User blog comment:SOMEGUY123/300 Word Long Stories/@comment-5952769-20150201091148

Nightmare 1 (450 words)

You'll have to do without running water here. It's the only way to be safe.

Like you, I used to live in the city and fear the wrong things. I was in the prime of life when it happened. Alone at home, cleaning myself under jets of unnaturally-transported water. I worried about intruders, so I screamed when the curtain opened.

The intruder was no man. It spilled out the sink, pooled on the floor, crept up the tub. Red like blood, thick like sewage. It tugged the curtain. It was alive.

I could reach a ways without stepping in it. We were going through remodelling. A hammer was lying around. I'd seen the bathroom torn apart. I knew what to do.

After smashing through tiles I made it into the space between rooms. I thought I was safe. Rested too long. The ooze followed. It flowed fast once it smelled me.

It was a tense scene inside that house's walls. I crawled on hands and knees, never slowing down despite cuts and bruises. Being caught would be worse. I couldn't always see what was chasing me. It was a dark mass in the dark. Only sparse glints of light revealed it as anything but a shadow.

I saw hope. Little patches of light, like stars guiding me home. When I stopped, I heard the sludge slurping along. Closing in. I bashed and kicked until there was one big piece of daylight.

I scrambled out onto the lawn and screamed with the joy survival. My neighbor and her kids were right there. She wouldn't call the police, only my parents, and she told the story wrong.

Nobody grasped the danger of running water. They thought I was the danger. I was forced to keep living in rooms surrounded by pipes, drinking and bathing in water from pipes, sitting on bowls of water connected to pipes. Torture.

Now I'm on my own. I get my water from wells and bottles. It's a lot of work, but it's safe. The creeping abomination that swims with the running water will strike again. Then they'll remember I warned them.