Brief observation

So I'm tweaking the horror story and thinking I've got to make this suck more. And it occurred to me that this is about the only genre where that's a positive thing.

...Of course, I mean "make this suck more for the characters," but it's still sort of perversely amusing to be looking critically at the text and thinking how do I maximize the gut punch effect without increasing the word count?

(N.B.: thanks to shaterri the story's tentative title is "Carrier.")