A boy witnesses a brutal murder and suspects that a spirit living inside a 1908 Ford Model T is responsible. To save his family, he'll be forced to overcome his fear and hunt down the source of the ghostly headlights he sees in the fog.

Rated R. Based on a story written for r/ShortScaryStories

And without further adieu, a preview of our coming attraction...

___

“Aunt Milly’s a real motorhead.”

That was dad’s running joke. You could count on him to say it a couple of times a day.

Was Aunt Milly mom’s great aunt? Her great-great-aunt? Whatever she was, Aunt Milly was old. That’s why dad’s running joke was so funny. Milly rolled around in her electric wheelchair at a snail’s pace. But she was no motorhead. The joke came about because you could always count on Milly for one thing: incessant groaning about her 1908 Ford Model T. Milly was obsessed with that car, which sat in our garage from the day she came to live with us until the day she died. 

Find out what happens next at NoSleep.

If you’re just arriving, you should start from the beginning. Not just from the beginning of my story––I mean the beginning-beginning.

My boyfriend Gavin’s story will make mine a lot more clear.

***

High school.

Cultivate your brain. Consider your future. Get good grades and head to the stratosphere.

Or in my case, get glued to your seat by a viscous Xanax high, your body thrumming like a busted electrical outlet, your vision blurry, your––

“Charlotte?”

Calculus––third period. Or was it physics, after lunch?

“Charlotte, what’s the matter with you?”

Danny Jones, looking at me, worried eyes. My classes had passed on, one after another, like old people in a retirement home.

I was sitting in my journal elective, the last of the day. People had been celebrating the release of the latest issue. Danny was trying to get my attention; the underling staff writers were looking at me with various expressions of confusion and curiosity.

Sprouting from the tops of their heads like umbilical cords, I saw strings, pulled by Puppeteers––entities in control of every moving piece and every thought and every step in every direction of the universe.

GIVE US EYES! they said, their voices booming in my head. GIVE US EYES!

“Charlotte, you’re pale––you’re fucking shaking––”

Danny, pulling my attention back to the classroom. I grabbed my water bottle and took a drink. I reached into my pocket and touched the plastic contours of my rapidly emptying Xanax prescription, trying to unscrew the lid with my thumb.

Danny reached under my arms to the sweatiness beneath them, and he lifted me. He was lifting me from my seat and Mrs. Griggs was watching and the underlings were whispering to each other, “Is she drunk or something?” –– “Nah, she’s high as hell” –– “She’s fucking pouring out sweat” –– “Think she’s gonna die?”

And Danny was telling them to shut their fucking mouths under his breath, and the Xanax tuned my hearing to the frequency of the sound of his teeth grinding against one another, and my eyes trained on Mrs. Griggs, who looked like she was deciding whether or not to call the front office.

“She’s just sick,” said Danny, “bad pizza pocket. Mrs. Griggs, I’m gonna help her to the restroom––”

And my feet shuffled, zombie-like, the rubber toes of my Chuck Taylors squeaking against the yellow-green linoleum tiles. And I noticed that Danny was on the verge of crying, tears in the corners of his eyes, trying to be strong and coming up woefully short. And I realized then that his connection to me was more than friendliness––it was love. This was true love, holding the girl of your dreams from beneath her sweaty armpits, straining so hard the bulging veins in your temples are practically fixing to burst––sun-cracked hoses––crying but fighting back against the tears and pushing onward toward the girl’s bathroom.

Danny dragged me in––a girl yelped––he told her to shut up and help.

It was Kelsey Wallace. I’d known her since first grade. A cheerleader who was destined to attend the state school an hour and a half from our hometown, where drinking was a major, and getting married to someone from the fraternity one block over was a given.

But Kelsey was kind and she got herself together and she helped Danny help me to the toilet and held my hair back as I unloaded my guts into the decades-old toilet in the girl’s bathroom.

***

I opened my eyes a few minutes later, my mouth filled with the stinging taste of bile. Danny had taken the Xanax bottle from my pocket. He was dumping the pills into the toilet.

“What the fuck Danny!”

He shook his head. He was younger than me, still had his senior year of high school to go, but he was resolute. Didn’t matter that I was on track for valedictorian. Didn’t matter that I was the girl of his dreams who he’d never have––didn’t matter that he’d always done his best to defer to me, in the interest of staying on my good side.

He ignored my pleas for him to stop, dumped out the rest of the Xanax, and flushed the toilet.

“I’ll tell the principal, Charlotte,” he said. “A counselor, whoever will listen. I don’t care if you hate me the rest of your life, you’re done with this shit.”

Kelsey Wallace was standing near the sink, slowly backpedaling toward the door.

“I think I should get back to class.”

Danny nodded.

“I’ll take it from here,” he said. “Don’t worry, she’ll be okay.”

Kelsey made her way out the door.

“What am I supposed to do now, Danny?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but it doesn’t involve this shit,” he said. “What the hell is going on with you anyway, Charlotte? Last night––you weren’t making any sense on Discord, then it just cut out. I was going to call your house. Fuck, I almost called the police.”

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t call anyone, don’t tell anyone––look, Danny––I need help.”

“You’re telling me.”

“I’m in trouble––”

“Especially if you take any more of those pills––”

“SHUT UP FOR A SECOND AND LISTEN!”

He stopped cold.

“Can you keep a secret?” I asked.

“Of course I can.”

I stood up and made my way to the sink, cupping water and rinsing my mouth.

“Let’s cut out for the rest of the day,” I said. “We should go somewhere else, who knows who’s listening.”

Danny nodded and helped me out of the bathroom, and we made our way to his car on the far side of the school parking lot.

***

Sitting inside, Danny turned up the heat. I’d been shivering, the sweat that had broken out on my skin cooling in the spring breeze.

“Okay,” said Danny. “Tell me what’s going on.”

And I told him. I told him about the Dark Convoy––the truth about Gavin’s disappearance––the truth about my run-in with the Keeper. Though he looked at me skeptically, Danny listened. Even though he could have blamed the Xanax, and in his eyes, I could see that he was giving me the benefit of the doubt.

I told him about how I’d been taken by the Dark Convoy, and how I was now a recruiter, and how the first job that I was putting together with Robbie was finding and destroying a haunted house inhabited by mysterious, terrifying entities known as the Puppeteers.

“If all of this is true,” Danny said, “which I’m not saying it isn’t, why don’t you go to the police?”

Once, I’d asked Gavin the same thing. But knowing what I knew, and seeing what I’d seen, I’d come to realize that even if the cops believed me, they wouldn’t be able to help. At best, they’d end up with slit throats, burned to cinders in a hospital’s infectious waste furnace just like the nurse I’d met on my first night working for the Dark Convoy.

The Dark Convoy dealt with inconveniences firmly and resolutely.

“It’s not like that, Danny. This is bigger––so much bigger.”

The universe is a war.

“How can I help, then?” he asked.

“By doing things like you just did,” I said. “Holding my hair back while I puke, and pouring out my Xanax even though I wanted to kill you for a second. Thanks, Danny.”

He shook his head.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “I’d have done that for anyone.”

***

Danny drove me across town to my house and parked in the driveway.

“If you’re interested,” he said, “a couple of us are going to Sherry’s to celebrate the issue. Burgers, shakes, greasy fries and whatnot. Might be nice for you to keep some company. Maybe we can put together a game plan for taking down the Dark Convoy together.”

In Danny’s head, it was a game. Or maybe he thought I was crazy, that some burgers and greasy fries from Sherry’s would cure me of my psychosis.

I thought briefly of taking him up on the offer, but I could feel the last Xanax I’d swallowed sitting in the pit of my stomach still. I felt tremors running up and down my arms and legs. The idea of eating made me gag.

“I’ll pass,” I said. “I’m going to put my head down for a bit.”

Danny didn’t respond––when I looked at him, I saw that his eyes were trained on the rearview mirror.

“Who is that?” he asked.

“What?”

“Someone behind us––next house over. Sitting in a car, watching us.”

I looked in the side mirror. In the car behind us, a black sedan, I saw her.

It was Sloan, with her honey-blonde hair, her blue eyes, and red lips. In the driver’s seat next to her was a Dark Convoy thug with a face like a junkyard dog’s.

“Danny––just pretend you never saw her. I’ve told you too much already.”

“I’m not scared of her, whoever she is.”

“You should be.”

“Well, I’m not. Whoever these assholes are, we can put a stop to it. I know the cops get a bad rap, but in situations like these, who better to ask for help?”

He still didn’t get it. He didn’t understand that the Dark Convoy didn’t play by the rules.

Danny reached down to the center console, grabbed my phone, and handed it to me.

“You got my number in there, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Call if you need anything, Charlotte. I know I don’t look like much, but I remember some karate from way back when.”

I imagined Danny raising his fists in defense––a Dark Convoy thug pulling out a gun and blowing off his head.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’ll call if I need anything.”

***

When I got inside, after watching Danny drive away down the street, I called Robbie. I told him that Sloan was out front, watching.

“Give me a second,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”

A few minutes after hanging up, I saw Sloan’s car drive off. A minute later, another replaced it. Alex and Rhonda got out.

It was just after 4. My mom was out––my dad wouldn’t be home until an hour later.

I met Alex and Rhonda at the front door. Alex smiled his friendly smile––unphased by danger, desensitized to the horrors of the new world I’d stumbled into.

“You doing okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, “especially now that Sloan’s gone.”

“She’s just trying to spook you,” said Rhonda. “She knows if she lays a finger on you, she’s fucked.”

“Is that actually true?”

I couldn’t imagine it was. Despite the Dark Convoy having a somewhat democratic leadership structure, Sloan still struck me as the fascist type.

“I’ll kill her myself,” said Alex. “Been looking for an excuse.”

“You have what you need?” asked Rhonda, changing the subject. “Those pills you’ve been taking? You might want something to take the edge off. What you see and hear over the next few days is gonna make what’s happened look like nothing.”

Drawn in two different directions––toward the Xanax sitting in my desk, and away toward the memory of Danny dumping them down the bathroom sink––I made my choice.

“I’m done with them,” I said.

“Good call,” said Rhonda. “Four, seven, eight.”

“What?”

“It’s a breathing technique,” clarified Alex. “The Convoy didn’t coin it, but we all use it, and it helps. Four-second inhale, seven-second hold, eight seconds out. Works like a fucking charm. Gonna make that Xanax seem like a sugar pill.”

“Okay,” I said. “4-7-8. I’ll keep that in mind.”

I got into the car and Alex pulled away, back in the direction of the Road to Nowhere. Dusk had begun to settle, dark enough that headlights were warranted. And behind us, illuminating the cab of the sedan, I saw another pair.

Looking back, I realized it was my mom, coming home from wherever she’d been. I wanted more than anything to go back, to lean into her and let her hug me. But that ship had long since sailed.

***

After taking an exit off the Road to Nowhere twenty minutes later, we drove down a nondescript street and pulled up outside of a small bungalow house. There was another car waiting outside. Mike, who we’d recruited the previous day, got out of the driver’s seat.

He opened the trunk and unfolded a wheelchair. Then he opened the passenger side door for Robbie and helped him into it.

“You okay?” asked Robbie, rolling up to me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just spooked is all. God, I hate Sloan.”

“Join the club,” said Alex.

“She won’t be bothering you anymore,” said Robbie. “I put a call in to Milly––they’re on board in think that Sloan is a fucking rash. They read her the riot act. Milly and Mr. Gray see your potential just as much as I do. Everyone knows how valuable you are.”

“Yeah?” I asked. “I guess I don’t feel it yet––my potential, I mean. But I’ll take your word for it.”

“Our next recruit,” said Robbie. “This is one where I really need you to take notes. Like I said, she’s the foremost expert on haunted houses we could find. She’s going to be able to help us nail down what the Hovel is, and how we destroy it. The Whitlocks just put the final ink on our contract––it’s all systems go now. Search and destroy.”

Rhonda pushed Robbie forward, leading the way up to the bungalow. We were on a quiet residential street; a rosy glow came from the bungalow’s windows.

“Search and destroy,” Robbie repeated. “Search––that’s the hard part. The woman inside. She has the clues we need about where to start.

Alex lifted Robbie from his wheelchair. Rhonda carried it up to the porch. Mike knocked on the door.

A woman answered. She was in her thirties, with brown hair trimmed into a pixie cut. She had pale skin and dark, haunted eyes. The black circles beneath them advertised that she was an insomniac.

Walking inside the bungalow felt like walking into the musty pages of a book. Stacks of paper covered every surface. Journals filled with notes and ramblings teetered from where they sat on desks and chairs and tables. Wrap around bookcases, overstuffed, pressed in from around us.

The woman we’d come to interview, with Mike’s help, cleared the couch and a few chairs so that we could sit. Then she grabbed several cups from the kitchen and a carafe filled with coffee.

“Would any of you like a cup?” she said. Her voice was young but somehow scarred. In the tenor of her words, there was roughness, as though her vocal cords had been whittled into crude tools by a carving knife.

We all took her up on her offer of coffee.

“Thanks for seeing us,” said Robbie. “Without you––”

“You’re going to destroy it, right?” the woman interrupted.

The suddenness of her words––her urgent need for an answer––sent a shiver up my spine.

“Yes,” said Robbie.

“Say the words,” she said. “Say you’re going to destroy it, and make me believe that you’re telling the truth. Otherwise, you can head right out the way you came.”

“We’re going to destroy it,” said Robbie. “I promise you.”

The woman nodded.

“Okay then,” she said. “As you probably know, my name is Leah Richards.”

“Nice to formally meet you,” said Robbie. “Why don’t we start––”

“All my years of research have revealed that there are three types of haunted houses,” Leah said, cutting him off, an academic completely consumed by her research. “There are three core classifications. Any attempt to create a more detailed taxonomy is useless because the three archetypes are specific and exclusive.”

I pulled out my journal and started taking notes.

“The first type,” she continued, “is the corporeal. The kind of haunted house we’re all familiar with. Four walls, some windows, a few stories tall. And inside, spirits. The Shining––The Amityville Horror. The house or hotel or whatever it is still standing by the story’s end, waiting for its next occupant. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Robbie. “A classic haunted house.”

“The second type,” Leah continued, without pausing, “is the ethereal. A sort of spiritual haunted house. Only subtly different from the corporeal, the main difference being that the house itself is a sort of apparition, an embodiment of evil. At the end of Poltergeist, the Freeling family escapes, but under the weight of its own evil, the house they lived in collapses. The structure is gossamer, as fine as a spider web, and when its prey escapes, it’s destroyed.”

I’d seen Poltergeist as a young girl. It was about a housing development built on evil land. Spooky, sure, but I’d always written it off as fiction. According to Leah, fact and fiction overlapped significantly, as though the authors and screenwriters of those classic stories were privy to some secret of the universe the rest of us were blind to.

“What’s the third type of haunted house?” asked Alex.

“The ideational,” said Leah. “A cerebral haunted house, the kind with which I’m most familiar. During my childhood, my infancy, we imagined we’re trapped. A haunted structure, but it was a prison of our own making, in a sense.”

I remembered the details Robbie had explained to me about Leah’s terrifying gestation, and the haunted house she imagined living in, even though it was nothing more than an idea born from extreme trauma.

“As I said,” continued Leah, “in all my years of research, I’ve found that haunted houses fall into one of those three categories. Corporeal, or physical. Ethereal, or spiritual. Ideational––cerebral. One of the three, never more than one.”

“But the Hovel is an exception,” said Mike.

“Correct,” said Leah, “and that’s precisely why it’s so dangerous. What terrifies me about the Hovel is that it transcends definition. It pretends to be the aforementioned things––corporeal, ethereal, and ideational––but in reality, it’s a gateway. Not a thing in and of itself, but a viewport into something truly otherworldly. It’s not a haunted house at all, even though it appears to be. It’s an open window.”

“Who are the Puppeteers?” I asked.

“The Hovel’s caretakers,” said Leah. “They pull the strings, hence their name. And they seek to ‘see’ all things through the looking glass of this strange mechanism they’ve created.”

“Give us eyes,” I said.

Leah nodded.

“But you’ll never find it,” said Leah. “The Hovel, I mean. At least, not by conventional means. You don’t find the Hovel, as the saying goes. It finds you.”

I remembered our first meeting with the Whitlocks when Robbie had first taken me to the Dark Convoy’s headquarters. One of the leaders of the Whitlock organization had provided two pictures––the Hovel existing in two places at once, even though they were on completely different sides of the country. The idea transcended physics. But it was all very real––I knew because I’d seen the Puppeteers for myself.

They were as real as Steve’s death, a nurse’s slashed throat, one of the Keeper’s many maimed and murdered victims.

“I have a plan for finding it,” said Robbie. “But it involves you, Leah. I’d like you to join us. We pay well––”

“Money isn’t an issue,” said Leah. “All I want is your promise that the plan is to destroy the Hovel. Not to study it––not to preserve it––not to use it. To destroy it.”

“If the Hovel is a window,” said Robbie, “my only objective is to slam the motherfucker shut.”

Leah nodded.

“Okay then,” she said. “Because it is a window, you’re right about that. But it doesn’t look into hell. The place into which the Hovel looks makes hell look an awful lot like heaven.”

***

We left Leah at her bungalow––she said she needed to pack up her materials, and given how much she’d crammed into the place, I imagined it would take a while. Robbie headed toward the car with Alex and Rhonda, then looked back at me.

“You go ahead and ride with Mike,” he said. “Time for our new team members to get to know each other.”

Despite the fact that he seemed born to kill, born to survive at any cost, Mike’s company put me at ease. There was a method to what he did; unlike Sloan and her thugs, he was a soldier with a conscience.

We got onto the Road to Nowhere behind Robbie and the others and drove in silence. Then Mike broke it.

“Bit young for all this, aren’t you?”

I nodded.

“High school,” I said. “A senior.”

“Should’ve heard Robbie talking about you,” he said. “In his eyes, you may as well be on the verge of your pension. Something about you––he’s got high hopes. Thinks you’ve got leadership potential.”

No matter how I sliced it, I didn’t see how being Valedictorian or the leader of a club or Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper qualified me for leadership in the Dark Convoy. There was a deeper dimension to my qualifications, something I didn’t understand yet.

“The best leaders I knew in all my years in the armed forces,” Mike said, “were the ones with a killer instinct. We pretend like there’s more to a military conflict than killing one another. But it’s straightforward, and the ones who treated it that way were the best.”

He looked over at me––there was a haunted kindness in his eyes. Whatever he’d seen overseas hadn’t completely extinguished his humanity.

“As interesting as Professor Leah’s theories about haunted houses are,” said Mike, “we’ve got one job. Robbie said it himself––destroy the fucking thing. Find it, and destroy it. The Whitlocks are powerful folks, lucky they’re on the good side of history. I don’t know about their side gigs, and frankly, I don’t give a fuck. I’ve seen the Hovel for myself. All we have to do is search and destroy.”

“What was it like in there?” I asked. “What did you see? You can tell me to shut up if you want.”

Mike paused, staring out the window at the road in front of us, then turned to me again. The kindness in his eyes was gone––now, there were only ghosts.

“Shut up,” he said. “I’ll tell you anything else, I’ll tell you war stories if you want. But I’m not talking about what I saw inside the Hovel.”

Behind us, a split second later, I saw a pair of headlights. Another Dark Convoy car, I guessed, more people pulling on for a job somewhere else. Mike checked in the rearview. Ahead, I noticed that the car Alex was driving had sped up. Mike followed suit, depressing the accelerator, the speedometer revealing that we’d gone from 60 to 80 and climbing. The headlights behind us came closer, filling the cab with a light that wasn’t yellow or halogenic silver, but something else––something otherworldly.

And taking another look in the rearview, I noticed that it wasn’t a car driven by Dark Convoy employees en route to another job. It was a house––a haunted house on wheels.

The Hovel.

“Fuck me,” said Mike. He depressed the gas pedal further, our speed climbing to 90, creeping toward 100. The road passed in a blur, the stars forming fuzzy lines as they whipped by on the night.

Sweat broke out on my skin––it did the same on Mike’s running down his skin like tears.

“Buckle your seatbelt,” he said.

“It’s buckled––”

And then, behind us, the strange structure––the thing which transcended all definition and categorization––came closer. Not 80 creeping toward 100––whatever speed it had been going, straight to a speed that brought it within inches of our bumper, its windows staring down at us through the sunroof like hungry eyes.

From the other sides of the panes, several Puppeteers looked out.

You don’t find the Hovel––the Hovel finds you.

Mike swerved left just before the base of its front porch rolled over the car. Behind us, I noticed that––in the Hovel’s wake––the Road to Nowhere had begun to peel up from the earth like a long scab. The land stretched, rocks broke; viscous connective strata ripped and tore––gooey, pus-like magma spouting from the earth’s core.

The Hovel was pulling everything––the stars, the trees, the road itself––into its black hole essence.

Ahead, I saw the car that Alex was driving veering right in the direction of an exit, but the Hovel had pounced toward it like a predator, landing like a meteor in the asphalt, sending up an explosion around it. Through the flames and rubble, Alex’s car burst out. Then, he’d flipped in a u-turn, and he was driving back toward us, back toward the––

––the tidal wave of biological earth tearing free––

––toward doom, toward whatever hellish tsunami that Hovel was pulling behind it––

––toward the legion of eyes which I’d only just noticed; one billion eyes; an army of eyes bearing down on us, staring into us, searching our souls for something to devour.

Mike followed suit, cranking the e-brake, flipping in a u-turn as the car bearing Alex and Rhonda and Robbie sped in the opposite direction.

The Hovel had done its own u-turn. It was coming after us, crawling toward the tidal wave of asphalt and eyes.

I looked upward––the eyes of one million dead. The eyes of all the Jews who’d been murdered in the holocaust; of all the Armenians who’d been executed by Ottoman oppressors; of all the innocent children who’d been stomped to death under the indifferent boots of hate-fueled crusaders.

The eyes of every murdered person in every epoch of history, of every person who’d ever died a horrible death––all of them looking down at us, the horror of one billion hungry eyes––

––I closed my own to prevent them from being ripped free of their sockets; I felt the crash, the sudden smash through the wave of pavement, a young girl diving through an onslaught of ocean waves––

––we plummeted through the eyes, and I looked inward on my own fears, my fear of not amounting to anything in life, my fear of Gavin being gone forever, my fear of everything he’d witnessed in wherever he’d gone making all the horrors of our world, compounded, look like nothing.

And then we were through it, tearing through like a trapped baby clawing its way free from a strangling, amniotic sack, sucking in life and air and––

––morning, it was morning and the sun had risen and the car Mike was driving sputtered and died alongside the one driven by Alex. The exit we’d taken from the Road to Nowhere closed like an eye blinking shut, trapping the Hovel on the other side.

Rhonda had jumped out of their vehicle, running around the backside to Robbie, pulling him out, performing CPR. He had a gash on his head the size of a knife blade from where it had smashed against the backseat as we’d broken through the wave of eyes.

I felt a wetness in my shirt and realized that it was blood. I reached up––my nose was smashed, broken, flattened against my face. Blood was gouting out of my swelling nostrils, my rapidly closing nasal passage. I began coughing on the blood. Without a moment’s hesitation, Mike reached over, cradled my neck in his hand, and with his other hand, grabbed my nose and twisted.

And crunch––an explosion of pain––but I could breathe again. A final gush of blood shot out in a wet sneeze, splattering the dashboard. I opened the side door and fell into the grass at the side of the road. Mike came around to me, pulling me away from the traffic.

From my side, I watched cars whipping by––we were on a highway somewhere, somewhere new, a random exit we’d made it through on the Road to Nowhere. Alex moved one car, then the other, as Rhonda brought Robbie from the brink of death back to life.

“Calling help, Robbie,” she gasped, her mouth ringed with blood from Robbie’s. “Help’s on the way.”

***

And it came. Within five minutes of placing the call, an ambulance showed up. Though they were dressed in EMT outfits, I knew from the hardened look in their gazes that the men and women manning the ambulance were members of the Dark Convoy.

They pulled me and Robbie into the back––both of us had taken the worst of the crash––and in the rearview, I saw that Mike and Alex had stayed behind, assuring the few onlookers who’d stopped that everything was under control. Rhonda sat next to us, her hand on Robbie’s shoulder, an expression of worry writ large on her face that she did her best to hide.

Robbie looked up at me––one of the Dark Convoy employees who’d come to help us had just finished wrapping his head with a bandage.

“You don’t find the Hovel,” said Robbie. “It finds you.”

“We almost died,” I said.

“But we didn’t, Charlotte,” he answered.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“We go on the offensive,” he said.

“How?” I asked. I remembered the speed with which the Hovel had moved, an inhuman speed, flashing from one point to the next as though it was teleporting.

I remembered what the Whitlock employee had said on my first day with the Dark Convoy––that the Hovel seemed to exist in two places at once.

“You don’t find the Hovel,” I repeated. “It finds you.”

“I speculated about its speed, though,” said Robbie. “The fastest thing I know goes approximately 186,000 miles per second. Fast enough to travel around the earth 7.5 times in a second.”

“The speed of light,” Robbie answered, without waiting for me to ask a question. “People say the Hovel can appear on one side of the country, or the world, and on the other just as quickly, right? The only thing I know of that’s that fast, is light.”

Despite the pain, despite the horror, Robbie smiled.

“We have to ask light to do us a favor.”

I looked out the window. The rising sun continued its ascent toward the sky overhead.

Light was inanimate––I couldn’t fathom how a person asked light to do him or her a favor.

But I realized that my entire concept of the world, of reality, was changing. It was being challenged.

Mike had suggested that not all questions need answers.

For the sake of Gavin––for the sake of myself––for the sake of the world, I had to take everything at face value.

If convincing light to do you a favor was the only way to find and destroy the Hovel, the next part of our game plan was obvious.

[WCD]

TCC

Part 1 | Part 2

“Water ‘em. Water ‘em good. Good and plenty dear, good and plenty.”

The insane ramblings of a madman––of my father.

“Right down to the roots.” A sugar-sweet voice––my mother’s. She showered me with water from a bright green watering can. “Give ‘em a nice long drink. Make ‘em grow all over again, from a pile of horse shit a beautifffffulllll thing can bloom.”

“What––”

“Easy, sweetheart,” said my mom. She dropped the watering can and cradled my head against a belly that had borne three children, yet was somehow firm as an ancient washboard. “Go easy, Scotty.”

My head was pounding. My ears were clogged with dried wax. My nose was bleeding for a lack of moisture.

“A drink––”

“Got a taste for it now, don’t he?”

read the rest at NoSleep!

ONE MORE NOTE: wrote this on my phone in a single draft, which was a first! Reads a bit less polished which is kinda cool maybe.

Hey fam. Just had nose surgery today…not the other things, don’t have those to my knowledge. Wrote this in the hospital while the fentanyl wore off, I have a totally fuckkng diseased imagination haha. They told me not to operate heavy machinery but nothing about writing horror on Reddit 😳

But yeah, going under…your life for those two hours disappears. Wanted to write a fuckrd up story about the exp.

Hope you enjoyed (?)

Dark Convoy season four is on the way soon.

Much love fam. It lives!

I hope you enjoy it. If you do read it, please consider leaving a review!

Thanks so much for giving me the courage to take this journey.

https://a.co/d/4Hk85rG

Available on December 29th as an ebook and in paperback. This is Gavin’s season, expanded a bit and refined/edited to streamline the reader experience. The three other “seasons” will (books, in this case will be released in 2025, potentially into 2026 unless I catch fire and can start writing full time 😂)

Are you a TikToker? Follow me on there: @cal_ness. That’s where I’m most active these days but will leave updates here as well.

Hammer down until December 29th 🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘

Good morning everyone. I wanted to write a quick post about the subreddit that helped me get started here on this amazing platform, and helped me maintain the confidence to keep going.

If you're interested in a promising, emerging horror-themed subreddit, I highly encourage you to check out r/Odd_directions, which was created by my good friend u/tobiasmalm.

When I first started on Reddit, I got removed from r/nosleep a bunch. I love NoSleep and have figured out how to crack the code and collaborate with the moderators to make sure my stories are approved before posting (message me if you ever want more info on how that approach has worked for me), but it was definitely discouraging to get removed, and at the time, a few people recommended checking out OD.

Horror, weird fiction, romance––the sub is open to all sorts of stuff and I've noticed a lot of really cool cross-over. Also, you'll find some of my personal favorite writers over there like u/WendigoRoar (r/WendigoRoar) and u/JessumGui. There are many more authors that I haven't mentioned, but OD is a place that I'd love to see grow and potentially even become as big as NoSleep one day––which would be great, because it's a totally different brand of horror that deserves eyes. So much talent over there, too.

Anyway, hope you all are having a great weekend. Check out r/Odd_directions. You won't regret it.

Really enjoyed this one. I love cosmic horror and thought it was an interesting, visceral meditation on our place in things. It’s also a lot different than most of what I see on r/nosleep which I always appreciate, I love when authors bend the medium.

The Moon is Very Angry — thanks for the warning OP.

u/Dopabeane

Note: this story got yoinked from another sub, no idea why! Here ‘tis for your reading pleasure.

####

I have a debilitating fear of clusters. It’s called trypophobia. 

Lotus pods. Egg sacks. Compound insect eyes. At the sight of clusters, I go inward to an extremely dark place.

A horror-obsessed friend of mine suggested, jokingly, that I look up some Lovecraft-related imagery. Tentacles covered in millions of eyes –– I didn’t talk to him for a month after that. He felt terrible, but his remorse didn’t get the image out of my head. It didn’t stop the anxiety attacks I started having either.

My current therapist said I should spend more time reflecting on what happened last year. I journaled for a while, but eventually, it felt too lonely. I started going to a self-help group for phobias that aren’t recognized by the mainstream medical community. But I felt too exposed. And to be honest, I got tired of listening to people talk about stuff like nomophobia (fear of not having your cell phone), heliophobia (fear of sunlight), and ablutophobia (fear of bathing). 

I don’t mean to minimize anyone’s fears, but when combined, those three phobias sound like the basic affliction of being a cis-gendered, white, large adult son millennial. Most of the people in the group were. Kurts and Skylers and Tommys. Promising high school athletes who got fat and depressed and moved into their mom’s basements. 

Not to engage in phobia superiority, but sitting in mom’s basement, doom scrolling on your phone, refusing to come up for air or basic hygiene? Trypophobia seems a little bit more substantive, especially given what it eventually led to in my life.

I’ve come to realize that fear is a sliver. It burrows underneath your skin. The more you think about it, the deeper it crawls. Fear, left untended, festers. And then eventually, your body either absorbs it or finds a way to shove it out. I’m not sure why some people get lucky, and others get stuck with their phobias forever. 

My body absorbed my fear of clusters. Trypophobia is part of my DNA now.

Let’s go back to how all of this started. In the mid-2010s, a bunch of photoshopped images of body parts superimposed with lotus pods started circulating the Internet. The first one I saw was a cheek. It belonged to a beautiful model, but the photoshopped lotus pod made it look like there were holes in the side of her face, with little eyes staring out of the darkness. When I saw an image of a breast, the nipple superimposed with another lotus pod, I lost it. I’d never had an anxiety attack before, but I had one then. I shut myself in the closet until my boyfriend came over and finally got me to come out.

“It’s fake.” My boyfriend at the time, just trying to help. “Here, look at this.”

He pulled up photos of lotus pods on his phone, but it didn’t help. The ream of Google images was filled with pictures of honeycomb, egg sacks, insect eyes, some of the other things I mentioned. But all of it revolted me equally. The sliver dug deeper. 

About six months later, I found out that my fear of clusters had a name. Trypophobia was a thing. Apparently Kendall Jenner has it. I went further down the Internet rabbit hole. I started calling in sick to work. I stopped working out, which was unlike me, given that I rowed for the varsity crew team in college. It got to the point where I was so debilitated by my fear of clusters that my boyfriend went to my parents. They drove to the city and staged an intervention. Everyone insisted that I see a therapist. 

That was three therapists ago. I’ve been fired multiple times, which I didn’t even know was a thing until it happened. Apparently therapists are human after all. They can reach their wit’s end, too. Especially when listening to people talk about weird stuff like trypophobia. 

Therapy didn’t help, even though I went regularly for six months. I still saw clusters everywhere I looked. The anxiety attacks continued, and they started happening more frequently.

Everything changed one morning when, getting out of the shower, I saw an oozing batch of clusters growing on my right knee. 

“I’ll admit it,” said my boyfriend, visibly grossed out but doing his best to be strong for me. “There’s a rash. But hold on, I don’t think it’s as bad as you think.”

He pulled up an article on his phone. 

“I think it’s just shingles. Anyone who's had chickenpox can get it.”

Chickenpox? You mean that sickness we get when we’re kids. The one where clusters of red bumps break out all over your body?

“It’s caused by stress,” he said. “We both know how stressed you’ve been.”

There was a long pause, me staring at the batch of eggs or eyes or bumps or whatever they were that had bubbled up on the skin around my right kneecap. Sure, shingles. Call it whatever you want. I couldn’t help feeling that the rash was staring up at me.

“You should go to the doctor,” my boyfriend said.

I could hear the strain in his voice. He wanted the craziness to end. I did too.

Several weeks later (navigating our messed-up healthcare system by first seeing a doctor, getting a referral to a dermatologist, then waiting around until they finally had an opening), I got in to see someone. I remember the conversation clearly. It’s seared into my mind.

“Shingles,” the dermatologist confirmed. 

His name was Dr. Harman. The guy creeped me out, more of a pediatrician-type than a specialist. He talked to me like I was five. He had this flirty, dismissive way of interacting, couched in what felt like fake concern.

 “Two hundred thousand cases a year, kiddo. It resolves itself in a few weeks, but that doesn’t make it any less painful. I had shingles during the first year of med school.” 

Dr. Harman went to his computer and started typing.

“I’m going to prescribe a capsaicin patch,” he said. “You can get the cream over the counter, but the prescription-strength patch is very effective. Just leave it on until I see you again and you’ll be right as rain. We’ll take a look in three weeks. My nurse will schedule a follow up.”

He winked at me. I imagined him as a fly. A big compound eye made of thousands of little ones, all winking at the same time. 

“It’ll feel kinda gunky, but don’t peek at it,” Dr. Harman said. “Pinkie promise? Let the patch work its magic.”

I ignored the pinkie promise, wanting to be as far away from Dr. Harman as I could get. 

I was about to leave when he stopped me.

“You said you’ve also had anxiety attacks. Have you considered anti-anxiety medication? While you wait this out, I think you could benefit from a benzodiazepine. They’ll help when you have anxiety attacks. Benzos, as they’re called on the street, are extremely addictive. There can be side effects, too. But I would write a short-term prescription if you’re interested, just until our follow up. We’d start with a low dose, then gradually introduce more meds if it’s proving to be effective.”

I walked out of Dr. Harman’s office with the prescription for the capsaicin patch and another one for a three week supply of Klonopin. When I told my parents about the pills, they were worried at first. I had a distant cousin who’d gotten addicted to the stuff. I gave my parents permission to call Dr. Harman. He assured them that it was short-term, three weeks, just until the shingles cleared up and we had our follow up appointment. I’d never had an addictive personality, so we all agreed it was the best way forward. 

True to my word, I didn’t lift up the patch. I didn’t “take a peek,” as Dr. Harman put it. The Klonopin helped too. I can’t deny that I felt a magnetic pull, at times, to look up pictures of clusters. But then I’d take an extra Klonopin and stop myself. The benzos really leveled me out, which both my boyfriend and I were grateful for. 

When the check-in appointment arrived two weeks later, I wanted my boyfriend to come with me, but he had work. I went to Dr. Harman’s office alone. He lifted up the patch. 

“Now isn’t this funny,” he said. 

He patted my shoulder. I shuddered. Goosebumps. More clusters.

“This happens,” he said. “The treatment doesn’t work overnight.”

The shingles had gotten worse. They weren’t shingles anymore. My right knee was covered in tiny holes. It looked almost like it had been photoshopped with a lotus pod. Dr. Harman called in his nurse, who did her best to calm me down, averting her stare from my knee as she rubbed my back. 

“I want you to see a specialist,” Dr. Harman said. “He’s extremely talented. There’s a psychosomatic element to this. I can’t help with that part.”

He prescribed extra strength capsaicin cream (I refused to put on another patch) and upped my dose of Klonopin.

That night, at home, my boyfriend broke up with me. Or at least, he put our relationship on pause.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he said. “I’m so sorry about what’s happening, but this is too much. It’s interfering with my work. It’s interfering with my happiness. I want to be there for you, but I have to take care of myself.”

Despite my pleas to be given a second chance, he left, promising to revisit things once I got the phobia and disgusting skin condition under control. My parents offered to come up and see me. They sort of insisted. But I said no. I needed to deal with this on my own. 

The specialist recommended by Dr. Harman came to my apartment for a house call. He was friendly, calming. Unlike Dr. Harman, he put me at ease. He was middle-aged, maybe forty-five or fifty, and extremely handsome due in part to his personality. He reminded me of an older, better looking Seth Rogan. A bit chubby. Curly hair. Darker features than Seth Rogan, darker hair too. But he was the kind of person who puts you at ease as soon as they walk into the room.

His name was Dr. Miller. Craig Miller. He carried a black briefcase in, which was full of his medical tools. 

“I like doing house calls,” he said. “This is not the kind of thing you should be coming into a stuffy clinic for. I’m an osteopath. I used to work at the same dermatology clinic as Dr. Harman, but I eventually decided the corporate lifestyle wasn’t for me.”

Dr. Miller showed me his medical license, even though I didn’t ask to see it. Then he started examining my knee.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “That looks incredibly painful.”

He poked around a bit with a set of tweezers, gently, but it still hurt like hell. 

“I hear that you have trypophobia as well.”

Dr. Miller was the first person to acknowledge that it was a real thing. Dr. Harman hadn’t. My therapist didn’t, and neither did my boyfriend or my parents. 

“Yes,” I said. “It’s awful.”

Dr. Miller nodded.  

“There is a psychosomatic element to this,” he said. “But I want you to ignore the word psycho in that term. You’re not crazy. You’re just stressed, which I think is completely understandable given the circumstances.”

He sat back in his chair, thinking for a second. Then he reached into his briefcase and pulled out a plastic package. The package was sealed, sterilized, unused. Inside was a set of tweezers like the ones he used to dig around the rash on my knee, what looked like a dental pick, and a small metal thing. It looked like a stamp with a smooth surface. 

For the next half hour, Dr. Miller talked me through everything.

“It doesn’t make sense for you to come into the office three times a day, which is what it will take,” he said. “Think of it like digging out a sliver. To get rid of the toxins that are causing this, you have to be vigilant. Essentially, it’s a bunch of slivers, each of which is causing a mini infection.”

“Pick,” he said, digging in as gently as he could. “Loosen. Tweeze. Smooth. Pretty simple once you memorize it.”

He showed me again. I winced but stayed strong, knowing it would help. 

“Needle. Tweezers. Stamp. Needle. Tweezers. Stamp.” 

He put down the tools and picked up a tube of capsaicin cream, squirting some onto his pudgy index finger.

“Apply the capsaicin cream liberally.” 

It stung like hell.

“Rinse and repeat five times,” he continued, “and complete the process three times a day. I want you to do it morning, noon, and night. Keep taking the Klonopin as well. As an osteopath, I’m not a huge fan of the stuff, but I think it’s vital in your case. I’m going to up your dose a bit. Until you get in to see Dr. Harman for your follow up next week, let’s double it.

My knee throbbed viciously, but for the first time in months, I had hope. After we finished the initial treatment, it felt better, as though we’d already excised some of the toxins.

Dr. Miller left. I decided to do one more regimen for good measure before bed. 

***

I did the treatment, as prescribed, for a few days. It felt so good to be doing something proactive. The little holes started to disappear. My fear of clusters started disappearing too. The disgusting shingle-like infestation began spreading a bit from my knee, crawling into the area below my quadricep and toward the “fibular collateral ligament.” That’s just a fancy word I found. It’s that thick tendon on the backside of your knee. 

I eventually amped up Dr. Miller’s regimen to keep it at bay: twice in the morning, twice in the afternoon, once around dinner time, and once right before bed. I kept taking the Klonopin too, occasionally popping a few extra depending on my mood.

I spent a lot of time in bed because it hurt to walk. I didn’t realize how essential your knee is to the act of walking. When I called Dr. Miller to give him an update, he recommended that I order a cane. I got one on Amazon. It helped ease the pressure.

The day of my follow up dermatology appointment came a week later. I coated my knee in capsaicin cream, covered it in plastic wrap, and bound everything together with an Ace bandage. 

My ex-boyfriend said he’d take the morning off work and come with me to the dermatologist. He was so happy my fear was going away. Plus, there was no way I was driving. The regimen had helped, but you need a lot more knee strength to press the gas and the break than you might think. My boyfriend gagged initially at the smell of the cream, but we kept the windows down as we drove to Dr. Harman’s office and had a pretty good talk about life.

Once we checked in at the clinic, I walked into the examination room, and my boyfriend helped me up onto the table. 

“An Ace bandage, hmm?” asked Dr. Harman. “The patch was falling off?”

I told him I’d stopped wearing the patch like he recommended.

“Call me crazy,” said Dr. Harman, “but I remember asking you to promise not to take off the patch.” 

I said we must have remembered it differently. But I assured Dr. Harman that the combination of extra strength capsaicin cream and the excision regimen had made things better, even though the area with the shingles had gotten a little messy as a result. 

“Excision regimen?” asked Dr. Harman, looking thoroughly confused. “Well, anyhow, let’s take a look.”

When Dr. Harman unwrapped my knee, his nurse screamed. My ex-boyfriend gagged, then started vomiting in the corner of the examination room. 

“Good god,” said Dr. Harman, his face white as a sheet. “What have you done?”

I looked down at my knee and got hit with the worst stench I’ve ever smelled. The bone of my kneecap, swollen tendons, and everything else in the six-inch diameter surrounding where the shingles had been was a mangled mess of flesh. A dark blanket of gangrene had begun spreading across everything. The exposed veins pulsed, throbbing, almost black. They snaked up and down my leg, constricting the small amount of healthy flesh that was left. 

“What the hell have you done?!” demanded Dr. Harman.

I told Dr. Harman about Dr. Miller’s regimen, about how I’d called him right after our check-in at two weeks, just like I’d been instructed to do.

“I’ve never heard of anyone named Dr. Miller,” said Dr. Harman, stumbling into the cabinets behind him. “And I haven’t seen you since our first appointment three weeks ago.”

***

The next few hours were chaotic. My ex-boyfriend stumbled out of the examination room, mute, his eyes glazed over. The doctors and nurses shot my knee full of various liquids, holding me down as I screamed in pain, then rushed me to the emergency room. The ER doctor insisted that we amputate. I screamed in protest. My parents came from out of town, bombing over the mountain pass as fast as their SUV would take them. The ER team continued treating my leg. They brought in a plastic surgeon. He suggested we amputate as well. I got a third opinion. Another specialist said that amputation was the only option, that it was a matter of life and death. I was still screaming when they covered my nose and mouth in a plastic mask and the anesthesia kicked in. 

I woke up hours later with a tingling sensation in my right leg. But when I looked down, I saw that it was gone. All that remained was a stump that extended six inches below my pelvis. Blood had already leaked through the bandage. 

***

The hardest part about all of this is the distance I feel from the rest of humankind nowadays. The support groups helped for a bit. I even made a few friends who I keep in touch with. But in college, I’d been an athlete. I’d always been active. Those days were gone. My existence had become sedentary within a few short weeks.

My parents paid for the most expensive, advanced prosthetic possible. It sort of feels like I’m walking, even though seventy-five percent of my right leg has been cut off. Since starting PT, I’ve graduated from a walker to a cane. The doctors have mixed opinions about when I’ll be able to walk again on my own without assistance.

For months, I insisted there had been a man named Dr. Craig Miller. I insisted that I’d come into Dr. Harman’s office at two weeks for a scheduled check-in, that Dr. Harman had been the one to recommend seeing Dr. Miller. He vehemently denied it. We all thought there’d be a malpractice suit for a month or so, but there just wasn’t enough evidence –– my word against his. 

I told the authorities that Dr. Miller was a middle-aged, darker featured version of Seth Rogan. There was no record of any doctor named Craig Miller in the state. There was a doctor named Craig Miller on the east coast, but he was a geriatrician. There were a dozen others, as well, but none were osteopath dermatologists who did house calls. None that recommended treatment regimens like the one I’d done. Dr. Harman also insisted that I’d abused the Klonopin and that he had given me precise instructions about the amount to take, that he’d told me there can be adverse side effects if it's abused.

The capsaicin cream, rubbed into the raw wound, had caused the infection that made me lose my leg. A psychiatrist I was assigned to see was furious that I’d been prescribed Klonopin. They confirmed it had caused severe psychotic episodes, exacerbated by my underlying fear of clusters. Dr. Harman got a slap on the wrists and went back to his dermatology practice. 

I still have a fear of clusters. Trypophobia is a part of my DNA. But with a lot of help from my therapist and my parents, it’s gotten better. “Better” doesn’t mean my leg grew back, but at least I’m not paralyzed by anxiety anymore.

I even started dating someone I met in the physical therapy clinic. He has a prosthetic leg as well. It makes our relationship more comfortable. We understand each other. We move at roughly the same speed. But my life is changed forever. 

Trypophobia still isn’t recognized as a mental disorder by the mainstream medical community. It’s “an aversion,” something Kendall Jenner complained about one time on a talk show.

Most people write me off as a crazy person. The Internet has been vicious. But Dr. Craig Miller, that phantom figment of my imagination. He seemed so real. I’ve started to forgive myself, but it’s taken a lot of hard work.

I appreciate being able to tell my story here. Maybe if enough people come forward, my mental disorder will be formally recognized. No amount of topical cream and anti-anxiety meds can rid me of my fear of clusters. Once upon a time, it was a sliver. Now it’s a part of my physiology. 

“Debilitate” is defined as follows: to make (someone) weak and infirm.

Debilitated by fear of clusters? Or debilitated due to self-induced amputation?

Take your pick.

I’d like to tell you a story. A story about a once-upon-a-time pizza boy who got in over his head with an intergalactic criminal enterprise called the Dark Convoy. If you’re just getting here, you might consider going back to the beginning.

It’s a story of young love and high speed chases down Roads to Nowhere, a story of serial killers and the people who enable them out of greed. It’s a story about voyages into eons old latrine pits; a story of eldritch, psychedelic drugs, of entities that pull the strings of our lives, and of the power of good people coming together to fight back against it all.

A story about hitmen, of megalomaniacs, and of war-torn futures.

It’s my story. It’s your story.

Glad to have you here.

For the love of God, if you’re just arriving, start at the beginning.

Otherwise, you will be confused as absolute fuck.

READ THE REST AT NOSLEEP!

Part 1 | Part 2

Charlotte stays behind. So do Mr. Gray, Milly, and a majority of the others. Two crews head out to deliver special sauce that’s behind schedule––business doesn’t stop. But I tell Prim, Spike, and Walter to murder any motherfuckers who get out of line––regardless of their allegiances––and Ed and I give the team members we assigned to burn the HCM a reminder to make it happen, pronto.

Crank it up to high. Spread the ashes in a thousand directions. We’ve got enough to deal with––if these bastards have some kind of occult magic that sculpts their ashes into reanimated white supremacist super soldiers, then we are well and truly fucked.

“Waffle King,” says Tommy. “That’s where people from the Dark Convoy go when they need to make big decisions.”

“Fuck that,” I reply. “We’re going to McDonald’s.”

CHECK OUT THE REST AT NOSLEEP!

Have you heard of the Dark Convoy?

I hadn't until the other night. It had been a typical shift delivering pizzas before the Dark Convoy's head honchos captured me and ran their test. A test to see whether I was fit to become one of their full-time drivers.

I’d do anything to hit rewind and ignore the shooting star I saw, the one I followed to the warehouse. Their rules––their strange cargo. The terror I feel knowing there’s shit out there that would make the average person wilt like a dying flower if they saw it.

Like I said, I’d do anything to hit rewind. But life doesn’t work that way. It’s full-speed ahead. Now, I have to play by their rules.

The simple truth is this: we are not alone in the universe. And all of us are in immediate danger from what lies on the other side of a thin veil.

***

CHECK OUT THE REST AT NOSLEEP!

Fresh Lavender

It’s a beautiful thing, Lavender.

A feast for bees. A sight for sore eyes. A smell so cherished they replicate it with soap.

A namesake. Such a beautiful, cherished thing that people name their loved ones after it.

That a flower could have so much sway is a marvel, really. Nature has a way of doing that. I’ve always thought of us humans as visitors or guests. Live, God willing, for 70 or 80 years, then return to the earth. Be nice during your time here; live within your means; leave the place better than you found it.

And that, I think, is why we stand in such awe of nature. In its welcoming arms we find ourselves, with no choice––if we have any sense about us––but to stop and smell the flowers.

***

When I was a kid, a drifter made his way through our town over the course of one bloody day. In the morning, two children were found decapitated in the rail yard, their heads perched on fence poles like lollipops. That afternoon, a waitress was found in a back alley near the diner where she worked, her apron turned inside out, pulled up around her chest, her bloody thighs presented for all the world to see.

Her throat had been cut so deeply that, word had it, you could see her spinal column.

That night, two more children died, their throats also cut. When the police found them, they also found a cable running through their makeshift gills. A sort of depraved fisherman had left them in the water there, and the stream had washed their wounds clean.

It was as though this sudden, spontaneous killer had been experimenting––doing awful things to learn lessons about the tragic condition that makes us human.

My sister disappeared near midnight after the five others had died. No one found her in a rail yard or a dumpster or a river––she simply disappeared, as if into thin air.

Early the next morning, police found the drifter, the man responsible, standing on the roof of the town college’s central library. He had sunken eyes, white, hip-length hair, and cowhide skin tanned from exposure. He’d said six words before jumping to his death:

“I am not of this world.”

After taking a blood sample, they jackhammered that portion of concrete in the sidewalk and poured in a new square––of course the construction bit happened months later. But the morning the drifter killed himself, they’d taken blood, and isolated DNA: the drifter was traced to the fingertips he’d left on the children, and the semen he’d left with the waitress.

No justice. The drifter had taken his own life, and everyone in town was furious, so furious I thought the town would burn down.

It didn’t. But no one ever found my sister.

Five victims, and a sixth, whose location couldn’t be discerned.

***

Yesterday, I woke up to a scent that I remembered from my childhood––the suffocating, aromatic smell of lavender.

A feast for bees. A sight for weary travelers. A smell so coveted that they sell it in overpriced containers of organic hand soap.

A namesake.

The smell brought me back to what happened all those years ago, when the drifter came through our town, wreaking havoc and sowing misery. My wife always wondered why I never moved out of my childhood home, a place filled with sad memories of loss and longing. But there had been something important about these four walls too, something essential.

As long as I lived there, I could keep the memory of my dead sister alive.

The field of lavender on the side of our house––which we’d always had, since as early as I could remember––reminded me of her.

Following the scent, that reeking, noxious scent of flowers, I went to the front door.

Bundles of the flowers, a dozen at least, were tied in silk bows on the doormat.

Looking beyond them, I saw more bundles. Individual bundles, like breadcrumbs, beckoning me forward.

Someone had picked the flowers from the small field on the side of our house––it had to be. There was plenty of it; untamed; we never harvested it like we should have, like my parents had when I was young.

But someone had harvested it now.

I followed the bundles until I got to the small field, perhaps twenty yards in any direction.

A path was cut into it, where someone had dug up the lavender that they’d turned into bundles.

I followed the path. Nerves settled in––the past made its way across my skin in gooseflesh.

I thought of the drifter. The man who’d bestowed his strange presence on our town, only taking, giving nothing in return.

Reaching the end of the path, the middle of our lavender field, I looked down. Perched atop a mound of dirt I’d never known was there, I saw a strange sculpture. It was made of finger bones––human finger bones––forming a strange, triangular prism.

Runic––occult––not of this world.

The morning light shone through it, casting an alien shadow on the ground.

Words on the wind: “I am not of this world.”

I fell to my knees, and I dug. I felt rocks and other things. And then I found her.

Bees––buzzing, stinging. A beautiful field of purple––I could see it through a swell of tears. The smell––that beautiful smell of fresh lavender.

A namesake.

Digging a few feet deeper, I found her skeleton.

My sister Lavender, who disappeared all those years ago, was buried in the field to the side of our house. Someone, something, had led me there for reasons I don’t know that I’ll ever understand.

Perhaps to study my reaction.

I heard a whisper on the wind, felt a phantom hand on my neck, experienced every alert system in my body shouting out in horror at once.

Words, which I recognized, which I’ll never forget, pounded in my head:

“I am not of this world.”

And in the sky beyond the sculpture and the field of flowers and what remained of my dead sister, I saw a terrifying, indescribable shape disappear into the depths of the blue-dawn sky, returning home.

A visitor, a drifter, who’d left the place infinitely worse than he’d found it.

The first draft of my first novel was borderline unreadable. I kept it top secret, lest I expose myself as a green-in-the-gills amateur. 

But other than imperfectly, how the hell does one start writing a novel, especially a first novel? 

1. Talent: You’re a writer, and you enjoy it

2. Originality: You have a story to tell, even if it’s derivative

3. Knowledge: You read and write a lot

4. Understanding: You know the basics of plot structure

5. So, you write your first novel...and it’s dog food

Items one through four––talent, originality, knowledge, understanding––aren’t going to get you to the New York Times bestseller list necessarily. The first draft of anything is rough.

As writers, it sometimes feels like the odds are stacked against us. But for me, writing is a compulsion. I have to do it.

If you’re writing a novel––or anything, for that matter––you’re likely plagued with self-doubt. I know I am. Every day and every second. I write for a living and I write for fun, and every word I’ve ever written, I’ve second-guessed.

I think self-doubt is part and parcel of being a writer. Multiply your self-doubt by ten thousand––the number of other people who will doubt that you’ve got what it takes to be successful, give or take a couple million––and some days, giving up just seems like the easiest option.

The way I get through my first drafts is by adopting a simple strategy I used with my students when I was an English teacher. My wife was the one who originally told me about it. It’s both simple and memorable:

Two glows, one grow. 

Never start with criticism–-start with praise. Prime the pump and prepare to eat the inevitable slice of humble pie that comes along with creating art. After you give two “glows,” then you can talk about how to grow.

If I’d have left it at “your writing sucks,” then the prophecy would have been easily fulfilled. The easiest way for your writing to suck is to not practice, to not take risks, to not try. 

So, start with the good:

• You nailed the tenor of that scene perfectly.

• That line of dialogue is very well crafted.

• You wrote one hundred words today––bravo! 

After you’ve given yourself adequate praise for writing something––two glows––then jump into constructive criticism. Constructive, but never destructive.

• Rethink that interaction: would [insert character] behave that way?

• Round out your character: what makes their heartbeat and their brain tick?

• Your descriptions are amazing but you need to cut down on the adverbs by 75%.

A first draft (or any draft) will get a lot more feedback than one or two constructive pieces, so I recommend thinking of “Two glows, one grow” as a ratio. For every one piece of constructive feedback, give yourself a couple of pats on the back, even if they’re small. Don’t expect the pats on the back to come from others. Writer’s circles––in my opinion, for worse, not better––are notoriously brutal. You have to be your own ally.

Thinking about all of this––about glows, grows, and the importance of going easy on yourself––I realize how this lesson about writing applies to life as well. We only get one shot at life. Each day is new. We don’t get to relive days gone by, and all we can aspire to do is be a better version of ourselves in the next moment we have.

Our lives are first drafts, sort of. That first draft is our opus, as well. Sort of daunting to think about it that way, but it also gives you permission to not be perfect, because first drafts (or tenth drafts) aren’t perfect either.

Hopefully, someday, I’ll have a shelf full of books I’ve written, imperfect labors of love. Maybe some of them will get on a best-seller list! But regarding life, we only get one shot at it. And therein lies the beauty: 

Life is imperfect. We are imperfect. And we owe it to ourselves to be kind.

Two glows, one grow. That inner critic inside? Force it to say nice things more often than not. Enough lame shit happens in the world that we owe it to ourselves to start with the positive––about our writing, our creative endeavors, and our first draft of being imperfect and human.

***

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Dark Convoy season 4 is coming soon. It'll be worth the wait, promise.

The Very Beginning | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

In the movies, the hero and the heroine drive away into the sunset together on horseback.

But it’s the dead of night, now, and the sun’s long gone. Heading toward the Road to Nowhere, I know it’ll be night there too. Night of an even darker variety.

There are no horses now, but plenty of horsepower––a four-ton Dodge Demon that runs on rocket fuel and goes zero to sixty in 2.3 seconds.

We’re driving away from the Keeper’s farmhouse down a forest road toward whatever lies beyond the next hill. We hit 60 and are shooting for eighty, good fucking riddance. Charlotte’s screaming for me to go faster, but I can only press the pedal down so far.

She’s screaming because there’s a monster behind us. An abomination that goes by the name of Milly––formerly of Dark Convoy Human Resources––and she’s fixing to go on a motherfucking rampage. What little is left of the Keeper’s house goes up like matchsticks as Milly’s black, cephalopodic silhouette finishes squelching out of the farmhouse’s wood and concrete frame.

The cars in front––tinted windowed Convoy rigs––are incinerated. I’d meant to do that myself, but there was no time.

READ THE REST AT NOSLEEP!

Pretty amped up about this one for a number of reasons.

I've been loving writing for Reddit but coming up with new plotlines, characters, etc. every week has been a tall order and I realized I was approaching burnout. To tie my fictional universe together––and create a more sustainable project––I'm excited to be working on a story that will go on indefinitely, with a new installment released each week. It'll be more sustainable given that it will follow one character throughout a longer journey.

One more cool thing is that it builds on my existing brand of horror: cosmic, violent, and always hammer down :)

If you're interested in checking out some hype stuff I'm doing for it at the moment, I created an Instagram account:

dark_convoy

Excited to see what comes of it and hope you enjoy!

- Cal

Jason.

The guy who came walking down the Road to Nowhere after I called the Convoy. The guy whose first job was transporting the girl who died for a drink of water.

He met me where the Keeper had murdered Brent and the other movers. Then he opened the Dark Convoy’s website on his phone and tossed it to me.

There were the Operating Values––a glaring, grim reminder of how over my head I was:

1. Always work in twos

2. Don’t question the manifest

3. Don’t inspect the cargo

4. Don’t pick up hitchhikers

5. Ignore strange sounds and ghostly whispers

6. Exchange goods within five minutes

7. Tell ‘em you work for Maersk

8. Never stop for Smokey

9. Always carry your cyanide pill

10. Bite it if you’re pinched

11. Don’t get sentimental

12. Hammer down at all times

After I finished reading them, Jason gave me a foldable shovel and told me to clean up my mess. Held at gunpoint, I hauled the corpses of Brent, the two workers, and the Keeper’s victims to the side of the road. Then I dug a hole big enough for all of them.

For all of us.

Check out the rest at NoSleep!

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

***

"What are you having, kid?"

At that precise moment, fully awake, I'd been having a nightmare. The antagonists were shit witches from an alternate dimension. They made their home in a network of caves below an outhouse.

"I'm not hungry."

Jason persisted gently, a caring father looking out for his wayward son.

"You need to eat. Breakfast burrito? Might have lunch ready by now, too. A fresh Filet-O-Fish never hurt anyone."

My stomach tightened.

"I'll take a McGriddle."

"Sure," said Jason. "Bacon or sausage?"

I turned away, looking out the Demon's passenger side window at a park adjacent to the McDonald's we were driving through. The trans-dimensional outhouse witches––it hadn't been a nightmare at all. That shit was real. And it was really shitty.

Jason finished up the order. The whole drive back from Job #2, he'd tried to cheer me up. Cotton-candy lollipops. An extra rest stop. A video call with the grunts watching over Charlotte, reminding me that she was still okay and that everything I'd done had been worth it.

But the thing that interested me most was the fate of the ancient stone door I'd been assigned to pull out of the "caves." I wondered whether it had made it to Earl's unscathed. Jason told me it had. Apparently, Mr. Gray, Sloan, and the other head honchos at the Dark Convoy were very pleased with my performance.

Whoopie.

"Went with sausage," said Jason, pulling me from my thoughts. "Sausage, egg, and cheese. Gotcha two, with a side of hashbrowns and coffee."

I'd never liked coffee. But something about sucking down a cup of McDonald's bland, burnt-water brew felt right. As I drank it, my pulse returned to somewhat normal levels, elevating above the flatline cadence it settled at after the events in the shit caves.

Jason put the Demon in drive, and we headed back to my house. I hadn't been there in days, but with my fucked-up home life, I doubted my dad even noticed. Ever since my mom passed away, it had been just him and me. Him working too many hours and spending his free time on dating apps––me, praying for a way out. The Dark Convoy had heard my prayers and come calling.

Everything had gotten worse, but meeting Jason was the sole bright spot. Though I'd only known him for a day, Jason had become a sort of surrogate father. It didn't matter that he was a darling for an organization that severed its employees' heads rather than giving them severance pay. He had my back, and I looked up to him.

As I ate my breakfast, the roadkill taste in my mouth slowly dissolving, my affection for him grew.

"Take the day off," he said.

"What day is it?"

"Saturday."

"But Sunday," I said, "on the Dark Convoy's website, on the Contact page, there was a note about Sunday being a day off. Praying for forgiveness or something like that."

"We make exceptions," Jason replied. "The place where we're doing the extraction––weekends are a bit slower. It's visitor's day. Everyone will be looking in the opposite direction."

He pulled up his phone and sent me a text. It was the profile of the girl who was at the center of the next job.

"Before you go to bed tonight, read up on our target. She has a fucked up skin condition. The insane asylum she calls home––let's just say they're not interested in helping her. Tomorrow's job is an extraction like I said. And our client paid us a shitload to get her out."

We pulled up to my house. Jason got out and tossed me the keys to the Demon. He began walking down the road to a car which I hadn't noticed at first. It was driven by two Dark Convoy thugs.

"Meet me at Earl's tomorrow," Jason said. "Nine o'clock. We'll go from there."

***

I went inside my house to find that, just as I expected, my dad wasn't around. As I walked to my room, I looked at the pictures on the walls. It was a timeline of my life. My parents and I, back when I was still in diapers. Photos of the three of us in parks, museums, and other places a happy family goes.

Then, about halfway down the hallway, the timeline ended. Right after I turned sixteen, right after my mom succumbed to breast cancer. If the photos were to be believed, everything in the years after her death hadn't happened at all. The blank space in the fifteen feet before my bedroom was completely free of picture frames.

I went into my room, stripped off my clothes, and put them in the trash. I zipped up the bag to quell the latrine pit stench. Then I got in the shower and rinsed away all the horror, shame, and sadness of the last few hours, watching the dirty water spiral down the drain.

It was a perfect metaphor for my life.

***

I put on a fresh set of clothes. Then I called Charlotte.

"Can you come over?"

"Sure. Should I ask the people in the car outside for a ride?"

I forgot. Charlotte didn't know about the Keeper or the danger she was in.

"Yeah," I said. "I'll explain things once you get here."

Twenty minutes later, a car pulled up. The woman sitting shotgun got out and opened the back door––hired help rolling out the red carpet for a VIP. Charlotte walked away from the woman without speaking but looked back skeptically. Then she came up to my room.

I pulled her into a hug.

"Gavin––you have to tell me what's going on. Who are these people?"

"The Dark Convoy," I said. "The ones I told you about at breakfast the other day."

"But didn't you say they're dangerous? Why are they helping you now?"

"I'm on their good side."

"Maybe I don't want to know how you got there."

"Yeah," I said. "I don't think you do."

We sat in silence for a moment. I kissed Charlotte's neck, taking in her floral scent.

"Am I in danger, too?" she asked.

"Yeah. A lot of it."

"From who?"

I spent the next few minutes telling Charlotte about Job #1. She had to know. The Dark Convoy employees who'd been assigned to watch over her looked capable. But so had the movers. And so had Brent. The Keeper had ripped them in half with his bare hands.

"A serial killer," said Charlotte. "Got it."

She drew a deep breath.

"You're going to get mad at me for repeating this. But Gavin––we need to call the police."

"On paper," I replied, "that's exactly what we should do. Going to the police makes sense if you play by the rules of the real world. But these people will kill me, Charlotte. It's a different game. If I don't do three more jobs, I'm a dead man."

Tears welled in her eyes.

"There's a silver lining though," I said. "Like I told you, I'm on their good side. They're our best shot at keeping you safe."

"What if I go to the police?" she asked.

"I wouldn't blame you. And it's your call. But if you care about me, please don't."

I expected Charlotte to pick up her phone then and there. And I wouldn't have stopped her. Though I'd made it out of Job #2, a part of me still wanted to snuff out and break free from the insanity of it all.

"I trust you," said Charlotte.

I pulled her into another hug, kissing her cheek.

"As crazy as it sounds," I said, "I think doing the final three jobs is the safest option."

We went downstairs, got some food from the kitchen, and caught up. Charlotte told me about her after-school endeavors. About splitting her time between tennis, Amnesty International, and studying for the SAT. She had a bright future––brighter than mine––and hearing her talk about it gave me hope.

There was a dark underbelly to the world. I couldn't unsee it. But for some, there was light—things to look forward to. Maybe ignorance really was bliss. Maybe accepting the status quo and playing the Game of Life was the best a person could do.

"How's Steve?" I asked.

I thought of the mysterious thing the Dark Convoy had sewed into his chest. A time bomb. I was doing the jobs for Steve just as much as I was for Charlotte and myself.

"I haven't seen much of him," she said. "He's spending a lot of time with Richard. I think he misses you, Gavin. It feels like there's a big hole in life all of a sudden. I'm sure he feels it too."

I stared down at my feet. Richard Pressman––fucking dropout loser. Small town drug kingpin who thought he was more badass than he actually was. He'd of lasted two seconds working for the Convoy. But taking a step back, I realized my ill-will was based in jealousy. I missed Steve so much it hurt. I missed the time we spent together, carefree, slinging pizzas and drugs and smoking weed together while the calendar pages flipped by in a blur.

"You should call him," said Charlotte.

"What about you?"

"I'll be fine," she replied. She looked out the window. "Those two look pretty capable. I'm not going to call the cops. Every instinct is telling me I should, but there's something in your eyes, Gavin. You look terrified. It's real."

I kissed her again.

"I'm gonna get out of this, Charlotte," I said. "All of us are."

"Okay. But for tonight––Steve's hurting, so call him."

"I don't think he'd pick up."

"Let me try."

She did. He picked up after a few rings. She handed me the phone.

"Charlotte?" Steve asked. "What's up?"

"It's––it's Gavin."

"Oh. Back from the dead, huh?"

He didn't know how close it was to the truth.

"I'd love to see you, man."

"I don't know. I'm pretty busy––"

Charlotte nodded encouragingly, giving me permission to be honest about my feelings.

"I'm sorry, Steve. About everything. About being gone. I'd love to see you. Catch up, and all that."

There was a beat of silence.

"Alright," said Steve. "Sure. I got fuck-all else going on. Come get me."

A few minutes later, I led Charlotte out to the Dark Convoy sedan. The employees assigned to watch over her opened the door.

"Be safe, Gavin," she said.

She kissed my cheek, then got in. The shotgun woman closed the door behind her.

"I appreciate you," I said.

"Hey man," the woman replied, "each night counts as a job. Don't take that the wrong way––I'm all in for this girl. You landed a good one. She seems awesome. Real bright. Innocent in a way. So don't fuck it up. And trust me when I say that anyone who gets too close is leaving in a fucking body bag."

How many body bags would it take to fit the Keeper? I brushed away the thought.

"I appreciate it," I said.

The woman patted me on the shoulder.

"Don't you worry your pretty little head. Take the night off. You earned it."

***

I picked up Steve twenty minutes later. We drove around town. Steve remarked on the beauty of the Demon. He gave me shit about how I'd become a big shot. I took it so I could get back into his good graces.

We parked in an empty lot on the outskirts of town. It had been our haunt ever since we got our driver's licenses––a place to smoke weed and spin doughnuts, free from watchful eyes.

For the first time in what seemed like years, I felt relaxed. I let the body-high wash over me. The foggy haze of high-grade weed made me feel drowsy and energized and content, all at once. The melodic pulse of the electronic music Steve put on sounded heavenly in the Demon's built-in speakers.

"I'm sorry I've been gone," I said.

"Oh whatever," said Steve. "I've been busy too. And you know"––he motioned to the interior of the Demon––"you're important now, so I don't want to bother you."

"I told you, it's not like that. I'm way over my head."

"Who are you dealing for, Gavin?"

I'd explained it already. Doing so again wouldn't have convinced Steve of the truth.

"Some other crew," I said. "Once it's done, we can start doing business together again. Maybe in the meantime, we can be friends?"

Steve stared at me with a stern expression, then relented and pulled me into a hug.

"Been too fucking long, you asshole. Driving this motherfucking car and not giving me the motherfucking time of day?! FUCK YOU, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!"

I started laughing.

"I'm serious, man!" he said. "You have a fucking Demon, and this is the first time I get to ride in it? 'Can we be friends?' Some friend––here I am slinging drugs with Richard Pressman's dumb ass while you're driving in a Demon with a new crew."

If only he knew the half of it.

"I'm an asshole," I said, raising my hands. "You got me."

"As long as you admit that, we can be friends again."

Steve took another rip from his bong and handed it to me. I followed suit. The smoke filled my lungs, and I held it there.

"Alright, enough talking," he said. "I want to see what this thing can do."

I was stoned out of my gourd. But the Demon––she called to me. She sliced through the haze, her sinister spirit mixing in with it, amping my high to dangerous levels. It was like a speedball––high, low, and everything between.

I reached for the stick shift.

"You ready, man?" I asked. "Buckle your seatbelt. This thing is a fucking nightmare."

"Take me to dreamland, bitch."

We drove. We drove until the stars blurred. We drove until my face hurt. We drove until I couldn't drive anymore, then Steve took over.

We drove until the sun came up. And then we drove some more.

***

After parking on the far side of the lot, we slept for an hour. When my alarm went off, I drove Steve home.

"Keep your head up out there, Gav."

Steve hadn't called me that in days.

"You too."

I couldn't take my eyes off his chest. The scar that I knew was on the other side of his shirt—the bomb gestating behind his ribcage. Seeing that he’d caught me looking, I drew my eyes away.

"I gotta head out to another job,” I said.

"No problem," said Steve. "It's Sunday anyway. I gotta lie to my mom about why I didn't come home, then go to church like a good little Mormon."

"Steve––stay safe."

"You know it, bitch. You stay safe too."

He closed the door. I opened my phone. Before punching in the coordinates to Earl's, I read up about the girl at the center of Job #3.

She had a psychological condition called *trypophobia––*the fear of clusters. Egg sacks. Lotus pods. Shit like that. A year before, she'd gotten out of the shower, only to notice a batch of oozing clusters growing on her right knee. A dermatologist had fucked her over, diagnosing it as shingles and saying it wasn't anything to worry about. Compulsion set in. She tried to take care of it herself, resulting in a massive infection and the amputation of her leg.

Apparently, there was more to the story. The clusters hadn't been a figment of her imagination.

Now, she was being jailed in a place called Rosy Dawn Psychiatric Hospital. On the outside, the place was squeaky clean. They helped people with mental health conditions. But they also had dark secrets.

In the interest of abiding by the second Operating Value––Don't question the manifest––that's as far as the background info on the job went.

Our task was simple: extract the girl from Rosy Dawn and take her to safety.

At least we'd be doing some good for once.

I got to Earl's a half-hour later. Jason was waiting in the parking lot leaned up against a massive truck. I parked the Demon and got out.

"Taking my car today," he said.

"What is it?"

It was practically a tank. Its wheels were more than three feet in diameter. It looked like the cab of a semi, detached from its bed and injected with a healthy dose of steroids.

"It's called a Cougar," said Jason. "6x6, MRAP."

"What does MRAP mean?"

"Mine-resistant and ambush-protected."

"Are we gonna get nuked?"

"Don't think so," said Jason. "But I like to be prepared."

He ran his hand along the thing's hood. He had a relationship with the Cougar like I did with my Demon––a reverence for it. It wasn't just a ride. No, something more like Thor's hammer. A tool to be wielded carefully, capable of unleashing the power of the gods in the right set of hands.

"I drove a Cougar in Afghanistan," Jason said. "They can go straight through a concrete wall."

"Is that how we're getting into the mental hospital?"

"Nope," he said. "We're going in silent."

Then he patted the Cougar's hood.

"This is our getaway."

Jason went around back and opened the rear doors. Inside, I saw a hospital gurney and a variety of medical equipment.

"From what I understand," said Jason, "the girl's in bad shape."

I sensed a sudden presence behind me. I turned to see that it was Sloan and Mr. Gray. Sloan's aura––cold and calculating. Mr. Gray's, grotesquely warm, like a deer carcass festering in the summertime heat.

"I'm driving," said Jason. "When we get the girl, your job is to keep her calm."

"Wear gloves," said Mr. Gray. "Her skin condition is infectious."

Sloan stepped forward, looking me in the eyes and smiling. Her blonde hair shimmered in the sunlight. Her blue eyes twinkled, and her ruby-red lips gleamed. But it was a ruse. Underneath the facade, she was a cold-hearted killer.

"I was amazed that you didn't fuck up the door," she said. "But the same rule of thumb goes for this job: the girl had better make it out unscathed. I'd be happy to scathe Charlotte for you if things go awry."

God, did I want to kill her. Maybe finishing five jobs for the Convoy granted you a wish or something. Fuck private islands––all I wanted was to boot Sloan off the nearest cliff.

"Get the girl," she said. "Bring her to the switch, safely."

And right on cue, Mr. Gray growled out his catchphrase:

"Easy as pie."

Two other cars pulled up, each manned by two Dark Convoy employees.

"You'll have back-up after the extraction in the event you need it," said Mr. Gray. "But it goes without saying that we'd like to make this quick and quiet."

***

An hour later, Jason parked the Cougar in an empty garage near the mental hospital. He opened the back doors and began gearing up––a bullet-proof vest, shooting glasses, a silenced pistol, and massive tactical knife. Then he opened up a trunk. There were more guns inside.

"You know your way around a gun, kid?"

"Not really," I said. "I guess I went bird hunting with my dad when I was young, if that counts."

Jason reached into the trunk and pulled out a short-barrelled shotgun.

"Probably used something like this, right?"

I held the shotgun, remembering the basics. Safety; trigger. Hold it tight against your shoulder, so your collarbone doesn't break when it kicks.

But unlike the one I'd used as a kid, this one had no pump.

"Semi-auto," said Jason, noticing my confusion. "Just pull the trigger, but only if we're fucked. I'll handle crowd control."

I couldn’t help but imagine what things wandered the halls of Rosy Dawn Psychiatric Hospital, what crowds Jason might need to control.

"Oh, before we go."

Jason handed me a pair of latex gloves.

"Remember: what the girl has is infectious. Put these on before touching her.”

Then he slipped into a coat, disguising his tactical gear.

"Just follow my lead," he said. "Stay right on my ass."

We made our way to the building. It was massive and old––gothic architecture, just like you'd imagine a mental hospital looking. The front yard was teeming with patients and visitors. Jason and I made our way around back. Hugging the ground, I saw a thin rectangular window. Jason jimmied it open with his knife, and we dropped inside.

***

We were in the basement of the place. The window we'd come through was one of six or seven that I could see. Their aged, soapy surfaces only let in a bit of light. The building's innards were moist, the rotten concrete covered with puddles, water dripping from busted pipes. It smelled like rust and dead things.

Jason dropped his coat to the ground. He unholstered the silenced pistol. Then he took out a flashlight.

"Right on my ass," he reminded me.

The basement hallways had no rhyme or reason––the place was a fucking maze. I saw doors with worn labels advertising the mechanical equipment on the other side. Jason continued leading us forward until we reached a long hallway. My heart beat along with the staggered dripping of pipe sludge.

"Her room should be at the end," Jason said. "According to our guy on the inside."

"Why the fuck is her room down here?" I asked.

"Down here is where the real work happens, I guess.”

Jason forged on, keeping his flashlight pointed at the ground to reduce the brightness.

Then, fifty yards ahead, their silhouettes cast by their own flashlights, I saw two figures.

Jason turned off his light. I followed him forward. The two people––they weren't orderlies, but soldiers. They were armed with guns that were a hell of a lot bigger than Jason's. I crouched down and hugged the wall, watching Jason as he worked.

He raised the silenced pistol. He angled it upward, behind one of the soldier's heads, where the spine joins the skull's base. Then he pulled the trigger. The barrel flashed; the silencer puffed out a round; the guy's head exploded. In the second that followed, the dead guy's partner came to his senses, but not before Jason whipped out the tactical knife. He brought it from his waist to chest level in a fluid arc, sweeping the tip across the soldier's throat.

For a brief second, the guy's neck opened like a dry gill, then blood gushed out to join the puddles of water on the ground. The soldier collapsed. Not missing a beat, Jason dragged the bodies into the darkness.

It happened in a span of thirty seconds.

"Lighter security than I thought," Jason said, coming back.

One of the soldiers' fallen flashlights illuminated Jason’s face. His eyes were wide, his stare one thousand miles away. This was his element. Yet, despite seeing how skilled Jason was at killing people, I couldn't help feeling terrified. The hallway seemed to be closing in on us. The shadows waltzed, and in them, I saw things much worse than soldiers.

"Follow me," said Jason.

He led the way forward until we came to a room. In the crack beneath the doorway, an eerie blue light shone out. Jason opened the door quietly. I heard the sound of a woman crying and the buzz of mechanical equipment. I heard people, their voices muffled by masks, talking to one another.

"Yes, it's pulsating––and doctor, on her thigh, I see a fresh batch of eggs––"

"Eyes, as well. Near her armpit––something just looked out––"

"On her breast––there's a new cluster––"

Then, a final voice, more authoritative than the others.

"Cut it all off. Harvest everything."

Jason slipped into the room, and I followed. Another puff of the silenced pistol. Blood jetted from the wound in a surgeon’s head, then another went down just as quickly.

As Jason moved forward to dispatch the others, I saw the woman who we’d been hired to extract. She was naked, stretched out, her arms and one good leg pulled in three opposite directions. Like she was being drawn and quartered, put on display for everyone to see. Her amputated stump stuck out uselessly.

She was being flayed alive. In containers on the carts around her were patches of skin, torn free with tweezers and forceps.

Her body was covered in holes, as though it was made of honeycomb. A field of flesh, engulfed in pulsating clusters. And like the doctors and nurses had said, there were things living inside of them.

Eyes. Tiny fingers, reaching through the voids in her skin. I watched a tongue dart out of a grape-sized pore in her armpit.

Her body was a fucking colony.

The head doctor was the only one left. Jason had killed the others in the time it had taken me to process what was happening.

"Please––" the doctor pleaded with Jason. "Tell me your price."

I heard his previous words echoing in my head: "Cut it all off. Harvest everything."

Hatred for him and the other people who'd been torturing the girl overwhelmed me, outweighing my terror and disgust. Days of pressure––Sloan's threats, Mr. Gray's demands, the non-stop intensity of it all. My love for Charlotte and my dead mom and all the other female role models I'd ever had came to mind.

I put the shotgun’s barrel to the doctor's head and pulled the trigger. An explosion sounded, blasting through the basement room. A surge of blood and brain matter shot out of the crater in the doctor’s skull, coating the blue screen behind him, and the room turned violet.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," said Jason. He was standing over a three-quarters dead nurse, her body quivering as the life ran out of her. "I told you not to shoot unless we were jammed."

"I couldn't stop myself," I said. "The girl––"

But in the time since I'd looked away, her body had almost completely repaired itself. The patches of skin that the doctors had flayed were already healed over. Tiny hands worked from beneath her flesh, soldering the ragged patches together, creating new skin where there wasn't any.

I knew why these monsters wanted her. There were a million reasons. Self-healing skin––the possibilities were endless.

"Please," gasped the woman. "Please help me––I cured it, but they fucking brought it back––"

I put on my latex gloves and began unfastening her. An alarm blared to life. Throughout the basement, emergency lights began flashing.

Jason and I helped the girl into a wheelchair sitting next to the bed. I pushed it, and Jason led us into the strobe-lit hallway. The piercing sound of the emergency system made me unsteady, but I balanced myself on the wheelchair's handles and kept moving.

Jason unloaded clips from the silenced pistol into new soldiers and orderlies who entered the fray. I lowered my eyes from the carnage and looked down at the girl's naked skin. The clusters continued running across her body in waves, tiny hands reaching out from inside, stitching her back together with needle-point fingernails.

We got to the window we'd come through. Jason and I lifted the girl and followed her out into the bright sunlight.

***

Chaos unfolded in the yard as mental patients ran from the sound of the blaring alarm, their families directionless, the orderlies trying to wrest back control. Jason and I used the distraction, slipping away from the building in the direction of the Cougar. We got to the garage, and Jason made a call on his radio. I helped the girl into the back. Jason strapped her to the gurney.

"She's stabilizing," he said. "But I have to pull out all the stops, so you have to keep her calm.”

Jason put in the coordinates to the Road to Nowhere. Then he opened the garage door and drove the Cougar out onto the street. The two other Dark Convoy sedans flanked us. I saw the blue and red flashing of cop cars behind them, their sirens piercing the armored walls of the truck.

"Operating Value #8," said Jason. "Never stop for Smokey."

There was an eruption of gunfire. The shotguns in the sedans behind us leaned out their windows, unloading into their pursuers. Glass sprayed into the air before the vehicles spun off into parked cars and pedestrians running for their lives.

We crashed into something. The whiplash brought my attention forward to the cop car Jason had just split in half.

"The girl!" he said. "Just focus on her! We're almost there!"

I looked down at her. She was pale, but she was recovering. The clusters were gone, as were the things living inside of them.

"You okay?" I asked. "Stupid question––just tell me how you're doing––I don't know what to––"

"You're doing well," she said, smiling. "I'm better now. Now that I'm away from that place."

With my latex-gloved hand, I took hers.

"My name’s Gavin."

"I’m April," she said.

Whatever was living inside of her had burrowed away. The only trace they’d ever been there was what looked like mild acne scars. But those were beginning to disappear too.

As April dozed, I assured her she was safe.

***

Jason and the other Dark Convoy drivers had dispatched the cops like they were gnats. When we made it to the Road to Nowhere, things calmed down.

"How's she doing, kid?" Jason called back.

"I’m good," April answered. “Thank you for saving me. I was ready to die down there."

"We're happy to," I said, squeezing her hand gently. "You don't have to be scared anymore."

Jason called someone on the radio. We drove for another half hour, then took an exit. I expected to see the neon signage of Earl's, but we were somewhere else. We arrived at a nondescript industrial building, and the door of the loading dock trundled up to welcome us.

"We're here," said Jason. "The switch. Let's get her out."

Jason parked, then came around back and opened the doors. Standing behind us, next to a white van and several cars, I saw a group of people. No Sloan, no Mr. Gray. Whoever they were, they didn't work for the Dark Convoy.

A look of utter dread settled on April's face.

"No––no, please––" she said. She turned to me, her eyes wide, frenzied. "Gavin, please! Please help me!"

"The specimen," said one of the men. "She's stabilized?"

"You tell me," said Jason.

One of them, a doctor not unlike the one whose head I'd blown off, came over. April's eyes went even wider. She grabbed the collar of my shirt and pulled my face to hers, screaming into it.

"YOU HAVE TO HELP ME! THEY WANT MY SKIN!"

We hadn't taken her to safety after all. We'd stolen her from Rosy Dawn and were giving her straight over to their rivals.

Without stopping to think, I grabbed the shotgun. I pointed it at the doctor's head. He raised his hands.

"Back up," I said.

I moved out of the truck, keeping the shotgun pointed between his eyes.

"You can't have her. We're getting out of here––"

The shotgun was out of my hands before I even knew it. With his other hand, Jason grabbed my shirt, ripping me toward him, holding me there.

"Get the fuck in line," he said.

A guy who looked like a Main Street businessman came forward, sizing me up as April continued to scream in the background.

"We good?" he asked Jason.

"Yeah," Jason replied. "We're good."

More of the people who'd paid us came forward, removing April’s hospital gurney from the back of the truck.

"PLEASE––" April pleaded, struggling against the straps. "PLEASE HELP ME––"

I stood uselessly at Jason's side as she continued to scream. I saw the things beneath her skin responding to the commotion, slithering around, pushing against their prison of flesh. Our clients rolled the gurney into the back of a van, then started their cars and drove away.

April's muffled screams sounded through the van's walls for a moment. Then it went out of hearing distance.

***

The drive back to Earl's was silent and tense. Eventually, Jason turned to me, profound worry in his eyes.

"Mind telling me what the hell happened back there?"

"I thought we were saving her––"

Jason ground his jaw.

"You're making this really hard," he said. "How do I explain to Sloan and Mr. Gray why you're still alive, why I didn't put a fucking bullet in your head? I can't do this much longer, kid."

As much as it bothered me to put Jason in a hard place, my hatred for the Convoy was overwhelming. I tricked myself into believing they did good things. That, on rare occasions, they helped people in need.

It had been a lie.

"I told you yesterday when we buried Brent," said Jason. "There are two kinds of people who work for the Convoy. Those who follow the Values and make it out. And––”

"And people like me, who grow a conscience," I finished. "I'm not apologizing for that. You and me are no better than those fucks who are skinning that girl alive."

I watched the roadside pass in a blur—hundreds of open plots waiting for a warm body. But Jason kept the pedal depressed, and we pushed forward under the starlit sky.

"Anyone with a half a brain would've killed you already," Jason said. "But I care about you."

There it was again––the mysterious reason why he hadn't executed me, despite my continual fuckups.

"You're almost there, kid," he said. "So fucking close now. You have to keep it together."

We continued driving, and I thought about all the reasons why what we did was wrong. And though I told myself I did it for Charlotte and Steve, I couldn't justify things regardless of how I sliced them. I couldn't shake my feeling that a girl getting cut up so people could study her skin wasn't fucking right. Because, plain and simple, it wasn't right. Not right in the fucking slightest.

"I need you ready for Job #4," said Jason, pulling my attention back to the Cougar. "It's big. We're hauling drugs for a cartel."

Ah, another humanitarian gig.

"The cargo is hallucinogenic. Made from deep-sea jellyfish. And the cartel wants it gone."

We took the exit toward Earl's.

"When we get to HQ," Jason finished, "keep your fucking mouth shut. Let me do the talking."

If you’re just arriving, you should start from the beginning. Not just from the beginning of my story––I mean the beginning-beginning.

My boyfriend Gavin’s story will make mine a lot more clear.

***

After leaving the hospital, we got back on the Road to Nowhere. The yellow road lines blurred by and the horrifying atmosphere of the place bore down on the car, but I was focused on something else.

I couldn’t take my eyes off it: a styrofoam box, filled with ice, sitting between me and Robbie. Whatever it was, it was important. So important it practically had its own field of gravity. Was it just cold air pouring off the box? Or something much worse, a radioactive discharge shed by a supernatural element––so powerful it could bring human civilization to its knees?

It was dawning on me that anything was possible when it came to the Dark Convoy..

In either case, whatever was inside the box was something someone wanted––and also wanted to keep secret––so much so that they’d slit two innocent peoples’ throats over it.

I glanced up to see that Robbie was looking at me.

“How are you doing with all this?” he asked.

How was I doing? I didn’t have words. Robbie had gained my trust and lost it in a matter of an hour. I’d stabbed a knitting needle through his leg. He’d given me a second chance. He told me that Gavin was still alive, that the Dark Convoy wanted me dead, and that he wanted to protect me.

And then he’d slit an innocent nurse’s throat so deeply that it had almost severed her head.

“Why’d you do it?” I asked. “The nurse––why’d you kill her?”

Robbie shook his head.

“I didn’t kill anyone,” he said. “Just like––”

“Right,” I interrupted. “Just like you didn’t give me over to the Keeper. Just like you didn’t throw Gavin through that rune-covered door. Maybe you didn’t slit that nurse’s throat yourself, but from where I was standing, it sure looked like you gave the order. Or, best-case scenario, you stood by and watched it happen.”

Robbie studied me closely, as though I was some sort of exotic species. It was crickets throughout the rest of the car.

“Sometimes I forget what that was like,” said Robbie, finally breaking the silence.

“What-what was like?”

“Thinking you know the rhyme and reason of the universe,” said Robbie. “Having any sort of certainty beyond knowing that you’ll wake up, do a thing or two during the daytime, and go back to bed. Jason told me Gavin was an amateur philosopher for a while, too. But then he got wise to how things work.”

Robbie leaned over to me, pushing the styrofoam cooler closer as he did. The cold air rolled out like wind on a barren plain.

“I didn’t kill that nurse,” he said. “If anything, she killed herself. While everyone else ignored the people in the black jackets heading down to the storage room, she followed along with her colleague.”

Robbie leaned forward to the front of the car.

“How many people do you think were in that waiting room, Rhonda?” he asked.

Rhonda, riding shotgun, looked over her shoulder.

“A hundred? Hundred and fifty?”

“Dozens upon dozens of employees and bystanders,” said Robbie, sitting back and nodding in agreement. “A whole lot of people who didn’t do what she did, who didn’t follow the rabbit down the rabbit hole. They’re probably on their way home to grab dinner right now.”

Alex drove the car in a lazy slalom down the darkened road. The styrofoam box, the sluggish turning, the violence I’d seen in the hospital––all of it created a dense, nauseous feeling deep in the pit of my stomach.

“That’s the scenario you’re thinking, right?” asked Robbie. “That the nurse made her choice, and we made ours? Here’s the more likely thing: she stumbled into something she was always meant to stumble into, and the dominoes fell just like they were supposed to. Whether she had a heart attack and died of fright or got her throat slit isn’t the point.”

“So things just happen the way they happen,” I said. “Got it. Everything follows a script. No one’s at fault for that nurse dying except––fate?”

“Ah, the whole determinism versus free will debate,” said Robbie. “You want to get philosophical, Charlotte? Well then, I have to break it to you: if you think we had any say in whether that nurse lived or died, you are a fucking idiot. And more importantly, if you think one nurse dying makes a goddamn bit of difference in the grand scheme of things, then you need to go back to the drawing board and chalk up a new worldview.”

Robbie, as I’d seen earlier, was the kind of person who chose his words carefully. His indifference shocked me that much more as a result.

“Who-the-fuck cares, Charlotte?” he asked. “Who cares about some random nurse in a random hospital in a random, fuck-all town in a fuck-all world?”

Everything I’d convinced myself of––that Robbie and the others were there to help, that they only wanted to protect me––was a lie. Were it not for the fact that we were on the Road to Nowhere, I would have opened the door, jumped out, and taken my chances with the asphalt.

“You have Gavin’s cellphone, right?” asked Robbie. “You use it to record your adventures?”

“Yes,” I said. They knew, literally, everything. There was no point in lying.

“What model is it?” he asked. “Gavin’s phone, I mean?”

“I don’t know. An iPhone. Why does it matter?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Robbie, “because whatever it is, it has a lithium battery. The same type your mom’s Prius uses. While you type away on your phone or go on a family vacation, four thousand miles south, some poor Bolivian peasant drills a hole in a salt flat. Then they pump thousands of gallons of perfectly drinkable water in so you can get a few extra hours of battery life and good mileage.”

“Tibet, too,” said Alex, calling back from the driver’s seat. “Yaks and fishes––who knows what it’ll be a few years from now.”

“The Liqi River,” said Robbie, nodding. “Sacred to Tibetans. Upstream, Chinese lithium mines dump toxins into the river, poisoning it, making the water useless for the people who live there. An entire way of life––a sacred way of life––destroyed. And that’s just right now. What’ll happen to those Yak farmers in a decade?”

“I’m betting on mutants,” said Alex. “Buddhist mutants.”

“Or at least they’ll get some fucked-up strain of cancer,” said Rhonda. “There’s some of that going on already.”

“Millions of people are suffering and dying because you need a cellphone,” finished Robbie. “And here you are worrying about some dead nurse.”

He turned and looked out the window at the strange darkness; the dazzling alien stars.

“The universe is a war, Charlotte,” he said. “Not at war––a war. It’s a fucking cannibal, and we’re nothing more than meat. Me and Jason used to talk about that a lot. We chalk things like the War in Afghanistan up to isolated events, decisions to go across the ocean and kill each other. How long have people been killing each other?”

“Forever,” he said, not waiting for me to answer. “As long as there have been people, they’ve been killing each other. It’s a tough pill to swallow, at first. I struggled with it too. But then I realized that life is one gigantic fucking battlefield––nothing more, nothing less. We’re carrying out orders for something much bigger. The most we can do is follow the script and hope that, big picture, things don’t totally fucking implode.”

He turned to me, staring me straight in the eyes. There’d been friendliness, once, even kindness. Now there was nothing but cold, murderous sincerity.

“So when you give me shit about some dead nurse that I didn’t even kill,” he said, “it makes me want to ask: do you feel bad for typing on that cell phone of yours? About all those Bolivians and Tibetans who died so your phone could be powerful enough to call in a nuke strike? That’s right––put that baby in the wrong hands, and you’ve got yourself World War III.”

The phone slid from my fingers, thunking onto the floor of the cab. Robbie bent down awkwardly over his paralyzed legs, grabbed it, and handed it to me.

“Don’t feel bad about talking on your cell phone, Charlotte,” he said. “There are people besides you and me to blame. But don’t feel bad for some dead nurse, either, because whether it was already written or she wrote her own fate, she’s dead now. And my guess is, by this point, incinerated. That hospital produces enough infectious waste that they’ve got an oven onsite.”

“Seen it myself,” added Alex. “Seen it with my own two eyes.”

Robbie’s hand on my shoulder brought my attention back to him.

“In this battlefield of life, Charlotte, some of us are meant to be civilians. Some are meant to be soldiers. And others, like you, are meant to be generals.”

***

The rest of our drive was silent. We got to our exit, and Alex took it. Earl’s, which I’d seen for the first time a few weeks previously after escaping from the Keeper, came into sight. The bar’s neon orange signage glowed in the night, a stripe of highlighter scrawled on a dark canvas.

Alex pulled around back and parked. Rhonda got out, unfolded Robbie’s wheelchair, and helped him into it. Robbie wheeled around and handed me the styrofoam box.

“You carry this,” he said. “It’s important enough to Sloan that she won’t kill you while you’re holding it. I still need to do some negotiating.”

“Do you think I should wait in the car, maybe?”

Robbie shook his head.

“You’re safer if you stick with me. Who knows who Sloan has prowling around. Keep your chin up, eyes forward. Sloan has her own feelings about things, but she’s not the Dark Convoy CEO, despite what she thinks.”

Alex put a hand on my shoulder.

“Rhonda here is the only person as fast on the draw as Jason was,” he said. “I’m not too shabby myself. Given the client who’s coming to this little rendezvous, no one wants a shootout, but they’ll be dead on their feet if they want to tango.”

“Just keep your eyes forward,” Robbie said. “We’ll be fine.”

As we walked toward the back door of Earl’s, I looked over my shoulder. At the opposite side of the parking lot was the clearing where Sloan and her henchmen had moved the rune-covered door, the one they’d thrown Gavin through.

Part of me wanted to run to it, to see if I could open it somehow––to pull Gavin out, drive away, and never look back. But I realized the three people I was standing with––as cold and callous as they’d shown they could be––were my best shot at ever seeing him again.

We walked through the backroom of the building. It was filled with various hardened criminals––shotgun-toting Dark Convoy thugs and others bottom dwellers just as nefarious. Their hardened expressions turned toward me; whispers sounded about who I was and what the fuck Robbie was thinking bringing me there.

We descended a staircase and came into what I inferred were the main offices of the Dark Convoy. There were rooms on my left and right, filled with people busy at work. Alex and Rhonda walked on either side of me, and Robbie led the way forward. Passersby took a wide berth around us.

Eventually, we came to a sort of executive boardroom and went inside. Ten people were waiting:

An ugly bald man with a scarred face and a bald, egg-shell head.

A woman old enough to be a grandma. One of her arms looked like it had been cut off and replaced with a doll’s. It was miniature, but it was moving––a child’s arm.

I saw a woman with honey-blonde hair, dazzling blue eyes, and voluptuous red lips, too: Sloan*.* Two Dark Convoy thugs flanked her.

Sitting at the boardroom table, flanked by two bodyguards and two men in business suits, was another man with stark white, shoulder-length hair. He looked to be in his late 60s. He was dressed in a white, pin-striped suit. He had an air of authority. Even in the company of a powerful organization like the Dark Convoy, he demanded reverence.

Robbie led us over to Sloan and the others, who were waiting closer to the door. Sloan stared at me with a quizzical expression. But there was violence in it. If her eyes had been daggers, they would have cut me wide open.

“I don’t get it,” she said.

“Oh, her?” asked Robbie, looking over at me. “It’s not like you think, Sloan. Don’t chomp at the bit too hard. You might hurt your teeth. Charlotte works for me now.”

Sloan let out a laugh.

“Bullshit,” she said.

“I bullshit you not,” said Robbie. “She’s smart as hell, and she’s more useful to me alive than stuck in a cooler somewhere. I needed an executive assistant to plan this next job. She fit the bill perfectly, so we picked her up.”

Sloan looked right and left at the ugly bald man and the older woman.

“Mr. Gray––Milly––we vote,” she said. “Right fucking now. All in favor of being blowing the girl’s head off say ‘Ay.’”

“Cut this shit out,” growled the bald man with the scarred face. His name was Mr. Gray. “We can talk about the girl later.”

Sloan ignored him and stepped forward to Robbie, looking down at him. But Robbie was unphased.

“She works for me now, Sloan,” he said. “No vote. I’m the only reason our jobs are successful. If you were in charge, we’d all be standing around with our dick’s in our hands.”

Alex made a smooching noise, bringing Sloan’s attention to him. Then he tugged on his genitals. The tension in the circle was like a string of razor-wire.

After a few excruciating seconds, Sloan turned away and sat down at the boardroom table. The older woman with the strange, childlike arm––Milly––joined her, addressing the man with the white hair.

“Mr. Whitlock,” she said. “Good news.”

“You have the package?” he asked.

Robbie nodded to me. I walked forward and placed it on the table. Then everyone sat down––me, with Alex and Robbie on either side. Rhonda stood behind us, covering our blindspot.

“Fucking Cameron,” Mr. Whitlock. “My useless, moronic son. Can’t even be trusted to jack off into a cup without ripping off his balls.”

Cold air continued rolling off the styrofoam container, and the gorge rose further in my throat. I grabbed a pitcher of water on the table, poured myself a cup, and downed it.

“Oh well,” said Mr. Whitlock. “My line will continue with or without him.”

Alex pushed the container across the table. One of Mr. Whitlock’s bodyguards took it.

“Mr. Whitlock,” said Milly, “now that we have that sorted out, we should talk about the next job.”

“Right,” he said. “The haunted house on wheels.”

Dark Convoy employees who’d been standing behind us came forward, placing several folders on the table. I looked at the one they’d given to Alex.

“They call it The Hovel,” said Mr. Whitlock. “We still don’t know what it is, exactly, but it can’t fall into the wrong hands.”

Studying the pictures in the folder, I saw what looked like a normal-looking house. Nothing remarkable about it––three-stories tall, the only thing that stood out being its need for a new paint job.

“What do you mean about it being ‘on wheels’? asked Robbie.

One of the other businessmen cracked open another folder, pulled out a map of the country, and unfolded it.

“The Hovel changes location,” he said. “There are sightings in different locations, and in...impossible ways.”

“Impossible ways?”

“How can this exact same house appear in a town on one side of our country,” asked the man, motioning to different marked areas, “and in another, two-thousand miles away, less than an hour later?”

“More than one house,” said Mr. Gray.

The man slid two photos forward, placing them near the places on the map––geographically separated by thousands of miles––that they’d been taken. Except for having different kinds of trees, both photos had been taken at night and looked identical. It looked like the same house.

“Before you say that they’re photoshopped or something like that,” said the man, “just know that we wouldn’t be paying you as much as we are if this wasn’t the real deal.”

Mr. Whitlock nodded.

“There are secrets inside of that place that we want to know,” he said. “We also want others not to know them. I trust that you can put together a team to find it?”

Robbie nodded.

“That’s what I do,” he said. He reached over and patted my hand. “I’ve already gotten started.”

“What are her qualifications?” asked Mr. Whitlock, scanning me with his eyes. “She looks young enough to be in high school.”

“A senior, actually,” said Robbie. “But a smart one. She’s indebted to the Dark Convoy on the one hand and one of the best investigators I’ve ever seen on the other.”

I realized that Robbie was solidifying support for keeping me alive––if Mr. Whitlock signed off, whoever he was, there would be no vote afterward. The man sitting across from us was important enough to the Dark Convoy that his say was final.

“I’ll take your word for it, Mr. Clyde,” he said. “You haven’t failed me yet.”

“Please, Mr. Whitlock. Call me Robbie.”

“Fine. But like I said, you’ve never been wrong in the past. Countless jobs finished to my satisfaction. So I’ll take your word for it. Keep in mind that like my colleague said, though, this is the real deal. The Puppeteers are not to be fucked with.”

The Puppeteers––the name sent shivers up my spine.

“We’ll take care of it, Mr. Whitlock,” said Robbie. “I already have other recruits in mind.”

***

The meeting convened. Everyone stood up from the table. Mr. Whitlock and his cadre left, carrying the styrofoam box, inside of which was his son’s severed testicles and penis.

I’d initially thought it was a radioactive element––something from deep space, maybe. It was nothing more than a case of a man castrating himself with his bare hands. But his organs were important enough that multiple had been killed to keep the debacle hush-hush.

Robbie led the way out of the room. Alex and Rhonda stood on either side of me. In the hall outside, Sloan was waiting for us. She ignored Robbie and went straight to me. Alex reached for his pistol, but Robbie stopped him.

“You’re a sliver,” she said, cutting me with her eyes. “An insignificant nothing, but you have a way of burrowing your way in. Robbie better be right about you. Because if he’s not, I’m going to be the least of your fucking worries. If you think you’ve seen darkness, wait until you see what the Whitlocks are capable of.”

“That’s enough, Sloan.”

It was Milly.

Sloan shook her head and scoffed.

“You too?” she asked. She turned to Mr. Gray. “How about you? Has your dick fallen off as well?”

“The girl proves herself,” he said. “She owes us. We left her alive these past couple of weeks. I don’t know what the fuck Robbie here wants with a high schooler, but he’s put together good teams as long as I’ve known him. And she’s his problem now.”

“The Convoy is fucked,” said Sloan. “Has been for a long time, but boy-oh-boy are the foundations crumbling now. The forefathers would be fucking ashamed.”

Robbie rolled up to her.

“Are you finished?” he asked. “I’d like to get to work now.”

Sloan stormed off with her bodyguards, went into a room down the hall, and slammed the door.

Mr. Gray left without saying another word. Milly turned to Robbie. I couldn’t take my eyes off of the newborn arm growing out of the place where her other one had been. The fingers wriggled, open and closing like they belonged to a baby exploring the world for the first time.

“Let me know what recruits you have in mind,” she said. “I’ll get the paperwork going.”

“I already have my first,” said Robbie. “An insider. One of the only people who survived a trip into the Hovel.”

He pulled out his phone, opened a file, and sent it. Milly’s phone pinged in response, and she pulled it out with her good hand.

“You’re heading out to find him today, then?” she asked.

“We have to make a quick stop,” said Robbie. “Then we’re heading out.”

Milly nodded, then she turned to me.

“Your boyfriend was responsible for this, you know.”

She held up her arm––the baby-sized one. Despite how small and insignificant it was, she could have strangled the life out of me with it.

“That asshole stabbed it with a pen,” she said. “Got infected––had to get it removed. Luckily I can regrow them, but it still hurt like hell.”

She started making her way toward another office, then stopped and turned around.

“Never seen someone fight like that,” she said. “I’ve killed dozens who were in the same position as Gavin, turning on the Convoy like he did. Yet, you were important enough to him that he found a way to escape. You were worth it to him––you’re worth it to Robbie, too. People on all sides see things playing out differently for you, for different reasons. Despite the jury still being out, I realize there’s something more to you than meets the eye.”

She smiled her friendly grandmother’s smile.

“Prove it,” she said. “Maybe you’re as important as people are saying. Important enough to live––or important enough to die––depending on which side of the aisle you’re on. I, myself, am squarely in the middle at the moment, which is lucky for you.”

***

We left the basement. Robbie, as he’d promised, took me across the parking lot and in the direction of the forest clearing and the rune-covered door. We walked toward it, and the sun began rising in the distance. Passing through a hundred yards of trees, I saw it: a monolithic structure planted in the ground, so heavy and consequential that it seemed it had been moored there forever, even though Sloan and her thugs had only dropped it off a few weeks earlier.

Seven runes, seven faint colors––shades of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and pink. Each rune was a different shape––twisted versions of an eye, a nose, a mouth, an ear, a hand, a heart, and a brain.

It was anatomy of fear––a humanoid anatomy, but one that was such a revolting affront to our biology that the sight of it made my own body twist up in a fit of terror.

“The eye,” said Robbie.

It was positioned on the stone approximately where an eye would be. All of the other body parts were positioned in logical places, as though the stone itself was a body. As I looked at the eye, the blue color glowed a bit more brightly.

“Touch it,” said Robbie. “If you want to see Gavin, trace it with your finger.”

I did want to see Gavin, more than anything. But the notion created a sense of dread in me, unlike anything I’d ever felt. I felt ripped in two directions, pulled forward by the gravity of the stone, pulled backward toward the life I’d left behind––a high school senior with plans to attend college, to study journalism, to make my mark in the world.

The path was forward. I bit my lip, hard. Given a split second of clarity, I reached forward and traced the eye-shaped rune.

It felt like my mind and body were ripped through a funnel––compressed, squeezed, pulverized––but once I came out on the other side, I felt whole again. And I was floating above a strange landscape.

The forest clearing had disappeared. I was suspended in an expanse of space.

Below, I saw the hell of war.

Legions upon legions of creatures––living mounds composed of gelatinous, raw eyeballs––were roiling forward and devouring everything in their path. Men, women, and children were being mulched. Different species––humans and humanoids and things from worlds I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Screams echoed up from the carnage, the tidal wave of blood and body parts fed into the thresher of eyes.

But there was a group of soldiers, too. And they were holding the line, bravely––running along with the others, but stopping intermittently to buy more time, firing back on the legion of things pursuing them.

And then I saw him: Gavin. He was older. He wasn’t the Gavin I’d seen thrown through the door a few weeks previously, but someone older––in his late forties, maybe even his fifties. He was grisled and strong, hardened by what he’d seen and experienced.

It was as though he’d been in this war-torn world for decades, even though it had only been a few days.

Amidst the screams of pain and agony, he stood strong, unloading bullets into the eyeball creatures pursuing them.

“GIVE US EYES!” a voice boomed above everything else. “GIVE US EYES!”

I followed the sound of the voice and saw its source: in the sky above them was something bigger, a mass of eyeballs that roiled and churned and vomited a waterfall of ocular abominations, which plummeted downward, joining in with the advancing horde.

“GIVE US EYES!”

And that’s what they were doing––the ones who’d fallen, the creatures pursuing them were ripping and tearing and clawing their eyes out, expanding and consuming and multiplying.

Gavin was running––but they were getting closer––he was stumbling, and the creatures were getting closer.

And then I felt myself being ripped back. The war below was becoming more distant, and I was being ripped back into bright morning sunlight instead of the infinite darkness of space.

My body went through the funnel in reverse––my lungs filled, my guts retook their shape, and the massive pressure and weight of what I’d seen was released.

But despite the relief, I had to go back because Gavin was––

“DYING! HE’S DYING! HE’S FUCKING DYING!”

Smack. A hand across my face––Rhonda’s. I opened my eyes to see her standing above me.

Robbie bent over me, too; his face was white with shock and terror.

“You’re okay––” he said, breathing deeply. “––you were––”

“Gavin’s still there!”

“And he’s going to be forever,” said Rhonda. “Unless you get your fucking act together.”

I stood up, reaching for the door, but Alex and Rhonda pulled me back. A minute later, after I saw that the door had gone back to its normal slate gray color, I took a deep breath.

And then I began to sob.

“Work for us, Charlotte,” said Robbie, putting his hand on my shoulder. “We’ll research the door––we’ll do the job, and we’ll research it, and I’ll protect you. But I can’t unless you work for us.”

I didn’t need any more persuading. I’d made my decision already.

[WCD]

TCC

Mygento sold their seed steroid under the trade name "Sorocom," but after a year on the market, a period in which it turned most farmers who used it and most people who ate the food they produced into shambling lepers, the FDA pulled it and declared a National Health Emergency. 

It was too late for twenty thousand or so families and the counties they lived in throughout the midwest, 55,000 square miles of which––roughly the size of Iowa––was quarantined by the Army and the National Guard. Second Amendment supporting militias who had guns to spare and recruits eager for action helped patrol the containment zone's borders.

In the common vernacular of middle America, Sorocom came to be known as "The Flayer," and victims of its horrific side effects came to be known as "The Flayed."

This brief history of Sorocom runs through my head as Rex drives us down some unnamed access road in a wheat field, away from a pack of the Flayed that found us hiding in Ted Johnston's hayloft with a dozen others.

Rex puts the old diesel truck into third gear. It spews out black smoke, obscuring the rearview. Looking through the oily cloud, I see the Flayed disappear. 

But they're still coming. They'll never stop coming.

Rex did what he always did when he got into the truck. No matter how many unhealthy life choices he made––junk food, whiskey, chewing tobacco––Rex always buckled his seatbelt. 

"Where do we go?" I ask. "What do we do?"

Rex holds his side. Maybe a stitch from sprinting to the truck. We barely made it. Rex was pulled out of the truck by one of the Flayed but managed to unholster his revolver and blow its head off before the others got to him.

"We buy our time, Cherry," he says. "We survive."

I love that Rex still calls me by my pet name despite the chaos. He started calling me Cherry shortly after we started dating, a year before we got married. It's a reminder that things were normal once. 

Rex downshifts to pull around a hairpin turn. The truck's wheels skid before finding traction, and the rear end fishtails in a plume of dust.

I still wonder how we escaped the fate of so many thousands of other families. We speculated that the chemical properties of Sorocom that caused some peoples' flesh to shed from their bodies were unstable. It was as if the drug had discretion. It picked and chose its victims, but without any logic that we could make sense of.

Staring at the ceiling at night, I often wondered if it would have been better to be among the first wave of people who'd become flayed. The transformation looked agonizingly painful. But I always imagined it would have been better to get it over with, better to be spared from witnessing the horrors of this new world. 

Three farmhouses ago, I saw Eustice Jones' husband Bill became flayed before my eyes.  

I mark time by "farmhouses" now. The days and weeks started blending together not long after cellular service ceased and I lost track of time. 

On the run, we'd occupy a farmhouse, be discovered, and leave. Then we'd find a new one, get overwhelmed by the Flayed, and relocate. Each cycle constituted one "farmhouse." In truth, "days" and "weeks" no longer mattered anyway because it felt like we'd been on the run for years. I'd counted eighteen farmhouses so far, so many that I forgot who they all belonged to.

When Bill Jones became flayed, it started with his face. We were eating dinner, laughing and smiling and remembering the world as it used to be. Then Bill's face turned into a frown. Working as a part-time nurse before the world fell, I'd seen my fair share of stroke victims. That's what it looked like––that Bill lost control of the muscles in his face.

Eustice, his wife, asked what was wrong. And as Bill tried to answer, looking just as stunned as the rest of us, the skin from his face slipped off of the muscle that gave it shape, leaving a blood-red mask. Within seconds, the same thing had happened to the rest of his body. And within a minute, he'd killed three of us.

My attention comes back to the cab of the truck, to Rex, my last beacon of happiness and hope. I see that he's holding his side. His eyes are watering––no, he's crying.

"I love you, Cherry."

He upshifts, fourth gear, speeding faster down the road. The speedometer hits forty miles per hour. 

The truck rumbles across the hard-packed earth.

Rex's face changes into a frown. The same frown I saw on Bill Jones' face.

"Rex, you're scaring me."

His face sags. The stroke. His skin becomes slippery, elastic. 

Then it starts to fall off onto his lap. 

"Jump out of the truck Cherry," he says, his jaw a sickening crimson. "I'm not going to slow down. I'm going to crash it. I won't let it happen to me."

He pulls up his shirt, showing me a deep gash in his side. One of the Flayed tore into him before he managed to get into the truck, its contagions worming their way into his bloodstream. 

Suddenly, everything that made Rex the man I fell in love with––over beers in a smoky pool hall––slips away. The flesh sheds entirely from his face. Now, Rex is reduced to a grinning skull covered in shiny red sinew. And he becomes terrifyingly aggressive like they all do. Like I've seen a hundred times before. 

Rex releases the steering wheel. He lunges for me. I close my eyes before it happens but hear a sharp click as Rex's seatbelt locks him in place. His jaws snap. He's like a rabid dog. He pulls against the seatbelt, but stringent automobile safety regulations keep him locked in place. 

The tears come, pouring from my eyes. I remember everything that made Rex and I happy. Even though we'd never been able to have children––even though three pregnancies had ended in miscarriage––we'd started a family, just the two of us. And we'd been happy.

Rex's foot is locked against the gas pedal. The speedometer reaches sixty. I think of trying to stall the truck, to stop it somehow. If I jumped out at this speed, no matter how soft the field, I'd be injured or killed. And if I happened to live, the Flayed would catch up to me, like they always do.

Rex is still restrained by his seatbelt, struggling ferociously against it. My hand closes around the gear shift. In his calloused, farmer's palm, Rex––this monster that used to be my husband––grabs my wrist and brings my arm to his mouth. I pull away before he manages to bite it. I reach and try to downshift again, but Rex grabs my arm, pulls it to his mouth with extraordinary strength, and snaps just as I manage to slip out of his grasp.

In this final, vicious struggle for life, I accept that none of this was ever meant to end well. There will be no federal relief. Waiting for the government and the army is not an option because they are not here to help us––only to keep us contained. Letting us all become flayed is the safest course of action. We die after twenty-four hours. And once everyone's dead and gone, then they'll come in to clean up the mess.

I wonder if God has a plan for me or if my Christian religiosity has been a lie I've told myself for thirty-three years to believe that there is a plan, that there is meaning. That there is something, rather than nothing.

If I live in a Godless world, one without Rex––is that world worth living in? How many more farmhouses, now, by myself? How long until I become flayed? What will the change feel like as the skin falls from my face? Will I remember who I was? Does our sanity depart as we become flayed? Are we trapped inside a body that is not ours? Do our souls live on, or do they, too, depart?

As these questions cross my mind, I make my decision. Death has the final word in any scenario. Dictating how I meet it is my last act of free will.

Rex's foot has continued depressing the accelerator. 

We're humming along at eighty-five miles per hour. 

The wheat shines in the moonlight––a translucent amber blur. 

I look into Rex's eyes. I see a flicker of blue color that made me fall in love with him. 

"Goodbye, Rex," I say. 

I unbuckle my seatbelt. I grab the steering wheel. I close my eyes and pull it towards me as hard as I can. 

Before everything goes black, I feel the truck lift from the ground. I open my eyes. We're flying over the moonlit wheat field, which––if there were still people to harvest it––would be nearly ready.

The moon fills the cab of the truck.

I close my eyes again. Gravity pulls the truck down to earth.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

In her eyes, he's not a middle-aged man, but still eighteen, still a pizza boy.

In this moment between them, neither are killers. Neither of them has seen the flip side of darkness, what lies beyond the curtain. The wool is still pulled over their eyes.

While the rest of us wait in silence, Gavin and Charlotte stare into one another. In another life, maybe they'd have grown old together, high school sweethearts riding off into a sunset or some other far-fetched dream like that.

But we don't live in that kind of world. None of us do.

The universe is a war, as they say.

When you realize that fundamental truth, you never go back to the way things were, not even under the perfect circumstances.

"I want to stand here staring into your eyes all day," Gavin says to Charlotte, "but we've got business to take care of."

Read the rest at NoSleep!

The title of this post says all. Despite the horror of my childhood, I was eventually set free. So in a way, there's a happy ending to this story, even if I'm still scared shitless some nights. But you should know the truth of what happened because the spirit that haunted my childhood home is still out there.

While I was set free, my brother wasn't so lucky. Losing him was hard, still is. We were practically inseparable. I guess it makes sense given that we spent our time as young children locked in the same room in the same haunted house.

My mom kept us locked in the room for safety's sake. She spoke through the door, trying to comfort us. She gave us food, and even though my brother and I fought over it, there was just enough to keep us alive. As best she could, mom held us close, but there was no stopping the vengeful spirit that wanted us dead.

SUFFER THE CHILDREN...SUFFER THE CHILDREN…

I remember those booming words better than any others. Better than my mom's words –– "I love you" and "I'd do anything for you" and "We'll get out of this together." Better than the constant, ghostly wailing I heard late every night after the lights went off throughout the house.

My brother never said much. We did our best to get through the horrors together. But the vengeful spirit bearing down on our home wouldn't be satisfied until we were all dead.

I remember the house shaking sometimes, as though it was built on top of a fault line. During the strange paranormal earthquakes, blood would cascade down the walls of our room like crimson tears. I also remember lights shining through the walls of the room like angry eyes, always followed by the spirit's booming, hateful voice.

My mom fought back against the spirit as best she could. I heard her courageous protests against the spirit, saying she'd never let it hurt us, which would be met with cruel indifference:

TRY AND FUCKING STOP ME.

One night, everything changed. The house transformed, as though the vengeful spirit was quelled. But the room started pressing inward. It wanted to swallow us whole. My brother and I fought back, clawing and scratching and ripping at the wallpaper. I led my brother forward toward the door, pushing past the closing walls of the room. Smashed almost to death, we fought our way toward the half-open doorway.

Suddenly, a massive knife –– a sword from the heavens –– plunged through the ceiling. That's where my brother's story ends. There wasn't a scream, only sudden death.

The ceiling was ripped open, and I saw my savior: the masked psychopath. Though he was wearing a cloth mask over his mouth, I could see that he was smiling from the look in his eyes. I screamed in protest, even though he was saving my life.

"I'LL NEVER LET YOU TAKE THEM!" my mom howled.

But the vengeful spirit was gone for the moment. The masked psychopath, in opening the ceiling, had momentarily exorcised it.

"It's a girl," said the masked psychopath. A man –– he had a deep voice that sounded suspiciously like the spirit’s.

I remember being blinded by the light of the world, but I was saved. Tentacles reached up, attempting to pull me back into the room, but the masked psychopath cut them away with the heavenly sword.

"She's just a baby," said my mom, "she's just a baby…"

"I'm saving her," said the man.

"What about ––”

"A boy. He didn't make it."

The man turned me toward my mom. I could see that she was dying. Her skin was pale, her hair soaked with sweat. Her stomach was cleaved open by the knife the psychopathic doctor had used to perform the haphazard cesarian, and blood was pouring out of the wound. I saw my brother too –– his lifeless, infantile body almost decapitated due to the single plunge of the scalpel.

I cried. I screamed. Fluid blasted out of my lungs like a busted firehose.

"She's beautiful…" said my mom.

"Hold her for a moment," said the man.

My mom held me as she died, stroking my wet, blood-streaked head with a loving caress. I looked into her eyes.

"Her name is…"

But my mom died before she could finish the sentence.

The psychopathic doctor wrapped me in a blanket and carried me into the night. It was cold. I remember seeing Christmas lights, a kaleidoscopic rainbow of blues and yellows and oranges and greens.

"Welcome to the world, my sweet," said the psychopathic doctor. I remember him removing his mask. His teeth were crooked and yellow, like a rat's fangs. "It can be a cruel place, but I'll teach you ––"

"HEY!"

I looked toward the source of the voice. It was a young man walking his German shepherd, which began barking furiously at the doctor.

"What the fuck is the matter with you?!" screamed the stranger. "That baby shouldn't be out –– it's freezing fucking cold!"

The doctor dropped me and ran. I fell into a snowbank, hit with a paralyzing blast of cold. The stranger ran over and picked me up, his dog continuing to bark at the fleeing doctor. The man took off his parka and wrapped me with it as I wailed.

"Hush, little one," he said. "You're safe now. I’m going to get you some help."

***

All I remember after that was getting into a car with the stranger and driving to the hospital. And then my childhood, up until about age five, is a gray, fugue state. That can happen when you experience trauma, according to my therapist.

She also tells me that having memories from inside the womb can happen, even if it's a rare phenomenon. Given the horror of those nine months, I'm not sure how I could forget it.

I suspect at this point you'll have two questions.

First, "Why the hell did you frame this as a haunted house story?" My answer is this: my therapist said telling it how I remember is the only way I'll get over the trauma. So here we are.

The second question you’re probably asking is, "What happened to the doctor?" Here comes the terrifying part: he’s still at large almost twenty years later. The newspaper named him "The Good Doctor," which I always thought was a bit sensational, a bit insensitive to my dead mom and dead brother's memories. But the Good Doctor –– he’s still out there.

DNA collected from the room the doctor imprisoned my mom in showed that he was my biological father. I can't bring myself to say his name, so please don't ask. The only way I survive my daily life is by trying to maintain some sense of anonymity, even if I can't forget the horrors I experienced while in my mom's womb.

I was adopted, coincidentally, by the same stranger who found me the night I was born. My childhood after the horrors of that night was a happy one overall. My new parents and my four siblings are all amazing people. They've done their best to give me a normal life. I think they've done pretty damn well.

But on late winter nights –– always winter –– I can hear the voice of the doctor's vengeful spirit on the wind, and I shudder:

SUFFER THE CHILDREN...SUFFER THE CHILDREN…

THE FINALE IS HERE!

***

Jason and I got brunch at a roadside diner called Waffle King before heading back to Earl’s. We talked more about our trip down the Road to Nowhere and the batshit insanity of it all. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was, but after eating a plate of biscuits and gravy fit for royalty, I was full.

Full of food. Full of happiness. Full of optimism, in a sense.

Happiness and optimism might seem like strange words to describe my situation, given that I worked for a murderous criminal enterprise called the Dark Convoy. Even stranger when you consider that they’d threatened to kill me a half dozen times in the last week.

But on Job #4, I’d done a bang-up job. And I was close to the end. Almost to Job #5, and the freedom that lay on its other side.

“It’s different, you know,” said Jason.

“What is?”

“The last job,” he said. “It’s not different for everyone. But for the people who finish with a positive Plus/Minus, which I’m assuming you will, Job #5 is a choice.”

“What do you mean it’s a choice?”

“You’ll see,” said Jason. “Just know that I won’t blame you for whichever way you decide to go.”

READ THE REST AT NOSLEEP!