Day 685

It wasn't just animals that came back from the dead, the plants came back too. While we were busy killing the reanimated, not giving them a chance to speak or take their first breaths of air after countless years buried in dirt.

There were clouds of living ash, born from the cremated dead. We called them Swarms and while they didn't mean to hurt anyone (in fact they were also called Sorries, for all the times they begged for forgiveness as they drifted over fleeing people, choking them every time) their death count was the highest. The living corpses just couldn't compare to the sheer size and density of the Swarms.

If the Sorries and the walking dead didn't get you, plants spontaneously and rapidly growing from your clothing or skin just might. There were plenty of stories about kids with dirty hands that had been holdings seeds or even books only for them to take root deep in their flesh.

Sometimes they were crushed by trees that looked hundreds of years old bursting to life. Other times they were fused together, there were clusters of these wretched individuals with books or damp rags sprouting little seedlings or saplings and occasionally a whole tree - though this was rare and often left the person comatose or begging for death.

When death stopped working, it went so much further than we'd ever expected.