Automobilus runoverus An invasive species has taken hold in Earth's Northern and Western Hemispheres over the last century and is rapidly spreading into the Southern and Eastern.
The creatures race through cities in herds, scooping up large numbers of bipeds and running over others. Their preferred habitat, however, is at the edges of towns, where they burrow into biped homes, occupying up to half the space of the structures. They regularly kidnap and release the bipeds into distant landscapes far from any suitable food supply. Only after sitting for hours in these places are the bipeds allowed to return home.
The creatures travel rapidly on narrow rollers that slowly wear away and are shed and replaced. The discarded limbs are foul-smelling and serve as breeding grounds to insects, but dirty the water when buried and the air when burned, so the bipeds invent new uses for them, such as playground equipment for their offspring.
The creature's diet is usually comprised of decomposed plant and animal matter, cured for millions of years underground. The bipeds will travel the globe to procure the substance, often violently disrupting the lives of other bipeds who happen to be in the way.
The creatures have also been known to consume fresher plant matter, which the bipeds grow and prepare for them, sometimes at the cost of food for themselves.
They don't hibernate in the winter, but do slow down and increase their intake of salt. Some grow large shovel-like snouts that they use to remove snow from their paths.
Their paths are comprised of asphalt and concrete, byproducts of their preferred diet that they shit in wide strips. The offal hardens and becomes impenetrable, creating problems for the waterways and soil, critical to the bipeds' habitat.
If the species continues to reproduce as rapidly as it has, it's unclear where they'll go and if it will be possible to bring the bipeds with them.
- B.C. Brown