Day 1,269

Her headbeams caught its eyes as the car began to sink beneath the marshlands at the edge of the forest. She wouldn't be found, presumed to have run away to another country under another name and forgotten by most of her loved ones within the year.

She would become a warning story for her younger cousins, if you try to run you'll never be heard from again. You won't make it to your destination, you won't even make it past the forest before the land pulls you back to its dark, muggy heart for good.

Of course she'd been told the exact same things by her family and in her final moments of clarity, before panic set in and she used up the last of her air trying to escape the sunken car, she understood what was keeping everyone in the village of Nopwater on the isle of Haggleton in the centre of Haggle's Lake.

It was more than stories, it was the land made physical. Every gardener she'd ever met had always said that the ground had a mind of its own, refusing  as many crops as it accepted and governing their lives right at the source of life itself - food.

She didn't see anger in its eyes, those wide brown eyes that reminded her of every ploughed field and every well-trodden pathway she'd ever seen. All she saw was disappointment. It was giving them everything it thought they needed, every ounce of sustenance was provided by the land and all it wanted in return was to keep them there.

And she'd tried to break free from that.

One in every generation tries.

The rest of the world still doesn't know they even exist.

Day 1,268

There's a reason why nobody raises the dead any more, not since the olden days when news of a death spread much slower. It was easier to call a false alarm back then, back before morticians and coroner's reports and morgue's holding the body until the funeral directors arrived.

There just isn't the time nor the space to bring a body back nowadays, much less find an unnamed infant to sacrifice in their place. Missing people are noticed a lot quicker, infants are named as soon as they are born and global media makes their disappearances last for months instead of days.

It used to be so easy to blame it on wolves or fairies or anything inhuman rather than admitting to raising the dead. I mean, it was still illegal but common enough that nobody dared to call out a "false alarm" as anything other than a little odd.

It just can't be done now... not without getting caught at least. Infanticide is somehow worse now than it used to be. Is it because they have names now? Naming something makes it so much harder to kill, makes them seem more like people and less like little animals whose souls can be torn apart to give life to an established person.

Day 1,267

We made them this way, took away their Leptin and let them feel nothing but hunger.
They don't know this yet, it's better this way.

They fed until their stomachs ruptured.
Then the chefs moved in to cart them away.

Nobody calls for a doctor here, not when a body is more useful than a patient.
Best to keep the beds empty in case of an emergency.

Fortunately the definition of emergency doesn't cover ruptured organs.
They are commonly believed to be fatal and as they are left untreated, they are never wrong.

Why waste perfectly good meat?
Why waste time and money feeding them good food unless you weren't going to use their meat?

These were the unasked questions, the ones said inside the mind and never with the mouth.
Long pork is cheap and abundant and stops the activists from protesting outside the abattoirs.

It doesn't count as murder if they were barely human to begin with.
At best its animal abuse, to leave them dying a slow death.

A single cut to the right of the neck and they slip away instead.
It's a kindness, a reward for their good feeding habits, to be allowed a peaceful death.

Of course some do struggle, they cling on stubbornly and insist that they will recover.
They never do, it wouldn't be right to let something so utterly subhuman carry on.

It's a kindness, we all agree that it is.
World hunger is solved thanks to their brave sacrifice.

We are thankful for their deaths.
We pray over their roasted flesh every night.

Day 1,266

We'd always known it as Mr. Friday's Woods, where the army trained and where we weren't allowed to go when the red flags were flying. Nanna said this was when they were shooting targets and we'd nod along, assuming those targets weren't alive.

When our Jamie joined the army Nanna pitched such a fit she nearly gave herself a heart attack. I'd never seen her so agitated at the thought of him staying local. That was her only issue - that he'd be joining the other military fellas in Mr. Friday's Woods, shooting alongside them in practice for war.

That was when she told us what they were really shooting at. She gave us its name on a scrap of paper and told us to never say it out loud. Áglæca - that's what Nanna wrote, that's what our ancestors called it apparently and even they never spoke the word.

She told us that it used to roam all of Britain once, long before humans crossed the ice and settled on the islands here. Now it's contained within the army's "training" grounds where they gun it down once or twice a week and watch it regrow in a matter of minutes.

They're all damned, Nanna says, every last soldier is cursed from their first bullet. Made us both realise just how much the army advertise in our town, how desperate they are for fresh meat and how quick they are to send people overseas only for them to die the minute they're out there.

The worst of it all is that Jamie still wants to join, still wants to pretend he's going to save lives and not end up guarding the country from the Áglæca's curse. They're just a distraction for it, that's why it hasn't escaped yet... we keep sending it toys to break.

Now every time I see the red flags go up I wonder if Jamie's had his turn yet, not that they'll tell us. They'll just send him away to die like all the others and pretend its some imaginary enemy in a country that isn't on any map.

Sometimes I go into Mr. Friday's Woods alone, head to the army fence wait to see if the Áglæca will show itself. I may not know what it looks like but I've seen the signs of it out there, all those dead soldiers that its left up in the treetops.

Sometimes they all look a bit like Jamie, other times they're just nobodies. More fools like him only less lucky. Nanna made him a necklace with all these carved beads on it and said that if he ever took it off, even to shower, he'd be just as cursed as all the others.

If he's got any sense left in him, if he's still alive, he'll listen to her.

Day 1,265

It wasn't so much a zoo as it was a conveyor belt with scenery. From start to finish it had been designed to funnel visitors through a singular subterranean walkway that allowed them to gaze right into the heart of their exhibitions.

Truly it was a stroke of genius - maximum display with minimal stress and minimal effort. Aside from maintaining that singular pathway and the occasional resting area, there was little else for visitors to do other than go forward, forward, always forward to the next display.

They really should have planned for escaped animals better. There was nowhere for anyone to run to, nowhere for them to hide when a bear managed to break through the thin electrified fence that was meant to contain it. Honestly the visual of the fence probably kept it in better than the physical fence itself.

My first instinct was to climb the fake trees on either side of the jungle themed section I was in when the chaos erupted. Most people thought laterally and tried to reverse which led to a stampede too brutal for any nature documentary.

When panic sets in, empathy leaves. Parents forgot their children and even trampled others to death as they desperately tried to head back to the entrance, all the while I crouched on a fake branch that overlooked the increasingly gory scene.

It didn't take too long for the stampede to have moved further back, leaving broken bodies and the faint sounds of sobbing in their wake. Just as I thought it might be safe to come back down, the bear ran through, trailing blood and with entrails tangled around its front paws.

It never stopped, never looked up. Even if it had I doubt I was nearly as interesting as the screaming crowd that didn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of outrunning it... not in such close quarters and not without running into other displays.

Apparently several did though and headed right for the "friendly" animals in the hopes that the bear would run right past and they could creep to the exit in peace and safety. They forgot that every animal in a zoo is tolerant of humans at the best of times, domestication is never their goal.

I hear they're still washing blood off the zebras.

Day 1,264

The grass at the end of the garden is always full of movement. Chubby little shadows that race away when you approach too quickly, hiding under laminated sheets carefully stapled to the fence. Each has a name and a year, eight in a row spanning a childhood.

At night the shadows run the full length of the garden, eating whatever plant they feel like and fearing nothing. Cats can't hurt them any more, neither can the cold nor the rain nor can the cancer that killed five of them and weakened the other three.

Their owners don't visit them like they used to, not now that they're grown up. What time do they have now for the little bundles of life that they'd once treasured? Most days they don't even remember all eight names, let alone their little faces.

The owners used to come by every Saturday morning and leave strawberries under every name (except for Skittles, she always preferred cucumber). They would talk to the ground and they would be heard by the little shadows who'd run after them until they reached the back door.

Now they chase each other through the tall grass and wonder whatever happened to their owners.

Day 1,263

It was a wretched way to go in that you never truly left. Studies showed that the undead retained at least some of their former selves, enough to avoid food they'd been allergic to and objects they were afraid of in life. It made killing them just that little bit worse.

There were those who dedicated their lives to finding out everything they could about every zombie they'd beheaded, burnt or otherwise mutilated during the outbreak years. With everything under control now and the hordes safely relocated to isolated prison states, there wasn't much else to do other than rebuild and recover.

Honestly it's a form of masochism, trying to find out who they were when they were human. Let them die and be remembered as a human, not a creature hell-bent on mindless slaughter. It's just cruel to their memory and to whoever survives them.

Still doesn't stop some people, those strange few who feel nothing but guilt for having survived and for what they've done to keep themselves from joining their loved ones. It's generally the main reasoning behind them retracing their steps and tracking down every corpse they'd ever brought to a permanent halt.

They always seemed to carry some kind of memento on them, the undead. It's like death makes you memorialise yourself in case there's nobody else who can. There's always some kind of trinket, love letter, photo on them that reminds you, whether you want it to or not, that they weren't born like this.

Whatever they remember, however many times they've screamed as themselves to stop while being helpless inside a meat-suit that craves blood, whoever they managed to kill before a lucky shot got to them - they were still human.

Maybe they're more human than we are.

Maybe they've always felt guilty for killing us while we massacre them.

Day 1,262

You can only see them when the trains are moving. Hundreds of people all huddled together on the tracks, wrapped tightly against the bombs they knew were coming but didn't know when they would strike. Lord knows how many of them died down there waiting for the All Clear that never came.

What the media don't know, what they haven't been allowed to know, is just how many bodies had been found when the old tube station was rediscovered. They hadn't been hit by a bomb, forensics confirmed that much, they all suffocated.

It was a peaceful way to go at least, gently drifting away in your sleep as most of them did. A handful seemed to have woken up gasping for air that simply wasn't there and were found further away from the majority, clawing at the bricked up ends of the tunnel.

It was strange how they'd never been reported as missing, how most of them had a death date several dozen or so years after their deaths in the underground, how some of them seemed to have moved since the last round of forensic photos.

Day 1,261

For as long as she could remember, the arms that rocked her to sleep each night had three elbows and ended in claw-tipped fingers with too many knuckles to be even vaguely human. Not that she knew of course, the arms were the only other living creature she'd ever seen and even then she'd never dared to look up or around or anywhere other than the floor just in case the arms left her too.

For as long as she could remember, her world consisted of her and the arms that held her each night. Sure there were voices in the corners of the rooms, ones that told her she was living a lie and that the truth had teeth that wanted to shred her to itsy bitsy pieces but she'd grown used to their words.

Aside from her little footsteps echoing throughout the empty streets, houses, museums dedicated to the streets and houses and the voices, she was surrounded by silence. Something about the air always made talking feel like a terrible idea, as if breaking the silence would break her solitude in the worst possible way.

Sometimes she's see remnants of former life like warm cigars that were still lightly smoking or shoes tossed hastily into a corner, as if she'd just missed the only other living person there. It could have been the arms - she knew nothing about them other than they possibly cared for her or at least cared enough to rock her to sleep each and every night without fail.

She liked to hope that there was someone else,someone who looked a little more like her but the voices in those rooms where the new things appeared didn't like to talk to her. Sure they'd laugh and snarl as always but they wouldn't even try to taunt her.

It was like they were scared by this other person.

Maybe she should be too.

Day 1,260

It was difficult to tell who was infected among the blind, the pallor of standard cataracts compared to the early stages of the parasitically induced can only be distinguished through specialised filtered lenses. The secondary eyes of the parasite don't show until the moment they're due to burst through the host's eyes and by then they're already gone.

At least, they aren't who they once were. Most of their fundamental likes and dislikes will often swap or dissolve entirely upon complete infection as their brain chemistry is reconstructed by the parasite to better suit the necessary protein absorption.

A positive side effect of this is how these rapidly shifting opinions often isolate the infected individuals, slowing down the overall progression of the parasite. Unfortunately it also means that sudden changes in strong opinions are now classed as a symptom of the infection rather than the natural progression of personhood.

Society would rather be stubborn and stagnant than risk being culled or placed with the infected (effectively still killing them but with far less effort).  The infected themselves have very little to say on the matter, the sheer amount of mucus they produce clogs their vocal chords up to the point where making any noise is a struggle.

They're always so still and they die so quietly that the only way to tell if they've died is by the gaping hole where their face was after the parasite crawls out in search of a warmer host. Even then with the larger parasites, the strong ones, the sheer amount of facial tissue they dissolve in order to be able to properly see and oxidise often leaves the host utterly faceless anyway.

Day 1,259

It was a game unlike anything we'd ever played before. A game that could hear us and react to what we were saying before we even knew it could. It would alter its plotline, throw false hints, kill and resurrect characters left, right and centre all in the name of making sure we don't win.

When we agreed to be the first testers, we were never told what would happen when we won. We were only told that if we won we had to come straight to the managerial team's office to discuss our strategy and help them further improve the AI.

We shouldn't have tried to win. It didn't like us winning and it won't stop trying to challenge us to a second game - even going so far as to take over the software in my grandad's pacemaker and effectively holding him hostage until I agreed to talk to its creators again.

I still don't know how it persuaded the others to comeback, they haven't said a word to me. It was our original strategy, you see. If it can't hear us talking then it has less clues to work with, less ways to predict our behaviour.

Last time we wrote everything down but this time it's prepared. This time the screen is watching us watching it and we don't know what will happen if we lose. They never told us what it would do if we lost, all we know is that if it wants to follow us outside of the game, it can.

Life has become the game and we're all trapped inside it.

Day 1,258

We reckoned it was some kind of podcastat first, one of those Real War Stories deals. Honestly we were so surprised that an unplugged radio in the middle of a forest was even working that we didn't put much thought into the how or why of it all.

We should have left it there, Ty shouldn't have taken it home and we shouldn't have been so quick to agree with him. Ever since he took it he hasn't been himself, it's like he's gone and this new person is wearing his face and begging his parents to let them join the cadets so they can get into the army.

The Ty we knew was a pacifist.

I think we interrupted it - the radio, that is. Whatever it was doing out in the woods, whoever the soldiers were and whichever was they were in, they should have been left alone. Maybe if we broke the radio it'd bring Ty back, or at least let him go.

Day 1,257

We mistook it for a whale at first, what with the sheer size of it.

They beached here regularly for reasons we had yet to figure out.

This one was different from the usual cases - it wasn't dead when we found it.

We thought it had gotten trapped in a kelp forest and managed to choke itself somehow.

Then it lifted its head and we saw that the kelp was connected to a humanoid face.

When it rolled over enough to free an arm with webbed hands and claw-tipped fingers, we ran.

No mammal of that size, and with teeth like broken bottles, was meant to feed on plants alone.

By the time we'd gathered a team of local volunteers, cameras and shovels to hand, it was gone.

We don't know if it was the government or if it wasn't stuck to begin with.

Either way, all it left behind was a large indent where it had been and a few skeletal remains.

Day 1,256

There's something about the way they stare at me with their glazed eyes that reflect only the insides of their heads, something about the way they call me mummy just makes my blood turn to ice. My wife keeps telling me that there's nothing wrong with them, that they're just reaching that "awkward age" as if that means anything.

I've seen a few other kids like them, varying ages too but never any adults. It makes me wonder why. Perhaps they are meant to be ended before they can mature, before they finish developing into whatever hollow creatures they are.

Did someone slip something into me during the pregnancy? Did one of the multitude of blood tests somehow change my babies into these human shapes that are becoming less and less like children by the day? And if so, what will they do when they're grown up?

I know it's some kind of conspiracy, only three other parents have agreed with me on this while every other forum has banned and reported me. Good luck on them finding me though, my details are as fake as my VPN and by the time I am found I'll be done anyway.

I know my children are hollow and I'm going to prove it.

Day 1,255

The best and worst thing about apartment stairways is that they bounce sound amazingly well.

When I was in an apartment tower near the city centre I could always hear another person walking the stairs with me but never in all my years did I actually see them. Not until I was moving out and they came to check in on me.

You can't always tell a human apart from an... Other just by their footsteps. I certainly wasn't prepared to open the door to something that looked like a humanish face stretched over a cow's skull with a body that resembled about eight bodies merged together.

She gave me the name Tamara to call her and said that if I left that night I'd be dead within the week. As much as I hate following irrational superstitions, the words of the Others aren't to be taken lightly. Every night for three weeks I'd come back to the empty apartment, every night for three weeks I'd wander the stairwells trying to find her and ask if the time was right yet.

I always heard her but never saw her, though I swear I was never alone in that apartment. Sound bounces just as well in a series of empty rooms as it does in a stairwell and footsteps never seemed to stop following me. Not until I was forced out by the landlord.

Writing this from my new house may be the last thing I do.

I still hear the footsteps only now I know where they are.

Day 1,254

The last thing he remembered was the sneering face of the janitor who told him "When the clock strikes six, I don't have to give a shit. See you on Monday kid." before thumping the locker and whistling as he walked away. From there he faded in and out of consciousness, knowing in the back of his mind that he was concussed as all hells and shouldn't sleep at all.

When he woke up the locker was being opened and another kid was being pushed in. They went right through him, crushing the flowers that had been crammed in through the metal slits and the notes hastily scrawled and stuck to them.

He didn't feel a thing as he stepped back and ended up halfway through the wall. The kid didn't notice him until they stopped crying and looked around as if they sensed that he was watching them. No sound came from their mouth, much as it frantically opened and closed.

They finally croaked out his name and asked if they were dead. He told them he didn't think so as he slowly realised that he was. He should have freaked out, should have cried and screamed at how unfairly he'd been treated, at the bullies who'd caused this and the janitor who did nothing to help him.

Instead he reached through the kid, his pale fingers finding the locking mechanism and wriggling about until it clicked open. The kid fell out, thanking him profusely while the hallway full of curious and worried children tried to peer inside.

They didn't see him but they saw the locker close by itself.

Day 1,253

In the end, his family were comforted by the knowledge that the fall broke his back and he hadn't died in pain.

Physical pain, that is.

Who can honestly imagine what it must have been like to have an escaped cow ram into you, sending you sprawling over the railing where you hit the sharp metal edge of the pig trough and find yourself unable to move as curious snouts slink towards you.

If he tried to call for help, it hadn't been heard by anyone (or so they claim).

Of course tears were briefly shed, as is only proper upon discovering the half eaten corpse of your husband, promptly followed by calls not to the police or an ambulance but to a lawyer. After all, in today's society a last will and testament can be worth the deceased's weight in gold.

The coffin they buried him in was so pitifully small, the pigs left so little of him behind.

One can only hope they went for his eyes first so he didn't have to witness his gradual death.

Day 1,252

Piece by piece the yearly tsunamis brought in the remains of a city. It was a mix of modern skyscrapers, ornate marble fountains and cars with license plates from the nineties. There were never any bodies, never any DNA to be found on any part of the city fragments whatsoever.

Meanwhile over three thousand two hundred and ninety miles away near Nazarovo, Russia, an unnamed experimental settlement vanished overnight. In its place was a colossal sinkhole measuring three hundred by two hundred and eighty miles square, the edges worryingly smooth and no strange sound or vibrations reported by Nazarovo or anywhere within the district for that matter.

Sadly as the city didn't officially exist, there were no answers to be had and no sign of the people who had built and thrived there. Perhaps they are still in the sinkhole, waiting for the tides to carry them out to the open once more. Perhaps they sunk the city themselves to end the tests and trial runs.

Perhaps this is exactly what the tests were for and they are now dispersed across the globe.

Day 1,251

We didn't realise that the dead had been digging their way up to us until our tunnels met.

Us mining for ore and them scraping upwards, desperate to see their loved ones again.

They called out our names and wept with joy.

We unloaded our rifles.

Following their tunnels we came right up to their graves... under every single grave.

We found that every coffin in the churchyard was empty, from ancient to fresh.

The tunnels stretched off into pitch black dirt seemingly without end.

I still wonder who else they found and what they did.

Day 1,250

Nobody knew what we'd left buried under all that salt and ash, nobody really wanted to find out. Our ancestors left us little more than cave murals and word-of-mouth stories to warn us away from delving down but with the weather turning worse and worse we have no other option.

All the places we'd been told to avoid - Scarborough Mound, Greenthorpe Lake, Stradmire Upon Creechside - all of them were gateways to the old roads of our buried past. At first we were hesitant to use them, too wary of the warnings we'd been fed from birth. When the radars showed a wall of storm noise coming towards us, a wall with no end, the decision was made for us.

I was lucky enough to be closest to Stradmire Upon Creechside which, as it turns out, was one of the more isolated settlements and one that is rarely prone to the ailments of the more populated zones. For instance we have yet to see the mass burial sites that held the remains of those who couldn't make it to the Archangel vessels.

Apparently they don't look as human as we do, they look more like dogs. Whether this is down to an evolutionary shift, plague-induced deformities or their eventual decomposition - who can rightly say? All we know is that none of them were our ancestors, they were the unsaven.

They were remnants of the plague that wiped out most of humanity, the very reason behind the Archangel project that sent the untouched away from Earth and into the moon's graceful orbit. Our ancestors said that this was where they watched the world end from, saw the grey leech life away before they sent pyroclastic warheads to finish the job.

When the first survivors were sent down,all they saw through their hazmat suits was a world of floating grey particles and now, just as we've built ourselves a stable home the world is taking it away from us yet again.

I wonder how the remaining few on the Archangels feel, watching the world end for a second time.

Day 1,249

The worst thing about National Trust mansions, those decadent relics and all their assorted lands, is that the grounds are impossible to hide in. Now at the time of their conception there was little to no need for anybody to be utilising the grounds as anything less than an aesthetically pleasing stroll.

They never planned for the undead.

Nobody ever does.

So when the hoards came, the uninfected gathered in their masses behind those grandois doors and bolted themselves from the outside world and all its chaos. Unfortunately word spread about this and soon enough every food raid turned into a battle on two fronts - against the undead and the uninfected, both of which wanted to be inside the mansions desperately.

Both needed the mansions to survive.

If it meant killing more uninfected then so be it.

For as many rooms as the mansions contain, the gardens seem to be inversely barren. Rows upon razor sharp rows of hedges, rose bushes and decorative ponds made it just as difficult for the survivors as it did the undead with eac falling prey to aerial ambush and ground based traps alike.

Soon enough the grounds were so clogged with corpses, it became easier to hide.

People began wearing the undead like fur coats to keep the others at bay.

Day 1,248

Swamp diving is tricky at the best of times, even when the sun's out the water's so murky you might as well be swimming in a cup of coffee, as my cousin Charlie used to say. Much as we kept to the "safer" shallower areas, the deeper waters beckoned every time and every dive made it harder to ignore.

'Bout three weeks ago we decided to take ourselves in deeper than any guide would dare to. Rented our own boat, packed our gear and set off as early in the morning as we could in the hopes that the chill in the air would keep any alligators on land basking.

We'd been driving two, maybe three hours out into the quieter parts, hoping we'd be far out enough to not run into law nor local. We settled on a clearing, hitched the boat to a nearby tree and before we could chicken out we were down there with a rope tied between us so neither could get lost.

Found ourselves a few small treasures down there, old coins and a few clay pipes. When we eventually resurfaced the rope got caught on something. I couldn't say if it was a branch, an alligator or what but when the rope went slack again only I resurfaced.

I don't know where he went, spent a good few days coming back and forth trying to find even a trace him before I gave up and called missing persons. Funnily enough some of theirs vanished too when they went looking, claimed the same thing about lines getting caught and some kind of hidden current.

Only difference is one of theirs came back. She swam her way from the middle of nowhere back to a ranger station nearly twelve miles from the clearing. Official story is that she got swept away in a previously unknown current but what she's been saying in the taverns is something else entirely.

Claims she saw eyes the size of truck tires at the bottom of the swamp and a mouth full of corpses that grabbed her by the flipper and dragged her to a wooden shanty town, all sunken with skeletons tangled in their fishing nets. Claims they held their arms out to her as the creature let her go.

She wants to go back now, feels the lure of the depths just as keen as Charlie and I did.

Day 1,247

Everyone knew the Oracle's human head was fake but that didn't stop them from looking it right in the eyes that weren't made to see. The real one was beneath its large robes, disguised as an ornate eye that seemed to follow you around the chamber (it did and that was always a bad omen).

Though the human face was pleasant enough to look at, the unblinking gaze and the voice coming from its stomach region made the whole experience a tad uncomfortable. Still, as long as the Oracle didn't start peeking out from under the robe to see you better, your fortune would be mediocre at the worst.

When it felt the need to see you unhindered by cloth, then you knew that ending your life right then and there would be a happier outcome. It took us a fair while to realise that sometimes the Oracle just wanted people to die so it could eat them in a flash of blinding light and crunching bones and claim they ascended.

Day 1,246

I heard them before I'd even set foot downstairs. Gran's voice echoed from the kitchen "Crows are circling again. Better find what's died and be rid of it before they draw something bigger." as her good morning. The shovel stood by the front door from the last circling, still couldn't get the damned bloodstains off but stained is always better than nowt.

Last circling I could barely get to the bloody half mauled deer for all crows in the way. It's not like they even eat the meat, they just like leaving a mess I swear. The alternative is worse, having scorn-ridden pests running all about the place - it just ain't right.

"Better dying than dead," as Gran likes to say, "cause the longer they've been dead, the more allure they've got for all of thems that'd like to eat us all." and she wasn't wrong. I mean, she hasn't set foot outside the house in over thirty years but she still knows a damn sight more than the rest of us.

She was there when the scorn first began, you know. Not in the labs themselves but she was working in the pub just down the road when the first few beasties escaped. It was some kind of American mountain cat thing, from what she described but then again it could have been a leopard, a lynx or any large cat-ish thing. They're all the same in her eyes - monsters.

Again, she's not wrong. Anything with scorn is to be scorned, as the news put it. Doesn't make them any less worrisome or disgusting up close though, not with all those gaping sores and the glowing blue fluids they leak out of bloody everywhere. Proper stains your clothes, it does.

Still, once it's had a shovel to the head and been buried deep enough it'll break the circling up.

Unless they've managed to invite in bigger prey.

Ain't no shovel big enough for them ones.

Day 1,245

The town has been playing hide-and-seek for the past fifty eight years and nobody has been able to find them.

It began with the local military base being evacuated though their official reports claim that everybody was sent to their duties, nothing more and nothing less. The fact that this occurred alongside the mass disappearance of an entire town is pure coincidence.

What nobody will want to tell you is how everyone was meant to go quietly, let the entire town fall into obscurity and let the nation prosper as a result. What nobody will want you to know is that there is one survivor, the only one who made it out when she was just a child.

On that day her parents told her that everyone was hiding and that she had to come back in five years to find them. Being all of four years old she agreed and started running, ignoring the shaking ground and cacophonous roaring that threatened to send her sprawling any second.

By the time all was silent and still, she was lost. Eventually she stumbled upon a farm wherein the staff called the local police, or rather, they tried to. The line was answered by the next county who claimed that there was no town near them and that there had never been one.

It stirred up enough confusion and distrust that when the police finally arrived at their doorstep to collect the surviving girl, she'd already been hidden deep below the farmstead. They claimed she'd run away when they'd gone to feed the pigs. They were believed.

Now twelve years later the child returns after a lifetime of hiding from the law that wants her to vanish as well. She goes to see the remnants of her home. She goes to pay her respects to wherever her parents bodies might still be.

She finds a town frozen in time, left with no fence and no guards and barely a single detail is skewed from her childhood. Though the streets are a labyrinth of broken tarmac, rusting cars and trees whose branches have been hacked away from all windows.

Her house still stands, the doors may have been blown clear away. The path to her parents room, to where she'd last seen them alive, beckons. Her heart feels like it's trying to beat the air from her lungs - everything is suddenly too much and her answers are too close.

She heads to her old bedroom, hoping to find the peace she'd cultivated there as a child. On her bed (sheets still perfectly made, just as her mother had done before she was sent to seek while they hid) was a note whose handwriting was achingly familiar.

It gave a list of "hints" for the seeker.

For her.

With a final deep breath she began to count from zero to one hundred, not noticing the voices quietly joining in with her.

Before she could say "ready or not, here I come", she heard the front door slam.

Day 1,244

Every moment outside feels like you're on borrowed time and each gasp you muffle into your sleeve sounds like thunder against the stillness that surrounds you. It all seems so familiar like somewhere your parents might have taken you to as a child only now time and decay have a chokehold on it and are dragging everything into the same greyish mulch that's swallowed half the country already.

The rest of the world breaths great sighs of relief that the decay is consuming one minor island in an archipelago with a name nobody can ever remember but they still fear that it may be waterborne. You reckon it's more likely to be airborne with the way each step you take stirs up a small cloud of dust and god-only-knows-what.

If it's able to infect humans then you probably have it by now, lord knows how many others got it before you. Wherever you go it seems there's always a corpse or pile of corpses gradually being engulfed by the grey and while you hope you survive all of this, you pray you don't die alone and lost like so many hundreds of others have.

Though life as you knew it has come to a sharp halt, if not The End, you remain thankful that you'll die before it hits the rest of the world.

Day 1,243

It all started when my wife told me to get away for the weekend. Well, not so much told as she plastered every inch of the bedroom with sticky notes telling me to get the hell out of the town by X date or I'll be seeing her sooner than I should.

There was nothing in the news to suggest anything dangerous was heading our way, nothing online and no office gossip to backup the notes she left me. Funny how she's silent for nine whole years and the first thing she does when she manages to make contact is to try and turn me into one of those paranoid foil-hats.

I still listened to her, for all our differences when she had one of her funny feelings she was never wrong. Like our fifth anniversary when she got a weird vibe from the cruise I booked us into and three days after it set off a storm forced it off course and into the side of an oilrig.

A town of 12,000 people and I'm the only one left. These coastal towns are always the first thing the media yell about when climate change is mentioned but to have an actual honest-to-god chunk of England break away and fall into a newly developed deep sea chasm? Unthinkable.

But that's my wife for you.

Nine years after her death and she's still looking out for me.

Day 1,242

We thought that bio-structures were the only solution to sustainable cities, ones that could spring up fully formed in a matter of months - roads included! As much as we bolstered, vaccinated and prepared the seedlings for the harshness of the wild world, we never thought the world would react so violently.

At first the outbreaks were few and far between - a pavement gone soft, lamp posts that gently collapsed overnight only to rise in the morning, windows that clouded over milky grey for no damned reason -  they were all malformed but pretty much functional.

In hindsight we should have known that these were only minor symptoms of a global plague that would send us all back to the stone age. It was as if the bone-structures were perforating to the point of reabsorption, a known human condition that had somehow adapted itself into our bio-structures.

Whole cities were evacuated as they collapsed in on themselves, softly smothering eight million people to death and injuring countless others. We may never know the full extent of their damage, not until we can trace them all back to the original seedling and obtain a core sample.

It's not stopping at the inorganic either, not with over forty suspected cases being examined. They may not be making their results public yet but they aren't roadkill, no matter what the news says there's no kind of vehicle that leaves bears looking more like rugs than rugged predators.

We haven't found any human cases yet but it works slowly, moving from spasms to full on seizures to eventual asphyxiation as the spine and lungs melt into each other before being completely reabsorbed by the body. It's the kind of death I wouldn't wish on anyone, not with the sheer number of creatures being found utterly boneless and alive somehow.

It's only a matter of time before the cases begin to emerge and then what? We've got no chance of vaccinating against something we haven't even categorized as anything more than a "condition". Not a virus, not bacteria, not anything we've ever seen before outside of late night gore flicks.

The public aren't being made aware just yet but we're already planning the kinds of equipment needed to sustain a human without their skeletal structure. Something low gravity, low movement and just pressurised enough to force the diaphragm and vocal chords to work.

It's far from perfect but as far as survival goes - beggars can't be choosers.