Day 1,300

Sometimes when you look outside and see them skittering about on all those spasming legs you think to yourself, that can't possibly have been a cat once. They're still somewhat feline, well, they have all the feline parts just not in the expected places... or colours...or quantities... but they still tick all the boxes to be classed as a cat... ish.

Deer are the worst for it,or whatever is passing for deer nowadays. Last I saw of one it had antlers like vines, if vines were made of pulsating meat. Yet again they are still technically deer with all the usual deer features like tusks, hooves and fur only not in their classical form.

It's like a child was given a box full of animal parts, paint and a healthy glass of neurotoxin and told to make whatever their little hearts desired. It certainly feels like the world was designed by a child, one who has no concept of morality or suffering only what looks aesthetically best.

You can tell the new creatures still feel pain, it seems to be one of the few original features that remain after all these years of rapid evolution and devolution. Their stuttered whimpers echo every night while we hide away behind iron doors as if that can protect us.

Day 1,299

It was the kind of place memories lingered in, the kind of place that traps moments like wasps to flypaper and leaves pieces of them lingering in the night air like so many torn wings. Now the average passerby might not notice this, might not even care that a fraction of their being is left behind as they walk past but you, you saw something in there.

There in the window of the house that eats memories was a face, or rather parts of it. The parts that are the first to be devoured as a body rejoins the dirt it came from. Those familiar soulful eyes, that wide grin full of joy as your respective gazes met and they remembered those nine perfect years you spent together.

You'd watched over him from eight weeks to almost ten years only for a car to take him from you in one tire-screech-split-second. You may have lived next door to the house that eats memories but you still found yourself gradually forgetting his face, the way he yelled at strangers, the way he liked to hide plastic bottles behind the sofa.

When you saw the parts of his face that the house had latched onto most you ran to meet him, hoping against hope that somewhere, in some room, he might be whole and he might be your little boy again but that wasn't how the house worked.

As soon as you'd smashed the small window on the back door to unlatch it, you felt the air turn colder and your mind grow heavier, number as the house feasted on your life. By the time you made it to the kitchen you heard the polite cough of your uncle who killed himself thirty years ago.

He looked just like the day you found him, head opened up like a ripe watermelon and clutching a note that only said "forgive her". His reappearance was accompanied by the sound of paws against concrete as your little boy paced around, now snarling like he used to whenever he saw your ex.

Perhaps he knew you were the one driving the car that hit him.

Your uncle's hand lingered on the back door,waiting to let those heartbroken eyes and dripping jaws in.

Day 1,298

It had been two years since Lisa died and she still hadn't changed much, at least, not compared to the others. Lisa's the first infected I've seen who still looks pretty much normal, just a little lankier and glassy-eyed. Out of a school of five hundred, barely a handful of you remained alive and untouched by what was now being called "The Long Life".

It was a hybrid strain of vita post mortem and quavis deformatione that left the infected in a similar semi-comatose state to the former while allowing enough internal rot to loosen all musculature to give the limbs almost comedic proportions.

According to the latest newline it originated inside the vats used to prepare food on an industrial scale, usually found in prisons, remote manufacturing sites and schools. Something about the way the inner lining of the containers reacted to certain bacteria found in specific pig breeds mixed with room temperature storage made them the perfect place for the hybrid to develop and spread.

Micro-strains have come about and each with their own unique twist on The Long Life, for example the infected from my region and especially from my school (with our almost-antique kitchen) were known for having no lower face. Everything from the bridge of the nose downward just fell off. It was one of the first signs but nobody seems to have found a reason for it.

One particularly interesting micro-strain I've heard of is found solely in Scotland. Apparently the way The Long Life developed there (something about the high calorie national drink and the colder climate) led to the infected's skin detaching from the body to the extent that it looks like they're all wearing melted Halloween masks.

Day 1,297

Three days.

That's how long it took to get to the heart of London, to Parliament itself and to the hive-mind behind every major political move that Britain has made since the Brythonic tribes merged in the 10th century. Us commonfolk didn't even notice until it was too late to do anything but leave the country.

The news stopped reporting on political events slowly - not so slowly that we would become suspicious but just slowly enough that thoughts of the government and the elections faded from most minds. We made it so very easy for the creature to sink its roots into the very minds and souls of our leaders.

It's controlling the news too somehow, we have no way to tell what's real and what's a careful fabrication designed to keep us numb and content. We don't even know who it's controlling, how or why. We don't even know if it's one of many or if it's alone.

For all we know we could be the last free humans hiding in the Highlands, on the Isle of Man, in the bays of the Hebrides with no way to know if we are safe until we see our loved ones start heading for the capital, for the core of the creature that has us all held prisoner.

If you're reading this then all we're asking is that you burn it.

Just burn it all down.

Stop the growth.

Day 1,296

It's the same routine every day.

Wake up at 0600 hours.
Shower, dressed and eating breakfast at 0630 hours.
Drive to work at 0700 hours.
Prepare the shop at 0745 hours.
Open at 0800 hours.

Not even the end of the world stopped that, turns out the undead don't really have much mental capacity to do anything beyond attack living beings who are within arms reach and carry on their daily routines. Makes avoiding death just that little bit easier, though the government have since used it as an excuse to enslave most of the undead population for free labour.

I still get my regulars waiting outside for me to open the doors on the hour. Nothing's really changed all that much except that the streets are quieter, crime's risen a bit but overall it's business as usual. There have been occasions where the routine has been disturbed by out-of-town undead who manage to evade the authorities while adding to their wandering hordes but even those are regulated.

Day1,295

The fields were swallowed by rainfall, as predicted. A gentle wet splattering filled the lull in conversation between passengers who were now too settled in to do much more than gaze at the passing countryside and wonder where exactly they were.

As the sun set and the rain became obscured under a thick blanket of darkness, it became impossible to say when the rain stopped and the bloodshed began. The passengers can only agree that the train smelled of metal at the station and that the blood didn't belong to any of them.

Somewhere and somehow, overnight it had seeped through the cracking rubber seals along the window edges, gradually coating everything and everyone on board with a scarlet sheen that took almost twelve days to fully wash off their skin.

What's worse still is that they all seem to have developed a shared madness - the belief that they never arrived at their intended destination and that they are now wandering through a purgatory of their own creation. Five managed to kill themselves in order to"alter" their afterlife while the rest remain pinned down in their cells, waiting for us to come and see them again.

Day 1,294

They preferred the cold silence of the abandoned things we left behind. The derelict coastal towns weren't enough any more. It was only a matter of weeks before they began to actively chase us out of our homes so that they could move further inland.

We were becoming trapped, landlocked on an island with our escape routes routinely being blocked or barricaded by the bodies of anyone who hadn't moved fast enough. After what felt like years (though in reality was about five weeks) they had us caged somewhere in the Lake District, surrounded by mountains of stone and corpse alike.

I was one of the lucky few who never found someone they knew in the walls, most of the others caught glimpses of familiarity and either took comfort in knowing that their loved ones weren't suffering or took it as an insult that their dearly departed weren't resting below as they should be.

Close to the walls you can hear the rumbling and cracking of our captors as they destroy everything in their path, carving their utopia from this new dystopia.

Day 1,293

The moments we remember best are the ones we never expected. We stumble into them like a blindfolded child whose friends have taken away the pinata and left them swinging a cardboard tube alone in a room full of cold chairs.

Sometimes when such a memorable moment arises, we scarcely know what to with ourselves aside from standing and staring at That Which Really Shouldn't Be Able To Exist Like That And Yet There It Is. At least, that's what I found myself doing when I encountered my first impossibility.

Everyone says it gets easier after your first trip to the Otherside and to that dimly neon hued, non-Euclidean, M. C. Escher monstrosity of a citadel that greets you, looming up out of pulsating, thrumming chasm of liquid chaos that somehow spawns the Otherside anew each and every day.

Most people don't really remember their first trip, something within the brain shuts down just long enough to obscure those initial moments. It gives you enough time to adjust to the unnatural order of life there and the way that the buildings around you seem to somehow lean in every direction but the one you are heading towards.

Few people remember their first day in its entirety, let alone being conscious enough to recall the people they met there. I only remember that they were trying their hardest to be human and that their disguises were all hideously uncanny.

Day 1,292

When the bombs were dropped we were told to expect low incoming patients. Initial reports indicated that the exothermic impact would vapourise 98% of organic matter within a fifty mile radius.The worst part of the primary attack wasn't the bombs dropped, wasn't knowing that our diplomats had been useless wasn't knowing that there was nothing we could do but wait.

The worst part of the initial attack was the survivors.

By all accounts they should have died months ago yet here they are taking up entire wards. It's not that there are many of them, not exactly. Most of them only have two or three speaking heads and are only counted as being two or three people despite the sheer mass of fused flesh that they are.

We gave up trying to fit them onto beds and instead lined mattress in a squarish shape to accommodate all of their limbs that still responded to temperature and pain, even if the main living heads couldn't feel it themselves.

Day 1,291

I remember when I was five my mother accidentally trod on one of the kittens. Strange how something so small could have so much blood inside it, I thought so at least. That was when she first showed me what we do when we make a mistake.

We pry off the floorboards in the basement, we dig deep and bury them there. We pour a little liquid limestone on top to hide the smell from predators and then we nail the floor down as if nothing had ever happened there. The blood was covered with a thick layer of varnish that father never even noticed.

So I buried all my mistakes from failed homework to burnt food to the first of many bullies. Mother only found out when she went to bury one of her mistakes and end her failing marriage. Father wouldn't fit under the floor for all the mistakes I'd already left there.

Day 1,290

I have forgotten what your face looked like in natural light

In the days before we came to be here, wherever here was... is...

The sickly green glow of the half chewed glowsticks,always smothered by the dark, is all I can remember now.

"What did we do? Before we were here," you asked me, eyes pleading for an answer I still don't have.

Perhaps you asked me yesterday, perhaps it was years ago.

Time's always the same when there's no true light.

"I think we still did this." I told you, after leaving a silence filled with feeble "maybe"s passing as answers.

You tried to laugh, at least I think you did.

Truth be told, I'm not sure how you were able to make that noise.

I don't think you could before we came here.

Day 1,289

No matter how many apologies it garbled out around the pus leaking from the jagged wound you'd sliced across its mouth-area, it was still trying to kill you and at the rate things were going it would succeed before you could reach the safe room.

Your ribs felt broken, eye too swollen to see through and your left leg sang with pain. In short, you were moving too slowly to get away but just fast enough that you remained out of arms reach... for now. It gave you time to consider your options.

1. Die. Not your preferred option but a likely outcome if your leg gave way entirely.
2. Find somewhere to hide and pray it would be too stupid to search for you.
3. Work through the broken bones and barricade yourself in the safe room.

While it hadn't shown any other signs of its former self, the creature that had once been Dr Montraleigh was still capable of basic speech. That or it was parroting the Doctor's final words like a broken record player. It was too hard to tell and you didn't have enough air in your aching lungs to ask it any questions.

The safe room was nearby and your options were coming to an end.

You turned left.

Day 1,288

The patients of Ward C grew more restless with each day they spent in submersive hydrotherapy. Their bodies were left suspended in vats full of an oxygen rich amniotic-based solution known colloquially as Lifeblood. The resulting loss of muscle was just about the only thing that kept them trapped within the Ward and kept the rest of the hospital that little bit safer.

They used to be content to jut float and let their minds wander back to happier times or onwards to plan what they would do once their treatment was over. This was before a junior doctor was overheard telling the nurses that they would keep their jobs for a good thirty or so years more. Before he told them that the "cure" was a sugar-coated placebo meant to weaken and delay the patients transfer to the terminal ward.

Word soon spread and within the hour a riot was beginning to form, well, as much as a group of atrophied and drug-dazed people can riot. All they really succeeded in doing was spreading their sickness to the remaining staff which resulted in Ward C being quarantined.

Eight weeks later and they're still in there. So many have been lost, too weak to survive so many days  on water alone. Others were made to take the full brunt of the blame and were left to the merciless vengeance of the staff they were trapped with.

The doctors and nurses look healthier for it.

Day 1,287

I remember when I was four and our Sunday school group held a sleepover in our church.

I remember being worried more than excited to spend the night away from home for the first time.

I don't remember who woke me up that night and told me to hide but they saved my life.


That night eight children went missing and thirty years later they haven't been found.

There was no sign of a break-in, nobody heard or saw anything and everyone blamed the new pastor.

The papers blamed him entirely, linked his modern teachings to moral corruption.


He never stood a chance against them all, there were far too many of them versus one of him.

He took it well at least and made no sound until his skin had been completely removed.

He's still alive today, much as he wishes he wasn't.


All those years and nobody ever asked the surviving children what happened.

Back in those days, they just assumed we'd been lucky.

If only they had asked or our parents had listened.


If they had they wouldn't have sent us back to church the next Sunday.

Not if they knew what else lived there.

Not if they knew where the missing children were and what they were becoming.

Day 1,286

Garden centres are the epitome of liminal space and not just the roadside ones, the town-based centres are just as dimensionally challenged as their motorway counterparts. Even their pop-up kiosks carry the same air of untraceable worry that there is something impossible spying on you from some tall shelf full of strangely organic looking ceramic pots.

Where possible, avoid roadside garden centres near closing time and especially in the winter when sunlit hours are pitifully few. All those little scuttering sounds coming from underneath the raised flower displays and the shifting bags of dirt that could so easily hide a body, all those tiny eyes and impossible jaws you see between the roses as you double and triple-take, all of them rise with the growing shadows.

Town centres seem to contain lesser versions of their larger sibling stores' inhabitants. Though lesser in stature they are no less deadly than their counterparts and far more adept at distracting humans to minimise their presence. It's so much easier to catch a child when their parents are otherwise occupied talking to a random member of staff whose pupils occasionally flicker and whose teeth change size slightly.

All it takes is a moment of your time, the mildest lapse in concentration and they have you. Hours later you'll realise you've been wandering the store alone, no matter who you arrived with and you now push a trolley full of sniggering bags of compost that will no doubt lead to a dozen or so squirrelcorpses being left at your back door in gratitude for freeing them.

Day 1,285

The accidents only stopped when we put up a cross at the roadside.

We still don't know who died there or even when but the cross seemed to help them rest.

When words began to appear on its base we filled it in with a thick layer of plaster.

We posted about it in the local gazette, we thought we were calling out vandals.

How were we supposed to know?


Every day the words were back, that same careful cursive and the same attempted phrase.

I am not here, I did not die.

As common a poem as it may have been, we couldn't figure out the who, how and why behind it all.

Soon it became apparent that the words were being written from inside the stone.

Our torches wouldreflect off something moving, writhing about inside its concrete prison.

Day 1,284

I wasn't dared to go through Alice's Cave, I chose to. Maybe that's what makes it worse... maybe that's why I saw everything and came out the other side roughly the same. You can't say that happens too often, or ever really.

We all remember the McColloughby twins who, in all fairness, might still be alive down there. I mean, I didn't see their bodies but I didn't see their bodies so there's a slim chance that they've survived. Whether they're human at this point is another matter entirely.

I found traces of them fairly deep down, past the old Catholic church. Seems they took off their matching helmets, jackets and shoes - all facing the Alice's Tears, that monster of a lake with a ceiling that drips so much it feels like you'll be up to your neck in stale water at any second.

If they were sensible they would've taken the tethered boat and pulled themselves to the other side but when I was there the boat was on my side. Either they never got that far or someone else moved it back after they'd used it.

There weren't any other signs of them past Alice's Tears.

There were plenty of signs for other things though, found a fair few dog tags and company badges from almost thirty missing people. I left it all there of course, felt disrespectful to move what might be the last remaining pieces all of those lost people.

It was a bit of a blur from then on, just tunnel after tunnel after tunnel after the feeling of something walking just out of my light's reach. I made the mistake of retracing my steps a few paces and saw footprints I'll not soon forget.

I can only hope it stayed in the cave but just in case it didn't... I'm so sorry.

Day 1,283

Was she always so much prettier than you?

Was her hair that perfect shade of autumn while yours lay against your head like rotting lace?

Was she a fighter or did she just let herself slip into death?

You know you hate someone, and I mean truly loathe their entire existence, when even the way their windpipe collapses is just so... perfect.

It's quite sickening really.

Even the way her corpse bloated made you feel inferior.

Day 1,282

The foundry was built over a series of elaborate pumps and drainage systems that culminated in mimicking the steady flow of the tides. It kept the infected alive and kept us waist deep in fresh subjects to test our cures on. Something was bound to work eventually, should the machinery remain functional.

The pistons have stopped working, clogged with either weeds or whatever remained of the chum we threw into the cloudy sulphurised water. Every time this happened we knew we'd end up losing another employee. The cures were working and not in the way we intended.

Sure the infected were slowly regaining their former personalities and general sense of self but their predatory instincts remained dominant. Every now and then they'd apologise or ask about the weather as if we'd just met on the sidewalk in a pleasant neighbourhood rather than the stinking bowels of the greatest foundry of knowledge this side of the Thames.

It used to be so much easier to get workers to volunteer for piston maintenance but now they've cottoned onto the high turnover, the sudden loss of contact and randomly approved holiday requests. They aren't as stupid as we've tried to make them.

The human mind always finds a way to defy expectations and soon enough we'll be all on our own.

It'll be workers and monsters against us - their saviours, the heralds of the cure!

Perhaps it's best we start from scratch, for all our sakes and all our safety?

Day 1,281

The-thing-that-used-to-be-Mr.-Wickers is outside howling again. Richie says he caught the bastard in one of his "advanced" bear traps and yet there he is, crying like the devil itself just came down and tore out his intestines through his eyes.

Pardon the language, we aren't used to having company over. It's just been so hard to travel with all these amalgamations and monstrosities popping up from out of nowhere and rendering your loved ones as little more than meat puppets. Hence the-thing-that-used-to-be-Mr.-Wickers.

He was such a nice man too, up until a pack of not-wolves-anymore caught him unawares when he was checking his crayfish pots down by the lake. We told him time and time again to let us know and we'd gather a group, cover each other's backs but that man was as stubborn in life as he is in whatever state you can call this.

There's something of his old self there for sure, otherwise how else would he have been able to remember the combination for the lock on his front door? Now whether that part of him is still about remains to be seen, he certainly carries no qualms over killing people he used to know.

First one to go was a fellow he'd had disagreements with since before all this devilry was unleashed, back when they were children and all. He never stood a chance, the-thing-that-used-to-be-Mr.-Wickers pounced him the second he stepped off his boat and he hasn't moved since. Not for lack of trying though, just that there isn't much of him left to move.

I reckon he'll merge with a fish and wreck the-thing-that-used-to-be-Mr.-Wickers' crayfish pots and kickstart their squabbling all over again. Richie reckons he'll be got by a plant and go on to ruin all our external crops. He always was a spiteful old git, too stubborn even for death.

Still, that'll be us all one day. Part of the bigger picture, the next stage in evolution, as what passes for the government likes to say with all their conjoined mouths. Couldn't trust them separately, certainly can't trust them now but at least they can finally get their lies in order.

I suppose we ought to do more than wait for the end to find us but really, what else is there?

Day 1,280

The town of Drechmere was slowly being swallowed by the forest and nobody could do anything to stop it. They'd tried everything they could think of - from axe to chainsaw to fire to hell with the damned place that seems intent on burying them all in moss.

By the mid 1960s Drechmere's last inhabitant had left and with a final glance behind he saw the forest creep over his home, formerly the last on its outskirts and now another pile of broken stones to be forgotten. A part of him wondered if it would continue to spread, to devour the road and the river and the neighbouring towns.

A crueller part of him said it wasn't his problem, he no longer lived there and once he reached his new home in the city he could forget all about Drechmere and the wandering moss-smothered scarecrows that patrolled the old homes within the forest's boundaries.

They wore the clothes the townsfolk left behind. It made sense, after all when one wakes up to find their windows blocked by leaves and their front door wide open, packing isn't as much of a concern as running to the a safer house is.

Sometimes they even made it past the trees. Not often but often enough that nobody ruled it out as an option, should the worst come to pass and they awoke to scarecrows peering over their bedside. Everybody had seen them, most up close too, but not a single soul could draw their faces or even remember their eye colour.

And so as the last resident's car passed out of sight, the forest of Drechmere seemed to stretch out after him. The scarecrows lingered at the utmost edges, still sheltered under the boughs but able to see the road crack as roots grew through it.

The forest would find a new town.

It always did.

Day 1,279

As you looked at the security footage you realised that you weren't alone, you'd never been alone.

All those years thinking that rats had been eating your supplies and running across the floors at night.

All those resources wasted on pitiful traps and poisons when the real threat was so much bigger.

So much closer.

Right at your bedside most nights, if the cameras were to be believed.

It just sat there and watched you, occasionally reaching out to stroke your hair.

You wondered if it had once known you.

Maybe it was an old friend or teacher or your mother.

Since the great extinction, you've only seen other humans on the horizon as they drive to safer grounds.

If they don't take you with them then soon you'll join the creature that lives with you.

Day 1,278

They called it the Laughing City for the stone faces carved into every available inch of the stone walls that surrounded it. Originally they were leftovers from the ancient Roman settlement, or so the carbon dating results showed. Nobody quite knows when the faces were added or if the Romans themselves had dedicated the town to Janus, their many-faced deity.

By most outsider accounts the Laughing City was just a cheerful place with a quirky wall. The vast majority of its tourism was dedicated to those faces, those awfully familiar faces who gazed out at the world with indifference and exhaustion. Not a single one was smiling.

For all their photos and comments, none of them knew just how deep the wall went and just how grotesque the faces became. They say the further into the great chasm below the city you go, the more you begin to look like the carvings on the walls. They say that if you reach the bottom you merge with the stone and become a part of the barrier that has protected the city for over five hundred years.

Day 1,277

We called Him here to swallow the world and free us from sin.

We don't know if the world will be a better place inside the Wanhafenes.

We don't know if there will be a world at all.

None of the old texts say what will happen once we are gone.


Perhaps the original authors knew and wanted to spare us from their fate.

All we can say is that they tried and they were taken, leaving only a gaping chasm in their wake.

They weren't strong enough, didn't have as much blood to give but we are prepared.

Decades of false blood drives and "save the anaemic" campaigns  - all worth it for Him.


From his gaping maw shall pour the rivers of forgiveness that cleanse the body.

His breath shall cleanse our souls.

His stomach will aid our ascent into a higher plane of being where hunger and pain can't exist.

The world will be broken down to its core and rebuilt in his image.


What the texts fail to mention is that the Wanhafenes saliva is deathly acidic and will melt you like hot wax.

The cleansing breath is some kind of organic mustard gas that melts you lungs first.

For all their inaccuracies, the original authors got one thing right.

Pain and hunger don't exist inside Him, only the liquid chaos of trillions of lives melded together.

Day 1,276

That old man's been hanging around the front garden again, I can't believe it's the anniversary of his death already. Seems like just yesterday we moved in to a normal looking house only to find a lingering spirit who refuses to accept the fact that he up and died fifty odd years ago.

Every time my husband's confronted him the old man just shakes his head and says "Can't be right, not when my wife's waiting inside with me dinner." when she died three weeks after him. Broken heart according to the townsfolk, they say she literally loved him to death.

I reckon if she'd died at home they'd be reunited and we wouldn't have to put up with him standing about outside, banging on all the windows, doors, walls - whatever he can get his bloated hands on. Scares the living daylights out of the kids every time. Seems they may never get used to him.

He drowned in the sewer grate just in front of the garden, now hidden under hedges. One drink too many and he ducks under the barriers and splat onto a concrete walkway, crunch and his legs are broken, squelch he tries to drag himself towards the ladder up, misses and falls into the water.

Somehow he managed to wedge one of his hands under the last rung, you can see the red indent on his hand and how much drier and smaller it is than the other one. That's how they found him you know, a watery wreck that was vaguely human in shape and that had to be dragged out to the closest walkway vent as he was too big to go back out the grate.

Now he just walks about, looking for his wife and wondering why he can't go indoors anymore. If he'd just accept that he died we could all get a decent night's rest but no,apparently he is alive and well and water doesn't pour from his mouth whenever he starts talking cause living people don't do that.

Day 1,275

Back when I worked for a fairly large lorry company, there was always this one guy who'd complain about "machines taking our jobs" the second the breakroom doors closed. Every stop we ended up meeting at he'd make a point to mention how many more people had been "replaced".

I hadn't seen one of the machines, even thought he was just being dramatic about our autopilot system, until last week. We met at a small garage somewhere in the midlands, one of those backwoods places that just give you the creeps.

She never stepped out of her cabin, talking to me through the window. I climbed up to hear her better and that's when I noticed her legs. She didn't have them, so to speak, and in their place were thick wires that she claimed joined directly to the engine.

I don't get how she could be so calm about her whole life being reduced to a torso driving a truck until she was declared an obsolete model and sent back to the main office for "refurbishment" which she said was her only actual concern.

She didn't need food or sleep anymore, her driving hours were far higher than any human could withstand and her free time consisted of stopping at the roadside to admire the scenery. She couldn't even remember being made into the cyborg oddity that she now was, she just woke up "improved" as she put it.

The way she phrased it made the whole process seem to peaceful, so much more fulfilling than any human would ever find the job. Makes me wonder if they're still looking for improved drivers and if they'd take me on as a candidate.

Day 1,274

The gallery has been closed for almost eight weeks now for spontaneous renovations. The staff dart in and out of the doors accompanied by at least two heavily armed security guards. Though they say nothing to the media, they mutter to their loved ones and word gets out eventually as the fragments they tried to contain within their social circles spread to the masses.

Depending on the source something, or several somethings, were trapped in the main building and were at risk of damaging the artwork. Now whether or not they were human vandals, escaped zoo animals or another kind of creature entirely was never specified.

Not until an anonymous post was submitted to a local art appreciation site.

The user claimed to have worked for the gallery for twelve years and in those twelve years they'd watched as every painted figure began to develop into fully fledged lifeforms that didn't want to stay in their frames. No matter the subject, if it could be alive it became alive.

Day 1,273

It was so still that at a first glance you mistook it for another tree.
Then it began to walk towards you.

Running wasn't an option, there was still the chance that it hadn't spotted you yet.
It was your good fortune to be wearing clothes that blended in with autumnal foliage.

The outskirts of the forest were a good ten miles away but beyond that stood civilisation.
Surely something living this far in wouldn't follow you into the town?

As you finally made up your mind to head for the safety of other people, you looked left.
It had stopped walking and was now standing right beside you.

From the treetops came the sound of it breathing heavily as if those few steps had exhausted it.
Hopefully it would be too tired to chase you when you decided to run.

If you could persuade your legs to move and not collapse when danger it literally beside you.
Anything that wouldn't draw attention to you, not when it was so very close.

Day 1,272

The warehouse was the smallest in the company, or so the manager claimed. At least you think it was the manager... it's been so long since you've seen another person that it could have been anyone. All you know for certain is that at least eight days have passed (judging by the way the clouded plastic skylight has turned from pale grey to pitch black and back to pale grey again) and you still don't feel tired, hungry or thirsty.

Before you were sent into the warehouse for something you can't quite remember and possibly haven't found yet, all anyone could talk about was this new flu strain that had been circulating the country. Some said it was from Europe, others said it had been dug up in an Arctic exploration but they all agreed that nobody really recovered from it.

There was something not right about those who survived the initial outbreak, something crooked and jagged in the way they move as if they were amateur marionettes. The medical reason was fever-induced nerve damage but it still didn't make the public any happier at the personality change that went alongside it.

You felt the first pangs of fever-ache when you woke up and by the time you'd arrived at work you were hot and cold at the same time, your bones felt like they were rattling inside a suit made of jelly and your vision pulsed steadily in time with your heartbeat.

Maybe that's why you were sent to the warehouse, so you couldn't infect the rest of the store and potentially shut them down for as long as the flu persisted. Strangely enough you started feeling fine around aisle K4 out of Z26.

That's when you decided to turn back, when you realised that you were well again (carefully ignoring how long you've been wandering, how you don't feel hungry or tired etcetera). All you had to do was follow the footsteps you'd made in the thick dust on the floor and eventually you'd be back in the store.

What you didn't consider was just how quickly the flu had spread and how the elderly didn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of surviving it. Their bodies had been stacked neatly by the rear counter, piled up like purescent jenga bricks.

This was your fault.

Still you survived for a reason and as you headed for the front door you saw what that reason was.

Over half the glass front had been bricked up,the wall left unfinished, presumably due to the flu. As a glance over the top you could see how most of the town had already succumb to these... preventative measured and just how quiet it was as a result.

There was a chance for you to escape, to seek out other survivors and join their ranks, if they even existed. Perhaps the rest of the world was carrying on as usual and ignoring the former flu-infested areas in favour of bulking up the healthy zones?

No matter, all you had to do was break the glass and climb over the wall and you'd be fre- a noise came from the back of the store. At a glance you spotted nothing back there before you realised that's where the bodies had been. They were all gone and the faint sounds of wet flesh slapping against concrete grew louder and louder.

Night was coming and you wouldn't live to see it again.

Day 1,271

You awoke to the sound of someone knocking on your front door. After half-heartedly yelling "Be there in a second!" they stopped. The apartment felt quieter than usual, the air somehow stale and unwelcoming as if you were intruding upon the lair of something ancient.

The moment your feet touched the carpet the knocking returned, faster and harder as though the person on the other side was afraid and desperately seeking shelter. You found yourself rushing passed rooms that you didn't remember on your way to meet the stranger who dared to disturb you.

For reasons beyond your comprehension, at the time all the oddities and falsities you were presented with (doors where they should and couldn't be, paintings that laughed at you as you hurried onwards to the door that was so much further away than it usually was) didn't strike you as anything but normal.

Even your front door didn't look like a door. The atmosphere around it made it feel more like an animal camouflaged as a door, waiting for you to reach out so it could strike you down. Perhaps it was pulsing slightly, as though it had breath, or was that your vision slowly fading in and out of clarity as though you were battling your way through another dimension that was now overlapping your home?

Either way, you knew that opening the door would answer it all.

Day 1,270

You woke up in a theatre, convinced that you'd fallen asleep during the opera. As you glanced around at the other patrons your memories seeped in and you remembered that you'd been here for roughly eight or so decades. Others had been there for so much longer that their skin resembled the thin silkish parchment of the programme and all their eyes the same dull milky-blue cataracts that stared longingly at a stage they couldn't possibly see.

You didn't dare pull your compact out from your bag to see if you looked like them, you wouldn't even look down at your own hands. All you did between resting your aching eyes is watch the current Act and puzzle over how it fit with the one you remembered last.

With every awakening you noticed the theatre grew a little emptier, your fellow patrons (or were you prisoners at this point?) had either found the strength to leave or had been removed. You wondered when it would be your turn, if you survived that long.

Each sleep seemed to last longer than the last and each Act left you grasping at straws, staring at the programme and trying to decode the glyphs in the hopes that you might better understand why you were there and what the opera was all about.

You know that soon you will be the only patron left.

Just one last sleep should do it.

One final rest.