Special Delivery

There are only about seven of us awake right now. With slenderman (no funny nicknames, sorry) and whoever managed to post on Zach's account everybody is sleeping during the day and staying awake at night.

Really it's only me and the "peroxide blondes" but really they're not too bad. I don't know what Suze has against them. They're not the sharpest knives in the drawer but a couple of them know their stuff about MMOs. I guess it's because their boyfriends play it? I don't know.

Anyways, only a few of us are up in the day. A lot of people have their days backwards, waking up an hour after sunset and then going back to sleep when the sun comes up. We only really see them during the day if something happens and me or the girls wake them up, and even then Lyle is as much as a bastard getting out of bed as he is with everything else. And that's if he even sleeps, most of the time he just sits in his tent and does god knows what on his phone. Him and Suze and Walter and Alex spent a ton of time on their phones which means they use the chargers a ton. We've gotten used to going without charging for a few days because those four seem to use them the most and believe me when I say the phones take FOREVER to charge. Not seeing the sun for almost a week now (not that they'd know) means that they take the whole day AND THEN SOME to charge. I managed to leave Lyle's phone half-charged (he's going to kill me for this later) and got some time for my own and that's why I'm blogging now.

I haven't really done a lot of research into "Slenderman", but from what Suze and Lyle tell me he sounds kind of like a cheesy horror monster but I know better than to doubt something that has Lyle white and Suze shaking. Most of what I heard is word-of-mouth from the four who DO manage to spend a lot of time online. I know about the garbage bags and the facelessness, forests, trees, stalking, tentacles. They've told me a bit but something tells me there's still a lot missing. Nobody really knows a lot about him, do they? I guess that's what makes him so scary. That and the bodies in the garbage bags.

I should probably talk about those. Jegus Lyle, would it kill you to go into detail? Anyways as Lyle said we found the professor and a couple of the other missing students. Or whatever's left of them. It was a little bit before noon and everybody who was up was up and everybody who was asleep was asleep. I was talking to Lyle when we heard this THUMP behind us. Lyle froze for a second and looked behind him, confused and ... annoyed?

"What is it?" I turned around as well. A big black garbage bag was sitting in the center of the camp and nobody saw who dropped it there. "A... garbage... bag?"

Lyle sent me a freezing glare and told me to wake everybody up. I didn't want to argue.

Some of them were already awake. A lot of the people who usually post on the blog mostly. I caught Walter on his phone writing up a post, so I guess looking at the blog he was writing the post before this one. He just kind of looked at me oddly and marched outside, muttering about so... so... sophiSOMETHING.

Richard and Suze were both out by that time, hearing the commotion. Richard took a scary amount of delight in waking up everybody else and Suze and Lyle were standing over the garbage bag, looking at each other like 'What the hell are we supposed to do?'

Alex and Elliott followed last, Elliott's hair sticking up like the mohawk he tried a couple months ago. By the time everybody who cared assembled around the black mass on the ground, a noticeable smell had started to emanate from the bag.

I spent a couple years in forensic pathology, so I'm both very good at identifying the smell of rotting flesh, and also very good at IGNORING IT.

Everybody else wasn't that lucky.

Lyle turned green and stifled a cough, the girls took two or three steps back, and Elliott wavered on his feet. It was me who had to bend down and poke the bag, trying to get a feel for what was inside.

When I touched it everything inside seemed to fall over, and the bottom looked like it was filled with water. The bag kind of... rolled over and hit the ground with a wet plop and everybody's minds went to all the wrong places.

This was the [REDACTED] bag we'd seen, but the first one to be found in camp. After Richard made the mistake of cutting open a hanging one and watching [REDACTED] nobody really wanted to touch the things, but what else could we do?

The group was completely silent, dreading what we were about to do.

"Scalpel?"

Richard was crouching beside me, butterfly knife in his hand. It took me couple seconds before... oh, right.

I took the knife from him and cut a Y across the top of the bag, (the standard incision for autopsy, usually used for getting inside bodies, not body BAGS) holding my breath as I opened it up. The smell rolled out like a wave and I felt it more than I smelt it; damp and hot, it stung the back of my throat and made my eyes water. But when it hit the small crowd behind me Lyle gagged and Suze's eyes snapped shut and Elliott's knees gave and he hurled.

It wasn't like we didn't know what would be in there, either. We had seen [REDACTED] more (as I said before) and had even said that we'd never do it again, but curiosity and something else seemed to drive us to peek inside every time.

Well, if this soup of flesh and bone shards and blood (SO MUCH BLOOD) was ever a person, it wasn't a person now. At least not one I could identify. But it wasn't like we had a whole lot of options: it was either Zach, Hayden, or somebody we didn't know or had gone missing and nobody had noticed.

Suze leaned over me, hands clamped over her nose. She was three shades too pale and five shades too green. "There." Her voice was a harsh whisper and it sounded like she was trying very, VERY hard to not cry. She pointed to something inside, her hands shaking. I might as well have been deemed 'the body guy' because I was the only one who dared touch the things. "There's something inside."

My eyes narrowed and I squinted, looking in the bag. What was she... ?

There was something red inside. Not blood red, cherry red. I reached inside for it, feeling the blood. It was cold. Congealing had already begun on the surface, and touching it made it wrinkle like soup skin. Elliott, who thought it was a good idea to look into the bag, saw its contents and spewed AGAIN.

I grabbed whatever the red thing was, noting that it felt like... fabric? It was thick and woven and stuck to something inside of the bag, and I ended up having to use both hands to pry it off, finding a buckle and finally pulling it out.

It was a collar.

Hayden's collar.

And don't you know, he squealed like a stuck pig on the first stab.

You could hear the movie-style *GASP* that rippled through the group.

Before I could examine it further Suze snatched it from my hands and squeezed it tightly, drawing the blood out of the fabric. It was obvious she was upset, biting her lip and holding that collar so tightly her knuckles turned white. Lyle gave her a look of almost pity, trying to offer her some words before she just shook her head.

"Clean it up." She said, her voice faltering. "We don't need a repeat of what happened with Stuart."

Strong words for the girl who couldn't stop the tears from falling from her cheek.

There was a long silence before anybody moved, and grief hung heavy in the camp. Everybody mourned the loss of another classmate, and it took Richard breaking the silence by barking orders to get everybody moving again.

It's been a few hours since then and my phone is fully charged, so I guess I can put Lyle's phone back on. If he wakes up and finds out his battery isn't more than half full I think he'll kill me, even if I lie and tell him there wasn't any sunlight to charge it with.

But yeah, that's what happened lately. Alex is usually the one who covers updates but he just wrote one so I guess I figured it was my turn. Plus I hadn't posted in a while and it feels awesome to write everything down.

- Chase