u/Clowndude787

Here's where it began

Things have been quiet the last few weeks. The guy, or monster - whatever the fuck it was - that was chasing me didn’t appear after my stint in the hospital. When I was discharged, I laid low in a safehouse underneath a Chinese restaurant I used to run with some of the guys in Chinatwown. I kept calling my father from payphones, and after some relenting, he agreed to see me at his house in Westchester. I had to prep. 

Underneath the bed in the safehouse - or saferoom since it was a cramped, little room - I hid a wad of cash underneath one of the floorboards. I pulled out a couple cans of beans, which I had cleaned out and used to hide the cash, and pulled out rolls of hundreds. Counting it up, I had about fifty grand there.

Didn’t matter now, I had to get the fuck out of the city before that fucking thing caught up with me again. I went to the other side of the room and pulled back one of the boards in the wall, and reached inside. Good, my duffelbag was still there. I opened it up, and inside was an Uzi, two Glocks, a .32 revolver, and a sawed-off shotgun with enough ammo for it all. Having it would make me feel better, but I kept replaying the images of the bullet holes imediately closing on the fucking guy. Maybe I had to aim for the head?

I stuffed the cash in my jacket pockets and swung the duffelbag over my shoulder. I went into the back of the restaurant and picked up a set of keys from the hook. The car was still parked in the alley behind the restaurant. thank God. I got into the car and drove the fuck out of there. After about two hours, I arrived to my father’s house, my neck sore from constantly turning around and looking left and right to see if I was being tailed. He didn’t let me in the house, didn’t hug me, and didn’t ask me how I was. 

“What do you want?” he asked, his arms crossed. I could see the outline of a gun underneath his white tank top. 

I looked down at the floor and said: “I just wanna know… how fucked am I? Any updates at all?”

“The boss’s niece is dead. After a while in that fuckin’ coma her body finally gave up… That’s all on you!”

“Dad, I-“ 

My father put his hand up and said: “You missed Alphonso’s funeral. Your mother is a goddamned wreck. His fuckin’ casket couldn’t even be opened, his fucking head was MUSH!”

I looked up, shooting my father a look. He scoffed and said, “Don’t gimme that fuckin’ look. You brought all this shit on yourself!”

“The boss sent that fucking thing after me! That THING killed Al, not ME!”

“It’s never your fuckin’ fault, huh? Never the work of Robby, always someone else! There’s rules in this life you gotta follow, shit that can’t be broken, and you broke it. You hurt the family member of not just any made guy, but the fuckin’ BOSS!”

“Always about the life, never us. Why do you think me and Marco ended up in the life? We had nothing else! Remmeber when that guy hit me with the car when I was twelve? Broke my leg, doctor’s thought I’d have a limp forever. What’d you make me do?”

My father tured his back to me and said: “Fuck this, I’m going inside. I don’t need this shit!”

“ANSWER ME!” I yelled.

“Your brother Al wasn’t in the life, whose fault is that, you ungrateful fuck! I gave you boys EVERYTHING! Education, food, a roof over your head! A damned good home life!”

“That is NOT what I asked, damnit! You made me and Marco find the guy two years later and help you beat on him. Marco went too far and crushed the guy’s skull in, and what’d you do? You had us hide the goddamned body. You never made Alphonso do shit like that.”

“I wanted you two to be men… tough…” started my father. “I wanted you two to never want. And this life is hard. I toed the line… was courteous to the right guys… never stepped out on your mother… but being good in this life doesn’t always work out. Some people wanna take advantage of others, no matter what. How could I live with myself if you guys couldn’t defend yourselves? Who woulda taught you guys to fight for yourselves if I wasn’t in the picture no more? For your mother, your brother?”

I looked down back at the floor and said: “This is all fucked, I fucked my life up, I know… what do I do, Dad? This thing… I shot it and the fucking bullet holes closed up right away. I’m… I’m scared and don’t know what the fuck to do.”

My father stepped closer to me and put his hand on my shoulder and said: “You gotta go. There ain’t much I know about this thing, but it’s scary!” 

I said: “You know about it? Have you seen it?” I asked, my heart thumping in my chest. Maybe this was a way out. My dad’s eyes went from hazel to green, and he pushed me down to the ground. 

The thing laughed and started mocking me: “God, you’re such a snivelling little shit. Woe is me horseshit constantly, how the fuck did you ever get to where you are now? Oh, I know, Mommy and Daddy used their influence and money to make sure their little boy Robby got everything. How sickening, no wonder why you ruined everything you touched, NOTHING was expected of you!”

“What the FUCK!? WHERE ARE MY PARENTS!?” I screamed as I crawled back on the grass. 

The monster rubbed his stomach and said: “Coursing through me. Your mother wasn’t much of a fight, she passed out after I pulled her arms off. Your father, though. That was one tough son of a bitch! I had both his legs and an arm off, and the fucker was still crawling! Your little calls every day on a payphone gave me a good listen and some awesome info! And don’t go running to Marco, either. There’s not much left of him!

“WHY!? Why them? You’re after ME!”

The monster said: “Nuh-uh! The boss said: ‘Him and everyone who helped birth and cultivate the fuck!’ His EXACT words!”

As the monster began his next sentence, I pulled out my sawed off shotgun and jumped up, then quickly unloaded on his head, his flesh and blood turning into a mist. His body fell back, along with his head. I kicked his body a few times and put a couple more rounds in him to be safe. When the last twitch happened, I ran back to my car and started it. After I threw the gun in the back, I turned back around to the front, and saw him in my passenger seat. I couldn’t even get a word out before he said: “You thought it’d be that easy? Dumbass!” He punched me square in the face, everything went black. 

I woke up after what felt like an eternity. Feeling around after coming to, I could feel a bunch of grass. After another minute of trying to find my bearings, I was able to sit up and looked at the sky. It was a cloudy, dusky red. Red clouds covered everything, I couldn’t see a single bit of blue sky or any kind of sun. Just thick red. 

Looking around the row of houses made me realize it was my neighborhood, and I was in front of the home my wife and I built… the same one she killed herself in all those months ago. I hadn’t been back to it in a while, ever since her funeral, and the neighbors had called me a couple of times complaining about over growth. But it looked neat, trimmed. My numeriate Nextdoor neighbor, Mrs. Bellavita, walked outside in her robe, something I’d never thought I’d see. This woman was always insanely uptight and particular, no way she was limping outside in her half opened robe. Covering my eyes, I called out to her, but she stood there and stared. 

One by one, each of the other neighbors came out of their houses and stared. I stumbled into the house, which was unlocked, and walked into my living room. I called out to my wife, parents, neighbors… nothing. I walked back towards my bedroom, and the door was cracked open. I knocked on the door, and it opened a bit further, creaking loudly. I looked inside and my jaw dropped. My wife’s lifeless body was hanging from the ceiling, her robe opened, exposing her pregnant stomach. Blood dripped from her mouth and nose onto her stomach. I fell to the floor and reached up, rubbing her stomach. 

Then it began to gurgle and seemingly… shake. A bunch of black liquid spilled out from between her legs onto the floor, followed by a black lump. The lump began to sizzle, and a small, reddish-brown arm popped out of the black lump. A baby connected to a rotted umbilical cord jumped up at me and began to attack me. I grabbed its neck and threw it down. The baby began to laugh, and the laugh got deeper. It grew into a full grown man in front of me, and the creature stood in front of me, his green eyes piercing through me. 

“Second time is supposed to be better! Why not have an audience to share this precious moment with?” 

All my neighbors were inside the room, point at me and laughing. The laughing became deafening, causing me to stumble back and out of the room. Then the noise stopped. I opened up my eyes and looked around, I was in a funeral home, and an organ played in the distance. An usher pushed me into one of the viewing rooms, and pushed me next to the priest. The priest pointed at me, then at the coffin. I looked around and saw my friends and family: my parents and brother Marco were front and center. I called out to them and they didn’t even notice me. The priest yelled at me to open up the coffin again, so I did. Inside was a body with its head crushed, the brains and blood splattered everywhere. The crushed head turned a bit towards me and said: “You did this to me, Robby… you did this to me”. 

Then the crowd began repeating what the body said, getting deafeningly loud and making me fall to the floor. The body stood up from its coffin, its blood and brains trailing behind it. Green eyes formed in its skull, then the pinstripe suit overlayed the plain blue one the corpse wore. 

The creature had be by the throat and said: “This is all your fault, ROBBY!”. It punched me in the throat, and I woke up, naked and in front of the deli the boss owned. Two police officers picked me up and dragged me into their squad car, talking about how I was “insane” and “running around nude”. I know what I saw, I felt the creature’s hand around my throat. One of the cops even spoke about me being found with a duffel bag. There goes the last of my chances at survival. 

They covered me with a towel and threw me in the back of their car. As they cuffed me and put my seatbelt on, I looked out the window at the guys… guys I called my friends, guys I worked for… and behind them was the creature, his hand on my boss’s shoulder, his piercing green eyes glistening in the sun, while he smiled at me, and clicked a finger gun at me. I realized it then and there: he wasn’t done with me, but he was gonna take his damn time with me. 

Now I wanted him to kill me, and he wouldn’t… at least not for a while…

I heard somewhere that Crackles is being removed from the ISE's, and even taken off the sales floor. His page on the website has also been taken down. Will there be a recall and replacement heads sent out, does anyone know? Supposedly it's an issue with the springs in his head.