Day 1,422

She was so much smaller than they remembered, looked so fragile that they hardly dared to breathe.

When they sent her away, the suitcase was barely bigger than her and now she was half the size of it.

How sweet she'd looked, how peaceful and serene she had been on that last day.

Now her face was frozen in a permanent state of terror, eyes shut tight and mouth open in a silent scream.

Luckily for them she had been too weak to break through the suitcase but she'd still shredded the lining.

The former pale pink silk was now stained in red from her torn nails and bruised knuckles.

Still, they'd buried her deep enough that nobody ever heard her.

If it weren't for the police dogs catching the scent of her blood she might have stayed there forever.

Day 1,421

It's been thirty four years since the bombs dropped and the air's still as dusty as day one. Life's moved on now, we aren't the same fragile children who'd been shoved into shelters without so much as a "be right back". We were grown and we were used to everything the world saw fit to throw back at us.

We knew it wouldn't be easy, going back to the surface after living out our formative years in stark concrete hallways. We'd spent so long breathing recycled air and eating our way through seemingly endless ration packs that anything else just seemed... wrong.

I wasn't the first to suggest going topside to check for other survivors, at some point or other everyone had asked to see if their parents were waiting by the main doors. When we finally had a majority vote to go and check, we didn't actually think we'd find anyone let alone find so many bodies that the first to open the door was crushed beneath their weight.

It took us days to move them all out with one of our own joining their ranks. We were all so busy carefully moving the bodies and cleaning the puddles they left behind that we barely noticed our observers. Of course we'd all heard of birds and a few of the older ones remembered seeing them in person but just like everything else, the bombs changed them.

It's hard to tell if they have feathers under all the dust but they still have beaks, they may be lined with broken bones and metal fragments but they're still the same sort of shape. Apparently birds used to be small too but the ones we saw could fit eight of us in their beaks at once with room to spare.

That's just how it is now, I suppose. Life adapts to whatever the world throws at it and we're just here for the ride. Maybe one day we'll find other survivors but until they we'll keep burying the dead, avoiding the birds and hoping the dead stay down for good this time.

Day 1,420

My parents never let me climb trees as a kid, not after they found me hanging from one. I still have no idea where that noose came from or how I managed to get caught up in it. As far as my parents are concerned, someone else was planning to use it and I ended up falling into the damn thing.

At least, that's what they always told me. When mum got sick they started telling me a lot more about my childhood, all the things I'd forgotten and all the little incidents that added up to a lifetime spent around the dying or dead without me even realising it.

They said a little girl used to follow me everywhere, that she floated when she thought nobody was looking and she'd always try to persuade me to climb into the trees with her. The first time I did was when I met the noose and it didn't get much better from there.

She would talk me into trying rat poison to see if it tasted as sweet as it looked or lying in the middle of the road to learn how to float like her. I don't remember any of this but my parents are still terrified of her and what she'll do when they die.

Even though she vanished when I turned fifteen I still catch glimpses of her little face.

She's been creeping closer for years.

Day 1,419

When the crate was opened the troop of clowns came tumbling out in a pile of partially-fused limbs.

Some clawed at the ground, the nearby heads angry and gasping for air, while others lay as limp and cold as the asphyxiated remains around them - most likely from the troop being stationary for too long and crushing themselves.

Eventually the troop would die from having too few living parts to sustain it but that was a process that could take years.

Like a beached whale it smothered itself with its own mass and inability to move on land.

Day 1,418

When we got the footage back from comet probe we sent out fifty years ago, we forgot we'd even added audio filters. The video alone was enough to send us all into a frenzy of excitement and furious examination of those brief seconds of film.

The audio wasn't picked up for nearly three months after the original footage came back. At first all we got was a mess of static, half-caught radio frequencies from Earth and the satellite colonies but deep underneath that was something new... something organic.

It took us a while to realise it was organic, that half-screech-half-word sounding noise that couldn't be traced back to anything from Earth. In fact the sound itself seemed to be coming from just past the camera's field of view, somewhere to the left of it behind a jagged wall of rock.

We became so fixated on finding the source of the noise, trying desperately to blame it on something from Earth, something safe, that by the time we realised that the comet had changed its course we were left with no time to do anything but brace for the impact.

Half of the world hoped that the new lifeforms on the comet would be friendly and that their technology would propel society forward into a new golden age while the rest just hoped to survive whatever would step onto our soil, if it even had legs.

We didn't expect them to have sent down bioweapons beforehand, let alone ones embedded within the visual and audio files of the comet we'd all become so obsessed with. The more the files were viewed, the worse the effects got so unsurprisingly the scientific community was the first to fall.

The rest of tech-savvy the world toppled not long after, leaving humanity back in the dark ages. With a comet full of something organic, something advanced enough to launch a planet-wide attack from a .mp3 file, something so utterly alien we didn't even have a name for it, incoming we counted our options.

We weighed our choices against all that we had left and found no reason to fight.

We just sat back and waited.

We weren't made to wait long.

Day 1,417

At first the news of the unearthed zoo shocked and saddened the world. It brought tears to their eyes to think that so many innocent and exotic creatures were buried alive by a bankrupt owner who would rather destroy everything he owned than sell it.

The tears didn't last long, the people behind them lasted even less.

When the broken bones began to mend, shrugging off fur and feathers alike, when the dead began to move, suddenly the world grew quiet and pretended that the zoo had never been found. Of course, this didn't save the local wildlife or neighbouring people but it made everyone else feel better.

Meanwhile the entwined remains of a clan of meerkats rolled themselves around like a jagged mix between tumbleweed and a bear trap, ensnaring rodents and stray cats without an ounce of mercy. Their leftovers were spat out and eventually began to move on their own, hunting and spreading their affliction as such things are wont to do.

It was only a matter of time before it hit humanity but by then, the rest of the organic world was long gone.

Day 1,416

In hindsight, adding a visual component to the black boxes might just have saved us, might have given us some clue as to how the contamination presented itself symptomatically. It's just that they look human enough to pass on eye level and they're just about organic enough to pass a biometric test - we were flying blind.

Literally, after a while. One minute you're reassuring a fragile survivor that they'll be okay and the next thing you know your eyes are beginning to fill with blood and pus as the contamination liquifies and expunge everything irrelevant to its own semi-organic systems as it worms its way towards your cerebral cortex and deep within your internal organs.

The few humans left, at least the few of us that are most likely to still be human, have gone into hiding not just from the world but from each other too. The contamination is no longer limited to physical contact, its airborne to an extent in that it now seems to hover around the host in a swarm of parasitic bacterium that merge with and overwhelm the surrounding microbiome of any organic being it comes into contact with.

It's been about nine years since I've seen another human and even longer since I've held or been held by one.

I'm starting to forget what we even look like.

Day 1,415

"Okay, but are you a human?"

"Definitely... probably?" they said, tilting their head with a smile that held too many inhuman teeth.

I mean, they were approximately human. They had most of the components to be considered a human just not in the right quantities and the rest were several species away from being even vaguely human but I do give them credit for trying.

And they must have been trying for quite some time judging by their outdated clothing and how grey their somewhat-human hair was. Their skin seemed to have come from one person and they hadn't quite got the sizing right. It wasn't too big, mind you, it was...well... skintight to use a pun.

Literally.

Every time they moved, some part of them creaked like worn leather and the faint cracks along their joints only became more pronounced over the course of our encounter. I had to wonder just how much longer they'd be able to hold themself together, if at all.

I never did find out exactly what they were underneath all of their attempted humanness. Part of me wanted to believe they were an actual human dressed up like a monster and not the other way around but like any sensible coward I made all the right excuses to leave when they mentioned, for the fifth time, just how pretty my teeth were.

Day 1,414

I knew he'd come back different, I just didn't realise how different he'd be.

Summer camp always brings you back slightly changed, always with those large eyes that have seen so much and done so much more than you as an adult can fully comprehend. They tell you all about their late night camping, the long hikes and tracking animal prints.

They don't tell you about the ones who miss the bus home.

They don't tell you in the hopes that you'll head out to find them and join them and there will be fewer problems for them. I did what I thought was right, I told the police and let them search while I remained at home trying to fund a larger, long term search in case they didn't find him or stopped after a week or so.

And last night he was outside the kitchen door.

I know it was him - he was wearing the gamer hat I got him for his birthday and he still had the same grey-blue eyes. The rest of him was a hulking bearish thing, fur dripping with something that stank all sickly sweet like the terminal ward of the local hospital.

He tried to speak, tried to say mom but all that came out was a low whine.

When he held out a trembling half-hand-half-paw, I knew I had a choice and I knew there'd be no going back. Behind him was a much larger beast that I suspect is his father. That man was always such a brute so this change suits him and maybe it'll suit me too.

He's still my baby and when he comes back tonight I'll join them and walk out to the woods one last time.

Day 1,413

It wasn't the screaming that woke you up, it was the stench of burning meat.

First time caught a glimpse at the cause of the scent you nearly collapsed, vomiting until all that came out was bitter saliva. There were more bodies lying around than you'd ever seen alive in your life. You hadn't thought it possible for there to be so many people all in one place.

Now you recognised how the screams marked the hours, each one a different section of the area marked for re-evaluation by creatures too vast to see and too inhuman to comprehend. They burnt and salted and burnt the world again and again until they found that it suited them.

At this point you'd died so many times, you could scarcely tellone life apart from another.

Day 1,412

You were never one for the old stories, never the intended audience, never got the messages and no damned dead relative stubbornly sticking around your apartment would change that. No amount of animal carcasses hidden under the sofa or warped faces peering from the other side of your mirror would make you move out or cleanse their grave or whatever it is that they wanted.

You weren't really paying much attention at this point.

At first it was a bit exciting - you didn't know what they'd do next or just how big their kills would get until it soon became clear that they were just another memory loop trying to act like a full person. It didn't take long before dealing with the-poltergeist-formerly-known-as-cousin-Jake became a daily scavenger hunt for dead animals stuffed in furniture and scrubbing away the messages written in their blood.

It was like having a large cat about the place except the cat could write and had no redeeming cuteness.

Some days you really wished you'd paid more attention when Father O'Lochlann taught the Sunday school classes on protection from the restless dead and how to guide them back towards the afterlife or God or whatever he used to say. In your defence you were nine and more interested in bugs.

Nine year old you would have loved all the shiny beetles that dead-cousin-Jake left in the fridge.

Present you was less enthused about the whole situation but there were worse roommates around. At least dead-cousin-Jake never brings anyone else back and hopefully he can't. Sure he makes a mess but he doesn't raise your bills beyond a few extra bottles of antibacterial spray every month.

All-in-all the restless son-of-a-so-and-so wasn't a total disaster, just another undead nuisance.

Day 1,411

Our homes will always be a part of us.

We leave too much of ourselves behind for there to be anything else.

Fallen hair, dust, childish scribbles hidden inside closets, faint speckles of blood on the tiles.

When we leave, we never truly go.

Something of us remains in the house and adds to the collection of partial souls they gather.

Day 1,410

When did the streets become so quiet and cold?
When did the pavement change from concrete to bones?
Why are the bones so small?

These and many more were the questions you asked yourself, yet not once did you think to turn back or even look behind you. Somehow the thought of there being a whole world behind you was more terrifying than the way your ankles began to sink into the bones.

It was hard to tell whether the sharp pains were from splintered bone digging into you or if the bones were dragging you down. Either way your pace never slowed and your eyes never left the horizon whose friendly cityscape seemed to gradually distort into a skeletal gathering.

They were tall, so very impossibly tall and growing taller still as you carried on towards them. You distantly wondered if you'd make it close enough to see just how tall they all were or if the bones would swallow you by then.

You didn't have to wonder long.

Day 1,409

It sounded just like the tone you hear when someone hangs up on you. It even said "the other person has cleared" over and over again until you end up walking right up to the desk it's hiding under, not that you can tell at first glance.

It's surprisingly flat for a creature that can eat a 6 foot man in less than a minute. Not at all what you'd expect from something that can clear an entire office block in about a day. It looked like a flat, fleshy, dark grey cushion that just so happened to be able to unfold itself like a well-read book.

Occasionally it would play up on its appearance rather than its vocal talents, choosing a seat in a quiet corner and opening wide the second someone's attention left as they went to sit down and then SNAP- they'd be folded like a lawn chair and swallowed in two bites.

Now the staff want to get rid of it, they're terrified that they might be next without a moment's notice but the bosses call it "incentive". If you're too scared to sit down then just imagine how much more work you can get done, how many more meetings you can set up to avoid being alone.

It worked too well for them to consider removal.

Day 1,408

It's in the way they smile, how it never meets their eyes, that's how you know they're infected.

It started with a crop of tainted lettuce, not that anyone knew until the farmer in question said he'd been dealing with a pesticide-resistant worm for years and had been brewing his own treatment without telling anybody.

Whatever he'd been spraying out there hadn't killed the worms, if anything it weeded out the weaker ones and left the strongest to breed until we were left with our current strain and even then they're always trying out new ways of spreading.

Weird as it may seem to talk about worms like they're sentient beings, these ones are or at least they're doing a damned good job at tossing together coherent speech through their host. They always go for the base of the brain, working their way up from the intestine through the D12 vertebra where it would slink its way up to total control.

They don't have perfect control, not with this generation of worm at least. It's the facial muscles that draw attention to it - the jerky marionette-manipulation between changing expressions or the way that words came out in a tangled mess while the face looked surprised that it had managed to speak at all.

They don't always speak but when they do they try to placate us, to reduce our fears and encourage us to accept them as a new way of thinking. Sadly this has actually worked to some extent and humanity dwindles in the face of a new human-worm hybrid that calls itself the next new thing.

Day 1,407

We used to see Mr Petrov standing at his upstairs parlour window every day, glass in hand that never seemed to empty no matter how many sips he took while he watched over the neighbourhood. Not once in all my life or my parents lives has he ever been outside or away from the window for more than a handful of minutes at a time.

The longest he was ever away for was when his wife was murdered and he left for three hours for her funeral. After that he went straight back to the window, glass in hand only now it's more often empty than full and he's more unkempt in appearance.

It was only a matter of weeks before he took to watching with the lace curtains closed so his body is obscured. We thought that maybe he was hiding just how disheveled he was becoming but after his head fell off, all our theories fell with it until all we knew was that he'd been murdered too.

The knife was still in his back when the police went in, finding him very much dead and strapped to an old sack barrow to keep him upright. If it hadn't been for that we might have found his body sooner and his killer too.

His house was sold last week, somehow that estate agent managed to convince some poor idiot to buy a house whose former owner still hasn't left. He can still be quite clearly seen at the upstairs parlour window watching over the street.

Only now we can only see him at night.

Day 1,406

They take so long to die that I'm sure the ones I buried out back might have moved.

One of them came at me today, plastic tubing extending out of its mouth like a hose.

It had the face of the girl who I brought a drink for back when everything was okay.

I checked a few minutes ago and it hasn't move just yet but I can still feel its eyes staring out at me.

It smiles around the hose in its face and I wonder if it remembers being human once.

I wonder if it was ever human to begin with.

Its arms twitched and it kept trying to speak until I told it to be quiet with the end of my baseball bat.

Day 1,405

Inmates had been disappearing for years and nothing was done, in fact the cell doors were left unlocked most nights. It was like we were being left for bait or maybe they just didn't care if a few low-rate dealers got out. Everyone knew they'd either be back or dead by the end of the year.

I've only been here for three months but five people have vanished already. There was no sign that they even left their cells, not even their cellmates noticed they were gone until morning.The wardens played their part well in pretending to look for people who would never be found before putting a warrant out for their arrest again.

A few inmates suspected some kind of black market organ trade going on and I wish they were right. It'd be so much safer then. I only know what's really happening because I was stupid enough to be awake when my cellmate was taken.

I'm still not sure if it was the feeling of something breathing on my face or the smell but I woke up to a pair of bright orange eyes that were about the size of my head. The rest of it looked like a cross between fresh tarmac and frankenstein, limbs with familiar tattoos appeared and disappeared into that weird pulsing lump of a body slowly and steadily, like it was breathing them.

Now here's something I promised myself I'd keep tilI died - I talked to it. I whispered to it and told it that if it took my cellmate I'd help it take the entire city and it nodded. It nodded and then it bent down and it just straight up absorbed him.

His arms waved to me, sinking into the creature as it left my cell and went on to the next one.

Day 1,404

At first it looked like the deer was just struggling to climb up the slippery banks of the river.

Then the water began to turn red as the waves lapped against the deer's sides, scraping away more and more fur and flesh until the waves met in the middle and the deer breathed its last.

By the number of bones that regularly washed up, it wasn't the first time this had happened.

Not by a long shot.

People assumed the lack of wildlife was due to the ever-expanding town and ignored all the signs.

Then the child was found, well most of them.

Their little water-bloated head barely looked human but the eyes... the eyes...

Day 1,403

The moors were frozen over but that still didn't stop them. We'd find their footprints among the morning frost, ice-slick mostly. Most of us knew better than to follow the trails, knowing they'd only lead us to the waterlogged grounds where they were fond of snatching at unsuspecting idiots.

In all honesty the moors should have been fenced off but some traitor in the council declared the creatures an endangered species and had the whole area signed off as a conservation site. What he didn't declare in all the documents was their food source - humans.

It would have been bad publicity but somehow the loudest voices that disagreed with him often went for walks along the moors and either vanished or turned up piece-by-piece, as the creatures like to do when they are both overfed and bored. Never a good combination.

People might not have minded all too much but those frozen footprints have been spotted heading around town. Just last morning I found a trail of them leading up to my windows and as someone who's unfortunate enough to live in a bungalow, where can I run to if they figure out how to break in?

Day 1,402

I only wanted to find out what my mother had been hiding in the garage all these years, I didn't know they were there. They never made a sound, not that they really could from the looks of it. She'd always been a wizard with her chicken wire sculptures but I never thought she'd use those skills to wire their mouths open like that.

I even recognised a few of them from their old uniforms. Classmates who'd vanished after going camping in the woods the other side of town, a checkout girl who'd flirted with me, the guy who nearly hit mother's car that one time.

There were still so many more that I don't recognise and that's what scares me the most. The fact that she'd not only been doing this for years but long enough for all their flesh to have rotted to the bone and I'd never so much as caught a whiff of peculiarity coming from the garage.

I always assumed she was using it to store junk, not run her own laboratory and certainly not one that aimed to prove the existence of souls by attempting to extract them via extreme trauma. I don't even know where she could have gotten that idea from but its in all her notes, the undeniable proof is plastered all over the place.

Three weeks ago she went in and didn't come back out.

That's when I broke the door down and found it all.

But they still haven't found her.

Day 1,401

Every night since that near-miss you had on the M25, you've had the same dream.

You wake up when that bleach-and-death hospital smell hits your nose, hooked to several beeping and blinking machines with no-one else in sight. It feels so real until you catch a glimpse of your reflection on one of the monitors and see how broken and distorted your body looks.

All of a sudden you can feel your legs, broken and crooked as they are, and you're on your feet before you can fully comprehend how you're even able to stand. Then you're running through stark white hallways with cheerful photos of flowers and medical charts plastered across the walls.

Following the exit signs you find yourself slowly walking towards those wide open doors. You're never quite sure why you walk at this point and why every inch of you screams that you should be quieter, be smaller and be quicker and just get out before you are seen.

And it always ends the same - your feet brush the threshold and countless arms haul you back in.

Not tonight though, tonight you're going to try to fight back.

Tonight you leave for good.

Day 1,400

Have you ever met someone whose personality just seems to soak up everybody else's until the room is nothing but their voice and their mannerisms? Some call it pack mentality and say it leaves when the proverbial group leader does, others claim it lingers about them for months on end.

Some say it never ends.

That you can wake up years from then and still hear their laughter in your head, still spread their mannerisms about like the common cold until everyone you know shares that same quirk of the mouth or tilt of the head.

Even death isn't the end for it.

Though there are very few recordings of it, the strongest memories make for the strongest ghosts. Those same people who absorb their surroundings do just the same when their life comes to an end. Sadly, for ghosts it is so much more literal.

A brutal murder easily outlives a peaceful sleep and these contagious people outlive them all.

Death isn't simply some walking dream where everyone you've ever known is carrying on their final moments like their hearts never stopped. Death is ten thousand people sharing everything but a face and if you aren't strong enough, you'll be just another face with their voice.

Day 1,399

The forest hadn't seen the surface for almost four thousand years. It hadn't seen light either, aside from the bioluminescent denizens of the Bathypelagic oceanic zone. Now it was starting to rise once more as the gases trapped within the rotting trees gently lifted them up.

It lay on the base of a continental shelf, skeletal branches now a mesh of kelp with the bones of everything and everyone who was unfortunate enough to have been there when it sunk. None of them had time enough to react as the ground shook and gave way like a broken elevator.

Before any of them could so much as blink, they were too deep beneath the ocean to do much more than gasp for the air that just wasn't there. Fortunately their suffering didn't last - that much fresh meat in such a short span of time attracted the carnivores in their hundreds and the swarming began.

We know all of this from the remains washed ashore, human bones with the large whale-like teeth of several dozen prehistoric species embedded to the point of fracture were most commonly found. Barnacle encrusted tree trunks with finger-bones lodged deep within the bark were next,occasionally most of the hand was attache but as with all of the bones from the sunken forest - there wasn't so much as a single scrap of meat to be found.

Day 1,398

Her body was limp, every bone so brutally crushed she looked barely human. Every inch of skin was a mess of swollen bruises with slivers of finely pulverised bone peeping through. Even her teeth were little more than white crescents that were hardly visible for all the blood left congealing in her mouth.

She was the fourth owner of 76 Slipshale Street to be found like this.

This time the police were not called, they hadn't managed to solve the last three cases and this one would be no different to them - just another photo to add to their collection of unsolved deaths. Her family were the ones who fought to have a priest come to the house as soon as possible, even going so far as to ask for her body to be left in place until he came.

He arrived the day after her funeral, already looking like a mess before he'd gone anywhere near the house. It wasn't just his appearance that made him seem just as distraught as the family of strangers who'd begged him to come halfway across the world, every word he spoke seemed like he was forcing them out against a wall of utter exhaustion.

As the weeks passed with him bustling between Slipshale Street and the town library, he only got worse. Still, he'd managed to outlast all four former owners which made him a target of suspicion as much as it did admiration.

Nobody in town knew what he was doing in the house, only that it appeared to be working.

They hadn't the faintest idea that not one, but two lingering souls wandered the rooms and that they detested their confinement almost as much as they detested each other. Their faces were in every mirror, their footsteps pounding across the halls as they tried and failed to kill the other.

In all their rage, they stopped seeing the living as their own kind and instead saw them as a means of transport out of the house and away from each other. Unfortunately they would argue over who should be allowed to leave and who should stay, jumping in and pulling the other out over and over again, forcing the original soul out and shredding it before it could even comprehend that it had died.

When their potential host was too broken to be useful they would retreat to their preferred corners and seethe until the next one arrived. It had been that way ever since they discovered that the other existed and could have been that way until the house collapsed of old age and disrepair if the priest hadn't offered them a better solution.

The people who reached out to him initially were the recently divorced parents of the deceased, having cometogether for her sake to solve her death. Neither had many friends or other relations to miss them or debate their sudden change in personality.

And the house was at peace at last.

Day 1,397

It started the same way as all your dreams did - you were being dragged out of your bed, out of your home and towards the new build. Somehow you knew everybody called it the new build and you knew it had been a work in progress for almost forty years now but it was still missing something... always missing something.

Your dream would switch scenes at this point, changing from you being dragged to you reaching your destination. The air smelt so real, so damp and metallic that it lingered with you even after you'd woken up. Tonight would be no different, it seemed, as you were made  to walk towards the exposed foundations and to your resting place.

You'd wake up as they began pouring concrete over you, just as it began to seep into your desperate lungs. Your sheets would be torn from the way you frantically clawed at the walls to try and escape your tomb without success, your skin drenched and ice cold to the touch.

What you didn't realise for many cycles was that you were never dreaming, not as such.

Ghosts are a tricky sort, all wrapped up in their memories and easily confused by the sudden appearance of living people in their death-space. You found yourself dreaming in reverse - your "waking"moments spent reliving your death and the periods where you were meant to rest and recover from your trauma were instead spent pretending to be among the living.

Not that they ever noticed you, not until you crept into their minds and borrowed them for the evening.

Day 1,396

At what point does a parasite go from being nothing to something we have to kill?

Is it when we can feel it?

Is it when we are wounded by it?

Or is is when it develops enough sentience to argue for its life?


These were the questions asked of us when we found that our city was a living, feeling being. Our legends called them giants and never mentioned when they stopped walking among us, only that they had once and gradually became no more.

Its head is tucked under its arms, what we knew as the south and west hills and the great valley between them. That's where its voice came rumbling from, shaking the ground and killing eighteen people in the process who either fell to their deaths or were so distracted that they drove into pedestrian-heavy paths.

It begged us to leave, said were killing it slowly. Apparently it was stuck, wedged so deeply into the ground that it would likely die soon regardless of us, as it continued to grow into a space that was already starting to suffocate it.

We certainly weren't helping it die in peace, not with the way we dug into its stony skin to build houses and roads or our non-stop movement and noise and the general chaos that our lives created for it. We were the fleas whose heads remained after the bodies had been plucked off, slowly rotting into its flesh and leaving infectious sores in our wake.

In our panic, in our cruelty we just ignored it. We pretended it was rogue earthquakes and not the broken cries of a creature whose skin we burnt and salted on a daily basis. We never gave much thought as to what we'd do when it eventually died.

Our city is a rotting corpse and the flies are coming soon.

Day 1,395

There are more warning signs along the lake than anywhere else around the town. The further away from civilization you get, the stranger and stricter the rules become. Reality isn't quite as stable as the rest of the town - which has a tendency to fluctuate between dimensions.

Joggers are usually the first to find corpses and the first to become corpses for ignoring every telltale signal, every warning and head's up that the signs offer as they try to outrun creatures that don't fully exist in this world and aren't bound by the same physical limitations.

They ignore the way the lake ripples follow them along the shore, slowly moving in closer and closer until the water itself pulses after them. If they can run faster than the lake then they won't be found clogging up the small tidal pools as so many others have.

They ignore the church bells that signal the patrol of thing known only as The Vicar. It wears the outdated robes of a Protestant clergyman, though they barely cover its hulking mass any more than the skin of the assumed owner does. It loves to chase and joggers make for perfect play and prey.

They ignore the crows that cry at them from the treetops, half warning and half taunting. Sometimes they'll tell you exactly what is following you and how to save yourself - which becomes yet another warning sign along the path. Other times they lead you further astray and straight into the path made of a thousand infected eyes where you sink into the blood-tinged lake of tears beneath them.

Yet another drowning - how common for the area.

Day 1,394

She made small-talk as best she could but the warped mockeries of her friends gave no response. The doctors said that reintroducing them to such normalities might spark their former selves and allow them to fight back against the unknown entity that was possessing them.

It made as much sense as everything else they tried.

There was only so much she could say to them though, only so much gossip she was allowed to pass on without going over the contact threshold and putting herself at risk of joining them. Some days she wondered if that would be such a bad thing though.

They seemed much more peaceful now.

Sure they were twitching, writhing monstrosities who wore the skins of her friends like a last minute Halloween suit and sure they were abominations before the eyes of God but they smiled at her every time she came to visit them.

When was the last time anyone had looked so happy to see her?

Nightmarishly unending rows of teeth aside, they were the same smiles her friends had given her on her wedding day, the same smiles they shared on their prom night, the same smiles now worn by things who refused to give their names and snarled with eight voices when pressed for answers.

Still she visited them - they were friends after all.

Day 1,393

It seemed to slide along the ground like freshly poured tar, every movement executed with a deliberate and thoughtful slowness. The man waiting at the bus stop didn't notice a thing, didn't hear the sounds of wet fabric dragging against stone or feel its hungry gaze.

He didn't even scream when it grabbed his foot.

That was when it seemed to realise that he was already dead and caution crept into its mind like fog over a river. It wasn't the only predator out that night and its competition was faster, quieter and close enough that its victim was still warm to the touch.

One would think that a being composed mainly of unseen eyes and a constantly shifting number of limbs would notice that it wasn't alone yet, much like its would-be prey, it didn't look up. Nobody ever looks up, much less a creature who already thinks of itself as death incarnate.

By morning only the man will be found, stone cold dead with one foot covered in an oil-like substance.

Day 1,392

The broadcast shouldn't have been possible and yet somewhere out in the Dead Zone someone was trying to reach us, at least we thought they might be. Every day they asked varying numbers to report to "scanner control" or "upper bay doors" with no context as to who, what or where the messages were intended for.

It was only a matter of time before people began traversing the Dead Zone to try and find the broadcaster. There were too many unanswered questions, too many theories flittering about for the intensely curious to resist heading towards certain death for answers.

The only person to make it past the clouds of radioactive gas, the half-starved/half-deranged remnants of local wildlife and the unpredictable migratory sinkholes only managed to text a few sentences out before their atmo-suit stopped registering any life signs.

They found the station tucked away inside an old army van that was in the process of being slowly smothered by the flesh-like vines that grew from the corpses of whatever creatures were unfortunate enough to die en masse. After cutting their way inside they found themselves face to... microphone with the broadcaster themself.

There wasn't much left of them, not after the toxic atmosphere had all but obliterated their organic form. Unfortunately for them, life adapts and so too did they until their body became little more than a perfectly formed mouth that was slowly fusing itself to the microphone. Beneath it were the lungs, useless pulsating things that writhed about on the blood drenched swivel chair.

They never stopped reading the numbers,not even as their lungs sprouted microscopically thin tendrils that reach out to their new host and began to absorb as much of their biomass as they possibly could. By the time this was noticed, they had already lost all motor function and before the broadcast had ended for the day they were another clump of flesh tied to the broadcaster.

They would sustain it for a while longer but another curious soul would be there before it ran out.

There was always another curious soul.

Always something else to eat.