Creepypasta & r/nosleep Stories

Tales from the Gas Station (7/?)

I logged all the invoices that had piled up while I was out, then I emptied the trash cans. I was hoping that I might run into the cowboy, but the only thing in the men's room was an obese Hispanic trucker punishing the toilet and surrounding air with an unholy fury that deserves its own scary story.

The sun was starting to go down when I hobbled out to the dumpster, balancing garbage bags against my crutches and probably looking like a baby deer learning to walk. You know, if that deer were drunk and two-legged and carrying several bags of garbage. The scorched earth near the dumpster was the same as I had left it: blackened down to the subsoil. Somewhere just past the start of the trees was another patch of smoldered remains, one that I neglected to mention in the police report, one that might look to the casual observer like the remains of a human body.

Before I turned to go back in, I noticed something odd on the side of the dumpster. At first, I thought it was a child's toy, stuck to the dirty outside wall. But then I realized that it was moving, breathing, crawling slowly and eating the gooey drippings off the rust of the dumpster. The thing looked like a giant tomato caterpillar, about eight inches long, and as the sun went down I swear I could see the thing give off its own light source. The squishy caterpillar-thing didn't seem to mind my presence, and even let me feed it an old starburst that I had in my pocket. A yellow, because like all people, I hate the yellow starburst. The critter bioluminesced a little brighter as it ate the taffy and I gave it a gentle pet. Its hide wasn't as wet as it appeared. In fact, it seemed to be covered in tiny clear hairs.

"You're not so bad," I said while it nibbled at the candy. "Not everything out here needs to be scary, huh?" It wiggled and crawled away to a place on the back of the dumpster with more gunk, and I went back into the gas station.

Marlboro has taken up smoking again. He'd quit for a while, but then explained that the suffering he was causing himself by not smoking grossly outweighed the suffering he was causing us through second-hand smoke, and Mathematically speaking, it didn't make any sense for him to quit. I had hoped that he was beginning to shed his cultist philosophy after the entire compound mysteriously vanished, but now I'm starting to fear that he can't be rehabilitated.

Oh well.

Today was a pretty normal (well not normal, but average) day at the gas station. We had some strange people visit. We had some normal people visit, too. And along the way I zoned out, finished a book I'd been reading, made some boring journal entries, and even got online to browse the internet for a while.

There's another package sitting under the counter, addressed to me from a return address I don't recognize. I took a gamble with the last package and it turned out to be something great. But that was before Spencer tried to kill me, and once again my gut is telling me not to open it.

I got a phone call today at the store a few hours after sundown. It was pretty late, hard to say when exactly. Marlboro was asleep in his hammock in the dry storage room and I couldn't remember the last customer. This was somewhere in that temporal wasteland between dusk and dawn.

"Hello?"

"Jack, listen very carefully. You don't know me. What I'm about to tell you will save your life, but only if you follow my instructions and do exactly what I say. In the drawer to your right is a pencil and paper. Get them, and write this down. These are the rules to your survival."

"One. Do not leave the gas station. Do not go outside under any circumstances.

Two. Do not drink the tap water. Don't even touch it. Don't smell it. Don't look at it. It's bottled water from here on out.

Three. Don't trust your eyes.

Four. Barricade the-"

"Hang on, hang on, where'd you say the pen was?"