This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/MichaelMonkyMan on 2025-05-22 15:57:37+00:00.

Well, to start off, I should say what my occupation is. I used to be a delivery driver–well, I still am, just not in the traditional ‘delivering mail and goods to suburban homes’ sense.

I was fired from that job. I can admit it was my fault; I had been caught stealing packages from my own van. I don’t regret it.

Customers always got refunds or a replacement sent their way due to their package being ‘lost in transit’.

But I had to make a living and put bread on the table for my family, and when the job wasn’t paying enough, the pawn shop pulled through.

My wife did the best she could during those times of living check to check. Many of our meals were sacrificed so our children could eat.

Getting fired seemed like a death sentence, and it was through my shady and short term solution of obtaining some extra cash that I ultimately felt like I had dug four graves.

It was my friend, Jason, who saved our family from our financial struggle. He’s an ex-marine, employed by a private military company, and had more connections than I had previously assumed.

You’d think he was an angel with how damn quiet and polite he is all the time. But I promise you, under that shining halo, tucked under those white feathered wings, there’s blood money.

He never told me what type of operations he exactly did. I got the sense the reason for this was less because he has some sort of NDA and more likely those memories are tucked away behind several mental locks.

But Jason, like me, was in a tough spot. Especially after leaving the United States Military. He needed money, and so he used the skills he possessed to make as much as he could.

I think that’s why he suggested the job to me. He could see I was in the same place he was. Although in my case I have two kids relying on me.

We met at a local bar to talk shop. As he explained it;

“This job will be just like your old one but easier! You could be making half of seven figures… if you choose your battles right”

Of course I thought he was bullshitting me; no delivery job could offer money like that. I know now that he was telling the truth. Not all of it, but the truth nonetheless.

A few weeks ago was the first time I attempted a higher risk delivery. Since I’m fairly new, I’ve only been allowed to accept lower risk stuff—guns, drugs, stolen goods; banal contraband.

We’re not really supposed to look at what we’re delivering but it’s not hard to guess when you’re crossing borders and are explicitly told to follow road laws to a T before arriving at isolated warehouses and factories with hidden inventories.

But since I’ve completed all of my deliveries with no issues for the past several months the opportunities for me have expanded from pennies and nickels to Benjamin’s.

Of course once I was eligible to deliver the crème de la crop of deliveries I aimed for the stars and accepted the most expensive I could find.

How my job works is very simple: I drive somewhere to pick up a package, I then drive with the package to the customer and deliver it at the drop off, then I ditch the vehicle.

Either way, the job’s simple if you don’t think too hard about it and I feel lucky to have found it after having been laid off.

Except this damn high paying delivery. I understand now why it paid so well—practically the pay of 15 standard deliveries.

I had to drive all the way across the US from the midwest, where I live, to the western deserts to access the pickup spot.

As my agent told me over the radio, the van containing the package would be waiting in an isolated and abandoned factory.

It was kind of uncanny seeing a clean black Mercedes sprinter van so lonely in the gutted architecture.

More details of the delivery are found once you enter the delivery vehicle. There’s a mounted tablet on the dash with the route to the destination preloaded (tablet is also destroyed along with the van).

When I first started out, I’d enter the cargo area to see the package I was delivering. But I’ve seen enough to stop caring. Or at least force myself to stop caring.

However, because this was such a high paying delivery, it was just too enticing.

When I was settling into the driver’s seat I spotted in the rear view mirror, angled through a window in the vans partition, a singular metal crate strapped to the vans floor.

This wasn’t shocking, but it did set off a spiraling curiosity within me. Normally I would deliver crates of bulk goods and now I was receiving a fraction of a CEO’s salary for driving around a 2x2x3 foot crate.

And oddly enough, with the scarce glances I did take at the crate, there looked to be breathing holes scattered over its surface.

I played the guessing game in my head as I drove the van out of the factory.

Is this thing radioactive hence the thick steel walls? Obviously this job is more dangerous hence the higher pay. Was it a bomb that could explode at any moment? Was it the chopped up corpse of some high up government official?

My tires left the disheveled pavement and hit the clean tarmac of the main road I’d be driving down for the next few hours.

I settled on a nearly exotic animal.

———————————————————————————

For a few hours everything remained boring, just as I liked it.

I periodically glanced in the rear view mirror at the box that was held still with metal and rope. Nothing about it had changed. It was inoffensively innate and not a single sound had emitted from the thing.

I tried accelerating over a pothole to see if I could get some type of reaction only to be left with a sore butt.

I was driving through some middle-of-nowhere desert across a winding mountain side when I got a call on my satellite phone. It was my agent, as I like to call him–he tells me to refer to him as Conrad, though.

He was the one who proposed the jobs like a glorified Doordash app. Agent Conrad is also the person I report everything to. In this instance he was calling for a routine check in.

“Hello Z, I see you’re three hours into your route. Everything’s cool so far?” Conrad asked.

“Smooth sailin’, just tedious. Haven’t seen nothin’ but sand and dirt for miles. Got a few vultures interested in the van–hadda’ shake em off my tail.” I chuckled.

“If anything else starts following you just let me know. You have over a day’s drive and we trust you to complete this delivery without complications.” Conrad gave his earnestly unhumorous response as usual. I hung up the phone.

What I didn’t know was there would, in fact, be a complication, and it revealed itself with a horrid, scraggly voice.

“SaNd aND dIRt…”

I didn’t know it at the time, but then and there I should have pulled that van over and called my agent. It was just quiet enough that I debated, for longer than I’d like to admit, whether it was in my head.

I resumed the drive in silence, still examining the small metal crate through the partition’s window.

‘Maybe the noise came from the satellite phone?’ I thought to myself.

It could’ve been some odd feedback glitch from the conversation with Conrad. But when I glanced at the satellite phone on the passenger seat it was off. I even tried turning down the already muted radio.

And then it spoke again.

“SanD aNd DIRt sANd anD DIrT saNd aNd dirT Sand AND–.”

The voice behind me, behind the partition, grumbled rapidly and fluctuated in pitch and speed like a rewinding vhs tape.

It came from the metal crate

Out of pure reaction from the absurdity of the sound, I spun myself to look at the cargo area. I took my eyes off the road for one damn moment. Just to see nothing but a dormant crate.

None of this would’ve happened if I sat still and ignored the voice.

I should’ve expected this; it was a high paying delivery after all. Something was going to throw me off. But I fell for the bait.

Before I could even set my eyes back on the pavement my tires had already left behind I was heading toward a steep and jagged cliffside.

I swerved as hard as I could as the wall of rock plummeted toward me. This might have not been the best maneuver I could’ve done, but it likely saved me. Instead of crashing head on at 65mph my van caught the lip where it connected to the ground and drove up it like a steep ramp.

At some point the van flipped sideways, as I recall from the aftermath. I woke up probably an hour after the crash hot and thirsty and with a banging headache. Other than that, I was fine. Physically, at least.

Because when I checked the cargo to see if it was intact I realized it slammed through the now chasmed ceiling and had cracked open when it landed on the ground, partially buried beneath the sand.

‘I just destroyed the cargo for a 6 figure delivery’. I thought to myself.

I pushed through the headache to crawl out of the van and limp over to the corpse of the metal crate, hoping to see its contents (whatever they were) would still be in one piece.

My hopes were crushed when all I saw was a lump of some type of pale goop spilled and dried up among the sand. I took the opportunity to examine it, though. It was nothing like I had seen before.

At my old job, I once delivered to a home with a mountain of packages out front. Worried, I checked the package dates to see that some of the envelopes and boxes were almost a month old.

When I walked up to their front door to knock I smelled what I could only describe as pure rot. The smell of death. That’s the scent this rough monotone blob emitted.

As I continued gawkin…

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1ksub1d/i_deliver_for_anonymous_people_one_of_my_packages/