Hello kiddos, this does get graphic, especially at the end. Not in a OHHACKSLASH way but more of a OOZEGOREBLEAGH way. And forgive the self-indulgance.

~*~

It always starts with the little things.
Someone goes too fast one day trying to get someplace on time and has a collision. A family of four dies and the driver spends the rest of their life a vegetable. A kid tries a hallucinogen for the first time and rips their own face off. A harmless prank is played and someone does indeed lose an eye.

It is those little things that kill.

It was a little trip to a lake. Some friends went, we all went swimming. We pulled up an old tank from the depths, and like the dumb kids we were we had to figure out what it was. Some dumb dares happened, and always out to prove myself I volunteered. I had a bad feeling.

We all do, over these things.

I pried the canister open with my paws, slowly bending and breaking the rusted metal back. Inside was a membrane of sorts that pulsed under my touch. I turned my face to my right to beckon my friends, and pushed too hard. It broke. Brown ooze laced with fetid green flowerets spewed on my face, in my mouth and down my side. I screeched, jumped into the lake like any kid would and washed it off. We agreed we would not tell my parents.

Then the little illnesses started. I would wake up with a dry mouth, feel aching in my jaw. Finally it started swelling and offsetting my jaw, so I told my mother what happened. I was rushed to the nearest hospital where we found an infection the size of a RF missile inside my major saliva gland. First it was drained, and through all the needles and pain I remember the doctor having to get increasingly larger syringes until they finally used a tube the size of a drinking straw to suction out a mass of blood, pus, yellow fluid and some little green flecks. It was sent to a lab where they came to no conclusion.

Years passed. My dreams all died. I dropped out of pilot school once the swelling spread up to my ears. The pressure was too much on my facial nerves, and it all started with a little tingling, then numbness, then the left side of my face went slack. I could not blink my eye, and my mouth was frozen in a most stoic of open positions. I would wake up to find blood and increasingly browning fluid dripping out of my mouth.

But my sister was a scientist, and she got a large grant from the Carrotus government to study extra terrestrial plant life. In a lab where she was protected from filth by inches of plastic and metal, thousands of little spores and seeds were sent to her lab. Many new narcotics and stimulants were found, some which would benefit the people of Diamondus, my home planet. Some would send people spiraling into addiction, which over the past ten years reduced the planet from a green beauty to a dismal overrun ghetto.

And then it was found. Containers found in the deepest dregs of Dreempipes filled with a mutant fungus. Evidently some spores of a less toxic plant got into the process on that planet and ended up taking over some lower pipes. The specialists working with those pipes all died, and they did their best to package up the remains of the fungus and destroy it. But it was found that when filtered, dried and burned, the fumes produced strong hallucinations and sensations similar to salvia, so a careful shipment was snuck off of the planet. The ship was caught by galactic drug police, but the caretakers had jettisoned the containers in special pods that were supposed to stay in the space around Muckamo, but some scavengers found them and started towards Diamondus with them. Years later, one of the canisters somehow ended up in the bottom of the lake, and through all of that lovely string of events, I was the luckless one.

Things did improve some. They did countless surgeries, each removing less and less of the floweretts that were spawning inside my head. The nerves were all severed, and I lost all possibility of ever having a normal face again. The spores leaked into the openings on the other side of my mouth, and soon (over five years) those glands were also oversized and filled with a plague.
A reasonable solution was made by scientists. In a test tube, the fungus died when exposed to radiation. I was a lab rat to them, so they zapped me.
It did not work. Not only did it not kill the fungus, it fused it to my system. More surgeries, more suction tubes and scalpels, but it was a part of me. Soon the saliva that came out was not saliva any more, but a fluid nearly identical to the contents of the canister.

I was sitting in front of my window, watching rabbits and the occasional chinchilla go about their daily business while pouring a tasteless mess of vitamins into my nearly functionless mouth when a little thing happened. I lost my balance and the heel of my paw ended up ramming hard into the swelling on my left. My mouth was filled with pain as a rancid taste flooded the remainder of my mostly-numb taste buds. Amongst the stream of breakfast was a bloody pool of brackish brown. I was once again rushed to the clinic where they found a cyst had burst.

Even under constant supervision and constant needles it had grown. The membrane of the cysts had protected me from the new strain sheltered within. When the cyst burst, the core released an acid. It trickled along the wound on the way to the clinic, eating a path through my deadened nerves. It was not until they propped my mouth open as far as it would go that they saw the raw flesh stippled with brown. They scraped remaining cells off of my mouth and set upon the other cysts to drain them, hiking up my antibiotics and cauterizing the wounds to keep the fungus from spreading more.

So often we have good intentions. So often we think that something so little will not be taken in a bad way.

But instead, the cauterizing left wounds that never shut, open to acid-producing factories. I woke up from the haze of the drugs they had me on one morning to finally feel something in my face – searing pain. Jumping up, I choked on my own repulsive, burning saliva and some went into my sinuses.

There is a duct that leads from the nose to the eyes, and it seems that most of the saliva went into my left sinus, for in a few hours my eye was swollen, the flesh around it bigger than my paw. It seems the fungus, in its most destructive form, had spread and planted itself in the optic nerve.

We take the little things for granted, but once we lose them, we see that we are lost without them.
I never saw out of that eye again.

Through the blurred vision of the other eye I saw myself after they attached me to a machine. Left eyelid swollen permanently closed, with brown fluid seeping down my face. Bar, furless patches where they shaved for surgery, but the skin had stretched and the fur never grew back. Distended cheeks, imbalanced to the right where so much scar tissue and so much fungus had sealed itself into a gnarled mass thrice the size of my other cheek, which itself was mottled with scars and pock marks, fistulas on both sides leaking the horrid fluid mottled with pus, which over time stopped being produced.

Into my mouth went tubes no bigger than a pencil, specially twisted down my left shoulder and anchored into the muscle with pins. The tubes went into each of the massive cysts, constantly pumping out the toxin my body seemed to want to destroy itself with. Into a bag it went on a pole, lower than an IV but still a leash.

My sister, so well known now due to her studies on me, disowned me. I was kept in the lab though, in a cell where they pumped me full of narcotics and pumped the acid out of me for testing. I watched the ceiling spin and curl in on me as the camera noiselessly watched through the plastic walls. When the psychotropic wore down, I could see shapes moving beyond me, but before I could focus they forced more into my feeding tubes and I vegetated.

I guess the funding went out because they stopped giving me the drugs. I was moved to a room down a metallic hallway where I could actually leave my bed, but preferred to stay lying down, imagining that I was flying, and that the dryness in my mouth was not there.

But then it happened. People bursting into my room, pushing me and my poison pole into the hallway. We were all forced down on the ground, where through my blurred vision and deadened eardrums, I saw them threatening scientists.
I was dead to them though. Although they pulled and prodded at me, I was incapable of speech, my mouth grotesquely distended around the tubes and swelling. The scientists must have said something, for they left me and left me in the hall. Occasionally I would hear a sound within my pitiful range, something like a weapon discharge, and once I heard a yell. They must have been slaughtering the scientists, trying to get something. Something worth all of their lives.

I remember before this happened images of war. The good rabbits in bandannas, the bad ones in full-body suits with weapons. I guess these were like the bad rabbits, for they all seemed the same color. I could not tell what they were doing, but I saw a scientist fall to the ground, its white fur turning red. Another one was thrown off the walkway. They broke down a wall and started bringing out barrels. One was cracked open, and I recognized the smell.
The same smell I had known that day at the lake.

They were coming for the drugs. Surely it had some value. I remained motionless while they stepped over me, propping the barrels against the railing.

They were fighting now. First with voices raised, then shoving, then one brought out a weapon. Three shots rang out, and he fell dead, his blood splattering over the wall. A bullet fractured the barrel and brown watery stank leaked out, green flecks in it. The ones who shot him then started blaming each other for the loss of the drug, and more shots rang out.

But they were not so counterproductive. It was the military firing on them. They scattered, but the military did not come down the walkway. There were more explosions in the distance, but I did not care. I still had the nerve-numbing, apathy-inducing fluids coursing through me.

But then I saw it. One of the rabbits was creeping towards me, or to be more correct, towards the barrel. Most of his leg had been shot off and he had a jagged gash on his forehead, but he still had the sense to get the barrel.
Maybe I hallucinated, maybe the drugs let off, or maybe a cyst burst and for one moment I could hear. He was hissing to himself. The barrel was his, he said. It had been his once, and he wanted it.

For the first time in years, I felt a burn build between my shoulder blades. It was people like this who had killed me. For the money, for the high, I was nothing. All my fantasies of being a pilot, a legend, had been killed by people like him.

No, for now, I knew it was him.

So while he pulled himself on the ground, lurching towards the undamaged barrel past me leaving a bloody wake of clots, I slid my numb limbs up around the handrail and pulled myself up. Towards him I limped, weight hanging off the pole, moving no faster than him. My eyes burned with unshed tears, and I felt the acid trickle down my face.

He had not seen me before, but his eyes turned towards me, and he raised a weapon with a strangely rounded end. A silencer. The bullet went in my left side; the receptors in my brain still too swamped by the haze of the narcotics for it to stop me. I gained on him; he fired again but I did not see where the bullet went. His eyes were visible even through the glaze in my eye – the acid must have gotten into the remaining one.

I wanted him to know what I had known. I wanted him to feel my pain. So as I lurched towards him, I opened my mouth. He was under me now, and I reached my right paw across my body to the tubes.

The tissue was ripping; it had grown around the tubes but was still weakened by the fungus. I pulled harder, it released and a spray of green slit the gray of the metal floor.

But it was on him. Though I could see less and less, I saw the mottled fluid across his face. I heard his screeches as the buildup of the fungus splattered on his eyes and burned him. I used my left hand, pulling my teeth farther apart, snapping my jaw but seeing more fluid, this mottled with blood, make angry torrents down his face. His screams went high and he clawed at himself.
I fell on him; unable to stand for some reason I could not feel. He scratched away at me, but I saw the swelling around his eyes, and the rawness of his skin where his beloved drug, through me, was eating him.

As I lost control of my limbs and as my hearing echoed with metal, I felt him stop moving. This raid must have been such a trifle, typical job. He set out this morning, sure that this would just be another little thing.

The little things kill.

Impressive. Good to see people writing, and the mere mention of any planet other than Carrotus or Diamondus gets bonus points in my book. Regardless of planet names, I like this, and wouldn't want to read it before going to bed. Nice job.

.. wow. No one could ever accuse you of not being creative, Cobbie. That completely creeped me out.

That's not to say that I don't like it, though.

Three words: Eeek.

A wonderful little spiel, if not an especially happy one.

I return for a moment only to have my jaw hang loosely in amazement.

This is quite the work, Cobra. Consider yourself commended.

Out of curiosity, what inspired this masterpiece?

Is there more?

Firstly, thank you all for commenting. I lurve you all to death

falcon: this was inspired by my own personal battle with an infection under my left ear. That's why in the disclaimer I said this was self-indulgence -- to other it might be a creepy story (I sincerely did not notice how bad it was while writing it) but to me it's a lot more.

MSB3000: No. Everyone is dead

*smothers everyone with love*

More!

Originally Posted by Cobra

This was inspired by my own personal battle with an infection under my left ear. That's why in the disclaimer I said this was self-indulgence -- to other it might be a creepy story, but to me it's a lot more.

Might be your toxic saliva a result of the infection?

This is a very nice story btw ;O.

Yes, the toxic saliva is a result of the infection -- 1/4 people I kiss gets sick
And no, there isn't more >|

edited for random reading dyslexia.

Well written, but not fun to read while eating breakfast.

Yay for a story that doesn't involve an epic hero killing everything in his wake.

eee
Scary, but well written.


...you didn't find an odd barrel of stuff in a lake when you were a kid, did you cobbi? ;|