TOY CRIME STORY PART 11

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The investigation cooled off after that. The toys went back to the way they usually did things. Wally and Mimi would occasionally visit Joey’s room, but they didn’t do anything suspicious. Mostly, they cried. They hated themselves. They never came here together.

Nightbeat tried to keep a full head of steam, but it all leaked out of him. He spent some of his time with Felix getting drunk. Sometimes with Angel, and even—every once in a while—with Spike. Cat taunted Nightbeat a great deal, and he tried to let it roll off his back, but it really hurt him. Joey had been a great kid, and now Nightbeat had failed him. More than once he found himself passed out in the closet from the previous night’s drinking.

One night, sick of the whole thing, Nightbeat drunkenly approached Cat, who sat on Joey’s bed with the brim of his hat perked up, making him look kind of dopey.

“I know you did it, you bastard,” Nightbeat said. He could barely stand by this point.

“Did what, now?” Cat asked. He smiled so far his head could have been split in two.

“You killed Joey. I don’t know how, and I don’t know why. I can’t prove jack shit. But you did it.”

“Oh, poor Nightbeat!” Cat said. His voice now took on the feel of a croon. “I didn’t do anything. But I expect nothing less from someone who couldn’t even figure out who tried to kill you.”

“You did that, too,” Nightbeat mumbled.

“Not I. But I know who did.”

Nightbeat was too drunk to figure out what Cat had just told him. He pointed a finger at the beast. “An’ ‘nuther t’ing. You’re a piece’a shit. I’ll see you unstuffed ‘fore the end’a my yerz.”

“I think not,” Cat said. He cocked his hat, and the shotgun inside blew Nightbeat off the bed and into oblivion.

The world around him ran red and flicked like flames. He saw through molded plastic Wally’s young face as he opened Nightbeat’s package. He’d been a Christmas present from Wally’s mom. Wally loved Transformers, and Nightbeat was his favorite. There were others back then, too. Cowardly Starscream. Heroic Bumblebee. Cosmic Cosmos. There was Galvatron, but Wally’s parents never got him Megatron, who looked too much like a real gun. Oh, the adventures they shared! Nightbeat solving crimes and fighting Decepticons. Wally had a good feel for storytelling through playtime, and Nightbeat got to enjoy a lot of stories.

But Wally grew up. He got into girls and rock and roll. Not so much sports, but plenty of weed. Nightbeat disapproved. He remembered being handled by one of Wally’s weed-smoking friends. It seemed like a harmless enough drug, but it made the room smell bad. Wally’s parents knew all about it, of course, but they kept a tolerant view of their boy. At least he wasn’t getting into any trouble.

Nightbeat screamed through the adolescent years until he was boxed away for what he felt would be forever. In that time, all he had was his mind and nothing else. He wasn’t even with the other toys. He was wedged between cardboard and a stack of papers. He spent a lot of time thinking about what would eventually become of him, if anything.

Nightbeat shoved through the light and into the hands of baby Joey. Never unsupervised, of course, but Wally wanted his son to enjoy the same things he’d liked as a kid. As Joey grew older, he got to play with more toys, but not very many Transformers. He overheard Wally telling Mimi once that they’d been thrown out by his mom when he left home. He pondered how much they would have been worth. Nightbeat thought it was an odd way to think about toys. They were worth more than money, right? They had to be. Memory was a lot more important.

Joey grew older until he couldn’t anymore. Nightbeat raged against the visions of Joey being pushed down the stairs by an unseen assailant. Thumping down near the end. Breaking bones. Breaking his neck. Dying at the bottom of the steps before his mother could help him.

That unseen being turned to face Nightbeat, and its face was a swirling miasma of faces, all familiar, all with their individual voices.

“Show me!” he screamed. “Show me your face!”

“No,” it growled. Teeth buzz-sawed out of the glop of ever-changing features, reaching out to take Nightbeat to pieces. “You know me.”

“I know! I’m going to rip the stuffing out of you until you’re nothing but a fucking rag!”

It laughed and swallowed him whole. Nightbeat rushed through a pink tunnel, and images of Joey’s death played on the walls around him. Joey screaming. Crying. The dry snap of his neck breaking. The anguish of his parents. The horror Nightbeat felt when he realized that this was a murder.

Joey screamed into infinity, and Nightbeat followed down with him. The railings at each side turned into sharp fangs, and the stairs warped into a long tongue. It took Nightbeat a moment to realize they were both falling down Cat’s mouth. The roar of genteel laughter boomed around them, filling Nightbeat’s chest.

Once past the teeth, Joey faded from existence. Nightbeat fell alone down a tunnel made of white and red stripes, just like Cat’s hat. “Poor stupid Nightbeat,” Cat whispered. “You can’t even solve your own attempted murder.”

Nightbeat crashed down on a flat floor, his gears rattled. Disoriented, he stayed down until he could get his bearings. The red and white checkered tiles beneath him didn’t help much. It had a hypnotizing effect that took more than a moment to shake off.

Around him were prison cells. All of them contained the rotting remains of a dead child, but they all still lived on, singing and talking and reading to while their time away. The cells rotated until Joey’s came into view. He stood in the center, his head dangling loosely from his neck like fruit from a tree. Rotten fruit. His skin was ragged and sloughing off in places. One of his eye sockets was empty. It stared at Nightbeat.

“Joey. I’m sorry. I—”

“You might as well have killed me,” Joey said. There was no passion to his voice, no anger or sadness. Just . . . nothing.

“That’s not true,” Nightbeat said. “I just haven’t found the killer yet! I’m still working on it! Give me time!”

“NO!” Joey roared. Still no passion. He opened his mouth wide, and the word boomed out, kind of like a speaker connected to a radio. “You failed me. I’m dead and in hell and you failed me.”

“I can fix this,” Nightbeat said. “Give me a chance.”

Joey slowly sank into the floor. “It’s too late.” Melting like a candle, leaving no puddle. His remaining eye filmed over with white before he disappeared. The bars slipped away, and Nightbeat fell to where Joey had been standing. A single drop of blood remained. He touched it, but it was dry. It still wouldn’t flake away.

The rest of the world shrank, and Nightbeat noticed that all of existence was a tiny disk of white and red that he knelt on. Blackness surrounded him. Then, a faint glow of red from below. He had a feeling in his guts like he was being lowered, though he couldn’t tell just from looking around. The red grew brighter until he saw it came from miles of flames just below him. Flames made from unstuffed toys. The stink overwhelmed him, and if he hadn’t already been on his knees, he would have been driven to them by it.

The fire came closer, and the disk showed no intention of stopping. Nightbeat found that he didn’t care if he burned or not. He’d failed Joey. He deserved to burn. He had no stuffing to remove, but fire would destroy him until he was nothing but a twisted metal carcass.

He felt warmer and warmer and hotter and hotter, and he screamed as it became unbearable and—