Creepy - Orange Denim

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

Written by: Hirtle***Bonus Episode: "Romantic Confessions of the Man O’ War" written by: Bryan Miller and Narrated by: Owen McCuen***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.

No. This is 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. Orange Denim.

Written by hurdle. Crack pavement, guns, bug swarms, rednecks, and the brisk Louisiana heat. To you, it may sound like hell to grow up in this environment. But to me, it's home. And you would be wrong. It doesn't just sell like hell. it's as close as one can be to it on earth. If Belinda Carlyle was right about heaven being a place on earth,

then I know exactly where the corresponding realm is. My name's John. Generic, sure. But a name I've grown appreciative of since names such as Petunia, Honey, and Baby started becoming commonplace. And that's about all the favors my parents did for me before careening into oncoming traffic with one hand on the wheel and the other on a bottle.

A tragic development for an already dubious beginning. I survived, but not unscathed. A shower, a shattered glass, left permanent scars. A parting souvenir from my parents that settles the nature versus nurture debate. There are enough disfiguring ravines

and gullies mar and my visage to ensure emotional trauma would forever plague my future. It was particularly brutal in my development years. Kids have no filter and rarely sympathy. I was Scarface from grade 6 to my graduation. Unoriginal, sure, but still able to cut deeper than any of my physical scars.

A nickname that stuck, that embodied my youth. And to an extent how I viewed myself. A fire that could not be smooth. mothered, a perpetual burning dehumanization, powered by the bloody fuel that was my disfigurement. I eventually fully embraced the title. Any sign of empathy for me? I viewed as condescension. Home wasn't much better. When my parents passed, child services found the closest relatives they could, not wanting me to go through foster care. They believed no one would want me. A fast, a fast, that stuck with me and one I also began to agree with child services eventually

follow my aunt and uncle whom I later learned were estranged from my father's side I imagine they were just about ready to kick out the child protection agent when they mentioned the welfare checks I grew up shunned at home and tormented at school though those were interchangeable stretches of time at school would go over by with little incident. But there were no highs for the lows. It was either negative or nothing. Even teachers would ignore my existence.

Perhaps knowing that harm doesn't befall he who goes unnoticed. Or maybe they just didn't give a rat's ass. And adversely, there were plenty of nights when Auntie Clare and Uncle Bobby would dive too deep into a 24-pack. They never hit each other. They actually loved one

another immensely, believing themselves to be emblematic of Bonnie and Clyde. I was the useless failed third wheel that ruined their dreams. No, until I was 18, I was fairly sure I was funding their dreams. If one can call getting hammered every night, dreams. A sanctuary I did not have. A benevolent love did not guide me. That was a despondent teenager, whose low aspirations were only matched by his self-worth.

Mind you, I wouldn't deem myself as depressed. Sure, I was overly melancholic. But there wasn't much for low patches anymore. Just an amorphous blob of gray. An endless dirt road that I thoughtlessly walked alone. My mind too callous to be affected by external factors. A fact that my aunt knows. took much advantage of, for they saw not only a scarred check, but also a form of free labor.

So for my 13th birthday present, they bared me the gift of responsibility. I was granted the ability to earn my place in their home. Something they always emphasized was that nothing was mine, or even ours. It was theirs, and this wouldn't change that. at least that would be less dependent. So I began work at their gas station, easy fill, charging exorbitant prices capitalizing on the rural town's isolation. Even though exploitive behavior was all I had even witnessed, I felt like it was unfair.

But I couldn't change the encoded number installed in each gas tank. I could only act as the messenger, whose latter rose with inflation each time I had to change the price display board. One weekend I traveled to the closest towns on each end of the highway that struck through our town, hammering in signs proclaiming last fuel station for 40 miles. It didn't help against the irritated customers who berated me on the 50-cent increase per gallon, but it gave me a small dose of fulfillment and peace. I feel in a satisfaction.

The sensation of rare appearance is time passed leaving me behind. Life in general was a tedious existence for the most part Until one unimposing day I recalled the day a Wednesday Nestled into the Easter week There were no festivities at home The holiday could have gone completely unnoticed if not for the upcoming extended weekend The morning of the Wednesday was rather eventful

The gas station ripe with travelers taking advantage of the upcoming school-free Friday. Most of the interactions were astonishingly neutral. The locals had grown accustomed to the overpriced gasoline and diesel the station charge. Unexpected tourists, on the other hand, almost always launched into petulant fits, which often proved difficult to endure. But that Wednesday was different. Aside from his singular interaction, I'd grown a depth to reading body language working that job,

so I knew this guy was pissed just by how he opened the door. He marched defiantly up to the till, chest puffed, as if he was standing against some injustice. Yet, as he opened his mouth, ready to go on his tirade, he hesitated. His previously locked-in eyes drifted aimlessly. Two deserted ships in Ivory Seas. After a moment I spoke, inquiring if there was an issue.

His vacant eyes suddenly reanimated, before he apologized, paid, and left. A strange encounter, but I'd interacted with enough bizarre people over my years at easy fell not to overanalyze such a mundane peculiarity. Someone either zoning out or having a drug-induced hallucination wasn't much of an issue. Someone stuffing five cans of compressed air in their pants and locking themselves in the bathroom? That was an issue. And more common than you'd think. I clocked out when Bobby arrived an hour late, the scent of Coke and rye lingering on his breath,

and he angrily instructed me to mow the lawn once I got home. After mowing to the captivated audience honk, Claire, I prepared myself a delectable meal of boxed macaroni. carrying it upstairs to my room. I picked through my VCR tapes, feeding the 87 film Evil Dead 2 into the machine. I was serenaded by the taste of cheese and sound of chainsaws as I drifted off to sleep. I woke cuffed to a white mesh table,

enveloped on all sides by void, as if surrounded by a dense fog. My feet were submerged in perhaps a foot, a shallow water, below me. I pulled at the restraint to my hands and to my surprise, the every chain gave way at the slightest tug. I rose to my feet, glancing around at the ebony mist floating a few yards away in each direction. Each step-by took some waves rippling into the dark, never to find shore. When I looked back at the table, a few sheets of paper materialized. Faces adorned each paper. The disgruntled and wrinkled sneers were already enough to recognize my aunt and uncle.

Below their names was a small line of text wrote with pencil. I looked at my uncle's first, which read, age 94, stroke. The words had yet to register before noticing that my hand clutched something. I unfurled the fist to reveal a pencil, equipped with a pink eraser. Without much thought, I scrubbed at the words until they had completely vanished, leaving behind charcoal-tinted eraser shavings. I felt like an observer in my own body, still in control yet strangely disconnected.

I could stop my arm momentarily, but once I stopped concentrating on halting the arm, it would continue. It was as if my subconscious and conscious mind were alert at the same time. the man in the body to do different things. I let it take over as I read what the body wrote, slowly and methodically. S-U-I-C. I felt a malicious grin percolate across my face as the word formed.

Before the arm could complete its sentencing, a voice boomed from above. I looked up to see a mirror. A face resided in the reflection. The face feeling familiar but surreal. A sensation similar to uncanny valley. No, it spoke before the mirror shattered. Raining glass shards down onto me,

awakening me suddenly with a jolt. The sheets of my bed were damp with sweat as the alarm sounded. The repetitive blaring pierced my skull and irritated the headache that had formed during the nightmare. My head pounded as the alarm went on, culminating in a sudden release attention. The clarity of my mind was unbelievable. A relief like removing a mental sliver. The alarm would also stop, the red-dashed insignia flickering off briefly. The power returned to the object, but as the time it shifted from 8-8-1, the clock remained silent. A rare benevolence bestowed by the universe, however minute it was.

It started as soon as I went downstairs. My uncle sat at the table. His stout balding figure scooped away at the bowl of cereal in front of him. Stepping towards the fridge to grab my pre-packed lunch, I nearly stepped on brown glass shattered on the floor in front of me. My uncle didn't even glance away from his phone as he instructed. I instructed me to clean it up. I protested,

explained that I'd be late for school if I didn't leave soon. He stopped scrolling through his phone, sending it down calmly to his side. He looked me in the eyes, his eyes lighting up, my words are healthy dousing of gasoline on embers.

He picked up the glass filled with orange juice that accompanied his cereal and took a final slow sip. I had an idea where this was going as I readied myself. He then casually took the glass and flung it in my direction. The glass shattered as it made contact with the wall. When I looked back up at him, he already had the phone in his hand again, silently scrolling.

There were no need for words, his actions clearly displayed his demand. I walked over to the closet, grabbing the broom and dustpan. The rage that built in my body was interrupted by a familiar sensation. My mind was racked with a slightly less painful pounding than before. The pain was still enough to cripple me as I dropped to my knees, massaging my temples. Just as suddenly as before, the pain dissolved. A strong pair of hands lifted me to my feet from underneath my armpits. I looked into my uncle's eyes as he asked if I was all right.

They seemed brighter now. Once narrowed and angry, his eyes lit up with sympathy and concern. In fact, his entire face seemed to lose a layer of constant frustration that was typically adorned on it. His tone was calm, a far cry from the bitter resentful voice he used exclusively for me. His compassion felt wrong. a trick, a ruse to draw my guard in order to hurt me deeper. I reached for the broom, and in response, he placed his hand on my shoulder and explained that he'd take care of the glass.

All this time wearing a discrepant fake smile plastered on his face. My gratitude was a barely audible whisper as I grabbed my lunch, careful not to step on the glass and stumbled out of the house. A fog of confusion accompanied the foggy humidity as I stepped out of the white bungalow. Both feelings escorted my walk to school. Compassion that was the side of my uncle I'd never seen, at least in private. In public, his persona was slightly less irritating. He did more listening than speaking.

And when he did speak, every word was calculated. It was more quiet and attentive, at least enough to be. to exude and be known for a focused and intense personality, rather than the truthfully abusive one. He didn't seem one for trickery either, however. There was no need for hiding his actions. Who would he be hiding him from? It was painfully clear that both him and auntie didn't need to veil their acts behind

some fake kindness. And even if he did decide to, why would he start at that moment? The short walk to school cursed the discourse to go unresolved. The parking lot of the school had been packed, the gentrification in the area having been clearly defined by the vehicles within it. Mindy this was rural Louisiana, where the desirable status symbols weren't luxury sports cars but lifted trucks. The entrance was shielded by a group of seniors.

Cigarettes dangled from lips and in between fingers. Their conversation gradually dissipated, I approached, their glares progressively locking in on me. Their hushed voices whispered something cruel, unheard yet clearly targeted. I shuffled through the doors leaving behind the group's laughter. The bustling hallway fueled my anxiety. Crowds never fail to make me dizzy. But it's a feeling I fight back as I nudge my way into Classroom 4A.

A gold plaque beneath the door's window reads physically. room. I maneuver to get a seat in the back, safely behind the adverse gaze of my colleagues. The teacher, Miss Krakovic, waited patiently at her desk for the bell to sound. Then she stood and in scratchy chalk wrote, Today's lesson, Newton's Law of Action, exploring real-world applications. The words on their own were enough to make me lethargic. She droned on. The feeling of hours passing was revealed as minutes by the clock's slow pace.

Sleep took me quickly. Like how a tiger pounces upon prey, instantly and unknowingly. My eyes opened to reveal reality had once again been taken from me. The stream was different from the mornings. I had replaced Miss Crackwick at the front of the classroom. The students I was just among were obscured. by a black fog, but I knew they were there, watching. I felt their presence, their glares. It took me a moment to realize my body was moving on its own again. My subconscious mind

having again been switched. He was in control here. Focusing allowed me a brief influence, but I allowed myself to continue, curious as to where this would go. I picked up the chalk and began writing. The letters were drawn in violent and quick strokes, the way in which I wrote alone allowing my subconscious to communicate the emotion. The general sentiment was excruciatingly transparent. Rage. Pure, unabashed rage.

Once finished, I stepped back, allowing me to read the chaotically drawn sentence. Today's lesson? Vengeance. I was suddenly aware of a weight, something obtuse and heavy. I felt a sneer across my face, an unyielding anger that I was cognizant of but couldn't feel. I had quelled emotional responses with years of indifference, but it seemed my subconscious mind had said vigilant in its demeanor.

A wall of fire emerged on the chalkboard behind me. I felt no heat as an inch meticulously forward, leaving behind an incinerated path. As the flames moved towards the darkened space where the class sat, there still was no movement. But there were screams. Violent, terrified screams. Desperate calls for help destined to go unanswered. A hollow indifference engulfed me. A vacant feeling in my mind accompanied the silence, a distant cat.

that enthralled my body, pages whirled through the air, charred and burning, all containing pictures of my fellow students on them. The sound of steam infiltrated the air as water began to pour in from the void above. Starting as a mere trickle, it soon grew in volume to a waterfall, loud and torrential. My body tried to swim, but couldn't tread water. anchored to the floor. As it filled my lungs, the taste of salt lingered on my tongue. Just as I felt my body lose consciousness to the flood, I awoke.

The classroom was quiet, and I initially believed it slept through dismissal, that no one had cared enough to wake me up. However, as I raised my head, I was met with the collective stairs for every single person in the room. There smiles full and eyes out. empty as they peered at me. Even Miss Krakovic stood motionless. She then asked if she could do anything for me, if any of them could do anything for me. The class then began to nod in harmony, as if agreeing with the teacher's statement. I stood to leave, more than disturbed by the class's

behavior. Yet as I did, the entire class stood with me. I froze, feeling like an animal caught in a trap. Sit, I said more as a plea than command. But as soon as all's worth were uttered, the entire class sat obediently. Even Miss Krakovac sat on the concrete floor silently awaiting her next command. I was surprised at this revelation, feeling a sudden surge of power coursed through my mind, Like a beggar being given the throne, I considered my first action carefully. I was not fully sure I had control.

This was another cruel joke orchestrated by the entire class. I noticed in the front row one of the kids who mocked me this morning. I gestured to the boy sitting next to him. Strike him. He turned and, on a dime, put his hips into a swing that collided with the pricks' chest. chin. The twinge empathy accompanying the bully's cry was overrun by an intense feeling of satisfaction. Again, I spoke, with more confidence than ever in my voice. As more sadistic ideas flowed through my head, a faint feeling nods somewhere in my mind, nothing more than a whisper on the wind,

a singular fleeting feeling of guilt and shame conflict against the thousands advocating for for justice, comeuppance, sadism. The feeling became unignorable as it grew in volume, overwhelming all other thoughts. The intensity of the phenomena seemed to multiply each moment. Fill in my mind with throbbing empathy. I screamed for it to stop, and both the fighting and sensation vanished. The two boys rose, bruises marring the face of the one. The black and blue skin which swelled and in flame could still not stop his smile from forming once again,

patiently waiting for the next command. The weight of my actions came down like a blacksmith's hammer. My thoughts sharpening the more violent commands. I wanted to hurt these people for their negligence, for their hatred of me. They hated me. They all did. But then, the sensation of guilt roared back to life spurred on by something unknown to me. The overflowing sense of guilt pulled me from the trenches of these thoughts.

A fragment of light filled the darkness of my mind like the peaking sun on a full moon's night. I bolted out of the room, feeling the eyes each person following me on my retreat. I didn't stop running until I reached the shabby. bungalow door my aunt and uncle's home. I arrived to see my uncle sat at the table in the same spot as I left him in. His eyes were heavy, dark circles surrounding each socket. He smiled as I entered breathless. It was off-putting and alien, like watching the devil grin. His eyes still contemptuous despite his amiable outward appearance. I stared for a moment. Not listening to his prattling fake inquiries.

I was in control for the first time. I cut him off mid-sentence as my eyes rose to meet him, filled with purpose. Clean up the glass. I instructed motioning towards the broken cup from this morning. His cold eyes immediately locked onto the broom behind me as he went to stand. No. Use your hands. My tone remained unnervingly emotionless.

Looking down, I watched as he grabbed at the shards below, together creating enough of a reflection to see myself. A scattered smile had betrayed the calculating demeanor I had meant to exude, but I couldn't help it, watching the man who had so many times hurt me with words and actions feel some sense of retribution. They dug into his skin as he fumbled through the wreckage. Long cuts shredded his hands wide enough to ensure they left scars. Watching this sent an idea to me,

my voice quavering for a moment before regaining its confidence. Pick it up with your teeth. I stopped suddenly as that needle of empathy had returned, quickly progressing into the feeling of an iron rod shot through the skull. The pleasure I extracted from his pain morphed into simply pain. universal for both he and I a migraine of previously unknown magnitude throttled my entire body

and I commanded him to stop I then turned and fled upstairs struggling with each step against the pain I collapsed under my bed clenching my eyelids tightly together begging for the pain to subside and like a prayer answered it did all at once and completely sudden

When my eyelids timidly opened again, a dream scape had encompassed me. The now familiar space contained within my mind. This time the space was empty, barring a singular standing mirror placed in the center of the lid area. However, the mirror did not adhere to its typical reflective properties. Stood directly in front of it, my likeness did not appear. Instead, contained within it was. a man. He looked to be around my age with a similar height and build, almost identical aside from our veneers. A stoke expression torn his face.

Who are you? I asked the man in the mirror. He stared for a moment before responding. Anxiety. As the word left his mouth, the mirror cracked, cutting his image in two. I tried to speak to question this non-answer, but was cut off as he continued. Hate, depression, despair, regret, resentment, envy, guilt, rage. With each word, the mirror fractured further, horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines ripped through the glass. As each stroke shattered across the mired man's face, I began to recognize myself. at what made me who I was.

As he finished speaking, a silence permeated the dream escape. We stared at each other. I was whole again, but I didn't want to be. I didn't want the cracks, the scars, nor the blood nor tears that leaked from them. But at least they were mine. A possession that couldn't be taken, secured in flesh and mine. My mirror image then stood as if reacting to my internal submission and spoke a solitary word. Hope, he said, stepping through the mirror, shattering it completely.

He stepped closer towards me. I had no fear, no concern when he approached. Hope, he repeated, placing his hand on my face. I felt one of many scars tingling. and then release, fading completely. He stepped back and smiled. Such a lovely smile. I felt bombardment of positive adjectives overwhelmed my mind.

I hadn't accepted any of them yet, but I knew how I could. I embraced myself, weeping openly into my own shoulder, leaning on the only one that had ever truly been there for me, The world seemed to begin crumbling around me, the dream scapes reality losing hold. As I felt myself begin to fade, any sense of external power fading with them. But as I awoke in my bed, I knew I didn't need it anymore.

I arose from the bed, glancing at the mirror in my room. All my scars were still intact. But the dread that accompanied them had been torn apart. I packed a small bag of belongings and walked down the flight of stairs. A new thought drowned out the rage filled the voice of my uncle. Compassion. The echoing of the war causing another scar to tingle as I stepped through the open door. For your bonus episode, Creepy Presents.

Romantic Confessions of the Man of War. written by Brian Miller and narrated by Owen McCune. I spend the brightest days of summer gazing down at the other attractions. Princess Patina's gracefully twirling swings, hokey-pokey puppies somnolent log flume, Sammy Conductor's subatomic train as it lopes along, and I wonder, why are they not hungry like me? I have a superior view of the park. My apex, just before the first drop of the camelback arch that corkscrews into a double loop,

is the highest point of Wonderworld, taller even than the spire on Candy Cat's Enchanted Castle. From up here, I watch the other attractions go through their motions, taking on riders and spilling them back into the cobblestone walkways where a gift shop conveniently awaits. Do the others not know the intoxicating taste of blood? or are they immune to it? For a time, the screams were enough. I'm not the newest attraction at the park, but I am the most popular and by far the most formidable.

In the first years, the riders would stampede toward me the moment the gates opened and form a cue that snake beyond the entrance emblazoned with my logo all the way back to the dip in dot stand. The riders might not flock to me with the same enthusiasm as they did when I was shiny and new, but wait time still stretch over a half hour as the perspiring guests inched their way through the holding pan,

awaiting that initial surge of speed when the hydraulic catapult launch flings them toward the first hill. I've cradled hundreds of thousands of asses on my unforgiving seats, felt millions of sweaty thighs peel off the summer hot plastic. I've heard the collective gasp of 40-odd lungs expanding simultaneously as the lead car teeters over the first drop. I felt the fingernails of white-knuckled hands bite into the rubber-handled grab bar

as the car is tilt upward into the first inversion. I know the tone and tenor of every scream across the entire spectrum, from squeals of delight to howls of pure panic. I was happy, or so I thought. Then, one long afternoon in the hottest stretch of July, I noticed a little girl in pink flip-flops stamping impatiently in the corral while a set of cars unloaded. Sandals or open-toed shoes aren't allowed on any of the premium attractions, just the water rides,

but none of the park attendants had noticed. Those sandals made a flap, flap, flap-flap sound against the scuffed wooden planks. In between impatient stumps, the girl hectored her father for funnel cake and an oversized hokey-pokey-pokey-pupy-pussy. Other riders had to stand aside to avoid her oblivious gestures. She said she was bored. She insisted that roller coasters are supposed to be scary, but they're not. The little girl and her father boarded the third car from the front. My harness hugged her close.

I felt a flutter against the harness as her heart rate spiked when we rushed forward. We slowed slightly as we ascended the lift hill, but her tiny heart kept hammering. Her small hands, waxy with the cinnamon-flavored lip gloss she wore, clamped down on the grab bar. She was barely an inch taller than the minimum height requirement. She pressed her sandaled feet against the rim of the car's bonnet so that she sat perpendicular, her narrow hips bent at a 90-degree angle. I made my move at the top of the second hill when the G-forces of the speedy ascension vanish, just before gravity goes with it.

All it took was a little twitch of a brake fin to create a slight hitch in the car's movement. I only intended for a minor stutter in the motion, a little added effect before the vertiginous second drop. I couldn't have known what would happen. I've since asked myself that many times, was it possible that I did? The slight jerk before the drop caught the girl off guard and caused her to clench her leg muscles then relaxed them slightly in the little delay before the plunge. Her sandaled feet slipped free.

Her toenails snagged on the hard plastic rim. The force of the drop did the rest. Nine of her ten toenails peeled off as her legs slammed down. She raised her bloody feet into the air. Hot, coppery droplets of her spattered across the seat. Those nine little toenails fluttered down onto the floor of the car like flakes of sugar. They tasted so much sweeter.

One of the park managers rushed to the scene, followed shortly by a set of paramedics in matching dark uniforms, trailing a rolling stretcher stacked with a first aid kit. While the EMTs hoisted the flailing girl onto the stretcher, one of the attendants shoed the disappointed throngs in a reverse line down the corral, back the way they came. There would be no more rides. The safety inspector would be summoned to tickle my undersides and test my hydraulic thrusts.

No doubt this would be attributed to the girl's unauthorized footwear. But I was done for the day. That was fine for me. For the moment, I was full. This is what I've learned about want. You can be satisfied right up until the moment you truly appreciate how much more there is to be had. Once the first splinter of desire works its way under your skin, you can never get it out. It only keeps growing.

You want and you want and you want and you want more. The screaming was no longer enough, never would be again. Now I wanted all of them. I barely even noticed when they started building Worley Bird. At the time, it appeared to be an unambitious new attraction, a gussied-up tilt-a-wirl branded with the bright blue avian, hero of the animated movie Out of the Nest.

Nearly all of the attractions in Wonder World are named after one of the gang from King Brothers Studios' classic cartoon comedy shorts, or else one of the characters from their newer feature films. My own moniker comes from the Man of War movie series. Once the human Man of War himself, Dave Battista, personally went for a circuit around my tracks

while a camera crew filmed his reaction to promote Man of War II, Next Man Up. I gave them the smoothest of rides. Batista's Cologne smelled incredible. DVDs of the film are for sale in the gift shop. Whirley Bird replaced one of the three Big Game Islands, which were clusters of arcade and carnival games.

Big Game Island number two was dominated by a bumper car arena that was forever causing minor injuries to the passengers. Despite the bumper car's simplistic construction and utter lack of grandeur, I was always secretly jealous of how many riders they injured with such limited means. I'd only managed to nip at a few dangling fingers and shake a few riders bloody-nosed, weak little sips, when what I needed was a good, strong drink.

Worley Bird drew blood on its first day of operation. A pudgy boy managed to snag himself on the cart's locking mechanism mid-ride. He held his spurting hand to the side, which had the delightful effect of drawing a bright red helix on the ground below, as Worley Bird's cars spun on their gimbals and the long metal arms swooped. The whole production made me want to slam two of my train cars together in applause. The overnight maintenance crews fussed over Worley Bird's shiny metal inards.

The portable floodlights they wheeled in cast the silhouettes of their crawling forms on the ground like enormous clumsy bugs. The white lights glinted behind Worley Bird's long steel arms and cast tendrils of of darkness along the pavement. Our shadows nearly touched. The maintenance crew made the same tweaks to me as they do every week, blissfully lubing the chains and the gears, sure,

but also tightening bolts, checking brake fins, testing the chest harness clasps, all things that limit my mobility and keep me from snatching up a rider to satiate myself. But two days later, Whirley Bird was back at it again, twitching with a forbidden surge of electricity

to knock over an older man boarding one of the carts. He crashed to the ground with a prodigious, if superficial, head wound. I buzzed with admiration. Then I think Worley Bird noticed. A few hours later, one cluster of three carts dangling from one of the four long arms began to spin faster than the others, suspiciously faster, until it was a blur of open, screaming mouths and waving arms. Jets of vomit painted the air.

before the attendant shut it down. You'd have to be looking down from way up here to recognize what just happened. Worley Bird was waving at me. Of course, I wanted to wave back, to call out to a kindred spirit. But I struggled to conceive a proper response. A splash of puke or some mashed fingers wouldn't suffice.

But the last maintenance crew had done an unusually thorough job of servicing my mechanisms. I was constrained. I was silenced. Meanwhile, I watched Worley Bird. The longer I looked, the more I appreciated slight curvature of its long metal arms. The way their flailing movements belied a certain subtle fluidity. The sun spangled off Worley Bird's chromatic blue metal paint job.

No, not just blue. Cyan. All my efforts to bite a hand or dislodge a rider with unexpected spasm of movement came to gnaut. I felt as useless as Princess Patina's limply dangling swings, as stupefied as Buccaneer Billy's pirate ship, which seemed content to mindlessly swoop back and forth on the same eternal half-moon exas in a series of never-ending shrugs.

Opportunity finally came knocking in the guise of a quartet of women wearing floor-length denim skirts and blouses, buttoned all the way up to the base of their sweating necks. I watched them as they egged each other into my line, laughing their way through the corral. Silver crosses swung from their chains around their necks of three of the women. The fourth wore a gold Jesus fish. Their pale skin was untattooed, unpainted, unpierced.

Their thick, restrictive clothing was a testament to the religious devotion on a blazing summer day, where ripe middle-aged mothers and teenage daughters alike bared sunburnt cleavage and fleshy midrifts beneath the knotted tails of their t-shirts. The four devout women had one other commonality, their prodigious hair. Those locks, never once kissed by scissors, were piled and pinned into dishwater blonde crowns atop their heads.

I studied their heads as they boarded, two aside in successive cars. I watched as the attendant strode past to give the customary tug on their shoulder harnesses, the way they flinched at a stranger's hand, even a foot away from their tucked away breasts. The way they shook their heads slightly from side to side to situate those mounds of hair against the cushion of the headrest. The way a trio of hairpins tinkled under the tracks beneath the woman sitting on the right side of the first car, the woman wearing the Jesus fish. The way one stubborn sprout of hair, freed by the detached hairpins and stretched a full length, drifted down far enough to tickle against my tracks. Before the attendant could throw the switch to start the ride, I rattled the cars as hard as I could. The four women all wriggled their shoulders and rolled their necks in response.

More of that hair unspooled. A dark blonde tendril twined around the metal coils of the springs until I felt it cinch in place, clamped down by the mechanism. The woman in the car jerked her head slightly. She must have thought her hair was tangled in the headrest. It was not. The attendant threw the switch to begin the ride. Beneath the train cars, the accumulators released the fluid pressure into the motors,

which caused the winch drum to spin so fast that the rapidly spooling cable yanked the lead car forward in a kind of liquid rush. The riders accelerated from zero to 42 miles per hour in less than one second. The train rocketed forward. carrying along all of the passengers. One woman's hair stayed behind, along with most of her scalp. It ripped free with the short, sharp sound

of wet fabric tearing and splattered under the tracks. You might think at first one of the passengers had lost her hair weave. Well, that's happened several times. But the weaves fluttered to the ground. They didn't splat. They didn't leak. They didn't taste.

as rich and oily as sweetbreads. Meanwhile, the train car was 350 feet away in a matter of three seconds. It climbed the first hill where the anti-rollback device clicks in place to prevent the possibility of the passenger sliding backwards. The woman in the Jesus fish necklace

was a screaming wraith by then, her whole face darkened with blood, a white patch of her skull atop her head like a monk's pate. her three companions cried out for the ride to stop. The attendant noticed something amiss, just as the cars clack, clack, clacked their way up to the top of the first hill. He blinked into the sunlight, baffled.

His hand hovered over the emergency stop button. Perhaps he made the calculation that it would take far longer to disengage the anti-rollback device and run the car backwards into the block brakes, and that the fastest way to get the passengers back into the station, was to let me run the course. Or perhaps he was too dim-witted to make a decision. The attendants are all young,

barely older than teenagers themselves. They have only the illusion of control. The scalped woman let loose a long, impossibly breathless scream as the cars tipped over the brink and rocketed down the hill. Her three companions harmonized in terror, the scalped woman trailed a wake of blood. The riders in the four cars behind her

were blasted with pink mist A young boy's glasses darkened red. They all tried not to scream lest the blood spray into their open mouths. Some were more successful than others. The train zipped up the next ridge, down another hill, banked into the corkscrew, then surged into the inversions.

For a glorious moment, the moon-colored knob of the scalped woman's skull pointed straight down to the ground. She watered the grass beneath me. She kept grabbing for her ears and pawing the back of her neck, trying to figure out what was missing, not realizing the answer was.

Almost all of it. The car is cycled through the second loop and into the final curve, high above the park, all those painted passengers squealing and flailing their blood-freckled arms. Hello, Worley Bird.

Hello? What is the first of the park? is the price of a single moment of inhibition? A brief wet spasm of joy? Everything, apparently. The park operators shut me down for an investigation, as expected. But this time, they refused to turn me back on. I was visited not by one inspector, but a whole team. Graven-faced and less convivial with management than ever before. They frowned at my hydraulics and clucked at my brakes and shook their heads as they fingered the loosened bolts of my struts. They shut me down. They had their hands full with Worleybird, too, who kept waving and tried to rattle cardloads

of riders together to signal my attention, as though I could take my eyes off of it, as though I could think of anything else. Then the torment began. On the first chilly day of fall, a team of two dozen workmen arrived to tear me apart. First, they tore down my front gate. They pulled up all the railings of the corrals leading up to the station. They peeled the cars off my tracks one by one. Then they began disassembling the tracks themselves, snapping off steep ribs to denude my spine along the launch point,

even while a separate team of workers unscrewed and unbolted my hydraulics until they unspooled on the pavement, like coils of spilled guts. That was nothing compared to my water. to the feeling of the diamond-tipped metal saws that drooled white-hot sparks as they carved me into pieces to be dragged away. Chunk by aching chunk. From my apex, which was no longer connected to track on either side, I could see the great semi-trucks below, turned into enormous herses that ferried away my daily ablations. I got my last look at Worley Bird the morning before they detonated a series of small charges at the base of my two widest sets of struts to bring down the mangled stumps of my

camelback hills. Thongs of riders gathered behind orange cyclone fencing to witness my execution. Cameras from two news stations filmed my demise. The spectacle drew the attention of most of the park's guests, so that the other attractions almost entirely emptied out. Only a few riders dotted Worley Bird spinning carts in my final moments. I looked down on Worley Bird for the last time as I waited on the concussion from below. The carts began to spin ever faster, out of control, loosing screams and sunglasses and car keys

and sprits of glimmering coins. Worley Bird's riders shrieked and flailed while the frantic attendant tried to work the control panel. The carts blurred together in maniacal motion. My hands weren't just tied. My appendages had been entirely sliced off. I couldn't manage even the slightest wave in return. I couldn't say goodbye.

A series of explosions knocked my legs out from under me. Worley bird fell away from sight as I collapsed into a storm of dust. I was still conscious when they saw the remainder of my corpse apart and packed the last of me into the waiting semi-trucks. The light blinked out when the doors slammed shut. I was so much more alone there in the dark, infinitely lonelier than I had been on my most solitary day in the park. It was enough to make me wish I'd never laid eyes upon a pearly bird

or learned the secret truth about the dizzying flavor of human blood. I woke to a glare of yellow light and a waft of hot, humid air smelling of salt water and diesel exhaust. The shadows of work. stepped into the light at the end of the long rectangular tunnel. With globed hands, they lugged me, piece by piece, out of the dark, into a broad field of half-dead grass. There in the open, the air was more familiar.

Brine and burned oil, yes, but also the tang of hot dog brine and sweet, greasy funnel cake funk. From my spot, prostrate on the sunburnt ground, and even more familiar sight. riders separated from the field by a chain-link fence. The younger ones clumped together in flocks that fanned out across the pedestrian streets, while the older ones slogged indolently through the oppressive summer heat. Carnival music tweedledeed all around. A little farther off, I heard the familiar thrum of heavy steel cars rumbling down tracks.

It would be several weeks before I got a better look at the park. Workers hauled me, piece by piece, deeper into a field where my metal spine was implanted into a newly built exoskeleton of wood, painted so bright white that almost hurt to look at. The agony of reconstruction as they welded me back into shape, scalding me back into some semblance of my old self, was even more painful than death. I wasn't even fully reconstructed. My inversions were gone, replaced with an unimpressive corkscrew into a drop that plunged riders into a verdant tuft of palm trees before returning them to the station.

I was humbled. At last, when the camelback arches were affixed inside my new wooden skin, I got a clear view of the park. Thrillville was a significantly smaller operation than Wonderworld, with fewer attractions clustered inside a narrow footprint next to a highway that wound alongside the glittering sea. I spotted only one other coaster, a low-slung mine-train car called the Prospector.

It curled around the log jam, an algae-scented log flume. Beyond that, near the edge of the park, a ship christened the clipper, swung back and forth, repeating Buccaneer Billy's old tricks. Nearest to me, an arena of clattering bumper cars echoed with low-speed collisions next to a stumpy-looking scrambler, with a mere four carts on two arms that rose and fell as they swerved, along an unsteady axis.

There were fewer attendance in Thrillville, many fewer, and most of them took turns billowing out huge clouds of skunky-smelling marijuana near the dumpsters behind the food court before returning to work, foggy-eyed. I saw the inspector just once. Only the maintenance crew bothered to regularly check the bolts and the brake fins, and their standards relax.

No one took the time to scratch the graffiti off the scuffed wooden handrails and the corrals or scraped the gum from their undersides. All of my fellow attractions squeaked and rattled, unoiled and loose on their tracks, their skin blemished with a rash of rust patches instigated by the blowing ocean air. It was paradise. Though I'd lost my vertiginous inversions and my hydraulics had been replaced with a pneumatic tire launch, the harness clasps were loose, the brake fins, had plenty of give, and the brake runs stopped the train cars with a whiplash-inducing jolt.

In the first week, I took two fingers off a man in a Florida is the only free state t-shirt, who stretched his arm out too close to one of the unpruned palm trees. They only shut me down for the half hour it took to find the fingers. One of them, anyway. The other was swallowed deep into the infertile soil below. From the creeks and groans and screams around me, I could hear the other attractions snacking on those brave, unafraid Floridians, who so boldly threw themselves into our rusty jaws. Even that humble little scrambler managed to dip on its axis suddenly enough

to bang heads against the top of the carts and gnaw a fleshy chunk out of an old woman's saggy arm with one quick pinch of a harness bar. The zipper. That was the scrambler's name. It was painted an ugly, inexplicable brown that had partly chipped off to reveal gunmetal gray beneath, and it only carried eight riders at a time, but it may do with what it had. That's something a once-proud coaster with no inversions can appreciate. I was still the mightiest coaster in the park, taller than the highest attraction by more than a hundred feet. I was a son of Wonderworld.

I was the man of war. I wanted to say hello to all my new friends, and, yes, maybe show off a little for the zipper. On July 4th, Thrillville filled a capacity with riders celebrating their unregulated freedom. Freedom, after all, is worth celebrating. The freedom to, say, clamp your thoroughly uninspected brake fins on a train car just as it spirals into the corkscrew so that the passenger cars are frozen in a scoliotic twist, half of their numbers still dangling upside down, their faces reddening as all that blood flows down from their inverted hearts. Meanwhile, the second train car has blasted past the emergency brake stop, which might have mattered if the stoned attendant was even looking.

He was talking to a girl on a purple tube top when the first and second train cars clapped together in thunderous applause. The cars broke apart as they ripped away from the tracks. The impact loosened several of the chest harnesses, catapulting riders into the air, spinning across the sky in their red and white and blue clothes like a bouquet of, flowers flung into the air as if to say, I love you. 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 share-a-like licensing,

or with written consent from the authors. No portion of this podcast may be rebroadcast or otherwise distributed without the express written consent of the creepy podcast production team and the story's author.