Day 1,058

Her radio was broken, she could tell that just by the way she'd landed. There was no way she'd even be able to get out of the mess that was her tangled parachute, let alone climb further up the cliff to grab the remains of her bag and the spare radio she'd packed inside it.

Below her, barely visible through the smothering fog, was a veritable ocean of a forest that stretched out to the horizon. If she weren't trapped halfway up a cliff with her parachute wedged precariously between overhanging craggy rocks, it might even have been beautiful.

As it presently stood, the sun was setting and she was quickly running out of options that didn't involve risking a long fall, climbing in the dark or waiting for the tattered and tangled fabric to finally tear and let her drop to a doubtlessly messy conclusion.

With mixed degrees of finality, trepidation and a little bit of desperation, she managed to haul herself up to the small overhang where the bulk of her parachute was caught. It would be enough to sit on for the night and likely hold until morning when she could better assess her situation and attempt a proper escape to safety, or at least relative safety.

At some point during the night she had dozed off, waking sharply with the sun barely peering above the trees and the feeling that she was being watched. The fog below her still obscured the details of the forest but it had lessened somewhat, allowing her to faintly make out a shape that was most certainly not a tree.

It looked almost like somebody had taken a human head, increased the size a dozen or so times and then stuck it on the end of a stick to admire it. As her eyes continued to adjust to the dim light she began to make out more details of the odd shape, mainly noting that it was moving closer towards her.

Day 1,057

There was something ancient in the woods, something that had escaped the prying eyes of humanity long enough that they'd forgotten that it had ever escaped in the first place. Even as it moved from forest to forest, using the back-country lanes to its advantage, it had been so rarely spotted that there was no longer any name for it. Not even a footnote in the most obscure local lorebooks.

When it rediscovered humans accidentally, it found them far better prey than it remembered. They tasted sweeter, were juicier and so much slower. It began to follow smaller groups around the woods, creeping between the dense canopy until someone wandered just that little bit too far from the others. It always struck too fast for them to so much as gasp out in surprise, let alone cry out for backup.

Nearly twenty years passed before the first of its multitude of victims were found by a young child who climbed a dead tree and found a half-eaten corpse in the hollow trunk. With the police being called to the scene shortly after, with more and more bodies being found each and every day, with the missing persons lists dwindling every hour as the dead were named, the creature found itself surrounded by too many things to eat.

That was when it made its mistake. It jumped into the middle of a forensics team, unaware that armed officers were close enough to hear their shrieks of terror and pain, abruptly ending in wet gurgles as their throats were clamped down in its large blunt teeth.

It had never been shot before that day and was never seen after, having fled in a blur of feathers and fur the second the first bullet struck. Nobody quite knew what they'd seen or where it went, only that they'd been left with nine fresh corpses afterwards.

Day 1,056

The campus was home to a series of large lakes that were rumoured to be interconnected, though there was no physical proof of this and all of the lakes were declared stagnant some hundred or so years ago. Aside from the recent addition of large fountains in their centres that kept the water circulating and reduce the algae, there only interesting thing about the lakes was their utter lack of wildlife. No birds had ever been seen near the lakes, not so much as a single sparrow flying overhead.

Around the campus they were nicknamed the Jenny's Sisters from the old English legends of the water-dwelling creature known as Jenny Greenteeth. A few older professors liked to jokingly claim that the lakes were teeming with Greenteeths, all hungrily snatching at any source of meat that stayed about for too long.

It was all seen as a quirk of the university until an entire biology class went missing after they attempted to cross one of the larger lakes by boat. A mix of human and wooden remains were found scattered all around the shore, almost forming a perfect circle as though something was marking out its territory. No divers were sent into the lake to find the rest of the bodies, no official cause of death was publicly released although the victim's families all report that they have been given closure.

A photography student attempted to set up a series of cameras around this lake overnight, claiming they were going to capture the algae in the moonlight. Its been five months and they haven't come out of the darkroom, their classmates deliver them food enough to keep them going until the staff can figure out what to do.

They still won't say what was in their photographs, only that there was so much beneath the lake.

Day 1,055

Through the dead tree a few miles into the woods, he could see a world burning. People ran shrieking, aflame and very much alive while he just stood there and watched, unsure if he could believe is eyes and unwilling to try and rationalise what he was witnessing.

He never told anybody about it, how could he? Who would believe that portals could exist, let alone be found in such an otherwise utterly unassuming place as a tree? For months he visited, trying to gleam some kind of answer from the people inside but none of them seemed to be able to hear him over their own screams.

It was as if there was a never-ending supply of victims for this world to burn and for a time he called it Hell.  It became an object of fascination for him to such an extent that he set up camp there, falling asleep to the sounds of countless people burning alive, helpless to save themselves.

Day 1,054

It was the second great ice age and according to every temperature reading across the global survivor's network, it was finally coming to an end. Every day it rose by a degree, white began to fade away and the frozen plant life deep below it saw their first glimpses of sunlight in almost eight hundred years.

For the first few weeks everything seemed fine, the preparations needed to switch all camps from underground thermo-bunkers to submersible house-pods were well underway. Nobody thought that there might be more than just frozen fungi revealed by the great thaw. Nobody thought about the countless living creatures who hadn't made it to the shelters in time.

As the ice fled, the first few thousand corpses began to float towards the surface, propelled by harsh currants and hurtling towards the gathering house-pods. From the distance it looked like the dead were coming to avenge themselves, remembering their deaths some eight hundred or so years ago and wanting to be amongst the living once more.

Removing all windows from the pods only did so much, after all they still had to sail through what was now being called The Bone Sea for all the rapidly decaying bodies that clogged almost every inch of the shallower waters. What little sea life that had clung onto their existence over the second great ice age now found itself suffocating in the ammonia-laced waters.

Day 1,053

The last humans left alive in England were barely teenagers, unsurprisingly. Their generation had grown up knowing that the end of the world was coming soon, their teachers taught them all that they could in the hopes that most would survive and another generation would remain to resurrect civilisation.

These children had no such plans.

What they had known as civilisation had meant them being cooped up in sweaty lead-lined rooms, told time and time again that every adult before them had somehow screwed up the planet and it was their duty to fix it all or they would die.

It wasn't exactly inspiring, to say the least.

As much as they had been prepared, countless doomsday scenarios drilled into their heads until they could spew all seventy-six major survival aids word-for-word, they were still unprepared for a world without people. A world now full of birdsong and silence, roads crowded with cars that nobody would drive again and cities reeking of rotting food from restaurants whose patrons went in the night like almost everyone else.

The children took nothing from the cities they walked through, intent on reaching the wilderness.

Humanity's last hope wanted nothing to do with their past, choosing instead to make themselves something newer, better, greater than anything before them. The children chose to embrace the end of all that they'd known with open arms and in return it took what little semblance of humanity they had left.

They became the next best thing - from them came the unimaginable and behind them the world wept.

Day 1,052

In that moment there were three things she knew to be certain.

1. The heat haze that made the desert horizon shimmer also made the cliffs appear further away.
2. Kay wouldn't be able to stop in time.
3. She didn't have enough time to warn them that they were too close.

In that moment she did what she believed to be the best option and destroyed her comm system. The governors would believe it to be sabotage if she looked beaten enough and she'd live to see another day in spite of her failure leading to the deaths of the governor's favourite recon team.

She was found unconscious and bleeding, just as she'd planned, and spared, just as she'd planned. Unfortunately she didn't plan on the governors counting this as an act of devotion and self-sacrifice, nor did she plan on them asking her to assemble a team to hunt down the saboteurs who dared to interrupt their reconnaissance missions.

There were several ways in which she saw herself taking this opportunity.

She could assign herself to hunt them down as an "act of vengeance" and gather enough supplies to make it to one of the rival bases, join them and survive a while longer. However should the governors discover her plot she would be hunted to death, possibly leading to the genocide of an entirely innocent faction in the process.

She could pick the best of the best and have them hunt a rival faction to death, gaining further favour within the governors and further cementing herself within their core. However this would make her even more of a target than she already was and more factions would notice her as a person of importance instead of a mere errand runner.

She could also pick the worst of the worst and send them off to their deaths, making the faction stronger but risking her own life if their deaths were deemed "unnecessary". However she might also be praised for strengthening the faction, the governors despised the unnecessary and should she become that or cause it then her life was as good as forfeit.

No matter how she was swiftly she was running out of time, she still found the chance to pray for the recon team she'd killed. She prayed for her own soul as much as theirs, finding no answers from above and wondering how long she could delay before she had to make the choice that would likely end her own life.

Day 1,051

Impossibly large bones began washing up on the beaches, all unidentified though exhausted scientists claimed them to be a species of whale that was thought to be extinct. While this in itself was considered exciting by the general public, behind closed doors labcoats scurried to and fro in their desperate attempts to identify whatever they now held.

A few days after the first public briefing (complete with images of the alleged whale to further convince the public that it did in fact exist) more bones began washing ashore. The same species as the first and much larger, so much so that they had to be cut and moved in sections.

At first it was never made entirely clear as to why the government insisted that all of the bones be removed from the beaches. By the time the bacteria was discovered, everyone who had been studying the new bones was infected and rapidly quarantined in their labs.

Officially, none of this was happening. There was no outbreak of a highly contagious contact-spread bacteria that ate muscle and excreted a series of chemicals that slowly calcified the host. At least they knew what had killed the deep-sea behemoths that had washed ashore, though that left little hope of a cure.

After all windows were bordered up they grew desperate to find a cure, some even resorting to amputation and claiming that as long as the infected areas were removed and burnt they would all survive long enough to develop a less drastic solution.

When the first of the government-issued food rations arrived, it became clear that they were expected to remain in quarantine indefinitely. Opening ration packs was somewhat difficult with their now reduced number of limbs but they soon adapted, continuing their research and praying that they wouldn't be forgotten about.

Five months later the electricity was cut.

A week later the food parcels ceased to arrive.

One year later a newspaper ran a story reminiscing about the bones, wondering where they were now.

Day 1,050

When I was five I used to picture my grandma as a swamp monster, inspired by sitting in her muggy greenhouse for hours at a time as I "helped" her garden as much as a five year old could. Her hair would always end up this sweaty, stringy mess that looked more like the off-white yarn she knitted with than actual human hair.

I never expected to see that same creature I imagined sitting in my own conservatory, arms caked in dirt and trying to plant weeds in the upholstery of my rocking chair. She muttered under her breath the same way Grandma did, shuffling from chair to chair with her trowel and the tangled mes of green in her weather-beaten old basket.

I'll admit I left the conservatory quite sharply, not wanting her to see me, not knowing what she would do if she did see me and not wanting to find out. The following morning the only sign she'd ever been there was the footprints she left behind.

Somehow she had been heavy enough to crack the floor tiles, each footprint a splintered mess of ceramic.

Day 1,049

My great uncle always insisted on keeping his well sealed shut with a large stone slab. Of course when he passed away the first thing my aunt did was hire somebody to remove it, claiming she wanted to remodel the garden. Really almost everyone in our family had been pressuring her to uncover the well in case my great uncle had left something valuable or illegal down there.

What they ended up finding, rather I should say who they ended up finding, was more than they bargained for. Standing around four feet tall and covered from head to toe in bone fragments held together by a mesh of moss, was a creature that called itself Enid. A creature that had apparently been trapped in the well for several hundred years.

Enid offered to show us its prison in exchange for it being allowed to come to the surface once a day. My aunt agreed in a heartbeat, telling us that there might be something of value down there that Enid was guarding. I don't quite know what made her thing that a creature that honestly looked like a cross between a hairless rat and an orca would somehow be in possession of valuable items but everyone was curious as to how Enid had allegedly survived in a well for so long.

It's strange how the thing at the bottom of the well wasn't what scared me - the rest of its prison did. Though there was in fact a well, an honest to god hole-in-the-ground-with-water-in-it well, there was also a large tunnel about halfway down that led to a series of unusual chambers. It was like somebody had dug out a full house right under my great uncle's humble abode (or maybe the house above was built to mirror the one below, the layout was strikingly similar).

After taking us through basic rooms with roughly carved slabs for tables, chairs and a bed, Enid took us down a staircase that led to a room full of coffins. The one by the farthest end of the room looked far too familiar, far to new. My aunt shrieked, recognising it as the same coffin we'd put to rest only a week ago. As we both ran towards it to make sure it was his, we heard stone scraping stone as Enid rolled a slab to cover the way back.

Day 1,048

In the middle of the marshlands the remains of a circus lie, half sunken in the soft peat and stagnant pools of algae-coated water. Once upon a time it held the name "Concetto Canalli's Carnevale" and toured the back roads of Europe, having only mild success and more debt collectors than they could shake off.

It isn't too hard to imagine them being hounded out of every town they visited in their later years, too disturbed by the paranoia that they might be caught and jailed (a death sentence to all, in those days). Perhaps the sight of a quiet, foggy marsh made them think of their homes or perhaps it seemed a safe place to hide?

Who can say if they even woke from their sleep before their livelihood was swallowed by the land, leaving only the partial remains of their caravans, tents and the few mechanical rides they hadn't yet been forced to sell. Still, the rumours had to begin somewhere, the story had to be told by someone and what better person than Canalli himself.

Being the ringmaster he would have been last to sleep and first to rise, always half-awake just in case the debt collectors drew too close. Would it be too far-fetched to picture him waking as his caravan began to pitch as it gradually rolled into the airless depths of the marsh? Would his screams have carried over the howling winds, alerting his troupe to their immediate peril or would he have been too late?

How long would he have stood on the roof of his caravan, caught between desperately shrieking for the people he'd come to know as family and looking for a way to reach the marshes' shallows? How many of his loved ones awoke trapped and gasping for air that wasn't there, banging on walls buried too deep to carry sound, breaking windows only to be smothered alive by a tidal wave of moist peat?

Through the very tip of the largest tent, light faintly shines through and the muffled laughter of the long dead circus echoes out around the marshland as they perform for an unimaginable audience, free from debt, from strife and from life.

Day 1,047

He woke up on a large plank of wood, surrounded by murky water in what appeared to be a low-lit chamber. Above him was a thick metal grate with wide enough gaps that he might be able to squeeze through yet the thought of the unknown landscape above and the unknown waters below left him in a state of deeply thoughtful inaction.

His eyes were so busy studying the grates that he didn't notice the ripples around him, slowly circling his flimsy raft and gradually rising until a smooth dorsal fin silently emerged and finally caught his attention. It moved hypnotically, swaying from side to side as it continued to circle him, slowly closing in until a head three times the size of his torso surfaced inches from the planks edge.

It was almost like a shark but rounder, its eyes round dinner plates of black, its mouth a round "O" as if in surprise, its continual movement round and round him still. Just below the water he could see its feathery gills fluttering rhythmically, its body extending seemingly without end, deep down into the water.

The more it circled him the wider it opened its mouth, from a pinprick of shock to a gaping, tooth-crammed maw that threatened to swallow him whole if he moved so much as an inch in any direction. His eyes continued to dart upwards while still trying to keep a fixed eye on the creature in case it decided to close in at last.

He didn't quite realise he'd been reaching his hands up to grasp the metal bars until the creature made a noise somewhere between a snarl and a garbled plea as red-tinged water gushed out of its mouth. It was enough to make him pause, arms up as if in surrender, but not enough to make him cease.

The creature continued to snarl/plea to him, almost forming actual words. The instant his hands touched the grate it dived deep below, as silently as it had arrived. Not wanting to wait for it to return he heaved his body up and onto the concrete flooring of a warehouse-style building. He rolled to the side, gasping for the breaths he hadn't realised he'd been holding in.

As he stood he saw the sheer scale of the building he was in, every few feet dotted with the same grate he'd woken up beneath. Peering into the few around him he saw red water, splintered wood and occasionally chunks of something meaty that he refused to think about.

Behind him he heard the sound of something wet hitting the concrete floor.

Day 1,046

We haven't seen the lower decks in almost 8 generations - they're all too clogged up with the dead and their debris. It'd be easier on the engines if we could somehow jettison those decks and pin the power chambers onto the active zones. We'd have better lighting, actual heating and maybe even full access to our own decks instead of our present "Power Is Limited So Nobody Goes Anywhere Until It Is Fixed" situation.

We've tried reasoning with the computer but it finds faults in every single argument we make. It's utterly pointless but it does kill time better than just sleeping all day or staring out into the void of space until your mind starts going funny. They call that the Overview Effect - in layman's terms you suddenly realise just how precarious it is to be inside a ship orbiting a dying planet and your mind just gives up.

We lost most of Deck 213 to the Overview Effect, in hindsight what did we expect from the only deck with nothing but a panoramic view of space to entertain them? There are ripples of rumours, little groups of dissidents that claim each deck is a test and we as a whole are failing. They've even gone so far as to claim that Earth isn't dying, we're just up here to provide entertainment for the rich and powerful who have nothing better to do with their money than to play god.

It doesn't even matter at this point, not with over 378 decks lost within the past couple of centuries and my deck is due next. It's just what happens when in such close proximity to death, like it's some kind of contagious disease that we've carried all our lives until we see it in person and then bam you're gone too.

I think I know how we're going to die as well. It'll be something new, has to be. The previous 57 decks all went to mass suicide and by this point we all know what symptoms to look out for and we're keeping each other closer than ever. It won't be the Overview Effect either - we've welded tables over the windows, the airlocks and anything else that might lead outside.

Our deck's most likely demises are drowning and starvation, strange as it seems to write that. A lot of the outer deck dwellers have been complaining of noisy pipes - the ones that feed the hydroponic bays - and a lot of the botanists have been begging the computer for new seeds and soil as all we have left is sopping mulch and a few weedy saplings.

Whatever's going on isn't triggering the safety systems (if they even exist any more, the upper decks might have dismantled them to save power for all we know) so our only options are to watch, wait and warn the deck above us to prepare themselves.

We don't know when the end will be but we have to warn them still.

After all, death is contagious.

Day 1,045

A little known fact about our town is right underneath the main street, beneath the frosted glass panels that pop up every few yards or so. Tens of thousand have walked over them without a second thought, children hop-scotch along them carelessly and nobody questions why their pets refuse to walk along there.

The town used to have a series of spa rooms beneath the streets, with the light from above gently diffused through the glass and bathing the spa-goers in a soft ethereal glow. All the water came from a local spring that allegedly held healing properties and as such, was not filtered. This would be the beginning of both their downfall and some unnamed virus that came and went like a hurricane.

It began as a series of pale green spots along the bather's skin, and only those who took to bathing among the multitude of relaxational activities. They weren't noticeable inside the spa but in broad daylight they gave the bather a sickly plant-like appearance. This was the kindest of the ailments caused by the water.

Those who took to mud treatments found thick scabs forming all over their bodies, soft yet embedded in their skin like scales. Those who came in weekly for manicures and pedicures found lumps beneath their nail beds, lumps that writhed and moved through their blood vessels in an unstoppable flow. Worse still were those who were massaged and soon after found their skin falling away entirely, like a boiled chicken's leg with a scent to match

Word soon spread and the council claimed they would cure any and all sufferers who made their way back to the spa beneath the town and so they flocked there in their hundreds. The doors were closed and sealed behind them, the glass panels were reinforced to the point where the entire street level was raised by three inches and almost all record of the spa was erased from the town's history.

It was for their own good, though word was still passed down to the point where there are still people in town who had a family member or friend of the family left down there. Not everyone does, not with the rate that people fled the area and were replaced by people from far away countries who'd never had a chance to hear of the spa and its victims.

It's said that some people are still alive down there and if you press your hand to the glass for long enough, a dozen hands will appear around yours,all banging against the glass and begging to be freed from the watery purgatory that they never asked for.

Day 1,044

He had been briefly famous for putting random statues of children around the town, calling them beacons of the unseen dangers that children face every day. They looked to be made of wax embedded with turquoise stones and plastic eyes that followed you wherever you went. The general consensus was that they were just a little too creepy to carry his message across, even more so when they seemed to multiply.

Over the next few weeks we went from having a couple along the mains street, a few in the parks and one in the woods to over fifty of those strange little figures. The artist released a statement saying he would keep adding them until the dangers were dealt with and the town made safer for all children.

The public finally lost their collective cool when the statues began appearing in people's homes. From there everything spiralled, abusers were suddenly brought to justice, the parks were made utterly spotless, the streetlights were left on all night and more were added every day.

Only then did the figures stop appearing in town, the artist gradually took them all away but kept releasing statements saying he was adding more still. Nobody understood until they were all discovered at once in the woods. Three days later the police announced the site of a mass grave, all bodies under the age of five and every single one seemed to have been killed this year.

The statues were gone completely for the first time in almost six months. This morning seventy five of the statues (all new) were placed in the town centre. He hasn't released any kind of statement but rumour has it the police visited him last night.

Day 1,043

When we found that the undead could still read, suddenly our survival efforts got a lot more creative. Our barricades were covered in signs that appealed to what little remained of their minds and over time we found exactly what could trigger them into a rapid retreat, what would make them talk amongst themselves and cower at our feet even though every inch of them ached to sink their teeth into us.

Ironically, they're afraid of monsters.

Not in the way that we're afraid of them (as in, they tear us limb from limb and we join their ranks), but in the way that a child will insist you check under their bed just one more time because there's a monster hiding there and it wants to eat all their toes one by one.

Naturally when word spread our fortresses and barricades were covered in large stories - simple ones that any child could follow - telling the undead that all manner of ridiculous creatures lived inside and they liked to eat people who were falling apart. At first we stood in amazement as the undead read the stories aloud as best as the could before they turned away in their herds, glancing back every now and then as if they would be followed.

We didn't expect them to try and disguise themselves as humans to trick the "monsters that lived with us" but with time they got very good at it. I mean to the point where we would have gone out to help a seemingly injured person until our resident sniper saw their cloudy-yellowish eyes and told the rescue team to bail.

Now we're trying something new.

Again.

We're becoming the monsters we've told them about.

They will fear us and, with any luck, we'll be safe again.

Day 1,042

The dead don't always know that they've died and it makes for an awkward conversation when the other party is slowly being consumed by a fire whose heat you can't feel and neither can they, judging by their utter lack of a reaction. Still they seem decent enough and once obligatory pleasantries are exchanged you can make excuses to get as far from them as possible.

It doesn't stop there though. Even aboard a plane someone may appear in the empty seat beside you, their body an absolute wreck and half smothered by the bloodied remains of a parachute. From their uniform you can tell they've been dead for over seventy years which is backed up when they talk about the the blitz like it's still happening, and for them it is. They leave just before you land, slowly sinking through the floor trailed by the parachute. You see the huge tear running through it as they look up at you one last time.

Even in the woods (especially the older ones) the dead cling to life and generally make a nuisance of themselves by bothering the living who just want to go on a nice, scenic walk without stumbling upon the remains of some poor old woman who was hung for being a witch ("Allegedly!" they always yell). Sometimes they gather in the clearings to converse with people they once knew or who were at least from around the same time as them.

It's all rather disconcerting, to say the least.

Day 1,041

There are three certainties you get used to on our estate.

Firstly, people tend to travel in clusters, it's harder for them to go missing when there are witnesses. It doesn't stop people from vanishing when the tapping sounds come back but fewer have gone since everyone grew into this habit.

Secondly, no matter the time of day or the weather, there's always a small group of people around the shops, huddled together and wearing hoodies. They will nod to you if you make eye contact with them but they won't leave their position. When asked they have previously said they're waiting for a friend, keeping an eye on the place or that they can't leave until they are done watching. What they watch, they never say.

Thirdly, it rains when church ends every Sunday at 1pm sharp. Not just a light shower either but a torrential downpour that leaves the ground shrouded in mist as the rain pelts the ground with such a fury we ask ourselves if we haven't prayed hard enough. If you ever see anyone in the distance through Sundays rain, you never approach them. They aren't people and they aren't friendly enough to leave you alone or unscathed.

Keep these in mind and you might last long enough to become a Resident like the rest of us.

No guarantees though.

There's always someone who forgets.

Day 1,040

She woke up with a start as the train she found herself on jostled about on tracks as old as the country's first trains. Glancing around with bleary eyes she saw people just as weary as her, just as confused and familiar in a way that made every bone in her body ache with a phantom sympathy she didn't fully understand.

As the sun began to fall, as the train passed countless stations too fast to read the names, the passengers wondered aloud where the next stop would be. One young man even volunteered to head to the front of the train to ask the conductor, only to return a few minutes later frustrated and disheartened as a genderless voice scratched out through the tannoy "There will be no stops at present. All passengers were informed upon embarkation. The Great Southerly Railway Company thanks all passengers for their continued cooperation."

And so the train carried on, just as the voice said it would and the passengers cooperated, just at the voice said they would. Nobody commented that they hadn't felt the slightest pangs of hunger, thirst or sleep though the sun had risen and set around five times by the next tannoy announcement.

"Will all passengers prepare for the next stop by bracing their heads against the provided headrests. Do not walk down the aisles, do not hide under the tables or in the toilets and do not forget why you are here. The Great Southerly Railway Company thanks you for your continued service."

The ache of familiarity grew stronger within her, little flashes of something she'd seen countless times before in trains - or maybe just in this one. A brick tunnel, a junction that should have been switched over and the sound of steel scraping through steel. Her eyes darted around her, trying ti gauge if anyone else had come to this realisation but only the young man met her eyes and with a solemn nod he closed his eyes and pressed himself against his seat.

Through the window beside him she could see the front end of the train turning into a station but more importantly, the train was heading through a brick tunnel to get there. Her head was a swirl of relived deaths and staunch denial of her circumstance as the bright lights of another train rushed towards them, clearly bypassing their turn, not triggered by a conductor who was strangely missing in all this mess.

Only a few people saw this coming, the rest only started screaming when they felt the impact begin as the faster-moving train began to plough through them carriage by carriage. She lived her death again, shrieking as she always had moments before she was crushed.

And all fell silent.

The dead picked themselves up and looked about their ruin in a daze.

She knew she couldn't keep clinging onto life and with this realisation a staircase raised itself out of the wreckage, leading up to the roof of the station. The young man gently grabbed her hand and together they walked away, onwards and upwards to something they hoped was better than this.

With one final glance behind her, she saw the trains separate and mend as everything began anew.

Day 1,039

He almost walked right into the elderly figure hunched over tightly in a half-sunken armchair. They paid him no mind, seemingly dozing away in the midst of the basement's flooded flotsam and jetsam bobbing about his knees and coming up to the elderly figure's waist. Their skin seemed as grey and waterlogged as the fabric of the armchair itself - even their clothes looked washed out

Reluctantly he moved his torch beam from their general vicinity (a little part of him screamed not to in case they moved the second he looked away) and further around the concrete maze he had found himself in when the floor above collapsed, throwing him onto a flight of stairs that had long since decayed at the top and left too great a gap to jump back up.

It was far larger than any other basement he'd ever seen, almost industrial in its size though seemingly without purpose and surrounded by dimly lit hallways that seemed to be his best chance at getting out of the wretched house. He decided to start from the entrance closest to the stairs and work his way around, hopefully encountering the way back up and nobody else.

The sound of him wading through the water covered up the faint splish followed by a deep hisssss that faded into rippled water. The armchair, now empty, went unnoticed by him as he carried on walking carelessly deeper into the basement, unknowingly accompanied. 

Day 1,038

They say it's good luck to have a black dog follow you 'round a graveyard as black dogs were always the first creatures to be buried on hallowed grounds. There's folk that reckon the black dogs are what make the grounds hallowed to begin with while others say anything buried first takes on the form of a black dog so it can best protect them that rest there.

Tis a well established fact that a black cat is bad luck and that to have one cross your path is to have death itself skim its fingers over your soul. There's no true source behind this thinking, only that cats are tricksy beggars at the best of times and known to flirt with the boundaries between this world and all the rest, where the shadows walk free from their objects and every breathing thing eats naught but meat.

Now to see a back mule in a field otherwise barren of all living thing, not even birdsong to lift the air that grows heavier with each breath you take, with each thoughtful and deliberately slow step the mule takes towards you, is something far worse than anything a cat could ever hope to bring.

The lone black mule means the borders between this world and the others is next to nothing. It acts as a harbinger, so to speak, a beacon to warn that there's far worse nearby, worse that might be closer to you than you'd care to think.

Day 1,037

I've always preferred red-eye flights for more than their price there's this atmosphere of tranquillity mixed with mild despair that just sends me straight off to sleep until we land. Makes those long flights to-and-from the varying office branches so much easier.

I try to get an aisle seat after my first flight experience left me a tad shaken, and by a tad shaken I mean I didn't stop shaking until my fifth shot of The Jilted Bottle's finest off-brand whiskey. To begin with it was your average red-eye flight. Everyone was tired and a little grumpy and me being naive at the time decided to get a window seat so I could fall asleep leaning against the cool glass instead of accidentally drooling on a stranger.

It must have been three or so hours into my twelve hour flight when I woke up sharply. It felt like someone was watching me. Closely. Like so close I could almost feel their breath against my face and after a few minutes of squinting around the dimmed seats I realised where the warmth on my cheek was coming from.

The window I'd been resting my head on was fogging up, fading to normal and fogging up again at steady intervals like someone was breathing against it. Of course when I looked someone actually was breathing against it, their face was pressed so harshly against the glass that there was a thick trail of saliva sliding down the corner of their mouth and into the wind as the plane carried on regardless of its extra passenger.

They looked so normal out there, just a normal old man with his face pressed against the window of a plane that was over 30,000 feet above the ocean. He wasn't smiling, just staring blankly like he didn't even realise where he was.

It never occurred to me to check the planes history until we landed and he slid off the wing and scuttled across the tarmac like a crab that just shat itself. The article had his face on it, the headline dated back five years and went on to say how the plane had crash-landed in the same ocean we flew over. The old guy had gotten stuck on one of the wings somehow and died of hypothermia.

Ever since that trip I've demanded aisle seats, I'm not going to  risk seeing a dead man again.

Day 1,036

I recently remembered a dream I had as a child, one that felt so real I still never sleep in the spare room at my grandmother's house. She used to tell me these stories, you see, about her younger sister Ava who died in that room when she was three years old. Not exactly the kind of bed time story a child wants to hear but my grandmother was a tad eccentric and ready to say everything she wasn't meant to at any given time.

From what she told me of Ava's sudden death (the wet wheezing breaths she struggled to take, how her skin was flushed but her lips were such a deathly blue) she had pneumonia. Something about the way she described her visits to Ava's bedside stuck with me all my life and well into every night I slept in the room where she once breathed her last.

Maybe this was why I dreamt I saw her in my bed one night, her eyes bloodshot, skin damp with sweat that left the bed sheets drenched where she grasped them in her tiny hands as she smiled serenely at me. I was frozen in place, my hand on the doorknob and my breath stuttering out of me like I was being sucker-punched again and again and again.

I remember the way Ava struggled to get out of my bed and how she tottered towards me, smiling that faint smile and holding out one blue-tinged hand. Some small part of my brain told me that if I held her hand we'd both be dead but she came to close to me that I could see each freckle on her face and count her eyelashes.

My grandmother shook me awake, said I'd been making loud choking sounds and when she came to check on me I was deathly pale. I didn't have the heart to tell her it was Ava trying to bring me with her. I just claimed I had no idea what happened and that I didn't want to sleep in that room any more.

It was strange how nobody questioned me on it, how my parents never asked me if I wanted to spend the night there again. Stranger still how sometimes when I walk past the spare room I swear I can still see Ava standing by the door with her little hand stretching out towards me, closer and closer each time.

Day 1,035

I only ever knew my uncle from the telegrams he'd send us every Christmas saying how well the war was going for us. It took me years to read the fear on my parents faces as that worn paper appeared in the living room every year, as a child I just thought of it as another part of the magical atmosphere that manages to snatch the minds of almost every child.

When I was eleven I began to realise that the war he wrote about ended in nineteen seventy-five, April thirtieth officially yet somehow my uncle was still right in the heart of Vietnam losing friends left, right and centre while still maintaining a full unit of men to carry on deeper into the jungle.

My parents refused to explain it to me, only ever saying that he was my uncle and that he was away in Vietnam sending us telegrams to remind us that he's still alive and well. I still don't know how he fits into our family tree - there's just no record of him anywhere. As far as I can tell neither of my parents had siblings, neither did my grandparents who carried forward the tradition of one child only.

There was always a return address on the telegrams, some tiny village in the Hoái Ân District whose name I forgot as soon as I wrote it down. I should have put more thought into what I was writing and who it was to instead of replying to his questions as though it was nothing unusual.

I told him that we were well here, that we missed him and we couldn't wait for him to come home safe and sound. When I told my parents they froze, slowly glancing at each other in pure terror. I begun to wonder if I had unleashed something terrible on us all.

They kicked me out of the house, refusing to tell me why it was such a crime to reply to someone who they'd always said was my uncle and who always asked if we were alright back home. That was the last time I saw them alive. Two weeks later the police called me apologising for my loss and asking that I come in to identify their bodies.

They'd been slashed up so badly I barely recognised them. Apparently they'd just been found that way with an outdated army car in the garage, a single set of large muddy footprints leading into the house and out into the nearby woods.

I can only assume that my uncle came home.

Day 1,034

During the late 1800s, Queen Victoria popularised a rare delicacy among her court. It was considered so utterly taboo that the only records of it exist within a single page of her diary that went on to describe the origins of the delicacy, the cooking process and which members of her court claimed to have previously tried it out in one of the many colonies.

The delicacy in question - human flesh and the origins - three small villages in the Scottish highlands that farmed children like cattle, aiming to produce the most tender and flavoursome meat for her majesty's sumptuous feasts.

The disease that spread to Queen Victoria's court was only mentioned briefly, a short list of symptoms jotted down at the very end of the diary that detailed the famed feast with a check mark beside five of them and a circle around the final one - a constant craving for human meat.

It is a scarcely known fact that those who ate at these taboo feasts are still alive today, safely guarded within the three hundred or so properties that have been entrusted to the National Trust. Their now inhuman wards remain drugged and contained to their rooms, all safely locked away from the public while their personal belongings are displayed for the world to see.

Occasionally someone will stray from the safely marked areas and wander into a room that should have been locked. The will never be seen again. Occasionally an almost-two-hundred-year-old creature will awaken from their drug induced haze long enough to scrape and clatter about their rooms, drawing attention where none should be and forcing the immediate closure of the entire property until the threat can be put to sleep once more.

Remember which rooms you find locked in the old English mansions and listen for their occupants carefully. Some are far quieter and far more cunning than their kin and all are eager to feast once more.

Day 1,033

The windows stared back at him, as cloudy as his grandmother's cataracts and almost as accusingly as the old bat. Of all the miserable bastards in the family, she just had to leave her house to him. He had to wonder what he'd done to deserve this or if one of his uncles had altered her will so that they wouldn't have to deal with it themselves.

It sounded about right for them, lazy and overly entitled as they were, but perhaps the old bat had her reasons for bequeathing him an absolute behemoth of wreck that she called home in her final days. It looked like she'd become the house at this point - cloudy eyes/windows, cracked face/facade, weather beaten as all hells and smelling distinctly of vinegar and lavender.

Overall the place was so rundown there was no way he'd be able to restore it and demolishing it was just as expensive so leaving it to collapse seemed the best option, if a little too close to how his grandmother had ended up dying to be a comfortable choice.

It's not every day you see a death in the family on TV before you hear about it from a relative but that was her way. She'd just do her own thing and let the rest of the world chase after her in a fearful flurry until the rest of the world got fed up and left her be at the ripe old age of one hundred and two.

The only reason anybody suspected something was wrong was that they hadn't seen her in the local news. Turns out she'd tried to repair her own electrics and fried herself to death. Her charred corpse was found fused to the ladder but at least her hair was back to its original black and she'd have been happy with that, less so about dying or so everyone assumed.

The thing is that the woman who found her, a 'concerned neighbour', originally reported that the old bat had been breathing. The police report said she'd told them that there'd been a nasty shock and that they should call an ambulance when they got the time. Bloody woman made it sound like his grandmother had poked a toaster, not toasted herself!

Five weeks later they sent a squaddie over to say hello and there she was, or whatever was left of her. The news reports varied so much that the only consistent detail is that they had to cut her body from the ladder and that they left the ladder behind.

A small part of him, a morbid part that he probably inherited from the old bat, wondered what the ladder looked like. As he found himself stepping inside the unlocked front door he swore he heard her wheezy snigger coming from the living room. Of course he must have been the only person there, who else would visit?

It didn't stop him from seeing her shadow flicker in the corners of his eyes, like she was leading him to the blackened leathery flesh that the forensic team had been to lazy to remove. With her attitude, not even burying the ladder in a church would stop the old bat from following him now that she'd gotten a taste for haunting.

It was so typical of her to carry on being a nuisance even in death.

Day 1,032

I fell asleep playing hide-and-seek with my friends so I'm still trying to piece everything together and figure out what could have caused everyone to die like they did. I guess those four years of being the hide-and-seek champion of Reignton Primary School paid off as I reckon it was how I got missed.

From the calendars I've been marking, it's been nine years since everyone died. All I ever found of them were their skins in a pile, like they'd just shrugged them off like they'd gone to find something more comfortable. Now those damp piles were shrivelled up, resembling raisins more than anything.

Now I know there are more survivors out there, or at least something that knows how to drive. There's this ice cream van that's been driving around the mall I'm hiding in, blasting out its music like it's trying to lure me out.

It might have worked nine years ago. Now I wait until it's at the opposite side of the mall and start placing my traps. It knows I'm doing this, manages to avoid all the nails, the barbed wire and the oil. I'll get it sooner or later though.

I'm the world's greatest hide-and-seek champion.

Day 1,031

A house is an odd place for a horror to occur, what with it being a human's primal zone of comfort and safety. This story follows a house designed solely to be a weapon against the human mind, something so perfectly innocuous on the outside yet contain within it a series of rooms that would eventually break whomever it was set upon.

Still, somewhere in this house, a door slammed shut. The person behind it swallowed their gasp and carried ever onwards as they navigated the labyrinth of their surroundings, praying that the odds were enough for them to outlast the architect.

Somewhere in the house this architect continued to manipulate the house's controls, inciting fear and paranoia in the person whose only crime was trespassing. Every corner became a risk, whispered voices stalked the person as the architect's sources scoured Web for further information that could be used to break their newest test subject.

The sources couldn't find a name, an address or even a birth certificate no matter how many times the architect made the person scream out their alleged life story. The person seemed to be breaking but where all the other testers had tried to flee, to hide or even kill themselves to escape the torment, the person kept going.

It soon became clear that the person intended to find the architect and his sources and to stop them. The person wasn't with any agency, gave the sources no new information, their DNA wasn't registered with any country and to top it all off, the were getting closer.

The architect briefly considered whether this was the house turned against them, that his own precious creation had made the person to bring an end to its master. The sources were afraid, cowering behind their multitude of screens as the architect's mutterings grew more frantic by the minute.

They were so occupied by the architect that they failed to notice the person waiting outside their door, staring into the camera and mouthing out the words "LET ME IN"

Day 1,030

It wore my friend's face like a cheap Halloween mask, grinning through her as it sauntered towards me through the crowd that stood around my body.

Funny how I always thought death was peaceful, what with the soul leaving and all the potential afterlives out there. If I'd have known just how wrong I was then I dare say I would be very much alive and studying for my exams right now.

The afterlife I found myself in looks like a city in perpetual night with tens of thousands of cars always gridlocked and shrieking at each other. I took a wrong turn trying to get home and now I'm stuck in a place where the buildings never seem to end, always spiralling upwards and every doorway has something crouching in it, waiting for whatever poor soul is stupid enough to try and enter.

I'm not alone here, I'm never alone. There are so many others who've been here for so long they don't even remember their names, let alone where they are. Some of they claim they've been here since it was all a village but nobody can be trusted in this place.

The thing that wears my friend's face is the only trustworthy creature around. Sometimes it talks like she did, warning me when I'm too close to danger and other times it just walks beside me, acting like a barrier against the other people or whatever's trying to pass for a person.

Day 1,029

The melting icecaps have freed so much more than methane gas. The very tip of Everest is sinking slowly as the ice warms and slides down, dragging with it the frozen bodies of failed explorers and the few guides who caught the tourist's misfortune. The ice began to release them,one by one until there were none left and Everest was left bare stone, right to the tip.

The world was flooding, freezing and boiling all at once. Nobody had the time or cared enough to bring the dead to their proper rest or to consider what else the ice might be giving up to the air once more. By the time anyone connected the dots, the death toll was in the hundreds of thousands and they roamed as though they were never killed by an unnamed virus.

They clawed their way through every ragged inch of the dramatically shifting weather, desperately trying to find some semblance of the world they left when they went up into the icy tomb of Everest. All they found were the remnants of their towns, their streets, their homes. The former occupants sought refuge in floating cities, well aware that the resurrected dead couldn't float and hadn't seemed to figure out how boats worked.

They were fragments of their living selves, held together by desperate need to find living, breathing humans to carry the virus on and remind them that they were once the same creatures they craved contact with. They were so misunderstood, so hated and so very lost in a drowning, burning hellscape that only ever hinted that they lived there too, a very long time ago.

Day 1,028

I'd always been told to never follow Will-O-The-Wisps that lingered by the back door of the library. Out of all the Wisps in the area, these were the worst by far, at least that's what everyone says. Every other cluster leads humans out of the way, usually to the nearby woods (or in one case, a pub whose landlord had bribed them to do so).

Nobody quite knows where the library Wisps lead you and as nobody's come back, we can only assume they're dead or worse - in the woods. The same woods that glow so brightly at night from the sheer number of Wisp colonies that thrive there. The same woods where people report hearing songs sung by long dead relatives.

The same woods I found myself being led to by the library Wisps - unwillingly, mind you. I only went out back for a quick smoke and then there they were all clustered around my legs, pushing me onwards and far too strong to resist.

It felt like wading through a river of blunt teeth that only dug in if I tried to walk against their current. They didn't bring me to the edge of the woods like all the others did, no they pushed me along a raised wooden walkway that ended at the mouth of a cave.

At least, it looked like a cave until I felt it breathe out and saw the ground twitch upwards as a colossal tongue scented the air. The Wisps scattered and I ran right after them as they unknowingly brought me straight back to the relative safety of the library.

As strange as things are around here, nobody will believe that Ponder's Hill is alive and that a cave in the woods is its mouth.