Creepy - Day 22 - Necrotic

Episode Date: October 22, 2019

For science...***Written by Lady Fear Boner and narrated by Heather Thomas***See your donation rewards podcast at patreon.com/creepypod***You can also subscribe to us on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ3SrH_3fsROXFAjomKcUtw***Produced by Steve Blizin***Title music by Alex Aldea***Intro/Outro Narration by Joe Stofko Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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Creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepypastas and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or are simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. Creepy Presents The 31 Days of Horror Day 22

Necrotic Written by Lady Fearboner and narrated by Heather Thomas If anyone were to ask me to this day what the most surreal job I ever held was Without a doubt I'd have to say my position

at a university as a research technician for an animal lab I was assigned to the rodent labs, which was fine, because I thought that rats and mice were cute, and they tended to be well-behaved critters. It took several months for my training to be completed. There was just so much to remember. But once I got going on my own, I rarely had any issues. In fact, my supervisor did not find it a hindrance for me and my coworkers to bring our headphones into the labs with us, as we each were assigned a handful of rooms to oversee and were very often alone while working.

So we could listen to music or podcasts or what have you without disturbing the research rodents. There were a lot of rules for me to follow, especially, as I was the technician for the A-status barrier rooms. These rooms were the cleanest in the facility, housing rodents that were free of zoonotic disease, pinworms, lice, and the like. As was the custom, a full protocol was required of personal protective equipment.

Surgical gown, hairnet, face mask, double set of gloves, closed-toed shoes. All three of my labs were barrier status, while my co-workers took care of mostly the lower status, B, C, and D rooms. These rooms typically harbored the nasty diseases and the immunodeficient nude rat models. It wasn't uncommon to find a very sick or dead animal in these labs, at least weekly. I was required, in the barrier rooms, to do all of my work exclusively beneath a ventilated hood apparatus. If you've never seen one of these bad boys, congratulations. You're amongst the majority. Imagine a chemical fume hood in a college science lab, but specifically designed to pull away microscopic toxins

and dander particles from the animals while they are inside the hood. My job was to make sure these animals never escaped from under the hood, no matter what, so as not to contaminate them for any clients that might want to perform their own research on rats and mice. being that I was a lowly technician. All I had to worry about was changing the rodents out from dirty cages to clean cages once per week.

Nothing to sneeze at, however, as I had hundreds of cages to worry about weekly, and it proved a daunting task at first. I'd also developed a keen eye for anything that seemed off about the animals, lethargy, abnormal cysts, fight wounds, in order to correctly identify the problem to a vet student, who would then come in and treat the animal? One day in the early summer, I was chisling away at the massive amount of work I had left to do for the day, and the clock was nearing closer to 3 p.m. the more I looked at it.

I was listening to a podcast of some sort while I worked, one about scary stories, of course. Lost in my own imagination while I was changing a particularly disgusting rat cage. It was times like these, I was thankful that it was nearly impossible to smell anything through my face mask while the cage was inside the hood. I grimaced at the super saturated bedding inside the cage as I grabbed each rat inside by the base of the tail, lifting gently to place them in their new clean home for the week. The rats chattered. Very happy to be in clean bedding.

And as I came across the last young adult to transfer over, I noticed something. Not quite right. She appeared to be in shock. Catatonic. Even though only moments before, she had been moving around the cage every bit as energetic as her sisters. The rat's bulbous red eyes stared forward at nothing,

not responding to any of my prodding, were gentle pats on her head. Hey, girl, I cooed at her. You okay? She just stood there in the cage like that, looking forward at nothing, paying no mind to me. The podcast in my ears was drowned out by the sound of the hood, an impossibly loud blowing sound like an oversized hairdriar, while I stared at the seemingly frightened young rind.

I sighed, getting ready to pick her up in order to restrain her so that I could read her ear tag number and report her condition to the vets. I couldn't say I'd ever seen anything like this before, that was for sure. As I grabbed around her chest, tightening my grip slightly to cross her arms over each other, I looked back into her eyes. They were black now. Gasping, I dropped her back into the cage, my hand going limp. What the fuck? I thought to myself, trying to rationalize what I had just seen.

A hallucination, surely. Worked too hard today. Time to go home and rest. That was it. That's all it was. My podcast stopped abruptly, and in its place was the most grating, chilling sound imaginable when you're in a room alone, and you're already spooked. A goddamn emergency alert about a thunderstorm on the way. I yanked my earbuds out, trying to get a grip on myself, when the young female rat looked back up at me, black eyes boring into my soul and scrambled from the cage out into the hood

I panicked trying to catch her quickly before she made her final plummet to the ground and she would have to be euthanized for contamination but she squeezed through my fingers so easily and landed on the floor anyway a small thunk as her body practiced gravity She stayed put for only a moment, and that was long enough for me to catch her and put her back into the dirty cage. You know what this means, don't you? I scolded her, closing the lid back over her cage and making sure her sisters had plenty of food and water.

Gotta go to the death chamber now. It always made me feel terrible to send animals to the euthanasia room, particularly when it felt like it was my fault. she had to die. I told myself it was an accident. I had just gotten freaked out by her eyes, was all. But when I looked back at them upon closing the cagelet, they were the normal redigan. I picked up the earbuds from the ground,

cleared the emergency alert off my home screen, and cleaned up the hood. That was quite enough excitement for me for the day. Once I had finished up in my final room, I sauntered down the hall with the poor girl's cage in hand, taking her into the euthanasia area. No one was here to do the deed yet, as we typically waited until the end of the day to euthanize. So I simply sat her on the cart that had a small army of other rodents, awaiting their imminent doom.

I walked down to the office preparing to let one of the senior techs and my superintend, supervisor know what had happened when the lights began to flicker overhead. I stopped in the hallway, glancing up at the fluorescent bulbs, hoping that the power didn't go out. Not while I was in this damn lonely hallway, and not before we run a euthanasia cycle. I couldn't imagine the rodents getting halfway through the deadly carbon dioxide cycle and suffering until they finally croaked, shaking the awful thought from my head. I continued on. I chose, not to mention the black-eyed bit,

since I am almost positive it was just a trick of the mind, and instead decided to follow another technician down to the death chamber to hang out and chat, as we often did at the end of the day. Once we got to the room, I noticed that the young female that had fallen to the floor earlier was dead. Had the fall killed her, ruptured something inside her and she bled out internally? Or was it something else? Something to do with her eyes?

Something to do with the way she just stood there? Oh, I exhaled. Looks like she's already gone. The other tech shrugged. We'll put her in the chamber anyway. You just never know. I nodded, and the both of us turned our backs once the animals were in their proper positions to be painlessly executed, for lack of a better term. I could never bear to witness the actual act.

It was more than enough to accidentally wander into the room at the end of a cycle. Dozens upon dozens of glassy eyes staring back at me from their tombs, following me everywhere I walked. Once the chamber clicked off, I watched as my fellow tech grabbed each cage out, putting the individual rodents on a biohazard bag to fully complete this end-of-day ritual. For mice, we typically performed cervical dislocation, a.k.a. severing the part of the spinal cord that connects to the base of the neck.

For ants, it's a bit more gruesome. They are laid out on their backs, and a pair of surgical scissors splits them from belly to upper chest, slicing through the lungs so they literally cannot draw in another breath. These methods, of course, are a last-ditch effort to ensure that the animals are completely dead before we bag them and refrigerate them. My co-worker was mindlessly slicing and dicing away while the two of us chatted about our day. when she came upon the female that I had brought to the euthanasia room. She cut into her abdomen with the scissors and stopped.

Her breath caught in her throat. Oh my! She whispered almost to herself. My interest peaked. I walked over to see what she was looking at. The inside of the female was completely rotten. As if she had been dead for days. perhaps weeks.

Black and dark purple entrails spilled out of her, and I nearly gagged at the sight. What the hell? I questioned. I've never seen anything like this, the other text said, a beat of sweat on her brow. This brat is completely necrotic. You said she died just earlier? Yeah, she... She jumped from her cage and hit the floor. And she was alive when I brought her here,

but dead when we came in together. I still didn't tell her about the black eyes. Maybe things would have been different if I did. Nothing strange happened for a few weeks, and I tried to push the incident from early summer out of my mind. I went back to perusing podcasts, getting amped up on spooky stories so I could piss myself in my nightmares later when I found a cage full of rats that were in the same state of shock as that female.

I checked the cage card for any signs that this might have been the same strain of genetics as the rat from a few weeks back. Sadly, it was not the same strain, meaning we couldn't just boil this down to genetics. I was starting to get pretty freaked out just looking at the same. cage full of rats, standing half-hazardly, not interacting with any other cagemates or outside stimuli, when I got another ear-piercing warning in my ear. Fucking Midwest thunderstorms.

The lights inside the lab flickered ever so subtly, and then every pair of eyes in that cage was looking directly at me. And they were all black as the night. To my dismay, I gasped, stumbling backward, but the eyes followed me wherever I went. Okay, that's enough of that. I have to tell a higher up. A vet maybe? A professor of comparative medicine? Fucking someone! I can't be the only one seeing this. I left the room in a hurry, rushing to the bathroom to splash some water on my face. It's not real. I told myself,

"'You've just been listening to that damn podcast for weeks on end. Of course you're going to trick your eyes into seeing shit. I was still debating whether or not I was going to tell someone. It was nearly the end of the day again, which meant that most of the vets and professors were gone for the day. I just didn't want to go back in there alone. I then cooked up the ingenious plan of taking pictures with my phone. The thing was with me at all times anyway.

So I bravely went back in, going through my gounding ritual once more. This time, I kept my podcast off, had phones sitting on a shelf inside the foyer of the room, so as not to inherit more distraction. Upon entering the room, I was met with a foreboding atmosphere. Like the air was dense. As if the rats were emanating, bread and despair themselves. And I was the empath who sucked it all in once my weary body had come into this realm.

Something was hideously wrong. And why I didn't high-tail it out of there and go home right then and there? I'll never know, black eyes. Everywhere. In every cage. Following me, I whispered, the horror of the situation. welling up. No, no, no.

I pulled myself together long enough to bring up my phone's camera, focusing intently on the cages. Somehow, this made everything worse. The eyes were vibrant and glowing, like a deer in a car's headlights, so I couldn't even make out that their eyes were any color than reflective. When I returned to the cage, I had found. found earlier. The first one of these to turn? I found an absolute bloodbath. Not just any bloodbath,

though. These rats had started slaughtering each other out of nowhere, having been cagemates for months with no signs of aggression. And yet, there were tattered limbs, tufts of fur, slick entrails scattering the cage bedding, every one of the animal's insides were rotten, necrotic, just like before. The scariest part, though, was the fucking pentagram painted in blood on the inside of the cage. It was hard to tell which rat was the perpetrator, as all were dead. They'd literally all mold themselves to death in the time it took me to go to the bathroom and come back. All of five minutes, and these animals were gone.

A rat having this level of artistic skill to draw an intelligible shape somehow, regardless of morbidness, was unheard of. and so I pulled up my camera again to take video footage of the site. The lights darkened completely, and all I was left with was the emergency overhead lights. That sinister beaming red-hued light bore down on me, while every eye in the room was trained on my being. I stifled a scream that managed to escape in a whimper. I knew these animals did not want me getting footage of any of this. But why was this happening?

Were they upset that we were using them in research? No, I assured myself. They weren't sentient enough to realize that. And anyway, the research was performed humanely. We'd never harm them on purpose. As that very thought crossed my mind, another cage started a slaughter fest, this time with the mother rat, completely obliterating her young pups. The baby shrieked in fear, trying to escape their mother, who all at once had turned on

them after nursing them, and caring for them their entire lives. It was no use. She tore them to shreds. I dropped to the ground with my head crushed between my fists, trying to wake myself up from this nightmare. The screams of the dying pups faded out into the low hum of static, the ventilated hood system. I could hear it again, finally. The lights came back on, and I glanced around, visibly shaken, hoping not to happen across anything else horrific. Everything was normal, like nothing had happened at all. Even the rats from before, who were stoic and unfazed, were playing and hopping around like they were in a flowery field of happiness.

I got hold of my supervisor on the phone and told him I was very ill, that I needed to see a doctor right away. The urgency in my voice startled him, but he agreed, wishing me well, and that he hoped I would be better by the morning. I wasn't. It took me days of lying in bed, trying so hard to come up with an answer of some kind, a solution to the madness, and still, nothing. I called in the rest of the week. My supervisor was noticeably stressed about my absence, but nevertheless, I had plenty of sick time in my bank and had rarely used it before now. Co-workers reached out to me to check up on me, offering to bring me medicine, soup, or just some company.

I rejected it all. The nightmares of my alleged hallucinations had me so on edge. I just couldn't fathom being around anyone right now. they'd think I'd gone insane. Maybe I had. The following Saturday I napped lazily on the couch, watching random YouTube videos about game glitches or something, when my phone screeched at me from the coffee table.

I threw off the blanket holding my hands over my ears as I read the screen. Emergency alert, find shelter immediately. Dangerous lightning approaching. Not even an all-encompassing warning? No severe thunderstorm or tornado warning? Now that was odd. My mind instantly flashed back to work. The rats.

Was something going on with them now? The pattern had been proven thus far. I get an emergency alert on my phone, just as something bat-shed happened with the rodents. I didn't know, but I was determined to find out. Keys in hand, I ran out to my car. Eyes trained on an ominous looming storm cloud, hovering out toward the west, toward my place of work, like it was about to descend on just that part of town.

Dangerous lightning approaching. I would be safe in my car, right? Right? The flashes began, almost as soon as I started my car's ignition, and they didn't stop. They pounded into the fucking ground just a few miles away, over and over. I would have pulled over to watch the spectacle if I weren't headed in the exact direction it was happening. The storm died down. That was it.

No thunder, no rain. No wind? Just lightning. I whipped my little Hyundai into the back parking lot, assuming this is where the brunt of the storm hit. I was right. And I instantly wished I hadn't come. I jumped out of the car, racing over to what looked like a huge gash in the earth. The concrete was busted open, a hissing sound emanating from within. Cautiously, I crept toward the hole in the ground, my phone out in front of me to capture the footage this time.

The only other person in the building would have been the weekend worker if he weren't already finished and gone for the day. That left just me, out here alone in the back lot, tiptoeing toward a massive hole that was opened up by a lightning storm. cool slowly carefully with building trepidation i peeked into the hole the bottom could not be seen but what i did see it looked like the inside of that female rat rotten black ugly necrotic and the smell was indescribable, like death times a hundred. I held my phone upward, bumping on the flash so that I could take a couple of quick pictures and then get the hell out of there. I pressed the capture button three times in rapid succession, and backed away from the hole

quickly, running to my car without stopping, not bothering to check that my phone had actually taken the pictures. Looking through the photos I had just snapped, I selected one and began to prepare a hasty email to my supervisor about what I'd found at work. I stopped before I sent the message, getting an eerie feeling that clamored up my spine. I hadn't actually looked at the picture before I was about to send it off. I saved the email as a draft and went back into my camera roll, staring at the deep, dark. coal in the ground and the dozens of illuminated eyes that stared back up at me. For more information, including pictures and videos of the stories told on this podcast,

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