Fearless Freddy Forty-Four

Freddy forty-four is fearless. He runs towards danger, never away, as reckless and as deadly as any creature can be when he has nothing left to lose.

He sees a solider in a nearby yard, the pink hands and head poking out of the drab green fatigues. The enemy runs when he sees him, and Freddy chases after him, crashing through the door of a modest house, and skidding across the polished wooden floor of what had once been a large living room.

The soldier is out of sight, and Freddy shrugs. The motion activates the holster, causing his Spitgun to slide over his shoulder and into his hands. He presses the trigger and holds it down. The weapon breathes out with a spat, and in with a clatch. “Spat-clatch, spat-clatch,” over and over and over again, ripping, rending, routing everything it points at, uncaring whether it is furniture, drywall, or human flesh.

Freddy lets out a scream as the slugs fly. It’s a primal wave of purest joy rushing in to fill the hole left behind where his survival instinct once was. He bellows and whoops as the smell of gun smoke fills his nostrils. Once, not so long ago, before they put a chip in his head, he would have been terrified by the smell. Now he loves it. It makes his mouth water, like fresh, ripe fruit.

Something impacts hard against the mesh of Freddy’s armor, and he stumbles backwards, the heavy gun slipping out of his hands and dangling from his harness. His feet start sliding out from under him, and he crashes backwards into a table. The air is gone from his lungs. He feels like he is choking, or drowning, but he literally can’t panic. Time slows down as the chip tries to compensate. One of his long arms reaches out, grasping for the doorway, but it is too far away. He falls downwards to the floor, but Freddy is still rational and focused as the enemy soldier races towards him, a gun in his hands. He growls with anger.

The chip in his head, his digital conscience, gives him a taste of terror. For a moment his fear flares, then flickers and fades. It puts him back on track, on target, on point, on mission. It gives him the will to survive and Freddy twists just enough to let the enemy’s bullets whiz by his head. One grazes him, burning hair, and leaving a raw crease across his gray skin.

Rolling forward, and up onto his feet, he charges the enemy. They both grunt with the collision, then grapple and grope. The chip fires adrenaline into his system, but he barely needs it. He’s naturally stronger than the pink solider, and he slowly twists back the enemy’s hands until he hears something snap once, then twice. He wraps his arm around the enemy’s throat and uses the other to pound his face with a fist until his own flesh becomes bloody and bruised. The only sounds that come out of the enemy’s now are short, ignorable mewling, like those of a baby.

Dropping the solider to the floor, he picks up his Spitgun, taking his time to check it before he shoots again. The first slug ends the enemy’s muffled crying.
He bursts out through the back door, the gun still coughing. A grenade lands at his feet and he screams with delight as he kicks it away. It explodes in the air, a fragment of it bouncing off his armor. His muscles flinch from the impact, but his eyes are still wide, white, and unblinking.

Out on the street Freddy Forty-Four joins his brothers as they route the enemy, chasing them down into a cul-de-sac. When the hairless creatures have nowhere left to run to the Freddys raise their long black arms into the air and bare their fangs at the survivors. Some of the hairless are soldiers, and they rip away their weapons, then slap them to the ground.

The Freddys beat at their chests with black hairy arms, and their armor rattles like thunder. The enemies cry and scream, terrified by the shaggy monsters that surround them. Their terror is useless, undirected, and impure.

When the retreat is called the chip in his head switches from flight to flight. Fear burns through every fiber of his body until he can think only of escape. He isn’t alone: all the Freddys turn as one, racing back to the safety of the handlers and their cages. The feeling is so complete that it is almost a new emotion, and Forty-Four can barely feel his bruised knuckles pounding against the ground as he runs home towards the hairless man that he calls friend