20160923

Day 872

It could have been any one of us, that's what we thought at first. I mean, the ship was so huge and we'd lost so many already, how would we even notice there were doppelgangers until it was too late? We didn't even know when they arrived here or whereabouts they came from in particular, just that the ship had experienced severe technological difficulties ever since we pulled out of Dowbridge Port.

There were countless little islands surrounding the port where seals would perch and hide in, slipping into the water through unusually smooth holes. It stood to reason that there might be other things inside the islands aside from seals, perhaps the things that slipped onto the ship somehow and began picking us off one by one.

I'll admit I was one of the last to notice but in all fairness I was a little busy as, when the head engineer's upper torso was found hanging from a vent and declared "indisposed of", I took on his duties and had been in the midst of fixing the multitude of problems the doppelgangers were causing. Technologically at least, preventing the murders was beyond my skill set to say the least.

Over the weeks that we'd been collectively hiding, repairing and generally trying to sail the ship to the nearest port while debating if that was a good idea, we managed to find an old airbase to dock beside. It was one of those floating monstrosities that was little more than a rusted outline but it gave us somewhere stable to sump the ship and escape on our lifeboats while not necessarily losing the cargo.

From the brief snippets of radio talk we'd all been able to establish, as well as a list of crewmen who were known to be dead for sure, we understood there were between 15 and 30 survivors when we docked. The doppelgangers put us back to almost a full crew and they outnumbered us  by far, at least we thought so.

During our time scavenging and surviving their repeated attempts to kill and eat us they had begun to stack the remains of the dead crewmen on deck, all neatly laid out for some reason. It was quite a sight to stumble across, even more so when the doppelgangers were still ferrying bits and pieces of the bodies to their original owners.

While three of us finally managed to get off the ship and find a port, the rest we can presume to be dead or as good as. I mean there are other lifeboats but I don't think the doppelgangers know how to use them, not when it took them almost a week to figure out how to use the horn and two weeks to open the doors.

So I'm telling you now, the "miracle rescue" that's recovering the remainder of the crew - all 36 - is not the crew we set out with. Most, if not all, of them aren't even human and they've either moved the bodies of the originals again or finished them off entirely. I don't know which is worse but the worst thing you can do is allow my crew to come ashore. They died weeks ago and they need to stay dead, however you can manage that.

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