CreepsMcPasta Creepypasta Radio - " Dad ate meat from a deer that walked on two legs. Now he’s acting kinda strange" Creepypasta

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

CHECK OUT THE AUTHOR'S BOOKS-►https://a.co/d/gsVoBVj►https://books2read.com/moreteethCREEPYPASTA STORY►by ChristianWallis:   / qulzm56ue7  Creepypastas are the campfire tales of the internet. Horror stories spread through Reddit r/nosleep, forums and blogs, rather than word of mouth. Whether you believe these scary stories to be true or not is left to your own discretion and imagination. LISTEN TO CREEPYPASTAS ON THE GO-SPOTIFY► https://open.spotify.com/show/7l0iRPd...iTUNES► https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast...SUGGESTED CREEPYPASTA PLAYLISTS-►"Good Places to Start"-    • "I wasn't careful enough on the deep web" ...  ►"Personal Favourites"-    • "I sold my soul for a used dishwasher, and...  ►"Written by me"-    • "I've been Blind my Whole Life" Creepypasta  ►"Long Stories"-    • Long Stories  FOLLOW ME ON-►Twitter:   / creeps_mcpasta  ►Instagram:   / creepsmcpasta  ►Twitch:   / creepsmcpasta  ►Facebook:   / creepsmcpasta  CREEPYPASTA MUSIC/ SFX- ►http://bit.ly/Audionic ♪►http://bit.ly/Myuusic ♪►http://bit.ly/incompt ♪►http://bit.ly/EpidemicM ♪This creepypasta is for entertainment purposes only

The party was two weeks ago. I stole a few beers when the adults weren't looking and shared them with Lucy Sitkins away from the crowd. She drank hers greedily as we sat beneath a bow of a low tree, speaking low so no passers-by could hear. Every time we whispered, we tilted our faces a little closer and closer. There was a moment when I thought she was going to rest ahead on my shoulder as she told me about how she wanted to be a vet,

and my heart skipped as I debated putting my arm around her waist. It was all cut short when a father, Larry, stood in front of everyone in the party and forced the beer can down his throat. I didn't see it. I only heard the cries that had us both sitting upright beneath the branches. By the time we got back to the party, the adults were escorting the kids away, and ambulance sirens were fast approaching.

Dad was there, and he told me to take my little sister home. The grim and frightening look on his face made me forget Lucy and the smell of beer on her breath. I try hard to remember if she ate from the barbecue. Sometimes I think she didn't. Other times, I swear, I can picture her biting into a burger, and it's so vivid, I think it must be a memory. It's mooted.

either way. I'll never see her again. I felt a little gross when I went into school the next day and asked around if the stories about a dad were true. When my father got home the night of the party, he hadn't spoken to me or mom. He just went to bed and didn't tell us what happened. Come morning, I saw some of the older kids by the school gates and overheard them talking. The details made my stomach churn, but I wanted to know more. I didn't want to act all excited about something terrible, but this felt like the kind of thing people would be talking about for years. Larry Sidkins had swallowed a beer can. Shuffed it down his throat like a damn bow constricted wreath in an egg. At least that's how one kid described it to me. There was

more, of course. He'd praised Satan before slitting his own throat, gotten drunk and fallen hard onto the ground while chugging a beer, tried to catch the can midair. Someone had punched him mid-sip. There were lots of variations on what happened and how, but there were only theories that got turned into rumours. A lot of us were just trying to make sense of it. Larry was a pretty run-of-the-mill guy. He was a landscaper who made lame joker. He was a landfair at kids' birthday parties, it was about as non-descript as they came, at least as far as a bunch of teenagers were concerned. We got halfway through the day before Mr. Straub shut the bleachers on his neck. It was in front of the cheerleaders. There were ambulances again, crying girls

and boys, and even some of the teachers. Most of them just looked confused, except for Mr. the Straub. I managed to catch a glimpse of him as I jogged over to find out what all the screaming was about. He looked empty of all thoughts and emotions, and his head sat at a crooked angle. I figured that was how people must look when dead, but apparently he'd been like that during the act. He'd walked up, perched his neck between the slatted benches, and hit the remote button to slide the bleachers closed. whole time he was just slack-jawed and stupid-looking even as the metal mechanism crunched vertebra in cartilage

I later learned Larry had been like this too when he killed himself he was getting ready to pop the tab on a fresh beer when he simply stopped looked up to the sky then forced the whole thing down his throat in a single world-shattering moment I didn't know it back then

but there were others just like Larry had Mr. Strobe. A barista in a coffee shop steamed half the skin on her arm while keeping eye contact with the guy in the drive-thru. A doctor at the local clinic used a biopsy needle to inject air straight into his own heart. Lots of people shot themselves, but not one of them aimed for the head. That's a weird touch if you think about it. These people obliterated their torsos or limbs with high-powered rifles at point-blank range. No reason offered. Just a vacant expression as they deleted pits of their bodies

and left nothing but ragged stumps. There was no school the next day, which was the only real clue I got about how panicked the local authorities were. Wouldn't be long before the national authorities joined in on the panic too, but that would come later. That morning, my parents left the house at home, at 9.30 for a meeting at the town hall, and they dropped me off at my grandmas on the way.

I waited for them to leave before I told Grandma I was heading out. It was a hot day, and she only nodded her approval, and she sat reading with my sister. She hated seeing me play video games, and always encouraged me to go make my own adventures outside. I had no plans, didn't even want to see any of my friends. I thought a lot about Mr. Straub's face as I crossed empty farmer's fields and walked into the woods. I'd be into an open casket funeral once. It was for Father Dennis who'd christened me as a baby. Not that I remember anything about him, except his stony face resting gently in the soft white folds of his caskets interior.

That seemed so long ago and so sterile that the thought of it was a bit sad, but not a whole lot else. But Mr. Straub's face had frightened me with his swollen lips and bulging eyes, alive one moment and dead the next, with only pain to separate the two. And yet he looks so bored hanging there from his own broken neck, still wearing those ridiculous red shorts he always had on,

no matter the weather. It took time to recognize that seeing a dead body had freaked me out. I felt like it shouldn't have messed me up as much as it did, and I guess that's why there was a little bit of anger mixed in with all those thoughts in my head. It's also why I pushed on through the woods until the trees began to thin, marching in the humid summer heat

until my t-shirt was soaked and my legs ached. I wanted to feel tired, wanted it so the only thing I could think of were my throbbing hamstrings and sunburnt forehead. It ended when I reached the tracks. Shaggy rocks and boulders rose steeply on the opposite side. Only other ways to go were left into town or right into a dark tunnel, its mouth bristling with ivy.

At least the air coming from it was cold. So I took a second to stand and catch my breath, feeling the sweat cool and evaporate as the wind billowed gently out of the darkness. I wasn't stupid though. I paid close attention in case I heard the sound of any passing trains. And when I didn't hear one, I raced off the tracks as quick as I could. It honked as it came past. Another day I might have worried that I was going to get in trouble for playing on the rails.

But all I could really think of was the thing I'd seen lying by the tracks. It had been lit up by the train as it came roaring out of the tunnel, not far from the entrance. In the strange silence after the train had gone, there was only the dim light of the setting sun to see inside the tunnel, and everything looked the same. Old clothes, broken bottles, discarded crates,

trash strewn around wherever it found space. But I knew what I'd seen in the harsh white light of the train's passing beam, and it was a hell of a lot more than garbage. I'd seen a man. He was lying face down. They'd even been a hand, bright and pale, like the moon in the night sky. I was sure of it. I didn't know what to do, not right away.

I was afraid and didn't want to go inside, but I couldn't pretend I hadn't seen anything either. I tried shouting to them. If someone down there heard me, they gave no sign of it. Wasn't until I stepped into the darkness and let my eyes adjust that I confirmed there really was a man lying down in there. He was draped across the tracks and he didn't have any legs. And judging by the way the bloodstains had turned the colour brown, he'd been there for a while. Hell, half a dozen trains must have gone right over him thinking he was just an odd bit of cloth or something. That's if they saw anything at all.

In that time it dried out a little. It wasn't a mummy or anything, but the blood on his stumps and coming out of his mouth looked more like jelly than corn syrup. I was sobbing by this point, crying hard as I tried to make sense of what I was meant to do, while also feeling like all of this was terribly unfair on me. There was a moment where I could almost feel myself wanting to be a kid again, a proper one, little, one who doesn't have to do. do things, one who can get upset and scream and run away. I'd only just started to appreciate how badly I'd been messed up by seeing Mr. Straub, and then God went and dropped that kind of nightmare into my lap.

Teeth stained black with blood and open eyes that looked at nothing. It felt like a nightmare, not just a moment with a body, but everything else too. everything since that beer beneath the tree had felt like it wasn't part of reality anymore, but nightmares end. I was outside, gasping, vomiting, crying my eyes out. When I heard something shuffle in the tunnel I'd just run out of. Part of me thought that a sound must mean someone was alive and close by, and that meant I wasn't alone. Another part of me thought something else entirely. It was the part of me that took over and stopped me crying and making any more noise.

My mouth turned dry as a desert and all of a sudden I was no longer hot all over. But cold, freezing cold, and my legs were backpedaling away from the tunnel with short, quiet steps. The noise persisted. It was the shuffle of something getting dragged over gravel and old plastic bags. It had a rhythm to it that was slow. The word that springs to mind is one I got taught in biology class a long time ago. Locomotion. Something down there was moving.

It was moving towards me. It sounded slow and broken and feeble. But that didn't matter. Somehow, even though I knew it wasn't completely insane, I just knew what was going to come out of that tunnel. I knew it the way the rabbit knows the wolf or the ant knows the spider. But still, when I saw him crawl out of the dark and into the light, I screamed so loud I'd have a sore throat for the next few days. It was the man from the tracks, and even though he moved, he was not alive. I tried telling myself that he couldn't have been dead, because only living the

things move. But that was nonsense. He dragged his bloody, legless torso with one working arm, while the other lay dislocated across his back, the fingers of both hands curling as he heaved himself along. And that face, that same empty gawking expression, just like Mr. Straub's. He wasn't alive. He was a dead thing, and that made him some kind of impossible mind. I turned and ran screaming through the trees. The whole time I could only think of the thing that was behind me and was trying to close the distance. It didn't matter that it was slow,

didn't matter that I ran for over an hour, didn't even matter that I wasn't sure if I knew my way home or even running in the right direction. All that mattered was putting one foot in front of the other until there was nothing left inside me. Time turned funny. Seconds moved into strange staccatoes until eventually I collapsed on legs made of rubber.

Then I dragged myself into an old hollow tree to hide. And that was where I lost all consciousness. When I woke up, the sun had set and it was dark. I vomited some, then found my way back to the beaten path and stumbled achingly through the cold night air back to my grandma's farmhouse. Dad was sick. My grandma screamed something to this effect at me as she held down his right arm, while my mother tried to grip his head in her bloodslic hands.

He resisted with dumb determination. My little sister cried, watching the scene like a shell-shocked soldier. There was grunting and sobbing, and suddenly, A bang Then a puff of plaster rained down onto my head And everyone began to yell And shriek a little louder

Dad Had a gun That was what my grandma Was trying to wrestle out of his hands She held a knife And that's why there was blood But I didn't know whose it was I wasn't sure what she was planning to do with it

Until she tried to use it to cut his trigger finger off The scuffle resulted in another bang and a window exploded outwards. I finally ducked and grabbed my sister, rushing her into another room, but there were three more explosions and each one broke something inside me. By the time I heard my name being called, I was half deaf and twitching at things that weren't there. My sister pleaded for me to come back, her pink fingers grasping for me as I put her down.

but my mother was shouting for me to come help and I wanted to keep my family safe. She told me to get something to tie that up while she and my grandma used both arms to pin each of his wrists to the ground. His hands bled weakly as my grandma used every inch of a strength to simultaneously pin him and stop the flow.

He thrashed beneath them, his movements languid and easy, but I could tell it was a struggle for them to keep him down. As I ran to the garage, I saw the gun on the ground with dad's severed finger nearby. I kicked it out of reach before returning shortly with the rope my grandma used to tie the garage door open during hot summers. Mom tied the knots. My grandma tried talking to my dad, and it was one of the few times in my life I saw her as the woman who'd once changed his diapers. She was so soothing and tender, and her constant muttering that,

everything would be okay. Seems so fragile. She was scared for him. Mom just did everything in her power to wrestle some safety out of the moment. Only once his arms was secure behind his back and she was confident he wasn't breaking free

did she stand back but her hands behind her and then immediately hunch forward and sob. Call an ambulance, my grandma told me as she walked into the other room to get my sister. Before I got on the phone, I briefly hugged my mom who didn't seem to notice. I risked a glance at my dad who didn't look at anything at all. Dead eyes glazed

vacantly at nothing as he fought to free his arms. When he finally looked at me, it was no different to how he looked at the floor or the wall. I didn't go to school the next day either. men from the government came to take Dad in the morning, and Mom ordered me to my room when they arrived. She asked them a thousand questions, but their replies were short and stern. All I managed to overhear were a few muffled phrases. Please stay put, ma'am. Someone will be in contact with you shortly. When I ran to my window to look at them walking down the drive, I saw that they all wore masks. One of them saw I was still. I thought he was going to wave, but he didn't.

There was a biohazard symbol on their clothes. After they left, Mom focused on making dinner and looking after my sister. She kept me close the whole time, barking anxious questions whenever I tried to leave the room. Where are you going? Just the bathroom? Oh, okay then. It felt like she was painting normality. into tissue paper, desperately afraid of breaking it. I tried my best to seem like I was okay.

Last thing I wanted was to feel like some kid who needed his mommy. We mostly just talked about mundane things, but it was hard for both of us. The only time the atmosphere seemed to change was when she asked me something strange halfway through dinner. Did your father... When you both went hunting a few months back, what did you do to the meat? I don't know, I shrugged. Dad took care of all that.

Why? The men who took him asked a whole bunch of questions about it. Then, with a fragile smile, have you done your homework? They told me your teacher would send you some assignments online. Just like that, the thin pretense of normality came back. But I was left with a wriggling feeling in my stomach. It didn't go away as the evening marched on.

In fact, it only grew worse until I found myself in bed rolling from side to side and thinking about mom's question. The men who bundled Dad off hadn't seemed like the kind who messed around. They must have had some idea of what was going on. So why ask about the meat? On some level, I knew the moment she'd asked me why it was relevant. Dad loved to hunt and he always brought meat to parties and barbecues. Wasn't it obvious? He'd brought something back from the woods, hadn't he?

I hadn't gone hunting for a long time, nearly three months. Every time he'd asked, I'd refused, and I think he knew why. On the very last trip, Dad shot three deer, but we only took back two. One for us, one for the town barbecue. The third he shot, but we left it on the forest floor, because by the time it had died, I was pale and shaking, and even Dad couldn't keep the tremor out of his voice. Neither of us had expected the deer to stand on its hind legs

and walk towards us like a man. its gate a heavy broken thing as it lumbered over the forest floor and it had kept coming even after dad shot it six more times one of the rounds struck it in the head but still it shambled forward on two misshaping legs as his brains painted the ferns in pestilent grey when it finally fell even dad had gone pale and in the silent aftermath i had to go off and be sick in a bush

After that, we cut the trip short. Dad walked me gently back to the truck where the two deer was shot and trust earlier that day lay waiting in the pickup. I don't think either of us even remembered they were there until later. He'd still ask me if I wanted to head out with him each weekend, but he never seemed surprised when I made some excuse.

The only time we talked about it was not long before the barbecue when he drove me to school one day. He didn't deal with it head on. He skirted the topic. Sometimes deer gets sick, he told me. A little like old folks do. Remember Grandpa?

He got real scary towards the end, didn't he? Well, deer gets sick too. But we don't have to worry. Same way you couldn't catch what Grandpa had. Well, we can't catch what the deer have. Us humans are safe. Just an uncomfortable part of it. nature. It had come out of the blue, or at least it seemed like it. I figured it was

dad's way of trying to get me back on board with hunting. I knew he liked me going with him. I'd liked it too, at least until I saw that deer walk toward me on two legs. But lying in my bed that night after Mom had gone to sleep, I started to wonder if maybe he hadn't really been trying to convince me. Maybe he carried a little doubt in himself. about something he was gonna do. What if he'd been trying to convince himself? It was okay. Too dear.

I tried remembering what they'd been like. I hadn't shake them after we got in the truck. Why would I? Seemed as normal as any others as we'd tie them down. But I hadn't really been paying attention either. I'd been hunting since I was seven, helping Dad was automatic to me. and to top it off, I hadn't known what I was meant to be looking for.

I squirmed beneath the sheets and tried so hard to remember every detail of that trip. Most of all, I tried to remember what the first two deer dad had shot were like. They'd gone down so quick. They'd seemed normal. But Grandpa had been sick with Alzheimer's a long time before he got scary. And I had to figure the same could be true for those days. dear. Who was to say the one on hind legs was the only sick creature in the woods that day? I couldn't have forced these thoughts out of my head with a crowbar.

At some point, I accepted I wasn't getting any sleep that night, and I settled down to torture myself some more, until I realized it didn't have to be that way. Dad had an old freezer in the shed, and he sometimes kept meat in there. Not for long, and usually not for eating. He'd use it for things he'd wanted to skin or tried to make a trophy out of it, which he rarely did since Mom didn't like that kind of thing in the house. But if the deer weren't in the freezer in the kitchen or the garage, then they might be in the shed.

And if I did open up that chest and saw two deer bodies in there, that meant whenever was going around and making people hurt themselves, couldn't have come from our little hunting trip. I snuck out of my room as quietly as I could. Mom was on the phone with my grandma and she was crying. I stopped briefly by a door and listened to see if maybe they knew something I didn't. But after she started talking about how scared she was, I just felt bad and moved on.

At least it meant she was too busy to notice me creeping down the stairs. I never liked the shed at the end of the yard. It was rarely used, even by my dad, who kept the lawnmower and some old junk in there. It wasn't the kind of place he kept food, but I had this feeling he didn't keep these deer with the rest of the meat he got from hunting. As I opened the back door

and looked over the shadow-covered yard, I found myself thinking about the tunnel and what I'd seen back there. With everything that had happened since, I'd done a good job I convinced myself it had never really happened. The man with no legs who dragged himself out of the darkness

had become little more than a half-remembered nightmare, a moment out of time that was incompatible with all logic and reason. But suddenly, it was back with me, all the emotions and thoughts that raced through my head as I'd stared at his rotten flesh and glassy eyes. The walk to the shed wasn't easy. I fought the urge to turn around the entire way there. Each step was like walking on feet made of lead.

At the door, I paused with my hand poised by the lock. The house seemed so distant behind me, and I became painfully aware nobody knew I was alone and out in the dark. Inside was nearly pitch black. My phone helped me light it up a little, but I didn't touch the nearby switch in case Mom saw it from a window.

Cobwebs hung low from the ceiling, and shadows crawled across the floor and walls as I moved closer to the freezer. The entire time I kept expecting something to happen. I even imagined that deer rising from beneath the lid, pushing it open to stand unnaturally tall on its hind legs where he looked down at me with the same dead eyes I'd seen in my father. The thought scared me so bad, I nearly hyperventilated myself straight into a panic attack.

But before I had time to really worry about any of that, I found my hand on the freezer's latch. I pushed it open and looked inside. The misty vapors cleared to reveal a pile of meat and fur and crusted with ice. There was only one head visible, but I so badly wanted confirmation that there were two animals in there that I took a deep breath and reached in to try pry some of it loose.

Some of it came away from the sides with a sound-like duct tape, but no matter how deep I rooted in that mound of bone, antlers and rock-hard flesh, I couldn't see a sign of the second deer. Her dad really served everyone's sick meat. Was that why Larry Sitkins and Mr. Straub and all those other people had killed themselves? The thought made me feel ill. I slammed the freezer shut and walked back to the door in a daze, trying with all my might to swallow the painful weight that's,

settled in my gut. I had one foot outside when the freezer door rattled against the latch. The entire world spun around me. My heart sank and my skin froze in the sensation that was growing increasingly familiar. I turned to face the sound, both hands braced against the door, and watched as the latch slammed into the lock once more. The light inside the chest came on for the the briefest moments, and I glimpsed thrashing fur and teeth. Then it happened again and again, and each time I saw bits of hoof and bone and strange musculature that frightened me so deep I fell down onto my ass and didn't even realize. When the latch finally gave way, the lid flew open and stayed there.

Light poured out of the box, and I waited, breath held for that thing to emerge, to come roaring out of sight and bear down towards me on unnatural legs. But nothing happened. The silence stretched on for what seemed like an eternity, until at last there was a crash louder than any before, and the entire freezer rocked back and forth and slowly fell over. The deer, or parts of it, fell out with a hard, wet thump. Bits of his chin and face shattered on the hard-packed ground, sending little shards of meat and bones skating across the floor on melting streaks of blood. Some of them even reached my feet. The thing inside moved with the sound of snow crunching beneath your feet, its thick neck

and broken head twisting side to side, scanning the shed's interior with faulty eyes. I've never seen anything move like that, not before or since. This was worse than the man in the tunnel, worse by a thousand times. The deer was still mostly frozen, but some impossible force was making the crystallized water in its own cells, and the result was skin that rippled like tissue and muscle that cracked and crunch as they tried to flex and contract. It lifted its head and tried to scream. The breathy sound that left its fuzzy black lips made my heart start skin. skipping beats or my bladder entered.

I couldn't help it, couldn't stop myself. And when I looked down and saw pieces of melting flesh starting to writhe and wriggle, I tried with all my might to stifle the cry building up in my throat. But it escaped as a desperate, high-pitched wine. The deer turned its head towards me with a violent swing, another breathy shriek, and then it began to thrash its stiff and frozen, legs in a terrifying attempt to get closer. To say it had a predatory look would be inaccurate.

Anyone who's seen a predator in action knows that nature is mostly indifferent when it kills. A bear tears into its prey with the same dull look of someone opening their McDonald's. Predators don't hate the things they're hunting. But this thing, I could feel its hatred, its malice. It was nothing like what I'd seen in my dad's eyes. or even the eyes of the man in the tunnel. But it had spent months in that box, hadn't it? This was the disease when you skipped three months ahead.

Anger, hatred. Geez, I couldn't even say if it was going to eat me. That's what you think when you see a zombie, right? It's going to try and take a big bite out of you. But this frozen clump of hair and meat and brain lips dragged itself across the floor with an expression like murderous rage, the look of someone ready to beat another living thing to death using its own hands if it had to.

Unable to face it a moment longer, I dragged myself back onto my feet and fled, shutting my eyes as I entered the cold night air. I made it three steps, before I slammed, into my dad. It was like I'd run full, speed into a tree. I bounced back and hit the earth, pain flaring at my coxics as my father loomed over me.

He felt cold for the brief moment where we made contact. My mind blocked out the sound of something hideous scrambling in the shed behind me, and the entire world narrowed until it was just the face of the man who raised me, looking down with pale, dead eyes. Dad? He swallowed and briefly examined his hands. I think I'm dead, he muttered, almost as if he was talking to himself. When did I die? I pulled myself up and grabbed his hand. He was cold, but his pulse was still racing.

I could even see the veins in his forearms throbbed sickeningly. Dad, are you okay? Dad? Dad, are you okay? They told me I'm sick, he said, his eyes gazing vacantly at the empty space behind me. I think they're right, but there's more. He looked at me, the intensity of his gaze so powerful that I let go of his hand and took a step back. For the first time in my life, I was scared of him.

I'm not alone in here, he said. his voice pleading for help. Slowly, his expression twisted into a grotesque mask of agony and desperation. Oh, geez, it isn't just me in here. I tried to move, but he was a big man, and his arms wrapped around me like steel bands. Dad! I cried, struggling to pull myself loose as he sobbed louder and louder.

Dad, geez, you gotta let go, there's... The shed door burst. open. I managed to turn around just enough I could see what came out, and I felt an urgent terror crawling on my flesh. The deer had pulled itself loose from the freezer, and now it stood in the doorway and two legs. Its body looked all wrong in that posture, like when you twist the limbs around on a doll, probably not far from the truth thinking about it. Dad didn't react, but I began to scream as the nightmare coalesced around me. My father gripping, holding me in place as that horrible thing lurched towards me on two legs.

It moved like claymation or a puppet show gone wrong. But it was quicker than I feared. As each step brought it closer, I found myself losing what little control I had. I started to scream, started to shriek. I beat at my father with my fists, but he didn't butt. an inch. My clenched hands just bounced off his strong shoulders, and it was like I was trying to hurt a punching bag. I started to swear to, started to scream things I thought were bad, then worse, then so bad, I'm not even sure I can blame other people for putting those words in my

head. I told my dad I hated him, called him the worst names under the sun. All that commotion got the attention of others. Neighbors' light started coming on, my mom emerged from the back door, wrapping a robe around herself, and she squinted at us in the dark. What the hell is going on? She cried, and she stumbled towards us. But when she saw that deer, she started screaming too. I don't know why, but I thought that other people appearing would help somehow. That as two, three, half a dozen people came stumbling into open lawns, peering over waist-eye fences,

it had stopped the slow but inevitable onslaught of that monster. It did no such thing. I had to listen to their confused shouts and cries, or gesturing and begging for help. The entire time, the sound of the creature over my shoulder getting closer and closer. Meanwhile, my hands tried to pry away my father's thick arms, but each time I got leverage, he simply flexed and his grip tightened around me. He was muttering.

something the whole time, but I couldn't hear it. Finally, my mum screamed and ran swinging an old rake at the space behind me. I heard the impact, the splintering of the wooden handle. Then she stumbled backwards, and I had to twist to get a look at the deer that was now just six or seven feet away, the spokes of a rake still sticking out of its face. A monster looked right at me and opened its mouth. and I swear to God who was going to talk. But right then, someone shouted,

For the love of God, Alice, get away from that thing. Alice was my mother's name, and she fell to the floor just seconds before an explosion broke the night, silencing all voices and shattering the deer's head like a crystal ball hitting the ground. My heart raced so fast, I thought for a moment I was going to die. Then I looked down at Dad and finally heard what he'd been mumbling this whole time It's in us and it wants us

It's in us and it wants us It's in us and it wants us There isn't much left of Dad these days I got to visit a couple of times Fat lot of good it did As far as I'm concerned He died that day in the kitchen When he first tried shooting himself

They're treating us in this special hospital. Mom was real upset that visitations are limited, but I think it might be for the best. Her and my sister tested clean. Most people did. I didn't. Mom snuck me this phone a couple weeks ago, and I've been using that to write. Funny thing is, one of the orderlies saw me on it a few days ago and just laughed. I think that maybe the government aren't too worried about this story getting out. At first I didn't really get why until I started actually putting all this down into writing. Got to the part where that half man came out the tunnel and I realized no one's going to believe me. Still, I got a try, partly because I want to protect people. Whatever this

disease is, it's a hell of a lot more than some twisted prions and I think the government knows that. Dad certainly did. Most infected did too. That's why they killed themselves. They want it out. The voice that comes with this illness is like, it's like if your brain is just words in a book and then someone dip that book in a full can of used motor oil.

You just want to give in, hand it all over. It wants your body so whatever you do, you don't fight. That's worse. Give it up. In hindsight, we should have let Dad kill himself. What he went through was, well, it was probably a lot worse than the others who got to die. I sometimes think about going into his room with a pillow, but security is pretty tight around him. As for me, infection is still in its early phase.

It takes everyone differently, and for me, it's taking quite its time. I think it's because of my age. Still, I can sort of feel it under there, growing. I think it's why I'm writing this. It wants me to. The sickness, it lives out in the woods, way, way out, in parts of the soil where the sun hasn't shown in millions of years. It's old enough to remember a time you could walk from Appalachia

to what's now called Glasgow, and it's been fumbling around out there in the brains of deer and other things. The sickness tells me this, tells me it's learning about this new world, tells me about how mind tastes. But most of all, it tells me it's getting closer.