Pizza And… Kidnapping?
Delivering a pizza shouldn’t have to involve kidnapping or a face full of urine. All Riley wanted to do was hand over the pizza and maybe get a decent tip. But that night had way, way more in store for the hero of our story. Riley recent took to Reddit to share how one particular night could get so horribly freaky. None of what he encountered that night was in his initial job description. A customer’s life was at stake, so he really needed to act fast. Every second counted, there was absolutely no time to waste. For those of you reading this at home, pizza would make an excellent pairing with this supremely wild story. You’ll never look at delivery drivers the same way again.
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A Menacing Quiet Threatens The Neighborhood
Imagine needing to pee in the worst situation possible. Now imagine that being three times as stressful, plus you cannot stop working. That’s where our dorky pizza delivery guy Riley found himself. Apparently, everyone in town decided that was the night to order pizza, so it was a non-stop back and forth drive throughout town to get those pizzas to those doorsteps. There was absolutely no time to pause and even take a breath! On top of that, there had also been a massive heat wave throughout the city. The only thing that Riley could do to not melt into a puddle was to drink his entire body weight in water. He didn’t even stop to think about the results of his actions until it was much too late. Riley needed to pee, literally right that very second. Fortunately, Riley was close to the customer’s house, so if he could wait a couple more minutes, all would be right with the world. Well, as it turns out, that was the night that everything went completely wrong with the world.
Riley pulled up to the familiar neighborhood, but he sensed something was quite wrong. All the lights were off in the customer’s house, not even a television was running. The entire block was deadly quiet. Huh. Weird. Well, someone must have ordered this pizza that Riley scrambled to deliver in time. So what happened to this person? Where could they have possibly gone? The answer was far worse than Riley could have imagined.
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Tension Keeps Building And Building
Was there even a person living in the address given to Riley? Do they just really like sitting alone in the dark?! Riley frantically called the customer’s number, his stomach twisting in knots. “Hey, it’s your pizza out front, but there doesn’t appear to be anybody home?” Riley loudly gasped, desperately looking for a quick answer. The voice on the other end responded, “Yeah, I’m not home.”
Fantastic! Riley couldn’t believe his awful luck. Time was very much of the essence, and Riley’s bladder would not wait for this pizza to be delivered. Riley snapped at the customer and stated, “Well, then we’re going to have to terminate the order, because I’ve arrived in the stated delivery window, and you were supposed to pay in cash. So I don’t know what to tell you. Plan ahead next time!”
Riley vividly recalls the regret and shame that washed over him as soon as he finished that intense statement. He recalls how, “I instantly regretted letting my bladder do the talking for me, as the voice on the other end came through more clearly as a young, bubbly, and very distraught girl, who could not have been older than 20 or 25.”
The frantic voice on the other end cried out, “Oh my gosh, I am so sorry! I was running down the street, so I could barely hear you! I just switched out my AirPods. Is that better? Sorry, I completely lost track of time at work, but I knew you were coming! That’s why I am literally running home right now. Please don’t leave, I’m starving and I don’t have a car. Seriously, please don’t leave! Five minutes tops, okay?!”
Well, this was a total reversal of what Riley had been expecting. Riley knew all too well what this customer must be feeling. Riley lived far away from most restaurants, and he needed the city bus to get anywhere when he wasn’t doing deliveries for work. He would hate for this person to go hungry. Also, Riley recalled delivering to this address a couple of times beforehand, and the girl who lived in this house was always the sweetest. What was her name, it was Kristen, wasn’t it? Was there any way to not sound like a total loser to the paying customer? Riley was fighting between his urge to be a good person and his urge to pee everywhere. He scanned the area, looking for discrete areas to use while not being accused of indecent exposure. Riley quickly replied to Kristen, “No, no, my bad, I’m letting the heat get to me, and it’s not your fault. No need to rush. See you when you get here.”
Riley hung up and desperately craned his head, looking for any sort of trees or remote areas of the neighborhood. Heck, he was desperate enough to use that old plastic bottle on the ground! But there was nothing. Was Riley being punished by some larger cosmic force, forced into in the most uncomfortable position ever? That’s when it hit him, his ultimate salvation. There was a large bush in front of the Kristen’s house. It was risky, but what else would you have done in his shoes, dear readers? What Riley didn’t realize is that, somehow, this bush would kick-start the night’s deadly escapades.”
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Mystery Man On The Attack
Riley scurried over to the sacred bush, his fears of wetting himself and looking like a strange idiot temporarily relieved. Riley had a pretty good defense for himself in his mind. He recalled how, “We’re a small shop who don’t wear uniforms, so if someone did spot me, they’d have no way to connect me to my employer. Animals pee outside all the time, humans are animals… This is fine.”
It was all completely fine, right? Absolutely wrong! Readers, you saw the title, you know that things will definitely not go well for our fearful delivery dude. Riley cautiously peered over both ways, unzipped, and experienced the most amazing relief a human being could ever experience. But after the initial second of relief, he noticed that the sound was way off. It sounded like Riley was peeing on something solid instead of something leafy. Riley started to panic, but he couldn’t stop anything once this process started. All he could do was to wait for his eyes to adjust to the night, to see what exactly he was aiming for. All of a sudden, a deep voice from the ground bellows, “WHAT THE HECK?!” (except it was much more profane in person, according to Riley). A large, intimidating man leapt out of the bushes, straight for Riley! There was nowhere else to run to, but what did the Angry Bush Man want with poor Riley?
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Uncovering More Hidden Horrors
The Angry Bush Man rushed past Riley, spitting onto the ground and shouting obscenities. Looks like Riley hit the bullseye, right in the dude’s hidden face. Yuck. The man disappeared into the night, with the screech of car tires following a few minutes later. Riley stood there, completely in shock at this bizarre turn of events. Riley vividly recalled how, “The reality was so terrifying that my mind refused to accept it, and I impulsively searched for a reasonable explanation that could make everything okay.” But there was no way to justify this sketchy dude hiding beside this woman’s house!
It didn’t take long for the reality of the situation to hit him. Riley’s inner voice was desperately screaming, “Bruh, that man was wearing a hoodie in ninety degree weather. That was a bad man. You are in a bad situation.” But Riley didn’t have much of a fight or flight response, so Riley naturally did something pretty reckless. He approached the bushes to investigate why such a disturbing man would be hiding in there. Who knows what could have greeted him next, Riley certainly didn’t! But there must have been a particular reason for a strange hoodie man to be hiding behind the bushes in the middle of a sweltering night! Riley turned on his phone’s flashlight to peer around the area. Word of advice from Riley: “As scary as things may look in the dark, seeing them with a single beam of your flashlight can sometimes make it even worse.”
Yeah, the narrow beam of light only made the night feel more like a horror movie. Riley got pretty wigged out and was about to turn it off, when he discovered the unmarked bag, stashed right underneath the bush where the creepy man had just erupted from. But what was inside the bag was somehow more frightening that a hidden Angry Bush Man.
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What’s Really Going On Here?
Riley discovered a tattered drawstring bag, slightly covered in his urine. Without thinking, Riley groped for the bag, believing that it would have all the answers to this worrisome night. It certainly did. Inside the bag was a sharp knife, a roll of duct tape, and a bottle of pills. Riley recoiled in horror. The adrenaline finally kicked in. Kristen must be in really grave danger! Riley knew what he needed to do next. He scurried as fast as his little legs would carry him back to his car. Before the door was all the way closed, Riley slammed on the gas and booked it out of the neighborhood. He drove as far away as he could until he found a place to pull over. He drove into the parking lot of a 24-hour Walgreens, and he tried to take several deep breaths. Riley will never forget how his first lucid thought was, “Who do I call first, the police or the girl whose house that was?!” All it took was a few seconds for Riley to realize that, “Okay, I am locked in my car with the engine running. If trouble starts, I can drive away. I know that something is up, but this customer might not. She needs to know not to keep walking towards her house.”
But then a sickening realization entered into Riley’s mind. Riley wondered, “I thought I remembered delivering to that house before, but what if I was wrong? What if the girl on the phone was just a decoy to get me there to rob me, or worse?!”
What if the entire operation was staged from the start? Was that too farfetched of a thought? Just to be safe, Riley started with the cops. He was a nervous wreck, but the operator was able to assure him that someone would be there soon. Riley’s mind was racing, which unfortunately translated to a fair amount of word vomit. Riley breathlessly told the operator, “You’ve got to save this girl because he wasn’t after me, I was just delivering a pizza. Unless they were after me, in which case there might not be a girl, but I talked to one on the phone, so then you should find that girl because they used her to lure me there. But if she’s real, she doesn’t know about the guy, who was also real, and there could be more guys if there’s actually a girl, and you know what? Even if there isn’t a girl, there might actually be more guys. I only checked one part of the bushes, so I don’t actually know. But we’ll know which guy is the one I saw because I peed all over him, you know. I didn’t mean to, this was back when I thought the girl was real but not home, but she might be real so you really need to find her if she is because the guy was real—”
Nope, enough talking. The operator firmly cut Riley off and told him to stay on the line. But all of a sudden, Riley noticed an incoming text from Kristen! She texted him, “Hey, I’m here, I don’t see you?” Riley immediately reported to 911 that she had returned, and the operator told him that officers were only minutes away. But he didn’t have minutes, not with the Angry Bush Man on the loose! Maybe she really was a decoy girl for some massive scam targeting innocent pizza delivery guys. Or (much more likely to anyone who stopped to think about it), she was the intended victim of a nasty predator. Riley reluctantly put the 911 call on mute and turned his car around, driving back to the scene of the almost-crime, heart pounding out of his chest. 911 wasn’t happy that Riley was searching for the girl when he finally told them, but he quickly spotted her wandering past the parked cars, looking for him. Every moment she was out there was another moment for the Angry Bush Man to return and snatch her away into the night. But was it even possible for Riley to save Kristen, or would he completely botch whatever half-thought out scheme he thought of next?!
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Kristen Has a Secret
Riley flashed his bright lights at the Kristen to get her attention. She bounced on over to his car, completely oblivious to the possibility of an actual kidnapping. Riley tried to whisper to the oblivious Kristen, “Get in. GET IN!“
For whatever reason, Kristen misheard Riley, so she simply stated, “Get it? Huh?! Oh, you want me to get the pizza from the back?”
There was no way Riley would have time to tell his entire story. Every second he grew more and more paranoid and fearful. Instead, he kept it brief and to the point. He told her, “There was a man in your bushes. I’m on the phone with the police. I don’t know where he is right now. Please get in the car, so we can lock the doors.”
Riley was shaking, like he had just downed ten cups of black coffee. He held up his phone, which was still on the call with 911, in order to verify this outlandish claim for her. The customer immediately got into the back seat without another word. Riley checked in with the 911 operator, updating her on what was going on. Riley and the customer drove to a secure location, which the operator told them to wait at for the police to arrive. Thank goodness it was only a few minutes before several officers arrived, but it felt like an eternity for Riley and Kristen. The officers chose to hear from Riley first. He tried to give the officers as detailed of a statement as he could. But when they questioned the customer, she revealed how she has a disturbing connection to the Angry Bush Man. She had a very good reason to be absolutely terrified.
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A Sickening Connection To The Predator
Kristen had gotten into Riley’s car immediately because she knew exactly who was hiding by the side of her house. As soon as Riley mentioned a man hiding in the bushes, Kristen knew it was her abusive ex-boyfriend. He apparently had completely gone off the deep end. The police officers decided to take our two scared heroes down to the station for some further questioning. They would be watching over both Riley and Kristen over the next few days, while they looked further into Kristen nasty ex-boyfriend. Riley drove back to his home, completely in shock over the past several hours. It took him a very long time to fall asleep that night. The thought of the Angry Bush Man, still covered in urine, haunted his brain and kept him uncomfortably awake.
A few days later, Kristen called Riley’s pizza shop to personally thank him. She also dropped off a massive tip just for Riley. Riley and his manager decided on her next order to surprise her with enough ‘one free pizza’ cards to last anyone a lifetime. This was one of the most horrifying nights in both Riley’s and Kristen’s lives. And to think, all it took was a frantic bathroom break to uncover how Kristen was an unsuspecting target or a predator. Riley has certainly never been the same since. No matter where he is, or whether he is on duty, he will always carefully check over his shoulder and inspect the area around his place. He is petrified of Angry Bush Man lurking somewhere else, waiting to take his revenge on the poor delivery driver. Riley never heard any updates from the police about finding or capturing this crazy dude. Every night, Riley would also pray that he never comes across anyone else as haunting as the Angry Bush Man. Pizza delivery has never been the same for Riley since that horrifying night.
That’s where Riley’s story ends, so hopefully he invested in some good self-defense classes. What would you have done in Riley’s situation, readers? How would you respond to the biggest threat imaginable at the moment? The next time you see a pizza delivery person, or really any delivery person, be sure to leave a generous tip and a warm smile. Delivering pizzas shouldn’t have to feel like you’re in a horror movie. Who knows what sort of action-packed encounters they might have had on an ordinary night on the job?
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