It Spreads – Ecological Short Horror
- Alex Alex
- May 6
- 3 min read
The darkest demons are those of our own creation . . .
It first appeared on the faces of dazed animals wandering around in a stupor. They had been lured in by the scent of food, sealing their fates. Animals infected wandered through suburbs and cities all over. Sometimes, a samaritan would remove the covering with whatever blade they had handy. The rescued animal would scurry back into the foliage, hoping to forget the entire encounter. Mostly, we just pulled out our phones to record and laugh at the dumb animals bumping into walls.
Then It invaded our waterways. Odd floating pieces of every shape and color. Tangled on the banks, clogging up rivers, floating out to sea. But below each one, hundreds more sank towards the sands. The rainbow rain a fantastical feast for the fish that filled their bellies. The bottom dwellers took to them, making homes in the ones concave and sturdy. We would read stories of sharks killed and gutted for hunting human catches; their bellies always packed full of these unnatural shapes. Could they have caused the erratic behavior?
Before we realized, we were all spreading It, as if we couldn’t help It cover the planet fast enough. We bought and brought to feed Its mass, dropping pieces of It wherever we went. The loudest patriots left festering wounds on their countries’ surfaces. Some tried in vain to contain It. Desperate attempts that seem so naive now, as if metal bins could have ever caged a virus.
We dug massive pits in the earth to bury It with the other mistakes we made; we built playgrounds and lives atop the horror, hoping It would never wake. We shipped It off to lands out of sight, where people eked out lives on the refuse of our follies. But It soon came in overwhelming waves, inundating us as we tried incinerating shredding dissolving It, anything to make It go away, but wherever we looked, more of It had consumed our lives
Only later did we realize
the toxins of the fumes we’d inhaled
the lacing of the food we ate
the million ways we had absorbed It through our skin
the eety-teeny-tiny particles flowed through us,
in our blood, to our brains, and finally our children, born into this world tainted by the sins. Of hubris and greed —of our species’ forefathers; the few who were not kind nor loving guardians of our people, but greedy, shortsighted souls who hungered for an immortality they would build out of fire, tears, and power.
They had fed us to It, a devil deal signed in the earth’s blood, paid out to them and theirs. We cried to them do you not care what you have done to the children!?
These children, born into a world that never knew a time before It; It was these children’s first companions as they formed in the womb. It sat on their lips, feeding them their milk, leaching bits of Itself in the liquid we drank, the clothes we wore, the spaces we lived in.
It took the form of social icons and iconography, cajoling the kids, take me into your home through an endless wall of screens. We resigned, accepting Its numbing gifts, empty of substance, hoping to pretend to enjoy our demise. It lived in all of us. We hosts pined for a time of an earth uninfected. A pristine wild, crystal lakes, soaring birds touring their songs.
We began dying of cancers and diseases in rates and forms unprecedented. The doctors and experts could not say where they came from. But we all knew. The whales, cousins who had taken to the sea, dragged themselves onto beaches by the hundreds, gasping for air. Their lungs had collapsed before they beached, under the weight of all they'd swallowed. It clumped in dams to rival beavers’; the subsequent flooding washed us out of our homes.
With each particle that settled in our brains, we lost pieces of ourselves: mother’s smile, father’s hands, a love’s laugh, our own faces. Strangers sat in our homes, they stared at us, knowing that one day they too would join us in the fog.
Our global species may die out in 10,000 years, 500, or tomorrow, but if far flung relatives on the vine of universal life ever find our sheltered rock, they would know we were here. Not for the grand monuments or radioactive imprints of the Blinking War, but because It would still fill the sands of the beaches. Suspended in the air. Raining down on peaks we thought we’d conquered. Only we could have made It.
