Day 1,180

He was only ever seen patrolling the river's edge in his old diving suit, lantern always lit no matter how many times the Reverend threw holy water at it. We all knew he was a demon of some kind but strangely his presence was a comfort to the town, a sign that death isn't the end for us sinners. Perhaps that's why the Reverend is so adamant that he had to be killed.

When he found out that the demon had been given a nickname by the schoolkids he threatened to burn the building to the ground to spare the innocent souls from further corruption. By now we knew his threats were never idle, not after he set fire to the theatre for playing a movie directed by an Atheist.

As the town came together to plot against our dear Reverend, the demon (now known to most folks as Old Riverboots) set foot on land. It took a few weeks before anybody noticed that he kept leaving, gradually venturing further and further out until someone spotted him wandering through their garden, his lantern still leading him on.

Our priorities changed so fast we didn't bother to ask what made Riverboots leave. We surrounded him when he next went out for a stroll and with the Reverend at our head we exorcised him back to whatever hell he came from.

We really should have suspected that there was something much worse waiting to take his place.

Day 1,179

We'd see them out on the highways, deep into the empty countryside where nobody's lived since the first settlers went out and never returned. Though they're similar in appearance, they can't be will-o-wisps - the ground's too dry for their kind to thrive in and the nearest marshlands are way down south.

They take people all the same but not knowing what they are makes finding their victims just that little bit harder and makes the search just that little bit deadlier. Every time someone finds a car, lights on, doors open and empty they give us a call and pray it hasn't been too long.

For most missing persons we give 24 hours before we can legally call them missing and 7 years before they're legally dead. With the roadside cases we head out as soon as the call is made and declare them dead if they aren't found by sunrise.

As unorthodox as it may seem to make the big decisions so soon, we never find them past sunrise. Past midnight is pushing it in all honesty, by then you generally find them dead or dying or worse and its the kind of scene that burns itself into the backs of your eyes for days.

Now as a precaution to all travellers, human and otherwise, we stop all vehicles coming into the area and make sure they know to never stop and never slow down for strange lights that follow them or tap on their windows. The outsiders are the worst for rule breaking, they never understand that when we say they'll die - it isn't a threat, it's a head's up at best and a promise at worst.

Still doesn't stop the scrapyard from being overrun with their abandoned cars and the memorials overrun with their names.

So, so many names.

Day 1,178

She came to me in a dream, her eyes empty holes billowing incense and her voice the sound of a dove's wings being broken. I don't quite understand how I know what that sounds like and I'm not sure I've ever heard it but the moment she spoke, that image buried itself in my mind. She was perfectly normal otherwise and one of the kinder creatures I've found in my wandering dreams.

There was always others lurking around the edges of whatever worlds my sleeping mind conjures up or visits... I've never been sure which it is on any given night. I've asked her before and she's told me that I'm "somewhere south of nowhere" which is as helpful as the dream creatures can be without turning malicious.

At least she stays in my dreams, unlike Ungolth (picture, if you will, a decaying weasel the size of a lorry). Ungolth likes to peer through mirrors and knock on them whenever I have guests over. Thanks to him I now have the reputation of social hermit and mild nervous wreck but it's better than trying to explain to yet another acquaintance why I cover all mirrors, whisper when I'm near them and why I occasionally break them.

Apparently that's disconcerting but I still say it's better than risking someone seeing Ungolth trying to eat his way through a sheet of glass. His determination would almost be admirable but for the fact that he's told me repeatedly that when he gets out he's going to skin me alive and cook me.

Yet he still remains one of the nicer dream creatures which really says a lot either about my mind or the other worlds.

Not sure which is the lesser of two evils really.

Day 1,177

My intentions were clear and good.

I was only trying to talk to my great grandmother.

It was my last resort - anything to get a smile from gramps.

He hadn't made so much as a peep since he moved into residential care. It's not that we didn't want to care for him, it's that we didn't know how to. We couldn't just lock him away on the off chance that he might go for a wander and get lost like he did when he lived by himself. It would have been cruel - practically imprisoning him for having a disease he can't control.

Fifty miles outside of the city was a village designed around Alzheimer patients around gramp's age. Every single inch of it was a throwback to the late nineteen twenties and we thought he'd feel safe there, make friends there and just live out the gradual brain failure in peace and comfort.

I don't know if it was because the village was based on another culture's experience of the twenties or if his flashbacks to his childhood were making him feel sadder than he'd be if we'd kept him with us but he just deflated. It was like being there was speeding up the disease and killing him too fast for us to bear.

I just wanted his final few years to be happy and I thought that if he heard his mother then he'd settle in better, maybe have a few rose-tinted childhood memories come back and generally be at peace. It may have taken a few months to do but I'd tracked down his childhood home - where she'd died of cancer in her own bed - and spent three days solid asking questions and recording the silence to see if she'd reply.

I never expected the dead to be so coherent, never thought she'd want to follow be back to see him but she did. She even explained to me how I could help free her from the house and place her in a feather so she could move easier when we got to gramps.

On my last visit I told him all about this, put the headphones on him and let him listen to his mother's voice for the first time in over eighty years. As soon as I pressed play he looked worried, the worry gradually morphing into terror as he spoke for the first time since he'd moved out.

"That's not my mother." 

Day 1,176

The townsfolk bolted their doors and cast out the sick as the evening stillness was filled with the bright ting of the Doctor's bell. It was the kind of iron-clad-sharp sound that stung your ears to hear, not that you flinched. Humans didn't flinch at the sound of iron and you were definitely a human.

Just like all the other humans you had checked your family for any signs of illness, the slightest things that the Doctor might sense. He was something totally-human like you but older, so very old that the dirt itself remembered him as a dear friend and the forest can't remember a time before he roamed among them, treating the sick and casting out the weak for the betterment of the whole.

The land knows he's always been a Doctor but lately he's become more... trenchant and less forgiving. The slightest ailments send him into a fury of "that cough will turn worse on a day or two so take this, eat that, your death will be much quicker this way" etcetera etcetera to the point where even the totally-human folk like me fear that he'll see some condition inside us and reason us willingly to our deaths.

As frowned upon as it is for us to kill our own, the technicality of the persuaded willingness would be enough to see him walk free. With this in mind we do just as our fellow humanfolk do, we ensure we are all perfect and in our perfection we are safe. At least we hope so, he's killed others for yawning and other harmless activities.

Tonight he's stopped at the house beside mine - an elderly couple who are fit and full of life but I can hear him mentioning their creaking joints and stooped backs. Such a pity, they were good people... for humans at least. With any luck they'll put up a decent resistance and their deaths will be enough for him to feel satisfied that enough of the weak have been culled tonight.

Day 1,175

The only time that the old upright piano played was when there were cats in the room. Any time cats were in the room they acted strangely around the piano, as if it was alive and they weren't sure how to approach it. Once they warmed up to it then it would play long and loud for them, though the "songs" were more of an eclectic mashing of keys.

As long as there was a cat in the room, it played itself somehow. It wasn't an automaton, it had no external sign that there was a mechanism beyond an average piano and should you press the keys as if to play it yourself,the sound comes out muffled and off-key as though there was something jamming the wires.

This was put down to the age if the piano and potential damage incurred by it being left in a garage for almost thirty years where the elements could seep through and warp it in minute yet devastating ways. It wasn't until someone thought they might like to repair it that we were even aware of the poor little creatures.

Fourteen kittens, their little bodies mangled between wires and so long dead that their congealed flesh was barely present. They looked more like a shredded fur stole than tiny lives that had been brutally extinguished, their little bodies left to fuse with the wires until their very souls were the piano.

It never played itself - it was the kittens trying to escape.

Day 1,174

Outside East Moors Penitentiary the snow fell like a thousand dying birds, inside the inmates were felled with just as much grace. Blood steamed through the air, leaving vapour trails as every convicted man breathed his last and passed away with a smile upon his face, blissful in the knowledge that he wouldn't have to face whatever now lurked within every snowstorm.

The sun hadn't been clearly sighted in almost thirty years - an entire generation had been born and grown without feeling any warmth but the meagre fires scraped up by the ruling brutes whose wealth came from their willingness to end any suffering they saw fit to.

Everywhere you went, frozen corpses littered nearly every surface, trapped eternally however they'd tried to escape. On the ground level of the Hub - humanities' precious last stand against the world that created them - the dead were left as monuments to failure.

From Jane who'd tried to punch through a wall and hide in the insulation (gotten her fist stuck and perished in less than an hour, poor dear) to Rashid whose body was still crouched over his younger sisters (he kept them alive for eighteen days of stormy weather but had inadvertently trapped them and doomed them to a much slower demise than standard exposure to the elements).

Every single floor of the Hub was scattered with the frozen dead, constant reminders that our lives hung upon a thin line, a tightrope whose walker is barely upright at the best of times. Each tilt of their arms, each quivering limb is another life lost to a cowardly summer.

Day 1,173

There's something thrilling about driving down a highway late at night - your headlights barely touching the utter void all around you, the blurred movements in the fields beside the road that never quite catch up to you and the radio tuned into a station you'll never been able to find again.

Your car is a haven against the night until something causes an accident at a busy intersection and you are left realising just how thin the windscreen is. Suddenly your headlights seem to get dimmer and dimmer, the void growing as those blurred movements that have been following you morph into the mangled corpses of whatever roadkill hasn't been collected.

The radio station addresses you mockingly and asks if you have a deity you pray to.

No?

Shame - it might have done you some good or at least provided a distraction from the inevitable.

Day 1,172

We didn't know that we weren't alone until our photos were developed. I mean, we heard a lot of branches snapping and a few whistling sounds but we just thought a storm was coming in and cut our trip short, didn't stay overnight and thought nothing more of it.

They looked so much like the trees but trees don't bend like that, they don't follow you and they don't have eyes. Every photo has at least one of them somewhere close to us and in several shots you can only see their eyes peering over our shoulders.

Makes me wonder if they followed us out of the forest and into the city. Everyone's been talking about the weird weather and the new trees in the park but after seeing our photos I'm not so sure that it's anything as simple as just the weather and just the council planting more trees.

I've been carrying a mirror with me everywhere, always pointing behind me so I can spot them before they can get to me.

So far so good but I don't know what to do when I sleep.

Day 1,171

After all these years of searching, all it took to find him was a seance. It just never made sense that he'd move to New Mexico after an argument with his brothers but through the medium's radio static we heard him loud and clear.

Of course it took a while for us to make sense of it. Just saying "walls", "drowning" and "still inside" had us puzzled for a good few hours before we thought to check the new extension that the brother's built when they claimed the house.

They may have waited a decent amount of time beforehand but their DNA was still embedded in the walls where he'd clawed at them as they poured the concrete over him. It was enough for a conviction but not enough to put him to rest.

He wanted them dead, wanted to get his payback in the afterlife and wouldn't let us rest until they were put to rest. It was cruel of him to make us suffer when we'd already managed to send his murderers to prison but the dead don't pity the living - they despise us.

Ever since that first seance I've been keeping a spare radio with me at all times, hooked up and recording wherever I go. The dead never stop talking once they know you'll be listening at some point. I'm beginning to recognise some of them and they really don't like that.

Day 1,170

We weren't paid enough to bother checking the storage units and in all honesty we don't really care. Once in a blue moon somebody would come around 2AM, pay for a unit in cash and drag leaking bags there.Often we'd hear about so-and-so going missing the next day or month but it still wasn't our job to check what client's brought in.

I've lost count of just how many corpses have turned up in storage - human or otherwise. The latest was three days ago in a unit that was right on the furthest side of the facility, blissfully out of sight, out of mind and just far enough from reception that we never smelled a thing, let alone the fifty seven exotic birds that had been left there over a scorcher of a summer.

The senior staff say you never forget your first corpse and they're right. I don't just remember mine (eight day old infant, unidentified) I took a little piece of them away with me. The police never cottoned on that the missing hand was in my possession, let alone preserved and hanging from my charm bracelet. A little memento mori of my very own.

It helps me here, it truly does. I feel it tugging at my wrist whenever I pass by a unit that has a body inside it. Those are the ones I flag up for odour, fluids leaking past the door etc and lo and behold once the owners are contacted for "maintenance" they always come within an hour. When they leave my little hand usually calms down.

Sometimes it works itself up into a frenzy, scratching at my wrist until I call the police. Those are for multiples. Fresh multiples like the fifty seven birds or the nine cab drivers or the murder-suicide in unit thirty one. Now that was a fun shift to have missed.

Day 1,169

It's that time of year already, the Omens have started gathering outside coffee shops again and telling everyone their doomed futures whether they want to hear or not. Nothing wakes you up better than a bitter espresso and an even worse prediction.

They're a right nuisance but they bring in their fair share of tourists so the council let them stay.
The rest of us tend to carry our own precautions and set up warning signs where the Omens can't reach which proves to be just a little bit tricky due to their vaguely incorporeal nature.

I saw one of them sink into a man's shadow, use it to climb up his body and snatch the "Danger: Omens At Work" poster right out of his hands. At least it didn't go for his eyes or gouge out his eyes on the way down. It's a nasty way to go, what with their claws being coated in a coagulating venom that can turn every pint of blood in your body to jelly in about eight minutes.

I digress.

The Omens are back around practically every corner and the council's brilliant solution is to open up more coffee shops to thin them out. In theory it was a good idea, less Omens in one area means that the more vulnerable people can avoid them better but having every other shop become a coffee shop turns every street into a gauntlet of doom and gloom that generally comes to pass within a week or so.

It's a great time to be a mortician, that's for sure.

Day 1,168

The castle was famous for its size and location, one of the largest Roman-based in England that boasted being the burial site for a former Senator. Its lesser features included a wall that surrounded most of the town, a silver birch tree that grew on the roof and a well measuring around forty feet deep.

When the well began to drain nobody paid it any mind, though the multitude of tourists took enough photos between them to form a timelapse of the creature's gradual ascent. For the most part, it was assumed that the water had always been that low and the large lump at the bottom was mud. By the time people noticed it breathing, they were too late to do anything more than shut down the castle and wait.

Previous explorations of the well had turned up nothing more than a few hundred new coins, a dozen or so from the early eighteen hundreds and the theory that the well may be the opening to a much larger reservoir of water,concealed by a false base. Of course the theory was dismissed due to a lack of evidence but the emergence of a creature from a well with an alleged end was enough to make them reconsider.

It took five weeks before the well had drained entirely, revealing a gaping hole in one side and the creature in its mud-smothered entirety. From that point onwards a series of unrevokable mistakes were made that led to the deaths of twenty eight children and the unfortunate destruction of the castle in order to prevent the creature from leaving for good.

The first mistake - removing the iron grating that covered the well.

The second mistake - closing the castle doors and leaving the creature alone.

The third mistake - searching outside the castle when the creature was found missing the next day.

The fourth mistake - reopening the castle for tourists, claiming the creature to be an April Fool's hoax.

The fifth mistake - not checking the dungeons before leading the first tour group down.

The sixth mistake - locking the door behind them "for safety".

The seventh and final mistake - calling for help and expecting to survive.

Day 1,167

We mustn't look outside when the sirens go off tonight but the newsreader won't say why. Thousands of viewers have called, emailed and texted asking for details that he refuses to give. It got to the point where the station stopped taking incoming messages at all, leaving us in the dark.

There is nothing unusual about the town, despite the warnings that suggest we are in the midst of something Very Wrong. The scarecrows are still tethered to their poles and nobody's dumb enough to let them go free for the night so they can't be the reason. The abandoned asylum is locked up and the moat was recently blessed again so nothing's getting past that. Even the creeping ivy that killed eight people last summer is now asleep for the winter.

If all our worst fears are currently safe and sound in their confinement, if the news station won't tell us what's coming and wants us to lock ourselves away in windowless rooms when a siren goes off, if we're expected to wait for some unnamed murder-inducing event to just slip past our homes and not pay us any mind then surely it can't be that bad.

If something wants us dead then no amount of sitting about with our eyes closed would stop that.

Right?

Day 1,166

The house is not haunted, at least not in the traditional sense. This ghost is of the newer kind, one of the many now trapped within the copper wires and buzzing fibre optic cables that surround us all. They wail and writhe, mostly unheard by the living but occasionally when the right signals align they get out.

The house in this example is a smart house - everything connects harmoniously and wirelessly. All it took was a particularly harsh storm, lightning striking at the right time for a ghost to be caught travelling through and then being forced out of a socket as electricity surges, causing a blackout that leaves the ghost out in the open for the first time in eighty three years.

Inside the wires, everything is muffled and smooth as though you were in a pillow fort with ten million other people who just wanted to relax and drift off to sleep as they were carried around the world in a gentle hum of energy. Outside the wires is chaos - two young children crying at the sudden loss of light, a third younger one staring right into the eyes of the dead and their parents fussing about with their phones, shining those little lights about to try and calm everything down.

The sudden exposure to so many sensations at once is agony to the ghost like every inch of their remaining self is dying all over again. They try to crawl back through the open socket, back into the peaceful humming mesh of the deceased but instead they find themself stuck in the house's wiring.

The loop is closed and all they can do is flit from room to room, leaving the lights twitching and pulsating strangely in their wake. Everything malfunctions when they move as if the house itself is taking on the ghost as its own soul and it can't seem to find a comfortable way to settle down.

This is not a traditional haunting... yet.

Day 1,165

Every Urbex forum you'd trawled told you that Mine-Town 53 was closed yet there you were, walking down roads that shouldn't have existed and peering into homes that were meant to be destroyed. They'd never been wrong about a lost site before, there was always someone near to the location who would post photo proof.

They never did for Mine-Town 53, it was just the word of eighty or so Urbex accounts against your own two eyes so you did what anyone else would have done, you took as many photos as possible. The only places you didn't go were locked homes and a couple of storage sheds whose floors were too unstable.

As the sun began to reach its peak, you decided to head back to your car for a break in the air-conditioned chill... where did you park your car? The squat houses blocked your view for the most part but it wasn't a particularly large town. You walked from one end to the other, circled the perimeter and still couldn't see anything but those dusty, crumbling homes and dusty crumbling roads that lead to nothing but ruins.

By the time you decided someone had stolen your car it was noon and you could feel the sun etching itself into your skin in searing waves that would burn and peel later on. Hiding yourself away in the nearest building you decided to review all your photos just in case you had somehow taken a photo of whoever else had been there.

Every image showed the same patch of desert from a variety of angles. Your car was visible in most of them until several spindly figures crawled out of the dusty ground, climbed in and drove off, leaving you to sit in a building that didn't exist, in a town that didn't exist and where nobody would think to look for you.

Day 1,164

Honestly when the dead came back we were horrified, until we found out they could talk... then we were terrified. There's just nothing quite as worrying as a body sitting upright in your morgue and asking why it's dark or where their children are.

They usually calm down a few minutes after our "you are dead-ish, you might have been murdered and we'd like to know who killed you (if applicable)" conversation and are generally pretty reasonable people - though the term is still being used loosely and there's still an ongoing global panic on whether or not the undead can be considered clientele, prosecuted or if they should be left in peace. etcetera etcetera...

On the bright side, once the brain decays enough they go right back to being legitimately deceased so the whole "undying population" situation won't be a problem for too long. Generally after death, the average person gets around a month of solid, cohesive function before the brain deteriorates and they just stutter to a halt.

Of all the bodies we get in, the water ones are always the worst. Their skin just slides right off them when they go to sit up and half the time they can't even talk properly because fish ate their lips and tongue. It doesn't help that hands and feet are often the first parts of the body to get broken away by tides, rocks or wildlife.

The thing about finding a corpse in any body of water is how impossible it becomes to identify a time or cause of death. There are too many variables underwater, too many "is it" or "could it be" questions to determine anything more than that they either drowned (the lungs act as a sponge - an easy tell) or were dumped in the water post-death (clear lungs, bloated and blue-tinged skin).

Give me a decent homicide on land any day.

Day 1,163

The tour guides always make sure to leave someone behind, not so far they cry out for the group to wait but just far enough that they won't be missed. The key is to pick someone young, someone travelling alone with a backpack full of all they posses and a penchant for wandering off.

Stone remembers, you see. It remembers being a mountain, being cut down and carved and breaking so many people in the process. All the old monuments we worship as masterpieces were built on the blood and bones of hundreds, if not thousands, of nameless workers and they must be fed daily.

They grow used to the taste of blood, the way it flows over their polished surfaces, sticking in the cracks and congealing in such a way as they can savour it just that little bit longer before someone comes to wipe away the evidence.

There is always a cleaner close to hand whenever a tour group sets off, they linger in the darker hallways, behind the steeper stairs or just out of sight in a poorly cordoned off room that looks ever so inviting to photo-thirsty tourists.

There are always rooms that the tour guides won't talk about, ones that don't even exist on the maps you can buy in their gift shops. Rooms meant for feeding parched stone and starving basins who suck down the fresh meat so eagerly the cleaners risk losing themselves every time.

Day 1,162

The second they cracked the tomb's door open, the mechanism was triggered. While the wannabe grave-robbers crept along dusty corridors in search of the main antechamber, a series of gears and clicked into place, seemingly following their progress a few metres behind with near silent clicks.

This was not noticed until the next iron-wrought door swung open before them as if the hands of an invisible butler had been waiting all these centuries to usher them onto their soon-to-be ill acquired wealth. It made them hesitate, the rumours of hauntings and curses swarming their allegedly not-at-all-superstitious minds.

Above and below them the gears turned on, sparking the next series of mechanisms that would eventually lead to the entire mountainside collapsing to expose the tomb to the sky at long last. Not that the trespassing thieves noticed, not until they had been led right to the heart of the tomb to a room full of cryopods that had long since broken down, the dead inside no longer waiting for their bright future.

Some of the pods must have malfunctioned recently, their passengers looked almost alive. It made the trespassers seem more like murderers when the authorities arrived to find them crouched between what seemed to be the recently deceased.

While they were being prosecuted nobody heard the cryopods in the chamber below start their resurrection sequence. The creatures inside smelled the intruders and in a split second silenced the mountainside once more, dragging their feast back down below and flipping the switched that would bury the tomb once more, deeper and deeper still until the next rumours brought them more food.

Day 1,161

The bodies - my bodies - are piled up in the rough shape of a throne. I wonder which version of myself did that, perhaps it is something I am going to do. I do not know if I should anticipate it or try to prevent it and pray that the time spectrum will be on my side... for once.

The spectrum works in mysterious ways, as the optimists will profess. I tend to disagree and say that time has no input, only the continual output of inherently flawed humans who like to screw each other over to  the point where not even suicide can break their loops of theft, murder and other unpleasant delights.

Take me as your humble example. I began using the spectrum in the hopes that I could somehow influence my sister's choice to start smoking when she was just eight and, in doing so, have her alive today and not as the shrivelled corpse-in-progress that she was when I last visited the hospital.

At very single point I tried to contact her or prevent the original influencers from finding her,something or someone delayed or stopped me to the point where I gave in to the exact same violent urges that everybody does when travelling the spectrum. I promised both my sister and myself that I would just go in, do my best to help her and leave if I couldn't.

Now I'm wallowing through a river made from my own dead body a hundred thousand times over, trying to make it all stop. It's not even about saving my sister at this point. It stopped being about her when I killed her eight year old self a few hours (and/or years, days, seconds etc) ago.

I should have just smothered her back in the hospital.

Day 1,160

Organic cities were perfect in theory - imagine concrete that couldn't crack, that shifted slightly instead or even literally breathed in order to balance out temperature shifts. Imagine a road that heals its own potholes, scabbing them over with thicker tarmac and becoming stronger as time goes by. Imagine a city that grows larger every year, new buildings sprouting in the summer and the disused dying every winter.

In theory there was no downside, however, in reality the city adapted beyond all human control until it resembled a slate-clad behemoth whose eyes were ten thousand CCTV cameras and whose mouth was every doorway, tunnel and bus stop. Worse still was the stench of pus that lingered wherever the city was fixing itself - the miraculous self-healing properties we'd all been so sold on failed to mention just  how organic they'd made it.

When the first few corpse were found, slowly dissolving in the park's lake,the entire project was declared a failure and the emergency shut down procedure was implemented. The ground around it wasn't just razed, it was bombed until a crater surrounded it while the world prayed its roots weren't deeper still.

By the time its seedlings were spotted hundreds of miles away, we knew we were too late.

Day 1,159

The man on the radio transceiver had been lying to you as he directed you towards his alleged safehouse, using the remnants of local CCTV feeds to predict where the creatures were prowling. Unfortunately you only realised this as he told you to take the next left in the labyrinthine streets of former London, wherein you came face-to-face (or rather, face to gaping maw) with a Springeye.

Luckily for you it had a fresh kill clutched in its quivering limbs, unluckily it was scoffing down what appeared to be a human, its eyes unblinkingly fixed on you. It was too late to run, it already had your scent memorised and was clearly planning to take you down once it had finished off the poor bastard it was currently making its way through.

That's the thing about Springeyes, nothing stays in them long enough to satiate their hunger. As soon as they've eaten, they go into a series of excruciating convulsions and projectile vomit who or whatever they just ingested. It would be your only chance to escape.

For once, you were thankful for the chemical bombs that had caused such severe nerve damage in those monsters. It saved hundreds of lives a day and with any luck you would be among the saved. Otherwise (best case scenario) whatever was left of your mangled body would be alive enough to develop the mutation and you'd live on... sort of.

The time was coming closer.

The Springeye was down to a pair of bruised and broken feet.

You began raise your arm, preparing to toss the transceiver at it and buy yourself just a few more seconds. 

Day 1,158

There was no record of a fifth lunar outpost and absolutely no record of any children being capable of micro-stellar travel, let alone thirty of them being stationed without adult supervision. Needless to say when base team three reported this encounter all we saw were red flags and potential chemical leaks within their suits causing some sort of collective hallucination.

Then we saw their bodycam footage and our worst fears were blown away at the sight of those things parading as children. Sadly none of based team three's suits fed back any kind of damage so all we could assume was that their brain chemistry had been altered somehow.

It just doesn't make any sense for children to be left to operate their own lunar outpost but the creatures were skilled at playing the "innocent and naive" card. When they asked to be brought back to outpost three we knew we had to act fast and convince our team that the best option was to leave all recovery to us.

We couldn't risk contaminating an entire outpost, not with the potential for them to return to Earth with these creatures and their neuro-alterative abilities in tow, so we counted our options and found them all to be less than savoury.

1. Have an already infected member from outpost three plant a system hacking chip in the fifth outpost's system.We take over and break all the air seals. Air goes and the child-creatures die, our team recover and Earth is saved blah blah blah.

2. Trigger the kill-switch in base team three's suits (infected members only). They detonate and the child-creatures die alongside them. Outpost three maintains a minimal crew until the next docking cycle. No further risk to Earth.

3. Trigger a mass kill-switch and start the lunar outpost projects from scratch.

Whichever option is voted in, none of the lunar outposts can know.

We can't risk the children coming home.

Day 1,157

Footsteps echoed across the empty factory floor while you remained hidden, holding your breath and praying you wouldn't be spotted among the other bodies. You curled your leg under and felt something on the body above you burst and ooze across your shin. It took every ounce of self control you possessed to keep from running.

More footsteps came into the room and began to pace its walls. Eventually they would find you, nestled under their other victims, but for now you remained lost to them. It bought you time to think of an escape plan that didn't involve running straight out in the open - not after you found the fresh remains of your friend whose spontaneous action was responsible for your survival.

Speaking of which, the footsteps are coming right towards you, at least two of them. With an unceremonious and startlingly wet thump they throw another body onto the pile you're under, the sudden weight forcing the air from your lungs in a painfully loud wheeze.

There are no footsteps for several minutes, no sound save for your shuddering breaths that you release as slowly and quietly as possible. It seems likely that they heard you or perhaps even saw some part of you twitch in a decidedly un-corpse-like way.

Keep breathing slow and low and pray that they go.

What else can you do?

Day 1,156

The world swims into focus and I find myself staring at my own face through the broken glass of my step mother's Cadillac. I realise after a few moments of agony and confusion that it's my reflection rippling across the surface of a pool and I can't breathe.

Turning my head feels like it takes a month, blinking a week at a time until I can eventually look at the driver's seat where my step mother float like me. A patio heater is embedded in her head. She isn't able to move like me, she looks less real than my own bobbing arms do and I wonder if I will look like her when I go.

I don't feel like I'm going anywhere right now. Everything burns and aches and is so very cold all at once but I'm still me, still conscious and still trapped in a flooded car that just keeps sinking down, down and further down into some stranger's pool.

The headlights still work, they're the only light I have and my only comfort even though all I see is my step mother's body beside me and blood flowing from us both like red smoke through the otherwise blue water. It's peaceful in its own way.

Strange though, I thought drowning took minutes but the sun is rising now and people are crowding around the edge of the pool. Maybe I've survived somehow, maybe dawn was only seconds and this brief lack of oxygen is making time move weirdly for me.

There's a diver with us now, he has an ID badge that says he works for the police.

He's crying behind his mask and I don't know why.

I'm still alive, aren't I?

Day 1,155

The only time you'll ever see a human is the reflection of train lights bouncing off our eyes as we stare out at a society that claims to not need us any more. When our world became the centre of the allied universe, we quickly found out how unwanted humanity was.

With a world that was rich in natural resources and with enough off-world tech to reverse and negate the vast majority of the damage we'd caused over the millennia, it became very apparent that we weren't actually needed.

It was the little things like the missed memos, major discoveries that we had no part in - and not for a lack of desire. We crave the unexplainable and unobtainable so much so that we hurled message after message into the void amidst the stars before we ever considered our worth as a people compared to the worth of our planet.

We began to realise that we were outnumbered and unwanted -  dangerous combination. As word spread between nations through our "primitive" networks, a tension grew between us and our allies. No name was ever given to it, no discussions were had nor were there any attempts to halt or even vaguely delay our plans.

They never saw it coming, never for one moment even suspected that humanity was able to just vanish without so much as a warning. They thought we'd found our way into the fae realm through the multitude of was we'd warned our children against, they wondered if we'd left for new stars in our sudden silence.

They never thought to look below or within our creations. We see them all through the cracks between walls, down in the depths of the subways where the glint of our eyes is all that reveals our existence and right in the heart of their governmental buildings where the vents are big enough for a  child of ours to walk through.

We have always been pursuit predators.

We can and will wait them out either until they find another world or they forget us entirely.

We'll walk into myth and comeback out as the monsters they prayed we weren't.

Day 1,154

The souls of the patients aren't allowed to wander the wards, the sisters make sure of that. Every night begins with the doors to the convent opening as the sisters are released to their duties. Its been this way ever since the asylum complex was bombed during the last war.

As well we all know, the more unexpected the death the more fixated in routine the dead become. Every night the same sisters patrol the lower grounds, the hallways and the roof while others call out rosters that grow and shrink depending on the phase of the moon and its effects on lunacy-prone souls.

Countless reports have been filed by urban explorers, potential developers and their legal teams all stating that they've seen people standing in the windows that no longer exist. Some even claim that during storms you can see the asylum in its former glory in between the flashes of lightning.

That's when they also claim to see the sisters running towards them, some blazing in anger and others literally burning just as they did the night the bomb struck. For them, every night the bomb strikes and every night they fight the other sisters to get the patients outside to safety.

Day 1,153

Platform Five at Bury St Stimphull Station was only ever used once and hasn't been seen since. According to the local legislation, no other trains may use the track until the previous one has been cleared at the next stop.

There aren't really any laws on dealing with trains that just vanish, let alone ones full of internet using travellers whose accounts have remained inactive and untraceable for almost seven years. Occasionally a photo will emerge from some odd website that hasn't been updated since the early 90's and another blurry photo of the missing train will simmer about the surface of the web before sinking back into obscurity.

Last month a video came out, allegedly from someone on the missing train. They were using their phone, the age of the device showed badly as the footage was mostly vaguely humanoid pixels calling out into an empty station and then running for the train when they hear a reply.

All nineteen minutes of the video showed this happening in eight different stations, all eerily familiar somehow and all empty but for a single voice that sounds a little too rough to be human. Each syllable is growled out like gravel under tyres but the e is never a figure in sight.

Come to think of it, you never see the passenger's faces either, they're always facing away.

Day 1,152

It's quiet uptown, all the good folks have locked their bunkers for the night and rest easy knowing they'll never wake up to a cluster of red orbs engulfing the head of a loved one. They rest easy knowing they'll never have to think "This is the best outcome among everything else".

Most of downtown isn't so blessed by good fortune and instead rely on luck as  our blessing, praying that the odds will bend just for tonight, just for one night so that we can move just that little bit closer to uptown. We pray that we won't be noticed by anyone who'd harm us, human or otherwise and latter will always outnumber the former.

We had almost fifty in our group with people dropping and being found sometimes seconds apart. Every death was followed by somebody crawling out from a fallen building and asking if they could join us. "Safety in numbers" was our motto until we lost too many to claim that.

Now we say "Just until tomorrow" which applies to everything. How long do we need to camp out here? How long will our food last? How long will we last? A question that's been asked too many times these past few days and our motto is the truest answer we can give.

For some it's the absolute truth. We've all watched more people die than we'd ever have reckoned and all done our fair share of euthanasia when their suffering looked like it'd be long-term. Lord knows I've done more than my fair share, especially for those in the group with attachments to the dying.

Nothing's harder than putting a bullet trough the eye of the disintegrating mass of flesh that used to be your mother but once you've done that, everything else is a walk in the park - and not just because the wretches and blood-lusters prefer lingering in dim alleys and old shop front instead of ponds and park benches.

Doesn't mean we're much safer here, just less likely to wake up staring down a tooth-filled throat with barely any air left in you. Not unlikely, just less so and that's the best we can hope for until we hit uptown and can press ourselves close enough to the walls that their shields will cover us too.

For now, the park it is.

Just until tomorrow.

Always tomorrow.

Day 1,151

They were clearly drunk, stumbling into closed shops like sluggish pinballs ricocheting with no end in sight. Still, they were the first people I'd seen for hours and after seeing a lamppost turn off and walk itself into an alley I needed to surround myself with some semblance of normality.

It took a few attempts to get them to notice me and several minutes of giggle-based interruptions before they agreed to walk with me to the closest taxi rank. I wasn't going to mention the lampposts until one blinked off and ran away from us.

The lads were confused at first, glancing at each other and me and the half-empty bottles in their hands like something would hold the answer. When it happened a second time all their joking ceased and we walked along in utter silence, now hearing the metallic shuffling coming from behind us.