I Found The Bunker Of A Prepper Family | CreepCast

Welcome back to Creepcast! Today we are going to be reading Christian Wallace's "I Found the Bunker of a Prepper Family Who Went Missing 3 Years ago." Which I said, "Tell the people who Christian Wallace is even though he needs no introduction." Christian Wallace is one of, definitely one of our most frequently covered writers, I would say, and for good reason, the man has put out some absolute bangers from my wife has taken our roleplay too far, and the counter-story my husband has taken our roleplay too far. Let me search those before. Sometimes, I think of an author and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, he wrote that." And I say I was confident and the people later will be like, "No, he did say that." And it's like, "Don't you do this for a living?" And I'm like, "Well, that's debatable. You know, I do this and I make money doing it, but to say I'm like a professional at it implies a level of ownership that I'm not really prepared for." And he also did the only other action on this mission, died six weeks ago. One of our friends. It's one of my favorite. One of my favorite. We've covered on the channel and we've covered a lot of his other stuff too. So we're reading another one of these stories today. Hunter saw this title a while back and has been really excited to read it ever since. So I'm getting out of the way he picked this one out. So if it's Christian Wallace's first bad story, it's Hunter's fault. It is my fault. But I will say, I'm a huge, I've done videos on my channel, Pop-A-Mate for it, but like Doomsday Preppers, that end of the world scenario survivalist is such a fascinating community of people. Because it's one of those things, I don't know if you feel the same way, but it's one of those things where you're just like, you can't say that they're totally wrong. So it's like, comparing for the inevitable. And I'm sure that some of them obviously go off the deep end or all that kind of stuff. But I will say, there's something just like, also, you know what it fucks with me is that I sometimes feel like I'm like, what do they know that I don't? You know, like I feel like they have something figured out that I don't and that always fucks me up too. So I'm very curious to see what angle Christian takes with this kind of like subject matter. I will say during the flood, like Hurricane Helene, when all the roads and like infrastructure was going for a few weeks, and it was kind of everyone was left to fit for themselves. That's who had the food, the electricity and was able to help everyone else. No shit really. The preppers. Yeah. They had a ton of, because they had food supplies for years. They were handed them out to people and they had electricity and they had like starlink systems that people could contact their families. And let them know they were okay. They could coordinate with other people to help rescue crews where to go and stuff like that. So yeah, made the difference. Look at the flood, this might be a stupid question, but our underground bunkers, they would just flood too, right? Or are there some that aren't actually airtight sealed where they could flood and they'd be fine? I mean, you can get ones that are sealed. It's so unless you do run a oxygen though, right? You would. I mean, like if you get really serious about this, you can have a re-breather system, you know, set up, we're like, you have an airway that like has a vent that's on higher ground, right? Or whatever it's all where your intake is. But most of it wasn't like standing water, you're stuck under. It's like floods of water that you just need to keep away from the door, right? So you're on any level of elevation and not next to a river. Any kind of bunker would have been able to endure it because you're not just setting under it. Right. It was caused by the wind and like the, the torrential rains creating these like mudslides and stuff like that. Interesting. Well, I tell you what, you know, Joe, Joe call you want, but when the power goes out, guess who's laughing? Guess who's got. Yeah. It's one of those, there's just a layer of the kid we got a bit from back in the day when he's like, everybody makes found a red neck until their car breaks down or something like that. It's like that kind of like, it's that same kind of eye, but the old saying, the man who sleeps with the machete is a fool every night, but one, yeah, so fucking brutal, so cool. It's sick. I mean, I'm excited though. Christian Wallace has, I mean, like I would say the, the astronaut story is one of my favorites. It also caused me to talk about Mr. floppy, which may be Mr. floppy will make it appearance here. I don't know. I hope so. We'll see. But yeah, I mean, if anything, let's get into it. And I just realized that on my new set, the way it's set up, where you can see the cryptid tear chart back there, which I will finish at some point, but you drew the big demon headed thing saying kind of cringe. And that's like the largest single item in my background, you've got to change that. The biggest thing on my set is something you did. That is unfortunate. You should change that. You need a commission like a sick, like a sculpture or something of like a cryptid. Well, what I want to do when I get, so this room's temporary. This is in the new house, right? And I'm just waiting for like the little studio to get built next to the house. Right. When that studio is built, I want the inside of it to look like a log cabin. Oh, that's fun. Like a fireplace and stuff. And I want to have a huge mount made. Like I have the little like the normal deer over there that I put the night vision on. I want to have like a massive, there's this, what's the thing? I think it's when the deer get too much calcium at like pay hunt forms, but they won't shed old antlers. They'll just grow new ones. It's like, it's not good for the deer and stuff. Like that's what happens when you over spike their diet. But it gets these weird like monstrous looking racks to come out of them. And I want to have like a commission art piece that looks like that with like a huge like monstrous skull night, like a win to go, you know, mount with the night vision. And I want to put that as like a mantel piece over the back of the room. I mean, that would be fucking sick, especially being in a log cabin. You would literally have your, for your set, it would look like the Lonely Broadcast station. So the, the way the set's going to look is one wall is going to be like solid cabin walls, fireplace and all that. And then the other wall is floor to ceiling windows that is pushed up against the forest. So, so I get that for free to out being in there at night. Fuck. Well, I mean, where I am right now, I've, they're, I've keep putting more lights up. So it's like, you can walk around the property at night. When those lights are off, we need, we need to, we need to do a night recording one night and really try to read one that we think is actually scary. And I want to see you fucking squirm in that new office because that way, I feel like, because I've done that even before, I love you, I've kept my composure, but there's times where I'm alone at my studio and all like, and I just, I'm so immersed in the story that I feel like I'm like, same thing. So I kind of like look up or look behind me or something casually. It's just, I, it fucked with you so well, but dude, the forest right there. No. There's no way. I would push you out so bad. Where I'm at right now, I've got, so this, this room's on the second story. So there's like trees that hang right outside the window and at night, I'll open the window to let the breeze in. So there's been a couple of times I've been playing a scary game or watching something scary and I'll glance and I'll see the wind like pushing the limbs towards the window. I can force. It's excellent vibe, but terrifying. So are they close enough to, are they close enough that they like tap your window? They're not close enough to tap, but they're close enough that they're in the peripheral kind of bowing in. I bet you anything, you start from, you like just, you imagine, you just hear it and you're like just like the, I bet you you're going to start feeling like you hear something, you know? It's too perfect of an environment to not have that happen. One night I came in here and an owl, I had the window open and there was an owl. That was perched on the window and he was facing away from me. But it was dark in the room and he was fat. So walking into the room, it looked like the back of someone's head. Right. But like I said, this is a second story. So that would be like an eleven shot. Yeah. The giant soul. The Appalachios. Yeah. I walk through, I walk into the door and I freeze and I see like the silhouette and then it flies away. Oh my god. John out of my skin. Oh my god. Yeah. Yeah. Good times. Yeah. I'll get scared for recording one night. That'll be fun. We should. Yeah. Also, thank you to our audio listeners right now who are driving or usually at work from what we see. Thank you for listening on Spotify or Apple Podcast. It helps us out. If you give us a nice rating and then also to our Patreon members who got a little exclusive story yesterday or a couple days ago and we'll probably be getting me a little more frequently while Isaiah has his beautiful baby coming soon. So if you want us extra content, feel free to go there and support the channel if not. You get all the free content right here, baby. Otherwise, Isaiah, do you want to jump in? Go jump in. I do have one question for the people because you brought up that a lot of people. comment that they'd listen to work and stuff like that. What, I feel like there's not a ton of jobs you can do that, right? Well, there has to be a ton of jobs for you, you can't do that. I mean, probably, but I think I don't know, even whenever I did construction or something, I always had an earbud in, construction and stuff like that. Yes, if it's you doing a task, absolutely, I get it, but if you're in any kind of service position, like someone can't be working to check out, right? Well, of course not, but you know, I do see as people will say on their lunch break, they'll put something on or I would say a large part of our audience, I think while they're doing like, I think that we are a background fodder for people cleaning their house. I believe this is is is a big one too. People are like, yeah, I just want to do my errands. I mean, that absolutely makes I do the same thing. I listen to YouTube videos. Yeah, it's the best background for I listen to creep cast. Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah. All right. Yeah. We can go ahead and get into it. So, and we will leave a link to Christians. He has an anthology book as well. We'll leave a link with a link with a link to his website, chwallis.co.uk, even though he's from the UK. I forgive him. He has a link to a ton of his one-off stories as well as his like short stories and stuff like that on there. I'm sure he's a fantastic author. I feel like all some of the best writers are from the UK that we've read, even like neon tempo with the live right game. That's also a UK line. And Nathan is no, Nathan's no, no, Nathan's American. He's American. Yeah. Yeah. He's on the right side of the pond. That's right. Okay. All right. Let's get into it. There. I found the bunker of a prepper family who went missing three years ago. Dr. Daniel Vance was a smart man, too smart for his own good, maybe. Forty years old, a lecture in fluid dynamics with a mind made of shapes and numbers. No one knows why, one day, on a whim, crunched the numbers on the apocalypse and came to a troubling conclusion. He didn't share exactly what it was he deduced, but given that he immediately quit his job and liquidated his many assets, it's fair to say it wasn't positive. Wip up in the wake of the tremendous upheaval was his wife, a 24-year-old PhD student who had grown and graduated with Daniel some time before. She loved the strange bear of a man who could just as easily build a log cabin as he could explain the idiosyncrasies of an ash towards orbit. Speaking to Daniel, always left you with profound impression he was right. So when he told her what he wanted to do, she agreed. 15 years and five children later, the vances were living in the distant woods just beyond my hometown. They were inigmatic, richer than the Pope, and extremely serious about their prepper lifestyle, but they were also funny, easy-going and incredibly compelling to speak to. This is like Ted Kaczynski if he could speak to women. Well, we don't know he's Ted Kaczynski yet. I will say I do like this super smart PhD guy builds log cabin in the woods if he didn't write about murdering women that he was afraid to go on dates with. Yeah. Well, that's what I mean is we have no, the doctor has no fault like that yet. If anything, I do like the dynamic of like very scholarly man has wife who was like infatuated with his studies. Now they like to live remotely. This setup also of like, I love this setup too, done to stop it too soon, but the idea that a learned man is doing this thing. It doesn't seem crazy, right? Yeah. Like these things, it's a person that is too smart for their own good at them doing it. You really don't think anything of it, but I'm curious to see where it takes that left turn. I'll also say there, again, not to make this about me, but I like making stuff about me. There is a surprising number of people you'll find and a lot of them I found during the flood, who are like preppers who, you know, live off the grid on their own generator for power, use, you know, wood pellets, stoves for heat and stuff like that who will come to find out are incredibly accomplished doctors, researchers, inventors. There's this one guy who was one of the people bringing supplies, repairing equipment for people, and it turns out that he had the patent on a bunch of like surgical technology stuff like that. Like, yeah, he was loaded. Yeah. But it's like, no, they'd rather just live off the grid, put their stuff together. It's like you get to a point where you're like, hey, this whole like rat race societal thing. Maybe not for me. Maybe all I need is a fireplace and a wife, you know? I also think that people, because of TV and stuff, have also made like every doomsday prepper person is like a religious fanatic or like a sheltered person or like trying to get all of these like negatives attached to it. When it could just be some people are just like too smart for their own good, they're just like, we should probably have these backups. We should probably have these commodities, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It's like, well, I mean, you know, you never know what can go wrong. Who has? Who knows? I'm too lazy. I'm, if the world ends, I'm just, I'm, I'm going to lay on my, my lawn outside and I'm just going to let it take me. I'm sure my wife will flee and she will live her life with a, with a man who was willing to survive. But I'm just going to be like, I'm, I just, I can't, I just simply cannot just of minor inconvenience. Yes. It's a thunderstorm. All right. I'm dead. It's well played world. I get it. They're, they're running a vacuum right outside of the door, anything but, okay, if you can't hear it, we'll keep going. But it made me think of that thing. I want some streamer dead where there were housekeepers in the background and he was like embarrassed. I think it's execution. So yeah, that's it. Yeah. That's right. Many mentions of, excuse me on this podcast. We only mentioned him twice, right? Yeah. I think the many that is a surprising number to come up. Yeah. Right. But they were also funny, easygoing and incredibly compelling to speak to larger than life survivalists who swept into town with bizarre requests that thrilled local businesses. As quantities of cement, iron, lead and steel were all shipped through the remote mountains so that the vances could build their shelter. The advanced methods they used to keep its secret were legendary. Daniel had once spent six months earning the license necessary to drive HGVs up to his compound so that no one else lay eyes on it. And on one occasion, when a company had refused their request for GPS tracker-free vehicles, he bought them out wholesale so that they had no choice. Wow. What are HGVs? By the way, high something vehicles, it's like, it's heavy equipment that you use to transport materials on. Okay. So it's not just like a semi truck, it's something that can go a mountain or something like it's more terrain or heavy, right? Good Lord. Okay. Heavy. I'm getting over the flu. Heavy goods. So any like tractor trailer, okay, so it's just like a semi bed truck. Yeah. So when they stopped appearing in town during the pandemic, when requests for food and goods stopped and all contact was dropped, most attributed it to lockdown. They had a bunker and it spent their entire lives training to be self-sufficient in the face of civilization's collapse. Even Alexander, the young guest at just three, was already collecting firewood as a chore and learning what local plants were edible. Most of us just assumed that if anyone could ride out COVID without breaking a sweat, it would be the vances. The reality turned out to be something else. When the worst came to light, we discovered that Daniel had used the pandemic as an excuse for a dry run. The family intended to spend six months in lockdown and essentially beta tests their fallout bunker. Three months in and the sheriff received a distress call on the radio. Investigators were provided by the hushed voice of a sobbing child that most assumed was Alexander, even though that's never been proven. The police arrived and found the bunker still sealed. It took hours for emergency responders to cut into the door. All the while, efforts were made to contact the family within a to no avail. Once inside, police were left dumbfounded. There was no one to be rescued. No bodies, no survivors. There was evidence the door's locking mechanism had failed and trapped the vances inside no way out. But if so, where'd they gone? So let's, so the, that's kind of great. So a child called in the report to even let people know where they're at. But now it looks the thing was basically it's sealed shut. No way of getting out. But they're gone. Yes. Correct. That is the horrifying. We're just, I mean, like we're kind of mystery, you know what, it just reminds you of something where it's like the, kind of like the lonely broadcast station stuff of like the 401 missing reports where it's like, oh, they're gone. And then all of a sudden they just reappear like this kind of like weird phenomenon. It has that vibe. But also just the idea of a child escaping and like, and calling the cops is such a horrifying, it's such a horrifying call to hear and it's so creepy how like casually it's just brushed by like a child weeping calls and we like went to work. Like it's just it's so nonchalantly said, it's probably the three year old, which how did a three year old know, but you would have to assume it's older than that, right? Because they had five kids. Oh, yeah, that sure could be any one of them. So kid calls, they were sealed inside, but they're gone. Yeah. So it's like does is there a secret door in the bunker? Does it go deeper? You know, that's what I'm wondering. Do you go into a thing where they discover that he was even wilder than they expected and went even deeper into the earth or, you know, like some kind of weird cavity or something like that. Or did something go burrow in? I don't know. Okay. You remember how at the beginning, it said that he was doing like equations and then he freaked out and that's what started all this. Mm-hmm. Okay. So they go back and look at his equations and it's like a bunch of numbers and like symbols and stuff. And at the end, it just says mold people. Yeah. It's like all these years like, how did he do this math? They got to mold people, he has a, he has a, he has a progly preserved mole skull in his room. Then someone, someone said the side, they're like, if he was afraid of mold people, why would he dig down? Yeah. One of the cops was like, why would he dig down? And then there's like a obvious mole person in a cop uniform. That is very strange. I don't know why he would do that. It's a great idea. Bob, that's a damn fine idea. Let's get out of here. Yeah. Let's go get some breakfast. Does anyone want to go to the caves perhaps? Yeah. Hold on a second. Let me dig this hole real quick. Bob in his holes. Of course. Okay. I'm ready. I'm ready. Beds and cots lay everywhere with moldy and yellow sheets. Buckets close to hand with stains all around them. Some doors were barred, others smashed to pieces. There was evidence of makeshift quarantines and, in places, looked like violence. The police, usually a fantastic source of gossip, are not forthcoming until the town demanded answers and the sheriff was forced to offer only the barest of outlines. We're now a break of waterborne illness has struck the vases down not long after they were locked inside and unable to seek help. Rumors of contagion were overstated and fueled by unrelated rise of COVID. Whatever contaminant had killed the vases, it was non-organic in nature. No need a panic. The vases loved ones had been notified. The bunker was going to be demolished and we could all put this terrible tragedy behind us. Uh-huh. Don't you hate those waterborne illnesses that completely vaporize the body and close? Yeah. I mean, there's a hundred percent just sounds like a cover-up, right? Yeah, of course. A hundred percent not telling the public what is actually happening. Just. Yeah. Or actually, I've been on our break of waterborne illness has struck the vases down. So you have mud all of your whiskers. Oh, sorry. Wipes it off. Thank you. That what? Officer Moll, what seems to be the problem? No. No. Yeah, that pitch was over your left shoulder and you swung at it. I know. It was right there for the taking. I'm so sad. This video is sponsored by HelloFresh. Mmm. Why do anybody tell us about weeknight dinners during the middle of the week at like six to seven p.m.? You still have to make dinner. It's bullshit. But you're tired and you have things to do. And for nights like those, I like to use HelloFresh. HelloFresh removes the mental load of cooking. Free portion ingredient step by step cards. You'll be ready to eat in just 30 minutes. And HelloFresh has 100 recipes each week, allowing you to always find something tasty. HelloFresh stays true to their name with substantially sour seafood and abiotic free chicken and seasonal produce. Plus, you can get steak and seafood at no, it's the crust. This past week, after working late, I tried the cantina-style steak case ideas. 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It's amazing how much flexibility you can get from boots. I got the Omen boots from Brunt, and I'm very satisfied with my choice. Brunt was tired of the workwear brands out there cutting corners. You worked too hard to get stuck in uncomfortable boots that don't hold up. So they built something better. Boots that are insanely comfortable and built for any job site. And for a limited time, our listeners get 10% off Brunt when you use code of creedcast at checkout. Get you bruntworkwear.com and use the code creepcast and you're good to go. And after you order, bless you, we heard about Brunt. So do us a favor and tell him we sent you. Thank you to Brunt for sponsoring this episode. Now back to the episode. Of course we still had questions, a thousand of them. Why hadn't the family called for help? Had radios, computers, smartphones too, they were survivalists, not omnis. And where were they? I think the implication that the omnis wouldn't call for help. Also, yeah, well, I think he tried to say that the omnis don't have cell phones, but I wouldn't have cell phones, but I'm pretty sure the omnis do have like a fucking horizon plan. So it's different to different groups, depending on where you're at. But a lot of the omnis people I know are like, they'll say that it's okay to use technology for work or stuff like that. Like they'll drive vehicles for work and stuff like that. It's leisure typically. Yeah. Stay away from them. So they'll call you in an emergency. Yeah. They need something. It's not like, well, I guess it's time to die here, Jenna. Yeah. I grabbed the message out and send this to the hospital quick. It's like, no, they can make a fucking call to Verizon, T-Mobile, what are these evil spells, you speak of, what are these demons in your magic box? Yeah. I don't want any temptation from you devils. Where are you? That vacuum I mentioned earlier is like shoved up on the door now, and I think it's because the omnis are upset. This is the omnis vacuuming your house. I said let us in you dirty boy. Yeah. Open the door. They're just like pilgrims. How long can someone vacuum directly outside of the door? I heard it in 25 minutes, 25 hundred up to fucking minutes, it's just been a person fucking vacuuming the same spot. Go out there, Tom. It's clean. He got it. You got it. It's like, it's a hallway too. That's like 18 inches wide. How long is the way it's a, it's a seven hundred and eighty foot hallway, so it takes a while. So yeah, I forgot to tell you, so did you have visited yet? So I bought the house from House of Leaves. It's actually a non-uclidean hallway, an unmapable entrance. So I forgot to tell you, I bought the Winchester mansion and they're vacuuming the stairs that lead to nowhere right now, so technically the house is the hallway. Yeah. We are the hallway. We've become the hallway. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I think they left for now. It's like a shark. Keep circling. Yeah, I know. I bet you she's right. Whoever's vacuuming, they're like right by the door and as soon as you stop talking, they turn it back on. We are. As soon as you're talking, they turn it back on. What's awesome, funny about this is I'm doing the YouTuber thing where I'm really unappreciative people that are helping me take care of my house. Listen. It's, you can have all the appreciation of the world. What could possibly be near your door that they have not got? What could have happened? I don't know. It's just hardwood. It's on that. It's hardwood. It's a rug. They're not even vacuuming. There's not even a rug there. Oh my god. Get a broom. Get a swiffer. Why are you possibly vacuuming? It's hard to go. - This is gonna go down to the most out of touch. - What psyched plastic wheels? - It's plastic wheels, hard wood. Oh my God. - Okay, all right, anyway. There were survivalists, not alamish. And where were they? What had happened to their bodies? Why didn't they simply left? We shouted these and more at the town meeting, but the police simply refused to comment. For most of us, the excitement lasted another week or two until we realized we weren't getting answers any time soon. Besides, the pandemic was in full swing and most of us had other things to worry about. The tragic story eventually faded until it was just one of those awful things in the town's history that we didn't talk about. I was as guilty as anyone else of just forgetting about it. I certainly never expected to find the bunker out there in the woods. Faded police tapes still on the open door, the tongue wide open, scorched marks around the lock. It stood out in the woods like someone that cut a hole right in the fabric of reality. Darkness so deep and black, it almost ate to look at. The side of it made my heart drop into my stomach, radiated pain. Does that make sense? I think some part of my lizard brain picked out details that wouldn't become apparent to me until I got closer. Like the bloody finger streaks that stained the handle from where someone had scrambled furiously at the lock without success. And the tiny viewing window had been smashed with a hammer that's still lay nearby. And it had only to glimpse it to imagine the family taking turns to stand there and scream into the woods. That's for for rescue. Good God. Under any other circumstances, I would have run. But I'd gone there looking for my dog. My light revealed a few wet prints making their way down the dusty concrete tunnel. Oh God, fuck, oh God, no. What? I abandoned the dog. There's no way. No, come on. I can't. I can't. There's no way. Can you ever? Okay. Go ahead. No, go ahead, go ahead. No, you go for it. Have you ever abandoned or have you ever, um, like, like what's urban explorations a lame way to say it? But have you ever been in the woods and like checked out abandoned structures and stuff? No. No. No, because I'll tell you, and I'll tell you why is because one, I've seen too many movies. And then two, I don't want to, I'm, I'm big, I'm a fat man, so I don't want to fall through any floors. And then three, I just imagined there's like squatters or something there that is going to hurt me. So no. And then also an active crime scene where there's bloody fingerprints where people have died and they haven't found the bodies. And then of course my amazing little fucking pepper had to just, well, why do I go down there? No. I'm good. They're going to go to pet go. I told the story on here about like checking out the abandoned penitentiary, I think, and stuff like that. I love walking through a band of buildings and stuff like that. Um, there was, this is weirdly reminiscent of some, there's some game I played where you're a man in the woods and there's an old bunker and your dog goes into it. What? That has, that has to be no story though, right? It was the Blair Witch video game interesting. This came out a while back and it was set in the universe of the Blair Witch and you played as a guy who I think was a veteran who was coming home because there was a missing person out in the woods. So him and his dog went out there to look for it and most of the game is you walking through the woods is like the Blair Witch gives you visions and the dog is like your only companion out there. And there's one segment where he starts to hallucinate memories of like Afghanistan overlaid. So it's like these barracks in the middle of the woods and the dog goes down into them and you follow. That's right. That's what it was. Hmm. The game actually went kind of hard. I can't, I don't know what the public reaction was, but there's a segment at the end of the game where the dog's injured and you walk with the dog for a long time. And the message starts showing up saying leave him. So you think the only way you can get out is to lay the dog down and like leave him in the woods, but I think I did something different or went backwards or something and it fixed it so you can't get out with the dog. But I remember like walking around for a while, not knowing what to do and then seeing the message leave him and I like my stomach drop. Like, I can't leave the dog. Okay. But under what? 100 wood. Oh, I would look at that text and lay a dog and I would immediately turn around and throw a bone down to the dog and I just go through the direction immediately with without a hesitation. That's good, buddy. I'm happy to hear that. My light revealed a few wet paw prints making their way down the dusty concrete tunnel. Half Bernice and half cally Ripley is the sort of dog who trembles in my arms when a storm above it's the windows and needs his paws held when we brush him. I love him. I do not have much of a family or a wife or even many friends, but I have Ripley. I can no more have turned around and gone home to an empty apartment where I would have to sob my grief away than I could flat my arms and fly. He was my dog and I'd raised him since he was a puppy. I wasn't going to leave him on those woods, I went in after him. I didn't know what to. Okay, hold on. What about your wife? I went down those stairs. Yeah. I mean, even the Ripley thing is made the dogs have very cute. I feel bad. I would probably go in after the dog if it was one of my dogs if it was tugboat. No way. That's selfish son of a bitch. I'd be like, you know what? Fucking live here. What if I went down there? She fucking hit that. Oh, I would go down for Claudette. I'd go down for Claudette. Yeah. Claudette's down there like. Yeah, I would feel very sad for Claudette. I'd be like, she's probably afraid. That's selfish son of a bitch, probably just like, oh, I live here, though, whatever. It makes you feel better. I also would not go in for tugboat. I know that is like in census. And people online are like, oh, he's so cute, blah, blah. I'm like, you have no idea the selfish hatred this dog has for all of mankind, tugboat likes to wait until I'm like, by myself in the kitchen, like drinking coffee or whatever and then get right behind me and scream as loud as he can. It's a just unfortunate genetic abomination. I didn't know what to expect, but I knew it wouldn't be good. Whatever the police had found, they not only kept most of the morbid details to themselves, they'd also lied. The bunker was not demolished or even sealed off. In fact, looking at the occasional blue latex glove tossed aside and the one or two broken police issue flashlights, it seemed like the last people inside had been in a hurry to get out. Given this was where seven people had presumably died, I assumed it was someone's job to clean it all up. But the corridor looked largely untouched. Just a few meters in and manic writing started to cover the walls. The desperate scrolls of a lone survivor left there to be rediscovered like cave paintings. Just for deliberations on how to get out, diagrams, blueprints, equations and formula, all focused on the door and the circuits were responsible for its faulty lock. I instinctively assumed they belonged to Daniel that he'd been the last to die. But a god-awful fate for a man to outlive his children, yet it got worse. Slowly the writing changed from equations and plans to a desperate scroll. The same few phrases repeated over and over. Five doors. Five. Not six. Six. Didn't make it. Didn't make it. Six doors. Six. What the fuck? God, dude. What the fuck? God. Also, I just want to say, I just want to say, I was already spooked by the idea of like the club's hostage. The idea too that's like the police are like, oh yeah, I know whether things like basically broke and you shouldn't have to go up there. It's like they probably went up there. It's all something and just left it completely untouched. Like fuck that. We're not going back. No, no, no. Also the cave painting aspect thing too is insane and watching like a person slowly mentally go insane is five times it did I tell you about my house? What happened? No. So the house we got previously a guy lived here with his wife since like they got married back in the 70s or whatever and then she died early 2000s and then he didn't die until like 2020. So for 18 years about he was living in the house by himself. So in the basement, he just started writing messages to himself and some of them are like notes like need to take out the trash, need to talk to so and so about an engine part blah, blah, blah. But as time goes on, they start to get more like remember to look at the dog today like remember to blah, blah, blah, all the stuff. And then he started to I think take notes about things that made him happy like he wrote like flowers bloom today and wrote the date and stuff like that. And above all of them, above like all the writing. He wrote on the wall sometime in 2014, baby owls flew. So like he was watching a nest of baby owls and then they took off that day and he wrote it down. So all like his like near two decades of writing, talking to himself is on the wall. And we were leaving that up. We're going to leave that there. But wow. You know, it probably is just a nice thing of like little moments and you get like little pieces of a person's life, but out of context and like not knowing anything about this, it that's horrifying. But you have got to try to make that into a story or something. You should write that. Well, I want to so I thought about either making a YouTube video or making a story called the man who lived in my house because between that and like walking through the house, I see other stuff he's done. Like I see stuff. I'm like that's like for example, in the garage, there were all these like pieces of wood that were like drilled into the wall. And I'm like, why did you do that there? So random until I started using the cabinets and with the garage door open, updraft would come in and shut all the cabinets shut, but where he has the wood drilled is just the right place that you can rotate the wood and use it as like a stopper to keep the doors stuck open and stuff like that. So walking through the house, I've seen stuff that he's learned from living in it that now I'm relearning, seeing where he's put implements and things like that. You morphing into a man in this property, like morphing into that other man would be so crazy. You know what I mean? Like a thing of like when you buy someone else's home, you become the last tenant that lives there. Yeah. Yeah. Something weird like that. That'd be like an interesting take on like almost immortality or something. Like some kind of person that's it is that kind of what you got from the ending of the shining. Honestly, don't know any of the shiny. That's fucking weird. Well, the ending where it's like, you know, like, oh, you're the keeper. You know, you've always been here and then the picture where it's him from the thirties. So that he is like, whoever keeps the hotel because it's like he's almost reinvigorated through the hotel again and again. Yeah. I'm not sure. I mean, like possibly it's just where to he gave birth to or he like his son as the guy that has has this power and the shiny too, so it just makes him feel very paranormal in nature. Yeah. But now it's a similar idea, I think, of like becoming the same person over and over again. But I've thought about, yeah, the man who lived in my house because some of those messages are kind of like, what was the one that bothered me a bit? It was something like I've got to quit talking about it, something really vague like that. Well, yeah, the things that are vague and you have no context for you're going to dissect that. And it could, you could totally misinterpret it, but it's just, it takes on its own meeting to you in a weird way. Yeah. I'm also, I don't want, because he still got family around. So I don't want to dox his name, but I'll text you what his name was because it adds to the thing. That was his legal name. Wow. Really? I just texted it to you on. Yeah. So I'm looking at it. I'm seeing it. It's like a Star Wars character, so while I, anyway, I thought you had a full on bounty hunter, like a Jedi living in your house at one point, it's kind of crazy. You're just walking around in a Mandalorian costume. Yeah. Stop talking about it. God. Damn. It seemed like the kind of thing you'd find in an asylum, psychotic, rambling, punctuated only by six paragraphs right at the end. Each letter wasn't peckably neat, and each small paragraph was topped with a beautifully drawn Christian cross. LA Advance Age 15, a gift you tossed. He liked boys even though he thought I didn't know. I loved him, but everything I had, he would have made a great man. Alicia Vance Age 14, she liked to paint and shoot. She had her mother's main streak, and would have served her well in the future. A large advance, age 8, the smartest of us all. These were Daniel's memorials to his family. Seeing the words lit up on my torch was haunting inside into the overwhelming despair he'd endured. Must have realized he wouldn't get the chance to speak at his family's funerals, or to write their obituaries. This was his last desperate way of making sure the world might one day know them as he did. It's real people. The words marked the end of the tunnel, standing adjacent to a trap door in the ground. It was not open, but the tunnel came to a dead end immediately afterwards, and Ripley's prints disappeared at the hatch. I feared he might be in danger, still I stopped and looked at the bunker door 20 meters behind me. The once gloomy forest looks so bright, even on this cloudy day, the air dotted with rain. Hard of me felt like I was leaving the whole world behind as I began to climb the ladder down. I entered a large, circular living space that was packed with furniture and little nooks and crannies. The walls were covered with folding beds and tables, and every inch was multifunctional. A dining space could become a sitting space, which in turn might be where someone slept or even exercised. It all depended on what particular bit of furniture you unfolded or unclipped or unfurled. Seven people in close quarters, nowhere near enough privacy, made sense they went with this cluttered overlapping use of space. But it was still a large room, bigger than most studio apartments, and there were a few corridors that led deeper into the earth telling me the bunker had unseen depths. I looked for some sign of my dog and soon found his trail, but this far from the rainy cops, Ripley's prints were starting to fade. After barely a few meters, they petered out vaguely in the direction of nearby door. I wanted to follow, but stopped myself from rushing onwards. It was unlikely Ripley was getting out any other way, and I'd do us no good getting hurt myself. I decided to take a look around and quickly spotted a dinner table. If I needed proof, the police had not bothered with a cleanup, this was said. The plates were still out, food brought into a strange blackened husk. Each child's hat lay across one place setting, the once creamy fleece turned a sickly green and yellow. The chairs had their bricks reinforced with wooden beams fitted with long grooves so that something the width of a nail could slide into them. And on each of the cushions were foul smelling stains that looked oddly like an aspirin. I touched one with glove to hands and the material cracked audibly. Whatever it was, similar stains were on the cutlery and plates, and there were even handprints of it placed firmly on the tablecloth. At first I thought it was blood, that wasn't quite right. It was too contained to be leaking blood. On the back of one of the chairs, the stained tapered exactly where a woman's waist would be like a near-perfect silhouette. As shivered as I remembered that marine advance, it had always been a slim woman, wondering how she left her imprint on the gray fabric. So is it implied there was like a rot on them? That's what I'm thinking. It feels like some kind of decay is what I'm thinking because it's not blood. Yeah, because at first I was like, oh, fuck, is it dried blood? No, I'm thinking it's some kind of rotter decay, but it also almost seems like, you know, like the atomic bomb, like those shadows, the shadows of Hiroshima, yeah. Yeah, like that. It kind of makes you think of something like that, too. Maybe not the shadows, but just in that way that's leaving the silhouette, but it does feel like a rot or like a mold or something. They were at the dinner table and the little eight-year-olds, "Mommy, look what I made." It just opens the capsule of your brain, he am two thirty-eighths. Wait, where'd you get that? Look, Mom, the power of God. If I had to say, though, I mean, I'm probably, it almost seems like a fungus or like a mold. Like, I'm thinking mold, like a leftover decay or something. I think a mold. He's walked into a Resident Evil 7 mansion. Yeah. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Baker's house, yeah. I definitely put some kind of vibe into the story of the bunkers, if I'm not picturing it like that, like swamp house kind of thing. Yeah. Down and to buy you, down in Louisiana. Also, I didn't even think of this. How did the dog go down a ladder? I don't know. It wasn't a ladder, though. It's a stairs. It's a ladder. No, I think it's a staircase that goes down to the earth. Using my torch, uh, British, using my torch, I saw that these stains repeated in the oddest of places. Yes, there were some on beds and blankets and even patches of plain floor exactly like you might expect in a room full of sick people. Why did one stain on the floor bear such a strong resemblance to a child huddled in a fetal position? Why was the same stuff all over the TV remote and on books on shelves and board games too? Everything from sofa cushions to TV boxes to piles of dirty laundry were covered in the same dried brownish material that gave off a bowel coppery miasma. Found the jigsaw, particularly baffling. Someone had set up another table with four chairs, all modified with the same back support as those by the dinner table. And a jigsaw had been laid out with four separate piles, but only one was depleted. The rest looked largely untouched, almost like someone had portioned out pieces for three other people who had absolutely no interest in going along with it. Maybe Daniel had tried to keep up morale while the family were sick. God help me. If that were true, I couldn't help but imagine the poor man sat there with his loved ones close to death desperately trying to encourage them to click their own pieces into place while they faded in and out of consciousness. So here's my theory of that line. His family was dead pretty early on and he was like plain house, like setting them upright, decaying in their chairs and moving them over to play jigsaw and stuff like that. So are you saying that there was like, are you saying that you think that the guy killed them and he was like messing with their bodies or on accident? They died. So you're not sure yet if you're like, you think that the doctor had any ill intent or anything yet. You think it's just like, you think you maybe just went crazy then or something? I mean, I got some trying to see like, because I like that idea of a guy like basically playing house and like positioning stuff and he's just like going about this like twisted and the stains are like the rotting corpse. I think either he went crazy and took him down there and killed them or bringing them down there got them killed somehow. I feel like maybe the police were right. It was a waterborne illness. Just they died. But then everything that happened afterwards is like him acting like they're okay with the bodies for like a year. I feel like they got sick or something and like they're existing with this illness that was like making them fucking ooze or something like that. Could be that. So then about that room emanated madness. The longer I stay down there flicking the bright discs of light off my torch from one detail to another, the more I wanted to leave. One door had wooden beams nailed across it. One sofa had been partially disassembled. Multiple beds had been burned and all the light bulbs had been removed and put in a box on the kitchen countertop. Looking up at the ceiling I finally had some inside and to why the police were so confident the vances had not survived despite never finding their bodies. So I went to jammed a human finger into one of the empty sockets. Almost like they expected it to glow with the flick of a switch. What was it about this place that had caused the police to leave and never return? Not to even take that finger and test it for signs of illness or even just to confirm who it belonged to. I decided it was time to hurry up and find my dog. People had died in that place. While I'm not superstitious, it can't be the only skeptic who has done the calculations in his head and realized it cost nothing to be respectful of ghosts. That's a funny line. That bunker was cramped, terrifying and the air stinks so bad I started to worry I'd get sick myself. Serve no one any good to lean her. I'd be damned if I just walk away and leave Ripley to rot down there. It's not like you climb a ladder and get out of his own and if I wasn't entirely sure how he'd gotten down there in the first place. Oh, so you were right. I thought it was a staircase. Wait, no, I'd yeah, so it almost seems like if it's if it's paw prints are down there, then oh my god, it kind of seems like something grabbed him and took him down. Mm hmm. Here's here's an even worse idea. Here's an even more terrible idea. Something has either his dog's legs or something that looks like dog legs and like is making little stamps on the ground. Oh, yeah. That he thinks is his dog. Yeah. Yeah. I also like how you're trying to gaslight me out of the ladder thing and it worked. This episode's sponsored by Tushy. Tushy is the luxury bidet that your bathroom has been missing. Enjoy daily decadence with the practical benefits when you use Tushy. Yeah, I can wash my ass hole with it as squirts water. It feels good. 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Restore balance to your bathroom and get the luxury bidet everyone is talking about. Tushy. Number two is Tushy's thing. Go take care of number one. For a limited time, our listeners get 10% off their first bidet when you use code creepcast to check out. That's 10% off your first bidet order at hellotushy.com with promo code creepcast. Thanks to Tushy for sponsoring this episode and now let's get back to the episode. Summating what little bravery I had left I called out and broke the silence. Something which felt like a terrible taboo in that god awful place. Excreaming in a graveyard. Ripley! I waited and hoped to hell I'd hear the bitter pattern of his pause but for the longest of moments it's only the kind of silence that makes you wonder if something or someone in the darkness is holding its breath trying to look like just another patch of nothing. Bide in its time until you finally turn around and show it your back. The TV came on with a blurred of white noise that was so loud and so sudden I cried. Through my arms up nearly fell backwards onto a rolled out sleeping bag and looked like it had been a week in the sewer. At the time I realized what caused the noise I could already hear a tiny rendition Daniel Vance's voice. A frown at the screen as I approached showed a greenish infrared view of the bunker with Daniel up front and the dinner table behind him. It was grainy and hard to see but I could clearly tell that his family were sitting in those chairs. Morendo's first to fall a little. Looking back it makes perfect sense. Morendo often went to stores to fetch food for cooking. We found it behind one of the refrigerators. One of the figures in the background slumped onto the table with a loud clank. It's in a plate spinning off onto the ground. You know muddered as he got up and grabbed the woman by the shoulder and set her upright. Morendo never did like my cookie. Snorted a laugh as he fussed with something at the back of the chair. The rods are much better than teeth. All those hours spent taping them up right to the chairs. Never worked but rods. If you went into the spine with a little with a little modification I could just slut them into the chairs. Apparently everyone's able to enjoy joining for dinner. I'm working on something similar for family game night. Great bear trap did. So a reluctant bear trap I will say because that's brutal. Yeah. I mean, shoving the rods into the spine is insane. And your family's spine. Also, they're still and she never liked my cookie. He's coexisting with something because he's like Miranda would go down to fetch food so she saw the thing first, right? So he's aware he's aware of something. It could also be like a mold or some growth or something back there that caused it. But what's weird is he yells out Ripley and then the TV just turns on, right? Yeah. And it's recording of Daniel in this room doing it. So there's something there's something going on there, right? By the way, it's probably apparent at this point, but this rules so far. Christian Wallsman. There's this story. Oh my god. I mean, even like he's he is one of the goats, but even amongst his works, this is one of my just setting the stuff. This is one of my favorite set up so far. So I can like, I can see it so plainly in my head, all the details. I don't know if you feel the same. I feel like I'm just picturing the the bunker is the same from a Cloverfield lane or whatever. I was thinking about that earlier Cloverfield lane. Yeah. I'm thinking of the room is more like a concrete opening. I don't. I have this clear image on my mind of it. Yeah. I have this, you know, it's weird. I think it's the same image in my mind that came when I first read the road and it talks about the father and son finding the supplies in the bunker. But I don't know where I got that original image from. Could have been weird. For no. Yeah. Because you know, the way my mind works is it builds off of stuff I've seen in real life. Sure. Or like in visual storytelling. So I feel like it had to come from somewhere, but I can't remember where it came from originally. Yeah. I'm curious. Maybe it is. Yeah. My mind is Cloverfield lane and I'm forgetting my mind is just when I hear like, Oh, bunker, it just whatever the first thing that pops up, I feel like it just sticks. And to me, as soon as he said bunker, I was even picturing the doctor kind of looks like John Goodman. It's like it's like just like kind of like it's building that kind of visual in my head. Not saying it's just pretty close. Yeah. This is pretty close to what I was thinking of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Daniel wandered over to the camera and with a grin, he lifted it from the tripod and scanned it in her table. I saw it nearly made me drop my torch. His family were long dead, gone faces, missing noses, lips that have receded to reveal awful grins. These were corpses, plain as day, even when viewed through such a low resolution image. The only thing that made them seem remotely alive was the way their eyes still reflected the infrared backs so that they glowed in the dark. Yeah, Daniel seemed oblivious to it all. Tossled Elliot's hair is his wife on the cheek. Run a hand a cross one young girl's shoulder. Even picked the young Alexander up from his high chair and I assume he called him. I don't know for sure because I looked away. I'm willing to see the poor boy up close. Eyes averted from the screen, I couldn't help paying my torch across the same dinner table and shiver as I finally realized what all those stains were. Not quite blood, a close. Liquid fine flesh. Left alone for months, Daniel had not put his family's bodies to rest. Instead he had moved them around from place to place, puppet them, living life as if nothing had really changed. Looking at where those stains had settled, I saw a clear pattern emerge. He had put them to bed, he had set them dinner. It propped them up to watch TV or gave them their favorite books. They even set theirs lifeless husks while Daniel waited for them to complete a jigsaw idea horrified me to my core. Back to work. It's obviously not a part of the original designs. No room on the other side. None of the blueprints. Ellie didn't believe me and why wouldn't he? And why would he? I've made every interest of his place, but I had not installed that door of the storage on the bottom level. I checked the cameras and some of the photos I took during the build and the walls is just blank. But the door is there now and must lead somewhere. I don't know when or why it opens, but it does. In the next time I'll be ready, because I have to know what's on the other side. And why did this to us? Alone down here, often all asleep at once. Anything could have slid our throats and been done with it. But it did. It took its time. I have to know why. It took our radios and computers and phones one by one. None of us noticing until it was far too late. I kept telling the kids they needed to take better care of their things. And even as they complained, I just assumed the phones were lined behind some shelf. Where else could they go in a locked bunker? But it wasn't the children at all. Looking back, there are so many signs. I kept taking away the lights. Okay, draining the batteries in our torches. How long did we live there before we finally realized we weren't alone? Was it here every step of the way? The door out of nothing that leads to nowhere. At least most of the time. Because I know for a fact it does not always open onto a blank wall. There is something haunted. I can hear it shuffling around there. With breath rattling in its lungs. A horrible sound. I hear rolling these halls when it thinks I'm asleep. Bro, this gives so hard. It's called up in the bunker. Yeah, it's weird. It's weird because I don't know if I can trust him. You know, like I really don't know if I believe Daniel in this in this deal. Because also we have to consider too. He brought his family down and locked them in this bunker. They kind of like, you know what I mean? So I don't know. Maybe there wasn't into the world coming, but like it was prevented somehow because of this. I'm not sure. I mean, there is all the calculations and stuff. But now it seems like it is like this kind of house of leaves. Like how did this get here? Like I did not put this here. And I'm wondering if that's also some of what his some of what his research on the walls, like the the cave painted that does read kind of house of leaves. Doesn't it the whole like there's the door. What does the door do? Yeah. Yeah. Will this one is this one is much more obvious, but yeah, Will Navidson didn't go in. I mean, he was obsessed with the door, but he didn't go insane because of it. Like this one did. Maybe he's not insane per se. Maybe he thinks his family still alive. Maybe he's more like I think he believes they're dead. I mean, that's why he's also like that's why they came in and did what he they did to us. I think that he knows that this thing is there. I think he's just like he's aware of his family's dead, but he's still playing puppet with them. Yes. Yes. Exactly. I could see that. We kept taking away the lights. We kept draining the batteries. So that's that mean the idea of being in a bunker and there's like a shadow there, an extra thing in there with you. That makes the writing from earlier makes sense to five doors, not six, not not six doors. Well, the other thing he said in the midst of that, he was like five doors, not six. And then he said, didn't make it, didn't make it. Yeah, which just him. Well, he said, here he's like, I definitely did not put that in. Oh, I didn't make the six store. Yeah. Yeah. Got you. Okay. I listened to Daniel, fascinated by this strangely compelling rant, movement caught my eye. And if we're at camera running in the dark, it's image, a rolling mess of form noise. What was it I'd seen? I paused the tape and rewound, squinting. I saw two pinpricks of light in the dark, and it's just over Daniel's shoulder. Slowly, image resolved itself in my mind. I knew what I was seeing, and it turned my blood to ice. We're in advance, it turned her head. In her lifeless eyes closed as she fixed them on the back of Daniel's head. Oh, my God. Not even any point leaving at this stage. I'm no doctor, but that door is giving off enough radiation to well, to kill a family of seven. If none of us had touched it, being in the same room was risky, but not lethal. We've given it how sick we've become. It's pretty obvious. Our curiosity got the better of us. One by one, and we all got too close, maybe not. We'll do that thing on the other side, came through and did this. I don't even know. Wait. What was that? Daniel turned the camera stop recording. Image at Frozen was of a lone man, right as a star in the camera's lens, facing off against unknowable darkness, broken only by six pairs of white, glowing eyes. Good God. Bro. That's so good. So my implication that his family's possessed by something, or they're still alive in the rotting bodies. I'm not sure. I mean, I could be a thing of radiation poisoning or something, and like something radioactive is getting them, but a hundred percent, one million percent, the family is going to crawl out of that six fucking door. They took the dog, and they're going to get our protagonist. Yeah. Well, by Ripley, you know, you were a good dog. I'll miss you dearly. Nice to meet you. I'm glad I got to know you when I did, but you're though. Also, it makes sense to why the cops aren't going back is because it's a fucking radio. It's a radioactive mess. The police were like, no, no, no, no, no, that's okay. I became painfully aware of my position relative to the table. And I had the painful premonition that if I turned, those chairs would not be empty. I would see the vances, all of them. Daniel is well waiting for me. Ed's turned. Body's left to rot for years in the dark. Behind me something shifted. It breathed. Loud. Quick. I knew what it was. I knew. Came at me so fast that when I felt something hot and wet touch my hand, I screamed only for the presence to suddenly recoil. But then without hesitation, it left it me and bore me into the ground. I webbed as Ripley licked my face. No, it was shivering and worst of all, silent, which was not normal. It was not a quiet dog, not when greeting me and not when excited like he was now. But whatever he'd seen down here, he clung to me and dug his paws into my shoulders like he wanted to be cradled over the shoulder. Something he had been too big to do for years. I could in a soft whisper and even in the dark, I could feel his tail wagging. Joking aside, well nothing but relief had fined him. Let's get the hell out of here. I picked him up, straining a little under the weight, but refusing to give in to tired muscles, made for the latter. Was uneasy climbing the three or four rungs to the hatch, but I managed it and gave the hatch a shove. First one hand, then two. Again and again with everything I had, still the hatch refused to budge. Shit! I cried while pounding at it with my fist, but all I achieved was a sore wrist. A hatch had jammed when somehow a handle had been snapped clean off. Now I'd need a pair of pliers or something to cut through the metal bar, locking it shut. My fingers couldn't move it nor could I brute force the hatch open. Metal bar was an inch thick and, at the very least, I need some tools to get at it from the side. At least it's fixable, I thought as I climbed back down and caught my breath, on one wall I noticed a simple diagram of the bunker made in chalk. It had three floors. The bottom was storage, and you'll mention that before, and I noticed that he had drawn through it with a large red X, and the top floor was labeled quarters, or I stood now. But the middle floor was labeled workshops, and it was there I realized that I'd find what I needed. There was one door that opened onto a concrete stairwell and, standing at the top, I showed my light down the spiraling guard rails, unsure of what it was I hoped to see. There were only harsh shadows, and the sense of something foul rising up in the air. The smell that tickled my throat and burned a little in my lungs. At the police even gone down this far, they seemed what I'd seen on the TV and just left. Somehow I thought it was unlikely that it'd been enough to send the entire sheriff's department running. So was it something else that had done it? Something that had been enough to terrified dozens of armed men? Something that was almost definitely down there. Door. went down quietly. At first I considered leaving Ripley behind, but after losing him the first time, I decided I'd rather risk it just to know he was right next to me. Besides he was being quieter than I was, and I didn't feel much like going down those stairs of my own. He accompanied me with only the quiet click-clack of his paws on concrete. Sound I've found deeply comforting, so I barely managed to keep my torch from shaking in my hand and my breathing steady. On one floor and I found the workshop exactly as you might expect. A large space filled with generators and fuel and water tanks and boilers and heaters and pretty much anything and everything that you need to survive. Which you couldn't put outside due to fallout. Wires, pipes and tubes ran from one end of the room to the other, and even years later, most of the machinery still hummed in the pitch black emptiness. An idea I found deeply unsettling. We can one look at the strange tangle of harsh shapes and industrial figures looming out of the walls and floor, a shivered and looked around. Quickly finding a small area Daniel had cordoned off for his own use. But if it's the total floor space, there's a large workbench and some seriously high-end machine and equipment. All very well-used, blades, buzz saws, drills, belt sanders, welding torches, everything a man needed to do it himself. Daniel had been busy. I'm not sure exactly what it was he'd been working, but there was an arm on the bench. It's like a scary visual that the reading of all the equipment, I thought he had been building contraptions or like creatures or something, and it's like my prized work, an arm. I wonder, do you think it's Daniel's arm? Could be. Good chance. Very good chance. It's at the top of pile of papers that it slowly turned brown over the years until the whole thing looked like it had been soaked into back-o-spit. On the whiteboard was a faded but still visible diagram of what looked to me like a ball-and-socket joint. I thought of the tape, Daniel's little mechanism to keep his family upright, and then looked at the arm and suppressed a momentary gag reflex. I don't know if Daniel had been working on posable limbs or just a way to put the decomposing remains back together after they started to fall apart, but the size of the arm suggested a preteen child. He left it out on the surface like it was a disassembled clock. It was also missing a finger. It's how crazy was he. I wondered as I pinched my nose with one hand and began overturning boxes looking for a hefty pair of pliers, or maybe a hacksaw. Probably backed away from the noise, but once I made sure it wasn't going anywhere, I carried on, grabbing and pulling at box after box, hoping I'd find what I was looking for, anything to break that metal bar. In the end, I managed to get a pair of bolt cutters, crowbar and heavy-duty pair of pliers. One went in my pocket, one went down the back of my jeans, and the other was clutched to my fist. Too large to be tucked away in my clothes. All cutters felt hefty in my hand, which was a bit of comfort that feeling didn't last long. Something moved in the darkness. Out there in the twisted jungle of shadows, cast by all those pipes and wires that ran from one machine to the next, a figure moved, thin and unmistakably human in its outline. I couldn't help but remember what I'd seen on that tape. Surely it couldn't have been real. We'd Daniel had to wreak something up, some fishing wire and a motor, maybe. The idea that those bodies had been moving on their own, couldn't be sure of that, could I? It was a frightening idea, while my mind had latched on to at a sheer panic. That was all, then I saw them. A pair of white pinpricks reflecting back at me from the depths of that cluttered room. Ripley already behind me, head nuzzled into my leg, pushed even closer against me and let out a barely audible wine under his breath, the behavior of a dog who was terrified, close to pissing himself with fear. "Just a bit of metal," I told myself, a slight shook so violently in my hand, I struggled to see straight, just two shiny bits of metal. They blinked and began to come towards God. If I had any doubts left, they were dispersed by the side of a pale white handy merging into the light. I ran straight to the stairs and went to climb them, but only one or two steps in and I saw something gripping the handrail on the top floor. Moldy clump of flesh only just recognizable as a fist, the flesh whithered until the fingers were basically bone. Without meaning to, I brought my line up out of habit and saw the bloated face of a hairless corpse glaring down at me. I couldn't even tell you if it had been a teenage girl or a 60 year old Daniel. Either way, I instinctively turned and found another body shambling towards me out of the workshop. I was trapped, nowhere to go. By the feel of warm fluid on the back of my leg, I could tell Ripley had finally pissed himself. An adult dog, tailed between his legs, shivering like a puppy and desperate to be picked up. God, I needed him to just stay together for a little longer. I couldn't take him in my arms, but I couldn't leave him behind either. With nowhere to go, I ran down and entered storage. There's the temptation to stop once I hit the bottom. Down here, the air was thicker and the sounds of my breathing were muted, somehow distant. It only had a look back up to see three pairs of eyes glaring down at me. So without giving any of it much further thought, I barreled down the corridor and stumbled onto a door at random. Opening it, I saw what looked like your standard storage room. The most of the shelves had been overturned and the food left to rot on the floor. One or two shelving units were still upright though, and their shelves were covered in tall opaque boxes that made them a fantastic hiding spot. That I decided would have to be where I crouched down and turned off my light. I was already inside when I realized that wasn't all that was in there. The door almost looked normal. I guess what a menacing sentence. I know. I hate that uncannyness of that. Oh, God. This is excellent. This story is excellent because it's in my head, I'm like, there's no way he would ever go further down, but then you put a threat that makes him go further down, which let's us see the rest of the layout and stuff. And also the presentation where we had a map of it. So we know what's coming while he's in the workshop. It's all very well done. This is an excellent story. I could see why Daniel must have been confused by it because it looked a little bit like all the other doors down there, but it was different too. It was too tall and too wide, about a foot and a half off the ground, and the metal rested in its entirety like it had aged out a sink with everything else down there. All around the jam was a profusion of wet, soppy moss like the kind you find hanging off trees and swamp. Refuse seconds to door with leaks, something strange and oily, like the kind of thing you find in a parking lot on a rainy day. Of course that wasn't too strange in itself, but the leak was horizontal to find gravity so that every few seconds, large glob of the stuff would whip across the room and slap into the wall opposite, reading a puddle about the size of a man that defied all reason. Interesting, so it's like gravity's thrown down there. Very Daniel's words about radiation, I instinctively, inched away from this puddle and the door on the opposite wall. Backing myself into the darkest, quietest corner I could, I pulled Ripley behind me and hoped to hell he wouldn't give me away. Once I was in there, I turned off my light and waited. Most have taken longer than I thought to hide in the spot, because it was barely two seconds later when a few figures entered the room. It was pitch black after I turned off my torch, but they made enough noise to let me know that at least two of them had stumbled in after me. I stayed there, unable to see anything, not sure if they were heading straight for me or just getting ready to leave, forced to hold out and let luck decide my fate. When I finally heard something scrape against the wall, barely two feet from where I stood, the gave up and switched my light on. Desperate to know what was coming for me, the sound had been terribly misleading. Daniel Vance, no more than six inches from my face. He hissed from a toothless and cracked mouth, a living corpse just like the others, somehow a flash of intelligence remained in those wide, terrified eyes, and then I heard it, the creaking of a door. Without even thinking I turned the light and saw it on the wall, I saw it open. From the strange still, there was more than just plain old concrete. Much more. I saw a raging gullet of flesh, a ring tube of pulsing muscle lined with teeth, the size of hands, a spiraling descendant of madness, hot-foded air washed into the room, buffeting me, and the rotting corpses, all of us paralyzed by what we were seeing, even if for most of the figures besides Daniel and myself they didn't have eyes to see with. The muttered, unable to take my eyes from the flesh to be on the doorway. Daniel whispered as he grabbed me with one fist and hurled me out of the room. I hit the floor and skidded along a slick fluid left by Vance's footprints, the smell of which turned my stomach. Perhaps the worst detail was that it was cold, I don't know why, I just expected whatever or oozed off of them to be feverishly hot. it wasn't. Soaked my shirt like I'd fallen into a muddy puddle. "It's coming." This voice wasn't Daniels. I couldn't say for sure, but it sounded like a child's whisper. One by one the body shuffled over to the open door and knelt before it. I don't know why, but I got the impression the others had lost pretty much everything left of their minds, but Daniel remained aware. He looked back at me once more and spoke before he pressed his head to the floor in supplication with the others. "The only thing we did wrong was being here for it, the door turned. It didn't need a reason. Just an opportunity. Leave. It won't let us go. It won't even let us die. And if it catches you, it won't let you go either." His forehead kissed the dirt, and then something reached through the door, gripped his head and its palm, the way you or I might pick up an apple. In full panic, I ran over and grabbed my dog and bolt-cutters and I ran like my legs were pistons, machines whose signals of exhaustion and fatigue could not slow me down or cause me to fall. I had to move. I had to leave. A hand that had grabbed Daniel at the side of it flushed my mind clean like some kind of inema. It hurt to see the image replaying my mind, but there was nothing else in my head echoing around except the side of fingers with one too many knuckles and nails as large as a smartphone. I reached the top floor and nearly collapsed from breathlessness, but I wouldn't let myself stay down for long. I crawled over to the ladder and climbed up and immediately went to work trying to cut the metal lock. It was hell with just one hand, the other clinging to the torch that I kept frantically pointing at the door behind me and it wasn't long before I fumbled one too many times and dropped my only source of light. "No, no, no, no!" I mured. There was no time to look for it. I had to get out and I had to get out fast. I couldn't see but I was sure I could hear something climbing up those stairs. Not the steady thump, thump of human feet. Now this was different. This was a rapid pitter-patter of a spider, maybe. Something with hundreds of feet or hands or God knows what skittering along the floor and walls and ceiling pulling itself along with the body whose mere shape would offend God. Using all my strength, I leaned hard on the bolt cutters and, at last, the bolt gave. Through the hatch open, it got just enough ambient light to see Ripley hovering at the bottom of the ladder, rallying ineffectually at the doorway. Crouched down, scooped him up and fled up the ladder so quickly that my muscles turned to jelly at the top and I fell over onto my hands and knees. But still, I was out. The long corridor covered in riding was ahead of me, and at the very end, a doorway capped now by the tired blue light of him, full moon. Ripley needed no encouragement. He whipped down the corridor with canine speed and I followed it, broken and stumbling crawl, eventually shouldering past the open door and collapsing onto the forest floor. For a few seconds, I drifted in and out of consciousness. But when I looked up and saw the canopy overhead moving, branches backlit by full moon, I snapped away and glared down at something gripping my ankle. Oh shit. The hand, reached out of the dark and seized me and was slowly dragging me back into the earth below. Whatever it was, most of its body lurked out of sight in the shadows beyond the doorway, but the hand that crushed my leg was the size of my torso, and arm that looked like it belonged to a mole rat. God damn it. Officer mole. I told you not to enter my hurry night. All right. Now that, that's my bear trap. That's a bear trap. I've hit two heavy ones this episode. That one was like, uh, that was like a prophetic pull. Oh my gosh. Oh, I know, I know what it's applying like under under dwellers and stuff like that, but just the fact that that's right. Oh, his equation did in fact say mole people. I struck it with my own fist. I dug my nails in. I cried and kicked in screen, but nothing could stop it. From behind the door, something like a face grand and leered at me with joy. It was taking its time, sure enough, pulling me in so slowly that it gave my mind all the time in the world to appreciate the nightmare that awaited me. I think if, in that moment, you'd given me a gun. I would have shot myself because God helped me. I couldn't have escaped the look in Daniel's eyes. Now he knelt to worship this thing like a man who knew that hope or pride or joy or anything with even a hint of goodness to it was so far out of reach for him it might as well be a dream. How long was this thing going to keep them down there? How long did it intend to keep me? A web like a child feeling like my mind was slowly crackling as I tried everything to stop it from pulling me into the shadows. I kicked at the earth. I dug into it using my hands looking for a roof or a pipe or anything to hold on to. Nothing. Nothing. I did would slow it down. I was no more than a foot from the doorway when Ripley appeared. A dog afraid of hoovers and plastic bags indoors that move on their own. Dog, who once got stared down by a particularly feisty rabbit, you stopped mid-chase and turned around, baffling the predator on its tail. Dog, you couldn't even watch scary movies around. And he launched at the arm like he was a wolf. You know what? Like he'd always been one. I had a boy Ripley. While he didn't quite break the skin, the pressure was enough to make the things grip weakened and I slid my leg out. Unable to stand, I knelt and grabbed the dog, pulled as hard as I could, and now that thing bled at last as the pressure of the jaws and the sliding teeth ripped into its flesh. Together, last, Ripley and I were let go, and said rolling backwards, head over heels. I wasted no time waiting or looking, processing. I heaved the dog to my chest and crawled until I passed out, making it maybe half a kilometer away. Only when I could no longer see the door did I let myself fall to the ground face first, give up consciousness. The doctor said I had pneumonia, which I suppose made some kind of sense. I might have even believed them were it not for the sheriff's visit, asking strange questions of me as I lay in bed about what I may or may not have seen. I dismissed them to the best of my ability. I wasn't interested in chasing that particular nightmare down, figuring out if it had been real or not. At least not while I lay there have drowning in my own infection. To be fair, I had at least some sympathy for why the police had done so little to seal that place off. I have, on occasion, thought about going and doing the job myself, but to this day I still have nightmares about being pulled into the dark beyond that door. Not just the bunker door, when I narrowly avoided at the end, the one below. What I saw was a kind of madness, I'm sure of it. I often think of Daniel's words. It didn't need a reason, just an opportunity. Somehow, the vances were that opportunity. Maybe they built their bunker on a lay line, or a weak spot between dimensions, or the side of former Satanic rituals. Not sure if it even matters. They went into the dark thinking it'd be a safe place to wait out the world's troubles, but something had been down there waiting for them. Waiting for a chance to get out of family of seven people to lock the men and to prive them of escape and slowly take from them everything it could. I've moved since then. Couldn't help it. It wasn't just the memories you see. It was the shortwave radio I kept in my basement. Something my father passed on to me when I was just a boy. God had forgotten about it, at least until I woke up one day to the sound of a blaring white noise down in the dark. Beared in that sound was the faint whispering of a man. His voice barely recognizable, but unmistakably is. And that is the end. Did you read the let them go? Yeah, I did. Wow. Oh my God. What a great story. One that I love about Christian Waltz's work is the pacing, but not only that, but the way that he does the exposition and the buildup to where like he spent it seems like he spends a lot of the very beginning of the stories instead of just being like, I'm going down to this deal. And then you get a lot of the exposition of like, oh, yeah, like when you're down there, you get the exposition. It's like I like that you get a lot of this like a little bit of backstory exposition of what's happening. And then it just seems like also my dog. And like, I think it just takes a, it takes a turn. It's like my dog went missing and he's down in that very bunker. Yeah, that's a fun way to present that. Yeah, all of the, all the little, because sometimes story writers have trouble with their connectors. How it's like, I want the character to do this. And I want them to see this thing. And they need to go here. And it needs to be this, it needs to be believable. And sometimes the things that will push the character to those different points doesn't work as well. But Christian Wallace doesn't have that problem because it's like, okay, well, he loves this dog. He establishes how much he loves a dog. So it goes into the first layer. Well, now he's trapped. He has to go the second to get supplies. And now we have to go the third because there's something on the second. So it's everything flows very well. And you get to see all the set pieces and it feels natural and it keeps attention up. There's never a point where you're like, well, I don't know about that, because let's her story. teller would be like, I was in the first floor, but I had to know what happened to the family. So I go down to the second where it's like, sure, we the reader wants to know what happened to the family. But no way this guy would, right? So everything feels very reasonable. Why do you think that? Why do you think the TV just turned on randomly? I feel like I almost feel like I missed a line or like I'm forgetting a line about like, yeah, I feel like I maybe didn't read it right. I wonder if in the shadow of the guy turned it on or something or what it seems like knowing that Daniel is down there, he's still, which also, I just want to say, how, God, how like daunting and horrifying is that of like your family, your family are husk. Like they're basically just zombies that just won't die, right? And you are rotting with them and you're, but you're still conscious and you're still able to understand all of this shit. And I love that Daniel's character was not used as a vessel to like kill. He was used as a vessel to be like, you get the fuck out of here. Don't end up like us, which is, which is kind of interesting too, because the parallel of like Daniel and his family were doomsday preppers, they went into the dark to hide for the troubles of the world, right? But they found a bunch of evil or whatever. It almost seems, it's just, it's like a, it's like a fun way for that character who did that to go out and just be like, don't live your life like this and like, basically like get out of here, which I think still to me translates to something of like, don't live in fear and get out of, get out of this place, you know what I mean? What was the, there was a picture of, what was my turn to think of it was, why am I stupid? I was about to say something and then I completely, I hate it when that happens. Yeah. Oh yeah, the door opened up and it was like a throat, right? It was like this thing of twist, there reminded me of Dianne a house, a lot of Dianne a house. I know that I say this probably every other fucking podcast, but the final prayer or something where it's like a entity living in the hills, living in the ground or something, but it did arm or something that comes out of it. And it's like, it's like keeping them in a purkatory. I like that thing that Daniel says it didn't need a reason, just an opportunity. It's just something that causes, you know, it's just a death mystery decay. It's a pure, it's a pure wickedness, which goes off of what you were saying, how it's like the family was paranoid of the world, something going wrong with it. But then they found the essence of wrong down in their hiding hole, right? Yeah. Well, in the hiding hole, I think that it's interesting that the creature, the six door is like an appendage. It almost seems like of this thing. Yeah. That just appears. So it's like on Kenny, it's like luring people in, but it's like you are trying to hide from the unknowns, from like the unknown precedent, like an unknown accident that would happen, right? You're trying to prepare yourself for something that could happen. And then of course, the thing they go down there for, they're completely unprepared for. I think it's just kind of an interesting, uh, I also like the, uh, which is, this is going to sound really rude, people aren't going to be happy with this. My one critique is I think the dog should have died. I knew it, I knew it, you would, you would fall in line. I know what's weird is because I, I am so happy the dog didn't die. I feel like my heart was fluttering because here's why, because here's why, here's why. Because there is a cautionary aura to the family, right? Like they feared the world so they hid from the world and they found something beneath the world, right? And we see Daniel, who is being punished for that and is witnessing the punishment of his family. Right. Because it's almost a curse where it is a curse that he keeps his consciousness, right? Like if he was made into some mindless zombie puppet thing, that'd probably be better than the alternative where he's completely aware of what's going on that his family's down there. Even in the final moments of the story, when he's listening to a shortwave radio and he can hear Daniel saying, let them go, let them go. He asked to watch his family be kept in this puppet state, which is like a hell, it's literally a hell of his own making, right? And then there is a weird connection established between Daniel and our author because similarly, the author went into this bunker for something he loves, right, the dog. So we have Daniel goes down there to preserve something he loves and we have the author that goes down there to preserve something he loves. But in both cases, going down there is a narratively moral wrong, right, do not go into the bunker, do not go away. Maybe for author it wasn't necessarily to escape the world, but he is going into something he knows he shouldn't go into, right? Even if it's for good reasons and help what he wants. So that scene where Daniel's speaking to the author and he's like, get out of here. That is like Daniel getting the author to do what he could not to leave. But nevertheless our author goes in. So I feel like if in that final moment where the dog came over and bit the hand and then if then the dog was dragged down and maybe our author passes out or gets away or whatever in the police find him, it's like, yeah, because he wanted to go down there, something he loved paid the price. I feel like that would be the final bow tie between him and Daniel. I feel like it worked a bit better. I feel like it's a bit too easy for him to go down there and there would be no consequences, right? Oh, sure. No, I mean, I, you know, I think going on top of that too, like I think like, and this is all hindsight, whatever, just subjective bullshit, but like, sure, sure. Daniel being more of like, maybe not like less of us like, like picturing him up to is like he was just like, you know, like basically like not a mentally unwell man, but just something where it's like expecting the worst always, he believed that it was going to go. It was more of a detriment, right? And then that way later, when he's sitting there with his dead family, it almost feels like you infect and you burden your family with that kind of mentality or you change them. You zombify them into that state of belief or something, right? The same way that with our protagonist, it would have been something funny. If it were not funny, but it would have been something entertaining if he was a conspiratorial guy as well, except maybe like net Doomsday, he was just like, they're not telling us these things. It's another case that they're just covering up or whatever. Some type of conspiratorial thing to where he goes out into the bunker, which is similar to Daniel going down for his own reasons. And then he has to like have that kind of pride, basically having some kind of motive to where our protagonist could learn where Daniel could not, like the young and young I think need to have the opposites right there, it would have probably felt a bit more satisfying or something where it's just like don't go digging for things that are going to get you in trouble or yada, yada, yada, which I'm paraphrasing and it probably sounds stupid. But by dude, I agree is what I'm saying with you. I think it is a bit too convenient of like, I'm going down here. I do wish they had a bit more motive of being like, this is, there's just something weird or these fucking cops are covering something up, something that is more about like something larger than himself is putting others in risk the same way that like a doomsday thing of like an atom bomb dropping or something and spending for yourself or helping your family. I feel like it's also a bit like the dog bites it and then it bleeds and it lets go. It's like, okay, so this is a creature that you can hurt and you can make bleed and stuff. I think I make more sense if the dog biting it was more of a sacrifice like the dog here. It would be heavier if the dog, it's not like the thing bleeds the dog's just like, okay, I'll take this instead. So it'd be like the dog sacrifice in itself to save it. What it kind of does, well, I thought on the line to bite him, I think that if you have the dog get like an ounce of courage, it's kind of a funny character growth for the dog. Like, you know, dogs are a big whimp and then he steps up. But if it does nothing, it's still like a noble gesture. I thought that what it was going to happen is Daniel was going to pop up and like grab it or something like try no, no, no, the monster, oh, the monster like he was going to bring it down with him. Yeah. Something I've just being like, this is my burden to carry and he's just off like that kind of thing. Like, to me, that would have been also a fun way to like tie that together because yeah, I agree. Then it just feels like it's the thing isn't, it wasn't hurt or something because yeah, with these like big, I don't know, like monstrous, deity kind of things. You almost want to see like to me, it's always effective when it's like man-made things cannot hurt this thing. Like a human being could do nothing to this source, which is also why it feels like of course he like bows to it because also it might be like fucking with his family or something. Of course Daniel is going to do whatever he can just to keep together this. Yeah, he can't do anything other than supplicate himself, of course, no resistance, yeah, yeah. I think I also want to clarify that my critiques of the story saying the dog should die because I feel bad sometimes when we read a great story and I spend most of the time talking about critique. The reason that's all I have to talk about is because everything else about the story banged, the workshop segment, the house, the living room, the like it was excellent. It was such a good story. So it's also just part of the, to me that's part of the fun of reading a story. I mean, how many times do you just need to be aware of stuff? You're talking about things and you're just like it would have been cool if they would have done this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just the idea that it's just like it. Yeah. definitely not undermining or trying to undermine the work. It's just something of like these are just like little subjective thoughts because also you can implement these things and they could suck. You know, like who knows? It's just fun to riff and all that kind of stuff. So definitely, you know, I will say this, I am a proponent in most media that the dogs should probably die more often because dogs are like an untouchable thing for people. Yeah, there's no way persona of like dogs like a baby because they're the ultimate person of innocence. But if the point of your story is that the personification of innocence is being injured, then it you have to kill the thing that is totally innocent, right? The best example of that, which I didn't even realize this happened until I try to watch the movie with my wife who hates it when dogs die in movies. In no country for old men like three dogs die. And it makes sense in that movie because the whole movie is about the laws of good, good guy, bad guy, you know, the share of riding and to clean up the town. That doesn't work here like things die, even if they don't deserve it. So the dog's dying there works. And I feel like there's too many horror movies that can get through with like a message like that and it be effective, but they won't kill the dog because people are going to be uncomfortable about it because people need to feel comfortable in a genre that the root word is horrific. And it drives me up. I mean, I see what you're coming from. I think it all just comes down to like, what is the point? It's kind of I think it's the same thing of like, I don't know, having like sexually sexual assault in movie or like, you know, child death. There's these things that are just kind of untouchable things that are just like you shouldn't include them. I will say cruel, but I mean, I think that it just it just comes down to the intention. Like if you just randomly kill these things, you randomly do this stuff. It feels like a fetish or it feels like you're fetishizing something and it's for it's like more for the director. I know like a critique that my wife has with a lot of stuff that has like overly sexual assault type stuff is it feels like it's a fetish for the director. It feels like it's a man. Yeah, or something, which I agree. But I do think that there's elements where it is like important. It is a horrific thing that can't happen. But it's the same thing with like a dog death or something. Does it? Is it just like a cheap way to make you feel something? Yeah. Well, I think honestly, I feel like modern movies are more liable to kill a kid than they would a dog 100% 100% yeah, and I feel like that's weird. I feel I don't like that. Well, you even see it in like social media posts too about people like you'll hear like it's something where it's like the Ruby Frankie thing where she like abused her children or whatever. That was my media attention. But like sometimes I still feel like you hear about like somebody like like a dog abuser will be hung from the gallows before like a person. Yeah. Okay, YouTuber who hits their kids or something like that, which is exactly. And to clarify, they're both bad. They're both awful. Nothing is good, but it's just crazy that a human lie. It's just it's just that kind of thing. There's a weird disparity between like innocence of like the young and innocence of animals. Yeah, they're both innocent, but it's weird that people are so uncomfortable by the death of an animal and not the death of a child a lot of times in horror movie senses, which I don't know. There's probably some greater conversation to be had with that. But yeah, I feel like the dog should die more. I feel like not it shouldn't be gratuitous. Like anything should be gratuitous. But I feel like I think the purpose of your story is this of loss of innocence and you have to lose the innocence. You know, I think, yeah, and I think that the only way I think I agree with you on that because in this one, I do like the dog stepped up like just as like this short film went because this was like a very punchy short story. Yeah, I like that the dog made it out. It was a nice ending even though like him coming there and all that stuff is as follows, I think that you have him get stripped of that if if he went there for a selfish or like like some kind of reason that is like you should plenty of signs warn that you shouldn't have went down there, which there was a couple here, but I do think like if if he was a guy that was just like fuck this, I'm doing it in any ways, they're hiding something blah, blah, blah. And you in that loss has to stay with you forever. I think it feels so much more like deserve like this is like a punishment. This is something that like you could have avoided this if you just stepped out of your own way if you weren't so selfish. Yada, yada, yada, that kind of stuff. But I mean, I don't know. People might totally agree with you too. And some people I know will get comments being like, you know, it just seems gratuitous. There should never be a reason for it. But I think that that's all open for discussion. And that's the thing too is it's all subjective. You know, like it's just your opinion and what you think and all my kind of stuff. So I'll say a couple notes like I remember with the dog dying thing. I was writing the story one time. I was telling Caleb about it and had a dog dying in there. She's like, you can't do that. And I'm like, well, it's like a flesh thing that consumes all it's like consume the family and all the wildlife and stuff like that around the house. So, you know, the family had a dog that's the dog and she was like, well, you can't kill the dog. And I'm like, okay, so you want it to kill everything but the dog is she's like, yeah, you have to read a reason why it didn't kill the dog like that's stupid. But also, I'm reading through the comments of the post and someone raised an interesting point. They're like, perhaps Daniel did find a way to survive the apocalypse that's about to come. Like his family has immortality now, but it's not the way you interact him, which is an interesting thought. Like a monkey's paw kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, like he felt like he did find an equation like, oh, if we build a bunker here, if we do this, we'll survive to come in apocalypse and they will. It's just not in a good way. Also, I say all that stuff about the dog dying. And I'm like, who's this for? Why would they kill the dog? And then I read, I read some of these comments. And there was that one that cracked me up is like, I was starting to do the same thing here until the paragraph about Ripley. I audibly went, well, I'd do that. I would do the exact same thing to save my doggo from being stuck somewhere. Yeah. It just doesn't get to be, you know, I mean, it's just that they're it's pure innocence, you know, there's also there's multiple people asking what the last part about the radio meant. And if they could get some clarification about the radio, and it's like, okay, maybe you can't kill the dog. Maybe these people get way too fired up if you killed the dog. I think it would, you know, people, people fucking they get they do. It's it's it's fucking yeah. I'm not critiquing Christian walls for not killing the dog because the because like people get mad about it. I'm critiquing the audiences to be like, you got to let the dog die more. You got to just be okay with some dog deaths. Okay. I love dogs too, but I also love people. And when I read a horror story, they both got to go. That's just part of it. They both got to go. Nobody bats an eye when a guy gets his fucking head blown up for sure. No, no, no. How many horrific medallions of men I've seen in movies and believed or not, all of my guy friends, men. So, you know, maybe I don't want that to happen to don't want that to happen to dogs. Show me it in a movie. I'm glad though. Christian Wallace three for three men. What a what I think we've covered more than three of his. Have I? I am positive. We've covered more than three of his. Well, we have that. I mean, it's fuck he's a perfect hitter in my book right now. I think that there are great things to at least for reading. You know, I know, I know, I know like a lot of people that listen to this podcast, they really want longer big episodes, but like somebody that can that can like give a story in such a in such a fucking lean punchy, like it just doesn't have a lot of fat. It's just like right to the jugular. I think it's just extremely impressive. And it just makes for like a fun casual reading. Like this is the great, which is also why I want to say be sure to pick up if you are interested in more of like reading his stuff. Be sure to support his his book. Well, like I said, we'll leave it in the description below. These are going to be like just such fun like, you know, your work or before bed or all that kind of stuff. These just like real fun easily digestible stories that I think leave a really fun mystery or you know, they leave a nice thought loop in your head of just thinking about the story. Yeah. The guy is like man, he punches with some stuff. He's in all time. Oh yeah, the one about the deer meat, the daddy didn't deer meat. That was Christian Wallace. Yeah. Okay. So he's got four. Yeah. We've you know what though? It's been a while. It's it's easily been like a I feel like a year since we've read one of his things. Well, the deer meat one wasn't a year ago, but other than. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Then whatever, but just ignore everything. Yeah. I don't know. I thought I thought we were talking about the another story, but the yeah, it's good stuff. What can I say? Thanks for listening on audio platforms. Guys, we appreciate you. Also, thank you to our patrons for supporting the channel and getting all the bonus episodes. We appreciate that as well. Until the next time guys, be sure to check out Christian Wallace's website. We'll leave some links to his website or where you can find his book below and just support the author, you know, if it wasn't for them, we wouldn't be reading the story. So until next time guys, stay creeped. We'll see you next one. Stay creeped. And look, just got to kill the dog. Okay. Got to kill the dog more. So get on that. Thank you. , and we'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. (upbeat music)