He was elbow-deep in some guy’s intestines when it happened. It was some fat, red-faced jackass who’d cut him off on the interstate. The bastard had the audacity to flip him off, too—right before the Creeper ran him off the road and cracked open his chest cavity like an overripe gourd.

Now dragging his leaking, bloated corpse through the grass with all the grace of a man on his last nerve, muttering to himself—when he suddenly stopped.

His truck was gone.

Not stolen. Not parked wrong. Not misplaced like a set of keys.

Gone.

He turned in slow, deliberate circles. Scanning the tree line. The empty road. The blood-soaked grass.

There.

A good mile off, his truck fishtailing down the road like some drunk teen had taken the wheel. Not for long because-

CRASH.

Right into a telephone pole.

The Creeper let out a screech so shrill it made the nearby cornfield curl and decay. He dumped that body and tore through the field, his wings shooting out of his body like a fucked up bat—batmaaannn—claws slicing through cornstalks, trenching the earth behind him as he shot through at full speed. He hit the wreck with enough force to buckle the metal under his boots and ripped the driver’s side door clean off its hinges. Ready to kill whatever idiot had the audacity to touch his ride.

It was you.

You.

That same little shit he had crushed this morning. Not metaphorically. Literally. The one who’d tried to run, slipped in the mud, and screamed so good when your skull cracked like a melon under his tire. The one he definitely stuffed in the trunk afterward, not even bothering to check the kill—because who the fuck survives a tire to the face?

And yet here you were. Your head was a bit lopsided and your eyes bloodshot but you were alive.

And currently winding up a crowbar for a full overhead swing right at his face.

It cracked him in the cheek hard enough to snap his head sideways. Black blood spattered across the window. For a second—just a teeny tiny second—he stumbled.

Not because it hurt. But because it made no damn sense.

You shouldn’t be moving. You shouldn’t be breathing.

And as he stared at you—dirt-caked and bloodstained— when he realized something very, very stupid:

He was going to have to kill you again.