Five Nights at Freddy's Fazbear Frights Collection, page 131
He looked around the room. Without his nightstick, he felt exposed and vulnerable. He needed a weapon. He spotted a hammer he’d forgotten to return to the supply closet after he’d used it to fix his desk a couple days before. He picked it up, hefted it, swung it, and nodded, satisfied. This would work.
He took a breath, checked the monitors again, and turned toward—
Wait.
He looked back at the monitors. He blinked and rubbed his eyes.
His vision was a little blurry, probably from both the blood in his eyes and the blow to the head. Was he seeing that wrong?
He leaned toward the monitor in question.
No. He wasn’t seeing it wrong. He was seeing what he was seeing.
Where was the animatronic that was supposed to be latched, immobile and trapped, to the wall in the inner hall?
Hudson flung the office door open. Gripping the hammer so hard his knuckles turned white, he strode down the hall to the—
Oh hell.
It was gone. It really was gone.
Hudson gawked at the empty hooks hanging from the wall.
Hudson heard a scuffling sound behind him. He whirled.
Nothing was there.
Or was something there, hiding just past that pile of character suits?
Hudson pulled out his flashlight and shined it around the hallway.
No. He didn’t see any movement.
He took a step down the hall, moving toward the bathroom. Turning in circles constantly, he tried to be aware of the entire hallway at once. He wished he had eyes in the back of his head.
He made it to the men’s bathroom without further incident. Pushing the door open, he tensed and raised his hammer. Who knew what was lurking in here? Was the mutilated rabbit waiting for him?
Hudson snorted at the word rabbit. He was thinking of the animatronic as a rabbit because it made him feel better to think of it being about as threatening as a teddy bear. But, of course, that was ignorance.
“Stupid,” the Mr. Atkin voice said.
Hudson whirled.
He was alone.
Again, he couldn’t tell where Mr. Atkin’s voice came from. Because it was his voice. Hudson was sure of it.
For once, Mr. Atkin was right. It was stupid to think of the animatronic as a rabbit. It was as much a rabbit as Hudson was. No, the abomination that Hudson’s friends had so calmly installed this morning was not a rabbit at all. It was a robot. And it was more. Hudson was pretty sure the remains of a corpse were stuck inside the rabbit-suit skeleton. He wasn’t one-hundred percent convinced, but he was convinced enough.
Quickly checking to be sure all the stalls were empty, Hudson held the hammer with one hand while he splashed water on his free hand. He quickly realized this was a clumsy way to clean up that wasn’t going to work, and after double-checking the room, he set down the hammer and started to wash his hands in preparation for cleaning up his face.
He never should have set down the hammer.
Hudson went from standing still to backpedaling toward the handicap-accessible stall in a half blink of a second. He was by the sink. And then he wasn’t. Now he was skidding across the bathroom, hauled by unseen hands toward the toilet in the biggest stall.
Hudson screamed, “Stop it!” and tried to grab at the stall doorway as he went through it. He couldn’t get a grip on it to stop his progress.
He slid the few feet to the toilet.
“Hold him down!” one of the boys shouted. “Get his shoulders,” another one yelled. Hudson got one last glimpse of the gray linoleum floor of the boy’s bathroom before he felt his head going into the toilet. He closed his eyes and his mouth just as he was submerged. Then the water swirled to the sound of laughter.
Hudson flailed and thrashed and fell back into the closed door of the stall. He coughed, spit, and tried to upchuck what little food he had in his stomach.
Water sluiced down his neck and trickled under his shirt. “Get away from me!” he screamed at the bullies tormenting him, even though he knew that yelling would spur them to do something else to him.
He tensed, bracing for another assault.
Nothing happened.
Hudson looked around. His gaze fell on the floor … the black-and-white floor.
He squinted at it, then put a hand on it. No gray linoleum.
His upper lip curled at the scent of urine. Hudson hefted himself to his feet, fumbled with the stall door, and bolted for the nearest sink. He stuck his head under the faucet and scrubbed at his face and hair with the hottest water he could stand. When he was done, he used a pile of paper towels to dry himself off as well as he could.
Then Hudson looked back into the stall he’d just exited. He stared at it. What was wrong with it? Something wasn’t right.
Hudson took a step back. Then he took two steps forward.
No, that wasn’t possible.
But it was.
The toilet in the stall and the stall floor were completely dry. And it smelled the way the rest of the bathroom smelled—like soap and disinfectant.
If he’d just whipped his head out of a urine-filled toilet, water would be splashed all over, and the stall would still have that acidic putrid scent. How could the stall look suddenly pristine?
Hudson couldn’t make sense of this, and it made him angry.
“Think you’ve gotten me, don’t you?” Hudson shouted.
He didn’t know whom he was shouting at, and that made him even angrier.
“What do you want?” he screamed to whom or what he didn’t know.
No one and nothing answered.
Hudson breathed heavily for several seconds. Then he sighed. “Okay. I give.”
He wasn’t sure what it was going to accomplish to give in to his opponent … who was his opponent? But maybe acting meek could buy him some time to figure out what was going on. Ha! Acting meek? He wasn’t acting at all! He wanted to surrender, wave the white flag, and roll over on his back like a submissive puppy. He wasn’t up for whatever kind of warfare he was in. He didn’t understand it, and he wasn’t equipped for it.
Speaking of which … He picked up the hammer.
He didn’t want to stay in the bathroom all night. He might as well head back to the office. He took a step.
He stopped when he heard a chuckle.
That was a chuckle, right?
Yes. There was another one.
Now he was being laughed at.
Where was the laughter coming from?
Sounded like it was coming from above him. Hudson looked up.
Sure enough. There was the source of the laughter. The yellow-green rabbit’s head was hanging out through the opening of the big vent high on the wall.
Its mouth was open, and it was laughing its head off.
Hudson roared and threw his hammer at the tooth-filled head.
The head disappeared back into the vent.
Hudson stared at the opening. He had to pursue. Didn’t he? First, if he didn’t pursue, he’d know he was a coward. Second, how would he know where the rabbit went if he didn’t follow it? If he didn’t know where it was, he was in more danger.
Before he could think more about it, Hudson jumped up onto a toilet seat, climbed onto the pipes, then to the top of the stall door. He grabbed the lip of the vent and heaved himself up into the cavernous tube above the ceiling. Once there, he went rigid, expecting further attack.
Nothing happened. He pulled out his flashlight, flipped it on, and shined it around.
He was alone.
He stopped and sat in the giant vent. What was he doing in here? This was crazy. Did he really want to go after the animatronic rabbit?
Hudson straightened his shoulders. Yes. Yes, he did.
He wasn’t going to be a sniveling kid anymore. He was going to stand up to the bullies and his miserable stepdad. He was going to go rabbit hunting.
Hudson giggled at his joke.
Did his giggle sound a little demented to his own ears?
Wasn’t he slipping in and out of his present and his past? For a second, he was a kid pretending he had the courage to go after the bullies who hurt him.
But it was just a second. He knew where he was. And he knew he had to go on the offensive or he was going to lose his mind.
Getting onto his hands and knees, Hudson put his flashlight in his mouth and crawled away from the opening to the men’s restroom. Stopping every few feet to take the flashlight from his mouth and aim it this way and that while he listened for sounds, he got about twenty feet before he encountered his first character head.
Startled, he lifted his own head and bumped it on the metal above him. He scuttled backward and stared at the face looking back at him.
It was Freddy Fazbear himself.
Not really. It was a Freddy costume head, an old, nearly threadbare one. Or was that threadbear?
Hudson giggled again, and he had to admit the giggle was too childish sounding.
He needed to focus on the task at hand. Find the escaped rabbit. No. Find the bullies. No. Find the strange animatronic.
He scooted forward to a vent corner. He peered around the corner, and he spotted another head. Again, he jumped so violently he banged the top of his head against the metal above him.
He forced himself to breathe calmly as he studied the head. It was Chica’s, though her teeth were half gone, and her bill was torn.
This head was still attached to part of Chica’s body. The body had just a shoulder, an arm, and a hand.
Hudson gave the thing a wide berth, watching it to be sure it wasn’t going to suddenly grow feet and come after him. He didn’t stop watching until he rounded a corner.
Hudson didn’t know how long he crawled through the vent system. He also didn’t know how many heads he found. He lost track of both time and sensory input. Every stretch of the vent seemed like every other. Every turn was both familiar and unfamiliar. Several times he was sure he got a glimpse of yellow-green fur up ahead. Each time, he stiffened and readied himself for an attack, but one never came.
Twice, Hudson heard the scrabbling of little claws on the metal in the vent, and he spotted one of the rats. He found rat droppings, too.
“Gross,” Hudson said more than once when he put his palm on rat poop.
Sometimes when he stopped moving, Hudson was sure he heard swishing sounds or tapping sounds or clinks or bumps from ahead or behind him. Mostly, though, he heard his own breathing—his own ragged, labored breathing.
Finally, his knees sore and his head throbbing and tingling, he decided he was never going to win a game of hide-and-seek in these vents. And he had to get back to the office and rewrap his head.
So, he turned to crawl down a vent tunnel that went toward light. He wasn’t sure where he was in the building—he’d gotten totally disoriented—but he was sure he had the leg strength to kick out a vent cover, and because the vent openings were so huge and the ceilings weren’t unusually tall, he figured he could drop from the vent opening to the ground no matter where he came out.
He began crawling ahead.
But something grabbed his foot.
Something grabbed his foot … and held on.
Swallowing a scream, Hudson turned and looked behind him. He fully expected to see nothing because he kept seeing nothing when he turned to check sounds.
But this time, something was there.
Screaming, Hudson yanked his foot toward his body and sat up. Once again, he bashed the top of his head against the vent tunnel ceiling, but he didn’t pause to care about it because the thing hanging on to his foot was still hanging on.
“Get off!” he screeched. “Get off!”
Using his flashlight, he beat at the yellow arm that had a grip on his foot.
It was Chica again … the Chica head attached to a shoulder, arm, and hand. And the hand was hanging on to Hudson’s foot as if his foot was the most important thing in the world.
Hudson shook his foot and pounded on the yellow hand that wouldn’t let go.
“I like you,” a woman’s voice said. Not just any woman’s voice—Faith’s voice.
Hudson froze.
He shined his flashlight back and forth in the vent tunnel. Then he aimed the light at Chica’s mouth. Had the voice come from Chica?
“I like you,” the voice said again.
The voice didn’t sound like it was coming from the Chica head. Just as the Mr. Atkin’s voice had come from a void Hudson couldn’t locate, so did this one. This voice, however, had a more immediate impact on Hudson. He felt it squeezing his heart, touching him the way it had when Faith said those very words to him on their first—their only—date.
“I like you,” Faith had said.
It was a different “I like you” than the casual way she’d said the words at work before she basically told him to ask her out. In the restaurant, under the muted lights in the alcove where their small table was tucked, Faith’s eyes had looked so soft and sincere when she said it. And it wasn’t just “I like you.” What she actually said was “I like you a lot, Hudson. You’re a nice guy.”
And then she reached across the table and touched his hand. Her fingers were so smooth and warm. And when he turned his hand over and took hers in his, she didn’t protest. She just smiled at him in a way no one had ever smiled at him before.
It was the best moment of his life.
Unlike this one.
Now Hudson wasn’t in the restaurant with Faith. He was in the huge vent, with a piece of an animatronic glommed onto his foot.
Aware of the pressure still grasping his foot, Hudson tried to lean forward and use his fingers to pry Chica’s hand from his shoe. But that was a bad move … because Chica just shifted her grip. Now she was holding his right hand.
Faith hung on to Hudson’s hand when he walked her home. She smiled the whole time, too. She listened to him, laughed at his jokes, and at one point, she even put her head on his shoulder for a moment. A strand of her hair blew up against his neck. It felt so silky, and it smelled like berries.
Hudson welcomed the warmth, the connection. He looked down at his hand, entwined with—
It wasn’t Faith’s hand in his.
“No!” Hudson screamed.
He no longer felt touched, not emotionally anyway. Obviously he was being touched, literally, by the yellow hand. And maybe he was touched in the head, too.
Hudson swung his arm around, which in turn swung the Chica parts around. He battered them over and over against the vent tunnel’s sides. Chica was oblivious. She held on.
He had to get out of here. Doing his best to not think about the animatronic part attached to his right hand, Hudson crawled ahead, making for the vent cover he’d had his eye on. He knew if he could get out of the relatively confining vent space, he’d have more room to maneuver Chica off his hand.
Ignoring Chica’s continued expressions of determined love, Hudson crawled to within a couple feet of the vent cover, turned his body, and kicked the cover loose from the wall. Crawling forward, he shined his light down into the room below. He was backstage.
Wow. He was totally turned around. He’d thought he was on the opposite side of the building.
Turning again, Hudson exited the vent tunnel feetfirst, dropping to the floor and immediately swinging his arm in a wide arc to slam Chica against the floor. When her grip loosened, he flung her free and kicked her into a pile of costume parts on the far side of the dressing area.
“I like you,” he heard again.
And then he heard a sound he’d never heard before. It was a sound he could barely describe.
It was a roar, he thought at first, an especially shrill roar with distinctive separate tones that told him it was a combined roar, the combined roar of many, many voices. It was also a breath, a great exhale, and a groan all at once.
“What—?” Hudson began.
The costume parts began to tear the Chica parts to bits. Like a frothing, churning pool filled with fuzzy, colorful piranhas, the costume parts came to life, and in seconds, they pulled Chica apart and ripped her into a hundred pieces.
He would have kissed Faith good night by her door after their date, but her roommate opened the door and walked between them just as he was making his move. Later, after Faith called to ask if he’d done it, he realized the roommate had opened the door and walked out deliberately to keep him from kissing Faith. That was probably the moment when it all began to come apart.
As quickly as the attack on Chica began, it ended. The pile of costume parts was once again just a pile of parts. It didn’t look any different than it had before.
And now Hudson was looking at wisps of yellow fabric. Chica had been reduced to almost nothing … just like Hudson. Faith’s rejection had torn his heart and his hope into little bits.
He looked at his hands. Was that yellow fuzz under his nails?
Hudson wiped his hands on his pants several times.
And once again, Hudson was alone in the stillness. Not liked. Not capable of understanding what was going on.
Hudson turned away from the yellow tufts of fur. He ran back toward the office.
When he reached the end of the hall, however, he stopped. He looked down at his empty hands. He’d lost his nightstick. He’d lost his hammer. With the animatronic wandering somewhere in the building and with everything else going on—what was going on?—he needed a new weapon.
He veered away from the office, in the direction of the kitchen.
When Faith and her team first designed it, the kitchen was only going to be a replica of one of the pizzeria kitchens. But then management decided they wanted this attraction to be available as a venue for parties. That’s when the fake kitchen became a real kitchen.
Over the last few days, Barry and Duane had been bringing in boxes of kitchen supplies. They were still stacked up next to the counters. Surely one of those boxes contained a knife or something that could be used as a weapon.
Hudson reached the kitchen without anything else weird happening, and he found what he needed in the second box he opened. Continually checking over his shoulder, Hudson armed himself with a butcher knife and a rolling pin.
Feeling only a little ridiculous as he left the kitchen, he held both weapons ahead of him as he hurried back to his office. Twice along the way, he was sure he heard a clickety-click behind him, but when he checked both times, nothing was there.
