Jeepers Creepers -
The engine turned over on the first try.
Jamie fumbled, pulled his camping lighter from his pocket. Riley threw the bottle into the fuel tank’s open valve. Jamie flicked the lighter. The flame caught the trail of black ichor—which burned like gasoline.
They drove until dawn. They didn’t speak. They didn’t cry. They just drove. And twenty-three years later, Riley still checks her backseat every time she gets in the car. She still locks the doors before the sun goes down. And she still wakes up some nights, sure she hears it—flap, flap, flap—just outside the window, waiting for the next spring.
The cellar door ripped off its hinges. Riley grabbed a broken bottle, held it like a knife. The creature descended, its wings folding tight to its body. Up close, it reeked of copper and formaldehyde. It didn’t attack. It just crouched, tilting its head side to side, studying them like a taxidermist examining fresh pelts. Jeepers Creepers
“Nowhere, apparently.” Riley grabbed her phone. No signal. The map on her lap showed a dashed line—an old county road decommissioned in the 1980s. “We walk. There was a church back about a mile.”
The harvest moon hung low and swollen over the backroads of Poho County, a jaundiced eye watching the rusted Chevrolet Impala crawl along the asphalt. Inside, sixteen-year-old Riley tapped the steering wheel, her younger brother, Jamie, snoring softly in the passenger seat. They were three hours from home, taking the “scenic route” back from a college visit.
The creature dropped from the steeple, landing without a sound. It tilted its head, mimicking a curious bird. Then it spoke, not in a whisper, but in the dead mailman’s voice. The engine turned over on the first try
“I’ve been waiting for fresh ones.”
Riley kicked, clawed, bit. Nothing. Its grip was iron. She felt her vision narrowing to a tunnel. In that fading light, she saw the creature’s back—the patches on its wings. One was a piece of a high school letterman jacket. Another was a scrap of a police uniform. The third was a square of orange cloth. Prison issue.
“Gonna get you, too…”
The cellar was a crawl space, barely four feet high. They pressed themselves against the dirt wall, holding their breath. The floorboards above groaned. The creature was inside the church. It wasn’t walking. It was… sniffing. A wet, rhythmic snuffling, like a dog tracking a scent.
The voice was a low, ragtime warble, tinny like an old phonograph. It drifted from the drainage ditch ahead. Riley slowed. A rusted culvert pipe jutted from the bank, and something was blocking it. Not something. Someone.