Fetch

by Scott Cawthon

  Greg looked up at his house to be sure neither of his parents were looking out the window. Nope. All good. The neighbor’s house was one story. They couldn’t see into his yard, and this part of the yard was sheltered from the street. No one was watching him. Even so, this probably wasn’t the best plan in the world.

  But it was the best he had.

  If the dog was a human, forensics would point to Greg in a nanosecond. But the corpse was a dog. He didn’t figure there’d be much of an investigation when the body was found. It looked like the nasty little thing had been mauled by a coyote.

  But it hadn’t been.

  As much as he’d love to convince himself that’s what happened, Greg knew no coyote would kill a dog and then pose it next to Greg’s bike. Because the dog had clearly been posed. Although a little blood from the dog’s neck and intestines stained the concrete next to Greg’s tire, it wasn’t nearly enough blood for the savagery of the dog’s wounds. The dog must have been killed someplace else.

  No, coyotes had nothing to do with the dog’s death.

  Greg realized he was frozen in place by the bush. He wadded up the plastic bag, trotted to the trash bin under his house, and stuffed it inside one of the bags of kitchen trash. He closed the lid.

  That’s when his phone buzzed.

  He didn’t want to look at it.

  But he had to. The incoming text was, as Greg knew it would be, from Fetch:

  Greg was still staring at the screen when another text came in, this one from Hadi: WRU?

  He should have been at Hadi’s house to catch the bus there five minutes ago. He quickly texted, SRY. L8.

  Then he grabbed his bike and pedaled out into the rain, hoping that the wind at his back would help him get to Hadi’s before the bus arrived.

  Greg spent the day paying very little attention to what was going on around him. Every chance he got, he pulled out his phone and scrolled back to delete old text messages.

  The spider had spooked him. But the dead dog had terrified him … Fetch had killed the dog to help Greg. What other “help” would Fetch try to offer? It didn’t take long after finding the dog for Greg to conclude that Fetch could do all kinds of nasty things with what Greg had said he wanted. So he tried to find any text in which he’d suggested he wanted or needed anything.

  But the problem was, Fetch seemed to be doing more than accessing old messages or conversations. Fetch seemed to be listening in to Greg’s life. How?

  Greg needed to talk to Hadi and Cyril. He needed their help.

  Unfortunately, two days passed before he was able to convince Hadi and Cyril to help him do what he knew he needed to do. He wasn’t able to tell them about the neighbor’s dog until after school. Predictably, they were freaked. Cyril wanted to forget it as soon as he heard it. Hadi, though, wanted to see “the stiff.” So he followed Greg home, and they stood together in the rain staring at the dead dog, which was now a wet, grisly pile of viscera and fur.

  “I want to go back to the restaurant,” Greg told Hadi once they were up in Greg’s room.

  Hadi stared at him. “After that,” he waved a hand in the direction of where the dead dog lay, “you want to go back?”

  “Well, want is probably not the right word. But I need to. I have to know what’s going on.”

  Hadi shook his head and said he was going home.

  But Greg was persistent. He hounded Hadi and Cyril relentlessly via text that evening and in person the next morning and on the phone the next afternoon until he convinced them to return to the restaurant with him. After school, they huddled together in the school lobby before racing through the rain to their bus.

  “It will still be raining tonight,” Greg told them. “Fewer people out.”

  “Yeah. Whatever,” Hadi said.

  “We’re going to die,” Cyril said.

  Greg laughed. “We’re not going to die.”

  So why was his stomach doing somersaults, and why had his heart relocated to his throat?

  It was a little harder to get away from their families on a Wednesday night, but they managed it by saying they were going to do homework together at Greg’s house. His parents, per usual, were out. His mom had taken a part-time job as a front desk clerk at one of the hotels. He wasn’t sure what that was about, and he didn’t ask. His dad was working late on his most recent build. “I hate the finishing work,” he’d complained that morning. “That’s when the client always gets nitpicky.”

  The first time they’d gone to the restaurant, Greg and his friends had been armed only with a crowbar and flashlights. This time, they also each brought along kitchen knives, and Hadi stuck his baseball bat in his backpack.

  It was just as easy to break into the restaurant the second time … actually, even easier. The service door lock they’d broken hadn’t been repaired or replaced. They just had to pull the heavy door open and slip through.

  Once inside, they flipped on their flashlights and shined them around. They started with the ground. Clearly, they all had the same idea. They were looking for footprints other than theirs in the dust covering the cracked blue linoleum floor. Unfortunately, they’d scuffed up the dust so much on their first trip it was impossible to tell for sure whether anyone else had been here.

  “Do we have a plan?” Cyril asked when they moved out into the hallway.

  Greg noticed all three of them were breathing fast. His voice sounded breathless when he said, “I think we should start by finding Fetch.”

  They walked shoulder to shoulder along the hallway. It was much quieter in the building this time because the rain, although steady, was soft. It was foggy, too. That tended to dampen sounds.

  “So, I found out something about the restaurant,” Cyril said. His voice sounded too loud and too forced.

  “What?” Hadi asked.

  “This was part of a pizza chain that … closed down after something happened at one of them.”

  “What happened?” Greg asked.

  “I don’t know. It took a lot of time to even find what I found. I just found a reference to it on a message board for people who like to explore abandoned places.”

  Hadi came to a dead stop, his flashlight beam jittering out onto the floor in front of him.

  “What?” Cyril asked.

  Greg looked along the illuminated shaft of Hadi’s light.

  Cyril squealed.

  Greg couldn’t blame him.

  Dog tracks came out of the pizzeria’s eating area and headed toward the lobby.

  “What the—?” Hadi still hadn’t budged.

  “You did turn it on,” Cyril said to Greg.

  “Yeah, way to go, dude,” Hadi said.

  Before Greg could respond, a clatter and crash came from inside one of the closed doorways along the hall.

  Cyril squealed again. Hadi dropped his flashlight.

  “We need to see what’s in those rooms,” Greg said.

  Hadi retrieved his flashlight and shined it in Greg’s face. Greg squeezed his eyes shut and turned away.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Hadi asked.

  “Probably. But I have to know what’s going on. I’m going to check it out. You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t want to,” Cyril said.

  “Fine.” Greg dug the crowbar out of his backpack, looked at the knife, and concluded that he didn’t have enough hands to hold a crowbar, a knife, and his flashlight. So he got a firm grip on both crowbar and flashlight then took five steps toward the nearest closed door. He noticed a small sign he’d missed the last time. It read CONTROL ROOM.

  He stuck the crowbar under his arm and reached for the doorknob.

  Hadi appeared at his side. “Can’t let you go in there alone, dude.” He produced the baseball bat from his backpack and gripped it hard.

  Cyril scurried over. “I’m not waiting out here by myself!”

  “Thanks,” Greg said.

  He turned the knob, took a breath, and threw the door open
. He quickly re-armed himself with the crowbar.

  All three flashlight beams sliced through the dusty blackness and revealed a bank of old computer monitors, keyboards, and what looked like control panels filled with dials and knobs. Nothing else was in the room.

  “I don’t see anything that could have made that sound,” Hadi said.

  Greg nodded. “Let’s try the next room.”

  “Wait.” Hadi crossed to the nearest keyboard and tapped keys. He turned a couple dials on the control panels. Nothing happened. He shrugged. “Had to check.”

  Cyril, gaining courage from his friend, came farther into the room and tapped and pushed buttons, too. Still nothing happened.

  Greg left the room and headed to the next closed door. As he figured they would, his friends followed.

  This door was marked SECURITY and the room behind it was similar to the first one. More dated computer monitors looked back at the boys blankly. Nothing worked.

  One last closed door. This one was labeled STORAGE.

  “The sound must have come from in here,” Greg said. He reached for the knob. But Cyril grabbed his arm. “Wait!”

  Greg looked at Cyril.

  “You never told us what you wanted to do here. Why are we here?”

  “Yeah, dude,” Hadi agreed. “You kept saying you had to ‘see.’ See what? Fetch? What are you going to do when you see him? Interrogate him? Reason with him? He’s a piece of machinery.”

  “Yeah,” Cyril said, “and when we left him, he wasn’t in there.” He pointed to the door.

  Greg didn’t know how to explain why he needed to be here. “I have to know whether someone else was here and is pranking us. And if it’s Fetch, I want to see how it’s working.”

  He didn’t bother explaining why he had to look in this room. Before they could protest again, he opened the door.

  And he fell back into his friends. Cyril screamed. Hadi gasped.

  Staring back at the boys, in the gleaming streams of their lights, were four life-size animatronic characters. They were at least five times bigger than Fetch, who was about the size of a beagle.

  Greg recovered himself first. He aimed his light around the room. Every time the beam landed on something, Greg’s breath caught. The room didn’t just house the four characters. It was also filled with animatronic parts and character costumes, a whole wardrobe full of them.

  Dozens of pairs of sightless eyes stared at them through the flashlight-transected gloom. Or at least Greg hoped they were sightless.

  His friends hadn’t spoken since they opened the door. Suddenly, a raspy humming sound filled the room. The boys’ lights skittered all over the space, searching for the sound’s origin.

  One of the animatronic characters seemed to move its leg, and then something small, dark, and furry shot out from behind it, arced toward the boys, barked, and then bolted out of the room. Before they could do more than gasp in unison, whatever it was disappeared from view.

  Cyril shrieked and tore from the room. Greg and Hadi were at his heels.

  This wasn’t a thinking moment.

  That was Fetch that had leaped out at them, wasn’t it?

  Had to be.

  Even though Hadi or Greg could have hit Fetch, or whatever that thing was, with the baseball bat or crowbar, Greg’s brain didn’t even consider that. Apparently Hadi’s didn’t, either. They had just one conscious idea in their heads: run.

  As they dashed down the hallway toward their exit, Greg tried not to hear the growling and claw-tapping that followed them. He also firmly closed the door on his mind when it tried to ask questions about how Fetch … No! Not going there.

  Get out, get out, get out. That was the only agenda.

  It took them only seconds to reach the door and squeeze through it, Cyril in the lead and Greg bringing up the rear. Was that a nip at his heel right before he pulled his foot through and shut the door?

  Not going there, either.

  Without speaking, the boys grabbed their bikes, but just as they did, a whine behind them made them pause. With a shaking hand, Greg aimed his flashlight at the pizzeria.

  A wet, stray mutt trotted toward them, but when Cyril yelped in fear, the dog veered away into the fir trees that surrounded the abandoned building.

  “It wasn’t Fetch.” Greg let go of his bike.

  “I don’t care,” Cyril said.

  “I do,” Greg said. “I want to find Fetch and figure out what he’s doing. I’m going back in.”

  “I’m going home,” Cyril said.

  Hadi looked from Greg to Cyril and back again. Greg shrugged—albeit a little shakily—and headed toward the pizzeria.

  “You can’t go in there alone.” Hadi let go of his bike, too, and followed Greg. He looked at Cyril. “The real dog made that noise we heard and probably the tracks, too.”

  Cyril hugged himself then sighed. “If I die, I’m going to come back and kill you both.”

  “That’s fair,” Greg said.

  The boys re-entered the pizzeria. They stuck close together as they went down the hall, closing the storage room door as they went past. Without speaking, they made their way to the dining area.

  Their flashlight beams zooming this way and that like spotlights, they crossed the room to the prize counter. They only got halfway there before they all paused.

  They didn’t have to get any closer to see what they came to see.

  Fetch was no longer on the counter.

  Greg flicked his beam to the floor and then all around the prize counter. No Fetch.

  “Maybe he fell behind the counter,” Hadi suggested, not sounding particularly convinced of his theory.

  “Maybe.”

  Since neither of his friends moved, Greg took a huge breath and shuffled forward. “Let me know if you see anything,” he told his friends.

  “We’ve got your back,” Hadi said.

  Greg wasn’t so sure, but he had to know if Fetch was there. Ignoring the trickle of sweat that ran down between his shoulder blades, Greg reached the counter and started tiptoeing around it.

  “Dude,” Hadi said, “don’t you think he would have heard us by now?”

  Greg flinched. Good point. He laughed, but the sound was more of a croak when it came out. So he rushed around the counter and threw his light beam everywhere it could reach.

  Fetch wasn’t there.

  Greg turned and looked at his friends. “Fetch is gone.”

  “What are you going to do?” Cyril asked.

  “I’m … not sure,” Greg confessed.

  Hadi, ever the optimist, jumped in. “What if you text him to stop? Or to leave you alone? He has to listen to you, right? It’s in his programming.”

  “Tried that.” Greg sighed. “Didn’t work.”

  “Could you give him an impossible task?” Cyril asked. “Something that would occupy his time forever?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, I’m just trying to find an easy—”

  “There is no easy solution,” Greg snapped. “I just … need time to think.”

  As a unit, the boys headed back out the way they’d come in. No one suggested looking around more. Not even Greg. None of them spoke. They just went back outside, got on their bikes, and pedaled hard into fog that was now so thick the restaurant disappeared into it. They pedaled in silence only broken by the pattering rain, the swooshing sound of their wheels on the wet pavement, and their panting breath.

  At the corner where they normally stopped to say goodbye before biking on to their respective houses, no one even slowed. They all just headed for home. Greg understood. None of them were ready to talk about what had just happened.

  Greg wasn’t sorry to get home and find his parents were still out. He was, in fact, relieved they didn’t see him. When he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, he was so pale his features almost disappeared into the blank whiteness of his face.

  A long, hot shower brought color back to his skin, and it brought con
scious thought back to his mind. Where was Fetch?

  Even though he knew Fetch would have had to leave the restaurant to dig up the spider and kill the neighbor’s dog, Greg had convinced himself Fetch went back to the restaurant when his duty was done. The idea of him being out there, somewhere, lurking …

  The hair on the back of Greg’s neck prickled. Suddenly remembering his phone, he stared at the green sweats he’d left crumpled on the floor. His phone was in one of the pockets.

  Taking a long breath, he bent over and retrieved the phone, checking for missed texts.

  Sure enough. There was Fetch’s latest text:

  H2CUS.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t hope to see you soon,” Greg muttered.

  Greg didn’t allow himself to ask all the questions that wanted to be asked after their latest encounter with Fetch. Instead, he decided to concentrate on school for a change, specifically, on Spanish. If he didn’t get on top of his Spanish homework, he was going to fail the class. So on Saturday morning, he texted Manuel asking if he had time to help him. Manuel didn’t respond.

  Greg shrugged. Okay, so he’d have to muddle through on his own. He opened his Spanish workbook and picked up his pencil.

  Then he snapped his pencil in half when he realized what he’d just done.

  “Oh no!” Greg shouted. He jumped up. He had to get to …

  “Crap!” He didn’t know where he needed to go!

  Greg grabbed his phone and called Cyril.

  “I’m not going back there,” Cyril said.

  “That’s not why I’m calling. Do you know where Manuel lives?”

  “Sure. He’s about a half mile up the street from me. That’s how we met.” He gave Greg an address. “Why do you need … ?”

  “I’ve gotta go. Sorry. I’ll explain later.” Greg shoved his phone in his pocket and tore out of his house. Grabbing his bike, he ignored the steady mist and pedaled as hard as he could.

  Greg nearly collapsed in horror when he got to Manuel’s house and saw that the front door was wide open. Was he too late?

  Right after he’d texted Manuel, he’d realized Fetch could have interpreted that text as instruction to retrieve Manuel. Given what Fetch had done to the neighbor’s dog, Greg was afraid Fetch might punish Manuel for not being available to help Greg. Or worse, Fetch might kill Manuel and drag his body to Greg’s house. There was no telling what the animatronic beast was capable of.