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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Wild-Tea-9242 on 2025-01-11 13:23:41+00:00.

It’s my fault he died, honestly. I’m 16 and I was supposed to be watching him outside. We live out in the countryside, some southern county no one cares about in the middle of bum fuck nowhere, and Rudy is always allowed to go out without a leash because he’s trained to not go too far and come right back after doing his busines. He’s a chocolate lab with a red collar and the biggest, sweetest wet eyes you’ve ever seen. He was, at least.

I let Rudy out after putting in a pizza, home alone since my parents were at work. As he played around our large property, I sat on the porch and watched videos on my phone. Suddenly, I jumped up, having forgotten about my food, and ran back inside. I’d burnt an entire frozen pepperoni pizza, and I was cussing up a storm, taking it out the oven and trying to figure out what I was gonna tell my parents so I wouldn’t be scolded for wasting food. I forgot about my dog for a while and rummaged through the fridge for something else to eat as the sun went down. That’s when I heard the most God awful sound.

Tires screeching on the road at the end of the driveway, a vehicle grinding to a sudden halt just as the loud pained yelp of our family’s best friend rang out in the humid, evening air.

I ran out the house, across the lawn, down the drive, and fell to my knees where Rudy was lying on the road with his chest and stomach caved in. The car was gone, speeding down the road, leaving tire tracks and gore over poor Rudy’s crushed abdomen. I cried harder than I’ve ever cried in my entire life as I watched him squirm and whine in agony before finally the light faded from his big brown eyes.

Rudy had gone up the drive for no real reason. He usually stuck to the woods around our house, digging up holes or peeing in bushes. He never had interest in exploring the road, and he never once tried. If I had told him to come in already, he would be alive to this day.

My parents mourned deeply, and I had the sense they were blaming me as well. A week passed and we tried to move on, but then one evening I went outside to walk around the yard and talk to my friend from school on the phone. We were laughing about something or the other, and I was enjoying the cool breeze on my skin as the sun set overhead, when suddenly I had this weird feeling. The feeling you get when you’re being watched.

I looked around, then my eyes fell on the driveway, which was surrounded on both sides by trees and curved sort of to the left, so that you couldn’t see the road from the front lawn. What I could see, however, several yards away, was a chocolate lab standing still as a statue at the bend, under the shadows of the trees. One with a red collar, tire tracks imprinted on his side, blood soaked fur, a completely crushed and mangled face, and entrails hanging from his gashed open stomach.

My breath caught in my throat and I felt like time went to a standstill. My friend asking me if I was still on the phone became white noise as I stared at what seemed like Rudy, and he stared right back unmoving.

We had buried him, far out in the woods where he couldn’t be seen from our property as a reminder of what we lost. He was definitely dead, there was no doubt about that. Was I hallucinating? It was starting to get dark, after all, maybe my imagination was playing tricks.

I turned away from the horrible sight as I choked back a sob. I rubbed my eyes and after taking a deep breath, I looked again. He was gone. I returned to my phone call and quickly went back inside the house, choosing to play it off as my mind fucking with me due to the guilt of Rudy’s passing.

But things were never the same after that. Since my parents are too busy working to drive me, I catch the bus each morning to school. That means walking all the way down our winding driveway and waiting at the spot Rudy was hit for that yellow bus full of obnoxiously loud teenagers to pull up. Every time I walked down the drive, I felt uneasy. The trees lining the gravel path on both sides blotted out the sun and covered me in shadow. Nature was silent and still, when usually birds were singing and squirrels were skittering up trees. I felt like I wasn’t alone.

I waited for the bus, and I felt the skin on the back of my neck burn. I turned around and saw him, closer this time. Rudy. His corpse just stood there and watched me, he didn’t so much as twitch, blink, or move his tail. I didn’t know what to do, he was blocking the way back home and the house across the street was for sale, meaning the closest neighbor was yards away. An overwhelming sense of fear enveloped me and I staggered back into the road, expecting him to move at any moment. To lunge at me and attack. After all, if he wasn’t some sort of zombie, then what was he?

The school bus screeched to a stop dangerously close to me, and this scared me so bad I screamed and fell back on my ass in the middle of the road. I had been so terrified that I didn’t even notice it approaching, and apparently the driver hadn’t noticed me until the last minute for some reason. When I got my bearings and stood up, I felt utterly flustered. I looked away from the driver’s angry face in the windshield to the driveway, and Rudy had vanished again. When I got on the bus, the driver yelled at me, asking if I had a death wish, and a few of my classmates made fun of me, but I didn’t care. I was absolutely terrified. My dog was haunting me, and its presence felt hostile, like it wanted me to suffer the same gruesome fate since I couldn’t help him.

I wasn’t able to focus on class at all that day. When the bus dropped me off that afternoon, I stood and waited until it left, then booked it down the driveway. I felt silly but at the same time I didn’t want to be there long enough to see him again. When I ate dinner with my parents that night, I was distant and moody, and my mom noticed.

“I made your favorite dinner and you’re just pushing it around with that glum look on your face.” She had said. “Honey, what’s wrong?”

I told her that I was hallucinating Rudy, in his post mortem form at that. I could tell by the looks on my mom and dad’s face that they were intensely uncomfortable at the subject. They had been close to Rudy too, he was an old dog and they had adopted him just before I was born. Yes, he was that old.

“I just wish I’d stop seeing it.” I finished my vent with that.

After a short moment of silence, Dad grumbled without even looking at me, “Son, you’ve been watching those freaky movies at night and barely getting any sleep. You can’t be surprised you’re seeing zombies when you’re running on three hours of sleep and marathoning every zombie movie ever made.”

“Your dad’s right.” Mom agreed when she saw the way my face balled up in frustration. “Plis, you’ve been sleeping past your alarms and missing the bus almost everyday now. I want you to start going to bed earlier and take a break from the horror genre in the meantime. Okay?”

“Yeah. Okay.” I thought that maybe they were right. I mean, dad was definitely exaggerating about the three hours of sleep thing, but I probably should lay off the scary shit for a while. I don’t think I could stomach it anyway, after what’s been happening.

Despite me following my parents’ advice, things got worse. I heard scratching at the door at night, and the whimpers and whines of a dog. My bedroom is on the first floor and closest to the front door, whereas my parents slept like a log upstairs. Even if my mom wasn’t a heavy sleeper, she probably wouldn’t be able to hear it over the sound of dad’s booming snores that reverberated through the whole house.

I laid there in bed, too scared to get up and check it out. I knew there shouldn’t be any dog out there, as far as we knew no one around us owned dogs. Still, I told myself a neighbor’s dog got out and had snuck into our yard so I wouldn’t shit myself. Let me tell you right now, I’m not a horror movie protagonist, I’m a coward and I’m not the type to go investigating. I run and hide, I don’t fight. So no, I wasn’t going to creep into the kitchen and peek out the window to see what the hell was pawing at our front door. I did not want to see my dead dog again.

But, as I listened to Rudy whine and whimper, I thought something sounded off about his voice. I can’t describe it, it just didn’t sound like him, it was a bit gruff and little too deep in pitch, like a mockery of our dog. Then again, he was dead, so I understood his vocal chords weren’t going to be in good shape. Or, maybe his body was possessed by a demon? Either way, the thought of this made it very difficult to fall asleep.

Paying attention at school was starting to become harder than ever before as I lost sleep due to this. My grades suffered and my parents were threatening me with therapy, or grief counseling as they called it. If anyone at school somehow got wind of that, I’d be cooked, I could already imagine what the guys would say. It all came to a head when one night, the scratching and whimpering started up again.

I decided that I had had enough, and stormed out of bed towards the kitchen. I was going to be a horror movie protagonist if only to get some sleep, I’d decided. After a few stomps towards the direction of the front door, the sounds stopped, as if Rudy or whatever it was heard me coming. I started to lose my nerve. When I got inside the kitchen, I tiptoed to the window and craned my neck to look out at the porch…

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