This guy I know (I’ve met him through someone years ago). I have no interest in him at all. I recently moved to Florida from the northeast, and when posting FL stuff up on Instagram, he strikes up a conversation with me about the area and how he visited there before. We chatted a bit here and there. And eventually it turned into “hey are you? How was your insert holiday or event”. You know those dead end conversations that end with “it was good, you?”.
Anyway. It was cool to chit chat. I don’t mind chit chatting with people. But found out he liked me, when he told me how cute I was and started liking my IG stories. And me not being interested after realizing he was taking a liking to me, I started to barely respond to him. Where as before I would say we had a small formed a friendship - that’s it. Just someone I chatted with once in a GREAT while (we were not chatting on a daily basis or anything), but we did chat on the phone.
Then I get a message saying “If I came to Florida for a short vacation/getaway, would you want to meet up?”
That was a very awkward question and honestly very direct, pushy and IMO personally inviting yourself. I don’t like that. I have no interest. He was just someone I was shooting the shit with who lives 1000 miles away in the northeast.
So I didn’t respond. And then I get “understandable if not 🙂”. I get most people would just say “No. Sorry. Not interested.” But for me, it’s hard to reject people and it’s awkward - unless the person is literally being rude or harassing me. I hate feeling like the bad guy. I know it’s dumb to say, but I have bad social anxiety and this is why I just end up not responding at all. My lack of response is the rejection. Should I just say “Nah I’m not interested in seeing you.” And be very blunt?
TL;DR: Guy I met from years ago invited himself to see me in Florida (I moved here from the northeast). We formed a “small” online friendship, meaning we talked once in a while just shooting the shit. I backed off when he showed that he was interested in me, because I have no interest. Then he laid it on me that he wants to visit me. I have social anxiety and I don’t know how to really say I’m not interested without it being awkward.
Part 1:
https://www.reddit.com/nosleep/comments/11wsvvs/i_was_a_911_operator_i_still_remember_the_call/
As we walked past the pile of corpses stacked like cordwood in a pile twenty feet high, the wind seemed to pick up. The smell of feces, urine, rot and rancid sweat emanated from the pile of bodies, nearly making me throw up. My son Anthony and my wife Margaret both tried to hide their faces in the crook of their elbows, their skin looking pale and all too white. I heard my little boy suppress a small retch, bending over as the smell grew stronger for a few moments. Then we were walking away, and though it was still terrible, the smell started to fade after a few hundred feet.
I had driven on this road out of town hundreds of times in my life, and yet I realized I didn’t recognize my surroundings. Furrowing my brow, I looked around. The pavement in front of us had turned white. I saw tiny bones placed closely together, forming the streets.
The trees had also changed. They looked like weeping willows, but instead of long strands of leaves hanging down, they had what looked like intestines and long strands of bloody hair blowing softly in the breeze, moving from side to side. As we drew closer, I realized thousands and thousands of maggots and other larvae swarmed in their otherworldly branches. The concerted motion of so many insects gave them a shimmering, vibrating quality. There was a sound like high-pitched crying that came out of the forests, and as I looked closer, I realized these sounds were coming from the trees themselves.
“Where are we?” my wife asked, her eyes wide, her body trembling. My heart beat so fast I could no longer differentiate the separate beats. They all slammed together in a concerted frenzy as I realized we had walked right out of our world and into the world of the monstrous corpse girl and her insane god that my son had told me about.
“She told me they call it Golgotha,” my son whispered, “the place of the skulls.”
“But how did we get here?” I asked. “And more importantly, how do we get out? Can we just turn around?” I looked back down the road and realized the pile of corpses that had marked the entrance to this mad world was now gone. I saw only the white street paved with bones stretching off into the horizon, endless forests of willows with blood and intestines hanging from them lining each side. Nearby, I heard the gurgling of a stream.
“No,” my son said softly. “We are in here. And I can feel her presence. The dead girl. She’s watching us right now. She’s trying to get in my…” He pointed at his head. “We have to go on ahead.” My wife grabbed my free hand tightly.
“I’m scared,” she whispered to me, too quietly for my son to hear. I nodded to her grimly, opening the revolver and checking the bullets. I had only four left. And I didn’t even know if bullets would harm the things in this place. Then we heard a voice that seemed to boom from the sky. It was deep, shaking the ground. Pieces of intestines and blood fell from the trees around us, and the streets of bone shook, some of them falling out of place like pure white potholes. I grabbed my wife, steadying her as she almost toppled over. My son seemed almost unaffected, but his eyes were wide, and he was looking straight up.
I looked up also, seeing the sky had begun to rapidly turn from blue to black, as if an eclipse were happening. But I could see no sun, no source of light, no moon or stars. Instead, I only saw a face begin to emerge from the darkness. It was a face that seemed to stretch hundreds of miles across. Its skeletal cheekbones and bleached white forehead seemed to blend into the blackness of the sky. Its chattering jawbone and massive pointed teeth opened and closed quickly in an eerie, shuffling way that didn’t match at all its words. It reminded me of a wind-up toy I had had as a child, one that just had teeth that would chatter and bounce off each other as the toy moved forward in a random way.
But its eyes were its most disconcerting feature. They were pure silver, but in that silver, there was a rapid shimmering and rotating. Madness emanated from every part of its face, and I felt it looking deep into my mind. It had a presence that was not only insane, but insectile, antithetical to life, and, worst of all, eternal.
“Have you brought me a new lamb for the slaughter?” it said, in a voice like rushing water. “Give me the boy. He will have company with the dead ones, the other boys and girls here. They’re all dead, but nothing here ever really dies. Give me your child, and I will let you go.” Then it stopped speaking, the only movement in the whole sky being its eyes, which now revolved faster, deeper and lighter shades of silver appearing and disappearing in a rapidly moving fractal pattern that seemed to zoom forever inwards towards the center.
“No,” I said simply, my heart beating fast, but a rising sense of anger battling it and giving me new strength. I put up my middle finger and aimed it at the sky. The voice laughed, louder than ever. I heard trees falling in the forests surrounding us, the stream no longer gurgling but being thrown around like tidal waves on the banks of its shore.
“Then you will all die,” it said, its voice fading as if zooming away from us.
Then the face and the blackness were gone, the sky returning to a deep blue. Light seemed to return to the world, and the eerie, insectile fingers that grasped and felt around in my mind disappeared in an instant. On the horizon, above the trees, I realized I could see thick, dark clouds of smoke rising above the treeline. The road seemed to head in that general direction. Motioning with my hand, I turned to my family.
“It looks like there could be some sort of town or factory over there,” I said. “If we keep going on this road, it will probably bring us close. Or we could turn around and walk back in the opposite direction. What do you two think?” My question was broken by a sob from the nearby trees. Whirring around, I saw Trooper Shea, his dress uniform torn, cuts and scrapes all over his body. His mouth turned into a perfect O of surprise, his eyes widening as he looked at us.
“Please,” he said, “help me.” Then he fell over like a ragdoll, plummeting into the dry soil and dead grass that surrounded the skeletal road. My wife began to run over to him, but I put a hand on her shoulder, stopping her.
“He could be infected,” I said. She glared at me.
“So you’re just going to let him die?” she asked. I shook my head.
“We approach danger slowly,” I said. “We only have one revolver with a few shots, one butcher knife, and the small knife that we gave Adam- which is basically a paring knife.” I laughed, even though it wasn’t funny. The sound of laughter in this grim place sounded wrong, and I quickly stopped. Margaret just gave me a one more disapproving frown, then pushed my hand away and knelt besides Trooper Shea. She had some medical training, having been a certified nursing assistant in her early twenties, and used it to check him over briefly.
She checked his pulse, his breathing, opened one eye and then the other to check the responsiveness of his pupils and make sure no blood was coming out of either. Turning back to me, she nodded.
“He doesn’t seem sick like the others,” she said. He was laying on his back, and she flipped him over to check for injuries on that side. As soon as she did, we all saw the cause of his collapse.
He was bleeding rather heavily. It looked like someone had stuck a knife into the back of his left shoulder, then pulled it out again. The blood was clotting, staining his trooper uniform a dirty red color on the back. He had clearly lost a great deal of blood.
“I don’t think it hit an artery,” my wife said to me. My son stood behind me, holding my free hand while I kept the revolver ready, scanning the forest and road for any sign of movement. At that point, Trooper Shea began to moan, his eyes fluttering open.
“Do you…” he said, licking his lips and clearing his voice, “...water?”
“Well, there is a stream nearby,” I said, getting up. “I don’t know if it is drinkable however. For all I know, the streams here could be made of pure mercury.” He shook his head.
“They’re water,” Shea said, coming back more and more to consciousness as he spoke. “I drank some of it when I was running. It tasted fine.” He got up slowly, and my wife came running over. He put an arm around her, looking like he might fall over again, but after a few breaths, he steadied himself. “Something was chasing me. I don’t know how I got here; one minute, I was in the fields, running towards the woods, and then suddenly the trees all changed and the sky went black.
“One of those nutjobs in the middle of town stabbed me in the back. My partner ended up getting bitten, and he became so sick within minutes that I knew there was no way I was getting him out of there. He went down fighting, though. He took out five or six of the sick people with him before they all jumped on him and began ripping his body apart with their teeth, their fingernails, everything. It was like a savage dog attack.” We started walking towards the sound of the gurgling stream nearby.
As soon as we reached the shallow bank, Trooper Shea fell to his knees, cupping his palms and drinking as much water as he could handle. Then he splashed it on his face and stood up.
“Alright, let’s get out of this fucking place,” he said, pulling out his service pistol and putting a fresh magazine in.
We returned to the road and began to walk towards the smoke in the sky. Within minutes, the forest started to clear out, and I saw towering buildings on the horizon drawing closer. It was eerie how quiet they were, however. I didn’t hear a single car or bus coming from that direction.
Soon the forest and the hanging intestines and gore were behind us, and we stood in a post-apocalyptic nightmare. Buildings hundreds of stories tall stood all around us, many with their windows smashed out. Bodies with nooses around their necks hung from lampposts on both sides of the road. Many had been there for so long that the skin and muscles were sloughing off, rancid gas causing them to bloat, their faces unrecognizable, their clothes bowing out from the pressure of the decomposition.
“The girl is coming,” my son said, pointing down the road. We all had our weapons at the ready. It would have seemed absurd in other circumstances- being so afraid of a little girl no more than four feet tall. Her mouth, stitched close, had dark blood dripping down from her lips, and her eyes were wide, sparkling, almost smiling. Her deathly white skin showed black, rotten veins that wound throughout her body, hidden by the black rags she wore in many spots. Then I heard her voice in my mind as she came to a stop.
“The god of Golgotha welcomes you all,” she said. I could tell by the widening eyes of the others that they all heard her voice as well. “This is your last chance. A sacrifice is required to move forward. Give us the boy. We will take good care of him for you. He will never die. Nothing here ever really dies.” At this, Trooper Shea raised the pistol and fired a shot at her. It hit her in the center of her chest, knocking her back. The voice stopped instantly.
“Run!” my son said. “There’s more coming from behind us.” Glancing back, I saw he was right. Dozens of boys and girls were coming out of the abandoned skyscrapers, flooding the bone-white roads, all with their mouths stitched close. Some wore decaying suits or the rags of dresses, while others looked much fresher, with intact shirts or pants still on their tiny bodies. Seeing that, we all sprinted away. I stayed behind my son, knowing he would be the slowest of us all. The others rapidly gained on us, and I felt tiny hands grasping at the back of my shirt, trying to pull me back. Turning quickly, I fired a bullet into the nearest target- a small boy with a suit that looked like it would have been new during World War 2. The back of his head exploded as I fired point-blank into his forehead.
The reaction of the others chasing us was immediate. They all stopped, their eyes widening as they saw the dark, clotted blood and brain matter that sprayed the street behind the corpse child. Then they placed their hands on the gore, trying to shove it through the stitches in their mouths. I heard deep slurping sounds as they sucked the blood through the black stitching, pulling their lips apart so hard that fresh blood began to pour out of the stitches’ insertion sites as they tried to feast, taking in as much as they could. It gave us just the distraction we needed.
While they circled around the dead boy, eating his body like vultures surrounding a piece of roadkill, we got farther and farther away, Trooper Shea running in the lead, my wife behind him, then my son and me. We took random turns, going down long-abandoned alleyways and moving deeper into the center of the city. Soon, we heard nothing at all besides the heavy footfalls of our group.
“Stop,” I said, gasping, bent over next to a dumpster filled with shoes in a tiny alleyway between two skyscrapers. “I need to rest.” My son clearly did too. He was breathing hard, doubled over. Trooper Shea and Margaret turned to look at us.
“What now?” Margaret asked. I looked down at my son.
“Do you have any idea how to get out of here?” I asked. Surprisingly, he nodded.
“I got a glimpse from the girl’s mind when she was talking to us,” Anthony said. “But I think she saw some stuff in mine, too. I don’t know if it matters or not.” I shrugged.
“Nothing we can do about that now,” I said. “So how do we get out of here?”
“There’s a well in the center of the city,” Anthony said, “where they go when they need fresh boys and girls to follow the god here. Or when they need bodies to feed them.”
“So let’s go!” Trooper Shea said, pushing my son in front of him. “Lead to the way, kid. We’ve got your back. Let’s get the hell out of this place.” Nodding, Anthony started walking on shaky legs. We followed him out of the alleyway to a massive street six lanes wide.
“It should be down this way,” Anthony said, pointing deeper into the tangle of abandoned buildings. I saw a cloud of black smoke where his finger pointed.
Then we heard the voice of that insane god again, but not coming from the sky this time. It was on the street, and not far away. The ground started to shake. Turning to look in the opposite direction that my son had pointed, I saw a behemoth dozens of feet tall. It had the same skeletal face, the same chattering jawbone and sharpened teeth, but it now stood on a slender, naked body with pus and deep gouge marks marring nearly every inch of its skin.
“Thank you for delivering the lamb to me personally,” it said in that voice so much like a waterfall, each syllable pounding into the other and causing small earthquakes as it spoke. There was no way we could outrun it. Though its legs and arms were emaciated sticks with bone showing through its countless injuries, it was fast and very tall.
My wife looked back at me one last time.
“Get him out of here,” she whispered to me, pointing at Anthony. “No matter what it takes.” Then she ran directly at the insane god. Its head swiveled rapidly, its silver eyes following her progress with a kind of lunatic intensity, its long arms reaching out to grab her, but she ducked into a nearby alleyway. The thing followed her, howling.
“Run, you idiots!” Trooper Shea said. I wanted to go help her, but I knew he was right. She had likely given her life to save our son, and to do anything else but get us out would be to waste her sacrifice. With tears pouring down my cheeks, I pushed my son ahead.
“Go, Anthony!” I screamed. Looking back at me, bewildered, he looked like he would just stand there forever.
“But what about mommy?” he cried.
“Just go!” Then we all started to run. The black cloud of smoke was growing rapidly nearer when I heard the shrieks of a woman. I knew it was Margaret. It sounded like she was being burned alive- a kind of pain and horror I had never heard in any voice before, even as a 911 dispatcher.
I could see the well Anthony was talking about now, only a few hundred feet away. Black clouds of smoke emanated from it, blocking out the sky above it. It seemed as if it had some eternal fire burning within it.
Then the dead children began to crawl and run out from every street and alleyway surrounding the well, forming a rough circle around it. They all stopped and stared at us with their dead eyes.
“I have an idea,” Trooper Shea said, looking at me with shell-shocked eyes. “But you’re not going to like it.” Then he ran forward, nearly emptying his magazine with a rapid succession of shots, aiming at the monstrous bodies that surrounded him. With the first nine shots, he blew some of them apart, leaving huge exit wounds in their chests and heads as he fired rapidly. Then they closed all around him, and I knew he was out of time and nearly out of ammo.
Glancing back at me one last time, his eyes watery and terrified, he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I saw it in slow motion.
“No!” I screamed. But it was too late.
The entire back of his head exploded like a deflated balloon. The corpse-children swarmed all over his body, dipping their small, white hands in his blood and brain matter, trying to shove as much of it as they could in their stitched mouths.
Without a moment of hesitation, I lifted Anthony and ran forward, jumping into the well, the clouds of black smoke enveloping us as we fell.
***
I woke up at the border of the town, surrounded by people in hazmat suits. I saw countless agents in unmarked black SUVs blocking off the border of the town. One man in a hazmat suit came over, shining a light in my eyes. I saw another doing the same to Anthony next to me. Then I fell back into unconsciousness.
I awoke later in a medical facility, surrounded by a few agents in black suits. They wouldn’t tell me which agency they came from, but told me my entire town had an outbreak of a mutated form of rabies. I shook my head.
“There was a dead girl with her mouth stitched closed,” I said, and they laughed.
“A few of the other survivors said the same thing,” one of them said. “Likely mass hysteria. Maybe a group hallucination from the stress of seeing such a horrifying outbreak. We have the entire town quarantined, however. So far, we have been able to keep this out of the media, and the goal is to continue to do that. We don’t need you to go around talking about monsters.” I stopped listening after that, knowing that they would never believe me.
They never mentioned how many of the bodies were never found, including those of my wife and Trooper Shea, both of whom sacrificed themselves to save our lives. Nor how a mutated form of rabies could stack hundreds of bodies into piles like cordwood, blocking off many of the roads into or out of town.
Since then, Anthony and I have moved far away from that town- the one that killed my wife and all my friends. I thought I had left the terror behind and started to heal.
Then last night, as I fell asleep, I had a dream of an insane god with chattering teeth and silver eyes, telling me he would see me again soon.
When I awoke, my floor was covered in footprints that left behind dark, clotted blood leading towards my bed.
I have a hard time with basically telling someone “Im not interested” unless they’re super mean to me. I find it awkward. I have social anxiety btw.
This guy I know (I’ve met him through someone years ago). I have no interest in him at all. I recently moved to Florida from the northeast, and when posting FL stuff up on Instagram, he strikes up a conversation with me about the area and how he visited there before. We chatted a bit here and there. And eventually it turned into “hey are you? How was your insert holiday or event”. You know those dead end conversations that end with “it was good, you?”.
Anyway. It was cool to chit chat. I don’t mind chit chatting with people. But found out he liked me, when he told me how cute I was and started liking my IG stories. And me not being interested after realizing he was taking a liking to me, I started to barely respond to him. Where as before I would say we had a formed a friendship - that’s it. Just someone I chatted with once in a GREAT while (we were not chatting on a daily basis or anything).
Then I get a message saying “If I came to Florida for a short vacation/getaway, would you want to meet up?”
That was a very awkward question and honestly very direct and IMO personally inviting yourself. I don’t like that. I have no interest. He was just someone I was shooting the shit with who lives 1000 miles away in the northeast.
So I didn’t respond. And then I get “understandable if not 🙂”. I get most people would just say “No. Sorry.” But for me, it’s hard to reject people. I hate feeling like the bad guy. I know it’s dumb to say, but I have bad social anxiety and this is why I just end up not responding at all. My lack of response is the rejection.
MP posted on their IG that the next episode is about Forks Over Knives. I remember a while back, Aubrey said that they had a heavily requested episode in the works, and I was hoping they’d look at the plant based no oil diet. I’ve following a vegan lifestyle for about 15ish years, and have pretty mixed feelings around the health claims plant based no oil doctors make. Thoughts on this upcoming episode? Tuesday cannot get here soon enough 😂