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.

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