Day 1,485

All the fish we catch are dead, no matter how far out we go or how deep the lines are dropped it's always the same.

There's never any bite marks or signs of trauma or even the slightest hint of rot.

It's like they just stopped working.

We can only hope it's just the fish.

Day 1,484

It either lived between the icebergs or it had been trapped there. Either way time and humanity's accidental interference had set it free to roam the ocean floor once more. That was when the islands began disappearing, one by one dozen.

It certainly shocked the world when the largest iceberg in recorded history suddenly split but the ensuing shock-wave wasn't attributed to something organic, not at that point at least. Neither was the overnight loss of three minor islands in the Zemlya Frantsa-Iosifa archipelago to the north of Russia.

Rising sea levels attributed to the separation of the iceberg were blamed for the archipelago gradually vanishing while their government didn't report that the islands themselves were utterly gone. They hadn't sunk, they looked to have been torn from the seabed itself.

When this was leaked, the world began to consider the idea of a more... organic reason. They didn't expect to find an answer, much less have the poor dying souls record and share their demise as their final act before yet another island was lost.

The timestamp on the footage showed midday yet the sky was pitch black and the ocean was nowhere in sight. The sky began closing in, ridged clouds coming into focus until they resembled the roof of a colossal mouth whose teeth were nowhere in sight.

It took them days to die, their vlogs and hysteria being broadcast for the world to see until one by one they fell into a black liquid that dissolved them on contact. Within a week the island fell silent and the world held its breath, evacuating all islands until humanity was huddled in the centres of the major continents, waiting for the next disappearance and wondering how much bigger this creature would grow before the mainlands stopped being safe.

Day 1,483

As the sound of drilling filled my ears all I could wonder was how did they manage to find me.

There are seventy official bases in Antarctica, mostly research facilities from the major global powers with a few security and medical centres for good measure. The base I found myself in wasn't supposed to be on any map nor known by any government as a precaution.

When the world ends you want doctors and scientists to start it all back up again and that's just what I was there for. We may not have seen it coming but we were as prepared for it as any other bunch of paranoid, overly certified eccentrics with more grant money than we could possibly throw at our research.

It wasn't a virus, the machines didn't rise up against us and neither did the dead. We were all but wiped out by the stars themselves. Half the world smothered in a blistering inferno, struggling to comprehend the level of absolute destruction and causing more deaths by reacting with chaos and panic while a few of us planned our escape.

Now here in the last remaining bastion of humanity I am soon to be confronted by all that we left behind. The nuclear plants went into meltdown last month so whoever, or whatever, is trying to get in will not be kind and might not even be human at all.

Wish me luck or a swift death.

Day 1,482

The mouth seemed to stretch on into the night, a never-ending maw filled with teeth so sharp they cut through the clouds. The gums were grey and wrinkled as the mouse you found in that long forgotten trap when you were five. It smelled pretty similar as well - that musty, meaty, lingering at the back of your throat kind of smell, the one that stuck to your clothes for days after.

If there would even be days after this.

You knew that if you looked close enough you'd be able to see that the shifting shadows were actually thousands of hands all reaching out for you, all belonging to things shaped like everyone you ever knew and loved and they were all begging for you to join them.

Something in the back of your mind knew you were one of the last ones left...

Day 1,481

It was a virus, a glitch in the system that brought the whole world to its knees in just five hours. Grandad says it serves them right for playing God and becoming more machine than man but he still drinks to forget losing mum and dad.

He may have shielded my eyes but I still heard their translator implants burst while their internal communicators spread throughout their body in a wave of blood-soaked grey. It's not the kind of sound you forget, even the smell lingers on in your mind years later.

I still see them from time to time standing at the precipice of the broken bridge with thousands of other tech-consumed drones. Sometimes I wave and the older drones wave back, the ones I think might have adapted to the virus or aren't as consumed by it.

My parents never wave back, nor do they sleep, eat or even move from their post. I asked Grandad if he thought that they'd rusted and become frozen like the tin man from the old Oz books. He just tells me to keep my eyes away from all those dead faces and to move on with my life.

How does he expect me to do that when there's twelve of us trapped on an island surrounded b y all the boats we burned and broke to stop the drone from following us? Nothing could possibly distract me from the fact that I'll probably die here while my mindless parents are staring down with nothing in their eyes but the unnatural glow of their ocular LEDs.

Day 1,480

Tucked away in the middle of the city, in a small courtyard behind the Lucky Sparrow Laundromat and Fast Vinnie's Gym, was a statue of a dog. There was no inscription on the raised platform, no mention of its creation and nothing overly unusual about it other than the thick layer of rust that covered its every inch in a thick layer of leaking, crumbling russet.

Nobody seemed to pay much attention to the statue, preferring to think that it was just an iron dog surrounded by a puddle of fresh rust and totally nothing to do with the missing people who were all last seen around this area. No, it was just a statue.

Until it was seen walking back to its pedestal...

Day 1,479

We jumped from light to light, relishing each brief moment in the utter darkness that spilled between the lampposts with pure childish glee. In those brief moments we were nine again and all of the world's monsters were practically unseen so we could happily pretend they didn't exist.

Now we see them running beside us, just outside of the dingy circles of light. Close enough to snatch us if we slow down but just far enough away to lure us into a false sense of security. As long as we were mostly underneath the lampposts we were safe, at least they let us think that.

Lord only knows how many corpses we must have run past, Lord only cares too. By now they're as shocking as finding hair on your head and as common too. We don't even try to look for people anymore, if you're late then everybody assumes you're, well... late.

Day 1,478

When the world flooded it wasn't nearly as dramatic as we thought it'd be. There were no great tsunamis, no sunken continents or no drowned cities. Most of the world was waist-deep in sewage tainted water that gradually cleared to a more natural silt-shade.

We didn't know what the rising water had brought with it until the coastal areas were emptied overnight. No blood, no bones, no trace of anyone. It was like they'd never existed and at first we thought they all moved out to sea without telling a single soul as if they knew something worse was coming and all fled before it could arrive but no...

The oceans stilled, the waters cleared and we stared into the depths.

And the depths stared back.

Day 1,477

From notes you hastily scrawled last week, the "l" looked more like an "i" and thus you walked right into an empty auditorium, dark and utterly silent save for the faint sound of a pen clicking. It's been following you ever since, that infuriatingly rhythmic sound that comes from nowhere and right beside you all at the same time.

You aren't the only one either. When you snapped at the person beside you for actually clicking their pen they froze and muttered that the more they did it, the further away it got. In that moment you knew it wasn't your imagination and you began to wonder if it was dangerous.

The person beside you refused to answer any of your questions, only warning you to never go back to that lecture hall again. Once gets its attention and twice seals your fate, according to them at least. When your next exam was actually scheduled there you found yourself waiting outside with the same person who told you to never go back.

They were arguing with the professor, slinging medical reason after bargain after plea until the professor physically dragged them into the hall to sign into the exam. The second their feet passed the threshold they collapsed, choking and writhing as if they were being strangled by unseen hands.

You were about the only person who didn't rush to see what was going on, lingering back and basking in the utter lack of clicking for the first time in months. After a few minutes they stopped struggling and went limp, everyone around them had either backed away or were on their phones to the emergency services.

In the brief spaces between their words, the clicking resumed only now it was muffled.

It was coming from inside their throat.

Day 1,476

The circumstances were irrelevant - they were together again and driving through the woods like they loved to do back before the times that they do not think about. He drove a little faster than usual, the trees little more than pointed blurs among the snow-smothered sky, while she was already asleep in her booster seat.

Usually they would both be awake and chattering away like the starlings that swarmed the garden every morning but this ride was different and the silence carried an undertone of finality. Something in them both knew this would be the last time but only one of them knew why.

She had just followed her daddy out to the car like always, even though she was told last week told that he had gone to sleep forever. He came back and that was all that mattered to her, in her mind it made more sense than a never-ending sleep.

He never said where they were going, never said a word at all. He just strapped her into the booster seat and they began to drive away. She was too young to notice the state of the car and how it shouldn't be able to drive while the back half was still engulfed in fire.

The further they drove into the woods, the more at peace he felt. This was how it was meant to go in the first place. He'd wanted them to be together forever, not to be separated by a messy divorce and only see each other on the weekend where he would watch them drift apart until they were little more than strangers.

She woke up as the car sped towards a sharp bend, looking over and seeing her daddy smiling as they flew.

Day 1,475

The media's been trying to get face masks back into fashion for years now, subtly at first but now the government has come out and made them mandatory. It's not that you have to wear them when you're going outside, you have to wear them everywhere that isn't a tier 3 safe zone - I have to wear one in my own damned house in my own damned shower!

There used to be plenty of outrage at the new law and the penalty fines were too steep even for society's richest. Now we're all outraged that they never told us why in the first place-we'd all have listened and obeyed right away if they'd only told us why and countless lives wouldn't have been lost.

It's in the dust, you see. Some kind of parasite that was unearthed from a core sample taken from the North Pole itself. We don't even have a name for it yet - its already killed the original scientists and nobody's been allowed anywhere near their lab since in case there's something worse still trapped in the remains of the frozen sample.

Common consensus is that it's some kind of plant-insect hybrid, I mean I've seen the photos floating about the internet and the way those bodies were just splintered open does make it seem like something was incubating inside them and burst free.

Of course the government is still denying this, still denying that it does anything more than cause the body to produce intestinal gas so rapidly that the body violently ruptures which could be plausible if it weren't for the videos that everyone's seen and nobody wants to talk about.

The ones where the infected pull up their sleeves to expose the writhing beneath the skin of their arms.

Day 1,474

I remember seeing death for the first time in the middle of 2nd period maths. I had one of the coveted window desks right at the back of the classroom - every daydreamer's ideal spot. From there I got a pretty good view of the retirement home next door.

It always struck me as an odd placement - a high school right next to a retirement home. It felt like we were almost gloating about our youth every time we walked past on the way to and from class. Sometimes they'd join us for assemblies, mainly the World War Remembrance ones and Christmas.

We rarely saw the same person twice, they just seemed to vanish and be replaced without any fuss or remarks by anybody and after 2nd period maths, I know why. And I get that everybody's seen death in some way, be it roadkill or a pet or a relative but few people have actually seen death itself.

It's nothing like the Grim Reaper, no black cloak and cartoon scythe to swoosh people away into the afterlife. Death is a cluster of gelatinous blobs that bring to mind the word cancerous. It's oil-slick black and fresh pus yellow and old blood red all at once.

It stalks the elderly to their rooms and suffocates them one by one, taking out entire wards in minutes.

Day 1,473

There's something rippling its way across the pylons, a whispering between the lines that almost sounds like words caught by the wind. It pauses at the first junction it comes to since it crashed... the choice to split itself into Many or remain One and see where the lines would take it.

The choice was made to become Just Two and take opposing directions, to cover more ground than it could have if it still had that body. It's a shame they're so prone to combustion upon entering the atmosphere of carbon-based worlds. A damned shame indeed.

The East found a small town, a little farming community whose homes provided it with much information and many more places to split into. It even came with more bodies to jump into, though the first dozen were too small and too young to handle the overtaking and crumpled to ash. It lost many parts of itself before it left the place known as "Daycare".

The West found a powerstation, using the great surge in power to call the rest of its parts together so that they could properly split into the correct amount needed to jump down every line that sprung from this hub that would become its base. The bodies that conveniently lingered about the grounds functioned far better than the ones found in the East, adjusting the output to maximise its speed and strength.

Day 1,472

At first we thought a bird had gotten trapped in the air vents and died but nobody could figure out how it could have found its way in there. You could certainly smell it whenever the air-con was switched on upstairs, that god-awful sickly sweet meaty stench that made the poor receptionist so nauseous that it's been almost a week and she still hasn't come back.

From the lobby you could see the very tips of its feet if you crouched and peered underneath the chairs. You can also see the shadow of something much bigger behind it - a nest was our first guess until someone had the great idea of shining a torch down there.

I still don't know what it was but it sure as hell wasn't a nest. I mean,for starters nests don't have teeth and grey gums and lips like shrivelled branches. Our best theory at that point was that some kind of nocturnal creature, maybe an inbred raccoon, had chased a bird into the vents, choked while eating it and we were now stuck the its body.

Management demanded the thing be pulled out and the vents scrubbed until the stench went which was all so very easily said and so very different in actuality. Firstly we didn't know how big the thing was, how bloated its corpse now was and if decomposing had made it stick to the sides of the vents at that point.

Turns out that was the least of our worries and not our worst mistake. Our worst mistake was assuming it was dead to begin with. Sure we poked it and prodded it but the second somebody's hand touched it the damn thing writhed and twisted and this great lumpy head shot out of the vent like a snake off a catapult.

Took John's head clean off with one unforgettably wet crunch. Stupid thing didn't seem capable of chewing though so it was stuck with its head out, waving and trashing against everything it could. Bruised my arm up a treat in the process but with five of us we had it pinned down enough for the rest of the janitorial team to tie a refuse sack round its neck like a tourniquet until it stopped breathing.

We cut its head off for good measure and, piece by piece, chopped it up into yet more refuse sacks that we dumped behind a neighboring restaurant. Took a good while for the stench to fade but by that point we were all on edge, like we were waiting for it to come back.

We didn't have to wait long - the stench is coming from behind the new air-con unit this time.

Day 1,471

I was never one for theme parks and carnivals but when your parents die and leave you as the sole guardian of your kid sister, you don't really have a choice. It's either face the water ride at the funfair or face the waterworks at home and I know which one I'd go for every time.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't want to spend time with my sister it's just that she never shuts up. Always filling in the gaps between conversations with whatever floats through her head until our every waking moments are just pure noise. Lord only knows how many calls I've gotten from her school saying she's mouthed off at this teacher or that student.

I think it's her way of coping after the funeral. My aunt and I arranged it all but on the day nobody showed up but me and my sister. The vicar said the bare minimum, probably feeling just as uncomfortable as we were, and then left us alone. We didn't even bother going to the pre-booked dinner - it all felt so wrong.

Like we'd died instead.

So now she fills the silence and I take us to theme parks and she fills the silence and I take us to theme parks and it was meant to make us feel happy for just one bloody day but since the last one she hasn't said a word and the silence is heavier than ever before...

Day 1,470

There's not a lot of privacy in an office. No matter how tall the dividers are or how thick the foam on the ceiling is, we can still hear the carnage that occurs during the bi-monthly progress checks and we make sure that we all know our place on the rosters. Being late only makes things worse.

As long as we stick to our cubicles, heads down and productivity up, we should be fine. I used to think we'd definitely be fine but they pulled Myers in for yesterday's meeting and he's not expected back for a good few months yet.

Same can't be said for the others.

Day 1,469

There used to be children here once, you know, before they were all Vanished...

It was the kind of sleepy village that was slowly being conquered by nature. The kind of village where nobody locks their doors - the things that come for them would only be angered and everything goes so much swifter, so much quieter when they are just left to it.

The unspoken rule is that as long as the yearly Fête isn't disturbed, they can take whoever and however many they need without any trouble from the church. It's a truce that's held since the mid 1600's when we called them witches and burned them alive while they warped the minds of our children and drove them to the edge of death.

It's easier this way, a voluntary sacrifice every now-and-then is good for the community.

And then one day they took the wrong person - a tourist with a quick trigger finger and portable wifi hotspot. Within hours the police were swarming the area and the hunts began anew only this time we knew what we were dealing with and the consequences for breaking the silent truce.

Day 1,468

He was the last one out as always, closing the store's shutters with his usual enthusiasm as he started the 15 minute walk to the basement car park. He always timed it so that the mall would shut for the night just as he reached his car, meaning security would always be too busy checking all the locks to bother him with empty platitudes.

By now every other store would be shut, all the lights dimmed and doors shut tight - not a single soul in sight save for the light patter of footsteps in the distance as the security lads did their rounds. Tonight, however was different. Tonight he walked towards the food court and saw someone asleep by the fountain, curled up along the stone wall.

From a distance they looked homeless but something about them, and the way the food court lights seemed brighter than normal, made the whole thing feel... off. He made a split second decision to stay on the upper level and take the staff elevator down to the car park instead of walking the more scenic route.

Just as the doors were closing he was the sleeping man sit up and look around.

He signalled to someone with his hand as a dozen more people peered over the ledges of the food stalls.

Day 1,467

When I saw the bones my first thought was they lied to me, shortly followed by who were they and how did they die. I was supposed to be the first human to set foot on Pluto and the first to see it with my own bare eyes and yet all I was seeing was the broken remnants of a shuttle and several corpses all huddled together close by.

None of them had name tags or identifying markers on their suits and their visors were so frozen over I couldn't make out their faces. I know I could have just popped off their helmets to have a look but touching a dead person it the absolute last thing I want to do out here.

The secondary and tertiary shuttles will be here in three weeks. I have until then to figure out who these people were, who sent them, how it was kept a secret and what killed them. The only damage that seems to have been done to them is the identical rips in their air hoses, it almost looks like it was done with a machine-like precision.

If any of their logs survived on the shuttle, if they even made any, then I'll at least have faces to put to the pile of suits.

Day 1,466

I never liked going to family reunions, too many political arguments and snide remarks and aunties who just didn't know when to stop pushing you for information. It was like every conversation was an interrogation and I was always in the wrong.

So naturally I found my excuse to not go for the first time,much to everyone's very vocal disappointment but "work wouldn't give me the time off" and "you guys have fun without me, I'll catch you around the year" not to mention "I'm so upset I can't even talk now" - all of which was a fairly big lie but they seemed to buy it.

A few days later I get a knock on my door and a couple of officers are bringing me the news that the hall my family rented out for the reunion had burned down. In fact, the fire wasn't quite out yet so I'd have to wait a while before I could ID anyone.

They failed to mention that most of the bodies were fused to the floor, the doors, the windows - all permanently trapped in their failed attempts to escape. Walking around with them, trying and failing to find even the slightest hint of familiarity from the warped corpses of the people I'd grown up with, that was the worst point in my life.

At least, it was until the dreams began.

They may have scraped everybody away enough to bury something of them but there's still so much they left behind that yesterday I got an invite for the next reunion. It still smelled like burnt meat and plastic, still had black fingerprints from where they had held the envelope.

I don't think I've got an excuse to avoid them this year.

Day 1,465

The office isn't quite right, isn't made for actual people to work in. I suppose after several thousand years alive you'd do anything to get rid of the boredom - even working in a 24/7 pest removal  helpline. Polite as they may be, there's an icy edge to their words when they talk about our... products.

Things had been strangely quiet for the night shift. I was about to ask if I could split my shift and head off early until I got a call saying that Carl jammed the printer. In hindsight it was a gigantic red flag coming from Gheorghe-who-brought-blood-bags-to-work-and-forgot-to-leave-them-in-the-fridge.

So yeah, when I got to the printer it was definitely jammed... with Carl's body. I mean I know him and Gheorghe didn't see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues, namely the blood bag thing and Carl's obsession with garlic and onion crisps.

Didn't think it would come to this.

Wasn't paid enough to clean it.

Day 1,464

It started with the whales - beluga specifically. At first it just sounded like they were mimicking human speech, making approximations and parroting us. Then they said their first sentence, the sentence that shook the world to its very core and gave us yet another reason to fear the ocean.

They want you to get out.

Every single one of them, captive-bred or wild, was somehow capable of saying this phrase in those water-distorted voices. It was like they were some kind of human-triggered hivemind that was only able to speak when we were near enough that they knew we'd hear them and believe me, they knew what effect this had on us.

Little did we know, they were just the beginning of what we'd later call The Awakening. It was just so surreal to be walking down the street with pigeons scuffling about your feet asking you for food, absolutely fluent in their regional language, or for dogs to call your name to get your attention.

Of course it wasn't all cutesy and harmless. Back where my folks lived was a very rural area, I mean my childhood backyard was the forest kind of rural. The kind of rural where bears walking through the town centre isn't unusual, just annoying.

The bears haven't quite grasped the nuances of the English language but they're wonderful mimics. Just ask my mother. The bear that killed her uses her voice to call for me in the same tone she used to get me to come downstairs for dinner. She must have said those damned words so often that it learned them first and foremost.

And now the town's nicknamed all the bears Andrews, utterly erasing the woman who said it last.

Day 1,463

It came from the bog, dragged that foetid stench all around the village like it dragged its emaciated body.

We think it might have been a deer once, before the bog got to it and leeched all the life out.

The wretches it leaves behind are barely conscious most days, which is far more of a blessing than curse.



Sometimes people come out, spindle-limbed and gaunt as fresh bones but their eyes are so very awake.

They're the ones we kill without hesitation, it's the kindest thing we can do.

The animals are left to rot away under mother nature's fair skies as is only natural.



We know the bog will come for us all someday and we hope we never see the sun again.

Everyone knows someone who only went down the road and never came back.

Those are the days when the air smells like dead eggs and stagnant water.

Day 1,462

Somewhere in the office below, the phones continued to ring. The caller was somehow switching between the lines and working their way through the entire building. Strange as that may have been on a regular day, when the building's been left to rot alongside the rest of the world these past fifty odd years it only tempts you to pick up the receiver.

And you would have, if the girl hiding nearby hadn't grabbed your hand and yanked you towards the upper floors with a hushed "Don't, if it knows we're here then it might come in!" and with no other explanation, began to lead you to a flight of crumbling concrete stairs.

She ducked at every window or crack in the walls and you copied her, still unsure as to why you were following her but too curious and worried to do anything else. Occasionally she'd pull you both to a stop and push you towards whichever room still had a door. You'd both crouch by it, bracing against it and listening as the ringing gradually grew louder and louder.

At one point you were both running as quietly as possible while phones cried out to either side of you, almost catching up to you as you dashed between toppled desks and hopped over collapsed filing cabinets. By the time you reached the narrow stairs leading to the roof you were both drenched in sweat.

She was faring slightly better than you, too alert to show her exhaustion while you clenched your knees, back bowed low and gasping for every breath of stale air. As you started recovering you looked up and saw her giving you a strange look, a calculated look... a look that said she had figured something out and that something would be bad for you.

"It's found you." she stated, as the world started spinning like the phones still ringing in your ears.

Day 1,461

Their voices echoed around the cathedral, each word multiplying and reverbing and distorting until their singing began to resemble guttural nothings tossed into the faces of uncaring statues. Such was the task of a choir - to keep the stone occupied while the congregation went about their worship of a higher power.

For the most part it worked, the statues were appeased, their saintly faces remaining amused, cheerful and most importantly - free from the blood and viscera of helpless worshippers who knew little more than how and when to visit the cathedral, their minds having gone aeons ago.

Day 1,460

I like to think that I grew up in a pretty average area until I remember its... eccentricities. They aren't mentioned in any newspaper, the schools schedule holidays and teacher training days around the worst of it - no local broadcast will do much more than hint and make vague references.

It's nothing too bad, at least not from my perspective, it's just something you get used to.

Like how whistling is forbidden after 8pm in case the graffiti whistles back and the next thing you know you're pancake flat on a wall watching your loved ones weep and place flowers underneath you. It's happened often enough that the base of most walls in the town centre is ankle deep in the brown sludge of long dead flowers.

Or how you don't touch the waters of Lake Taverholme. A cousin saw someone tip some kind of fish into the water and ever since then nobody's been able to see the bottom of the lake. It's just an inky black pool now, with the occasional pale spot that seems to follow you as you walk past.

Speaking of which, the cousins... we aren't supposed to talk about them either. We call them cousins cause if you ask any doctor they'll confirm that they are almost human in every conceivable way but just inhuman enough to be classed as a separate species. Telling them apart from humans is pretty obvious really - we don't have teeth lining the inside of our throats.

Day 1,459

Somebody had been round the woods and swept all the leaves up into piles. It was surreal to see so many identical little heaps, all so precise and symmetrical. At the time I thought it was either an art project or a prank, now I know it's something much, much worse.

I didn't even think twice about letting my kids go and jump in one or two but the further into the woods we got, the deeper the piles seemed to go, the more my kids struggled to get out of them until one pile just swallowed them up.

There was no sound, no crunching of bone or growling or anything to give away that they were alive. They were all alive. Every last one was something, some kind of creature the likes of which I've never seen before nor since.

As I was running out of the woods to get help I saw them all begin to emerge, behind me at first but speeding up and up and up until I was dodging their outstretched necks like gym class hurdles. When I reached broke free from the trees and stumbled out into the fields I turned back and caught a glimpse of the sheer entanglement of bones that decorated every single creature.

When winter came they all vanished in the span of a single day.

Day 1,458

The robot stopped working after Day Seventy-Six P. R. (Post-Rift). It was meant to last a lifetime - her lifetime to be exact. Com-droids used to be all the rage back when people were everywhere and nobody had to worry about being disappeared but now... now they were all gone, her family was all gone, her droid was all gone and she survived.

She remembered the others who'd survived with her a while ago. Together they did the unthinkable and found the source of the disappearances - a rift between this dimension and another. In theory everybody who hadn't died was carrying on their lives in another world and if they hadn't closed the rift she could be with them all right now.

But they had to close it, she thought grudgingly to herself as she walked beside one of the canyons it had formed as it began to engulf the world, rip it to shreds and fuel itself further from the dying embers of Earth. Selfishly she tried to reopen it again, potentially dooming the Earth just so she had enough time to get in but none of her attempts to worked.

A part of her wishes she did what Maureen had done and jumped into the rift just before it closed. Sure, she left half her right arm and leg behind when it shut on her but she was with everyone. She wasn't the last human left, wandering aimlessly and wondering when she'd run out of processed food and have to figure out how to make a life from nothing.

Gradually the others died from age, illness or infection. None of them were doctors - nobody knew anything more than basic first aid and there hadn't been enough time to find the information from the nearby libraries before nature swooped in and took them all away.

All but her and her droid.

And now just her.

Day 1,457

We thought it was just a tumble of seaweed at first but no seaweed in the world is as full of eyes as what we found that day. It looked a little like bladderwrack until it started to blink and move in a distinctly octopus-like manner.

Of course we pegged it as far as our little legs could take us, right until we'd hit the old navy base. Spent a good half hour just leaning against those worn concrete pillars, just catching our breath and glancing behind us to see if it was following us.

Sure as rain, there it was writhing its way towards us from the far edge of the beach. We did what any sensible eight year old would do when faced with the unknown. Firstly we tried not to cry, mostly succeeding, and then we ran for our homes, again mostly succeeding as Allan tripped over another one of those not-seaweed creatures.

Now we call them blinkerwrack (not creative, I know, but it suits our ways just the same) and now we know that burning them is the best way to stop them in their tracks. Back then though, all we knew was that Allan wasn't making any attempt to pull himself free and he wasn't making any noise and he wasn't breathing and...

We just kept running, only we stopped looking back and started to cry. By the time we reached the edge of the village we were all but bawling and barreling ourselves into the arms of the closest grownup which happened to be the greengrocer, Mr. Patel.

He rounded up a few others, including Allan's parents and they all headed off down the beach. All that came back were the bits that the blinkerwrack couldn't eat. Hair, bones and clothes were found in the morning neatly piled up around the village outskirts and all across the shoreline.

Each fresh wave brought more of them in until the whole beach was nothing but a writhing mass of those mucus-dripping eyes and the leftovers of whatever poor creature they just so happened to catch. It got to the point where you'd wake up in utter darkness with the ocean's scent in the air and blinkerwrack's all crowding 'round your windows.

Now, after fire after fire after fire, there aren't too many left. Still enough to be a concern, mind you, but nowhere near the levels we faced back when I was younger. Someday I hope we'll get to a generation that thinks the worst part of the beach is sand between your toes.

Until then, grab the kerosine and meet me at the tidal line.

Day 1,456

We never found his body but we knew he'd died down the mines by the way that the phantom water ran down his body, rusting his toolbelt and making stalactites of his fingers. He was somewhere deep below our feet and we never found out where.

His team only reported him missing after they'd clocked out after spending the rest of their shift looking for him. At least they said so. When we asked his apparition he just shook his head and clenched his hands like he used to when he was alive and frustrated.

We knew he had something to tell us but every method of communication we tried ended up failing. He couldn't move the planchette across our ouija board, couldn't interfere with the radio chatter, couldn't move so much as the tip of a pencil to say one single solitary thing.

He's been walking about the house for weeks now, I'd say he was muttering to himself but his lips aren't even forming words. He's just opening and closing his mouth like he's still gasping for air down in the mines and for all we know he might just be.

The only place we've ever been able to see him is inside the house and as soon as we get to the front gate he walks through and disappears. It's like he only exists because there's enough memories of him within the house that he can form a physical being.

We'll never know where (or even if) he's still alive down in the mines - they won't let us near the place. Something about us hysterically grieving and obsessing over a missing person who we believe is haunting us when he's still officially unfound and his death is unconfirmed.

When we get to the mines though, we know he'll be there waiting to show us where he is. He might have been there since the day he first appeared in our home. Maybe he haunts the mines like he haunts us, only down there he's reunited with his body and up here he's reunited with his family.

Day 1,455

There were three things he knew for certain.

1. Something is living in the garden shed, has been for quite some time too judging by all the bones on the floor.

2. It eats meat and isn't choosy either, if the clumps of wet fur and scraps of fabric all congealed together to form its nest were anything to go by.

3. He never saw it leave last night, he just assumed it was gone but the warm air gently blowing against the back of his neck would suggest otherwise.