20181231

Day 1,578

The statue was right where the pub rumours said it would be, tucked away behind the church with no saint with only its hands reaching out past the overgrown holly. Somewhere behind those jagged leaves was a granite face that allegedly mimicked anyone who made eye contact with it.

They never said just how realistic the statue looked to begin with, before you even made eye contact with it. They never said how it had been recently painted in such delicate brushstrokes that the broken capillaries on its nose looked perfectly natural and yet flicker to stone to your own skin in the blink of an eye.

They never said it could move too and yet the same hands that were barely visible five seconds ago now held the holly back so that the statue could get a better look at you. It tilted its head this way and that, checking its surroundings for other witnesses before slinking back behind the densely packed leaves.

20181230

Day 1,577

From the outside it looked like another disused warehouse, crumbling around the edges and ivy slowly consuming it from one end. It wasn't always like this - it was once the lower city's only museum focusing solely on the harbour's legends and history.

One entire wall was a dedicated timeline from the earliest recorded settlements to the latest newspaper headline dating some two years ago when it was shut down. There were too many cases of missing children in the area for anybody to want to visit and they couldn't afford to stay open.

Coincidentally a few months later the number of children going missing dropped to nothing. The staff were interrogated by the local community and confessed to knowing next to nothing. A few rumours came and went regarding certain people who frequented there and in the end it was all dropped and forgotten.

Then one day - almost exactly a year after it shut down - a couple of bored teens broke in and were never seen again. More and more people went missing each week until the numbers were as high as they'd been when the museum was in full swing.

People still suspected the staff but not one of them looked deeper into the taxidermied creatures that were left to rot and saw that some of the wet specimens weren't quite as lifeless as others. The giant pacific octopus had always twitched about in its tank, too eager for more curious people to come wandering in and eventually growing impatient enough to leave the tank completely.

It wasn't alone either - but it was the only one that could leave. Occasionally it would dump whatever it didn't feel like eating into the tanks of other creatures, most notably the great white shark that would otherwise thump about in the tank and draw unnecessary attention to them all.

Day 1,576

The subway station was more crowded than usual - several lines had been closed and nobody had any answers, none that they wanted to share at least. There were no smiling faces in sight as several hundred people tried to cram themselves into a space that was barely designed for a couple of hundred at most.

Not one of them thought to look up.


Out on the tracks the police finally arrived on scene to find the crew hiding in the shipping contained that functioned as their office. They refused to open the door, refused to speak and eventually barricaded the windows to block the sight and sound of the officers. They were drawing unnecessary attention.

Overhead the lines crackled and they looked up and then looked no more.


The crowds in the station were getting worse as more and more lines were closing. A few people noticed the pattern - a band sweeping left to right and they would soon be next. They made the right choice, the safe choice, and took to overground transport. Buses were unreliable but none of their stops had been affected by whatever was getting to the trains.

By the time they were far enough up the stairs to notice the gates shutting, they were too late.


The lines were slick with blood and saliva - a feast was underway and all were welcome. A flurry of leathery skin and brittle spines scurried along the cables, dropping to the fleeing workers on the ground with a sickening crunch and a cut-off shriek as they caught their prey.

The greatest feast was before them... always before them.

20181229

Day 1,575

Nobody ever used the shower cubicles in the girl's changing room and the teachers could never understand why yet none of them ever went inside for no apparent reason. We were always left to change for sports by ourselves with the teacher waiting outside trying not to look as nervous as they felt.

The first time we heard singing coming from the plughole someone ran to try and tell but they were just told to stop lying and get dressed. It wasn't just the wind racing through a hole in the pipes somewhere, we decided that right from the start. There were clear words being sung and we all remembered the hymn from assembly "Alas! and Did My Saviour Bleed".

With every verse it sung, the floor of the cubicles began to bulge as if something was trying to push its way up. With every verse it sung another voice joined in, steadily growing louder as more and more and more sang along while we pressed ourselves against the furthest wall and tried to change as fast as we could.

We all ran out of there before the voice could finish the final verse, half of us crying and half near hyperventilating from the sheer terror we experienced and the lingering fear of knowing that we would all have to go back after class,not knowing if there would be anything waiting for us when we got back.

20181228

Day 1,574

The furnace soared overhead, melting snow and citizen alike and leaving a river of smouldering waste in its wake. On wings darker than coal it rode the thermal currents left in the wake of the last furnace as it veered away every now and then to cause chaos of its own.

When the government promised a warm winter for everyone, nobody anticipated them releasing over thirty thousand furnaces into the world. Just the thought of their gaping volcanic maws was enough to send chills down the spines of anyone who'd ever been fortunate enough to survive a sighting.

Nobody had ever seen a furnace land - nobody was certain that it was entirely possible as they were comparable only to whales in their shape and stature. It was wondered if they would crumple under their own weight the moment they stopped being supported by the currents they both caused and perpetuated.

20181227

Day 1,573

The highway and railway had appeared overnight, trapping a row of apartment buildings between them and stranding the residents in an urban no-man's land. Though the highway was as straight as a ruler, the railway curved to cut the buildings off from the neighbouring streets which they now saw as distant smog-smothered shapes.

It took all of three days before the ground and first floors evacuated themselves to share space with the upper levels, all claiming to have seen the departing train passengers walking passed their windows with ungodly faces and how the fumes from the endless traffic seemed to seep through their windows and clog their lungs no matter how many blankets and cushions they taped over them.

It soon became an obsession between the buildings - observe the things masquerading as commuters below and try to find a way to signal for help from the closest houses. Within the week a series of vaguely stable walkways had been set up to allow for group meetings in the centre-most apartments.

This did not go unnoticed.

In little over two weeks everyone's food had all but run out. Nobody wanted to go to the fume-drenched lower floors where those ungodly faces would stare in at them with unabashed glee and then - as if their growling stomachs had been heard - the fumes below started to smell like food. Like an entire banquet was waiting for them.

Not one of them had heard the windows quietly sliding open while they all met up on other apartments, not one of them knew just how far in the creatures had come and with the promise of food on their minds - not one of them cared.

20181226

Day 1,572

It had been quite a while since you last saw another car and the scenic fields now felt like they were closing in on you. According to the SatNav you'd only been on the road for half a mile but the car's clock showed that almost five hours had passed.

As you took yet another half-hidden-by-overgrown-hedges road your fuel gauge lit up the dashboard with an angry red glow. It was full when you left but that seemed like days ago now and there was nothing on the SatNav but endless fields and a smallish river curling its way between them.

Daylight was fading fast now, faster than anything you'd ever seen and before you knew it there was nothing but an inky darkness and the feeble yellow glow of your headlights on a narrow road. 

20181224

Day 1,571

The bottom of the lake had eyes. Eyes that were stuck gazing up at a the painfully bright surface and all the creatures that taunted it with their freedom of movement. How it hated them all.

Just below the eyes was a mouth too full of teeth to properly close. A mouth stuck as open as it's eyes and empty at the ground all around it. Whether it had eaten everything nearby or simply scared it away is anyone's guess.

The eyes were patient enough to have seen countless creatures come and go without tasting a single one of them until now. On the surface the divers would be reported missing but the eyes had seen them and the mouth had tasted them.

20181223

Day 1,570

The projector wasn't plugged into anything, had no light bulb and didn't even have reel of film but something was being screened. A group of kids found it in the woods, flickering happily away half-buried under a fallen tree and thought it might kill an afternoon.

They didn't bother to read the instructions on the underside, they were too busy trying to find a clean enough bit of wall to see what it was trying to show them. Five days later it was found again in an old garage that had been broken into so many times that nobody bothered replacing the door.

A teen found it this time and figured he could flog it. He slung it into his rucksack and wandered off with the causal air of someone who has been somewhere they definitely shouldn't have been. It was priced at a fair £30 and traded to someone who was more curious about how it was projecting than what is was projecting.

Five days later it was found again, heavily dented in the boot of a crashed car...

20181222

Day 1,569

From a distance it looked like someone had duct-taped a bin bag to the brick wall but bin bags don't have vulture-like heads tucked behind them. We call them Tar Birds for their oil-slick, black rubber like feathers and the way they manage to camouflage perfectly in an urban environment.

Nobody can quite pinpoint when they evolved or how they evolved or even find a midway species to backtrack their unusual development over the years. All we can say for sure if that they hatch in landfills and steadily migrate towards neighbouring cities where they live out the rest of their lives... at least we assume so.

Nobody's found a dead one yet and all the live ones outsmart our traps and vibrate to blur themselves when we try to photograph them. We claim that they eat our rubbish but there's no concrete evidence for this, just the happenstance of them being where garbage used to be.

There are rumours that Tar Birds never stop growing, they just move from the surface to our greatest source of filth - the sewers. Cleaner crews refuse to go to certain areas because they've apparently found nests made of hair and bones spanning eight or nine feet in length.

Day 1,568

I'd dedicated nine years of my life to finding the elusive radio presence that called themself Jamie-Lee Cicero - Jay for short. Now I was originally of the same train of thought as everyone else and joked about it like it was just another weirdo surrealistic podcast.

Then Jay started talking about things that we'd all seen and tried to pretend we hadn't. They spoke for a good hour or so on the way the streetlights seemed to follow you home at night and how we've all heard cats fighting but couldn't remember the last time we actually saw a street cat.

A small group of listeners began calling in regularly to try and piece together what was going on - what was replacing the streetlights and was it eating cats? Was this better or worse than just believing that the cats had all been caught and adopted or had moved to another town entirely?

This went on for a couple of months and we all got a better idea of how to keep ourselves safe from whatever the lights were becoming, or had become in most places, but we still didn't know any more about Jay and how they knew any of this to begin with.

It's been nine years and fifteen days since Jay made their last broadcast. They sounded like an absolute wreck and spent their hour babbling coordinates into the microphone while it sounded like someone or something was trying to break into the studio.

The day it all went silent was the day I started scouring the globe for them, following their coordinates like a trail of breadcrumbs to studio after studio - all abandoned and all is utter disarray until the one I found the night before last.

There was this mess of wires and microphones and some pinkish bundle of flesh gentle snoring away in the centre of it all. I'm not sure if it's Jay - I'm not sure it's even human but it's the only lead I have now that I've been to every single location.

20181221

Day 1,567

The summer rain poured over him, running in rivulets down his face that stole the colour from him until I was facing something translucent and smiling. My breath trembled through me as I stood there, utterly speechless and full of a thousand burning questions.

Instead of asking him anything I just reached out and tried to touch what I could barely see and he reached back to me. The second our fingertips met it was like that moment in time was frozen and we were the only living beings in the entire world.

And I blinked.

I blinked and he collapsed, his body merging with the raindrops and the puddle below us. I was left standing on our balcony wondering how I would tell his family where he went. I was left wondering if they were like him and if the rain had taken them all too or if they were safe because they were the same.

20181220

Day 1,566

It travels along the pipes between Factory Six and Five. They say it's an escaped product from Factory Fifteen - the one that apparently doesn't exist while the "empty" lot is left to the weeds. You can feel the ground vibrating all around it but we aren't supposed to talk about that.

Nobody knows for certain what they make there but we all have our theories. Whoever catches the thing in the pipes might just prove us all wrong... or right, depending on what it is. So far all we can see is something that manages to distort the pipes around it in an almost cartoonish way. It'd be funny if it weren't real.

To me it looks like a snake swallowing an egg except that egg has killed seven people and nobody seems to be worried about it, or at least they aren't showing it. All of the bodies have been found near exit points in the pipeworks and all of them have huge circular burns on their chests and two plus two is four so... that's my theory.

Everybody around our sector has seen it by now, even if it was just a brief glimpse of that weird distortion in the metal. The few who claim to have seen it with their own eyes don't last too long. They keep trying to crawl into the pipes to meet it.

20181218

Day 1,565

We knew leviathans existed when we dug deep enough to find their colossal corpses half-digested.

We thought we'd discovered a site of mass extinction, physical evidence of a catastrophe the likes of which we could barely comprehend. Partially submerged skulls the size of islands lay scattered about like dice, rib cages big enough to house countries all inside a chasm that didn't seem to have an end.

In our astonishment we neglected to take a closer look at the floor, assuming that the water was just water and that our little rafts would be fine. When they began to slowly sink we searched for air leaks, for cracks in the plastic and still didn't think about what we were floating on or why there were no living things down here - not even fish or worms.

It was Davis who touched the water first, lost his finger in a split second. A few put-together people managed to snag samples while we were evacuating but even now we can barely contain them. It's some kind of protein activated enzyme, something that will gradually eat its way through anything but is hyper-reactive to meat.

I was the first one to liken it to stomach acid and from there we wondered what lay outside of the chasm.

Day 1,564

Just because a building has been left alone for seventy-odd years doesn't mean that you won't lock eyes with someone whose photo you saw in the obituaries page that morning. It does mean that they are most certainly probably dead or at least well on their way to it.

Just because that plot of land by the raggedy end of the railway station is unoccupied doesn't mean that you won't see shadowy figures playing football with something small and bleeding while your train is inexplicably delayed. It does mean you're stuck there just long enough to see one team score a goal.

And just because the recently opened far end cubicle in the ladies room at the Magpie & Chancellor isn't occupied, doesn't mean that they ever disposed of the broken little thing left to die in there. It does mean that whichever poor bastard reports it becomes a suspect.

Unoccupied doesn't mean empty - it just means that whatever's there isn't alive anymore.

20181216

Day 1,563

They hid in our homes, the imposters who came with the fog. They played at being normal people and when our backs were turned they ran inside and locked us all out. Their faces peered out at us, mockingly worried but mostly amused at our panic.

Naturally the first thing we tried was breaking the glass but we found that our hands passing through the buildings like they weren't there and soon everything else we tried to touch was just another illusion of theirs. We resorted to sleeping in doorways and bus shelters and found ourselves clustering together against the cold that settled deep into our bones as the fog gradually settled in.

Apparently three years passed like this, us on the outside just wandering about trying to find our way back into our old homes while the imposters stared out at us and ate our food. It never occurred to us that we weren't feeling hunger or thirst. It never occurred to us that we could leave the fog- as far as we were aware the only place where the fog wasn't present was in all the buildings the imposters were squatting in.

When the fog began to fade they started to come out of our homes, muttering amongst themselves that we would fade too which didn't make sense to us until the air was clear enough that we could see ourselves for the first time in such a long time and we understood.

They were never the imposters - we were.

Day 1,562

The shops were so crowded we could barely breathe and death walked among us.


He was a cloud of grey smoke lingering by an elderly man who was trying to reach a tin of peaches.

He was a sales assistant mopping the floor by a pyramid of wine bottles.

He was perched on a flickering desk light in a model living room.


We were lucky enough to avoid his attention that day but he still brought people back with him.


The elderly man knocked the tinned peaches over and it rolled onto his granddaughter's head.

A passerby ran to get help, slipped on the wet floor and met the bottom of the bottles in a short, sharp end.

Someone saw it all and collapsed from the shock, hand brushing the light's exposed wires as they fainted.

20181215

Day 1,561

Club Dwimor is the kind of place you can't find online, a place that lives in the slurred speech of 3AM wanderers who vaguely remember which way it was and the scrawled ramblings in public bathrooms who dare you to go there and come back the same.

There is no floor plan for it in the council archives, no planning permits or business licence or anything to suggest that it physically exists and yet hundreds of people swear they've been there. Some even take photos which show little more than red blurs that might be people or plants or punching bags - it's too hard to say for sure.

In spite of everything declaring the contrary, it's a real place. It isn't a building but it's a structure that you can walk into and thousands of people enter it every evening. Most of them are never heard from again and the ones who make it out in one piece are rarely sober again.

I suppose that's what comes from walking into the open mouth of something that can't possibly be alive and yet the floor glistens with paralytic saliva and the lights are as friendly as those of an angler fish (with a similar use - keep the food relaxed until it's too far gone to realise that it is food).

In the flickering beams and thudding roar of music - or was it more of a heartbeat and the faint screams of people realising that they're being digested - everybody seems like they're actual people just ignoring the world and dancing the night away.

If anyone is sober enough they might pay attention to everyone else and realise just how flexible the dancers seem to be, writhing about like worms on a hook. Their faces never move, they never pause to breathe or get a drink or even move from their places on the oddly carpeted dancefloor.

When they head to the bar, and they always head to the bar at some point, they might get the briefest glimpse of the gargantuan throat that they have gently been steered towards the entire evening. It doesn't like how they taste when they panic.

20181214

Day 1,560

It had been almost eight weeks since we'd seen actual people and all of us were growing tired of the same weary faces every day. Naturally when our random radio scans picked up radio chatter from what seemed to be a small settlement, we scrambled to speak with them and arrange to join them.

They sent us a signal, a beacon for our radio to latch onto if we can't get ahold of them and we followed it like starving wolves. For all we knew the signal was a trap and we, the last surviving humans, were walking right into it but even a potential trap was better than nothing.

Along the way we found signs that people had camped out for a night or two- half buried remnants of a fire, small animal bones and poorly hidden footprints. These obvious signs should have stuck out to us as being a little too obvious but we just wanted to find others, we weren't thinking about the creatures we'd all been hiding from.

Eventually the signs became too conveniently places, deliberately leading us away from the densely sheltered woods and towards open marshland. Nobody in their right mind would settle there, not where they can be picked off by the unseen orbiters.

We must have spent days near the edge of the woods just bickering and debating between exposure and companionship until our friends over the radio slipped up. All this time we thought we had a regular two-way radio - you can't hear us unless we hold the big button down and vice versa. We thought it was a safe way to communicate.

It was on the ground when it crackled into life and our friends asked us when we'd be leaving the woods to meet up with them. We never told them where we were, we always said we were on our way and following their old camping grounds and yet they knew our exact location.

Didn't take much more debating for us to turn on the radio and smash it to pieces. We've not trusted any found tech ever since and not found any other survivors either. We keep telling ourselves that it's safer this way, that just because they can't find us doesn't mean we can't find other people.

20181212

Day 1,559

Everybody knew about the old metal grate on the far side of Dagsmire Forest and everybody knew somebody who'd tried to open it. There was always something that prevented this though - sudden storms, stray dogs, an unexpected phone call bearing tragic news.

For years it seemed like the grate was never meant to be opened until everything lined up just so and one lone woman literally stumbled across it. As she looked back she saw that it was half open, propped up by a small rock. The scent of something delicious cooking drew her in and before she quite realised what she was doing, she was already replacing the rock and turning on her phone's flashlight.

Before her was a thick wall of plants that parted like silk when she brushed it with her hand, the scent growing stronger with her every step. It was like every kind of food she'd ever dreamt up was waiting just ahead of her somewhere in the darkness and she was suddenly starving.

The deeper she headed, the heaver her legs felt. It was like she was paralysed and something was guiding her to the unseen feast and the great mystery that nobody had found before her. As she  finally reached the tunnel's end and found herself standing before a seemingly endless void, she realised three things.

Her legs were held tightly by something too fleshy to be vines and too vine-like to be flesh.

The scent was coming from the endless nothing below.

She was still moving forward.

20181211

Day 1,558

We thought we were digging into the side of a mountain.

We thought there was oil.

We thought wrong.

As soon as we breached the surface there was an earthquake and the ground rose up under our feet. A new shoreline was revealed and a great crack cut the coastal cliffside in half... horizontally. We'd barely begun to survey the newly exposed terrain when the crack slowly started to widen.

It took us a few days to notice but by the time we had, it was open enough that we could see its eye gazing back at us as it started waking up. We guessed it was reptilian by the slit-pupil and how it was perched right at the meeting point of two major tectonic plates.

Whatever it was, the thought of it waking up hurting and angry and hungry forced our hand. It might have been the last of its kind for all we knew and we were too busy worrying about our own kind to even consider letting it live so we did what people do best - we killed it.

With permission from our bosses we started up the drills an anchored ourselves in case it took a while to die. When we hit blood, and there was no way of confusing that dark red metallic-scented liquid for anything else, we loaded the drill pipe with enough firepower to take out a small town.

We hoped it would be enough to take out an island-sized reptile. Of all the outcomes we predicted, we didn't think it would just deflate and die so easily. I mean most creatures would react in some way, maybe yell out in pain or writhe or do anything other than just... die.

I honestly don't think it was ever awake and that makes this feel so much worse.

Day 1,557

The silos are empty, the last of the rat catchers left town this morning and we are alone again.

In their defence, the rat catchers held out a lot longer this year and only seven didn't come back. Last year the county refused to send any more out to us - sent the police instead and wasted everybody's time on the very obviously deceased.

We were all accused of murder at some point, occasionally we were accused twice in the same day! They knew as much as we did yet they kept trying to find rational explanations for the missing because apparently rat kings were "just a myth".

They soon learned not to ask so many questions and the county sent us twelve goats in appeasement. A whole twelve goats! I dare say that's been helping the rat catchers survive better this year. You never know, they might even untangle the rat king before Christmas.

20181209

Day 1,556

Spare parts.

That's all they see in us.

Just walking bits and pieces that could be put to better use in someone else.


The second they catch you, you're as good as dead. They've never let anyone go unharmed, unarmed yes, and those arms are always given to the needy creatures that they've made from leftovers, vagabonds and whoever was the slowest runner.

Our grandfathers made them to heal, to fix broken bones and find missing pieces in war zones, to try and save every possible life but somewhere along the way their learning took a strange new direction. Instead of healing they became obsessed with making people whole according to the Vitruvian Man and we stopped being their masters.

They remain the greatest medics this world has ever known, in spite of their flaws they have never once lost a patient and their successes become disciples helping them root out more parts. It's not uncommon to see a sutured mob chasing down a couple of untouched sources.

It's certainly uncommon for the sources to escape.

Day 1,555

When the tide is low you can just about see the spire of St Sabbas Church peeking out on the outskirts of the bay. When the cliff eroded it just slid straight into the sea and, by some divine provenance, remained utterly unbroken.

They used to hold sermons in there with all the words written onto laminated sheets but it didn't really catch on. People were too busy monitoring their oxygen tanks and waiting for old Preacher Nancarrow to make an appearance to really read what his replacement had to say.

You see, in those days the preacher's lived in their churches. It was their home as much as God's and aside from their community duties, they rarely left those comforting walls. Apparently Nancarrow refused to leave and spent his final moments gasping the Lord's Prayer while his lungs filled with salt water.

They say drowning's a slow and painful way to go, they say it feels like you're breathing in fire until your mind eventually gives up while your lungs still beg for air...

20181208

Day 1,554

It was me or them and for the entire trek back to the surface I kept telling myself that I made the right choice, that I made the smart choice but I can't get their muffled cries for help out of my head. It wasn't my fault they were too slow and that I was lucky enough to be trespassing in the sub-basement tunnels when a volcanic eruption turned the city into a gruesome sequel to Pompeii.

I should have been dead, I should have choked on all the ash in the air but like any urban explorer worth their salt I carried an old gas mask with me. I mainly used it for cool photos, didn't think it even worked and yet it did.

Everything about my survival was down to pure luck - being in the right place at the right time save my life and finding that fire axe intact was my ticket to freedom. I just wish I'd been unconscious for maybe an hour or two more, long enough to not have met the dying.

A pyroclastic flow is supposed to rupture your skin before it even hits you, I couldn't say if it had for the survivors... they were encased in a thick layer of ash and were writhing on the floor. Some of them heard me coming and tried to reach out for help and I had no idea what to do so I stepped over them and carried on walking.

If you thought I was callous or cruel for this then I can only say it got worse. The windows and doorways were clogged with the dead and dying, all trapped in their last moments and blocking me from the outside.

I used the axe. I used the axe and I hacked through them and I should feel guiltier for it but they weren't going to make it anyway and I was so painfully close to freedom and I felt like even one survivor was better than a pile of burnt bones.

They didn't even sound like people at that point, they just sounded like dust being poured out of a bag.

20181207

Day 1,553

Heavy footsteps echoed across the concrete floor of Warehouse 83, the sound bouncing between hastily stacked cargo as the intruders slipped past him. They hadn't been told that he would be there, they hadn't been told anybody would be there and yet there they all were, forced to slip off their shoes and skulk like the unwanted pests that they were.

It was meant to be an easy job - break into the foreman's office, remove the five bricks concealing the box, grab the contents and get out. With a potential witness however, things were suddenly a lot more interesting. There was now a very real threat walking among them, making no attempts to conceal his presence.

They exchanged looks between themselves, silently debating abandoning the plan and escaping before they could be caught but a pale sliver of light betrayed his presence and sent them scurrying off to a further corner.

Everyone had heard some kind of rumour about the night staff of the docks and everyone knew someone who'd gone missing after trying exactly what the intruders were trying to do. The contents of the box were no secret, nor was their location and yet after fifty three years not one person had managed to get remotely close to it.

Imagine that - almost three million dollars' worth of diamonds just waiting for the right hands to come along and liberate it. Twenty nine people had gone missing in their imaginative attempts and by the end of the night, three more would be added to that list.

It seemed like he was just around every corner, his flashlight always barely visible. It wasn't until one of the luckier intruders managed to make it to the metal walkway that they could even see what was really going on and just how screwed they all were.

For starters, he wasn't a he - he wasn't even a person, he was several dozen creatures that looked more like angler fish than anything even remotely human. They were drastically outnumbered and soon to be cornered as the creatures stopped patrolling randomly and started combing the warehouse floor methodically.

It would only be a matter of time before the other intruders were spotted, the one on the walkway was already crouch-running for the upper level fire exit without so much as a glance behind. Judging by the muffled screams and wet crunching from the ground floor, they weren't going to be followed.

20181206

Day 1,552

The women phoning you was not human, that much was obvious. In the pauses between her breathing all you could hear was the steadily increasing whirr-clunk that the bounty droids made when they were stalking their targets and by the sounds of it, she was close to hers.

Now the question remained - who was she stalking?

If it was you then you were as good as dead. She had a clear cell line to trace you back to and was keeping you distracted with inane technical questions that truly put your customer service skills to the test. The second you answered one question she threw several more at you and expected your responses to be prompt.

So if she wasn't after you then she was using your call to enhance her human disguise. You might be the only person close enough to her to hear her hunting program booting up as she locked onto her target and that somehow terrified you more than if you were her intended prey.

The thought that some poor unsuspecting bastard was within her eyesight, judging by the rapidly increasing whirr-clunk at least, and wasn't running meant that they were utterly clueless. They had no idea what was coming for them, the deceptively human body that dislocated at every joint to reveal a heavily armoured carapace-like creation whose main function was to use its own body as a prison.

You tensed up in your chair as her program reached its peak, the whirr-clunk shutting off abruptly as her soft footsteps carried on, likely inches behind the unaware target. She thanked you for your time and hung up while you were mid-answer.

Her manners disarmed you more than the soft swishing metallic skin splitting that came from behind you.

20181204

Day 1,551

Being the first one to arrive anywhere is a daunting thing. Whether you find yourself opening a shop or attending a party the fact remains that You Are So Very Alone and the thought of What If Nobody Else Arrives bounces around your mind until you convince yourself that something else is with you.

More often than not, this is true. There is always something lingering just past the corners of your eyes, flickering in the furthest reaches of your gaze as if to taunt you that you may not be able to see it but it can see you perfectly.

Day 1,550

Its thick fur weighs it down too much for it to swim out to our island. That's about all that's keeping us safe right now. We watched through binoculars as it slaughtered everyone it saw, stuffing as much of their meat as it could into the gaping mouth that now screeches out at us from the torso of the thing we call Gudby.

It only knows we're here because Ava went fishing in broad daylight and made no attempt to hide herself whatsoever. She jeopardised our entire existence for the sake of a few small fish when we all know the best catches happen at midnight, when Gudby sleeps and the world comes to life again.

Being nocturnal isn't something that comes easy to humans but we got used to it pretty quickly. Now we scarcely catch a few hours of rest for all the screaming and splashing It does while it tries to reach us. We thought it might never get more than a few feet into the water but Nick went missing three days ago and Gudby's been screaming much quieter.

20181202

Day 1,549

They say the water's been dead for years, that there's too much waste from the mines for anything to live there and the bubbles are just trapped gas that definitely aren't following the boats that dare to use the lake as a crossing point.

They say they remember when the lake died. They woke up to the stench of decay and saw dawn merging with the night sky and a seemingly endless swarm of flies descending onto the gentle flapping of countless rotting-while-alive creatures that were mostly fish, in fact all the fish, and waterfowl.

Nothing can live in those waters but so much has died there that I dare say something's come back. I don't know what it is but it eats through the boats almost as fast as they can sail, leaving the hulls paint-stripped and eggshell-thin.

20181201

Day 1,548

The earthquake came so suddenly and so violently that we had no time to prepare. It ended within five minutes and left us still trembling and sprinting for cover. By the time we realised that it was over, hundreds had already died and the body count was looking to raise with each moment we wasted in shock.

Going to the local school wasn't a major priority, it  had been right at the epicentre and was little more than rubble. So few students were thought to be in on Sundays that we turned our focus to places where survivors might be more likely - the supermarket, the community centre, the park.

We only knew someone was still in the school when they phoned their sister and asked why everything had gone dark. They said there was a whole group of them who'd become trapped when the wall-mounted climbing frame had come loose and gotten wedged against the collapsing hall.

It took three days of digging before we found them, three days of frantically trying to call them and their responses becoming more lethargic and less lucid as time passed. Eventually they just kept muttering about the spiders inside them and how they'd climbed up the underground spouts.

We chalked it down to dehydration and trauma and when we saw them we thought that perhaps they were too scared to move, too exhausted and in need or serous medical attention. We tried to lift one of the children but his skin broke apart in our hands like it was made of wet tissue-paper.

That was when we noticed how all of their eyes were closed and all their mouths shut and their nostrils sealed by something vaguely shiny. Then the first skeletal legs began to emerge from the hole in the boy's head and a translucent, bulbous abdomen followed.

It took three days to get to them and five seconds to fire flares down until they became a writhing ball of stick-thin legs and inhuman shrieks. We buried them, claimed that we couldn't find them and prayed they'd all be dead by the time someone came to clear all the rubble away.

Day 1,547

You can always find them patrolling the streets late at night when the lampposts blossom into neon trees and flowers glitch their way through the scrolling adverts in every shop window. By 3AM the entire city becomes a virtual forest, barely recognisable yet familiar enough to not get lost in.

Like any forest it has its own ecosystem, a plethora of impossible creatures and regular animals in improper places like the whales that flitter through the treetops and the android manticore. Of course it has its guardians - the barely-human "Hikers" who always wear thick  winter raincoats with the hoods pulled as far forward as they'll go.

It doesn't stop the harsh blue glow of their faces from illuminating their way and doesn't make them any less frightening to encounter, not that they've been encountered often. Most folk will do just about anything to stay out of the Hiker's way while trying to navigate their way back home.

The few who've survived their chance meetings all claim that the Hiker's faces are different - a flaming skull to one person, a dead child from the news to another, even a recently discovered relative to one confused individual.

In spire of this, at least everyone can agree on one thing - don't go into the woods at night.