Link to article: The Spiciest Pizza.
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[[>]] [[module Rate]] [[/>]] It is 9:56 at night at your town’s local Spicy Crust Pizzeria. Just four more minutes before closing, and you are itching to get your shift over with. You never anticipated that you would work until closing, but it somehow managed to sneak up on you, like it had yesterday, and the day before that. You had thought the job to be a good way of earning some extra cash to sling around during the later years of high school, but you always thought it to be a temporary arrangement, one you’d cast aside when faced with something better. Four years of community college later, and something better never came, and you stuck around the greased floors of this hole in the wall. Only now, you were here full time. Something’s gotta pay the bills. As the minute hand ticked over the twelve, you put up your last chair and locked the door behind you. Technically, you shouldn’t be leaving just yet, as there was still a table and a half’s worth of chairs still sitting on the ground. Bill might be paying you to close, but he wasn’t paying you a cent after ten o’clock, so as far as you were concerned, the chairs were his problem now. It wasn’t like he was the shining picture of a protestant work ethic himself, as he seemed fond of taking off on a shift whenever he damn well felt like it. You quickly stopped ruminating on the topic. You were free now, this job wasn’t going to take up any more of your time than it already had to. Thankfully, you finally arrived at the front door of your apartment. Quickly, you tossed the full weight of your body onto your bed, not bothering to change out of your uniform, as sweet oblivion was all you could think about at that moment. As you felt yourself drifting off into the ether, quite a rude awakening presented itself to you in the form of your landline ringing. Groaning, you pulled a pillow over your head and waited for the piercing beeping to subside. And you waited. And waited. And you waited. > {{H- hello? Who is this?}} > {{Yeah, hi, it’s Bill. Listen, I know you just got off of your closing shift, which thank you for, by the way, but there- there’s this other thing that I you- we uh, gotta do. See, there’s this customer that ordered a pizza pretty dang close to the closing time, which, heh- yeah, it’s a dick move, I know, but an order’s an order, and it looks like it slipped past us, and they still haven’t gotten their pizza. So you’re gonna have to- to do that. Yeah.}} You almost hung up on him right then and there. Bill was always a little aloof, but he must be near delusional if he thought you were going to deliver a pizza, off the clock, past closing, to some random fatass in god knows what part of this stupid hick town. You also resisted the urge to call Bill a liar, as you were at the pizzeria the entire day, and had not heard that phone make a beep past 9:25. As a matter of fact, you could call him a liar, what did he know, he wasn’t in the pizzeria at all since 4:00, he wouldn’t know jack. Luckily for your job, these thoughts stayed in your head, and before you had the chance to self-terminate, Bill presented you with an offer most peculiar. > {{I know this is probably like a real- really bad time for you, but you’re the only one that’s available at this hour right now. So look, just- deliver this one pizza for us, and tell ya what, I think a promotion could be in store for you.}} > {{A promotion?}} > {{Yeah, pay raise and everything. Right hand to god.}} The offer of a promotion surprised you enough to where you forgot to think about if he even had the authority to give you one. If you did get that promotion, which was practically being offered on a silver platter, you could finally pay your rent on time, and actually have a decent bit of money left over. Maybe getting promoted would look good enough on his resume for you to finally look for a better job. Bill’s still an asshole, though. > {{Okay. Where am I delivering?}} > {{Can’t really say right now, but I’ll call you at the pizzeria in about 20 minutes. Bye.}} And with that, Bill hang up on you. With your prospective promotion in arms reach, you don’t have the energy or patience to question why Bill was being so secret about what was probably just a very cold pizza by now. You simply grab your coat, and walk back out into the night. Walking back to the pizzeria, you only just begin to notice how eerie your trek to and from work can be. Your town is, after all, quite small and out of the way, which means that it had none of the lights and noise that would come from the bustling downtown of a major city. No, for you your trek to work meant an awkward 15 minutes shuffling through the quiet hinterlands of your town's suburbs. It wasn’t like you were feeling your way through the pitch black of the country or anything, the streetlamps which lined the empty roads gave you enough light for you to see where you’re going, but also illuminated just enough for you to look into the precipice of places where you couldn’t see. Your town isn't doing the best, finance-wise, which reflected in the quality of housing on this side of town, which fell short of stellar, to say the least. More than a few windows were boarded up, the wood of the porches were rotting and being eaten by moss and fungi, and of course, there were no working lighting fixtures to be seen, leaving the streetlamps to just barely light up the fronts of the house, giving you the feel that they were almost staring at you from beyond the pale. You wonder if anyone is looking right back at you from the shroud of darkness. You think about how fast a human is able to run. Shoving that thought to the back of your mind, you finally cross the street and come into view of the empty strip mall where your town’s very own Spicy Crust Pizzeria was located. As you step between the shuttered nail salon and convenience store with your keys in hand, you stare through the glass walls of the establishment and peer into the pitch darkness which began right around where the second table on the left was. You know, the one where you hadn’t finished stacking- The three chairs which you flippantly left all over the ground now sat neatly in a row, upside down on that table. A shard of ice runs up your back as you try and parse who possibly could’ve done that, because it sure as hell wasn’t you. None of the other high schoolers that helped run this place cared a smidgeon more than you did about whether or not the chairs were stacked correctly come closing, and you were the only one closing that night anyways. The only set of keys were in your hand, which you quickly found out needn’t be the case when you discovered that the door was already unlocked. It would be a lie to say that you weren’t at least a little nervous at the prospect of the pizzeria not being completely empty, but the logical half of your brain decided enough was enough, and you dismissed your wild fantasies about axe murderers or roaming skinwalkers. Ordering yourself into a relative sense of security, you flick on the lights, which still made you jump as a tiny part of yourself still expected a humanoid silhouette to be standing off ominously in a corner. Aside from the chairs, everything is as expected. Before you were able to search for the nondescript pizza you were meant to be delivering, the phone at the front began to ring, and as embarrassing as it is to admit, you hurriedly picked up the phone to hear Bill’s dopey voice so that you would have at least one familiar face with you. > {{Hey, so the pizza’s on the first table in the back. You’re delivering to 423 Hefford Avenue. Be there in less than thirty minutes. Company policy and all that.}} > {{Yeah, got that, and I just got a question about- about the pizzeria, cause I closed at around ten, and I was just wondering if you ever came back after, or-}} > {{Also, when you get the pizza, don’t open it at any point.}} Although he started off in his usual informal, dopey way of speaking, you felt as though Bill was being uncharacteristically– stern, was the right word? He enunciated his words far more clearly and had far more bass in his voice than you had ever heard him speak with, and spoke with the conviction you would expect a SWAT responder to have, not the middling manager of an irrelevant pizza chain in the middle of nowhere. And you already weren’t going to open the pizza, so you really didn’t get the urgentness in which he barked that last command at you. > {{The way to 423 Hefford is pretty confusing, and it's a bit of a ways there, so I want you to take- ahem- there’s a prepaid cellphone in the safe in the back, take it in case you ever get lost or anything, I’ll answer. The code to the safe’s on the pizza box.}} Once again, before you could question what exactly Bill just said, he hung up on you, but this time, you were too bewildered to be angry at him for essentially ordering you around. You thought about the peculiarity of the orders you had just received, you were delivering a pizza, not meth, so you question the need to use a burner phone like you were a drug dealer. Besides, he put his phone number on the list pinned up on the wall with all the other employees. If you really needed to call him, you could just use your regular phone, the one that was made in the last decade. You shove those thoughts aside as you perform your last twist of the safe’s dial, cracking it open, expecting there to be a modestly sized stack of cash or the property deed that you would have to resist stealing, instead you see two lonely items– a prepaid cell phone, and a small handgun. Mildly surprised, you take the phone. It’s not that seeing the gun itself was that surprising to you, you just didn’t peg Bill as that type of guy. Closing the safe door, you still haven’t shaken how oddly specific Bill worded this specific order. He’d never expressed that much concern for if the delivery drivers knew where they were going, probably because he trusted them enough to know how to use a GPS. And even if you didn’t, you knew where Hefford Avenue was. Right by the Stevenson & Carson Projects. As you take a sharp left into your municipality’s infamous housing tract, you feel remarkably less safe than you feel you should be, even with a car protecting you, and a small revolver poking into the side of your pocket. Your town has had the unfortunate distinction of having the highest mortality rate in the area, and a large portion of that statistic is thanks to the Stevenson & Carson Projects. Almost monthly, like it’s a scheduled event, some sort of massive tragedy would befall the denizens of this town, and it would always come out of this seemingly cursed neighborhood. A kidnapping here, a mass shooting there, an attempted terrorist attack one time, even a falling satellite, all were events that had occurred within or out from the Projects. It’s a wonder anyone still lives there, a fact a bit more bewildering than the speed in which the local news covered each incident that happened in the Projects, way before word of mouth can even have an opportunity to spread. If you didn’t know any better, you’d wager that they were orchestrating these events so they’d have a story to tell. Either way, you felt uneasy driving past the Projects even at day, let alone at a hair’s width of midnight. Pulling over off to the side, you notice how eerily empty the entire neighborhood seemed to be. Even the derelict hinterlands you brushed past earlier had signs of habitation, with rustbucket cars, and indented stairs that showed at least somebody was in the area relatively recently. Not here. The houses, although much nicer than the ones on your side of town, were barren of any personality. No lawn decorations, no cars in the driveway, and not even any window dressings. Some houses didn’t even have any paint. The streets were better paved than anywhere else in town too, with the asphalt not having one dent or pothole taken out of it anywhere, as far as your eyes can see. It made sense for the area, as there wasn’t a single car accompanying yours on either side of the road, anywhere. The entire neighborhood had a perpetual feeling of being constructed last week, which gave it an air of indifferent unease which made you ask if there was anyone around to hear you scream. Maybe the nearby elementary school would, if it wasn’t the middle of the night. You suppose that’s what the gun is for. Before stepping out of the car, you lifted up the mysterious pizza box, the odd weight distribution of what was allegedly a pizza in there throwing you off again, making you almost drop the box on the spotless road. Wanting to get out of this passively hostile environment as soon as possible, you quickly shuffle over to 432 Hefford Avenue, which was about as remarkable as the rest of the neighborhood. You gave the blank white door a knock, to no response. Suddenly, your burner phone came to life in a flurry of beeps and vibration, breaking the veil of silence. > {{Drop the pizza off in the backyard of the house.}} > {{What?}} > {{In the backyard. The gate’s locked, but it's just a latch, so you should be able to let yourself in. When you enter the yard, you should see a pretty big tree by the center. Just leave the box somewhere by the base of the tree and you’ll be done. Customer request.}} > {{Why-}} Your inquiries were met with silence as Bill hung up on you once again. You had almost grown desensitized to how weird he had been recently, dismissing the nightly delivery out of nowhere, the weird burner phone instructions, and the gun in the safe, but the latest batch of instructions pulled you violently back into reality as you question whether you’re delivering a pizza or feeding a lion. Of course. A crushing realization befell you like a bunch of weights on your shoulders that all of this must have been some sort of shitty prank. Just a ruse to waste your time because he felt like it. But what if it wasn’t? Your promotion was one step away, practically in your hands, and if you walk away now, you risk potentially squandering the opportunity, wasting the last hour of your life. You contemplate just leaving the box at the doorstep and saying you did all that weird shit, but if the customer did request the box in the backyard you could risk a complaint… If this really is a prank, you don’t really have much time left to waste, right? Walking across the perfectly trimmed lawn and over to the latch gate, you notice the first outlier you’ve seen here all night. Although the gate's materials seemed to be in perfect condition, the structural integrity of the gate very much wasn’t, with what seemed to be a modestly sized hole punched through it, big enough to fit a large dog, or a goat or something. You’re torn between a sense of distress at what possibly could’ve happened here or a strange sense of relief that this neighborhood was more normal than you gave it credit for. Whichever way you end up leaning, you let yourself through the gate. Turning on your phone’s flashlight, and you start to think you may have been right to have been distressed. There was indeed a tree by the center of the yard, but what Bill neglected to tell you was that there seemed to be an impromptu tree fort sitting on top of its branches. You cannot see into the fort itself. You turn left, and you see where the material for the tree fort came from. The back of the house was almost completely mutilated, with bricks, planks, window panes, insulation, and roof shingles all haphazardly ripped out of the walls by what looked like was without any tools, like someone had simply ripped them out of there with their bare hands. You hold your breath, and resolve to quickly make your delivery and not give this fever dream of a night a second thought once you make it home. You somewhat crudely toss the pizza box on the floor, the impact of which forces the cover open, spilling the contents onto the grass. There wasn’t any pizza in that box. An assortment of roadkill, with all manner of birds, rats, and even an opossum or two came sprung from the flimsy cardboard box. There was so much roadkill you were surprised that it fit that snugly in the box. The cacophony of dead mammals were in various states of mutilation. Some you could see were mostly intact, sans a leg or two, quite a couple of lone heads dotted the foul stew before your eyes, and the rest was a mulch of various muscle tissue and organs that all blurred together in a sea of viscera. You felt the fingers on your left hand. Earlier you had felt a wet spot at the bottom of the box you just assumed was the grease. Holding it up to the light, you now see that it was blood. After staring at what you’ve just done for what felt like an eternity, you finally remember to get the hell out of here. But before you could bolt out of the yard, you heard a low rumbling sound coming from inside the house. And before you could devote a single neuron to what it was, you felt a crushing blow to the chest. Next thing you knew, you found yourself crumpled on the floor, with a thud and a crack. You find yourself immobilized by the extreme agony you are in. After the crushing pain falls to tolerable levels, you open your eyes to find your phone. You almost don’t comprehend the present danger you are in, as you desperately search for the one thing that can bring back your primal sense of sight, so you can even begin to defend yourself. After far too much feeling around, you sense a small metal rectangle, which gives you a modicum of relief. With some of the focus taken off, you remember to pay attention to the ambience of the surroundings, and quickly find out that it is not as quiet as it was when you arrive. You pick up your phone, and you quickly find the source of the wet sounds of chewing you had just been hearing. Caught, bright as day, like a deer in the headlights of your phone’s flash, you see what looks to be [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-974 a small child], ravenously shoving the desiccated remains of a rat down its throat like it was its last meal ever. Unfortunately, it also saw you. It momentarily paused from its sickly feast and opened its little mouth the widest it could, and let out a sound that was somewhere in between a growl and a hiss. Its first course of action was to desperately retreat to the makeshift fort on the center tree, but the wood planks stapled to the trunk serving as ladder rungs were not prepared for the amount of force the creature put into each step, with the third one quickly collapsing. It fell to the ground in short order with a thud, quickly turning its gaze to meet you once again. You didn’t wait to see what its second course of action was. With each step sending shockwaves of pain down your spine, you sprinted off of this godforsaken property as quickly as your legs could move. It was with such desperate vigor you ran back to your vehicle that you momentarily forgot to maintain decent running form. This cost you dearly as your center of mass came careening down to the pavement. Terrified, you turn around to face the inevitable, the child-thing a mere foot away from you, with its mouth caked in blood, and its eyes wide and pitch black. It leaped like an animal, with its arms positioned like a leopard’s paws, and its mind ready to do god knows what to you. With speed you didn’t know you possessed, you quickly pulled out the petite revolver and squeezed the trigger rapidly. All six bullets found their way into the child’s center of mass, but they might as well have missed, as it only seemed to piss it off even more. The feral eight year old landed on your stomach, pinning you to the ground as you vomited blood up and back into your eyes. After taking a bite out of your shoulder, it wailed on your head with the force of five men, with your will to fight dissipating more and more with each blow, until you had subconsciously accepted your ultimate fate. You awoke in a blaze of light. Not the light of the gates of heaven, or any other afterlife for that matter, but the light of a burning jet of fire which engulfed the small child almost totally, who immediately abandoned your bloody torso to escape the black silhouette you saw direct the streaming inferno onto it. Of course you were not completely spared from the effects of the flamethrower, with your legs being bathed in second degree burns, but the situation felt so unreal that the pain almost didn’t register. As you turned, you saw the monster child being subdued by several more black silhouettes and carted off in the back of a black van, the first vehicle you saw in the neighborhood other than your own. As your vision begins to fade from the excruciating pain your legs are in, you hear the black silhouette, someone you now see as a man clad in black armor talk about “skips” and “containing chambers”. You think you hear him say your name, followed up with something about a “level zero”. You open your eyes for the last time in a while and see your own reflection in the visor of the man’s helmet. The last thing you hear is him chuckling, and then going on to say, > {{I think you’re going to be delivering a lot more pizzas with us.}} You really should have stayed home. @@ @@ [[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box]] [!-- N/A (No Images) --] [[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box-end]]