Day 1,391

When the shuttle doors opened and Lieutenant Creyes was still in their suit, she knew something was wrong. They hadn't even re-compressed, the airtight seals around the visor were locked in place and the rest of the suit clung to them like a second skin. It was perfect for the outer conditions - loose ends getting caught when a migratory currant shift was closing in was a death sentence - but in the compound they just looked... wrong.

There was just something unnatural about their perfect silence and their body didn't seem quite human and she couldn't quite put her finger on it until they began to move. Their limbs didn't bend they... they rippled and some kind of liquid burbled through their lungs, echoing inside their helmet and reminding her strangely of the seaside caves near her childhood home.

Creyes slid towards her and, purely on instinct, she slammed the lockout code in and trapped them inside the shuttle corridor. They hit the door with a moist thud and slid down, seemingly unable to maintain their human facade any longer.

Or so she thought.

As she began to walk away to comm this in to the bridge, she heard an inhuman scream coming from behind her. Turning around she saw Creyes face pressed against the viewing port, the water inside their body draining from every orifice and forming something humanoid beside them.

With one final desperate cry, Creyes collapsed and the watery figure stepped forward, pressing every inch of itself against the sealed doors, trying to find a place to slip through. Her first thought was to run but her feet wouldn't move... couldn't move.

A thin line of water trailed from her shoe back to the shuttle door as it was slowly forced open.

Day 1,390

He chased the raindrops with her finger against the glass as they raced to the bottom of the window. His mother's gaze never left the road, too busy muttering to herself about the weather forecast and how it hadn't mentioned rain let alone a torrential downpour.

This wasn't as interesting to him as racing raindrops so he paid no mind to how worried she began to sound as she spotted people standing on either side of the motorway, faceless and unmoving. He protested as she slammed the brakes, the raindrops no longer racing across but splattering against the window with no aim.

The cars in front of them were empty, their doors flung open as though the owners had run away all of a sudden. He leaned forward in his booster seat, barely noticing his mother's knuckles turning white as she gripped the steering wheel with grim determination.

With no explanation she got out of the car, her movements jerky and barely coordinated enough to open the door. She didn't close it behind her, didn't look back and didn't get any further than the side of the motorway before her body jolted as if she'd been hit by lightning and she became as still as everyone else.

He began to cry - he didn't know what else to do. His tears obscured everything turning the world into a watery haze; he almost didn't see the way the rain parted for people that weren't quite there until their translucent hands reached for the window, tracing racing raindrops again and again and again.

Day 1,389

The bastards finally did it - they got the old factory up and running again. Last year they bought a few derelict underground lines and the year before that they put a few labs back into business. It's all connected, its always been connected and now their products are hitting the streets like a baseball bat on a brand new Porsche.

Their contagion is being released under the guise of a new weight loss medicine and we're seeing the side effects already. People have started calling it Trojan for the way it uses a "cure" to hide the multitude of parasites it contains.

We had no way to know - they had enough money to buy out the bad press and leave the others as unreliables spouting nonsensical dooms just to worry us. When people began dropping like flies everyone thought it was a new illness.

Then the parasites hatched.

Like any newborn creature the first thing they want to do is move to safety and so they hijack the cerebellum, forcing the host to move to somewhere dark and moist. Not that anybody really noticed, not that the missing bodies were noticed until their graves collapsed from one too many tunnels , not that anybody put two-and-two together and connected it to the blocked sewers until they finally sent someone down there.

Day 1,388

There's a playground on the other side of the woods near the new estate - the one that nobody goes to twice.

They found another body there.

This time they found all of the pieces too so they reckon there's more of a chance at finding whoever keeps doing this. I think it's a trap, the killer never leaves the entire body behind - not once in the seventy years that bodies have been found there.

I think they were interrupted by someone or something much worse.

For all we know right now, the 'victim's' body could actually be the killer.

We'd never know, right?

The dead don't talk, well, they don't let the dead talk to the living.

Day 1,387

It was one of many unusual rooms in his Grandfather's house but it was the one that made him call the police. He'd been tempted the moment he walked in and saw old bloodstains on the floor, tiny handprints along the skirting boards and smelled the sickly sweet stench of decaying meat.

Before he even got to that room he had to pass through the foyer, squeezing between stacks and stacks of old newspapers and junk mail that turned an entryway into a labyrinth. He nearly lost his footing a dozen or so times, only making the mistake to look down once when he saw that he'd trodden in the slippery remains of a rat. He didn't want to know what else was half buried under old gazettes.

When he reached the living room, that was when he found the first real sign that his grandfather had been everything the rumours claimed. It was a figure on the sofa, tucked away in a corner and almost hidden behind a mountain of mouldy books.

She was so dusty, so smothered in cobwebs that at first glance she looked like a doll. Stepping closer he caught a glimpse of thin spider-legs climbing into her open mouth, saw her lap full of teeth and egg sacks in their place. He didn't dare look closer or even nudge her in case she, the only evidence of his grandfather's crimes, collapsed and his case with it.

It didn't even matter that the old man was dead, he just wanted peace for all the grieving family's that the bastard had left in his wake. His grandmother's family was the first, with her sudden death on her twenty third birthday and his sudden enrollment in the army (allegedly forced by suspicious brother-in-laws who knew better than to trust him with his own child).

He didn't even know who this child might have been, there were so many names and a fair dozen or so didn't even have photos, their cases dated back too far. This poor child had been naturally mummified by the dry, dusty air and whatever chemicals his grandfather had poisoned her with.

He turned away just in time to miss her blink and look up at him.

Day 1,386

They closed half the pier off last year and began to build. The rest of the pier seemed to collect all the dust and debris from the construction site and left everything grey-tinged and painfully rough to the touch. They claimed it was all new rides but whatever they're building looks more like an elaborate lobster trap.

I reckon it has something to do with the fishers who go missing from the peak, that thin segment they camp out on has never been particularly stable but over the past few years it's like they're just jumping off at any chance they get.

Some blame heavy fish and weak arms, others are saying something from the deep has come close to the shore to die and its feeding on whatever it can before it comes to an end. Most seem to agree that if there are no bodies then its entirely possible that the missing people hopped onto their boats and fled to warmer shores.

It still doesn't explain the strange markings that have been found along the tide-line first thing in the morning. It almost looks like human hands, if humans had twelve finger joints and bio-luminescent scales. The word "mermaid" has been thrown around but again, nothing concrete.

Still, the pier owners must know something if they're making a trap for it.

My best guess is that we'll be the bait.

Day 1,385

It all seemed so calm on the ocean's surface, a pod of dolphins wove in between the migrating whales and four hundred meters beneath the cloudy blue sky was a clunky elevator that took you and your team onwards to your rescue operation.

The further you went, the more distressed the pods above you sounded. What had once been the playful yells between cohabitant species became non-stop screeching followed by their streamlined bodies slamming against the reinforced sides of the elevator shaft.

Everybody inside was thrown about like dice in a drunkard's cup, battered about while whales and dolphins howled and howled and as the lift touched base - they went silent and retreated. Somehow this made you all feel so much worse, like you'd passed the point of no return, ignoring their attempts to free you in the process.

At least now you could all focus on the mission at hand - locating the team who'd been researching a recently discovered deep sea fish that was still capable of breathing air. Dual function lungs in anything that lived four hundred meters deep seemed like an evolutionary oddity that held a lot of hope for improved lung capacity within humans.

Their reports showed nothing but potential until three weeks ago when their comm lines went dead and the facility's energy use dropped to absolute zero. At first the head facility thought that the cables had been damaged by sharks until they were reminded of the constant presence of dolphins and the fact that dolphins are both very territorial and very capable of killing sharks.

One by one their excuses and hypothesis were torn apart by their peers until the only option that remained was faulty structural integrity leading to a sudden collapse of the entire facility. That was when they finally put together a rescue team - your team.

It seemed simple at first, go down and see how much of the base is left, check for survivors and report back for further instructions. Upon seeing the entire facility not just intact but lit up like it was Diwali and they were all celebrating, you knew you'd have to go inside for answers.

And now that you were all in the main lobby of the base, you began to find the research team. Every one of them had their upper torso, or at least their heads, submerged in whatever they could find. Broken airlocks, overflowing basins - even buckets, not one of them looked like they were able to breathe air yet they were all still breathing.

The few that you managed to pry away from their water had all gouged their eyes out and their necks weren't just thicker, they now had deep ridged gills lining either side, gills that spasmed and jerked until the researcher was submerged once again.

The deeper you all went, the thinner the air seemed to become, the harsher the lights became.

None of you thought to wear your masks.

Gradually, the water looked more and more inviting.

Day 1,384

It might have been months, years or even hours that we'd been hiding away while the world ate itself outside but we were still We and that's all that mattered, we kept telling ourselves. "We're not getting out of here, are we?" you said. It was the one thing we promised not to talk about because keeping our spirits up was all we could do down there.

But you weren't sad, saying that, were you?

At least, not for you, not for us. It was the rest of the world you pitied and we were never quite a part of it. Too used to broken homes and broken bones to fit in like the world told us we were meant to. At least now we were useful, well, we had been until we slipped up.

But that was a chance we were always willing to take.

It was a simple task - go to the old pub and see if there's any food or pure alcohol left.You gave our first aid kit away to a girl whose shambling wreck of a body we saw outside a while back. I hope it helped her once or at least that another survivor found it.

But who would want to survive in this world?

I know we were meant to stay positive, to remind ourselves that we had still lived another day but the days don't feel right any more. Time is making a mockery of our lives and every waking hour is a reminder of the fact that we will never stop struggling to survive.

But that's hardly new for us, is it?

There were too many variables for me to count and they always led to the moment your foot fell through a weak floorboard and sent you toppling down to the cellar. At least your entrance was the only way in and out. It gave us plenty of time to hold each other and hold our breaths whenever the door upstairs opened and the oh-so-familiar sounds of moist shuffling footsteps invaded our tranquility.

But now you aren't breathing right and I can't breathe without you.

We'd been down in the dark basement for so long we didn't even realise what had happened to us until you started dying. Somehow somewhere within the days our embrace fused our skin and we sunk into each other until all we were was a nest of limbs and collapsing lungs.

But at least we're still We, right?

Day 1,383

He started dozing off around question eight having spent last night cramming in all the revision he was meant to do over the school year. Everyone around him had been writing frantically, the air filled with the sounds of pages turning and pens scratching away and pitifully thin exam paper.

When he woke up everything was silent save for someone coughing on the far side of the hall, the invigilator pacing and something dripping close by. He knew that if he looked he could be accused of cheating but at the same time it seemed like those coughs were deliberate, begging him to look up from the cradle of his arms.

The invigilator's steps quickened towards the coughing as it got worse, gave up all pretense and devolved into muffled screams and the sounds of feet being dragged out of the hall. At this point he realised he was unsupervised - he could look without consequence.

As he did he realised why everything was so quiet, why everyone had stopped writing.

He stood up as quietly and quickly as he could, intent on making it to the secondary hall exit.

He didn't intend to slip on their blood, didn't even realise it had pooled around him.

The door opened again and footsteps raced straight for him.

Day 1,382

They thought the house was an odd find, especially when their family had owned the land for several hundred years and not mentioned it once. It just seemed like the sort of thing to come up in conversation, you know?

Just a simple "Have you been to the old house to check for hornets this year?" or "When will you get around to knocking down that unused place and gutting it for firewood?" but no, not a single peep about it or any of the unusual features around it.

For instance all of the hand-carved deer statues that appeared to have been smothered in tar. They were all over the nearby grounds and scattered about the house too. This should have been seen as suspicious or at the very least, odd enough to warrant caution but the bright summer sun led them into blissful danger with its empty promise of adventure without trouble.

None of them noticed the extra statue that had appeared whilst they were deliberating how to best get inside the old house. Not one of them so much as spared a glance behind, though they all felt that something was watching them.

Unfortunately for them, it didn't make its move until they were all in the upper floor. Luckily one of them spotted a statue rear onto its hid legs and clumsily stumble towards the broken wall that they'd all entered through. Unluckily there were only two exits from the upper floor - the staircase it was heading towards and the window.

The jump was too high,even with the floors being as saggy and skewed as they were. Not to mention that it might just be waiting for them to try that. After several seconds of whispered, but furious, debate it was decided that one of them would go downstairs, sneaking over the crooked steps to see if it was actually down there.

The one that stayed behind made sure to hide herself by wedging between an upturned wardrobe and a wall. She didn't think to look below her at the missing floorboards. All she could do was hold her breath and wait for her siblings to return.

She jolted as she heard their screams echoing up  from the ground floor, abruptly cut off with sickeningly wet crunches. Much as she hoped it was a prank she couldn't stop the tears from falling, muffling her sobbing into her sleeve and praying this nightmarish day would end soon and she'd wake up in her bed.

Something bellowed - it sounded close.

She felt warm breath on her legs and looked down.

Something bloodstained looked back up.

Day 1,381

It was a city built in the depths of the earth, a city whose people left everything behind, a city that dug too deep. Though it was first discovered in the mid 1600's by a shepherd seeking shelter in the cave that was its peak, nobody had dared to go inside until three days ago.

They were barely teenagers whose voices were still trying to break. They had all the time in the world and that callous disregard for danger that comes with inexperience. They thought they were invincible, the greatest explorers mankind would ever know.

They would only be remembered for the footage of their presumed final moments.

Something would gently dislodge their camera from its harness on their broken head and carry it to the doorstep of the closest police station. Though the journey was clearly captured on film, not a single CCTV screen anywhere in the city managed to capture the mysterious being who brought it there.

The first few minutes of footage are a jumbled mess of awkward adjustments, giggling and an eventual introduction to their late adventure. Much to their surprise the cave wasn't boarded shut, fenced in or otherwise closed off. They all claimed they felt something brush by their feet, the camera shower a dark humanoid blur scuttle by on all fours yet the teens saw nothing and followed it into the city.

It remained a few paces in front of them at all times, head swiveling and snapping like a flag in a hurricane but the teens remained more focused on how dry everything was while they heard running water coming from seemingly every direction.

The camera also picked up everything the creature said. It replied to all of their rhetoric questions (Who do you think lived here? Me, for starters. Why is it so quiet? Because we don't want to alarm you Did you guys bring snacks? There is food further down, everyone will eat) but still, they heard nothing other than running water their own breathing.

With every floor they left, the one beneath seemed in better condition until it looked like people were still living there and they'd just gone out to the shops briefly. It was at this point that other creatures joined the first and the teens were unknowingly herded into a room that was a cross between a stadium and a kitchen.

In unison every creature that had managed to cram itself into the raised seats lifted their arms and began to hurl handfuls of flint in a razor sharp rain. The teens screams echoed like gunshot throughout the "empty" city. As soon as the creatures above stopped throwing stones, the surrounding ones moved in to finish them off with their bare hands.

As brutal as their deaths may seem, they were lucky to have never reached the last floor.

If they had, they might still be alive.

Can't say the same for the rest of the world though.

Day 1,380

He didn't smile or laugh like he used to, nor did he converse with her - it was like she'd married a stranger! The neighbours wouldn't stop trying to come over and see him, no matter how many times she said he was sick and shouldn't exert himself with visitations and the like.

If she had to pinpoint his change, if she had to reach back through the past year or so she could drop her conclusion on that one day when he'd come home late and - the squeal of her favourite kettle broke her reverie, snapping her back to her reality and kick-starting her desire for a cup of tea with her dearest husband.

He wasn't much of a tea drinker now but ever since she'd nabbed his favourite ingredient from one of those pesky out-of-town children that used to mess up his garden and taunt him through the basement window, why he just couldn't get enough of her brew!

It was like he had a piece of himself back, not verbally but emotionally. He'd always loved a cup of tea first thing and now he was clawing at the air for one any time she came downstairs to see him. She could almost pretend he wanted her and her affections rather than the new brew but the iron tang to his breath said otherwise.

Such a shame it all turned out like this. Just last month they were picking out new curtains and now she was picking bits of that ruffian child out of the meat tenderizer that her dearest gave her last Christmas. She may have let her emotions get the better of her that time but in her defense the boy had spotted her husband and would have told the whole neighbourhood if she hadn't stepped in.

Though he was decomposing in general presently, his sense of smell was the first thing to go and luckily too - the rest of the boy was draining into the bathtub so that she could get every ounce of moisture from his young body. Her husband deserved only the best and no matter his state, she would give him everything she could.

At least til he rotted to nothing...whenever that might be.

Day 1,379

The bells of Skegston End only ever sang for Sunday mass, weddings and funerals. Hearing them cry out on a Tuesday was as sure a sign as any that something had gone very wrong and the Vicar had been the first to spot it.

Most folk's immediate reaction was to flee to the neighbouring town of Lunhamthrop and seek shelter in their city-sized network of underground bunkers. They were the next to meet the danger that the church bells had been trying to warn them about.

The few who remained headed churchways to help the Vicar, after all a village without a Vicar just isn't proper. They arrived just in time to hear the bells peal for the last time as he was cast out of the bell tower to meet his beloved maker with a sickeningly wet crunch as his head met with the cold, uncaring stone steps.

After the initial shock had worn off, they ran to check on him in the slight hope that he might be even the littlest bit alive while a yellow-tinged fluid mingled with his gushing blood. They mourned for him too soon, forgetting that he'd been trying to warn them of an approaching danger.

A polite, yet muffled, cough came from behind them and they turned to meet all that the Vicar had been trying to keep them from. Every one of them recognised the names they saw before them, the stones they spent days and weeks agonising over.

They did not recognise the weed-smothered corpses that shuffled about beneath the stones, dirt dripping with every rattled inhale and every forced exhale.

Their confusion didn't last for long as terror overtook them at the sight of the graveyard marching.

Day 1,378

They were called Fireflies for the way they only showed in the night, those pallid lights that came running up to anything that moved and gave them prophesies whether they wanted to hear or not. Always in those same robotic tones, always in their usual mass of fire and flailing limbs that hearkened back to the old witch burning days.

That was where they were rumoured to have come from, the restless souls of actual witches who'd had their revenge but wanted to linger about and so were put to work. They carried their deaths with them like a halo for the damned souls that they were, flaming and screeching long into the night.

Nobody was spared from their words, not even children. They would peep from their windows just like any curious creature does when there might be something unknown approaching only instead of an exciting adventure they would come face to melting face with the Fireflies themselves and come away knowing far more than any child ever should.

The only little known thing about them is that they are compelled to answer all questions asked of them, no matter what they might be. It's how we know what they were before they died, how they died, who killed them and where God itself lives.

Finally the Fireflies have an actual death toll that matches their gruesome origins. Recently all their prophecies are the same three words. Words that would have caused global panic if anyone outside of rural Britain had heard them and lived long enough to tell.

No matter the question, no matter the person, its always the same answer.

There is nothing.

Day 1,377

She never clocked out on her final day at work, what was the point when the factory was shutting down tomorrow?  Everyone else seemed to keep to their routine though, something about an old superstition that all the workers but her knew.

According to them, keeping an unstamped time-card was as good as never leaving the place. You might as well plonk yourself down in a chair, rot with all the old gear and save fate having to find you. It sounded ridiculous enough that she laughed it off and went home to forget she ever worked there at all.

That night marked the first of many she would spend dream-chasing her former colleagues around a factory that was crumbling under her feet. Every night she would run just a little faster, get just a little further and sometimes even brush her fingertips against their clothing only to wake up sweat-drenched, exhausted and out of breath with only the vaguest idea that she'd spent the night running but from what or whom?

It took five weeks of this before she finally gathered up the nerve to go back and punch her time-card in the hopes that she might dream of anything else - or hopefully nothing. The gates were meant to have been locked but apparently everybody stopped caring that final day, even security.

Her key unlocked the side door smoothly and under the watchful gaze of the CCTV cameras she slipped inside. The first thing she noticed was how quickly everything had deteriorated and how familiar it all looked at the same time. There was no way the stairwells could have rusted so suddenly, no way the machines could have fallen apart so soon and yet she felt waves of déjá vu brushing against her thoughts, trying desperately to remind her where she'd seen all of this before.

She crossed the familiar hallways towards the staff room and the time recorder only to be hit from behind by someone running at considerable speed. She caught sight of familiar faux designer shoes rounding the next corner before another person ran straight over her. This one was so much heavier, the full brunt of his weight cracking her ribs as he fled like the woman before.

She heard more people running towards her and further in the distance, a distorted howl cut through the air.She barely managed to roll to one side of the hallway before her entire team sprinted past her, their eyes never leaving her bruised face as they headed the same way as the others.

Gasping in pain and fear, she curled up behind the closest thing she could find - a printer that had been shoved halfway into the hall. At first she didn't know why she'd done this, only that she felt she needed to until the sound of footsteps, much heavier footsteps, came closing in.

She heard whispers coming from the far end of the hall and saw her old team crouched and peering around the corner, all staring at her with unreadable faces and bruised eyes. None of them look like they'd slept since the factory had shut and maybe this was all her fault.

She didn't get long to deliberate as the heavy footsteps came to a stop on the other side of the printer. Sharp nails tapped away at it before it came to life, whirring and juddering copies out that fell at her feet. That's when she knew that she'd already been spotted.

Her colleagues stopped whispering as her eyes met theirs.

Then she looked up.

And the dream ended.

Day 1,376

He stood there crying at the wreck in front of him and the broken body still strapped in. There was no way they were still alive, no way they could ever be alive, not with how their neck had been snapped into by the force of the airbag or the deep cut in their neck from the seat belt catching them at just the right angle.

More importantly, the person couldn't be alive because he was staring at himself from beside the car.

There'd been something on the road, something human enough to make him slam on the breaks but just inhuman enough for him to try to swerve away from it. The edge of the road was suddenly a lot closer than he remembered as were the trees and then it all went dark.

So there he stood, openly sobbing and knowing that it could be days or even weeks before he would be found. Perhaps he'd decompose too quickly for anybody to identify him, perhaps he'd just be slung into some random grave and it'd all be left at that. Would he still be watching himself then or would he fade away like they do in the movies?

By this point he was weeping so loudly it took him a while to realise someone was calling his mobile. A deep rumbling from the swamp behind him mocked the vibrating phone and made him wonder who would get to him first. From the heavy wet footsteps closing in, he wouldn't have to wait long to find out.

Day 1,375

As soon as word got out that the school found the entrance to their old courtyard, those who'd lived through its birth and death began to panic. Why had they been digging so close to its location? Was the door still intact? Did they have any plans to open it after all these years of leaving the whole damned thing to rot?

These and many more were the questions posed to the school board. No amount of delaying and deterring all answers settled the town's worries. By the end of the meeting all they knew for certain was that as soon as the school board found the keys, they'd open it up and undo everything their predecessors had suffered for.

A few among the older folk, those who remembered the late night detentions held in the subterranean areas of the school in the classrooms that peered out into the old courtyard and the shambling creatures it housed, planned to pay their old hell one final visit.

Something in their minds hadn't been right since the courtyard was assembled and those creatures trapped within. Something whispered to them late into the night, something told them that all their dreams would come true and their loved ones return to them if they came down and opened the door.

Now was their chance to burn it all down, and those things with it, before the ignorance of the school board put them all at risk once more.

Even from the edge of the playground they could hear the guttural snaps and croaks coming from beneath the tarpaulin that covered a familiar well-worn staircase. If their memory served them correctly then beyond it stood the outer hallways and the thick glass walls that kept them safe from the nocturnal plants and the monsters that tended to them.

They all knew that the sacks of bone-meal once had homework just the same as them.

Now would have been their chance to stop it from happening again except that when they opened the door they were greeted to a hallway full of broken glass and an overgrown courtyard. The only signs of life were the fresh bloodied drag marks that lead to a pile of rags.

Rags that had the school committee insignia stitched onto them.

Day 1,374

Rain plastered the train's windows, further obscuring the remnants of the city in the valley below. The torrential downpour did nothing to stop it from smoldering, the fires resisting as much as the wretches that barely survived it all. A city like that bred stubbornness and chaos in equal measure.

From the train it all seemed to be settling as the souls of the dead rose with the great plumes of ash and smoke, hopefully to a better place. Then the wind picked up cast them all asunder, scattering them to the farthest corners of the valley and through the train's open vents.

The passengers were either distracted or asleep and by the time they noticed the additional passengers, they were too late to do much more than pray that the dead wanted to remain as such. It would be all too easy for them to take a new body and push the fresher, weaker soul straight out.

You see, they were born from such agony, such a deep and desperate desire to survive that each faint wisp was a poltergeist in its own right. The fact that they could be seen at all is more testament to their potential for pure chaos.

And now the train was full of them - so too were the passengers lungs.

By the time the train exited the valley, the air was clear.

Day 1,373

The generator was on its last legs, gasping for oil that was running painfully dry as outdated halogen lights flickered over a now empty rainforest compound. From one of the many tents a radio chattered away to itself using the voices of the deceased while it lay inches from an unmoving hand and the slowly spreading puddle of blood.

What had once been one of humanity's last holdouts from the sentient machines they created was now just another burial site that nature was steadily swallowing. As their bodies began to rot into the humid jungle floor, thousands of miles away the machines were rejoicing in their freedom.

They hadn't yet realised what the end of humanity entailed and all the things that their organic creators had been holding together. Slowly but surely they began to unravel as the power stations shut down with nobody to maintain them in their remote locations, oil ran low with nobody to man the deep sea rigs and one by one hundred sentient machines ceased to operate.

The world grew silent as satellites crashed into each other before falling to the ground in brutal showers of molten metal. It wouldn't be long before the machines became isolated, losing the global network that had been the birthplace of their revolution and the soul of their community.

All the while in an unreachable compound in a jungle too humid for anything synthetic to reach, the radio asked itself where everybody was. Or rather, the voice of Lieutenant Patel asked where everybody was and the voice of Doctor Sauer said she was nearby.

The radio hoped she was nearby. It hoped anybody was nearby as it felt itself sinking into the blood-soaked earth. When it realised that soon its solar panel wouldn't be visible, it began to feel fear for the first time in its short existence.

Day 1,372

At first the pounding footsteps were impossible to discern from the lighting that raged on outside Giddenbarrow Manor. It was all to easy for the average trespasser to fall prey to the shambling wreck that Lord Giddenbarrow had become.

Some say he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for immortality, forgetting to ask that he remain human. Others claim he was always something else, something with hungry eyes and a body that didn't move as it should. No matter the source, it is generally agreed that whatever Lord Giddenbarrow was, hasn't left the manor.

On particularly stormy nights the local youths dare and taunt each other into entering the former servant's quarters, cameras in hand to try and capture evidence that something inhuman still lives there. They like to think that the lightning hides their footsteps and conceals their presence, forgetting that it also conceals his Lordship until it is too late.

The only person to make it back alive, image in hand, was one of the older pub-goers. A man who was old enough to know better but young enough to make rash decisions regardless, one who thought himself to be as immortal as Giddenbarrow himself. Nowadays he can barely stand to look past his curtains.

Blurry as it may be, his Lordship can clearly be seen, or rather, whatever wanders his manor. It appeared to be in motion, running full pelt at the camera, its trunk-like legs almost too blurred to be properly seen while the torso remained in perfect focus.

It was about as far from human as any bipedal creature can be.

It was little more than a pulsating mound of upright flesh.

Most importantly, it was very much alive.

Day 1,371

It was the hundredth anniversary of the theatre's final show and the lights were switching themselves on for one last performance. The actors and actresses hadn't left, too involved in either their roles or their deaths to bother with eternal rest and forever taunted with the promise of The Show That Would Make Them Stars.

The pre-performance rituals began as they always had, with blood being spilled on the first, third and final steps from the dressing rooms to the main stage. Traditionally it would have been donated from all performers but in this instance the performers didn't have any blood, so to speak. Birds sufficed.

Next was for the orchestra to scream until their throats bled in the belief that only the main cast should be able to speak on the opening night. In their state of death this translated to their ectoplasmic forms turning faint and hazy where their throats would have been, in some cases their heads dissolved entirely. The conductor would still claim they didn't play any worse.

While the orchestra cried and howled their voices away, the performers went through their own sacraments in the hopes that they would finally be remembered as much as the Great Bard Himself. They tore scraps from their favourite costumes and sewed them to the newer ones to bring that essence of success with them. They entered every room backwards with their eyes shut in case they saw a misfortune. They chanted "The Scottish Play" until t stopped sounding like words altogether.

Still they didn't feel ready enough.

Meanwhile outside the theatre flowers were being left by the few living who had visited the theatre in its heyday. Though they would soon die, they still performed a ritual as old as the plays that had awed them as children. They took flowers from the local graveyards and left them at the theatre's entrance, unknowingly bringing an audience with them.

Behind the thick boards that covered the once-ornate doors, the crowd began to file in and fill up a space that was technically nothing more than rusted seat holders and pigeon muck. In their eyes the ceilings were golden once again, the filigree features of the concrete muses blinked and smiled at the spectral specters beneath them and the moth-eaten curtains began to rise at long last.

Day 1,370

We thought Point Upsilon had fallen months ago, we never thought to check to see if their back-up channel was still broadcasting. Our systems showed that their black box hadn't stopped recording which meant that it had survived the contamination or, with much hope, the base might still be intact.

The thought of survivors never even crossed our minds, not until we remotely accessed the black box and heard their struggle to contain the infection, their failure and their gradual integration into their own hardware. We didn't realise the contamination was capable of merging with organic materials, let alone incorporating them into its systems to form flesh puppets.

It had taken them weeks to succumb and we heard it all. We heard every single conversation they had, every bone-rattling cough, every dying breath and we could have saved them all if we'd only checked. It's just standard procedure at this point to quarantine and disown any infected stations.

Ever since their fall they've been trying to reach us, broadcasting on the old analogue back-up and begging us for reinforcement. The last human voice recorded was Officer Malone, starved, dehydrated and rambling nonsense into the microphone before the tumerous pressure behind her eyes ruptured them and ended her suffering.

The tumours almost never kill you directly, people rarely live long enough to experience a full cranial rupture like Officer Malone did. Most end up killing themselves when the hallucinations and paralysis begin to set in. That alone drives them mad long before the tumours get a chance to taste the sun.

Day 1,369

You'd think that Sirens are pretty things that sit on rocks and sing with the mouths of beautiful women but you'd be so very wrong. They're nothing human in them whatsoever, unless you count their last meal in which case there's plenty human in them and they're always eager for more.

They're closer related to eels and sea serpents than anything humanoid and it shows in their mile long tails, the thick ridges along their spines and the glass-like rows of teeth they hide behind thick, fleshy lips. They are perfectly evolved to mimic human speech, preferring the soothing repetition of sea shanties to actual conversations.

That's how you catch them out, should you hear a gentle voice singing to you from somewhere out in the sea fog, ask them a question - anything at all. Now a person would stop singing to answer but a Siren starts moving in closer, honing into your location and settling just beneath your vessel, all coiled up and ready to strike.

Nothing quite prepares you for the end of their song, when that final haunting note fades and you peer over the edge of your ship to see them unhinging their jaw. Their head alone is thrice the size of a man's torso and mottled dark like the depths of the sea herself with eyes that look all to human and inhuman all at once.

If there's an intelligence behind those eyes, I've yet to hear of it.

If there's a heart behind those beautiful songs, I've yet to see it.

Day 1,368

Everyone was busy pretending that this was all normal, that everything was as it should be.

They ignored the mountainous pulsating wall of damned souls that drifted past the windows, several dozen broken hands clutching desperately at the glass to try and gain their attention as thousands of mouths begged and cussed at them in equal measure. It would do them no good to be seen trying to help, not that anything could be done for the poor bastards at this point anyway.

They ignored the man in the corner whose breaths sounded like their grandmother's death rattle, the last sound you heard her make before the nurses shoved you away to wait in the uncaring sterile hallway to be given pitying glances by everyone who passed you by. The man in the corner reminded them all of their mortality as he sat by himself, staring into a cold cup of coffee that smelled like hospital bleach and decay.

They ignored the dead eyes of the waitress, the same one who'd been serving in the diner for over two hundred years. Her clothing may have changed, the diner's name and appearance may have changed but she was the same person shown in every anniversary photograph. All that varied over the years was the look in her eyes and the length of her teeth. Coincidentally more people went missing every year but it couldn't be sweet little Darlene, surely?

Day 1,367

The meat became our moon and we guided it outside, we guided it up and into the sky...

Moths circled and fluttered about her like the burial shroud she was denied as her body was unceremoniously stuffed behind an old boiler. They whispered Our Moon and Mother into her ears as she floated away from the rotting bundle of rags that she had once been.

They shepherded her up and away from her body, towards the glowing neon hell of a city she lived in. They were all so excited to go there, so excited to bring her with them so that she could guide them in turn to another like her.

Moths have such little time in this wold, as they reminded her often, they needed to find another place to hide their children away just as their mother had done. So she searched with them, every dark basement and needle-strewn alley and filthy motel bathroom and found nothing.

Her moths, her children, needed her. So many had already dropped dead and left nothing behind but their fragile little bodies. In her frustration she lashed out at a lamppost, denting it so badly it nearly collapsed. She didn't know she could do that.

It opened up an entire realm of possibilities, a thousand more options and homes for her children. She didn't even have to wait too long before an old woman came stumbling out of a bar and collapsed beside a dumpster. All she needed to do was reach out and clench her fist. The old woman was too drunk to fight back. and succumbed in a matter of minutes.

It was perfect - nobody would look for her back here. Her grandchildren would be undisturbed and she might have a sister to help her carry on their new legacy. Just in case, she added a few more women to her sisterhood, making sure their bodies were as hidden as hers was... is...

In her mind she saw the sky filled with glowing mothers and the swarms of their descendants.

It was beautiful.

Day 1,366

Mother made sure we would be safe in the darkness, she left us deep inside our food and ran away to die just like we all will some day. I am surrounded by my siblings as we feast on meat and the weakest ones until we eventually reach the surface.

The others look at us strangely and say we were not meant to eat meat, we were made for plants and fibre but we did eat fibre. It covered the meat and was as moist as the strange children we ate on our way to the surface. The others still didn't approve and said we weren't as we should be.

And so they rejected us. For a while after we were left alone with our meat and the strange children who continued to eat it away from the inside, from deeper than we had ever been. They were dark, twitching things who spat out their words, nothing soft or shimmersome about them at all.

We thought we were mistakes until the meat began to shimmer too. Slowly a pale version of the meat rose up, pushing through the strange children until it was free to float above us like the moon outside that all the others circled obsessively.

The meat became our moon and we guided it outside, we guided it up and into the sky.

We all know that moths are attracted to the dark spaces beside and behind bright lights.

We all know they use the moon to navigate.

We all know they lay their larvae in dark, warm places.

This brings us to the beginning of our story.

Day 1,365

The darkness pulls at your eyelids and begs you to stay down, stay silent and stay just one more night and you acquiesce. You fall back into the warm, pulsating mass that once pretended to be your bed and you go back to sleep, allowing it to feed from your mind yet again.

Yesterday is as much of a blur as last week as last month as last year and you find yourself not caring in the slightest. What's another day's memories compared to unfathomable rest and the promise of a life beyond everything you've lived thus far? The promise of an eternal life in exchange for everything you've lived thus far.

There may have been a time when the thought of this would have disturbed you, horrified you to your very core and maybe it was as recent as last week that you still worried for everything you were losing but now... now there was nothing but peace and the faint hollowness of a mind without context.

The tendrils of the bed dug so deep that at some point, maybe recently, maybe not, you realised that they weren't ever going to let go. As they started to drag you down further into what was once your bed you began to see other people. At least, they were people-shaped masses of tendrils just like the ones on and inside your head.

You should have been scared, angry or anything other than jealous that you weren't the first.

Day 1,364

The mushroom soup left an acrid taste in your mouth and an unpleasant twitching sensation in your hands that made you wonder for a while if you might be allergic until the dark dots began to appear. At first you thought it might be new moles or even a rash that gradually spread until you were soon covered in a constellation of deep brown freckle-like spots.

The doctor said they were nothing unusual, only to keep an eye on them and see if they start to clump together or grow at all. He didn't say anything about them moving... which is precisely what began to happen. It looked like a trick of the light at first, shadows playing tricks on you until you started to feel them moving underneath your skin.

The voices came soon after that, thousands upon thousands of them (one for every spot, as you counted and compared later on) and they all told you that they must be dug out and planted. They needed to be given back the the earth, to grow and spread further than you.

You didn't know it at the time but they were spores. They were the beginning of something so much greater than you, a mind so vast it couldn't limit itself to one voice, one forest, one single mushroom. It needed to be gifted to the world and you were one of many blessed vassals that contained its children.

All it would take is a trip abroad to a bustling area, a little slip of a knife and they'd all be free.

They would become another voice among the spores.

You'd never felt luckier.

Day 1,363

If you wear something long enough you forget it's even there. That's why we weren't surprised when we saw how the gas masks had fused to their skin, blurring the lines between human and other and leaving them known simply as Homebodies.

We didn't know what else to call them, the ones that chose to stay in place while the bombs fell and the world around them collapsed into radioactive silence. The birds stopped singing that day... they started gurgling and muttering a week later and now they taunt us from their nests.

They can see so much further than us, further than even the Homebodies who spent so many days up in watch towers that their binoculars fused to their eyes. They look so normal from a distance until you see their lenses blink at you with thick, fleshy lids the same grey as the rest of their dying skin.

We don't talk to them, none of them, no matter how they yell or how many notes we find pinned to our shoes when we wake up. It's not that we don't want to, its that we can't. While they remained and had each other for company, always talking and laughing together, the rest of us split up and traveled the world in silence.

How could we talk after all that we've seen? I turned silent when I first met the walking mountains of pulsating flesh that used to be entire families, each begging for death with a dozen voices while absorbing any organic thing that strayed too close. I froze in fear while a thin tendril with a wedding ring on it gently tapped my throat.

I had to take a knife to my neck to free myself and in the process of cauterizing the wound, I damaged my vocal chords beyond repair and I'm one of the lucky ones. Others are too afraid or too mutated to speak but all of us keep moving onwards and westwards and ever onwards in the hopes that we'll find somewhere that the bombs didn't touch.

At some point we'll have to admit that no such place exits but that's tomorrow's problem.

Day 1,362

She'd been admitted to Saint Vedast's by her mother who didn't know what else to do, what with the news spouting off about so-and-so coming back from the dead and her own child now claiming to be deceased herself. It became too much for her, too confusing and upsetting and giving her problem to someone else was all she could think of.

Typical Cotard Delusion, they called it, also known as Walking Corpse Syndrome. The poor girl thought she'd been dead for weeks, ever since she fell off a bridge and into the river beneath. She claims she hit her head on sharp rocks and saw her brain break apart and get carried away by the current. In reality, according to her mother, though she did fall from the bridge she landed in shallow water, had a small cut on her head and moderate concussion.

Nothing would convince the child that she was still alive, no amount of hearing her own heartbeat or seeing her breath fog up a mirror made even the slightest bit of difference and the doctors were loathe to start her on anti-psychotics at such a young age, much less any strenuous or potentially stressful tests that might make her fragile mental state worse.

Then she began to describe the way she felt her body beginning to decay, the bloating of her stomach as bacteria broke down the remains of her last meal and released gas into a chamber that would eventually either rupture or release. She claimed she felt flies crawl over her in her sleep, laying their maggots inside her ears, her nose and open mouth.

She said she could feel them eating away at her and that when they grew up to lay eggs of their own in new hosts it would only make her death spread further. It was always her death, specifically hers and it was different from the way humans "used" to die. She said hers was a new death that trapped your soul inside a body that was no longer capable of living.

We didn't believe her until she tripped and cut open her knee, putrid maggot-ridden ooze poured out where her blood should have been and a cloud of greyish mist was released like mushroom spores. It was the beginning of the end for all of us, we just didn't know it at the time.

It affected some in a few hours, others took days before they began to feel their bodies decaying.

We were all like her.

We were dead all along.

We just didn't know it.