The NoSleep Podcast - NoSleep Podcast S6E12

Episode Date: December 13, 2015

It's episode 12 of Season 6. On this week's show we have five tales about tormented tots, cautioning creatures, and monstrous meltdowns. The full episode features the following stories. The free version features only the first three tales. "Dad Was a Safety Officer at Chernobyl" written by Max Aaron and read by Jesse Cornett & Erika Sanderson. (Story starts at 00:05:10) "I've Had My Dog Since the Day I Was Born" written by Milos Bogetic and read by Peter Lewis. (Story starts at 00:15:45) "Hiking in New Hampshire" written by Max Aaron and read by Nichole Goodnight. (Story starts at 00:35:40) "Olivia" written by H. K. Reyes and read by Mike DelGaudio & Jessica McEvoy & Corinne Sanders. (Story starts at 00:52:10) "The House in the Field" written by Elias Witherow and read by Jessica McEvoy & Erika Sanderson. (Story starts at 01:13:30) Click here for Wil Dalphin's GoFundMe campaign  Click here for the Liberty audio drama podcast  Click here to learn more about Max Aaron  Click here to learn more about Milos Bogetic  Click here to learn more about H. K. Reyes  Click here to learn more about Elias Witherow  Click here to learn more about Jesse Cornett  Click here to learn more about Erika Sanderson  Click here to learn more about Peter Lewis  Click here to learn more about Nichole Goodnight  Click here to learn more about Mike DelGaudio  Click here to learn more about Jessica McEvoy  Click here to learn more about Corinne Sanders  Podcast produced by: David Cummings Music & Sound Design by: Brandon Boone & David Cummings. "Dad Was a Safety Officer at Chernobyl" illustration courtesy of Jörn Heidrath Audio program ©2015 - Creative Reason Media - All Rights Reserved - No reproduction or use of this content is permitted without the express written consent of Creative Reason Media. The copyrights for each story are held by the respective authors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a horror fiction podcast. By listening to our stories, you are choosing to be frightened and disturbed for your entertainment. You do so at your own risk. Brace yourself for the No Sleep Podcast. It's the No Sleep Podcast. I'm David Cummings. Thanks for joining us. On this week's show, we have five tales about tormented talk.

cautioning creatures and monstrous meltdowns. For those of you interested in a season pass, I want to remind you that we're still offering our rent-to-own program. This is where you can purchase the individual episodes one week at a time, and when you've purchased 14 episodes from the same season, you can upgrade to a season pass. We're getting close to episode 14, So at any point in the season, if you buy your 14th episode, just send me an email and ask for your free upgrade to a full season pass.

And speaking of episode 14, that's going to be our first episode of 2016. As I mentioned last week, our special Christmas episode will be out next weekend on the 20th, and that will be our last episode of 2015. But if you're all good little boys and girls, you might consider checking your stockings, or at least your podcast feeds, on December 27th, you might find a late arriving present for you there. You never know. And if you find yourself in need of things to listen to over the holidays, might I suggest an excellent serialized sci-fi audio drama?

It's entitled Liberty, Critical. research. Beyond the colony city of Atreus is a deadly expanse known as the fringe. This dangerous territory only meters away from the civilized city threatens the lives of those living inside Atrius' protective walls. To discover more about this impending threat and study its violent inhabitants, an expedition team is assigned to infiltrate the southern fringe by a covert government department. No training could possibly prepare the team for what's to come. It's a really well-produced show with an excellent cast. In fact, there are two actors on there who sound an awful lot like Peter Lewis and me. You'd almost think it was us. So if you need a bit of

an off-planet escape this time of year, this is a great way to do it. Check the show notes for a link to liberty critical research. And finally, I want to let you know of a way you can embrace the true spirit of the season by giving a gift to a very worthy cause. You'll likely be familiar with one of our most prolific authors on the podcast, William Delphin. Will's writing has been featured on the podcast 16 times so far, and he's now in the process of publishing his first book. It'll be a collection of his excellent stories, fully illustrated, and it will include an audiobook produced by our friends at Chilling Tales. There are, of course, costs associated with this venture, so keep the giving spirit alive and consider sending a bit of money to Will's GoFundMe campaign to make this

great project a reality. Check the show notes for a link to the campaign. So there's gifts to both give and receive this time of year, so why not unwrap a few audio presents early and start listening to this week's show. In our first tale, we meet a man whose father has a harrowing tale to tell. You see, as explained by author Max Aaron, the man's father was present at that infamous Russian nuclear power plant back in 86 when the disastrous events took place. But despite the the official story, what his father witnessed will make you reconsider the real cause of the meltdown. Performing the tale are Jesse Cornett and Erica Sanderson. So let's listen in as the man explains how dad was a safety officer at Chernobyl. My dad was a safety officer at Chernobyl. I won't give a long

backstory because it doesn't matter. Basically, He got the job through a former schoolmate of his who worked in some mid-level party position. Dad was down on his luck at the time, and Igor happened to see him at a local tavern. They got to talking, and Igor pulled some strings and gave him the position. Didn't matter that he wasn't qualified. Half the guys aren't, he was told. Anyway, Dad started working there in 1984 and did a pretty good job. He did what he was told.

Most of it was just checking dial readouts and making sure pipes were sealed and whatnot. In late 1985 and early 1986, he started noticing far more party representatives coming in and out of the plant. Usually the visits were limited to compliance officers and hazardous material supervisors when radioactive material was moved in or out. But these weren't plant specialists. They looked like they were Politburo. He told me he recognized a couple of them from televised speeches, but he didn't remember the names. He just knew they were high-ranking. On the night of the meltdown, Dad was doing his usual valve and dial checks when Politburo members,

accompanied by soldiers with Kalishnikovs, streamed down the hall toward the reactor area. The soldiers were wearing radiation suits. The party members weren't. He tagged along a few tens of meters away and went up on a few tens of meters away and went up on a high catwalk where he could see all of them. They crowded around the cooling pools. Dad made an effort to act as if he was staring at the pressure readouts in front of him, vaguely noticing they were rising as he watched.

This was around the point when the lights cut out. Apparently this wasn't abnormal for the plant. The electrical systems were under-maintained and all the electricians on staff were tasked with more critical work. Even with the lights not working, Cherenkov radiation cast its characteristic blue glow over the group and illuminated the politicians and soldiers. The water in the pool started moving. Now, Dad wasn't a nuclear engineer.

Still, he knew whatever was happening in the pool was abnormal. He'd been by the area plenty of times and never once did the water move like it did right then. It sloshed with turbidity and looked like it was coming, to a rolling boil. He glanced at the dials in front of him and saw the temperature and pressure and the loop system was dramatically higher

than it should have been. As he was beginning to sprint across the catwalk toward the nearest alarm station, he saw something that made him stop. What he told me didn't make much sense at first. You have to figure someone running at a dead sprint to pull an emergency alarm at a nuclear power plant wouldn't stop for anything.

but he stopped and he stared. Something had floated to the top of the boiling water. The way he described it, it was dark, grayish red, almost shaped like a person, but much bigger and dreadfully deformed. It floated face down in the pool. The party members didn't react, but the soldiers raised their rifles at the thing until one of the politicians barked an order at them to stay.

stand down. A moment or two later, the thing crawled out of the pool and raised itself on thick legs to stand before the gathered crowd. What dad said he remembered most about the thing was its head. It sat directly on its lomp-sided shoulders, and it had no eyes, no nose, no ears. All that was there was a gaping hole, not even a mouth, but a hole. And inside, the same blue glow from the pool shone out onto the faces of the people surrounding it. Someone else in the plant must have noticed the temperature and pressure abnormalities and pulled the alarm because sirens began to blare and diesel generators were galvanized into action to force the cooling cycle into overdrive. None of that mattered to Dad, though.

He said the thing approached the soldiers one by one and without any of them putting it. up a fight, it pressed the hole in its face against the top of each of their heads, and they started to dissolve. First, their suits melted. Then their skin began to blister and char. The thing moved its maw downward until it nearly reached their legs, which dropped to the ground in a smoldering heap. It then did the same to the assembled Politburo, all but one. She stood in the middle of a pile of steaming legs and hips and crotches and stared at the atrocity. Then she screamed at it. It's something Dad said he's repeated to himself every day since.

As the words left her mouth, the Geiger counter dad was forced to carry with him at all times, exploded into life at the same instant the politician burst into flames. He could swear she smiled and she burned. All this was finally enough for Dad to make a break for it. He knew he'd been irradiated badly, but he took some solace in the fact that ticks from the counter slowed quickly as he left the pool area. Right before he was clear of the room, he took one last glimpse at the thing. It had begun to melt.

As soon as its body began pouring through the metal grate, The water below erupted into a mass of superheated steam. Dad avoided being scalded to death by about half a second when he turned the corner and slammed the door behind him. The rest of the meltdown played out more or less like it was eventually reported. Dad was able to get out before the main explosion. He lived with the profound guilt of running by his colleagues who still didn't know something truly catastrophic was about to happen. He believed his thyroid cancer was payback for his indifference toward them during his escape. The iconic photograph of the radioactive elephant's foot in the basement of the power plant stood, framed on his dresser for the rest of his life.

As he told me this story, he confessed he kept it to remind him of the implications of the politician's words before she was devoured. by flames. Unhabitable for a hundred years. And it's melting through the ground, even today. If it hits groundwater, it'll explode like a dirty bomb and make the disaster of 86 look like a firecracker. Russia, Europe, North Africa. All irradiated.

He died a couple days after he shared his experience with me. I just have no idea what to do with it all. Obviously, he could have made the whole thing up. But I don't know why he would. He doesn't have anything to gain now that he's dead. Maybe some of the other survivors or their kids can corroborate parts of what he said. Maybe they can't. Either way, if it's true, there is so much more going on with that disaster than we've been told.

Even now, as that radioactive slag melts into the ground, Dad's story almost makes it sound like the meltdown was just a precursor to something far worse. Something plotted. I don't want what he told me to be true, but salt the earth terrifies me more. than I can bear. Many of us know the joys of having a faithful canine companion by our side. But few can say they've had their dog as long as the man in this tale from author Milos Bogetich. You see, most dogs don't live to be over 30 years old, and most dogs don't have the odd ability

to protect us from very mysterious encounters with people who seem to want to harm us. Performing this tale is Peter Lewis. So let's hear from the man who tells us, I've had my dog since the day I was born. I can see now how strange it is that I've had my dog for almost 31 years. But when you live with something every day of your life, it's kind of normal, you know? I mean, sure, it crossed my mind here and there that, hey, how come snow, Snoop is 20, 24, 26 years old.

But I never gave it extensive thought. Good nutrition and daily exercise is what I'd say and move on. It wasn't impossible, right? Snoop's always been with me since day one. I was born on August 10, 1985, and my parents got him. on August 9th, about 12 hours before I was born. They wanted me to grow up loving animals, so they got me a best friend from the start.

He was the best dog in the world, and I know everyone says that about their animal, but mine really was. He never left my side, and I took him everywhere I could. Some of my ex-girlfriends weren't thrilled that I was so close with Snoop, but since he's been my buddy from the day I entered this world, he was always my priority. Not only was Snoop always available for cuddles and 24-7 games of fetch,

but he also got me out of a few strange situations. I remember one day when I was a young boy, before my family even moved to America, I was mowing the lawn outside my parents' house, and a man walked up to me. He wore a black suit and a nice hat, so he looked legitimate to 11-year-old me. He talked to me about Star Wars, which I loved obsessively, and told me that he had a huge figurine collection in his van that was parked just down the street. Normal-looking man plus Star Wars toys equaled me throwing everything parents drilled into my brain about strangers right out the window. I was about three feet away from entering this man's van when he turned to me, his face pale as a ghost.

He then violently turned back around, ran into his van. and sped away like a madman without saying so much as a word. I stood there, confused for a second, and when I shrugged and turned to go back home, I saw Snoop standing right behind me. He didn't bark, but he still must have scared the nice gentleman who was going to show me his toy collection. I was mad at Snoop for startling the man, but he was my best buddy, so he was my best buddy,

I forgave him right away. Strange event when I was 19 or 20. I went camping with a couple of buddies, you know, beer, lots of meat to grill, that kind of deal. Of course, I took my dog with me. Everyone loved him, and he loved the woods as well. On the last night of camping, my buddies went to look for some wood to light of fire,

and I went on a stroll to the river. Snoop was sleeping in my tent, so I didn't take him. He was such a good dog. I was never afraid of him running away. When I got to the river, it was getting pretty dark. I got close to the water to see if I could gauge how deep it was, and I heard footsteps behind me. I turned and saw this maybe 11 or 12-year-old little girl standing behind me.

She was kind of out of place looking, wearing a nice black dress in the middle of the woods. I asked her if she was lost, and she told me that she was, and apparently wandered away from her parents' tent. So I helped her look, basically just following her around the forest. Just when I started thinking that I may end up having to call the forest ranger, she turned to me with a smile and said, that she could see her family's tent in the distance. We walked up to a large black tent, I thought, was empty because, well, it was perfectly quiet,

and also I assumed her parents were out there looking for her. However, when she opened the tent, I saw a man and a woman sitting inside it, smiling at us. I thought it was very strange that they were all so in a room. appropriately dressed for camping. The man wearing one looked like a black sport coat, a dark turtleneck and black jeans, and the woman with a long black cocktail dress sitting on the ground. When the kid got inside the tent, the man finally spoke up in a cheerful voice and insisted that I get in and have a drink with them since I found their daughter and they were so worried about her. and although I found everything kind of odd, I went for it.

Hey, I was never good at saying no. Right as I started stepping inside the tent, though, I heard whining behind me. Snoop stood some five feet away, whining and looking very disturbed. I've never seen him act like that. I stepped out of the tent, and as I walked towards Snoop, I heard the man yell for me to come back inside. I went to Snoop, as I always did.

When I knelt by him, I thought it was weird that I couldn't hear a thing coming from the tent or that none of them would come out. All of this was a bit too much for me, so I just yelled that I had to go back to my camp, and my dog and I left. Snoop started wagging his tail. as soon as we were walking away, and I was happy that my best friend was cheerful once again. Another time, a few years back, I was driving around town with Snoop in the passenger seat. That was kind of our thing, riding around and letting him look out of the window as we passed the world.

It started getting dark, though, so I turned and headed home. When we got near our house, I noticed a car parked on the side of the road. with all of the lights off and smoke coming from under the hood. In front of it stood this girl, dare I say, attractive girl, who I barely noticed because she was dressed in black and it was already dark. I don't know much about cars, but I felt inclined to help, so I pulled over. Snoop became very restless, jumping from the seat to the floor and back. I told him to relax and got out of the car, leaving him inside.

The girl seemed very relieved that I pulled over. I told her I didn't know much about cars, well, that I knew nothing about them, but that I had some emergency flares to give her so that she would at least be visible to the other drivers. She thanked me as I handed her the equipment. She then asked me to take just a look. under the hood anyways. And again, despite me being terrible with cars, I had a hard time saying no. Plus, the girl really was good-looking. As I got close to her car, Snoop started acting really strange. He was now scratching at the window and whining. I told the girl to wait a second because I wanted

to let my dog out. She grabbed my hand and asked me. me to just take a look at her engine first. Again, I put Snoop in front of everyone else, good-looking or no. So I just smiled and walked back to my car and opened the door. He jumped out so quickly I thought he'd hurt himself. He was already over 24 years old, and his joints weren't what they used to be. When I turned my attention back to the girl, I was a little bit. When I turned my attention back to the girl, I was really surprised to see her driving away, with the hood still lifted and smoke still coming out of it. I thought, I guess she fixed it. I didn't give it much thought, really. I just picked up my flares and got back into the car with Snoop wagging his tail right next to me.

I'm finally starting to realize a pattern as I recall these strange events. The last bizarre situation I can remember happened about a year ago. Snoop was feeling a bit under the weather. I mean, he was almost 30, after all. So we were just hanging out in our front yard. We live in a quiet suburb where nothing happens. Kids were riding bikes on the street while my best bud and I, relaxed by the blow-up pool in the yard.

I heard a loud crash. followed by crying coming from the street. When I looked up, I saw a kid crying by his bike, and I walked out onto the street, leaving Snoop in the yard since he wasn't feeling well. He was whining, but I wanted to quickly check on the kid. I asked the boy if he was okay, and he rolled up his black pants to show me his bleeding knee,

and I saw that his dark shirt was also torn up in a few places. He asked me if I could take him home, which was just around the corner, and of course I could. I walked with him, and when we got in front of his house, he asked me to come in. I'm not one to enter strangers' houses, especially with a kid, so I thanked him and started walking away. Then the door opened, and his mom came out. She was dressed in a black dress. and accompanied by a very nice smile and warm, inviting face. She begged me to come in and have some freshly made lemonade,

her way of thanking me for helping her kid. I was reluctant, but I caved in. She seemed so nice. As I was climbing the steps to the door, I heard loud barking behind me. I turned around and saw Snoop standing. in the street. He almost never barked. It was strange because my fence was at least four feet tall and my dog could never jump over it. But then I saw that his belly was bleeding, all scraped up from what I

figure was him jumping over the fence I always thought was too high for him. As I started walking towards him, the kid grabbed my hand. He asked me again. He asked me again. to come in, followed by his mom, who was now basically begging me to come in and try her fresh lemonade. Once again, I chose my buddy over strangers, so I apologized, let go of the kid's hand, and walked my hurt buddy home as the door slammed behind us. Snoop was so happy, even though he was hurt. He, uh, passed away yesterday evening. He died in my lap while I was gently scratching him behind his right ear, his favorite.

I didn't want to cry while he was taking his last breaths because I wanted to be strong for him to show him that it was okay to let go. Once his belly stopped moving and I knew he left me. I broke down. I cried harder than when my grandpa died. Harder than ever in my life, really. I knew that this day was coming. I just wasn't ready for it. Even after almost 31 years in my yard last night.

Some people may find that strange, but he was my best friend and an indescribably big part of my life. And I couldn't just give him away to be buried or cremated, who knows where, trouble sleeping last night. I was tossing and turning for hours, and when the clock hit 4 a.m., I knew that sleep just wasn't going to come. All I could think about was my best friend, now laying in the cold ground in front of my house. I got up to look at his final resting place, almost as if to check on him one more time, to see if he somehow miraculously woke up and was waiting for me. When I walked up to my second floor window, all of the first floor. all of the sadness and heartbreak I felt at that moment were instantly replaced with a horrifying wave of dread that struck my body.

On his grave, right in my yard, stood some dozen people. They were all looking up straight at me. You never expect to see someone standing in your front yard in the middle of the night, especially not all those people, all dressed in black. And then another shock hit me. I recognized them. One by one, I knew them all. It took me a bit, but I did, I swear to you, I did.

know them. The kid on the bike and his mom, the child from the forest with her parents, the girl I stopped to help on the side of the road, even some other people from different one-time situations from my past. All of them were people I encountered after we moved to the U.S. All except one. The one which nearly paralyzed me with fear was the man who tried to make me get into his van when I was a boy. The man who didn't look a second older than how I remembered him. The man who I first met in my home country thousands of miles away. The man who was now standing in my yard, looking at me, then yelled, come on out.

And everyone started motioning for me to come down, and his mom smiling. The broken car girl combing her hair and sending kisses, the camping family waving. They all wore the same clothes I remembered. wearing in the past. I practically tore the drapes closed and dialed 911 as quickly as I could. After a few minutes of dreadful silence, the police finally showed up. They didn't see anyone in the yard, but promised to look around the neighborhood. Neither they nor I can explain the multiple sets of footprints

in the grass of my yard. I wish I could say it was merely a grief-induced hallucination. I wish I still had my buddy next to me. I'll out in the forest one day, a man discovers a diary which was buried in the woods many years ago. As we learn from author Max Aaron, the diary was well preserved, seemingly in the hopes that it would be discovered one day. and the events described therein leads the man to wonder if something strange and worrisome happened back then or is still happening today.

Nicole Goodnight performs the tale as the woman in the diary, so let's hear what happened to her and her husband as they were hiking in New Hampshire. The diary was from a while ago, 21 years according to the dates. It was sealed really well in plastic wrap and stuffed in a watertight bag. If I hadn't hit the thing with my shovel when digging a latrine in the forest, I never would have found it. I wish that would have been the case because I can't stop thinking about the stuff I read. I'm only going to share the fucked up parts, but all I'm leaving out is the lady talking about how she and her husband were spending the month camping

and having a good time. There, I just saved you five pages. Here's where it got weird. July 2nd, 1994, 7 a.m. Last night, James and I got woken up by a ridiculously bright flash of lightning. There was no thunder either. James said it must have been heat lightning. He's probably right, because it was disgustingly hot.

and muggy all day. And once the sun went down, it got even more humid. We eventually got back to sleep, and this morning the air seems a little less like a wet sponge. We're hoping to do 12 miles today. July 2nd, 94, 8 p.m. I don't even want to write this down because it's so gross. James asked that I do it anyways, so we'll remember to report what we saw once we get to a ranger station. Like I could forget something like this. Anyway, here, all day, while we walked, we saw animals, deer, birds, raccoons, squirrels, chipmunks, and a black bear. That's pretty par for the course out here.

But when we went off the path for a little bit, because, well, James was staring at my ass for the last hour, while we walked, and I guess he got some ideas. We were stopped by the sight of something awful, about 100 feet off the path. Well, many some things. Strewed across a wide area that I estimated to be a couple thousand feet were miscarried animals. They were all at different stages of development. It was horrible. July 3rd, 94, 24, 45 a.m.

not able to sleep after the events of yesterday. James, of course, is snoring like a buzzsaw, despite the big flashlight lighting the tent up. What the hell could have caused something like that to happen? I've heard about animals going to find a safe place to die when they're sick or old, but I'll be damned if something like what we saw is in any way normal. That heat lightning just happened again. This time, it was three flashes clustered together. within a couple seconds.

No thunder. Fuck, that's creepy. James is mad that I just kicked him to wake him up and tell him about it. Sorry, hon. July 3rd, 94, 7.30 a.m. I got to sleep about an hour after the lightning. Thank God we brought some good coffee to brew over the fire. We're going to do 10 miles, although it might be a little less because the map says

getting into a pretty hilly area. Good for the glutes. July 3rd, 94, 915 p.m. Pretty good walk today. We're both going to be sore tomorrow, though. The map does a decent enough job telling us where the hills are going to be, but it's shitty at indicating how steep they are. On the bright side, and I never thought I'd be at a point in my life where this sentence would make sense, we didn't see any more. are fields full of animal fetuses. Wee.

July 4th, 94, 6.10 a.m. My dickhead husband smuggled some fireworks in his pack and decided to wake me up by setting them off right outside the tent while screaming, happy 4th of July. Of course he was naked as he did this and was presenting himself to me through the tent flap while holding a sparkler in each hand. I've come to the conclusion that I love his sense of humor between 8 a.m. and midnight, and anything from 1201 a.m. until 759 a.m.

makes me want to choke him. Waking up to explosions and his dick and balls is not quite how I envisioned our mornings together. Take away the explosion parts, though, and I'm pretty okay with it. It looks like it's going to rain today. The clouds are low in the sky and it's pretty breezy. Gusty, too.

The rain gear we bought before we started our hike kept us dry during the storms last week, though, so I'm not too bummed out about it. July 4.94, 6.30 p.m. No rain while we walked. James shot a rabbit an hour ago and he's about to skin it and get it ready for the fire. He's making me learn how to do it too.

It's pretty much the last thing I want to do, but there's no reason why he should have to be stuck with the job every time he want to eat some cute forest critter. Ugh, here we go. July 4.94, 7.30 p.m. I just finished throwing up. As soon as James started working on the rabbit, we saw how sick it must have been

while it was alive. Again, I'm only going into detail so we can report it at the Ranger Station. But for fuck's sake, James, if I have to learn how to skin a rabbit, you can learn how to write clear, descriptive sentences. That's a fight for another day.

Under its fur, the rabbit was absolutely covered in what looked like big whitehead zits. They were under a lot of pressure, too, because when James poked one with the tip the knife, it burst and flung grayish white pus like 10 feet and onto the tip of my shoe. Cue me throwing up for half hour while he apologized and tried not to laugh. We still have a good amount of beef jerky and stuff in the food pack, so it's not like we're

going to go hungry, but it would have been nice to have something a little different. The rain finally started and we're stuck in the tent. And here's the lightning again. flashing over and over. Sometimes it's a few quick bursts. Others, it's just single ones that last upwards of four or five seconds. It's those long ones that scare the shit out of me. I've never seen lightning like that before. James keeps telling me it's unusual, but not unheard of, especially at this time of year. It appears to be tapering off a little now, and I'm pretty glad it coincided with rain this time.

I guess it's just plain lightning. James is a pretty reassuring guy. Early bedtime. July 5th, 94, 10.10 a.m. Freaking out, because James is trying hard

not to freak out. We've been up since six, and when we opened the tent, the ground outside was covered in dead birds, dead birds, dead bats and dead bugs. And I mean covered. I guess we didn't hear them hitting the ground

because of the rain that started up again while we slept, but we still have no explanation as to why they're all fucking dead. That's not the worst part, though. They're all covered with those zit things like the rabbit. We're deciding to cut the trip short and get the fuck out of here. The map says there's a ranger station about 40 miles to our west, and James says we can get there tomorrow afternoon if we really move. Both of us are at the point we're really moving.

Sounds like a great plan. July 6th, 94, 1230 a.m. We walked fast and we walked far. The whole way we saw dead animals. They weren't as tightly clustered as they were around our tent. but we still saw a lot. I remember walking under a tree where the ground was littered with dead wasps. When I looked up, there was a huge nest with nothing flying around it.

The forest is almost silent, too. No birds, only insects. And even their sounds are few and far between. I never realized how omnipresent their din was until it was nearly gone. Fuck Just a minute ago The first live deer we'd seen In all day

Walked into the lit area around our tent It stared at us for a while On the outskirts of where the light fell And when it turned around I saw a dead fawn hanging halfway out of her body As the deer trotted away The fawn slid out and hit the ground

With a wet thump Still connected to its mother by a tangle of afterbirth that stretched until it, too, slid out a few feet later. Fuck everything. Good luck trying to sleep tonight, Mel. Okay, something just happened while we were sleeping, and I am freaking the fuck out and can barely breathe, and I don't know what to do other than to write it down to make it make sense.

The lightning came and just stayed. The whole forest was lit up. James and I tried to convince each other it was just the weather, but it stayed lit for a whole minute. Then too. I begged James not to go outside, but he unzipped the tent and went out. I panicked and didn't want to be alone,

so I followed him, and the entire sky, not just one area where lightning might be, was white. Brighter than the sun at noon. It hurt my eyes really bad to look at it, and James was squinting hard too. I squeezed my eyes shut to recover a little, and when I reopened them, he was gone. I ran around and looked and didn't see him until I turned back around, and he was right there again, staring at the sky. Except he was wrong. He didn't answer me when I screamed his name.

He didn't even blink. And I could see bumps starting to form on his neck and face. The light was so, so bright. I pushed James to try to get his attention, and when I did, the area under his shirt where I pushed got soaked with something. I don't know what it was, but I couldn't look. I couldn't. I can't.

He is still outside, and he's not moving, just standing and staring at the terribly bright sky. His pupils are gone, and all that's left is the blue and white. He's different. He's wrong. His skin is getting worse, and I'm fucking terrified. Little bumps are popping up on my hands while I write this, and they're coming to a head, and now one of them just broke open,

and that's my blood on the page. I know the wetness I feel on my thighs is blood too. Blood signifying the end of what I'd been waiting to tell James on our anniversary next week. I keep thinking about the dead fawn sliding out of its mother. I'm going to wrap this journal up in a bag and run in the direction of the Ranger Station. I don't know what else to do. I'll leave it under a tree or in some safe spot right off the trails so someone can find it if something happens to me on the way.

The page is soaked through now. I have to go before I get worse. Before James gets worse. The light is so bright. And that's what was in the diary. As soon as I read it, I decided to bag it and mail it to the CDC. Because I have no fucking idea what was wrong with that lady and her husband. and I sure as hell don't want to catch anything.

That last page she wrote on was disgusting. I wish I'd been wearing gloves when I touched it. It was encrusted with this dried stuff, probably that pus she wrote about. Oh, that smelled awful. I washed up real good and left a note for the CDC guys to be careful with it. I'm pretty reluctant to go back in those woods again, but maybe I'm just being stupid. I'll bet the whole thing was a prank by some high school assholes,

and I'm going to waste the time of some pretty important guys when they get what I mailed over. Still, I'm more than a little creeped out. Everything that lady wrote about is just so far-fetched. But I still wonder. I wonder because I vaguely remember hearing about some massive animal die-off back in that part of the state in the mid-90s. It was probably something else, though. It had to be. We thank you for being with us for our devilishly dark tales.

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