Creepers: Jeepers

It reached for Jamie. Riley lunged, driving the broken bottle into its shoulder. Black ichor sprayed. The creature didn’t scream. It laughed—a high, wet, wheezing laugh.

“Jeepers creepers, where’d ya get those peepers…”

The cellar exploded in a ball of white fire. The creature shrieked—a sound that split the air, that shattered the remaining stained-glass window, that sent every bird for a mile into panicked flight. It thrashed, wings flaming, and crashed up through the church floor, taking half the roof with it.

“Where are we?”

It was clinging to the steeple of the abandoned church, a silhouette against the moon. Human-shaped, but wrong. Its arms were too long, ending in curved, metallic-looking claws. Its back was a mess of tattered, patched-together wings—leather, canvas, and what looked like dried skin. And its head… its head was a nightmare. Bald, veined, and split by a grin that held rows of needle teeth.

“Found you,” it purred.

Riley kicked, clawed, bit. Nothing. Its grip was iron. She felt her vision narrowing to a tunnel. In that fading light, she saw the creature’s back—the patches on its wings. One was a piece of a high school letterman jacket. Another was a scrap of a police uniform. The third was a square of orange cloth. Prison issue. Jeepers Creepers

The engine turned over on the first try.

“Every twenty-three years,” it whispered, tapping a claw on its chin. “Twenty-three springs. I wake up. I eat. For twenty-three days. Then I sleep. And you, little mice, are the first course.”

They pulled it open. The smell of mold and old coal rushed up. Riley went first, dropping into darkness. Jamie followed. Above, the door exploded inward. It reached for Jamie

The last thing they heard, fading into the static of the radio, was a single, scratchy line:

But it was the eyes that froze her blood. Yellow. Hungry. Ancient. They weren't just looking at her. They were savoring her.

The voice was a low, ragtime warble, tinny like an old phonograph. It drifted from the drainage ditch ahead. Riley slowed. A rusted culvert pipe jutted from the bank, and something was blocking it. Not something. Someone. The creature didn’t scream

They ran. The song followed them, not from the corpse, but from above—a rhythmic flap, flap, flap of leathery wings. Riley looked up once. Mistake.