RUN.exe

''DISCLAIMER: The following is transcribed by PFC. Robert Galloway, close friend of PVT. Allen Goodman. The following is told in PVT. Goodman's POV, and is his final words before his execution at the hands of the state of Texas. With the exception of spelling corrections, it remains unedited.''

As I sit here, waiting for my reapers to come, I have decided to tell you the truth of what's going on, so that hopefully you will be able to understand. I am not seeking pity, nor am I wanting help, but I am trying to stop someone else from falling under this same fate. My memory is still a little foggy, so forgive me if there are some inaccuracies in my statements compared to the news agencies, but I will tell you the truth and nothing but the truth of my story. I have nothing to lose, and I have no regrets....

I was an avid gamer in my youth, I grew up with war games such as Medal of Honor, and later Call of Duty, and it was the latter that sold the idea of joining the United States Marines to me, after playing through Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare way back in 2007. In 2008, I signed up at the local recruiter, and by 2009, I was boots on the ground in Iraq. In 2012, during my third tour of duty, my squad and I were caught in the explosion of a school full of children by Al Qaeda, in the aftermath, I was sent home with a Purple Heart, and nightmares that haunt me to this day. I distinctly remember the sight of one of the children, nearly skinned in the explosion, and it is this child that haunted me the most.

Back in the states, I was forced into treatment for post traumatic stress disorder after I went to bed one evening, and woke up the next morning, on my stoop, covered in blood and mud, the first of many similar awakenings. A year after the explosion, my good friend Arnold Sanchez and I were enjoying a night of booze and burgers, and he told me about a creepypasta he had read (we passed the time in Iraq by checking out creepypastas, basically Internet scary stories) talking about a supposedly 'cursed' game called RUN.exe. By now, I was more than familiar with the like of SONIC.EXE, and all of these other pitiful "dotExtension" stories, but we decided to give it a shot. The story was buried in the bowels of the Internet, he had told me that a fellow army buddy of ours had happened upon it and immediately thought of us. The story spoke of a 'cursed' game that was rumored to drive its players insane, and provided a link to a supposed MediaFire page of the game that had been conveniently removed.

Drunk, we decided to try and dig through the archives for any sign of this 'cursed' game, but after a number of hours with little success, Arnie went home, leaving me alone with the wife, who went to bed soon after. Suffering from chronic insomnia and personally wanting to avoid the nightmares that plagued my sleep, I decided to search for the game by myself, and after an untold amount of time, I finally managed to find a working link to the game on an abandoned forum. Before installing the game, I ran a virus check on it with some military grade software I had...eh..."obtained" from the Pentagon databases, and when it came up clean decided to let it run. It installed pretty quickly, and upon booting it up, I was greeted with a warning telling that the game used binaural beats, subliminal messaging, and other experimental crap to try and 'increase the scare factor' that the game produced.

I shrugged off the warning, booting up the game for the first time, and was amused to find that it had been developed on the Unity engine, the creator hadn't even bothered to give the damn thing a unique intro or icon, the moment after hitting the EXE I was thrust into a standard Unity-graphic forest in a blatant ripoff of Slender: The Eight Pages. I do, however, have to commend the author, as the game's music was quite the interesting blend of distorted 8-bit and heavy use of nearly subliminal audio tones that, on full blast with headphones, actually worked to put you on edge. It almost reminded me of some of the supposed music from the Misfortune.gb game that had been rumored to be scrapped, its resources cast off to the wind to become several well-known Nintendo handheld titles. The game, even though maintaining very few bugs or glitches, was brutally and unfairly filled to the brim with fake difficulty. The monster hunting you was a rather graphic, nude, skinned woman, the muscles on the front of her body missing to expose her skeleton, with clouded eyes and lips as blue as ice. The object of the game was to find seven newspaper clippings tying into real life a bit by mentioning a well-known serial killer around my area, named the "Infinity Killer", who was on the loose and terrorizing the area.

However, you're doing this fetch quest while being hunted by the skinned woman, who spawned at a random location on the map almost instantly after you did, and loved to spawn around you, while moving much faster than you, making the game nearly impossible to beat without sheer luck. The world was procedurally generated, requiring an Internet connection which it apparently used to grab your approximate location via IP address and render the world given to the game by Google Maps, or something along those lines. Anyway, I was basically running around my neighborhood, including the forest just outside my house, and even saw my house itself, though I was locked out, collecting these pages and being chased by this undead maniac. Death by the girl was signified by a spray of gory shock images flashing epileptically across your screen, with the scream of a woman, volume cranked up to eleven so its deafening and ran through some kind of program that added a reverb and metallic effect to it before crashing back to the desktop, yeah...probably not a good idea for someone dealing with P.T.S.D....at 0300 hours...alone...in the dark...with headphones and volume cranked to max.

I managed to beat the game, just as dawn was approaching, and crawled in bed with my wife to find that game's horrific imagery binding with my already rampant nightmares terrorizing my sleep. The next morning, I woke up on the stoop again, covered in mud and blood, the head of a dog resting beside me, not the first time it had happened, and like I always did during these horrifying moments, I hid the head, quietly slipped back inside, bleached the hell out of my clothes and took a hot shower. What was odd, was that as I went about my life, I began to...see things...out of the corner of my eye, a sign my P.T.S.D was acting up and on the fritz. In addition to that, the horrible music that played in RUN.exe was stuck in my head, and played over, and over, and over again, refusing to let up. By the end of the week, the song had made itself audible, I was now physically hearing it, a tulpa-like affect, from what I learned from a friend of mine who went into all that psycho, mental bullshit back during my service.

Two days after discovering the game, and unable to contact my buddy about my discovery, I read the papers, perusing through the headlines and searching for any updates on the Infinity Killer, something that had become a sort of obsession with mine. At the top of the page, in glaring bold, was a red alert, mentioning that the Infinity Killer's modus operandi had changed, drastically. Where before, he or she had gone about, breaking into houses, undressing and beheading school-age girls (though not sexually assaulting them), carving an infinity symbol into their chests before fleeing the scene, he had recently been targeting young women, skinning them alive and filleting them. The only way the authorities could tell that it was the same killer, was that the infinity symbol was being carved into their exposed sternums. Reaching the end of the page, I cut out the article, stashing it into my battered binder where I stored the clippings before I rolled up the paper and tossed it into the wood stove, watching it burn before going about my daily business.

After reading that story, that haunting music began to torment me again, it had gone silent and still after the last time I had woken up outside, but it had returned again, threatening to drive me mad. I made a mental note to see my psychologist ASAP, and went about my daily business. However, the tune was getting progressively louder, and that creepy girl from RUN.exe was no longer appearing in my peripherals, she was now appearing in full view in the center of my vision, before flickering out with the sound of static, her decomposing, milky-white and pupiless eyes accusing, her mouth twisting into a wide, impossible grin with the sound of creaking leather. The hallucination was accompanied with her jaw detaching, her mouth opening wide with her jaw literally down to the base of her neck with her hellish scream before she evaporated, disappearing with a blast of hot wind reeking of death and decay. She appeared over and over again, that day, and I put in a call with my psychologist as soon as I could, requesting an immediate visit the next day. The pills were not working anymore.

The next morning I awoke on my porch, a gutted tomcat being my bedfellow that day, and I cleaned up, heading to the clinic only to find ambulances in the parking lot, carrying a bodybag on a gurney. I approached one of the paramedics, querying as to what had happened. He told me that one of the men, my psychologist as a matter of fact, had been the latest target of the Infinity Killer, thus initiating a strange change in the murderer's preferred target demographic, bringing on talk of a copycat killer, or perhaps an accomplice. Shaken, I returned home, frightened to find a note buried in the mud outside my house, near where I woke up actually. It was hastily scrawled and nearly unreadable, but was stained in blood and read one word: "RUN".

Beneath the cryptic message, scrawled in bright red and looped several times over, was the infinity symbol, the signature of the killer. My heart sank, my stomach churned, and I entered my house. The door was locked, but now the house was lit by sunlight, I was horrified to find that scrawled on the walls in blood was "RUN". It covered the wall immediately to the left of my front door, "RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN..." and at the bottom of the wall of words, was the infinity symbol. The killer...had been in my house! There was a knock on my door, one that almost made me shit myself, and opening the door, I was greeted by a graven neighbor, a kind old lady that lived next door, and was known to give my wife and I fresh-baked cakes at least once a week. She told me that my friend, Arnie Sanchez, had been found dead in his home earlier that morning after neighbors were complaining of a stench surrounding the property. By the state of decay, they said that he had been dead for a couple of weeks at least, and although there wasn't much left of him, the state of the crime scene suggested he was either a complete random of the Infinity Killer, like my psychologist was, or was the start of the new modus operandi, as he was assumed to be skinned and gutted, just like my psychologist.

Deeply horrified, I tried to call my wife, but she wouldn't answer. I heard a voice, deep, garbled, and metallic, behind me, and I, in terror, fled outside my house and into the woods, never stopping. My foot became tangled in an upturned root, and I fell to the ground, smacking my head against a rock and knocking myself out. When I awoke, it was nighttime, I was alone in the middle of the forest, and resting by my sticky head, still tender to the touch, was a newspaper clipping, one from my collection that I had unintentionally grabbed on my way out of the house...on the Infinity Killer. The clipping blew away, and I picked myself up, dazed and disoriented, my ears ringing, my eyes burning, my head was dull and throbbing, my vision was redded out, and I was sick to my stomach. I doubled over, dumping out that day's lunch onto the leafy ground before straightening again. I picked up my binder, cast to the side, and going through it, found that seven clippings had gone missing. Driven by an inexplicable desire to retrieve my collection, I disappeared into the forest, following the wind in search of my missing fragments. Stepping into a clearing, a blast of hot, summer wind, reeking of the decay of a nearby wolf corpse, blew around me, and I heard a distant, inhuman, metallic scream, one I identified as female, ringing out throughout the still air.

The chase was on.

I charged blindly through the forest, intent on finding my collection before heading back home and locking myself away in my house, maybe even stringing up a belt to the ceiling fan in the kitchen to end it all once and for all. In my peripherals, I saw a dark shadow move swiftly around the bushes around me, followed by the ghostly laugh of schoolgirls. I felt a flashback trigger, finding myself seeing the horrific scene of the dead schoolchildren in the aftermath of the school explosion flashing before my eyes, and the wind morphed and distorted into the sound of heavy breathing. That inhuman, metallic screech wail ran through the air, now identifiable as words...to some degree.

"RUUUUUUUUUUN!" the girl screeched, and I did not object to her suggestion.

One by one, I found and retrieved my clippings, stuffing them carelessly into my binder, each retrieval bringing on another round of ghostly chuckles and swift shadows, sometimes even the ghostly girl and her hanging jaw leaping out of the forest and charging into my face with that inhuman howl before she evaporated into shadowy mist inches before my face. Finding the last page, I turned a complete 180 and begin sprinting back to my house, hearing the sound of a creature chasing me relentlessly from close behind, hearing the heavy labored breathing of a woman, liquid and dead, sprinting after me. I did not turn to look as she came closer and closer to me. Soon, my house was in view, a dark, almost haunted silhouette compared to the street lamps just outside, I raced forward, into the door I had left open, and I slammed it shut, swiftly bolting it before racing upstairs, locking myself inside my room. I could hear her angry snarls, hear the sound of pounding on the back door, she was furious, and she was bashing down my door. The house shook and a loud bang told me that she had torn down my back door, and I could hear frantic stomping across the house and upstairs. Her laughter, ghostly, childlike, and dead, was omnipresent, swirling around me, and I opened my dresser, revealing a bloodstained combat knife as I clenched it tightly in my hands, my back against the wall, eyes bugging out as I watched my bedroom door shake and warp with her pounding thuds and angry, animalike screams. Soon, the pounding died down, and I held my breath as the world was overcome with eerie silence...was she gone?

The door burst open then, and I was horrified to find the woman standing there in the doorway, completely nude. Her hair was stringy and full of clumps of dirt and soil. She had been skinned, and the muscles on her front half had been completely removed, revealing the clean white bone of her skeleton. I watched her heart beat and pulsate with life, her intestines, somehow remaining in place, churning and rolling in her gut with her motions as she approached me. The skull of her skinned face was shiny and smooth, her braincase surgically removed to reveal the grey matter within, and her eyes were milky white orbs, rotting within her eye sockets. Her lips, as blue as ice, were still attached, and she grinned, the remaining muscles of her jaw creaking like ancient leather as she approached me, her breathing heavy and liquid. The sound of muffled crying emitted from her, even though she bore a homicidal and maniacal expression, and her jaw detached, her mouth opening wide as she hissed like a cat, charging towards me at impossible speed. She pounced upon me, her cold, slimy fingers reaching their way into my mouth and jaw, prying the two apart. I screamed, loud as ever, and remembering my knife, thrust the blade deep into her pulsating heart. Upon the blade penetrating the flesh, her vicious, canniablistic glare became one of shock and terror, her hissing stifled into a dog's whine of death, and she back away, clutching at the blade buried within her chest ,trying to remove it.

She fell forward then, and I, terrified, ran to her side, grabbing my knife and stabbing her repeatedly, carving the infinity symbol into her sternum, compelled to trap her spirit within her body with that mark. I called the police, crying for help, and I stumbled into a corner, rocking myself as the horror I had experience replayed over and over again. After what seemed like hours, several uniformed officers entered my house, shining their flashlight in my eyes. With tears and an inaudible groan of joy, I leaped toward them, wanting to embrace them for rescuing me from that hell. The swore, they cried out, and I felt the butt of an assault rifle bash up against my forehead. Stunned at their betrayal, I tried to pick myself up before they piled onto me, and I felt a sharp prick of a needle stab into my neck before everything became numb and dark.

When next I awoke, I was in a padded cell, bound in a strait jacket. I called to nobody, crying for help and demanding an explanation for my imprisonment. But from there, the days bleed on into one another, and I cannot distinguish one day from the next during my sedated stay. Today I sit here, on death row, awaiting my executioners for reasons unknown. I hear them approaching, I know my time is near. They drag me across the prison, and I struggled to write my memoirs. They bind me into a cold chair, my head is pressed to the back of it, and I cannot see near the bottom of the page, so I only hope that my message is readable. They tell me that they found me in my bedroom, covered in blood, the skinned corpse of my wife, a fresh kill, laying at my feet. They tell me that when they entered, they found me carving the infinity symbol into her sternum with my combat knife. They tell me I'm the Infinity Killer, that I am responsible for the murders of fifty girls and a dozen women, as well as my best friend and my psychologist. They tell me that it is time for me to pay for my crimes. I hear the buzzing of the generator, its becoming harder to write as my muscles refuse to cooperate. The woman, the demon woman, stands before me, grinning widely, her muscles creaking like leather. I smile, because she is transparent, and as the first painful bolt of electricity goes through my body, nearly crippling in its pain, her jaw detaches and she screams before dissipating into mist. Finally, I can havvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv