The Carrier

A bustling city, crowded streets and hectic traffic. A feeling of doom weighs in the air, as if gravity is magically increased here, trying harder to swallow everything in its insatiable maw. Slip. Let your mind slip. Let your eyes unfocus. Let the light pass through your dulled vision. Don't look right at it because you won't see it. There! A tail, a tendril a spiney limb, it skitters across the concrete, lithe and limber, sinewy muscles under ethereal flesh.

It does not know what its purpose is, yet it serves one all the same. Existing between dimensions, it makes a nightmare run through its territory, passing through pedestrians like a sinister wind.

Fiery violet eyes scan the distorted mess before it. Angles are skewed, colors are dim, contrasting. It lives in a chaotic nowhere too incomprehensible for a human mind to theorize about, let alone see, but to the beast it's just home.

There's a burning in its guts. A splinter throbs in its body, leaking venom into its limbs, making its brain ache intensely. Had it a mouth, it'd scream in unimaginable pain. Had it claws, it'd slice open its own torso and wrest the vile thing loose, but it has neither so it runs.

Pores on its body open and close, open and close. Doing their trick, releasing a toxic negative kinetic energy from the beast. As it bounds down the sidewalks and through the streets, it infects all it passes. An inter-dimensional death sentence delivered by an ignorant carrier.

It streaks across and through the front of a speeding car, the brakes deteriorating ever so slightly, the stage set. "Two die in fatal crash on the I-95".

Now it runs faster. The pain fueling it, urging it on. The beast just wanting to exorcise the brutal torturous substance which grows inexplicably within itself.

A line in front of a theater. Pores opening and closing the beast cuts through, a brain tumor is seeded, an aneurysm buried, a heart condition, a degenerative bone disease, cancer, each healthy person it passes through bringing tidal waves of relief to its agony wracked body.

It sprints and leaps, its agile form passing through the supports of a scaffolding setup, rusting the insides heavily. Tomorrow it will collapse under the weight of a dozen men hard at work, a tragedy attributed to equipment failure. Eight will die crushed under the steel and wood.

It effortlessly glides through the ground level of a hotel, eroding the wiring inside the walls. The lobby will catch fire in a months time. With unnatural quickness, it will spread through six other floors consuming fifty souls.

Plunging onward, more and more speed until its muscles will carry it no faster. Corrupting and tainting everything its ghostly presence reaches, violates, rapes. Children, animals, buildings and cars, it is tragedy incarnate, seeding chaos just below the surface of the normal world.

The beast begins to slow. The wicked splinter is exhausted at last and no more anguish flows through its veins. It stops, sits. Curling up slightly, the fire in its eyes now diminished, it lays a hideous head on aching limbs and slowly drifts into a fitful rest. Even now it can feel the awful thing inside of it regaining its vitality. It gives an otherworldly shudder before closing its eyes and slipping into the dark recesses of its own thoughts.