20XX
Two decades later.
TING.
"Thank you for buying, please come again."
This was Damon's life after graduating high school. Greeting. Scanning. Cashiering. Repeat. He wasn't like the other kids who went home to warm meals and comfortable houses. He had bills. He had himself. And that was about it.
He worked as a store attendant after school hours, trading what was left of his evenings for a paycheck.
Some nights the store was packed. Other nights it was just him, the hum of the refrigerator units, and the slow crawl of the clock.
The routine had worn itself so deep into his bones that it stopped feeling like a routine at all. It just felt like breathing.
Either way, he showed up.
Growing up, Damon had only ever relied on himself.
His parents died in a plane accident when he was young. No farewell. No warning. Just gone. And in their absence, he was handed off to relatives who never let him forget what an inconvenience he was.
Not a child. Not a nephew. A burden. A curse. Something they were stuck with.
"Why'd your dead parents leave you with me?"
He heard that more times than he could count.
He was treated like shit. Like a slave, doing chores and duties no child should ever be handed. He had no games, no laughter, no soft years to look back on.
In short, he had no childhood.
He endured all of it like a Chad, never once blaming his parents for their death. Instead he took it as blaze of inspiration to go better in life.
After graduation, he left his relatives behind and lived a life of his own. Had his own freedom.
But yeah.
He thought he had it. Turns out this shit was even worse.
Well. At least he had freedom.
Anyway. The shelves weren't going to restock themselves.
He went back to the ones he had abandoned earlier, restocking what was empty, slotting items back into their places one by one.
Once he was done, he grabbed the mop.
Outside it was raining, and the floor showed it—a trail of muddy footprints running from the entrance all the way through the store. He worked through it quietly, the mop dragging back and forth in steady strokes.
Then the door swung open.
TING.
A customer.
Out of instinct he straightened up and dipped his head.
"Good evening, welcome to 9-11. How may I help you?"
Silence. No response. Just ragged, heavy gasping.
He looked up—and took a step back.
"Oh, shit. A-are you alright?"
In front of him stood a heavily bruised man in his thirties. Tall, around six feet flat. Soaking wet from the rain outside, already ruining the floor Damon had just mopped. His face was covered in scratches, blood dripping from his chin. His dark long-sleeved polo was half ripped—like something had clawed through it—and so were his jeans. His dark boots, somehow, were fine.
Damon didn't dwell on that. He moved to assist the stranger immediately.
But the stranger dismissed him.
Instead, he held out a strange wooden box, roughly the size of a gallon of ice cream.
"T-take this... P-please." he said, voice barely holding together. Almost pleading.
Damon stared at it. Then at him. Mouth slightly open.
"Uhmm... W-what?" He scoffed. "Is this some kind of p-prank? I ain't taking that shi..."
Look, this day and age, you couldn't just trust random shit handed to you by a bleeding stranger at ten in the evening.
Two probabilities.
One—that wooden box could be holding a stack of cash from some unhinged rich content creator from Metube. That's the positive one.
Or...
Two—it could go kaboom. Not the good one.
Either way, Damon just wanted to play it safe. That was all.
But the stranger didn't care about his hesitation. He pushed the box into Damon's hands anyway, forcefully.
"P-Please... This needs to be protected." he pleaded, pressing it firmly against Damon's chest.
"H-HEY, WTF—I'm just gonna take this if this thing's loaded with cash—"
TREMBLE.
The wooden box vibrated in his hands. Lightly. As if something inside was alive. His eyes dropped to it immediately.
'...Uh?'
Then it stopped.
He blinked.
"What the hell was that."
He looked up, brows furrowed.
"Hey, why the hell did this thing just —"
He froze.
Where the stranger once stood, there was nothing. Only the glass door swinging on its hinges, pushed back and forth by the heavy wind, rain pouring in through the gap and pooling onto the floor.
"E-e-eh?! Where the hell did that dude go?"
He set the box down on the nearest shelf and stepped outside to look.
The wind hit him immediately. Strong and wet. The streets were flooded, rainwater crawling up toward the entrance of the shop.
He looked left. He looked right. Nothing. Not a soul. Not even a shadow. Just the howl of the wind tearing down the empty street.
He stepped back inside and pulled the glass door shut behind him.
"What the hell. There was no forecast for rain this strong today. This some typhoon level rain."
He stood there for a moment, staring at the rain battering against the glass door, arms crossed.
And then it hit him.
"Ya, right—"
"That wooden box."
He turned around and walked back toward the shelf where he set it down.
But it wasn't there.
He blinked.
He checked the shelf above it. The shelf below it. He crouched down, looked under the rack.
Nothing.
"...Huh?"
He straightened up and looked around the store. Left. Right. Up and down every aisle within eyeshot.
The wooden box was gone.
"WHAT— where did— I literally just put it right here."
He stood there, dumbfounded.
When suddenly—
SCRTICH-SCRITCH!
A faint sound.
His head snapped toward the backroom of the shop. He straightened, listening. There it was again—soft, shuffling, just beyond the door.
He clicked his tongue. "Rats again."
He pushed through the backroom door of the shop and slapped the light switch.
CLICK.
Fluorescent light flooded the room.
He scanned the shelves.
Nothing. No rats. No movement. Just rows of stock and the low, steady hum of the exhaust fan.
He exhaled through his nose and turned to leave—
Then he saw it.
The wooden box.
Sitting atop a pack of one-liter colas.
Still. Centered. Like it belonged there. Like it had never been anywhere else. Like it hadn't just vanished from a shelf thirty seconds ago.
Damion froze in the doorway, hand hovering over the light switch, staring at it. Confusion plastered across his face.
"W-What... how the hell did it get here?"
He wasn't crazy. He knew exactly where he'd left it. Though maybe— just maybe— this was the cost of running on two to three hours of sleep.
Not that he had a choice. His shift wasn't even over yet; he still had assignments to finish, and an exam to review for next week before going to his shift. And the only thing keeping him upright was the chain of energy drinks he'd been cracking open one after another. Not healthy. Again—not like he had a choice. He hated coffee.
He shook his head, trying to clear the haze. Then he smacked the sides of his skull, left then right, like an old TV with no signal that just needed a good smack to work again.
That seemed to do it.
He pushed off the doorframe and shuffled toward the box, mouth already running on its own.
"Jeez... I really need to steal some sleep at the end of my shift. Even just an hour."
He paused, frowning at nothing in particular.
"Oh. Right. Thermo's still in the afternoon." A beat. "I can totally squeeze in a nap before uni. okay. okay. We're fine. We're surviving."
He nodded to himself, convinced.
Then he gagged. "Ke~, I don't wanna die this early. I still have dreams to f—"
THUD!
The words died in his throat. Damion froze mid-step.
'...uh?'
Silence.
Then the wooden box shuddered.
It shook again. Harder. Then harder still, rattling violently against the colas beneath it, seconds stretching like elastic.
BWOOOSH!
The hinged lid exploded open. Violent, sudden, absolute. The force sent Damion stumbling backward, crashing hard onto his back, his ass meeting the concrete floor with zero mercy.
"O-oww! What in the world just happened?" he groaned, scratching his back as he pushed himself up.
He looked up. And went completely still.
Speechless. Unmoving. Unblinking.
In front of him was a creature.
Alien-like. Dark, phlegm-like in texture. Grotesque in feature. Amorphous in shape.
He'd seen creatures like it in movies— but no, it wasn't Venom. Not even close. Its legs, if you could call them that, were spindly and wrong, made entirely out he same dark, phlegm-like substance as the rest of it.
Damion's throat bobbed. Cold sweat prickled across his skin. He couldn't process it. He couldn't name what he was feeling. All he could do was stare.
Then—
It moved.
The creature lunged. Crawled. Rocketed across the floor with a speed that made his brain stutter.
No time to dodge. No time to flinch.
It latched onto his face.
And then... horribly, unbearably slowly... it pushed itself inside his mouth. Choking him. Filling his throat.
The edges of the backroom blurred. The fluorescent light stretched and warped like melted wax.
Then.
Darkness.
TBC...