SNAKES I WAS READY FOR. THIS WAS SOMETHING ELSE.

I grew up in churches — weird ones. The kind where speaking in tongues came before lunch, and healing oil was kept where other families might keep salt. But nothing — not one tent revival or demon-casting caravan — prepared me for Muddy Calf Gut Creek Full Gospel Church.

I expected rattlesnakes in burlap sacks.

What I got was Pastor PeeWee. Prophet Preacher Willy Nelson Jr. Esquire. And a congregation that didn’t handle serpents…

They became them.

By the time they barricaded the doors, it was too late. Eyes rolled back. Bodies convulsing. Skin tearing. A whole room of Amen-shouting saints turning into hissing, slithering things.

My mom grabbed her Bible. My dad asked me for “Dan and Smith.”

And I realized — when the Holy Ghost fails, you’d better pray your .357 doesn’t.

Episode 1 — The Shimmer

I know I smoke a lot of weed… but I swear this really happened.

There are some things you don’t see with your eyes, you see them with whatever part of you dreams while you’re still awake. I was sitting in a doctor’s waiting room when it happened again: the shimmer. A rip in the air, like a slit in reality. And through it, I saw her.

Not the sick woman in the chair… but the thing wrapped around her. Part panther. Part serpent. All hunger.

It saw me staring.

So I did the only thing that made sense. I called my mother.

What happened next—oil, tongues, flying chairs, the name of God used like a weapon—you don’t have to believe. Just listen.

Because if you’ve ever caught something out the corner of your eye… you already know the shimmer is real.

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