🩸 Five-Minute Fright: The Gold Coin (Part III)

Opening Monologue – The Nightly Storyteller

They say curses don’t travel far—but gold, it seems, has legs.

Last week, it whispered through a man’s home. This week, it found new hands to haunt.

Some treasures aren’t lost… they’re just looking for the next fool to pick them up.

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The gold coin gleamed faintly in the morning light, half-buried in the gravel near the driver’s door.

“Mom, look!” little Harper said, picking it up with both hands.

It was warm—too warm for dawn.

“Probably some tourist trinket,” Sarah murmured, taking it from her daughter and slipping it into her jacket pocket. The surface felt slick, almost alive, like skin after a fever.

They were heading to Blackwood Ridge Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, an isolated outpost deep in the forest where a wounded mother bear and her cubs had been found. Five crew members waited at the gate: tired faces, muddy boots, and eyes that darted too much toward the trees.

Inside, the air stank of antiseptic, wet fur, and something metallic—something like blood.

The mother bear was massive even in her weakened state. A deep, ragged bite mark carved across her back, so wide it exposed bone beneath matted fur. The wound oozed, and the stench hit Sarah like a wall of rust and decay.

That night, as the generator hummed and rain ticked softly on the tin roof, Sarah was jolted awake by howls—not wolf howls, but something lower, longer, almost human in its rhythm. The sound vibrated in her ribs. Harper stirred beside her, whispering, “Mom… the bear’s crying.”

The next morning, deep claw marks gouged the wooden beams by the front door—each one as long as her forearm. The crew brushed it off, nervously joking about “curious mountain lions,” but Sarah saw how their hands shook as they locked the doors.

By the second night, the laughter stopped.

They found Mark’s body by the supply shed—his torso torn open, ribs like white spears jutting from meat. The smell was overwhelming: iron, bile, and rot. Scrawled beside him on the concrete in something red and sticky were words:

“GO BACK.”

Hours later, another scream, this time closer. When they found the second body, the same bite marks as the bear’s were carved into his flesh. Sarah clutched her daughter close, her breath fogging in the freezing air. “We’re leaving,” she whispered.

But they couldn’t. The roads were flooded, the radio dead.

Then came the night of the attack.

A blur of fur and shadow smashed through the window, teeth flashing in the lamplight. Sarah swung a fire poker blindly and felt it connect—a spray of black blood and a furious snarl. She grabbed a handful of fur as it retreated into the dark.

At dawn, as they tended to the wounded, she noticed the third crew member, Eli, pressing a hand to his side—right where she’d stabbed the beast. His eyes darted to hers, and for a heartbeat, something inhuman flickered there.

Realization struck cold as ice water.

It wasn’t monsters attacking them. It was the crew.

She tried to escape with Harper, but as they ran through the corridor, two of them began to change—bones cracking, skin stretching, hair erupting from their flesh as jaws elongated into fanged muzzles.

The third man—the one she’d wounded—grabbed the gate keys, blood pouring from his mouth. He looked at the bear’s cage, whispered, “I’m sorry,” and unlocked it before collapsing.

The mother bear roared—a guttural, world-shaking sound of pain and vengeance.

The wolves lunged for Sarah and Harper in the cafeteria. The air was thick with the smell of sweat and blood. One wolf raised its snout and howled—only to be answered by the deafening roar of the freed bear.

The door exploded inward, the bear’s massive paw slamming down, crushing the first wolf’s skull in a wet, snapping crunch. The other turned, snarling, but the bear charged, driven by fury only a mother could summon.

Sarah threw Harper into the truck, slamming the door as claws raked the metal. Through the windshield, she saw the bear and the last wolf collide in a storm of fur and blood.

When it was over, the bear stood trembling, panting, her cubs emerging from the shadows. She limped away, back into the forest.

Sarah sat shaking behind the wheel until dawn light crept through the windshield. Then—a knock on the glass.

Two new crew members stood outside, bewildered.

“What the hell happened here?”

As Sarah opened the door to speak, something rolled from her jacket pocket and hit the ground with a metallic clink.

The gold coin spun once, twice… then stopped.

It was warm again.

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We’re just getting started—and things are about to get dark.

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