Creepy - Night Devils

Episode Date: September 8, 2025

Night Devils***Written by: Bianca Riddle and Narrated by: Heather Thomas***Good luck***Written by: Adrienne H. Lee and Narrated by: Cole Burkhardt***Can't Love a Dead Chick***Written by: Tor-Anders Ulven***Support the show at patreon.com/creepypod***Sound design by: Pacific Obadiah***Title music by: Alex Aldea 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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as a young woman battles monstrous hunger hidden beneath a fragile human facade, she walks a razor-thin line between predator and prey. Creepy Presents Night Devils Written by Bianca Riddle and narrated by Heather Thomas. Nineteen ninety-eight, two a.m.

Under your chewed fingernails are crescents of grit and the greasy stain of orangey blood. Your slick thumb and forefinger frantically pinch at wet teeth. Can't get a proper foothold under your purple olive gum line. The intrusion would chafe. Cut up if it weren't for the excessive drool running down your hand. Your grip trembles, falters, tightens up. tries again, pulls, seeking that starting thread of decay. It's only a matter of time before your body rejects them in a way that's more excruciating than twisting them out yourself.

Hand-touching a scalding kettle doesn't begin to cover it. You can't have these teeth. Can't keep them because of what they're now implicated in. The weekly print is filled with a lot of interesting theories. animals being obvious, acid rain being creative, the ugly wildness of you, unknown, unthinkable, a separate, discriminant force of nature. There's one rule.

They have to come to you. That's how you get away with it. And it's a slight distinction that quiets a loud conscience. You struggle under the light of the half moon from the wind. above the kitchen sink. You crane your neck up to the tacky rooster print quarter curtains floating there. Popcorn ceiling. Wood trim.

Little flits of gray string cobwebs. You've never found meditation or breathing exercises helpful. Not the marked chapters in health and wellness journals skimmed between the aisles of used bookstores. Or the handful of times your father coached you through hyperventilation. ventilation. You fall back on it now, regardless. Two quick inhales. One elongated exhale. Again. You swallow. Blood's one of the few things that has taste anymore. Artificial sweetener. Draws out more spit. You close your eyes. The heels of your palms press into your sockets until blue dandelions scatter behind them.

You breathe again. In through your mouth, slowly out of your mouth. There's a gargled clicking at the back of your throat. The house is silent except for you and the freezer working on making ice. Clattering. Purposeful half turns of a large corkscrew waiting to shove cubes down a shoot and into a bin.

Crick, there it is. That noise and the blood moving around in your brain. The spare adrenaline that still wants you to kick off from point A to get to B. A warm, woolly urge that tells you more. That parts, not animal. There are whole species that don't engage in infighting. Whole other ones that don't kill over territory or mating disputes. least of all just because

nature knows how to break apart and lick its wounds for the sake of the population killing for the hell of it is entirely human you have necessity on your side the one redeeming aspect you've tried not and it went over as well as you'd expected you maintain a minimum

never overindulge It's not as if you have the violent impulse to rip someone up outside of hunger. Most of your intrusive aggression is directed and kept inward. Even when you see something adorable in your initial instinct is to squeeze or bite at soft spots, you put your hand back in your mouth, tear at it. This is familiar labor. There's no amount of experienced pain to compare it to. this invasive takeover, the subsequent ruining of self.

This wasn't routine dental work or waxing your legs, taking a fast softball to vulnerable cartilage with or without the protection of a helmet. The closest sensations to it, as you can imagine, are breaking bones or swallowing something you shouldn't have, fighting to get something sharp down. Some of this stuff you don't mean to ingest. It's the will of the beast.

This hole you sometimes accidentally feed metal. You see yourself do it in third person. Scuffed sneakers at the edge of a pit. You pull a wetting band out from behind your back molar, unembed it from your gums like the shell of a kernel. Toss it into the gorge. There's never a splash. no amount of reverberation feedback, which would allow you to guess at depth.

It doesn't sound like anything. These foreign pointed calcium stones click-clack against the stainless steel lining of the sink before reaching their home run at the bottom of the garbage disposal. In a few hours, you'll be the first to come back out to the kitchen. You'll turn on the inexpensive coffee grinder, then you'll flip the switch to the disposal. one metallic chewing hum, masking another. If you're a dog, then the noise is truly Pavlovian.

The simultaneous want to vomit and to feast. Coat your stomach with a liquid feeling. Your mouth holds on to nostalgia and waters accordingly. Mouthwash isn't a strong suppressant. Does nothing to mask that smell of damp rust. Vitality. One spritz of your father's aqua de jo cologne covers your tongue like a crop duster. You'd take it on a shitty paper route in a bad part of town years ago to save up for the tiny vial.

Now the smell makes him violently ill, his own conditioning, and that part of the ghetto became your stomping grounds. There's no spice to it, no warning that it's poison. It tastes as much like water as rubbing alcohol and every flavor of crushed soda. Liquids taste like weight, regardless of temperature, carbonation, chemicals, dyes, any of it.

It's a heaviness that you take inside of you until it hurts, threatens to come back up. Fluid mass looking to fill space until a threshold is met and starts spilling over the sides. raw protein is a trickier unit of measurement, fickle and marginally substantive at best. At worst, it only serves to remind you of your hunger.

It simulates the act that your body has come to recognize as an ineffective placebo. You throw a handful of altoids into your mouth. Let them dissolve on your tongue until you can slowly grind them down into a paste once new molars replace the bloody gapes you left in your fugue state. a sort of rebirth in your mouth. The one place your certain regrowth happens. But you've thought about it, chopping off a pinky as an experiment. It probably wouldn't enlighten you.

The rest of you still looks human. A finger can't be a lizard's tail. You place the cylinder of perfume back inside the pack of Marlborough 100s, next to two stale cigarettes. They roll around as you put the peat the peat. packed back into the decorative barn-themed sugar canister that holds odds and ends. Junk. The cigarettes, the mints, you hide under a spool of black thread,

a baggie of miscellaneous screws and washers, a leather book of alien keys, and dozens of expired fast food coupons cut out from the newspaper. They create a false narrative that's easier to explain than reality. Once you're in the complete pink of your bedroom, you strip, down to your birthday suit and slide in between the cold-fitted sheet and top sheet. The nightlight by the bedside table throws crystal fragments halfway up the salmon wall. You think, not for the first time, that the mattress is too soft. The soap bedspread and the pillowcases with the roses embroidered at the corners are too nice.

You're undeserving. The gentle habitat you've been raised in couldn't keep you dossil. You can no longer mimic the behaviors reinforced by lovely people. You are surrounded by so many examples of goodness. When you were younger, your father would warm a fuzzy blanket in the dryer for you. Let you sleep with it cocooned around your small frame. You'd always wake up with it missing, and it would always be in the dryer for the following night's ritual.

Now you've outlived his patience and exhausted all understanding. Now that you're older, you occasionally put the blanket in the dryer yourself with the understanding that he'll never come around to what you are. He's scared of you. Yernan would call you a she beast at regular intervals, especially during what she deemed to be particularly foul behavior. Drinking straight from the carton with the fridge door wide open, socked feet propped up on her antique coffee table with the dinged up lines. feet. Leaving at late hours. Believes it has something to do with promiscuity and hard drugs. Muttering opinions about the wrong crowd. Your father would intervene with the point of his finger

and say something erring on the side of diagnostic and diplomatic. Being a high school guidance counselor, all-cargained good nature, a multifaceted she beast. Coming to your defense, Despite wearing a fairy circle scar in the shape of your more animal than little girl teeth on his upper arm, you could see it in the moments after it happened. Wistful hope, the wanting of all wanting. If you infected him, he'd at least be able to identify with your appetite. The head spinning lack of control, the emptiness that makes you claw at your own throat. you'd be made easier to love and protect.

You'd have someone exactly like you. You can tell he all but hates you now. What happens to you isn't any known version of lycanthropy. No curse, no bite, no genetic carryover. You can barely call what happens to you a shifting of the form. It doesn't run in the family. No one else is beholden to this. this dietary restriction. You can't stop. But you remember it wasn't always like this.

Before the change, you were just beginning to like the taste of scrambled eggs. The smell of warm sourdough bread. Your cravings were very typical ones. You wanted sugary cereal, the brands that promised cheap single-mold plastic toys within their boxes. You hated green beans. They were essentially wet pieces of cardboard. You wanted donuts with sprinkles. After demolishing a bowl of chocolate ice cream, you wanted a follow-up bowl. You're almost always denied seconds in the sweets department. It'll rot your teeth.

That was the cautionary tale. Is that why you're like this? Too much sugar in your diet has turned you. You don't even want to think about it. It has a name, the act of it, not the specifics of what you are, entered the English language stratosphere in the 16th century. Wasn't a dawn of man practice like you'd expected? Or maybe under situations of extreme and rare desperation, it did happen before 1541. Just not in mass.

If it's common enough, it gets a name. In 1541, it no longer mattered if you. you shared a face with what you ate. Your father keeps all his projects in the garage, most of which he doesn't see through. The 1968 Chevrolet Camero that lives under a dust cover, a few salvaged pieces of furniture waiting to be sanded down, or for upholstery to be stapled to it. A lone ship in a bottle, and other transportation models in various stages of completion. He uses these hobbies as an excuse to stay up. up, to do something with his hands while he waits.

A distant hovering. The garage doubles as a pressure cooker. It holds onto tension, even when no one's in there to do anything about it. His disappointment is palpable every time you come in through the side door. The overhead floodlight always catches the sticky slickness. The blood soaked through your black running sweats. Hair, mostly pulled free from its scrunchy, matted with tangles. Bruising, rising against your cheek or eye.

Phantom stains around your mouth, and more obvious pink lines running down your neck. Knuckles banged up. You say, there's no shortage of terrible men who mistake me for defenseless at night. You at least have that to offer him a solace. preying on larger predators, if any type of killing could be moral. Mostly men, sometimes women who are in on the luring. One rare instance where it was just four women. And you learned that not only is there no extent to your appetite,

but that eating more doesn't buy time. Another feeding happened in a few months' time. You never told him about that incident because you could see it being perceived as excessive and not preservation, that if your pain meant the forfeit of four lives, he might have preferred you let them rough you up, that you laid down into a tight ball and tried your best to absorb what came your way.

In his mind, that would have been better, maybe fair even. Suppose you disappeared one of their boyfriends, a brother. You're never wounded for long. You don't scar. Your muscles are even tough. Deceptively so, under the plain look of you.

You're just a teenager wandering around after curfew. What's being bedridden for a couple of days? A mummy under all those bandages. But whole. Three nights tops before you can prop yourself up on your elbows. Another day, and you're out of bed. Good as new. Peachy Keen.

The last bit of bruising manageable. with concealer. What you don't say is, I was hungry. My body was twisting itself so much that all of my tears had run out. The sad hopelessness became anger, and that turned into reckless action. You don't try to humanize yourself. Justify rationale with burning discomfort. You can see the humor in it. Your dad having a degree in behavioral therapy that you can't utilize. that you don't talk, that neither of you can effectively express yourselves. There's silence between you.

He doesn't stand in it for long, wordlessly excusing himself so you can throw your soiled clothes into the washing machine. You go back outside into the dark in your underwear, bring the garden hose in from the side of the house, kinked, bent in your fist, dribbling down your foot as you walk back inside, and spray the bundle down. Counting to 60, before you return the hose and shut off the water, you slowly walk to the kitchen to pull out these teeth of yours that have shifted,

that happened to be the only visual representation of the physical transformation you undergo. Not exactly canine, not shark. Nevertheless, mean and pointed, to hold and rip. You seek out your right. reflection often in shy, forgivable ways. You always forget that you look like that. Normal, unassuming, ordinarily pretty. Your biggest secret could be that your mind wanders during Sunday service or that you take

extended smoke breaks with a co-worker behind the retail chain where you work. Typical, I have my own shit to deal with things. Like you resent how your parents went about raising you or your work. You're worried you're investing too much time in the wrong things. You're meant to be a brain surgeon, a lawyer, something grandiose, anything but what you currently are. You should be thinking about marriage soon. What if I have kids and they get what I have? You might be the catalyst.

Generations from now, they might link a dozen people back to you. the woman they can attribute 500 deaths to. You tell your mind to stop it. You're out of the house now, trying not to squander your chance at a college education. Depending on traffic, you now live two hours away from the metropolis you grew up in. You don't bring it into his home anymore.

Never showing this demon past your father's threshold again when you visit. Not the soiled clothing or your disposables. Never risk Nan finding out how terrified of you she should have been, needing beaded necklaces to bring to her chest as she gave you a wide berth in the tiny hallway of a tinier Memphis-style house. Things were always so crowded. It's a miracle to you you kept this one secret. It would have literally killed her. You're homesick. missed the farm-themed kitchen with all the yellowing hen magnets on the fridge, the smell of dry sun-full carpeting and the dusty residue of lavender powder, the stale glue that held the floral papering to the walls, that popcorn ceiling, and the sound the refrigerator makes.

You even miss the ugly bits. The dank garage. The cages. All the evidence you wash down galvanized. pipes, a pound of dusty residue. You're so sensitive now. It's mostly smells. The new environment. The shared bathroom between two dorm rooms. The white clean scent of perlessent body gel. The clouds of perfumes that are supposed to smell like chocolate or Christmas time or a summer's rain and grease. An expensive night out on the town. Strawberries and champagne.

The offensive smells are extrapodent. Roadkill. That permeating musk of death. The heat from a stovetop element. Cheap scented individually wrapped toilet paper in the cleaning aisle of a convenience store with beaten carpets. Frozen gray shrimp in vacuum-sealed packages. Every scent has a flavor to it now.

And that's new. Somewhere in the change, all of your wires come. got crossed. Your teeth always hurt, feel gritty and weak. You catch yourself running your tongue against them far more than you should. Everyone who's noticed has never brought it to your attention. They're too polite. This is just one of your idiosyncrasies. You covertly press on your pearly whites, but they don't seem to move under the weight of your fingers. You don't mention it to your father. It's psychosomatic. You suppose it's because you've had to play pretend more than you're used to. Your roommate invites you out, introduces you to people. It's always centered around

food or consumption. Hot meals, desserts with whipped topping, bowling alleys that offer pizza with elastic cheese, and bars that smell like beer foam and deep-fried onions. In the summer you can chew on ice with sugar syrup. In the winter, you can drink melted chocolate. All just dandy. You've had practice eating human food around others. No one looks at you anyway. Your nan noticed back then, questioned it with a, you're not eating. That was more of an observation, mild interrogation. She didn't fall for the pushing around technique you deployed to conceal that when you do eat, it was very little. Often your father let you eat in your room.

Told his mother that the kids of your generation valued their privacy. They like being alone now. Most of my students aren't sitting down for dinner with the family anymore. More white nighting. More secret keeping and holding down the fort. The only other time your lack of plate cleaning is addressed is when a waitress pointedly suggests getting a box for you to take the leftovers. Chewing. Not your favorite activity. Not the right texture. Feeling teeth cut into roasted cherry tomatoes and al dente pasta.

Pasta. Pushing it to the back of your mouth with your tongue to grind it to mush. Until French 101, you thought, al dente meant tender food. That when you threw a boiled spaghetti noodle against a ball, and it stuck, that meant just gummy enough. Your professor promptly corrected you. It means to the tooth. Noodles, rice, vegetables, vegetables, cooked to firmness, made so that it's pleasing to chompers. You don't mind smaller foods that you can swallow whole like rice, corn, peas, raisins, some soups. You'd skip biting into non-living things. You'd skip biting into non-living things. things altogether, if you could. You can work the food in your mouth,

batter it around long enough to get it down reasonably. Swallowing requires the bulk of your mental fortitude. Your body doesn't want this. Your throat all but closes off to reject it. Chasing it with something to drink helps. Gets you through it most times. A mouthful of soggy bits and something unpleasantly cold and fizzy.

your father made you practice this, sat across from you, trained on your face as you ate bites of uncooked, unseasoned chicken. In the early days it was more than you could hope for, the true extent of his love, coaching you to keep up appearances, not forcing vegetables on you. You never mentioned that you preferred red meat, not wanting to turn down his charity or take his patience for granted. but it seems to help if it really bleeds. You knew what you could survive off of, but needs change. Grow more, eat more.

You believe you've reached a limit. The amount you need is around 370 pounds every few months. You'll be honest with yourself, just this once. It's two people. There. not simply a numerical value. Owners of feelings. People who you choose to believe are decent to someone in their lives,

even if you make yourself easy pickings for ill intentions. They resemble people you grew up with. You remember faces. You're not a complete monster. Your main concern was the length of time between feedings decreasing, that you could develop gluttony beyond the high of an eye of an object. opportunistic frenzy. Your highest count remained those same four women. If you weren't a monster, you would have let them jack all your shit, push you around when they found out you weren't carrying a

wallet. You didn't. You think about that a lot. How you contradict yourself when it serves you. How hunger can excuse. There isn't a hierarchy, a grade, a strict regime needed for quality assurance, a breed of upbringing that tastes better than the other. It all tastes good. All of it akin to a drop of water in the desert. You're not a danger to the average person. Don't have many close calls or many instances of a lack of restraint. Not much in the way of temptation if you keep everything timely.

The allure of feeding is subjective. The same aroma of food is more appealing on an empty style. Everyone in your immediate vicinity on a given day has good odds. You're resigned to find a proper meal tomorrow, to wait out at the lake after dark, have a bite to eat, and then go for a swim in your jean shorts and tank top. Forty years from now, you'll be doing this, setting up traps, wriggling like bait, plucking pieces of you out of your head. a yawn hit you the exact moment your roommate Tanya

propositioned you with food she'd said let's go somewhere oh the messiest fillies are on 1237 let's bounce there are a dozen interactions like this one where she beats you to her own conclusion she's the type of person that uses others to have a conversation with herself you're constantly her soundboard with minimal effort on your part Tanya's friendly, low-maintenance, fun, personable.

So it's no surprise when a few of her friends wander across the two of you, and sandwiches downtown, turn into a start-of-break party invite later tonight. She attracts more energetic people. Being around her reminds you of being a child, being slowly consumed in a colorful ball pit, all no use, and I insist. A party, you will go. You thought this would be fine, that you could have it, a normal nocturnal experience.

Tanya has her arm looped in yours. Is loving pulling on you to hurry. The lawn belonging to the single family home smells like watered down beer and muted puke. Not the acid of bile, but more chunks of food and the wet of stomachs. It makes you think of pink inside. the walls of your own esophagus.

The party is spilling out in all directions. The house windows gently rattle from the subwoofers, pulsing with club music. The front door is propped wide open with a thick textbook. People come and go. You bump shoulders with them, but not unkindly. One song bleeds into another. It's all women with smoky vocals crooning about love. This feels nice.

This will be fun. It's an open floor plan. The living room is dim in a deep blue light from a painted bulb. It doesn't reach the kitchen. It's practically dark on the left side of the house. Tanya doesn't abandon you. She's a good friend. A great one.

You encourage her to ditch you all the same. She's hunting for boys. She embraces you and yells in your ear. Meet me at the bottom of the stairs around one. You're each other's bodyguards back to the dorms. All the humidity from the swaying bodies makes the living room damp. Everyone is a black outline in the jumping sea of people. You don't really capture faces or particulars as you follow suit.

You don't have much experience dancing, not since you were a little girl standing on your father's feet as he clomped about or swung you around. But this is just hopping. Something you could copy. That's how you've made it so far out on your own. Look, follow, participate. Maybe an hour later now, and the music's gotten louder. Fusion pop.

Aggressive shit that makes the corner of eyes hurt. The base of it reaches pointed fingers between ribs, grabs, and rattles. Pushes the internal monologue out of your head. No room for thoughts. just the repetition of breathy lyrics from a heavily accented European idol. A whispering mischievous sprite. Ethereal. Nice boy.

Nice boy. Looking for the right boy. You need a break. Not unpleasantly. Everyone smells like salt and body odor. Petroleum-based lip balm and orange peels. Magnetic security tags. blue ink from ballpoint pens, ammonia from hair bleach, dryer lint and day-old socks,

under the hoods of warm-stalled cars, like rain puddles sporting a rainbow film of oil. Hunger tastes like the inside of a car that's been baking in the August sun, aged peppercorn, burning construction paper, sometimes metal shavings and tire rubber. People smell like dark rooms. Your teeth are on fire. as you move through the house, looking for space beyond the bottleneck of people leaning against one another in the foyer.

There's a line for the toilet down the hall. Someone whispers about going upstairs. Someone else slowly murmurs about, next door. The kitchen is cold. The island is littered with overturned cups. In the center is a swiveling mini-bubble projector. A color wheel rolls around inside it, casting fuzzy, curved green, then red,

than green sprinkles onto whatever it sweeps over. You angle to look down into it, peeking at the bright white bulb beneath sheets of tinted plastic. You try to imagine forcing the light bulb past your rows of teeth. Here, crunching glass. It's something new to try, to consider. No one could ever blame you for not trying to find alternatives. You have.

Your father has Bare feet on the chilly concrete of the garage An ungodly hour Cartoon pajamas A raccoon trap that's caught a raccoon Brought in from the cold Placed on a folded tarp It anxiously paced under the scrutiny of your long shadows

Tastes like nothing More hunger A separate night the raccoon's trap caught a stray cat when you said you'll release it, your dad responded, you won't. It was an unspoken kindness that you weren't made to go after something bigger in middle school. Left to fend for yourself on a school night, waiting for someone to approach you outside of the protective cone of a street lamp. You're a monster, but you're still a person, still experience fear. You get afraid during the act of entrapment.

You still have to fight and kick, get the upper hand. It's just biting is your first resort. Not the last. It's usually a finger or two first. The meat from a hand that was put over your mouth to keep you from screaming. That's probably the most eerie part. You don't want to scream. Call unnecessary attention to yourself.

You want both you and them to go quietly. Your inner thoughts. Repeat a mantra. Normal. Normal. You're normal. Be normal. Not some vigilante with free will.

Not some evil capable of guilt. So what are you? There's a guy in the corner. You briefly meet his gaze. The farmhouse sink is full of bottles of liquor, half buried in melting ice. You take a handful of crushed ice, all but shove it down.

down your throat. Then you gravitate to the first bottle you can get your hands on. It won't taste like anything anyway. It won't even dull the senses. You've seen the effects of alcohol on television, though. How it lowers inhibitions and makes a man throw his arms around his neighbor's wife. Possibly weep into her shoulder in his living room when all she wanted was a cup of sugar. Maybe smush a face between two wide palms and plant a cat. kiss. You take a large swig of the clear stuff. Swish it around in your mouth like it's fluoride. Rub your gums like it's cocaine. You've seen movies about the mafia, too. And if you had a favorite, those are your favorite. Hurts. Fuck. Everything smells like cold spit. Mint toothpaste and flat

soda, fructose corn syrup. The wet hot moisture trapped under piles of grass clipping. That green rubbing of onion grass stains on the knees of denim jeans. Your nans' chamomile tea. You feel a cold sweat. The color is probably washed from your skin. You feel flat and starved. But it shouldn't be time. From the other side of the room, there's the guy still, light brown eyes.

He keeps staring, like the two of you share a secret. He has a look about him that says, Junior or Senior, a major in the sciences, maybe social, maybe computer. You can get a whiff of him from here. Smells like green apples. His girlfriend's shampoo, you'd wager. He stares, not even judgmental,

as you stumble to the refrigerator, throw open the door. You start twisting off the caps of bottles. upending cartons and greedy gulps, uncaring about the mess it's making down your neck, at your front, reminds you of the times your nan caught you trying to stave off your basic nature, berates you,

she beast. The guy just watches the attempting drowning of yourself. The same desperation an animal has when it eats grass to induce vomiting, gnaws through the legs stuck in a trap, next to rude shuffling of the contents. Smoothy ingredients, large tied bundles of kale, bags of spinach. You see it. Red styrofoam tray.

Pork liver. You can almost taste it through your fingers as they run over the thin cellophane. It's a hefty organ. Fatty. Beautiful. You'll never see a pig with skin this color, red kidney bean. It's a sacred shade. The stuff in which altars are built around.

The cooked brown of meat is treason. sugarless, bloodless from oxidation. You take the package out. Your exit is right there, right beside the fridge. This is yours. You stumble from one backyard into the next. You have no clue what you're doing. The back patio sliding door opens easily,

like it's been oiled recently. It feels and smells like no one's home. Newly vacated for break. The dark isn't so dark to you. Not when you're like this. You barricade yourself in the bathroom, hunkering down in the tub, being where you'll feel smallest and safest. The off-green plastic shower curtain soaks everything into that hospital scrubs color.

There's only the green and the deep purple of package you're holding against your chest. The meat brings the sensation of a hot fire poker to your gut. Your body is a smelting cauldron for bad things. You're meant to be the hell or inferno or what the hell ever for bad people. Not awkward college boys who stare. Choice, selective participation is all you have. You're not cognizant of your jaw dislocating. Serpentine.

The vacuous pit. The taste of sunshine. You peel the meatliner from the tray. It's absorbed most of the blood that sweat off the liver. It drips its rich juices. You've always thought of them as sanitary napkins. It's sick. You're sick.

You're determined to choke it down if it means only you get to have it. You lazily pat your hair down in the mirror. There's a ruddy stain against your chin and shirt. The homeowners had a third of a pound of lunch meat for you to pilfer. You watch with rapt attention at the corners of your mouth. This does look like convincing chewing. Not greedy or crazed? Hickups move your body.

You're twitching like a marionette. You'll finish here and take Tanya home. She needs you. For your second story this evening, while an invisible enemy is harvesting humanity one person at a time, A survivor documents their harrowing experience of grief, randomness, and realization. Creepy Presents Good luck, written by Adrienne H. Lee, and narrated by Cole Burkart.

We found the empty apartment by accident, or luck, if you believe in that sort of thing. It was day 202, and it was immaculate, like it was staged for Realtors' Open House or something. It even had power. Not that we would ever turn on the lights. Light is a variable and not worth the risk. We're having an unprecedented run of good luck, which makes me a little wary. I hope it lasts. I think the apartment belonged to a well-off couple who had the means to bug out early. Where they went is anyone's guess.

Safety is an illusion. too many variables. I'm not even sure if an underground bunker is safe. There's not much you can do when they come for you. They don't care about money or status. Money is a variable from before, one we don't have to worry about anymore. I found this journal on our third day here,

tucked away in a drawer in the bedroom. Like the apartment, it was untouched. Not a single word written inside. I guess that fits the vibe. The whole apartment is sparse. Everything, furniture included, is stone or pewter, or whatever the hot, bland aesthetic color is that's all over socials. Was, that was all over socials.

Another variable removed from the equation. What I wouldn't give for some, form of information or insight right now. All we've got is speculation and dumb luck. After we found this place, we boarded up the windows. I guess the structure was being renovated into one of those warehouses turned trendy apartment buildings. We found all sorts of plywood and two by eight lumber and nails and screws disstarted in construction dumpsters in the alley. With the windows boarded up and the thick cement walls and exposed iron beams, I feel a little bit better. Sort of. There are still too many variables, but for the first time since they showed up, I feel like I can rest for a moment

and write some stuff down. That's not the right way to say it. They never showed up. They just started taking people. It's hard to explain to someone who has never seen it happen. I, I, I wish every minute of every day I hadn't seen it myself, but I did. That's why I have to write about it. If I don't, who will? There has to be some sort of records, so it might as well be me who writes it. Maybe once it's over, the record of what I saw could help someone figure out who it was and why they did this. organizing my thoughts might even help me make some sense of it all.

At the very least, it's a way to honor Lav's memory. So what do we know? Next to nothing, sadly. We can't see them, and they are all powerful. Not a lot to go on. I'm constantly studying the variables surrounding their attacks, looking for a pattern. It's the only thing that keeps me from feeling utterly helpless.

We are at their mercy and they show us none. There's no rhyme or reason to when they take people or who they take. It's the randomness of it all that I find the most unnerving. That and the way they take you. There is a smell, which is weird. Ammonia. It's the only consistent. variable so far. When you smell ammonia, you know they're close, but beyond that, what can you do?

I don't know if it's instinct or human nature or that fight or flight thing, but all we've been able to do is run and hide. There is no fighting back against an invisible enemy that strikes randomly. How do you strategize? How do you defend yourself? You can't. And I think that's a what they want. To be honest, I don't even think they're here at all. Like I said, I saw what happens when they take you. I'm no scientist by any stretch, but I'm not stupid. I've seen my fair share of science fiction movies and TV shows, and I know what I saw. It's a portal. Maybe its proper term is a rift or a tear, but that's how they take you. And, and I know what I saw. And and it's why I don't think they're here on Earth.

There's the smell of ammonia, and then there's this crack or rip in our existence, our dimension or whatever, and then this force pulls you in. How are you supposed to protect yourself and the people you care about from something like that? I keep analyzing the variables, rationalizing the irrational,

but it's not working. and I keep losing people. There must be some logic to it, a way to defeat them, or defend ourselves. I often wonder if anyone knew they were out there. That's not unreasonable, right? There were more than 8 billion people in the world. Surely some scientist, a theoretical physicist, maybe, might have suggested that something like this was a possibility.

Am I naive to think that there were no great thinkers or philosophers debating a hypothetical invasion from something outside our realm of understanding? Maybe they were contemplating it and simply abandoned the whole thing. That's what makes the most sense. It's the futility of the situation. How would you protect all of humanity from a threat, not from Earth or something? space, but from another dimension. I guess there are no war game scenarios to run for a theoretical threat. Not that human weapons have any effect on them whatsoever.

When they took my dad, he had an AR-15 on him, and he fired everything he had. I smelled the ammonia and turned my head when the screaming and the shooting started. When I turned back, the ammonia smell was gone, and so was my dad. That was day 13. Lav was the one I saw. I mean, I saw when they took her. It was day 72, and our group was larger back then. It was me, my mom, my sister, my sister's best friend, whose parents were just taken,

Lav, her aunt and uncle, had a cousin. We ran a lot back then. We thought if we just kept moving, they wouldn't be able to catch us. Looking back, I think they were tracking us. No matter where we were, we always seemed to run right into one of their traps. We'd be running down a street,

through a field, in the woods, and we'd start to smell the ammonia. As a group, we'd suddenly change direction to shake them off our tail. Every single time, we'd run right into one of their portals. They were herding us, coralling us into their traps. They were excellent hunters, an unfortunate variable. When they took Lav, I thought we had done everything right. We were tracking the variables.

We weren't running anymore. We were hunkering down in abandoned places for two or three days at a time. We had made it to the city by this point and thought we might have had a chance. The suburbs were bad, but not as bad as the country. We met a couple that lived in a tiny house on one of those micro-farms, and they said all their neighbors had been taken. Was that a variable? being out in the open?

The couple was with us for a few days. Then they were taken. Anyway, we were in this convenience store on the edge of the city. We were starving and exhausted, and we barricaded the front door and windows with whatever we could find, just in case.

We thought we might have a few days to recover and build up our strength. We didn't. On our second night at the convenience store, Lava and I went out to find her friend, Rain. They lived a block away, and at any other time, it would have been a 10-minute walk. That night, we took an hour, being extra careful despite the supposed protection of night. You see, in the earliest days, they didn't take people at night, so that became a variable. The thought was that maybe they had poor vision and could only see during the day. A pitiful oversimplification of the scenario, obviously, but we were existing on guesses and

theories, and luck, of course. Eventually we'd out to Rain's building to find the front door kicked in and all the windows smashed. The lobby was a disaster, and the elevator was broken. We couldn't tell if anyone still lived there, but Lave was determined to find her friend. We cautiously entered the stairwell and hiked up to the fifth floor, encountering no one along the way. Rain's apartment was at the end of the hall, and we held hands as we inched our way closer. As we approached, we saw the door was open, a slight push, and we were inside.

There was no sign of rain. Blav found an envelope on the couch next to a stuffed frog. She read the letter inside. I saw her shoulders drop and started to go to her, but she waved for me to stop. Her face was wet. She never let out a sound. I watched as she grabbed a frame photo from the coffee table, the stuffed frog from the couch,

and a wilted daisy from a bouquet that had died. weeks ago. Then she walked down a hall and out of sight. She returned, empty-handed. Lav walked past me and out the door, never meeting my eyes. I turned and watched her walk back the way we came, head down, a silent shadow. I caught up to her at the door to the stairwell, and we made our way down the five flights. In the lobby, I took her. I took her. her hand to make her stop. She wouldn't look at me. I pulled her close and lifted her chin with my finger.

Our eyes finally met. I had never seen such brokenness, such loss in a person before. I wrapped my arms around her, pressing her to me, my feeble attempt at comfort and reassurance. She whispered in my ear. At least now I know. We stood there. Our bodies fused together in the middle of the apocalypse. Then they came. We smelled the ammonia at the same time.

It was coming from behind us from the stairwell we had just exited. I hesitated, not sure where to go. We were indoors. I had never smelled the ammonia indoors before, another variable. and it was night. They never took people at night, right? Were the variables changing? My brain couldn't process the new information fast enough. Lav panicked.

She grabbed my hand and pulled me outside the apartment building into the street and into their trap. I saw the portal open. Even at night, this hole in our dimension, this thing that shouldn't exist, disturbed me to my poor. It was black inside, but not like the color. It was like a feeling. I know I'm not describing it right, but how can I make you see what I saw, feel what I felt?

It was like I knew on a molecular level there was a chasm of pure nothingness just on. the other side of that opening. If I fell into it, I was certain I would fall forever, lost and alone in the abyss. Then, like a light switch being flipped, everything came to a near stop. Time itself de-accelerated into a sort of cosmic slow motion. I tried to get away but could barely move. It was like when you're trying to run in a dream

and you feel like you're standing in wet cement. I willed my feet to take a step back, only to fall. I let go of Lav's hand. She turned back to me, reaching out, eyes brimming with despair. I've heard that when people experience traumatic events, like a car crash or a tragic accident, they say something like, it's hard to remember, it all happens so fast. The brain helps the body cope with the trauma by editing the event,

cutting things out and speeding things up. This was a trauma orchestrated so acutely and was such calculated intent that my brain recorded every millisecond. Nothing was edited and time was a construct ignoring all laws of nature and expanding into eternity. My brain transcribed every cry uttered, every terror felt, and every ounce of pain Lave experienced onto my physical body. My muscles screamed when Lave screamed. That's when they showed up. You can't see them. You can only feel the effects of what they do. I felt their pull as I watched, labbed it sucked into the portal, the force of which snapped her spine, folding her in half. The pressure was so intense, so unrelenting that she began to separate, like those jars of pebbles, sand, and rocks you played with in elementary school.

Remember those? You put the contents of the jar through a multi-layered sifter and all the particles separated according to their size and mass. That's what they did to laugh. I couldn't stop them, I couldn't see them, but I saw laugh. Her skin went first, then her musculature, then her bones. I watched as they the invisible, unpredictable, unpredictable, predators who couldn't even be bothered to enter our physical dimension, took, lav, layer by layer,

piece by piece. That was 144 days ago. And eternity when you're trying to stay alive. And that's what I'm doing. Trying to stay alive. Not for me, but for my family. We're down to three now. My mom, my sister and me. We've been in this apartment for nearly two weeks, the longest amount of time we've spent in one place since this whole thing began. The thing is, we've experienced no variables in that amount of time. No ammonia smell, no streams, day or night,

or in the streets or from any of the surrounding buildings. Weird, right? It's like they're taking. or break, or they've put the decimation of the human species on pause. As I write this, I think I'm figuring something out. I've been going about this whole thing the wrong way. The variables, they mean nothing. Science and reason have nothing to do with whatever is happening right now. And that's, that's, that's just it. That's the point. There is no logic to it. That's why it's so easy to hunt us and why they don't even need to come here. We're fish in a barrel. The hunter doesn't

need to be in the barrel to shoot the fish. The hunter stands safely and confidently outside of it all. with their weapons at the ready an 8 billion fish concentrated in one planetary barrel. It's not an equation to be solved. It's a game to be won or survived. I don't know who is still left on this planet besides me and my family, but I think I understand things a little bit better now. I'm not giving up just yet. Wish us luck, if you believe in that sort of thing.

For your final story this evening, a self-professed doomed girl saves a bullied teen's life with love, violence, and one final sacrifice. Creepy Presents Can't Love a Dead Chick, written by Tor Anders Olvin. I only knew Michelle for a month, but it was truly a month to remember. I first met her when she was carving out my high school bully's eye with a butter knife. And we were more or less inseparable after that. She was a few years older than me, so of course I felt instantly in love. But I knew deep down we were destined for friendship and little else. I knew this deep down because she made it clear that she was going to die in roughly a month.

Can't love a dead chick, she'd say. At first I thought it was just a cleverer. way to avoid the awkwardness of turning me down. But at some point, I came close to believing her. It was just something about her, something extremely free, careless and unconfined, refreshingly brave and outspoken and honest. When I met her, I was going through the most depressing period of my life. I was constantly bullied and belittled at school. My younger twin sisters were both hospitalized, each needing a transplant to survive. Jenna needed a heart. Chloe needed kidneys.

My parents had their hands full covering the medical expenses. I think we all in our own ways were on the verge of just giving up. Just letting go. I was saved by Michelle. I have no doubt about it. If she hadn't shown up when Brett was beating the shit out of me, I would have killed myself that day. I was just so sick of it.

Sick of the beating, sick of the abuse, sick of being alone. But Michelle came out of nowhere, threw him into a wall, knocked his nose halfway up his brain, and proceeded to dig out his left eye with the aforementioned cutlery. He never touched me again. You think she'd get into trouble after doing something like that. But it was never reported. Brett claimed it had been an accident

that he'd crashed with his moped. I think he feared that Michelle would kill him if he said otherwise. I, for one, have no doubt she would have. That was just who she was. Michelle never went to school. She said it was because she knew she was going to die. Why bother with bullshit like school then? No.

She was all about enjoying life to the fullest, kicking assholes in the face, fucking over people who fucked over others. She wanted to leave this world a better place than she found it. And by her logic, this was done exclusively by ridding it of shitbags one way or another. How do you know you're going to die? I asked her once. My parents tell me, she said. Every day, and they're good for their word,

she wouldn't explain it in detail, just that she was raised knowing the exact date and time of her death down to the very second, and that it was meant to be. That's what they told her. In death, her life would have meaning. At first, I didn't think much of it, you know. She was a crazy girl, and she always said weird stuff like that. I was kind of banking on it all being some bizarre job. joke or something. When the month drew to a close, I was getting really worried. It might all be true. I'd grown too attached to her. Every minute I wasn't at school or the hospital was spent

with her. And the thought of losing her, my only friend made me horribly depressed. That last week, I was really on edge. The twins were in bad shape, and my parents were spending every waking minute at the hospital. The idea had yet to find any donor matches and time was running out. It felt like my time was running out too. The dark thoughts were returning, and I started imagining how I'd kill myself should Michelle ever leave me. I found it strange that she never invited me home.

I mean, friends do that, right? Invite each other over? She's been to our house several times. She even crashed down the couch a few times, and we'd often watch movies there, raid my parents' liquor cabinet, get wasted, and generally just have fun. But I'd never been to her house. Not once. I don't even know where she lived.

So one night I just decided to follow her. What was her to lose, really? Maybe I could get some answers from her parents or something. Some way to explain why she was so convinced she was dying. Maybe they lied to her? Some sort of cult? A way to form her beliefs into accepting the unacceptable, a way to control her. I stalked her for 30 minutes, lurking in the shadows as she paced down the streets.

When she headed to the outskirts, I started getting worried. And when she took the narrow trail through the forest, I was almost having a full-on panic attack. Where the hell was she heading? As far as I knew, there weren't any houses for miles. About halfway into the forest I suddenly lost her. It was like she vanished without a trace. I walked back and forth, up and down, but there's just no sign of her at all.

Eventually I had to give up and return home, my mind growing ever darker. I remember the last day like it was yesterday. Every minute of it, crisp and clear and vivid in my mind. Every scent, every sound, every muscle, moving on her perfect face, all those smiles and kind words, everything, the last day came and and went. But I didn't know it was the last day. If I'd known, I would have told her how much I cared for, how much she meant to me, how much I owed her my life and sanity. Without her, I wouldn't

be alive, but I didn't know. And I never told her. I hope she somehow realized it that you could see it in my eyes and actions every day. But I can never be sure. She just acted so normal, you know. She was Michelle that day too. Same carefree spirit, same wild devil-may-care attitude. We spent the afternoon smoking weed, watching silly cartoons, laughing, and just enjoying each other's company. But when she left, I knew something was up.

I don't know how. I guess there was some detail, some little thing that alarmed me. But having replayed and analyzed that day over and over in my mind, I can't think of anything. Nothing. But I knew. So I followed her again. This time I stayed closer. I was having her in my sights.

I was doing exactly where she was. She was walking considerably slower that night, almost like she knew I was behind her, almost like she wanted me to follow her. The air was cold and crisp, and whenever autumn draws close, I can step outside, take a deep breath, and relive the exact moment when she suddenly turned on her heels to face me. This is it, she said, this is the day I die. She walked over to me and handed me an envelope. It was light, but there was definitely something in it. A letter, perhaps. You'll need this.

She stroked my hair gently. When the time comes, you'll know what to do with it. I don't understand, I said. Please, let's just leave. Let's just get out of here. She smiled and kissed me on the cheek. If I concentrate real hard, I can still conjure up the smell of her perfume. This is goodbye, she murmured softly.

But you'll come to understand that it was always meant to be. I reached out to hug her when they emerged from the darkness. Two tall figures clad in dark robes, an old man and an elderly woman, their milky white hair flowing gently in the breeze. They had this solemn expression on their faces, the kind you'd see in funerals, an expression of acceptance to sorrow and despair because it's just a part of life. Michelle pushed me away forcefully, and by the time I'd regained my balance, it was already too late. Her throat had been slit from either side of her neck, a perfect cross left to right, right to left. Blood was squirting out, coloring the dull brown at the roadside, a deep shade of crimson.

The robed couples swiftly stepped back into the shadows, leaving me desperately clutching the lifeless body of Michelle, screaming my lungs out, wailing like an animal into the cold night. The paramedics came ten minutes later. I have no idea who called them. Anonymous, they later told me. She had no idea on her. so they asked me a bunch of questions. I didn't know the answer to any of them.

She was Michelle. That was all I knew. Her name was Michelle. She was my friend. And she was the best person I'd ever met. They let me ride the ambulance to the hospital, but they quickly pronounced her dad. She'd lost too much blood, they told me. It wasn't my fault.

There wasn't anything I could have done. This didn't offer me much comfort. I was devastated, totally broken, the dark thoughts resurfacing once again. This time with more power than ever before. What's that in your hand? One of the paramedics asked, does that belong to Michelle? I glanced at the envelope. It was completely drenched in blood, much like me.

And then it suddenly hit me. I don't know what it was, but it was like she told me. When the time comes, you'll know what to do with it. So without thinking, I just handed it over to him. He sort of held it up like he'd somehow see through it if you got a better angle of it before he gently opened it. Well, I'll be damned. He said, I'm better now.

I still have problems understanding what happened, but I am better. I've come to terms with it, with the fact that everything happened just the way it was supposed to happen. And it has shaped me, sheaped my life into what I am today. Michelle didn't just save me. She saved my entire family. Every aspect of my life. And I guess you're wondering what was in that envelope. Maybe you figured it out. Maybe not. It was a donor card. And as it turned out, she was a perfect match for my twin sisters. Can't love a dead. chick, she said. That was the only thing

she was ever wrong about. For more information on this podcast, including how to submit your own story for consideration, please visit creepypod.com. You can also follow us at creepypod on social media and YouTube. All stories told on this podcast are done so through creative comments.

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