The Last Birthday by Anita Morozova

Could I ask you not to publish it, please?

The smell of cheap pepperoni and synthetic birthday cake frosting clung to everything at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza — the carpet, the curtains, the coats of the shrieking children who ran between arcade cabinets and knocked over paper cups of flat soda. It was a smell Martha had always hated. Tonight, she would come to hate it for a different reason.

Susan had been so happy when they'd walked in. Nine years old, paper crown askew, laughing at something one of her stupid friends said. Martha, fifteen and already exhausted by the noise, had found a corner booth and scrolled her phone while the party happened around her. She was the responsible one tonight. Mom and Dad were working the late shift. Just stay with her, baby. She knows you. She'll be fine.

At some point, she looked up and Susan was gone.

"She probably ran off to look at Foxy," said Devon, Susan's best friend, barely glancing up from his cake. "She's obsessed with Foxy."

"She's been gone like twenty minutes," Martha said.

"Maybe she's in the bathroom." This from Lily, another classmate, already bored.

"She's a wimp," added a boy whose name Martha didn't know. "Probably got scared of the eye and bailed home."

Martha walked the perimeter of the main hall — past the animatronic stage where Freddy and his band sat inert and grinning under the stage lights, past the ball pit, past the row of prize machines. She checked both bathrooms, calling Susan's name into the stalls. Only the buzz of fluorescents answered her. She circled again. Then a third time.

The party ended. The kids left. The staff, cheerful and indifferent, began wiping down tables.

Martha walked home.

She already knew what she'd find, but her feet moved anyway, mechanically, key in hand. The lock turned. The hallway swallowed the sound. She listened for the TV, for music, for Susan doing that thing where she narrated cartoons at full volume.

"Susan?"

Nothing.

"Susan?! Hey!!"

She took the stairs two at a time. Susan's bedroom door was open. The bed was made — untouched — the stuffed animals arranged in a neat semicircle on the pillow. Susan had done that herself before they left. She'd been proud of it.

Martha stood in the doorway for three seconds.

Then she ran.

Freddy Fazbear's was locked. Of course it was. The parking lot was empty under a single sickly orange streetlight. Martha tried the front doors, the side entrance, the delivery gate around back. All locked.

She stepped back and looked at the building's face. No alarm sensors on the exterior. No cameras visible. There was a window low and dark along the side — some kind of office or utility room — with a thin gap where the latch sat loose in its frame.

Martha took off her hoodie. Wrapped it around her elbow. Closed her eyes.

The glass gave with a sound like a gunshot.

She laid the hoodie over the jagged frame and climbed through.

The room smelled of stale coffee and old paper. A security office — monitors dark, a wheeled chair shoved back from a desk. On the wall: a pegboard lined with keys on labeled hooks.

Restrooms. Manager's Office. Kitchen. Storage A. Storage B — Staff Only. Stage Access.

She grabbed them all, stuffed them into her jacket pockets, and stepped into the corridor.

The building was a different creature at night. The light came from emergency strips along the floor, casting everything in a dim red-green wash. The air was still carrying the smell of pizza and sugar, but underneath it now — something else.

She moved slowly, listening. Her footsteps on the tile were the loudest thing in the world.

Manager's office. Empty. A desk calendar, a framed photo of staff in Freddy's uniforms, someone's half-eaten granola bar. She checked under the desk, in the closet.

Kitchen. Commercial prep surfaces, a walk-in fridge, a deep fryer cold and full of congealed grease. She opened the fridge. Racks of prepared dough, sauce containers. She exhaled.

Storage A. Spare parts. Limbs. She didn't let herself think about the arm lying across a shelf, the matted fur, the blank eye. Animatronic parts. Just parts.

She stood outside Storage B — Staff Only for a long moment. The smell was stronger here. Sharper.

The key turned.

The room was large. Used for what, once, she couldn't tell — the far wall had been paneled over, the floor was bare concrete. There were suit parts here too, older ones, paint cracked and fur worn thin. Freddy. Bonnie. Chica. Foxy. Standing in a loose circle like they were mid-conversation, facing inward.

Martha's hand found the light switch.

Susan was on the floor in the center of the circle.

She was alive — Martha knew that first, before anything else, because her chest was moving. But her face was turned sideways against the concrete and there was blood on her temple, dried dark, and her party dress was torn at the knee. Her paper crown was somewhere else in the room. Martha saw it in her peripheral vision, crushed flat under one of Foxy's boots, and she did not know when that had happened or how and she did not let herself think about it.

"Susan." Her voice came out wrong. Too quiet. "Susan. Hey. Look at me."

Susan's eyes opened. They were glassy and slow to focus. "Marty," she said.

"Don't move. Can you move? Don't move yet."

"My head hurts."

"I know. I know, I've got you."

Martha got her arm under her sister's shoulders and lifted. Susan was heavier than she expected. She got her upright, took her weight, and turned for the door.

The light in the corridor had changed. Or maybe it hadn't. Maybe she was just scared.

She moved fast, Susan half-carried half-dragged against her side, down the long hallway toward the smashed window of the security office. Behind her she heard — she told herself it was the building settling, she told herself old structures made sounds, she told herself a lot of things in the length of that corridor.

She got Susan through the window first, then herself, scraping her palm on a shard she'd missed.

Outside. Cold air. Parking lot asphalt under her feet.

"Hello? I need — my sister's hurt, she was — I need an ambulance, I need—"

She gave the address. She was still talking when she heard the door.

Not the window. The front door. It opened from the inside.

The man in the uniform stepped out slowly. Manager, the name tag said. He wasn't calling the police. He wasn't asking if they were okay. He was looking at Martha the way someone looks at a problem they need to solve quietly and quickly, and she understood in that moment several things at once — why Susan had been there, why he hadn't searched for her, why there was no alarm system on the exterior of this building.

She grabbed Susan tighter and ran.

She was fast. She'd always been fast. But the parking lot had only one exit, and he knew that, and there were two of them, and he was not alone.

The last thing Martha saw clearly was the orange streetlight above the entrance.

Then it went out.