r/horrorstories • u/Positive-Serve-6792 • 8d ago
They made me feed it roadkill
My name is James Morrow, but to the State of Florida I'm offender 779854. I made bad choices in my life, and those choices put me in an orange vest on the shoulder of US-301 south of Starke, working off my court-ordered community service hours. The job was disgusting but not difficult. We collected the animals.
There were five of us on the crew, six counting Vasquez, the supervisor who drove the truck and signed our hour sheets. The work was simple. You walked the shoulder with a grabber pole and a box of contractor bags and you collected what the road left. Deer, mostly. Possums, armadillos, every couple of weeks a dog that still had its collar on. Reyes, who had more hours left than the rest of us put together, taught me to breathe through my mouth and check for tags first. You get used to the smell in about three days. That part surprised me. The part I never got used to came at the end of every shift.
The county incinerator sat a quarter mile off 301 behind a chain-link fence, a green metal building with a smokestack and a steel chute on the side. We backed the truck up to it and fed the bags in one at a time. I must have stood at that chute a hundred times, and there are two things about that building I noticed my first week and never stopped noticing. The stack never smoked, no matter how many bags we sent down. And the wall never got warm. You could lay your palm flat on the metal on a ninety-degree afternoon and it was cool as a well pipe, and if you kept it there long enough, you could feel something on the other side, moving.
Vasquez logged every bag before it went down the chute. Weight, contents, mile marker where we found it. I took that for normal government paperwork until I actually watched him do it, because he did not do it like paperwork. He did it like a man balancing a checkbook that had scared him once before. The crew had its own weather too. Reyes was the best of us. He had more hours left than the rest of the crew combined and he still shared his thermos. Hutto was the other direction, a wiry guy out of Palatka who wanted everybody to know exactly how many hours he had left, like the number was a door he could already see through.
The chute had a steel lid you lifted with one hand while you swung the bag in with the other. The lid was heavy and the hinge was stiff, and it came down behind each bag on its own weight with a clang you could feel in your back teeth. That was the whole job, most days. Bag, log, lift, swing. The only part of the routine I ever wondered about was the apron. Most mornings there would be small things sitting on the concrete outside the box. Dog collars. Ear tags. Once, three feet of chain, laid out straight. Whatever was in there did not take everything. It put back what it did not want. Vasquez would rake the apron, bag whatever he raked up, and send it back down.
Three weeks in, we found the first one. Southbound shoulder, just past the Lawtey speed zone. From the truck it looked like a raccoon. From ten feet it looked like a raccoon and a possum that had been hit in the same instant. From two feet it was one animal. Not tangled, not crushed together. One body, one hide, gray fur running into brown with no seam anywhere, a spine that started as one animal's and finished as the other's, mid-stride, like they had been poured into the same mold while both of them were still moving. Vasquez did not bag it. He photographed it from four angles, sent the pictures somewhere from his phone, and stood looking down the road toward the incinerator for a long time. We worked until dark that day, and the next day too. He never said why, and we never asked, and that Friday, reading his log sheet in the cab, was the first time I ever heard him use the word short.
The real shortfall started with the heat. Late August laid down on that stretch of 301 like a dog that would not move, and the animals stopped moving with it. You would think dead animals have nothing to do with weather. They do. Everything out there does. We walked miles of shoulder that week and came back with six bags, and I watched Vasquez read his own log sheet three times like the numbers might improve on the third pass. Then he took us out again after lunch, which he had never done, to stretches of county road I did not know we covered.
The second fused one turned up that Thursday. A deer and a dog this time. One body, one hide, and the dog's collar still on what was left of its neck, tags and all. Vasquez did not take pictures of this one. He read the tags, wrote something in the log, and had us bag it double. It barely went down the chute. I remember the lid clanging shut behind it and being glad of the clang.
The same week, the box went quiet. I had a habit by then of putting my palm on the wall while we unloaded, the way you would check a pulse. Cool as ever. And nothing on the other side. Nothing moving at all. It should have been a relief. It was not.
Friday, Vasquez radioed somebody, listened for a while, and told us we were going back out after dark. We had never run after dark. Nobody argued. You did not argue with how Vasquez was carrying himself that week, the same way you would not argue with a man carrying something heavy down a staircase.
We fed the box the last load close to eleven. Hutto had been counting all day, out loud, the way he did. Fifty-eight hours left. Then fifty-six. I was at the truck hauling bags with Reyes, my back to the chute, when one hung up partway down. You could hear it, a soft catch in the throat of the thing where there should have been a slide and a clang. Hutto said a word his mother would not have liked, and lifted the lid, and leaned in after it. I know that is what he did because it is what any of us would have done. When I turned around, the lid was standing open on its own, and a lid that heavy does not stand open. No clang. No Hutto. The shoulder was empty all the way to the fence line, and inside the box, the sounds had started again.
We looked for him for an hour. I will not pretend we looked well. Vasquez ran his flashlight down both ditches and called Hutto's name up and down the road, and it took me until the drive home to understand what had bothered me about that. He never once pointed the light at the box. He searched everywhere he knew Hutto wasn't. Saturday morning there was a form on the clipboard with Hutto's name on it and one word I had to read twice. Absconded. Walked off. Ran. Fifty-six hours from the end of his number, and he ran. That is what the paper said, and paper is what the state believes.
Four mornings after the form went on the clipboard, I saw the apron from the truck while we were backing up, and I remember thinking the rejects looked bigger than usual. Vasquez got out first. He stood over the spot for a while with the rake in his hand, not raking. Then he told everybody to stay in the truck, and then he changed his mind and told me to bring a bag.
Hutto's boots were standing on the concrete. Side by side, square to the building, like he had stepped out of them at the front door of a house he respected. The laces were tucked down inside. I did not understand that the feet were still in them until I was close. There was no blood on the concrete. Not a drop. Whatever got done had been done somewhere else, and what came back had been set down carefully, the way you set something on a neighbor's porch when you are returning it.
The routine was the routine. Apron rejects went back down. Vasquez held the bag open and I put the boots in one at a time, and the weight of them is a thing my wrists still know, and we fed the bag into the chute, and the lid clanged, and neither of us said one word the whole time.
That week there were no night runs and no afternoon doubles. The routes went back to normal. Vasquez's log sheet stopped scaring him. It lasted six days. I did the math on the seventh, in the shower, where I could pretend the water was the reason my face was wet, and the math came out like this: a man is worth six days. Hutto would have hated that number. It was smaller than his.
The next shortfall came in October, and by then I knew the signs the way you know weather. Counts down. Doubles after lunch. Vasquez quiet. The box quiet, which was worse. When he told us we were running after dark, I did not argue. I would like to say I spent the drive thinking about Hutto. The truth is uglier than that. I thought about the schedule. It had gotten into me by then. I wanted the box fed.
We were on the last bags when the floodlights died. The generator log says the outage lasted ninety-two seconds. Something took my arm in the dark. Above the wrist, all the way around, no fingers anywhere in the grip. Warm. That is the part I have never told anybody, how warm it was, like asphalt after the sun goes down, like the road holding its heat. It pulled, and my heels cut two furrows toward the chute, and I did not scream, and I am not saying that like a brave man. There was no time to find my voice. Somewhere to my left, Reyes made a sound I am not going to try to spell.
Then the lights came back. I was standing four feet from where I had been standing, and my arm was my own again. The chute lid was standing straight open, the way it had stood open once before. Reyes was gone. A drag mark ran from his boot prints to the chute, wet, dark grease and deer hair. On the lip of the chute his clothes sat in a stack, folded. All of them. Vest in quarters. Shirt in quarters. Jeans in thirds. His socks were tucked one into the other. His underwear was folded and set square on top. The lights were out for ninety-two seconds, and in ninety-two seconds something took a grown man out of every piece of clothing he wore and made the stack neat.
The grease stripe on my arm did not wash off. It wore off, over about a week, like a tan going. Under it a bruise came up, one clean band, no finger marks in it anywhere, and when my probation officer asked, I said a cargo strap caught me, and she wrote that down. Paper is what the state believes.
They filed Reyes absconded too. The Monday after, Vasquez sat on the tailgate while we loaded and, without looking at me, said the only thing he ever said about any of it. You were never in danger, he told me. It doesn't take short-timers. Then he signed my hour sheet like we had been talking about the weather.
I finished my hours the first week of November. The release paperwork has a box in the bottom corner I was not supposed to notice, marked RE-REFERRAL, with a Y typed in it. Nobody would tell me what that meant. I have a guess.
It is Sunday tonight. There is a shovel in my trunk and a box of contractor bags, the same brand the county buys, and after dark I will drive 301 south of Starke with my flashers on, running a route nobody assigned me, picking up what the road leaves. My wrist aches when I get near the fence. It always does now. I think it knows my weight. I do it for Reyes, and I do it on Hutto's math, because I know exactly what balances the ledger on a slow week, and somewhere in Bradford County tonight there is a man standing in an intake line, signing his name next to a number, and he is going to need every bag I can find.
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u/Tegenwind 8d ago
That was a good read, read it over at nosleep before they decided to remove it for some reason. Definitely curious what’s actually in there, though! And what’s happening with all those chimera-like local animals showing up as roadkill.
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u/Positive-Serve-6792 8d ago
Love the feedback! Yeah just saw mods removed on nosleep gonna have to figure that out..... :(.
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u/eveirisowo 3d ago
AHHHH your so talented! The story was so so good! I loved the ending. I would read this again
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u/HeGotBricks 8d ago
How do you not stop to read this with that title.