Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1776lep/be_careful_about_the_orders_you_deliver_on/Part 3: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/17b5hmz/be_careful_about_which_orders_you_take_on/
I woke up the next day around noon. I don’t remember when I fell asleep.
I called my dad.
“Hello?”
“Dad… hey, how uh… how are you doing?”
“How am I doing? Robert, you sound awful, are you sick?”
“No, I… listen, have you seen anything weird lately? Maybe anyone… around the house?”
“Huh? What do you mean, Robbie?”
My phone vibrated, made me jolt like I had been tasered, “Shh…” a text from “Nick”.
“Are you alright, Robbie?”
My eyes watered, “I’m just… checking up on you, that’s all. Please, just… be careful.”
“Don’t worry Robert, you’re old man isn’t going down any time soon…”
“I…. I love you dad.”
“I love you too, Robbie.”
“Bye.”
I fell back on my bed. My phone vibrated twice.
“Keep up the good work, and papa will be alright. We might even send him a gift or two if you do well.”
“Your real work begins now. Get up and at ‘em!!! 👍 I believe in you Robert!”I opened the app, and my whole body reeled with vertigo as I saw what was on the screen.
A dozen orders. All of them, every one of them, had at least one item blanked out or with a question mark like the order to Nick. They weren’t just orders from the gas station, they were from… everywhere. Big restaurant chains, takeout places, grocery stores… and the spots I had to deliver to were all over the city.
A rundown apartment in the slums. What looked like an abandoned warehouse in the industrial centre. A highend apartment. A regular old family home. A trailer park. Mansions.
They were all over the whole damn city.
I didn’t look in any more packages. Hell only knows what manner of gruesome cargo I was driving around everywhere.
Needless to say, I was horrified, worried sick for dad and fearful of displeasing “Nick”.I delivered everything that appeared, and everyday it would cap off with the same old delivery to Nick’s house.
Nick probably wasn’t his real name. There might not even be a “Nick” but rather multiple people contacting me, or… Maybe something that isn’t human.
Whatever was happening, I eventually started to not think about it. I thought of nothing other than survival and my father’s survival.
The first night on my new routine, the door opened. Matt was there, a big smile on his face, but he spoke without any inflection, completely monotone, “Right on Robbie. I thought you wouldn’t come man.” His eyes were glassy. There were stains on his shirt that didn’t look like sweat.
I thought of jumping on him and choking him to death for an instant. But he was obviously only an errand boy, some sort of patsy. Whatever was going on, he obviously wasn’t in that deep. Killing him would solve nothing. Especially not considering the police were involved in some way, whether through bribery or I don’t know what. Hell, why didn’t they just get the damn compromised cops to do everything? Why the fuck did it have to be me?
The girl was on the floor of the entrance where she had been last time I saw her, dried blood around her mouth, her eyes still vacant. She was hooked up to an IV drip that was haphazardly placed tipping against the wall. Though she didn’t see me, she laughed when Matt opened the door a bit more to reach his hand out. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the cloaked figure wasn’t there, but there was another gathering, obscured in the shadows of the hallway. I could barely make out pale faces staring at me from within the darkness, their eyes wide.
I made a lot of money that day. Each order gave me at least 80$. The main order was reduced to 250$.
A lot of blood money.
If I didn’t do it, then dad would…
So I had to!
Guilt, paranoia, horror and despair weighed heavy on me. Every night I drowned myself in drink and drugs.
Every day, at noon, my phone would vibrate, “Up and at ‘em, Robbie”
I was nothing but an empty husk.
I’d call my dad whenever I woke up, just to check on him, dread filling me with every ring, expecting him to not pick up.
That went on for eight days. Eight days and nights that were a sluggish, terrible blur.
The only allure that money held for me anymore was a means to bury everything through my vices. Maybe that’s what it always was.
On the evening of the eighth day, as I came to “Nick”’s house, I tripped, fell onto the ajar door… and I tumbled inside.
I scrambled to my feet and spun around every which way in a blind panic. As I saw before, the entrance was different from what little of the house I was able to gleam from the hallway. Aside from the filthy welcome mat, the entrance was surprisingly clean, looked like the lobby of a hospital or something.
Aside from the IV stand that was still there, tipped over (though without the girl attached to it that time), the room was empty. I didn’t hear anybody, but I could see flashing multicoloured lights coming from the right of the hallway ahead. A light was beaming down from the wooden stairs in the hall.There was a slightly ajar door to my left.
I felt like I was stuck in a trench during an airstrike. The faces I had seen on the medallions flashed in my mind, the fingertips, the bag of blood…
I was only frozen in panic for a second before I managed to get my body moving the hell out again, when I saw the delivery near my foot. I brought my hands up to my temples and groaned.
A face stared neutrally up at me from the ruined remains of the package. An old lady I had seen ordering at a takeout place when I had picked up a delivery the day before.
Around the medallion was what was presumably her shaved off hair and… an eye.
I almost screamed, but choked it back when the sound of something ruffling drifted from behind me, from the other side of the door, a sound like tarp shifting…
The door creaked, the tarp ruffled, started to fall, I heard a wailing unlike anything I had ever heard in my life, muffled, then clear as the tarp fell from its head, revealed what lay beneath, it turned its mangled face down at me, my whole body was wracked with an indescribable sensation as my ears pounded like someone had taken a power-drill to them…
The next thing I remember, I was roaring into my driveway, tackled my front door open, locked it, started boarding up the windows. What happened between the door opening and then was just a faded blank. It made my head hurt to think about it.
Curled up under my bed, I tried calling my dad. No answer. It was 2am. I tried until 5am, when I must have drifted off, overwhelmed by everything.
Vague remnants of what I saw underneath the tarp haunted my dreams, that gurgling, twisted, wailing, mangled nightmare made flesh…