the security room and picked up the phone, prodding each of the slain animatronics with her P90 to make sure they were dead.

"How? How did you defeat my minions?"

"I don't know, maybe it would help if you didn't make them out of something that was only supposed to sing and dance for six-year-olds?" Elizabeth replied sarcastically.

The mad machinist was clearly about to say something but Summers cut him off. "How about you just go fuck yourself and take the opportunity to start running? I could search this building and the neighborhood, I could find a way to trace this call back to whatever hole you're hiding in. But I'd rather not because the blizzard outside has likely only gotten worse since I started shooting your little tinker toys." She shot back, slamming the phone back on the receiver and giving the building one more sweep. Fred the dead security guard was still a corpse, Frankie and his bandmates were still scrap metal, but Elizabeth had seen enough horror movies to know that dead things don't necessarily stay dead. On the positive side of things, the kitchen did have power and as she suspected, Frankie's never made its own pizzas. It always bought them premade from one frozen food place or another. Still, after ten minutes of carefully searching the freezer, she found a small pie that still looked reasonably edible and after a little fiddling with a commercial-grade microwave, she had a steaming hot cheese pizza.

Sitting in the party hall by herself, her gun set at the seat beside her and her surroundings illuminated by the light of a battery-powered lamp she kept in her backpack, she poured herself a plastic cup full of flat soda as the pizza slowly cooled. After a moment thinking about it, Elizabeth put on one of the cone hats and shook her head. "Happy birthday Timmy." She muttered, suddenly so very tired. In her mind's eye she could see it all; a full house hosting several parties, Frankie and the gang jamming out on stage. "How did that old song go?" Elizabeth asked no one in particular. "War, what is it good for? Absolutely fucking nothing." She answered to the same absent company. Biting into the still-warm pizza, Summers let the tears stream down her face as her mind wandered back to simpler, happier times...