Day 1,636

You first met him when you worked as a receptionist. He was part of the cybernetics-based broadcasting centre - one of their thousand or so monitors. He brought you coffee whenever he came to fill out his forms and always remembered your name.

Shortly after the closure the world came to an abrupt halt. Some kind of old-world disease was released and before we knew it "organics", and those who were pretty much techless, were dropping like flies and the few of us that remained suddenly had to form a society from scratch.

We went out to the deep woods, me and my guy. A whole group of us stationed ourselves in an old firewatch tower and acted as a central communications point for the whole state. Every single piece of information flowed through us and then towards the appropriate place.

For a while it was working great. Then reality began to set in and the food drops slowed to a gradual nothing. As mostly organic, you didn't live on the feed gel that the others did and you still had enough of your digestive system to thrive on whatever you could hunt and forage in the area.

The others weren't so fortunate - your guy wasn't so fortunate. They may have been faster, stronger and better equipped for their jobs than you could ever hope to be but in that moment you realised just how fragile they all were.

When his telecom implant stopped working, you buried him out by the train tracks. It seemed a kinder thing to do than watch him waste away like all the others and it left you with more than enough feed gel to keep the other cyborgs up and running.

Sooner or later it would run out though. You'd have to pick and choose and debate and try to keep as many people alive as you could and feed them all their information and keep the world running when your own world ran on feed gel from a factory that closed almost four years ago.

Still, one bridge at a time.

Day 1,635

For a severed hand in a jar, she was a damned good navigator. Her manicure-tipped finger pointed him towards half-hidden supply caches and scribbled safety tips on the old notepad she kept with her. She kept him out of danger and away from other survivors and all she asked for in return was to be placed in fresh blood every now and then.

She claimed that uninfected blood worked best, helped her keep her thoughts in order. Whether or not this was true was less important to him - survival came first and logic trailed after it in the small hours of the morning when she was resting and he was questioning everything that had led him there.

If he hadn't heard her tapping patiently on the side of her jar, tied to the waist of someone who thought they knew better, he probably wouldn't have survived past the first few days. Within minutes of holding her, she managed to save his life and he tried not to look back ever since.

Lately though, things haven't been quite right and getting uninfected blood is slowly becoming impossible. She's suggested that he could give her some of his blood but something in the back of his mind said that if he did this, she wouldn't keep her mind to herself and he'd soon find himself inside the jar instead.

Day 1,634

The wind is rattling the windows again, digging its fingers into the cracks and trying to pry them open. We put boards across them and filled the rest with cement as best we could but the wind doesn't get tired - it's been doing this far too long to be stopped now.

The wind is howling at the door, tossing whatever it can find in the hopes that something might be strong enough to break it all down. I remember when it just mimicked somebody's knocking and tried to trick you instead of this brute force.

Not even the wind has patience anymore, too busy trying to get inside the house and inside our lungs to rob our last breath away to join it in the Great Gale out there. There was a time when it only took the dying gasps of the dead and we were all content with that.

Day 1,633

We had always walked among beings that were best left to their own devices. The ones who flitted between the boundaries of reality and time as it it were a game of hopscotch and our pitiful little lives were the stones they threw to mark their squares.

Everybody had, at some point in their lives, encountered one of these beings, traded favours or courtesies and lived to tell the tale. It had been this way since the city was little more than a handful of wooden huts by the river that was now a key trading route for the entire country.

Then something- or perhaps someone - tipped the scales and throughout the city, unseen hands carried lanterns that led tens of thousands into the subway stations and onto trains that had no mortal destination. The beings themselves were nowhere to be found and all their enchantments faded away to nothingness and nothingness we became in return.

We are but shadows roaming the underside of other cities, trying to reach through and warn them while the beings flee from us like we were the fleas carrying plague instead of the rats trying to find a home in a world that they carried us to and blame us for.

Day 1,632

Whenever one of the family pets died, mum would say they ran away.
Then she'd bury them behind the shed.
I only realised it when we went to plant some vegetables there and I accidentally dug up a hamster.


She wasn't perfect but she tried her best to raise me and my sister when dad left us.
I only found out he'd been having affairs when she got drunk one Christmas.
My sister started arguing with her around that time too.


In hindsight I know that she figured it all out before me.
Maybe I just didn't want to believe that mum was capable of doing something so cruel.
Then one day she told me my sister had run away.

That's when I figured it out.

Day 1,631

The one thing that bothers me most about working the early shift is how much you begin to notice the little details and realise how fucked up your, otherwise cheery, little neighbourhood is. It's all the little things I keep seeing that I can't bring myself to tell my coworkers about - last time they just shrugged and said "welcome to the area I guess".

That was back when I kept noticing the newspaper boy hiding packets of white pills in his rounds and getting a fair amount of cash in return. Apparently he only keeps a small cut of it at the end of the day, most of it goes straight to the corner shop and the dealers living in the flat above.

The police caught on eventually but by then the poor kid was hooked and I hear he's yet to be sober.

Since his additional deliveries stopped I've been noticing other things like just how many recycling bins are full of broken wine bottles and how many of those are stained red - even the off-brand chardonnay. I never see them being put out either, they're simply there already and always running red.

I've also been noticing how the wind moves the rubbish bags. I mean, I used to tell myself it was just the wind, used to hope it was just the wind but no. Something was alive in those rubbish bags and it desperately wanted out. Even after the trucks came and they were slung in along the actual unmoving rubbish, they still writhed furiously as if they thought they could roll themselves away.

Now I've grown used to that to, and utterly numb to the possibilities of what might be in there and exactly how many of them have been ,crushed to death already, I've begun noticing our customers. I've started seeing eyelids move in ways they shouldn't and jaws open that little too far to be normal.

And now I'm noticing how many of my coworkers aren't quite as human as they think I think they are...

Day 1,630

The voice over the intercom has been telling me to go straight for almost half an hour now but I still haven't reached the end of the store. She promised this was the safest way to go, promised that anybody who listened to her would live and this twisted game of Simon Says has me as the last player.

Bodies are all over the place, just left wherever they tried to run to or hide from. Following her instructions often meant that I had to step over them, even when they were gasping their last breaths I had to walk away. Hesitation was as good as joining them.

Music still played over the speakers when she was quiet, those faint and muffled songs that sound similar to a few pop songs you'd heard over the radio but something about them was just off enough to make you wonder if you'd ever heard it to begin with.

Half way through one of these internal debates you realised that the voice over the intercom hadn't spoken to you for quite some time now and there was a slow, deliberate shuffling sound coming from behind you. You caught a glimpse of a large fleshy lump in the side of a display fridge and considered running.

It hadn't helped any of the others but this might not be what killed them. This could have nothing to do with any of this. You might have a chance if you just ran straight forward like the intercom had been telling you to do and then you'd find the exit doors and escape and and and

And these thoughts weren't entirely yours. Still, you walked just that little bit faster in the hopes of getting out of its thought range. You don't know how you knew it even had a thought range but it just seemed right at the time and your other options were to slow down or change course - both of which felt like worse choices.

Just as you passed a stack of slow cookers for what felt like the fifth time, she spoke over the intercom again and told you to stop walking. She said the exit was right in front of you but It wasn't letting you see that. She said it was too late for her - for them all - but you could still reach forward and open the door.

And you did. You felt the metal bar of an emergency door and pushed down, half expecting an alarm and instead seeing the body-strewn store in front of you open out into the car park. The shuffling sounded like it was retreating so you whispered your thanks and never looked back.

Somehow your shopping was already waiting in the boot and your keys were in the ignition.

Day 1,629

I dreamt I was walking through the caravan site my family used to stay at every summer. It was one of those borderline-derelict coastal towns kept afloat by drinkers and tourists and yet my parents insisted that the days we spent trudging along the same stretch of pebble beach and same drunkards who kept "mistaking" our caravan for theirs would end up as pleasant childhood memories.

I thought they might be right too, after the years wore on and the memories dulled around the edges a little but that dream brought all the worst of it straight back to me. All those solo trips to the only laundrette in the town at 3AM when I thought nobody else would be around and the one time they were. Every single walk back from the beach and navigating my way through a labyrinth of shoddy caravans and all the barely-human faces peering through the grimy windows.

I'm half tempted to go back there just to see if it's as monstrous as I remember it being and if the site really does stretch from the outskirts of town right up to the cliff. According to my parents it doesn;t but I have such vivid dreams and memories of waking up and looking out of the window to see nothing but the sea, feeling the caravan tilt just that little bit more and praying it'd last us another few days til we could leave.

It never felt like we were guests there, it was always like we'd been sent there to atone for something. Even as a kid I knew it all seemed wrong and that we should never have gone and still every year we'd find ourselves crammed into a tin box for five weeks, counting the hours, the minutes, the seconds, the roaches in the kitchen - anything to occupy our thoughts.

Funny how now I can't seem to think of anything else - can't seem to dream of anywhere else...

Day 1,628

One or two fairy rings appearing overnight isn't too much of an oddity but eighty is rather more concerning. They were almost evenly spaced apart - not a single one overlapped and all were near perfect circles... unnaturally perfect and yet seemingly naturally made.

When the ground began to vibrate later that afternoon we began to further question the legitimacy of the fairy rings and their spontaneity. By evening the entire area was caught up in voracious tremors that sent us all flying towards open and sturdier ground.

When it was deemed safe to return we saw that the tremors had opened up several dozen holes and sunk most of the fairy rings, leaving perfect circles that appeared to lead toan underground chasm. As far as anyone knew the town was built on solid rock and yet this contradiction was right before us.

It was a few weeks later, when we began filling the holes, that we first saw them moving about in the shadows. Before then there'd been the odd report of unusual footprints and missing pets but it was all chalked own to the larger wildlife native to the area.

We never expected them to grow so bold as to venture out into broad daylight and stand with their domed heads held high. They resembled something of a fungus mixed with a parsnip, pale and sturdy creatures with a thousand glistening amber eyes that retracted with every blink.

We didn't consider the possibility of spores until a fatal cough developed a few hours later.

Day 1,627

We live our lives under neon warning signs and bask sparingly under heavily filtered phototherapy bulbs which aren't nearly the same as standing in actual pure sunlight. At least that's what the older folks say. The few who've made it up high enough to see the sun and get back in one piece claim it's like being surrounded with life. Of course that could be the parasites slowly waking up too.

Most of us will never get to experience natural daylight, the city watches us all and seals the sun away from us so the parasites won't have anything to trigger them. It's such a slow and painful process to go through and we're lucky to be spared from it.

I'd have preferred the chance to be informed and choose to either live under the neon or go out into the world. Sure it'd be death but I'd get to see the world as it should be seen and not through filtered telescopes or old monitors but with my actual eyes.

Tomorrow a group of us are going to break out and spend the rest of our days out in the open.

If you're reading this,assume we've made it and we're happy.

I hope we'll be happy...I don't wand this to be in vain.

Day 1,626

There's a pocket dimension in the cinema lobby, not that they tell you this and not that it's even noticeably different at a glance. Most people end up walking straight through it, slipping in and out in-between blinks and not even paying attention to who vanishes and who remains because they have a film to catch.

Sometimes people go missing there, mostly customers who walk in alone and get up halfway through the film to use the loo. They get drawn towards the lobby only to disappear into a crowd who never see them and that's generally the last time they're seen at all.

It used to happen to staff all the time - they went through cashier after cashier after cashier until the police threatened to close the cinema down to fully investigate. That scared the folks that come from the other dimension, they'd gotten too greedy and it nearly killed them all.

Around that time they got new carpet, some weird pathway pattern that was meant to engage and direct customers (away from the dimensional rifts, of course, but nobody would ever say that out loud) and the number of missing people dropped drastically. It was enough to satisfy the police at least.

I remember the last time I ended up wandering off the path and into the other dimension. My date distracted me with some childhood story and led us both away from our world as we knew it. I'd been there before, little infrequent trips back when I was a kid and the safest part of the cinema was the street outside.

I only realised that we'd crossed over when everything got real quiet and most of the other people seemed to melt away into the darkness that swarmed around the windows and behind the counters. Only a few other people remained and they were all slowly turning towards us.

I knew you had to stand still and look at your feet, my date... panicked. They like it when people panic, love it when they break the unspoken rules and start getting aggressive. It means they can say they acted in self-defence when they flipped him.

Now when I say 'flipped' I don't mean that they tipped him over. I mean they turned him inside-out, not true inside-out but close enough to permanently disfigure while rendering their victim utterly helpless and much easier to slowly eat.

They start by warping the dimension around your body, deep into your bones until your features start receding until they're totally inverted and you're staring at your own pulsing brain, trying and failing to comprehend everything but the searingly sharp pain.

Then they twist you, a little more and a little more until you're spooling out skin like a bobbin of thread and that's when they start to cocoon you. I don't know how they do this and keep people so alive and breathing and so perfectly conscious when they look like a slab of pork, softly weeping pork.

I closed my eyes when their tongues started sliding over him, acidic saliva doing its job at a snail's pace. When the smell of burning meat faded to stale popcorn I opened my eyes and was greeted by several members of staff who all gave ma cover story for my date's disappearance.

As far as anyone knows, he got up to use the loo an I never saw him again.

Day 1,625

My dog gave me worms, the little bastard.

It wasn't the little white ones you see in the adverts or the pink ones you dig up for fishing neither.

These are horrible grey things the size of a toddler's arm.

I was bent over to scratch his ears one last time before he was about to be put down when he pounced.

First he got the vet - not surprised by that one.

Had him pinned down and bit at his jaw til it broke them vomited a couple of worms down him.

It was like the mother birds feeding their babies.

I didn't think he'd turn on me next but then again, I did bring him there to die.

Day 1,624

There's the old saying "If it sounds too good to be true - it probably is" which, in a world where the impossible is just one piece of tech away, doesn't ring the old alarm bells it used to. I mean it does for the older generations who still remember what life was like before we had all the world's information in our pockets but the rest of us are just left to guess and rely on the typed words of those who went there before us.

At least, that's my excuse for going on a suspiciously cheap cruise and ending up being trapped in the ruins of an old army compound wondering if those screams were human or something mimicking a human to lure me out again. They nearly got me last time, had me right by the front gates and were setting up to leap when one of them made the mistake of growling instead of sobbing.

Not an easy mistake to make if you've been human all your life but they're just getting started and everyone who agrees to go on this particular cruise is just more practice for them until they get it right. I assume that's when they'll be let out and the global population will be reduced to a more manageable size.

At least I hope that's their aim - if that's not it then I dread to think what else it could be.

Day 1,623

Last night I used up the last of my batteries trying to keep them outside the suspended pillowfort I've been hiding in for three weeks. I used to be able to look outside and see hundreds of similar constructs reaching up and over the horizon, each beautifully unique and just that little bit too far apart to reach.

Lord knows how many people tried to meet up over the years, building elaborate bridges and fabric tunnels all in the hopes of seeing another living human. There were so many humans lying around, their glassy eyes and vacant faces weren't much company - even less when the flies settled in.

Day 1,622

Everyone remembers the weird kid from school - we called ours Possum at first because he played dead whenever the bullies came by and he was real good at it. He'd drop like a rock, bashing his head against the tarmac, barely breathing and barely peeping from his eyes until the bullies left.

He was always bruised and dizzy after playing possum, the teachers warned him that he could seriously hurt himself but he just kept doing it whenever they came near. We knew they'd all go too far one day but we didn't think they'd go that far.

They just kept kicking and kicking and kicking him until nobody could tell if he was breathing and nobody wanted to find out in case they got into trouble so we all just left him there for the teachers to find. They thought he was just playing possum too and walked off, leaving our Possum to rot in the sun.

It was only when school ended and we saw flies crawling in and out of his mouth that the teachers got concerned and checked for a pulse that was only just there. He was out of school for almost a year and he never really recovered from it.

He was much better at playing possum though - he certainly looked the part now.

Day 1,621

When I woke up I thought it was still night. There wasn't a single spec of light coming from any of the windows, it was so dark I couldn't see anything more than my reflection. At first I wanted to just go back to sleep but then my alarm went off which meant it should have been 0930AM.

At no time of the year had it ever been pitch black so late in the morning. I texted a few friends to see if it was some kind of weather thing and then I tried to check the news. Nothing would load, my texts wouldn't send - it was like even my phone had blacked out.

I started to panic a bit and tried to open my front door but something was blocking it from the other side. Something that I couldn't see in the dark. Something that started growling and banging against the door so hard I thought it would break so I just sat and stared out into the dark.

When I woke up this morning I thought it was still night... then the night blinked.

Day 1,620

Deep beneath a quiet village, a door is opened and the stale air of an ancient cavern meets the stale air of a tunnel. The faintest sliver of light cuts through the darkness, sparking flashes of pain in their bulbous eyes as they walked towards it with purpose.

On the outskirts of a quiet village, something has startled the cattle and they bellow in terror. Their farmers are utterly incapable of calming them and not even the dogs can corral them all back into their paddocks. Several herds flee for the hills, unable to comprehend the danger and unwilling to stick around to see it again.

By the warmth of a fresh fire in the pub of a quiet village, the few survivors huddle together. They are unsure of what they have seen, unwilling to talk about it and unable to forget it. Like their cattle they are lost amidst a gently creeping chaos.

Day 1,619

I saw my guardian angel for the first and last time yesterday. You're not supposed to see them until you're on your deathbed and apparently they're just weeping wrecks at that point. There's been the odd instance when someone's had a near-death experience and caught a glimpse of their guardian angel saving their life but my situation was... odd.

All my life I've had a fairly easy time, the usual close calls with cars and a few drinks too many but nothing serious. Or so I thought. I was just coming back from a date, walking through the park on the way home when I heard something gasping for air behind me and there they were - my guardian angel and my date lying unconscious at their feet.

They're meant to be strong right, but also kindly looking and clean but mine was an absolute mess. They were heavily scarred, hair missing in great scabbed patches, eyes bloodshot and their teeth were either missing or broken. Even their wings were crooked and the feathers were tinged red. A nasty looking knife was sticking out of their neck.

It's meant to be that they hold you while you're dying but last night I held my angel. I held my angel and they told me just how many people had tried to kill me, drug me, rob me, how many times I'd actually nearly been hit by a car or walked under an unstable air-con unit or general falling debris.

I don't know if you can live without them, if anyone ever has or is but I guess I'll be finding out... if I can bring myself to leave my apartment. I suppose if I stay for too long I'll starve but the options outside seem to be so much worse.

Day 1,618

For all the sweat and toil of living in a boat, it's still safer and cheaper than a house. I may have to move every two weeks and have the toilet pumped out from time-to-time and something may have been following me for the last eight or so weeks, knocking on the hull when it knows I'm trying to sleep but otherwise it's been great.

My inland friends have been dropping like flies from all the creatures that got released when someone broke into a sealed mine tunnel and let a whole lot of chaos out. I've lost count of all the "Rest In Peace" messages I've read online while me and the other boaters just keep moving and listening.

Knocking from the hull aside, the biggest danger out here is honestly just storms. A decent bolt of lightning can split your boat right to the water and the next thing you know your bilge pump is overheating and you've got to jump ship which is as good as walking right into a knife.

Day 1,617

He tried to smile through the twigs growing out of his gums - it wasn't a pretty sight. His eyes were tinted green instead of red and he didn't seem to blink once the entire evening which was only mildly less concerning than the fact that he got close enough for me to smell him bleeding.

Don't get me wrong - he was a nice enough guy and it was sweet of him to grow flowers in his hair to try and hide how metallic he smelled but people that far gone don't last much longer before they fully bloom and I don't think I'd be able to stomach that.

I remember him saying that he lived in a colony with others like him - you know, The Grove that everybody keeps talking about. Apparently it's a pretty decent resting place. Like one of those memorial forests but they get a bit longer to properly choose where they want to be forever.

He tried to lean in for a kiss at the end and I couldn't bring myself to let him. He got proper offended and started going on about how it doesn't spread like that but I could see the pollen cloud floating around his hair-flowers and everybody knows that their pollen is more like mushroom spores.

It just seems a little bit rude that he'd try and get me like that when he could have asked me at any point and let me say no rather than make me out to be the bad guy there. He stormed off after that and I thought that'd be the end of it but this morning I found a bunch of empty bottles on my windowsills.

My whole flat smells like his flowers.

Such a dick move.

Day 1,616

It's happened about eight or nine times now and every time I think it's about to end I somehow wind up back at the beginning and the worms are barely biting at my veins. On my left is the leftover pile of meat that was my mum. I'm glad she stopped breathing when the worms reached her spine. She isn't in pain any more.

To my right is my brother. He's crying but he isn't crying tears - he can't. They've already squirmed their way from his mouth to his eyes and they're just bursting out and he's screaming and he's choking and I know that in three minutes he'll stop too. He always stops after three minutes.

By then my turn is already underway and I can feel them moving through me, drinking up all my blood and multiplying with my every heartbeat. I fall but it doesn't hurt. Nothing hurts at this point and I know the beginning is coming back.

Dad breaks through the hotel door and cries out. He's too late again and he swears he'll try something else this time. He looks me in the eyes and promises that next time will work and we'll be playing on the beach again. There's something metal in his hands and he starts chanting.

And we've just finished dinner, the three of us heading back to our room.

Dad was supposed to join us but he got caught up at work.

We don't feel so good.

Day 1,615

She stood in the middle of the hospital hallway and everything flowed around her as if she didn't exist at all. Almost everybody was going about their business, carefully moving passed her without acknowledging her in the slightest. She stared at them all as they came close to her, leaning towards them as they moved just that little bit faster to get away from her.

It seemed as though the only ones who could see her were the elderly or terminal, the ones who edged towards death and towards her. Some greeted her like an old friend, all happy smiles and eager kind words while some cursed at her and blamed their poor health on her existence. All the others looked on in confusion at the apparent not-so-empty space.

The few who leant into her open arms collapsed and died within minutes.

Day 1,614

I knew I shouldn't have fallen asleep in the fields.

I felt something crawling over my face but I thought I swatted it away in time.

The spots started appearing a few days later.

Thought it was just acne until they began to twitch.

It was almost rhythmical, like they were moving in a pattern.

I never expected them to hatch.

Day 1,613

They say drowning's a slow and painful way to go, they say it feels like you're breathing in fire until your mind gives up while your lungs are still trying to breath in the water. Makes me wonder if this is why there are so many ghosts on the beach and why.

They're all dressed nicely, all prim and proper and we know why that is at least. See there was this church on the cliffside led by Preacher Nancarrow - The Church of St. Sabbas - and the council kept telling everyone that the cliff was eroding more and more with every storm but people always said it'd last another year.

Apparently there was a storm during one of the Sunday sermons that sent the whole place tumbling down into the sea. The waves were so bad that there weren't any survivors and before anybody really had much of a chance to mourn, the second World War came along and people were kept occupied.

By the time that had all blown over there was a village with barely anybody in it and a beach full of ghosts all led by Nancarrow. He keeps trying to march the congregation back into the village but they can only get as far as the ruined church's remains.

Sometimes people pick up pieces of the church and move them closer together to stop the congregation from trying to reclaim their old homes. Other times people will take a piece of the rubble and carry it about, leading them on a wild goose chase right up to the village boundary before tossing it back over the cliff and watching the congregation soar alongside it.

I'm sure we won't find it so funny when the rest of the village joins them someday.

Day 1,612

Officially it was called "United Cooperative Habitat Version 6.835" but everyone just calls it the Zone. Old media made it seem so clunky and scary to plug your mind into a machine and zip your entire conscience into a virtual world but now it's where most people work and it's about as mundane as it gets.

Aside from everyone being represented by avatar-ish figures ranging from custom models to celebrities dressed in animal onesies, it became the new norm pretty quickly. There's still plenty of IRL work and nobody's losing jobs to it, if anything the Zone's expanded the potential job market exponentially.

Doesn't mean it's any safer though, if anything you've got to be more cautious. There's been a new sweep of takeover-type bugs and it's not just people's credit cards that are being stolen - it's their bodies too. Someone's found a way to upload their own consciousness into "empty" (in other words, active) users and is just strolling off with their lives.

It's starting to get to the point where people will set up vocal password so that the second they log out of the Zone they're held at gunpoint by their own home systems and if they don't say the right words they get ejected right back into the Zone and the authorities are on them like flies on rotten meat.

I mean, it isn't too bad as far as solutions go but there have been cases where the original consciousness was destroyed so we're back to rotting meat stuck in a chair with an agro alarm system that won't let anybody in until the right password is said - even when the body's decayed to nothing but a visceral mess.

Day 1,611

Letting the coastal towns die was the kindest thing to do. It gave us the time we needed to fortify ourselves against the things the tide brought in and to steel ourselves against the pain that came when the tide left and took so much with it.

Over three million declared dead and it still wasn't enough. They weren't enough and the sea came back for more and more every single day til we feared that there'd be nothing left of us but our bones and yet we continued to barricade and dig and build and try every last thing to keep the sea away.

While others dug deep into the earth, we made self-sustaining skycraft. Water collection, waste recycling, gardens, slaughterhouses - everything to keep a densely packed population alive and well above the sea. All we had to remember is not to look down at everything we'd left behind.

We'd see people reaching out to us moments before the waves hit them and swept them away to join the rest of the country. If the wind was right we'd be able to hear them crying and screaming and begging us for help that we wouldn't give.

How could we endanger the thousands of lives onboard for the sake of a handful of people below? It was one of the countless times we had to focus on the numbers and not the crippling guilt from letting more people die when we had the space and resources to take care of them.

But there were always too many of us and too few of them to risk it. Now we've been drifting over partially submerged mountains without so much as a flicker of movement from below, save for the fish and all that lurk with them.

Not a human in sight for miles, save for us.

Day 1,610

They say the tunnels were always beneath us - not just in London but the entire country was full of them, all interconnecting and almost all of them repurposed. They became tube stations, war bunkers and laboratories and the general public were led to believe that people made them all.

Everybody knew somebody who'd helped create the tunnels that linked cities in amore intimate way than a road ever could and in all honesty people did help to make them, just not the entirety of them. We dug our way down for other reasons - burials mostly, came upon them accidentally and decided to make the most of it.

Of course, the tunnels weren't empty to begin with. There weren't quite as many burial pits to begin with but entire work crews were slaughtered by the hour until we barricaded and detonated certain sections to contain the creatures as far away from our newly discovered underground network as possible.

It worked well until they managed to dig their way back towards us and we made it all too easy for them by hurling trains through and causing the surrounding ground to vibrate for miles and miles around and led them right into the heart of our civilian population.

They never saw it coming.

Day 1,609

Nobody really sleeps for the first few nights in the dorms. It's not just the whole "new room, gotta adjust to it" thing or the fact that the guys next door blast their tunes out at 3AM for no discernable reason or the weird stains on the ceiling that look like blood at night when the streetlights shine through the pathetically thin curtains.

It's the hands that slip under your door and tap gently, beckoning you over with increasing urgency until you cave and walk right up to them. You peer through the keyhole and see a writhing mass of grey flesh and countless stick-thin arms jabbing out and slowly withdrawing again and again and again as those hands try and tug you closer.

It's easier to stay awake and keep an eye on them.

Easier to swat them away from the door handle when they get too close.

Easier to stop it from letting itself in.