Creepy - Rescue & Sugar Bugs

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

Rescue***Written by: Ryan C. Bradley and Narrated By: Owen McCuen***Sugar Bugs***Written by: Keely McCarthy and Narrated by: Alicia Atkins***Content Warnings (for Sugar Bugs): Tooth Horror, Body Horror, Bug Horror, Self Mutilation, Maternal Abuse***Support the show at patreon.com/creepypod***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. which listener discretion is advised. Creepy presents.

Rescue. Written by Ryan C. Bradley and narrated by Owen McCune. When people asked me what kind of dog Riley was, I said, she's a rescue, indignantly, so that they would know what a good person I was. Really, though, she was a roar shock test.

She was 30 pounds with dark brown fur and black dots like freckles on her cheeks. So people would tell me, German Shepherd mixed with corgi, Minpin, blue healer. My partner and I always said that when we got the money, we'd get one of those DNA tests.

Whatever kind of dog she was, Riley got me through the worst of my depression. I'd come back from therapy, scarf down a burrito, and bury my face in her side while I cried. I couldn't cry in front of my therapist. I was raised in one of those households where crying wasn't okay. Nobody yelled or hit me with a belt or anything crazy like that,

but I was told sternly that the behavior was unacceptable. Riley accepted me, tears and all, without question. She made me laugh, too. Humans don't deserve dogs. We have wars and genocide. We had the power to build anything, to make life equitable and fair, and instead we built a labyrinth of bureaucracy, a system that told people starving on the streets that the problem was that they didn't work hard enough. The worst thing that she did was go berserk at skateboarders. If she saw one, she'd forget all of her leash training, get up on two legs, and nash her teeth. She'd snarl, and she might have only been 30 pounds, but it was a guttural noise. I'd be running the other way if she weren't my dog.

The weird thing was that she'd spin in circles every few barks. That's how she got off leash when she saw the rabbit. She was doing her berserk act, hopping on two legs and lunging in the direction of the rabbit as I pulled backward on the leash. Then she spun in a circle like I'd seen her do a hundred times before, and I finally understood why she did it. The leash's clip got caught on the harness and popped open.

Riley sprinted across the street after the rabbit while the limp leash dangled in my hand. Our regular afternoon walk took us by exactly one abandoned house. It was a one-story ranch, the yard so overgrown you could barely see the porch. It had an odd smell, almost like cat piss, which, according to my partner, meant that someone was cooking meth in there. But the smell was only part of the reason we stayed on the other side of the street. We'd also heard screams in the night.

I half wondered if it was in my head when I heard a man screaming for help, footsteps clapping away from the house the night before, and I hadn't seen anyone, but Riley had parked her ears too. Her memory must be shorter than mine because she followed the rabbit through the front door of that house. There was no way I wasn't going to follow her. The grass was almost taller than me, but there was still a path to walk up the sidewalk. Errant stalks tickled my legs. The wind parted the grass in rows, and I half expected to see someone crouch there. The catpissed smell intensified as I got closer to the house. I did some mental gymnastics telling myself that it wasn't meth, but that there were a lot of strays claiming the house that humanity had abandoned.

It would be hell on my allergies, but a lot better than fighting one of the meth heads that walked through the neighborhood in the night. The porch of the house was small, maybe three feet out, and there was a mural on the left wall. There were six painted tongues, yellow, bluish-white, orange, dark purple, green, and vainy gray. They poked out of flesh. No mouth around them, only uncannily realistic tongues pushing through skin. It took me a second to place it. It was a blown-up version of a Game Boy ad that had scared this shit out of me when I was a kid.

I remember my dad calling me over to show me the picture one Sunday morning to confirm that this was what I wanted for my birthday. I had no idea why the hell anyone would want it painted on the side of their porch. There was a boarded-up window on the other side and an archway in need of a door. A rectangle of sunlight hung into the house past the tongues. I reached inside and knocked on the wall. Hello? I waited, trying not to see the tongues again. When no one responded, I knelt and yelled,

Riley! From the outside, it looked like any abandoned house. The floor was piled with fast food wrappers and broken bottles. The sun sparkled off the glass, and I pictured Riley cutting her paw, being unable to come to me. I called for her again, louder this time. Whoever owned the place had taken the furniture with them. Bear spots snaked along the drywall from the copper wiring being ripped out. The smell was worse at the precipice.

I could have turned around then, saved myself, but I couldn't leave Riley. She saved me. I wouldn't leave her alone. I stepped inside. There wasn't much to the front room that I hadn't already seen. There were doors on the left and right. It was a small house, a one-story ranch, so I thought that whichever I chose,

it would loop back into the other. My partner and I were left-handed, so I stepped over some glass and went through the door to the left. I stepped out into a large room with two floors above me. Each level had two doors, walled off by a two-foot-tall balustrade to keep anyone from falling.

I turned back, and the door that I had come through was gone, a solid wall in its place. A wave of dizziness rippled through me. This wasn't right. This wasn't possible. What was happening? I froze. I wanted to scream, to run, to shout. But I was the deer, and this impossible house was the headlights.

The sun pouring in drew my eye up to a stained glass skylight three stories above me. Some of the panels had been knocked out, but the image was still clear. Someone had stained that glass into a replica of my grandmother's diabetic foot soar, the one that I'd been disgusted to rub ointment on when I was 16. It snapped me free. Riley! I yelled. On the top floor, I heard whining.

Riley had slipped into this hell. There was no way back, so I went forward to the only door on the ground floor. It was unassuming, unpainted. I braced myself and then opened it. Roaches scurried up the wall. There was a staircase without railings leading up. Riley, I'm coming, I said. I took the steps slowly.

The second floor had only one other door, and I followed the balustrade to it. The catpice smell was supplanted by mothballs as I approached it. This one somehow opened into my grandmother's bedroom, her foot, with its open. open sore propped up on two pillows. She called my name, telling me she was glad that I was there. I didn't know what was happening and I didn't want to live through this again. Once had been more than enough. This was maybe two months after my grandfather had died. I'd just gotten my driver's license and that meant I got to use the car to run grandma's errands. Family feud blared on the TV behind me. She told me that my grandfather had visited her. He had stood right there where I was standing

at the foot of the bed. Did he say anything this time? I asked. She shook her head, no. She believed that his spirit had been visiting her. Everyone else rolled their eyes, but I wasn't so sure. Her ointment was on the table. I unwrapped her bandages,

and the smell of her infection, like maggot-ridden rotten meat, got stronger. The wound was yellow around the edges, getting redder as it circled to a red hole the size of a penny in the middle. She'd refused to rest her foot while my grandfather needed to be taken care of, and this was the end result. We were desperately fighting to save it. I was as gentle as I could be with the disinfectant, but she still jumped.

I tried not to touch the center, not wanting the pus to get on my fingers, but it did. Even with the gloves it grossed me out. While the family on TV cheered for a right answer, my grandmother told me that she wanted to be with him. I wrapped a fresh bandage around her foot. I miss him too, I said. She said that I wasn't hearing her. She wanted to be with him. She paused for a long while, like she was picking her words.

She finally looked at me with pleading eyes and asked for my help. I dropped the bandage. It unrolled on the floor. The people on the TV chattered away as if nothing had happened. Her hand motioned to the sun. side table near her. All I had to do was leave the pills there. She sat up for the first time in weeks since the funeral. She said that I wouldn't be responsible. Grandma, I need you, I said. I held back tears. She told me to buck up when I cried at the funeral. I couldn't argue with her

standing on her necrotizing foot. She shook her head. She muttered at me to never mind that she would stick around forever, just for me. Grandma, I said. Red X's flashed across the TV screen. I bent down to pick up the bandages and composed myself. While she laid back down, she asked me one more time to leave the pills out. I wrapped the fresh bandage around the foot, eyes filling with tears. I pulled it tight.

The day it actually happened, I had almost run out of the room when I finished dressing her sore. I was an adult now, though. And as I finished rewrapping the bandage, I locked eyes with her, crying openly. I said, I was 16. I was a child. Grandma sat up again. She reiterated again, men don't cry. Why the fuck not? I asked. She crossed her arms. With her face twisted up in anger, she told me to get out that I wasn't hurt Casey.

You asked me to kill you, I said. I can cry and swear as much. as I want. The other family cheered on the TV as a door appeared in the wall behind her bed. I didn't give her time to answer. I ran across that room. I couldn't live through that again. Couldn't have another conversation with her.

I hadn't left her the pills then, and I didn't leave them now. This door led to another staircase, identical to the first. It headed in the same direction, putting me at an impossible angle outside of the house, but I was climbing up to the third story of a ranch already. This door took me out to the balustrades with one door left. Riley? I asked quietly. This was where I'd heard her earlier, but I didn't get a response.

So I went into the last door, wondering what hell it would open to. It was another scene from when I was 16, days after the last one. My mother was openly weeping at the kitchen table. My father was rubbing her shoulders. I remembered the feeling of walking into that room, knowing that something awful had happened, knowing that something had to do with Grandma's request to leave the pills on the end table. I hadn't done it, but I wasn't the only person in and out. My father motioned for me to sit down while my mother was sobbing. Grandma, I asked, still standing. My father asked me to

sit again, more forcefully this time. Mom picked her head off the table. Her eyes were red, her face streaked with tears. She wanted to know how it was. She wanted to know how to be. She was I knew. I collapsed into a chair. There was a pit in my chest. I picked at the green fabric of the cushion that Grandma and I had stapled on together. My father started talking, saying sometimes when people get very emotional, and he trailed off. He paused. The words stuck inside him. He started going on about how depression is a disease, and he had suffered from it too, how it can make people do things that they don't want to do. Grandma killed herself, I said, sparing us both the awkwardness of him trying to pad the blow. Mom wailed. The pills, I asked. Dad nodded. Mom grabbed my wrist,

demanding to know how I knew. I didn't answer. I didn't know how. I wanted to cry, too, but I thought of Grandma days before, how she'd reacted to my tears. I sucked it all in. I sucked it all in. Mom's eyes were red. Her voice cracked as she pleaded with me to tell her. But grandma asks me to leave her pills out, I said. Mom's head crashed back down onto the table. Her grip on my wrist clamp, relieving bruises that would last a week. She kept repeating that I had done this. I didn't, I said. I was crying too now. Dad gently loosened her fingers, trying to de-escalate his wife, telling her that it

wasn't fair to me. She picked her head up off the table. Her voice was low and calm now. She stared at me. Her mother was dead. There was no fair anymore. She asked me to, but I didn't, I said. Venom practically flew from my mother's mouth as she screamed at my father to get me out of her sight, to get me out of there. My father said she didn't know what she was saying. That's when my mother finally lost her cool and screamed. Get him out of here now! I stood, but she still had me by the wrist. I'd fallen so deeply into the memory that I'd forgotten it was 15 years ago.

My adult self came rushing back. I won't accept blame for this, I said. I knocked her fingers off with force. You're going to apologize for this moment, and I'm going to tell you I accept it, and I won't, and we'll grow further and further apart. I don't know what you are, a ghost, a fantasy, a memory, but the real Marla is going to regret this moment for the rest of her life.

Mom had stopped crying. Dad's hands were on my shoulders to gently guide me out of the kitchen, but another door opened on the wall behind Mom. I shrugged him off and stepped through it. You should never have put that guilt on me, I said. Dad tried to get between us again. I shoved him out of the way and left. The fourth door took me to a gas station parking lot.

It didn't look like anything from any of my memories, at least not any traumatic ones. There was a highway to one side and a McDonald's to the other. I swallowed, trying to put the reliving of my grandmother's death behind me. Was this my future? Was I going to get mugged in a few months? Hit by a truck? Then I heard Riley barking.

The wheels of a skateboard were rolling along the concrete, close to her. I walked past the gas station. There were three kids drinking out of bottles in brown paper bags, circling Riley on their boards. One of them had a camera, and he was narrating. They found that piece of shit, my dog, behind the dumps, He asked his viewers to watch what Riley would do when his friend Allie charged. Riley was in the center of the circle, tail between her legs.

She was trying to track the boards, but they were pacing themselves so she couldn't see all three at once. So this was it. Why she was scared of skateboarders. The girl, Allie, I guessed, turned her board toward Riley. Fuck that shit. As she rolled toward Riley, the dog scrambled away. I charged. Allie tried to jump over the dog, but her board came down on Riley's back legs.

Ali landed on her feet, stumbling a few steps forward. She didn't see me coming. If this was a real human, I might not have barreled through her the way I did. But this wasn't a real person, and that was my real dog. I hit her so hard her shoes came off, her bottle shattered on the asphalt. The kid with the camera yelled, What the hell at me? I grabbed Ali's board off of Riley and swung at the kid with the camera.

I was aiming for the mouth, but he fell backwards and I only got his cigarette. The camera clattered onto the cement. Instead of fleeing from me, he went after it. So I did too. I stomped on the camera as his fingers reached it. Plastic and glass crunched into the cement. He was screaming that I was a psycho and I'd have to pay for that. I kicked him in the teeth.

That's my dog, you little shit. The third kid came up behind me. I decked him with the board. A shock vibrated up my arms. He collapsed. They were only simulations, and my dog was real. Come here, Riley, I said. She ran to me.

I picked her up. She was shaking. She licked my face, hugging her tight. We walked through the next door that appeared. When I opened this one, we were back on the porch of the ranch. I hooked the leash back into her harness, and we walked up the sidewalk. The sun was shining high in the sky. I stretched my back, feeling the best I had in months, and craving a burrito.

I heard the skateboard before I saw it. Riley heard it, too. I waited for her to pull against the leash, but instead she sat and looked up at me. I laughed and said, I'm not doing that again. Creepy Presents Sugar Bugs Written by Keely McCarthy and narrated by Alicia Atkins

Pain radiated through my jaw pulsing and pushing against my gums cupping the white pills I swallowed them down with ice-cold water my eyes screwed tightly shut in agony Stupid goddamn toothache came out of nowhere and mowed my ass down My gums were swollen and red. I had a low-grade fever, and I could feel my pulse pounding along my teeth like tiny jackhammers.

I could just hear my mom's voice grating in my ear. I told you the sugar bugs would eat your teeth. She was a dental hygienist and obsessed with immaculate teeth. She always reminded me a Willy Wonka's dad from that one movie, never letting us have candy, soda, or anything else that would cause our teeth to rot from caviative. No cake on birthdays, no ice cream on sweltering summer days, and if she found out that we had indulged while at school or a friend's house, there was hell to pay. She would force us to sit on the sink in the bathroom and scrubbed our teeth until our gums bled. She was irrational, delusional, raving about the sugar bugs.

The bitch was fucking crazy. She refused to let me brush my own teeth until I was 16 years old, claiming I never did it right. My brother and sister were carbon copies of mom, obsessive over their oral hygiene, and little narcs if I ever broke one of the sacred rules. I turned 18, hopped a bus with a few hundred bucks in my pocket, and never looked back, not even when she died six months ago. A sharp, blinding pain stabbed my jaw again, radiating out in waves of excruciating agony.

I whimpered, making my way slowly to the living room in the bottle of clear liquid, on the end table. My dentist couldn't see me until the morning, so until then I was going out to find a way to numb the pain. Just as I am wont to do for my emotional pain, and I cracked open the bottle of vodka and took a swig. Stars burst behind my eyes when the liquid touched my back molar, and I felt as though I was about to pass out.

I groaned, stumbling towards the couch, landing hard on the arm of it, grasping for air through my clenched teeth. The cold air swept over my inflamed gums, stinging like a thousand angry Arctic bees. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I bawled up a fist and pressed it to my mouth, biting down on my impulse to shout. I don't think the neighbors would have liked that. The pain ebbed and my mouth throbbed.

A warm metallic liquid coated my tongue. Great, I thought. Now I'm bleeding. Staggering to my feet, I made my way to the bathroom and smiled into the mirror. Blood-soaked teeth smiled back. I winced an alarm and ran icy water into my cupped hands, swissing it around my mouth and spitting red ribbons of blood and spit into the immaculate porcelain sink.

The water stung, but not as bad as the vodka. After a few mouthfuls, the water ran clear and I sighed in relief, inspecting my gums in the mirror. They were an ugly, angry red. and I noticed several ulcers dotting my gums and inside of my bottom lip. Fucking great. No wonder it hurts so bad. From behind the mirror, I rifled through the pill bottles until I found what I was looking for.

My last percocet from when I broke my ankle last year. This would take the edge off, and maybe I could finally get some sleep. I swallowed the pill with another pull of vodka, being careful to avoid my aching tooth, then laid down on the count. My mouth thrummed, pulsing with every beat of my heart as I drifted to sleep, lulled by the sound of the television. I dreamed I was walking through a graveyard, rows and rows of headstones and crosses peaked at me through a dim mist. Trees cast shadows, their long branches reaching for me like gnarled fingers ravished by arthritis, as I made my way through the rows of graves. I was searching for something. No, someone.

or at least their grave. A sudden clattering over headstones caught my attention. Someone was chasing me. I felt warm, fetid breath tickled the back of my neck. I ran blindly, tripping over exposed roots and headstones jetting out of the ground like a snaggle-tooth smile. One of the roots caught my foot, and I fell headfirst into soft earth. A musty smell invaded my nostrils as my jaw flared to life in fresh pain.

I spat out freshly turned dirt and sat up. I could taste the moss and the soil in my mouth, feel the tiny granules running over my tongue as I spit it out. I groaned, a hand moving to cradle my aching jaw. The headstone in front of me was large, dark, and pitted with age. The rough granite was marked with an inscription that made my blood run cold. Mathilda Detertivo Loving mother, devoted by.

mother, abandoned mother, heartbroken mother, forgotten mother, upset mother, angry mother, your mother, mother of retribution. Panicked, I scrambled to my feet, my fist clenching clumps of her grave dirt as fear swept up my spine in a rush of ice-cold wind. No, this was a dream, and I needed to wake up. Now. I threw the fistfuls of dirt at the tombstone, all the anger and fear of my childhood building into a maddening scream tearing at my throat. I opened my mouth, but before any sound could come out, whatever was chasing me, found me. It was her. A cold, gray, decomposing corpse stood right in front of me. Rotting flesh dangled from her disjointed limbs, from her crooked jaw.

Thousands of bugs crawled out of her skin, her nose, her mouth as it slowly opened. Millipedes, beetles, maggots, and a hundred other insects skittered out of her mouth and matted hair, scurrying down her raised arm to jump onto me. I screamed, feeling their little legs whispering over my skin. I lurched away from her, slapping the army of insects crawling all over me. I felt the tickle of them up my neck. as they crawled towards my mouth. I felt their tiny jaws clamping down on my skin,

their teeth stinging as they bit and chewed through me. I heard the dry, crusty laugh as the corpse that was my mother bared down on me, using the shredded flesh of her finger to try and brush my teeth. I awoke with a scream lodged at my throat, choking me as I gasped and sat upright. The dim light from the black and white movie on the TV barely illuminated my living room. Breathless, heart pounding, I leaned forward, holding my pulsing jaw with my hands. The dream was so real, I swear I could still taste the grave dirt, and feel the little bugs crawling

in my mouth. Jaw pounding, gums pulsing. I stood slowly and made my way into the bathroom. The bright light seared my eyes, taking a few minutes to adjust. My reflection looked fine in the mirror. My cheeks puffy and swollen from the toothache. I opened my mouth to inspect the tooth, see how bad the inflammation was. To my horror, I saw my gum so swollen they almost swallowed my teeth. Angry red lines and veins pressed against the red, raw flesh of my mouth. Gingerly, I reached in and touched the tops of my teeth barely poking out. Pain flared and I whimpered, pulling back. What the hell was wrong with my teeth? I needed to go to the emergency room if it was this infected.

What had started as a mild toothache had erupted into a full-blown life or death situation. I was about to turn away from the mirror to get dressed when I saw one of the veins under my gums move. It wriggled and twisted under the gums before disappearing. What the fuck? I whispered. I opened my jaw wider, leaning closer to the mirror. I saw the top of my molar from within its blanket of gums. In the center was a black spot.

No, it was a hole. I squinted to see it better. There was something sticking out of it, something black. Food? Is that why it's so infected? I had a cavity with rotting food stuck inside. My fingers reached in slowly, but I couldn't quite grab a hold of it. Tears squeezed from my eyes when the pain seared my jaw.

I needed something smaller to grab it. Opening the drawer, I rifled through the contents until I found what I was looking for. Tweezers in hand. I opened as wide as I could, sliding the thin metal into my mouth. My finger's slipping, piercing the raw gums and I almost passed out from the agony. Blood welled, thick and bright. Blinking the spots and tears from my vision, I went in again, slower, and gently grasped the black thing with the tweezers. Tugging, I felt a weird sensation inside my gum, like something was sliding against my flesh as it slowly began to emerge.

It was long, thin, and to my whore, it began to wriggle as I pulled it from my tooth. A slight popping sensation told me whatever it was was free of my gums. I brought it out to look at it. At least seven inches long, it curled and writhed its tubular body, as millions of tiny feet squirmed to detach itself from the prongs. Hot bile rose in my throat. Was that a fucking bug? Shaking, I threw it into the sink,

and watched as the black thing crawled. around the white porcelain. Is that? No. It can't be. How the fuck did a millipede get inside my teeth? Stomach rolling with revulsion, I recoiled from the sink and slammed my back into the door. Was I hallucinating?

Some of the pressure from my mouth faded, but I still felt the pounding, pulsing, wriggling, squirming. No, it's not possible. Sugarbugs, I whispered as something tickled my tongue. With quivering hands, I peered once more into the darkness of my mouth. The ulcers are my gums, bowls like blisters until they popped, dropping mounds of maggots from my lips to the sink. The hole in my molar was assaulted with pinching, biting, blinding white-hot pain. I double over, gagging, clumping, maggotty, smugging, clumping maggotty.

spit dripping down my chin. Back inside the mirror, I watch in panic as the segmented body and long spider-like legs of the centipede emerged from the hole. The pincers grabbing and tearing at my gums, my squirming gums. Choking on a scream and a mouthful of maggots, I ran from the bathroom, heart pounding. My stomach was still heaving from the mass of wriggling bodies rolling inside my mouth. Blindly, I ran into the kitchen, throwing open drawers until I found what I was looking for. The plastic handle of the steak knife clutched in my hand. I tore back into the bathroom. The door bouncing off the wall so hard it left a hole. Tears now streamed down my face as I pressed to the mirror, watching my skin bubble and bleed, writhing underneath the teeth. Trimbling hands lifted

the blade and slashed into my gums. Pain raced along my jaw like fire. I clenched my teeth so hard I heard one crack. Blood, thick and dark, poured down my chin as I sawed my way into my swollen gums, sobbing and groaning. Slimy worms slithered from the slice, followed by black and white beetles. The pressure on my gums lessened, but my teeth throbbed as though something was burying up from underneath them, attempting to dislodge them.

Throwing the knife into the bathtub, I scrambled for the kitchen again, my feet slipping in blood as I grabbed the pliers from the junk drawer. A bubble of laughter burst from my lips as I held the tool triumphantly. They couldn't get my goddamn teeth if there weren't any to eat. Fighting through the agony, I hurried back into the blinding white light of the bathroom. The walls were black with the scuttling bodies of cussing. cockroaches and dirt falling from the hole in the drywall. I ignored them.

She wouldn't win this time. She couldn't send her fucking bugs after my teeth if they were gone. Shadow swung around the bathroom as they swarmed around the light, choking it off. Gripping the handles of the pliers, I latched onto my front tooth and pulled it out with a sickening tear that sent pain surging through my entire body. I held it up to my eyes in the waning light. The roots of the teeth squirmed like mini-gorgans. I dropped it next to the writhing millipede in the sink, panting, pale, sweat pouring from my body.

I reached in to grab another one. 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 Commons Sherrillite 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 stories author.