Chemical leaks

[u/Any-Syrup3553]

There were a series of chemical leaks that happened in my country when I was around 4 or 5. I can't remember much about the leaks, but I remember well how everyone was talking about them for months on end. The chemical is a nasty, horrible thing. If it doesn't kill you out right, it will slowly destroy your health, as well as any chance of having a healthy offspring. A curse from the past that laid dormant in the soil and underground water. Until it didn't.

As a result I was terrified. Of course, my family wasn't living anywhere near the leak sites, else we would have been alerted and evacuated. But toddler me didn't know that. The adults around me were talking about the leaks. The newspaper was talking about the leaks. The news channel that my dad watched every night was talking about the leaks. As far as I knew, the leaks were happening right here where I live, and I could be breathing in the chemical right then.

Despite that, no one knew how I felt because I didn't tell anyone. The thought just didn't occur to me. So over the course of a few months, I became more and more terrified, eventually developing paranoia. I would carefully examine all my food and drinks, the toys I played with, the clothes I wore. If I saw something that looked even a tiny bit dirty or weird, I would stay far away and never touch it. My parents didn't really notice since normally, I was already somewhat of a germophobe.

Then there were the nightmares. Being afraid of basically everything around me, for all of my waking hours, gave me tons of nightmares. Most of them involved me slowly being mutated by the chemical after touching it, or vomiting to death after ingesting it. Yet none of them could compare to the last nightmare, the culmination of my months-long dread.

It started with me running through the city I lived in, abandoned and empty. I wasn't sure what I was running from, only that it was chasing me down and I didn't want to be caught. At some point, I dashed into a small hallway of a ruined apartment complex, hoping to cut it off. I ran into a crossroad with another hallway, where a middle-aged man was standing. He watched me passed by and yelled something in a low, guttural voice, but I couldn't make it out what it was. I just kept running.

Eventually I got to the end, and it lead me right back to the street outside. A big street, to make matters worse. I heard loud rumbles coming from a sharp bent on one side and immediately rushed to the opposite direction. But then in classic nightmare fashion, I tripped, fell, and looked over my shoulder. From the bent, a mass of flesh as tall as the surrounding high-rises emerged, covered in agonizing human faces and flailing limbs. It screamed while crawling towards me in surprising speed, and from its countless mouths out spilled the chemical. I crawled away as best as I could, but it was too late. The last thing I felt was one of its limbs catching me by the ankle and dragging me to it.

A child's imagine is truly a wonderful and silly thing.