The Outsiders || Phan

Black

warnings: very graphic despcriptions of blood and gore, loss of loved ones, the inviabilitty of death, brief mention of animal abuse, and what may be perceived as suicidal thoughts. this whole story is going to be triggering, so please stay safe and only read if you are comfortable with it. enjoy! —ash

             Terror dug it's sharpened nails into the boy's throat, it's calloused bony fingers locked on the idea to cease the boy's breathing. His throat was raw with silent screams, his mind horsley commanding his body to move, but his limbs remaining unresponsive and in an almost paralyzed state. Salty tears streaked down the boy's pale cheeks, traveling down to his jaw before sliding to his trembling chin. The drops fell in an unsynchronized pace to the cracked tile below, nobody there willing to wipe the boy's distress and pain away.

Philip was scared, hopeless, and alone.

His heart pounded furiously in his rib cage, like a small blue bird desperately trying to escape through a closed window. It was futile, the constant fluttering and flaps, his fate had been sealed when he heard the piercing shatter of the café's front window breaking into millions of microscopic glittering shards. He was doomed when the first wave of dark thundering clouds advanced on the city, when everything that had mattered became worthless, useless even.

His grades became nonexistent, his phone became a cold lump of wires and metal in his palm, staying alive became the main priority, the focus that everyone's attention was forced to. Appearance was destroyed by bruises that littered legs, sores that scorched the roof of feet, and dark circles rimmed around bloodshot eyes, veins webbed past scarred irises.

Nothing mattered anymore, nothing but staying alive: surviving one more day.

He was trapped in a constant state of mind, his worries and distant nightmares becoming reality. Philip couldn't do anything but desperately gulp for air, his Adam's apple bobbing, and struggling wheezes slipping past his chapped lips into the freezing air. His lanky pale arms covered his head, his knees tucked so tightly into his chest they dug into his heaving rib cage: in one last desperate attempt to protect himself from them.

The Outsiders.

They seemed to exist only to extinguish humanity, to collapse everything that man perceived to be true. It had started out insignificantly, so small that scientists hadn't discovered it until civilians were begging for death, their skin rotten and flesh boiling after exposure to sunlight. Doses of bacteria had been implanted by them into public water systems, the multiplying vermin changing the quality of water, and tinting it a slight gray. The diseased liquid had already been drunk by millions before the symptoms began and the bacterium had decided to reveal their ultimate goal—the terrorization of the human mind.

It started out with a mild headache, a normal occurrence until the victims found themselves locked in an endless loop of shrieks, unable to complete simple actions. Propaganda from The Outsiders was circuited into the depths of the host's mind, their purpose to proclaim their arrival and slowly turn the human against itself. Within days, the most necessary component to survival became a poison, water into inescapable sickness, and sunlight into fatal rays that penetrated deep past the skin and slowly stripped the human of until their muscle was exposed, flesh burning.

The ill were dismissed as incurable, their mouths unable to form understandable words, saliva spilling down unhinged jaws. The foreign bacteria left the host an empty shell of rotting flesh and a mind plagued with inhuman lies from them. Loved ones wept as the ill clawed at their clothing, screaming nonsense and foaming at the mouth. They couldn't be saved. No one could.