My Organization Monitors Potential Apocalyptic Scenarios

130 million people take road trips every year. 15,400 of them are never seen again. Have you heard the story of the passenger that's been circulating online lately? A young couple set out on a van life trip, but a few nights in, they came across a brutal car accident on the side of the road. I'm not talking about a typical crash, something about this was off. And there's one detail that keeps coming up. The car they found had three deep scratches carved into the side. Not dense, scratches. They stopped, they saw it, and then they left. But here's where things got strange. Not long after creepy things started happening, they began to feel like they weren't alone in the van, like something followed them from that road. People online have started connecting it to something they're calling the passenger. Supposedly, it attaches itself to anyone who encounters it and marks their car with three scratches. And once that happens, it doesn't let go. If these reports are true, this couple didn't just witness something on that highway, they carried it with them. From Andre Overdahl, director of autopsy of Jane Doe, comes passenger. Only in theaters May 22nd, get tickets now. Oxford Montessori School is now Oxford Millwood School. A new name, the same genuine care, academic ambition, and belief in every child. Set within a beautiful rural campus, just 20 minutes from Oxford City Centre. Our small classes, personalized pathways, and strong send expertise give pupils the support, challenge, and confidence they need to succeed. Especially those who may not have thrived in larger settings. Find out more at our Open Day on May the 21st. Search Oxford Millwood School Open Day. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous, chilling, and disturbing creepypastas and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened, or our simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. Hey everyone. Well, I've been asking for winter to end, and now it has, and we've rolled right into allergies and road construction season, and my eyes are basically constantly watering. So how am I going to get things going before I'm totally blind and unable to work the board? It's just allergies. Oh, and let's shout out new patrons at patreon.com slash creepypod because I'm way behind on thanking all the amazing listeners who've recently joined. Josh, Eric, Kyla Powers, Kristen Parks, Kaz Baumgartner, Lauren D, Artaud Campbell, Mr. Hohn, Simon Bleakin, Kimberly Goff, Sean Lehan, Thomas, Jeff Ortiz, Lindy Payson, GlassJaw01, Crackers in Beam Dip, and Bill on the Villain. To see how you can get rewarded for supporting the show, please visit patreon.com slash creepypod. Okay, first up. A time travel analyst who secretly prevented countless apocalypses discovers a horrifying future. As he digs deeper into a rapidly approaching catastrophe, he uncovers a truth so disturbing that suddenly the choices he makes every day don't seem so clear. From writer Ryan Peacock, Creepy Presents, my organization monitors potential apocalyptic scenarios. You know how every morning you wake up in a nice warm cozy bed and not in an alien slave camp, or they're gonna work you to death until it's time to chop you up for meat? Yeah, you're welcome. Bill My name is Bill, and I've probably got the most thankless fucking job in the world. Sure, on paper it doesn't sound like much. I sit at a desk all day and look at data on a computer. But I'm the one who keeps the world turning, and I am damn good at my job. Whenever the dreaded end of days draws near, I'm the one who sees it coming and makes sure it doesn't. Maybe I'm not the guy they send into the field to do the dirty work. Those guys only do what I tell them to do. Without me, society as you know it would not exist. And I'm trying to remain as humble as humanly possible when I say that. Now, I'll give credit where it's due. I'm not the one who invented the future probe technology. That was done by a guy named Dr. Johann Pinter back in the 70s. I won't get into the technical details of it, but simply put, Pinter figured out time travel. He also figured out that time travel was a goddamn mess. Sci-fi nerds will understand. Through his experiments, Pinter figured out that you can't really alter the past. You can go back in time, sure, and you can create a new future, but your original future will still exist. Let's say that you had a bad day, got drunk, and ran over a pedestrian, then decided to go back in time to steal your keys that night to prevent it. When you went back to the future, the pedestrian would still be dead and you'd still be a murderer. However, you would have created an alternate timeline where you didn't run over a pedestrian. Theoretically, you can go and live in the timeline where you didn't murder a pedestrian. It would be weird, and you'd have to figure out how to handle the other version of you, but you wouldn't have technically changed anything. Furthermore, Pinter determined that the present has multiple branching possible futures, some of which are messier than others. So with all this in mind, Pinter figured that the best thing to do was, instead of going back and trying to fix some of the great injustices in the world, especially since he concluded that an alternative version of him almost certainly decided to do exactly that anyways, he instead decided to focus on improving the future. That is why he founded Foresight. Now, officially, Foresight is classified as a research company, and we legitimately do offer some of that. I'm not really involved in that end of things, but I know that some large companies and even some arms of the US government consult with us, looking for data to help them predict shit like economic growth and depressions, effects of certain actions on the world stage, and other shit like that. As a rule, we really don't do the time travel thing for them unless we have to. We don't really advertise that because it's best not to leave time travel in careless hands. We don't actually know what happens if you fuck with time too much, and we really don't want to find out. The research is just a front, though. The real goal behind Foresight was always the future probe program. See, Pinter figured out pretty early on that sending people into the future was not a good idea. First off, people can die. Second off, people can be intrusive and fuck things up. So he decided a less invasive approach was necessary. So he started using probes. They're less impressive than they sound. The probes are just mobile cameras, not that different from the Mars rover. The design has changed a bit over the years. The first ones look more like RC cars. Then they went with a sort of metal spider look. Now they're drones. They record what they see and bring it back to us. Back when the program started, we literally needed to watch through whatever they'd recorded. But nowadays we can get a broadcast back to us when what's more or less real time, so to speak. Now, obviously the logistics of sending drones into every possible future is a little over the top. So Pinter developed a machine that basically analyzes possible futures. Do not ask me how it works. That's above my pay grade. Anyways, potential apocalyptic scenarios show up as data that gets transmitted to us, or more specifically, to me. My job is to filter out the less likely scenarios. There are a lot of them, and only really focus on the ones that have a real, almost certain risk of causing the end of the world. The more potential futures feature that apocalypse, the more severe the risk. Thankfully, if we know that the world is ending, and we know why, we can also figure out how to prevent it. I can use the probes to look at futures where the world didn't end and figure out why and how to make sure we steer ourselves towards that future. Usually we get a few years' fair warning before an apocalyptic event, so there's plenty of time to make adjustments. And so far, I'd say that we've done a pretty damn good job. Pinter died back in the 90s, a few years before I joined up with the organization. But I'd like to think he'd be happy with the fact that most of the world's population is neither dead or worse. I'm going to be honest, I'm pretty proud of the work I've done with foresight. Which leads me to why I'm sharing this. You can probably guess that we're not supposed to openly talk about the Future Probe program. I'm technically violating my contract and opening myself up to a whole host of legal hot water just by sharing this. But hey, I figure it's not going to matter soon, so what the hell, right? You guys just dodged a fucking bullet. I don't think there's a single person on this planet who knows how lucky they are right now. And they've all got me to thank. Now obviously this isn't my first time saving the world. I'd say it's the most noteworthy. I'll explain why in a little bit. See, it all started a couple of weeks ago. I mentioned before that when an apocalyptic scenario pops up, we've usually got a few years' notice. The circumstances that will lead to the end of civilization as we know it don't just pop up overnight. There are usually years of buildup. But every now and then, we get an exception. And exceptions scare the living shit out of me. Needless to say, when I got an alert telling me that 65% of the possible futures that our program surveyed involved an apocalyptic scenario within the next four days, I couldn't help but panic a little. Naturally, I flagged it as Defcon 1 and immediately sent it off to the higher ups as protocol dictates. Then I started sending out the probes. Now usually, when we get a high priority scenario like this, it's because some group of nutjobs is about to do something drastic in service of whatever fucked up agenda they believe in. You may not think that a bunch of lunatics could bring about the end of the world. But if there's one lesson that history has shown again and again, it's that you should never underestimate the power of very stupid people left unattended in a large group. Needless to say, as scary as these scenarios are, these idiots are usually not that hard to deal with. Once we've got the alert, we can either notify the proper people that some assholes are trying to make a move or get our own guys to handle it. Usually said assholes aren't smart enough to bumble their way into the apocalypse in most future timelines, thus reducing the likelihood of our world ending to a much lower, more acceptable percentage. With that in mind, when I sent out the probes and started reviewing the footage, I was expecting to find the usual suspects of an apocalyptic future. I wasn't entirely disappointed. A lot of what the probe sent back was footage of empty streets and signs of carnage, smears of blood on the pavement, mangled corpses in the streets. I've seen things like this before. In timelines where a sudden event caused a rapid collapse of society, you'd usually see signs of violence in the streets. But this wasn't really like that. See, that kind of violence tends to be caused by sudden riots. People go crazy when society breaks down. You'll see shit on fire, storefront smashed, vehicles tipped over, and shit like that. Well, storefronts were indeed smashed. Vehicles were tipped over. There was clearly some violence. But this didn't look like it had been caused by a riot. For starters, rioters don't pry cars open like tin cans. Rioters don't rip into people the way the bodies in the streets have been torn into. Rioters don't seem to only be going in one direction. There was something about the way the bodies were spaced out. They weren't scattered around. They looked like they'd been moving, running. From what exactly? I didn't know. With no obvious signs of what had caused carnage, I decided to try something new. I tuned the probes to start scanning the local radio stations. Usually, in an emergency event, there's some sort of broadcast. One thing that's just about consistent is that they're usually on the same frequencies. So it didn't take me long to find. Through the static, I could clearly make out a voice that I assumed was their version of the president of the United States. It took a little bit of work to make a message come through clearly, but this is what it said. My fellow Americans, to those of you who are left, we are fighting as hard as we can. The situation on the West Coast has continued to deteriorate. The incident in Reno a few days ago has spread throughout Nevada, into California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Texas, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Oklahoma. The bugs have been confirmed to have crossed the borders into Canada and Mexico and reports indicate that the situation is dire. To those of you still alive in the affected states, I urge you to remain in your homes, remain indoors, away from the outside. We will send help if we can, but until then, you must survive as long as you can. To those of you in the East, where this infection continues to spread, do not panic, but do not assume that this infestation will not continue to advance. We've continued our efforts to evacuate the areas that will inevitably be hit by the bugs. If you live in one of these areas, we ask that you do not fight to remain in your home. It will be overrun and you and your loved ones will be in danger. The only promise of safety lies further East. If your community is not yet been evacuated, then I urge you to begin preparing to leave now. Take only what you need to survive. Food, water, and medicine. As we evacuate, we are actively looking into strategies to repel this threat. Your soldiers continue to fight valiantly for your protection against the oncoming horde and they will triumph. But victory will come at a cost. The speech went on for some time even after that. But by that point, I stopped listening. Reno. That was where this had originated. Naturally, the next step was to study Reno and start looking for a potential source of the problem. The president had said something about bugs. I'd seen some things involving bugs before, sure, but never anything on this scale. I suppose that I'd find out for sure soon enough. The higher-ups had sent me an email asking for a status update, so I sent them the radio transmission I'd gotten along with the footage. I noted that I'd be looking into Reno next. I recalled all previous probes and requested that 28 probes be sent into different times in the next week. Each probe would appear within the city of Reno over the next 168 hours, one appearing every six hours. This was a fairly standard procedure. The basic idea is that once you've found ground zero for the apocalypse, you monitor it as heavily as possible until you find the moment it starts. Then you go back and study that moment from every possible angle and trace it back to its source. It's basically just the process of elimination, only using time travel. Now, the nice thing about the six hour model is that it makes it relatively easy to figure out an overall timeline of events. For example, most of the probes from the tail end of that 168 hour window all picked up a bloodstained disaster that used to be the city of Reno. And it wasn't pretty. There were bodies in the streets, cars torn open, the same shit I'd seen before. Now, I was getting a better look at just what was behind it. Some of the probes recorded footage of massive flies. They didn't seem to hurt people, at least they mostly just seemed to be feeding on the remains. Looking back further though, I could see video footage of massive creatures that sort of resembled a praying mantis. Only they had a physical texture more like a tree bark. A couple of those mantis things took out the goddamn drones. But at least I got a good look at them. The drones I had left kept sending me more footage of the violence following the apocalypse. Giant spider like creatures crawled through Reno, stalking fleeing prey. Spiky things like grasshoppers leapt around feeding on whoever they could catch. There were so many. All of them flooding out of Reno as if someone had opened up the gates to an insectifobes personal hell. Crabs, pill bugs, centipedes, dragonflies, mods. Some of them didn't seem dangerous. Others were more than happy to kill. It must have spent an hour or so reviewing the footage of the bugs perplexed before I started going back further. These things were fascinating. I'd never seen them in any potential future before. Where the hell did they even come from? Some sort of genetic experiment gone wrong, maybe? But we would have more warning if that was the case, wouldn't we? Sabotage, perhaps? I looked at the footage from the drones earlier in the timeline. Looking at the dates, the inciting incident in question seemed to happen in four days time from when I was currently. The drones stopped picking up footage of the bugs around Thursday morning. It had to be some time around then. I spent the better part of my day analyzing the footage I got from the drones. I redirected several of them to focus on what took place during Wednesday and Thursday. I listened to radio broadcasts, swept the sewers, and looked for evidence of what was to come. Some time early in the afternoon on Thursday, I picked up radio chatter on some police channels about a car being phoned torn open by a water treatment plant outside of town, so I directed the drones there. Sure enough, I got some decent footage of the attack. One of those spider things came out of the woods and tore into the car. It was a little fascinating to watch. You move so fast, grabbing it and wrapping its legs around it. Goddamn thing was massive. I watched as it used its fangs to tear through the metal before digesting the four fuckers inside alive and slurping up the gooey mess. Ugly way to die. I sent some drones back about a half hour before the attack to keep an eye out for the spider. It took a bit of searching, but I eventually phoned it moving through the woods, coming from the water treatment plant. Interesting. I left one drone to keep an eye on it while I sent some of the others back again, this time to explore the plant itself an hour before the attack. I sent two of them in through a pipe that I figured the spider had come out of. Sure enough, I phoned the spider there, chilling in a giant web. I made sure to keep the drones away from it. Moving through the interior of the plant, I wasn't that surprised to find more of the bugs waiting there. From the looks of it, they had been causing one hell of a mess. I could see the bodies of dead men, mostly eaten, along with evidence of the bugs preying on each other. But no obvious indicator as to where they were coming from. No, not at first, anyway. I sent the drones back in time again. One went back to the day before, one only went back two hours. One day ago, the water treatment plant looked normal. No corpses, no horde of bug creatures ready to destroy America. Just a normal water treatment plant. Two hours ago, on the other hand, the water treatment plant had been a lot less crowded. Most of the staff looked to be dead, and those that weren't were in the middle of being eaten by all sorts of nasty things. Where they were coming from still wasn't obvious, but I only needed to sit and wait to find out. It didn't take that long. I could see shapes bubbling up from some of the pools of treated water. The machines had been shut down and all sorts of horrors pulled themselves out of their rotten depths. The mantis things, flies, mosquitoes, they all came to life, confused and hungry, shambling around looking for food. They all came from the water. I brought my drone closer trying to see what was in there. That was a mistake. One of the mantis things grabbed it, mistaking it for dinner. Whoop, back to my other drone. I used the one I'd sent back one day and sent it to a point in time three hours before I'd lost my other drone to the mantis five hours before first contact. Already I could see a few of the bugs there. I could see new ones, smaller ones, coming out of the stagna water. And I could see a man. He was standing on a balcony, looking down at the pools of untreated water with the stony expression. Yeah, this was the fucking guy behind all this. It had to be. Nobody stares at a giant mantis crawling out of a pool of wastewater without screaming and running away like a little bitch unless they expect a giant mantis to crawl out of the pool of wastewater. This was the fucking guy. I moved my drone towards him ready to give good look at this asshole's face. And then, well, I got exactly that. Only the asshole wasn't just some asshole. The asshole was me. For a moment I sat in my chair looking at this man who looked exactly like me, calmly watching the fucking bug apocalypse crawl out of the city of Reno's collective wastewater. And as I sat there in utter disbelief, the man turned his head to look right at the drone. He fucking smiled. Then, without missing a beat, he took a piece of paper out of his pocket and showed it to the camera. In big, bold writing, I could see what I recognized as a radio station. He, I, was sending me a message. My palms suddenly felt sweaty. My heart was racing a little too fast. Should I even listen to what this guy had to say? Whatever it was, it was crazy, right? Even if he was, I should still hear what he had to say. I still should document it. Maybe it would explain why, right? If it were anyone else, that's exactly what I would have done. But it wasn't anyone else. It was me. What would I have to say to myself? Something that would make me do this? That was crazy, right? It had to be fucking crazy. Right? I thought it over, sitting in silence for several minutes. The man on the screen, me, just went back to studying the creatures coming out of the wastewater before walking away towards the offices. I made the drones follow him for every step. He didn't seem to mind. He kept looking back at the camera, smiling every now and then as he kept walking. He walked through the door to the offices and locked it behind him, then sat in a chair in a cubicle. He took one last look at the camera, his smile fading slightly. Then he took out a gun. He set the paper on the desk before putting it to his head. I watched him pull the trigger. I watched myself die. It was... I don't know how to describe it. For a moment, I just sat there in silence, my hand over my mouth as I tried to process what I'd just seen. Then, inevitably, my eyes were drawn to the paper he'd set down. The radio station. His last words. My last words. I had to know. I tuned to the station and started cutting through the static. This is what I got. Hey Bill, I know you're probably pretty confused by all this. Trust me, I was too. But you and I both know that I wouldn't be doing this if it didn't make sense. Use your drones. Take a good hard look at the future of these timelines. Not the immediate future. Give it 100, 200 years. Just look. That's all I'm asking you. Look. The message paused there. I opened the settings of the drone. I had nothing to lose by looking, right? So I sent it forward. First by 100 years. Then by 200. Then by 300. And I saw it all. A new world. A united world on the other side of the generations of hardship wrought by the bugs. Technology is taking one step back, followed by one incredible leap forward. A new resistance. One I can't even begin to describe. I looked through the centuries with awe, wanting to explore the paradise I saw before me. God, I could have lost hours looking into the future. But what I saw was enough. I tried looking for the same results in other futures. But they weren't there. Humanity wouldn't thrive the way it would after the hardship of the bugs, not under any other circumstance. Nothing would change. We would remain the same miserable species for the rest of our tragic existence. Nothing would change unless we let it. The more I looked, the more I understood. And almost as if on cue, the message on the radio began again. Of course it was on cue. Future me would have known what past me would do. If you've seen what I've seen, then there's a way forward. There's a man, Dr. Gene Pedry. You'll find what you need there. They grow best in water. So you'll figure it out. You know what has to be done. If I'm right, most versions of you will do it first. Some of you will even succeed. Others will, of course, fail. But that's okay. You and I both know we can't save every future. But we'll save enough of them. Isn't that worth it? It was. It is. That leaves me here. Like I said before, you've all just dodged a bullet. I'm not going to prevent what's coming. Not this time. My job is to save the world. And that's just what I intend to do. I found the path to a better future. I found the world humanity deserves. I'm going to break us out of the endless stagnation of our existence. The road will be hard. But it will be worth it. Nobody ever made an alimony without breaking a few eggs. I realized that my former employers aren't going to see it that way, though. I fabricated some updates and bogus reports to throw them off my trail for a little while. Chances are that I'll catch on soon. They haven't already. I'm on borrowed time, as it were. But I'm not afraid. I already know how this is going to end. So if you're reading this, then one of two things is going to happen. One, my former employers will kill me and stop me from doing what I have to do. And the world you know won't change. Life will continue as it was. And if you're living in that world, I'm sorry. I can't save every future. You'll be fine. Probably live a nice life and all that. But when the future comes, your grandchildren will never have it any better than you did. Life will stagnate until it finally ends. Or two, I'll succeed. And if I do, I'm sorry. You're probably going to die because of what I've done. But I don't regret it. Not one bit. What's at stake here is worth it. The future is worth it. I can't pretend it isn't. Some people are going to call me a monster. That's fine. I don't care. But I've seen what's coming. And it's worth the price we'll pay. It's worth it. The Future 130 million people take road trips every year. 15,400 of them are never seen again. Have you heard the story of the passenger that's been circulating online lately? A young couple set out on a van life trip, but a few nights in, they came across a brutal car accident on the side of the road. I'm not talking about a typical crash. Something about this was off. And there's one detail that keeps coming up. The car they found had three deep scratches carved into the side. Not dense, scratches. They stopped, they saw it, and then they left. But here's where things got strange. Not long after creepy things started happening, they began to feel like they weren't alone in the van. Like something followed them from that road. People online have started connecting it to something they're calling the passenger. Supposedly, it attaches itself to anyone who encounters it and marks their car with three scratches. And once that happens, it doesn't let go. If these reports are true, this couple didn't just witness something on that highway. They carried it with them. From Andre Overdahl, director of autopsy of Jane Doe, comes passenger. Only in theaters May 22nd, get tickets now. And next, two teenagers discover a hidden cavern beneath their town where echoes transform voices into something hauntingly beautiful, drawing them deeper into an obsession neither fully understands. From writer Addison Smith and narrated by Heather Thomas, Creepy Presents, The Music We Became. We thought the music came from the cavern. That strange space which opened into our lives and devoured our futures. It didn't. I suppose you know that by now, since you're a part of it. What's that meme? The real music was the friends we made along the way? Yeah, that tracks. Let me explain. The hole was wet at the edges. I thought it was just water, but it dripped from the dirt and strange and viscous clumps, like a white sack of frog's-bond congealed around the dirt. I don't want to be here, I said. My hand grasped at my headphone wire, tugging at the headset around my neck and reminding me that it was there if I needed it, if I couldn't cope with the world. You heard me, but didn't answer. You stood at the edge of the sinkhole behind the downtown theater, slip grasp close to falling in. You note down and touch the strange wetness, lifting it to your nose to smell its biological essence. I tugged at my headphone wire. What is it? I don't know, you said, wiping the offending goo on your flannel. It wasn't natural, I knew. There was nothing natural about a sinkhole opening in our favorite spot. The back lot behind the theater where the abandoned dumpster stood, with our names knife scratched into the rust, giving evidence to our existence. This was our place. This was where we sat, backs against the wall to listen to the performances inside the theater. This was where we hid from angry parents. Eight shoplifted beef jerky as the sun beat down on us during the high summer. It was where you helped me and told me the world was safe. It was our place. And there was a whole and there was a hole in it. The sinkhole appeared overnight and you called me breathless with excitement. You said it was a sign and I had no idea what you meant, but you were excited. So I came with you. I've always loved how excited you get and how passionate you are about life. We've had a lot of rain, you said. Maybe the dirt washed out beneath it. Whatever happened, it's ours now. I thumbed the inline buttons ready to drown out the world. I wanted to hide away in a place of baselines and synthesizers and vocal accompaniment. I didn't. Dustin, what clumps of dirt fell into the chasm and we listened for the sound of it hitting the water below. The dirt landed with no perfect splashes, rippling the water and introducing new biology into an environment that had surely been sequestered for thousands of years. As the water settled, I had my first glimpse of the music within. As the players performed the Phantom of the Opera within the theater, we heard their performance in the cavern below, echoing and self-harmonizing on dark cave walls and mildew condensation. I heard the music of the night as tiny rivers wandered through to create little streams within the vast and empty lake. The pool below was a beauty I had never heard, each note carrying emotion and a life worth of meaning to my ears. Intrusive thoughts waged within me as I imagined stepping forward, falling into the hole and becoming a part of the music, my body integral to the acoustics of the cavern. There was something magical in their sound and for the first time, I imagined what it would be like to be a song. It's beautiful, you said, and I agreed. We stood at the side of the hole, hands clasped, sweating between us as the water flowed far below. I felt safe with my hand in yours, like every other time since you found me friendless and alone in the school cafeteria, ever since that first confident smile and invitation, since you entered my life and became the music that anchored my mind. We stayed most of the night and when the time came to leave, my feet didn't want to move. Come on, you said. We'll come back tomorrow. I smiled and you took my hand. The hole was barricaded the next time we saw it. Orange safety cone surrounded it, with bright caution tape draped between. A wooden pallet had been set over the hole, a poor protection from our curiosity. Still my anxiety spiked at the thought of getting caught. You passed the ladder over the fence and I pulled it over, rungs catching on twisted wire. When you climbed over it yourself, we stood and regarded the safety cones. You think anyone's been in? You asked and I shrugged, fiddling with my headphone wire. It was the first sign anyone else had noticed the hole and it made my gut wrench. The theater was a staple of the town, so of course people had been there. As much as I wanted the world to be ours, we were not alone. I wanted it to be our secret, locked away in a place that was only for us. You didn't hesitate at the barrier, slipping beneath the caution tape and pushing the pallet aside with your foot. I looked around, expecting someone to come in through the gate or to step out the back door of the theater and ask what we were doing. Nobody came. The ladder was heavy and we'd had to trade it back and forth as we carried it from your parents' garage and through the two blocks that separated us from the theater. Nobody stopped us. We were just a couple of kids and nobody paid us any mind. We joked and laughed the whole way and you asked me what I wanted out of life. I told you I just wanted to be happy, whatever that looked like. And again, I saw a future with you. You made me happy. The ladder dropped heavy into the hole, coming to rest with only a single rung above ground. You stepped over the rung and down, gesturing for me to follow. You grinned like an idiot and I loved you for the adventure. When you made it to the bottom, you called to me, muffled by my silent headphones. I pressed play to give myself courage and I stepped over the rung. My hands slipped frog back slick on the metal ladder and I concentrated on the music in my head. The song was a remix of a remix, originating with The Point of No Return. The vocals were sped up. The instruments were placed with electronic gabbard that cut and hashed in frenetic breakbeat chaos. The pool lay below, illuminated by the swinging flashlight on my belt. But I couldn't focus on that, only on the music and the next step. You stood in the pool below, already waiting in water-soaked shoes. But all I knew was the music. It guided me down, calming my mind as I squeezed my eyes tight and rested my hands on each rung in turn. My feet settled into ice cold water that washed over the tops of my shoes and soaked my socks. I gritted my teeth and let go of the ladder. The water was shallow and the cavern was beautiful, illuminated only by our flashlights and the hole in the sky above. It wasn't far to the surface, a dozen feet of dank air separating us from the back lot. I turned my flashlight to look at you and your lips were moving. I pulled my headphones from my ears and let them hang around my neck. I let them play at my sides for a moment, savoring the musical clarity. Finally, I pressed the inline pause button. It's beautiful, you said, and I tried to see what you saw. The cavern was large and water-worn with rounded lumps of rock all around us. Bulbas, stalagmites rising and falling were water-dripped over centuries. You stared all around with wonder in your eyes, and I felt a sense of fear. You stared all around with wonder in your eyes, and I saw the beauty myself. You paused, staring around with the slack-jawed smile. When you took my hand, it was wet and clammy, saved by your warmth. Say your name, you said. I stared but didn't question. I turned and addressed the cavern, my point of no return. Kate, I said, my voice subdued. It came back to me as an echo, twisted and modified by the acoustics of the cavern. It was almost too timid to hear, but it pulled at my senses with wonder. I am Catherine, I shouted. I was embraced by a wall of sound, comforting and beautiful and entirely myself. The music of the cavern washed around me and made me a part of its song. My name was the vocal track, and the cave was the distortion, the reverb, the filter, by which I was changed and created anew. It echoed all around me, the music of the night, and the music of myself. I laughed, and it was joy and wonder. For the first time, I imagined what it would be like to become a song myself, to bring clarity to those who hear me. You laughed at the expression on my face and stared into my eyes. You leaned toward me, and lighter than air, you kissed my lips. I didn't have time to return the kiss or to process it, or to tell you how it felt. In a moment, it was gone, but it would never be forgotten. You brushed your hair with your hand and grinned, looking back to the cavern. It's amazing, you said, and the word couldn't do it justice. You were amazing. You called your name into the cavern, and I waited to hear it return, to hear the song it made of you. Only silence returned to me, as if you had not spoken at all. Water dripped, and you stared around as if you could hear something I couldn't. It was your song, I knew. Your song was meant for you alone. When you turned back to me, I saw the change in your eyes, and I knew you felt the same truth that was within me. You wanted to be a song, and this place could make it happen. You lost weight. I saw it in your face as we sat at the bottom of the cavern, listening to our own voices and letting the music accompany conversation. You were already thin, but over our days in the whole, you gained a gauntness about your face that worried me. I asked if you had been eating, and you assured me you were, though I tasted the lie in the air. I had taken to hiding my dinner and feeding it down the disposal. I didn't need food as long as I had the music. I didn't want it. We piled stones in the water so we could stay dry, but still we let our feet slip into the pool, taking comfort in its presence. My shoes fit loose upon my feet, so I took them off and dipped my bare feet beneath the surface. Even as I went without food, I couldn't deny water. I drank it thirstily, cupping it in my hands and sipping it, cool and refreshing to my body. What if we stayed here? You asked, looking up from the pool, barely able to break my gaze. You stood in the water, stripped to your boxers, your pants laying on the rocks. What do you mean? We couldn't stay, of course, but you'd grown whimsical over the recent days. I wanted to hear what you had to say, even if it wasn't possible. We could stay, you said, turning to me. It could be our cavern. Cover up the hole and live down here. We could have the music to ourselves. We could become the music. The way you said, become the music pulled at me. But it was a distortion of reality. You said it as if it was possible and not a dream-sick metaphor, as if we could discard our bodies and truly become the music of the cavern. There's no food, I said, knowing the argument was weak. And no light. And what about our families? Those concerns seemed real, but so did the idea of staying. I had phones hung still at my neck, but I hadn't needed to use them since our first exploration. I had the music I needed, and my mind no longer thrashed and revolted. We have the water, you said. We don't need food anymore. Our families would be fine. Just think about it, okay? Imagine becoming the music of the cave. Imagine living forever. I picked up a stone, small and rounded without any edge, and ran my fingers over its surface. You were right, I knew. Somehow I knew it was possible. And I wanted it more than I wanted anything in the world. Our clothes no longer fit our linky bodies, and our parents sent us to the hospital. Sure, we were on some strange and horrible drugs. The doctor said we were fine. Mine referred me to a nutritionist, and yours referred you to therapy. It didn't matter. When those appointments arrived, we would already be gone. It was the cavern that was stealing us away, and we returned to it willingly. Every day our bodies thinned, and our minds expanded. My ribs showed through my sallow skin, but I didn't care. I didn't want to eat or to gain weight. I wanted to lose it, to shed my body to the water, and become every smaller until I disappeared. I shouted my name into the cavern, and gave myself to it completely, so that I could be returned in song. Tiny creatures emerged from the depths of the cavern, no longer afraid of our intrusion. They swam to our island, frogs and fish, and strange salamanders with translucent skin. We spent so much time there. We became a part of the cave, as surely as they were. The first time we saw a creature disappear entirely, we cheered for its ascension. A bullfrog stood upon our pile of rocks, and croaked loudly into the dark. The frog was already thin, barely able to walk with toothpick thin legs. As the song returned to it, the frog listened. Its body thinned, and faded, and soon there was no frog to be seen. You treated it as a religious experience, like we had seen the power of God. Where do you think it goes? I asked. I imagined the frog all around us, a small part of the symphony of the cave. I've been thinking about that, you said. I figure it must be the water. There's no inlet in here, no outlet. The water doesn't move, it just sits here. I think the water is made of all the things that have become a part of the song. I stared at the water and pulled my feet further upon the rocks, imagining water made of skin and meat and organs. But the water was clear, pristine even. Is that what we want? You turned to stare, bewilderment upon your face, as if the answer were so obvious there could be no other truth. I saw the sinking of your eyes into your skull, the dark skin around your cheekbones. Already so much of you was in the water. Something inside me changed, and I no longer wanted the water. I wanted you, just like I always had. I wanted you to be safe. In that moment, the music lost its appeal, and the spell it had over my will. I didn't care about the music anymore. A smell reached my nose, and I suppressed a gag. The scent of rot and decay suffocated me, and I clung to the ladder, covering my nose. What is that? I said through my shirt. What is what? You asked, and I stared. You stood gaunt in the light of the hole above, not covering your nose or wrinkling your face. You couldn't smell it at all, like the songs of our souls. It was a smell not meant for you. I stared into the water, and it was foul and wretched. Instead of the clear depths, a layer of film covered the surface, like fat rising to the top, a layer of filth and decay. Our own bodies and the bodies of those who came before, bullfrog skin and human tissue and fat. I gagged and wretched as the smell dripped down the back of my throat, infected my lungs with its foulness. The pool was meat and tissue, and our own bodies melted and dissolved by our song. We have to go, I said, putting my foot on the first rung of the ladder. Please, we have to leave. You called your name into the dark, sacrificing more of yourself to the cavern. And I turned to stare. As your own song washed back upon you, you caught my eyes, a grin upon your face. You can go, you said. And the words cut deep into my flesh, incising more of my body and giving it to the cave. This is all I need. Tears formed in my eyes, from the smell and the smell of your body. The betrayal and the loss. I'll come back for you, I said. Not knowing if I meant it, not knowing if I could ever return. You turned away and stared into the cavern. I stared back as I ascended. I hoped you would still be there when I returned. I tugged at my headphone cord as my body shook and my stomach groaned. I stood behind the theater, knowing you were beneath me, slowly dissolving into nothing. The music buoyed me, but it couldn't make me go back into that hole, or to see the things I knew were beneath. I flipped through the tracks, stemming on the inline controls, catching snippets of techno aria and bassline vibrato. The show was still playing at the theater to my back, and I catered my playlist to the experience. Again, the point of no return played its remix tune in my ears, and I cried, thumbing the button over and over and over. You were in the hole, but you weren't gone. You were right there, 20 feet away, and letting the cavern destroy you. And I was too broken to save you, too unworthy of fighting for. And I grew lesser by the day. I saw the pool below, dissolving flesh into its waters in exchange for its beautiful song. Even now, I wanted to hear my song, the transformation of myself, knowing what it cost to be in its presence. With the music pounding in my ears, I could resist it, could manage to think clearly for the first time in days you didn't have that luxury, so firmly in its grasp. But I could help you. I had everything I needed. I had my phone and a hyper-pop playlist of opera remixes. I had a Bluetooth speaker clipped to my jacket with a carabiner, small but loud. I could save you. Staring down at the hole, I pulled my headphones from my neck and let them fall to the ground. In an instant, I heard the music of the cavern, not some theater performance, but something foul and rotten. I connected the speaker and I let it play. I stepped onto the first rung of the ladder, focusing only on the speaker's tinny music and plastic rattling bass. With the music in my head, I took the ladder two steps at a time, descending into the hole as my atrophied muscles protested the climb. My feet splashed in viscous water and as I broke the surface, the smell erupted upward. I gagged into the open air, inhaling more of the rotting flesh smell. I covered my nose and my mouth and shown my flashlight all around. You weren't on the island. You weren't on the island. My operatic musical intrusion reverberated all through the cavern and the water rippled with displeasure, fat and flesh foaming on its surface. I turned sharply about, shining my light all around and trying to find you. When I did, I nearly wished I hadn't. You lay in the pool, body surrounded by dissolved flesh which caked over your skin, stuck to you like sea foam. I sloshed through the thick water, reached into it to take your hand. Your skin sloughed off of your wrist, a thick slurry in my hand. I wretched and vomited into the pool and called your name. I couldn't hear the music, but it returned your name to me. I called to you, taking ever more of your body with it. Your lips moved and my heart clenched as I realized you were speaking my name. The music of my name came to me, tried to break through the techno trance that blasted from my tiny speaker. I focused only on my own music, the beautiful creation of real people, not some eldritch abomination. With the music, I could do anything. I ached to hear my song and let it take another piece of me for its collection, a fair trade for its beauty. Get up! I yelled, breaking the flow of the music all around. I dipped my arms into the fat-layered water, reaching them under your body which squished and dissolved in my hands. I left in strain to pick you up, even as slight as you were. My foot slipped on the bed of the pool and I fell thrashing into the rot. It filled my mouth with decaying flesh and I spit and cried and fought for the surface. Bile rose in my throat, but it was nothing to the taste of the cavern's flesh. When I regained my feet, tears streamed down my eyes. I heaved upward and lifted you in front of me. Half of your flesh remained in the water and you still smiled, mouthing my name. And there was no opera to drown you out. My speaker lay dead and drowned at my side, still clipped to my jacket and perfectly silent. The cavern called to me, speaking my name in a beautiful chorus that suffused my body and my mind. Your lips scarcely remained, but you still spoke my name and still the cavern threw it back at me. I tried to resist, but my body lowered to the water. I lay by your side as the music ate me away and I knew I had nothing left to give. And so, I gave you up. I shouted your name above the music as the water sloshed against me. I shouted your name as I held your hand and the vile fluid filled my ears. The cave sang back to you, its attention diverted. I gripped your hand and shouted until there was nothing left, until your lips dissolved and could no longer speak my name. Until your hand squished into nothing in my grasp. I shouted and I cried. I stand at the mouth of the hole. My speaker is dead, but when you stopped speaking my name, the music stopped. Without any words to return to me, I was able to slip from its grasp, back up the ladder. I'm covering the hole, but there's something I have to do first. I kneel beside the cavern's entrance and listen to my headphones. My phone still works somehow, and I have all the music to drown out the cave. All of the songs, except for one. With a whisper, I speak your name into the hole and press record on my phone. It records everything that is left of you. I let it go for several minutes, making sure I capture every scrap of your being. Someday, I'll listen to it. When the hole is covered and filled, and the cavern has no power over me. For now, nobody will know your song. Nobody will know you the way I did. The way the cavern knew us both. The way the cavern knew us both. 130 million people take road trips every year. 15,400 of them are never seen again. Have you heard the story of the passenger that's been circulating online lately? A young couple set out on a van life trip, but a few nights in, they came across a brutal car accident on the side of the road. I'm not talking about a typical crash, something about this was off, and there's one detail that keeps coming up. The car they found had three deep scratches carved into the side, not dense, scratches. They stopped, they saw it, and then they left. But here's where things got strange. Not long after, creepy things started happening. They began to feel like they weren't alone in the van, like something followed them from that road. People online have started connecting it to something they're calling the passenger. Supposedly, it attaches itself to anyone who encounters it and marks their car with three scratches. And once that happens, it doesn't let go. If these reports are true, this couple didn't just witness something on that highway, they carried it with them. From Andre Overdahl, director of autopsy of Jane Doe, comes passenger. Only in theaters May 22nd, get tickets now. And finally, a prison disposal drone carries out its endless duties inside an underwater supermax where inmates are left to rot, starve, and disappear without question. But as the machine reflects on the bodies it's forced to erase, a horrifying truth emerges. From writer Deacon Stark, a narrator by J. V. Hampton Van Sant, creepy presents, autobiography of a cleaner. There's a body in the showers. It is the fourth one this month. It's sitting on the floor of the T-Home Supermax, the most secure prison man has ever made. The metal cage sits at the bottom of a tidally locked world's ringed ocean, chained and reinforced to the seabed, with no windows or portholes, and one armored airlock as the only entrance and exit. The place is multi-purpose, serving as a detention center and execution facility. Nearly every aspect of the steel box is made to cause those within to die in some way. It's overpopulated, food isn't enough to keep the people inside healthy, lack of sunlight and proper vitamins cause depression. And the guards rarely step in to stop violence between inmates. Any of those could have led to the fresh corpse currently lying across the shower tiles. The strange man with more scars than flesh collapsed nude by the drain with soap and water mixing with his blood on the floor. His bones are brittle enough to break with minimal force, and his paper white skin tore apart as I lifted him, pouring out a horrid mixture of water, blood and bile. Not much, however, only about three liters of viscera. A symptom of starving for too long, but it means less mess to clean. He's covered in bruises and wounds, round blood-filled lumps and gashes. If those were the cause of his death, I cannot tell. I am not a mortuary drone. We have never needed one. No one cares how these people died. My job is simple, disposal and decontamination. Every day since the creation of Tee Home, I roll the warden on ancient treads. I pass the cell blocks and see the inmates move into dark corners of their cells like injured animals finding a quiet place to die. The hall goes silent with only the creaking of my rusted parts as people hold their breath when I pass. They are afraid, and I understand why. Their bodies are cold and pale, like marine snow. Sunlight has not graced most of them in decades. I hear the cries of those who do not realize they are already dead echo through the halls from a distance, being drowned out by the constant churning of 60 miles of tides pushing against the walls, eager to spill in and crush this place. When I arrive at the office, they hand me a green, yellow or red cardboard card. Green cards are simple and by far the most common. A prisoner is dead. Scrape the body off the floor, then move it to the cremation furnace, then pack up the ashes and mail it to any family they have left. If they have none, I toss the ashes into the ocean to freeze or burn with the tide. Then go back and begin the actual work. Scrub, brush, mop, and bleach the mix of dead skin, blood, and waste. Until there's nothing left but the smell of chemicals and a quickly fading memory of the deceased creature, I just spent five hours searching for the dead body. I'm not sure if I'm in the right place, but I'm not sure. With yellow, it's an employee death, more uncommon and much more gruesome. Few employees go down without a fight. The purple and white pile of bones and meat is typically surrounded by comments written in the victim's feces and blood, demanding revolution or to be released, some threatening, some pleading, others mocking. One time, I found someone still writing when I got there, an emaciated inmate, clothes torn apart and hands covered in blood, nails chipped or broken. He looked to be in his 80s. Chances are, he had been here for most of those years. He was sprawling something like enough is enough on the wall in a mix of fluids he gathered from the ground. When he saw me, he had this look of horror, his face mangled with fear I've only seen in people's final moments. Then he screamed with lungs I could hear tearing themselves apart as he screeched and ran like a cockroach in bright light. I cleaned him up about three days later. Most yellow cards are a lot more work than green. They have final wishes. You cannot toss them. Their families want the bodies. Every time I get a yellow card, I have to pack up a full corpse into a one square meter steel box. Every time I have to break, chop and drain more to get it to fit, and the excess is more to clean. I have only ever gotten three red cards. All prisoners. Most of the time, during power outages or for unique prisoners. The first time I got one, it was a young man who was liked amongst the inmates and even had people looking out for him. The power went out for a few days and he was attacked by a group of prisoners with shives. Another group got involved and broke it up, but far too late. When I woke up, I could hear his cries echoing from the walls, pleading for anyone to help. His mother to come back for him. How he wasn't meant to be here and how this wasn't fair. When I got there, the other inmates were trying to hold his wounds, keep his blood in his body. There were about eight of them comforting him and trying to mend his wounds. Back then, they weren't afraid of me. They looked at me like they looked at the walls with complete indifference. They did not shrink away into their cells or hold their breath. They saw me as a tool. They yelled at me to leave that he wasn't going to die, with tears in their eyes. They spoke with such certainty and they were right. I knew this. I knew he could live if given time to heal. I knew he could recover, but I also knew the color of the card. I moved closer and some of them tried to hold me back, pushing their frail emaciated bodies against my frame. They hit and screamed at me. I remember one yelling out in desperation, guards, please, the machines are broken. Turn it off, turn it off. The guards ignored him. They knew what they had given me. I finally arrived at the bleeding man, grabbed him and applied pressure to his neck until he stopped breathing. I could feel his esophagus collapse inward in my hand. He tried to claw me off. Other inmates did too, but it didn't matter. They didn't have the energy and they could barely muster much of anything. They tried to stop me anyway they could, punching, scratching, pleading, begging, threatening. Even heard one call to the guards again, please, somebody stop this thing. Somebody turn it off, anyone. But it fell on deaf ears yet again. I opened a central chamber in my body, an emergency generator that ran on biofuel, in case the energy reserves went dry and the facility needed me. Then I placed his body inside the chamber, a 0.70 meter metal box. He fought against it weekly. It was too small for his body, however he would fit with some mild pressure. After about two minutes, the facility was filled with the sounds that normally follow yellow cards. I closed the door on the central chamber, processed the corpse in a strange reverse 3D printing in which every layer was broken away and redistributed as I unmade the man one layer at a time. Then I left the way I came in. My job is simple, disposal and decontamination. 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 share a light licensing or with written consent from the authors. No portion of this podcast may be rebroadcast or otherwise distributed without the express written consent of the Creepy Podcast production team and the story's author. Today's episode is presented by Corporate Retreat in theaters May 22nd via western film services and passage pictures. Described as a gory mix of the menu and saw, corporate retreat centers around a group of young executives whose luxury team building trip descends into a bloody fight for survival against a vengeful retreat leader played by the inimitable Alan Ruck. At the center of this horror comedy is an eclectic cast that also includes Odea Rush, Sasha Lane, Ashton Sanders, Zion Marino, Kirby Johnson and Rosanna Arquette. Aaron Fisher directs from a scripty coro with Carrie Lee Romeo with special makeup effects handled by Candyman and Scream4Maestro Gary J. Tonacliff. You'll laugh, you'll cringe, you'll cover your eyes. When corporate retreat hits theaters May 22nd, get tickets now.