20190731

Day 1,789

Beneath our meat we are all near identical bones.

For the most part, our bones are us as well but every now and then a person is born with the wrong bones.

It's usually found in twins, not that they notice for the majority of their lives. Most are so close to being the same person physically and genetically that they never realise it at all and merely feel a little odd in themselves sometimes. Those who do notice don't last too long.

Nobody likes being away from their bones.

Occasionally it will happen to strangers born on the exact same day in the exact same maternity ward. It won't be picked up by the staff, it all starts in the brain when it starts understanding what it is and it not and it is not the bones that dwell within it.


20190729

Day 1,788

When they were drilling the tunnel they expected to find nothing more than rocks and dirt.

Instead they found Her.

She'd been asleep beneath the mountain for so long that there weren't even any stories of her floating about in local folklore. She was a total mystery. A sixteen foot tall mystery covered in flaky grey skin and patches of dense fur. Her mouth was full or heavily serrated teeth, all stained deep red.

She learnt our language within an hour and within a day She'd laid out her terms and conditions.

We could finish the tunnel and travel freely as long as She was allowed to eat whenever and whomever She pleased. The alternative was letting Her roam freely which had the potential for murder on a far larger scale than the occasional driver.

So we said yes and let Her kill and eat thousands.

The road on both sides of the tunnel is stained as red as her teeth.

The entire area reeks of something putrid and rotting.

The alternative was worse - we repeat to ourselves when someone else goes missing.

We did The Right Thing.

Day 1,787

When the wind is right you can hear singing coming from the drains near the river. When we were younger we'd dare each other to stick our arms through and wait for something to grab them. We were so convinced that someone lived down there and now we're old enough to know better.

Nobody lives down there - they all died thirty odd years back.

They either didn't get the memo or they refused to read it but we've all seen their pale, skinny little faces in the distance. We used to wonder why they never came towards us or tried to open the grate until we caught them coming back to it.

We must have been walking real quiet for them to not notice us all but we sure as hell noticed them dragging an entire stag through the open grate, guts trailing behind it like toilet paper stuck to your shoe. We made sure to hang back and keep low until they'd closed the grate back up again.

Dead as they might be, we didn't fancy our chances at taking them on face to face. I mean, how do you even hurt a ghost and were they even that? There's plenty of fiction to say that ghosts can kill but far less to explain why they'd drag dead meat to their main haunting grounds.

Unless they aren;t fully dead and whatever's left of their bodies still needs to eat.

20190728

Day 1,786

The fog was so thick we had to wear our respirators or risk drinking the air instead. If we'd had a choice we would have turned back and waited it out but luckily for us we were being pulled through it by Fernsby's dead daughter and she had somewhere important to take us.

Sometimes she blended in so perfectly with the fog that we thought we were walking ourselves through it but she kept turning around to make sure we were still there and hers wasn't a face we'd soon forget. Riddled with bullet holes and a nasty gash across her throat to top it all off- brutal way to go but unfortunately a common one.

We were deep in the woods when dawn came, not that we really noticed it through the fog but we felt its warmth graze us from time to time as young Miss Fernsby led us further still. I couldn't feel my legs at that point and I was glad for it, I'll take numbness over crippling pain any day.

Must have been noon by the time we reached the other side of the woods, out to the other side of town. Neither of us had been there since the amnesty talks had dissolved eight years ago and the whole planet had become more and more divided as countries became states became cities became gangs.

Now we were back and still being pulled towards the old apartment towers, towards a strong stench of decay that pierced through the respirators like nothing else could, towards her end goal we assumed. For all we knew she was taking us to our deaths - we hoped they'd be quicker than hers.

When she stopped leading us, when she stopped and raised both arms up and reached for a gaping hole in one of the towers that had been hit by one hell of a bomb, we saw what she wanted us to see. We saw what the initial war machines had left in their wake.

Nobody wanted to admit to adding radioactive material to their bombs. that would be far more immoral than a regular bomb and would last so much longer with much worse consequences in the long run. Consequences like cancerous mutations of the skin, ones that lingered in bloodlines and soil alike.

The young Miss Fernsby was reaching out through the fog to what initially appeared to be fabric tangled in a weird web that spanned the gaping hole. As we stood, trying to figure out what we wanted us to do about it, the fabric moved in a way fabric shouldn't - a way it can't- and we saw it for what it actually was.

Have you ever heard of a rat king? A whole bunch of rats tangled at the tails, squabbling and clawing at each other, desperately trying to get free. We just found the human equivalent and it wasn't tangled by clothes but by skin fused together so tightly that we couldn't really see where one person ended and another one began.

We slowly started recognising parts of people we used to know, people we left behind when the town split into gangs. We remembered the weird meteor shower we'd seen a few days ago, realising that they weren't meteors at all. They were miniature nukes, ones that were often sent into densely populated areas to wipe them clean for mass invasion.

Fernsby's daughter was giving us a head start - Lord knows we'd need it.

20190727

Day 1,785

She had broken every rule her mother ever gave her and in the end it still wasn't enough to save her.

In her defence, he approached her to begin with and she treated him just like anyone else at the bakery.
Don't talk to strangers - especially if they're outsiders.

She saw a cut on his hand and she knew blood that red was probably human, she sold him a bandage.
Don't help them, you don't want things like That in your debt - they'll repay you cruelly.

They kept bumping into each other around town, gradually growing closer and closer.
Don't invite them into your home or they'll never go and you'll not leave alive.

Before long she was spending several days in a row just sitting beside him in gentle silence.
If you say "I love you", they'll take your voice away.

Everything made sense when he invited her for a moonlit walk along the moors.
Don't go out there at night child - the water's been hungry for as long as it's been.

Will-o-wisps flittered about her, forming a path that led away from him.
Follow the little ones, they're all mothers and they'll always lead you back home.

No matter how much she wanted to run, her feet were stuck matching his steady pace.
If you go out too late then they'll snatch your soul straight from your shadow.

There must have been hundreds of them in the water, countless eyes shining in the lantern's dim glow.
The water's all theirs and you'd do well to remember that before you traipsing off for them to drown.

20190725

Day 1,784

If it were alive, it can become a haint.

Don't matter none if it were human or not.

Haints is haints, boy.


I lost count of how many times Nana said that to me when I was a kid and I doubted one of her many ghost stories. Now I've found reason to believe she was onto something. At least I think she is, i Mean there's simply no other explanation for cave divers to drown when there's not a single stream in the entire network of tunnels.

They were also found eighteen miles away near a dried up old riverbed which makes me wonder if the river itself counted as alive, or was so full of little critters that it felt alive. Either way, I reckon we're looking at the ghost of a long lost river.

Now there's nothing I can think of to put a dead river to rest. I doubt it has unfinished business or feels vengeful... maybe it doesn't know it's all dried up and gone? But surely it would have felt all the little lives inside it leave or die or both?

How to put a dead river to rest... Do we feed it more souls until it feels at peace? Do we seal the caves and hope it doesn't figure out how to move? Do we find what killed it - if we even can? There are too many questions for me to know where to even start and yet someone has to try.

There's not a snowball's chance in hell that the police will see this as logical, let alone enough to seal the caves themselves. I could do it with enough explosives but that would draw too much attention and then someone would wonder if anyone was trapped inside and they'd dig it all up again.

I could fence it off and post a few official looking signs up but deterrents never really deter, do they?

Day 1,783

Some say the audience date back as far as mankind has existed, possibly further still. As long as one can perform and be seen, for as long as the audience is required, they are there. Their lips may strain over teeth that struggle to be in one place at the same time but they are smiling with joy.

They meant no harm at first - they only wanted to join in and participate with us. They inspired us to mix blood and dirt to make the first drawings on cave walls. They stood among the crowds in the Globe Theatre to watch Shakespeare's plays and steer him towards tragedy every time. They killed so many millions and we watched them.

We hid behind a thousand excuses, saying how realistic movies were getting whole praying all the blood was fake and the screams were just really good acting. There's only so much that can be manufactured and we know it, we feel it every time they kill another dozen people in some z-list horror flick that we call fake and boring.

They adapt and learn and evolve alongside us, as visible and invisible as any other person for the most part. As soon as they start to gather, as soon as they become an audience they drop all pretense of being human and become spectators.

When one show fails they're already halfway through the next.

When one contestant dies they've already got another dozen lined up and ignorant.

When one person writes this all out they're already waiting to stop the next post.

20190723

Day 1,782

Mum never believed that grandad came out of the vents at night even though she looked straight at him every time. She'd stare him dead in the eyes and say that he was dead and dead people can't come back. She said it every night and eventually he did stop coming back.

I miss his visits. He'd seep out of the vents all smoke-like and perch on the end of my bed to tell me stories about the war. I don't know which war he meant really, mum always said he was never in the army and he was too young to have been involved in the last world war.

Still he'd talk about strategy meetings that ran long into the night, holding your breath so the enemy couldn't see it in the cold winter air - he even taught me the quietest way to pop a door off its hinges. He never said who the enemy was though.

I figured it must be whatever killed him down in the basement. His body wasn't officially found there but I saw the scorched outline before mum suddenly decided to put thick carpet down there. The outline leaked through it though and even with that new couch she's put on top of it, you can still hear something bubbling and squishing if you sit down too hard.

Grandad hated the couch, said it made it harder for him to come out and visit me. I tried to tell mum but she wasn't having any of it. She just said he was buried and resting and that was final. There was no talking sense to her, not even when grandad waved to her on his way out.

The stain on the carpet is still there, though he doesn't come out any more.

I wonder if the enemy came back after all this time.

I wonder if he's finally at rest.

20190722

Day 1,781

"Can you help me?" she asked breathlessly after she strode through my door like she owned the place. I knew she wasn't human, not by a long shot but her act was almost believable so she'd been undercover for quite some time. Probably for longer than time had existed as a human concept.

It was her eyes that gave it away - solid blocks of deep green with pupils that didn't dilate when she stepped into my dimly lit office. She didn't even hesitate at the door like everyone else does when they're trying to decide if I'm in business tonight or not. Chances were she'd been casing me long enough to know my hours.

I'm becoming predictable and in my line of work that's enough to end you.

Most creatures tend to get antsy when they see me, knowing just how many of them I'd put down before but she was different. She was older and deadlier than anything I'd faced before and yet she wanted my help. Or she was setting me up for failure. It was hard to get any sense of her actual emotions behind the face she wore.

It was a familiar face too - the barista down the street has one just like it... or rather, she had one just like it. Creatures like this one don't like to share. I didn't doubt I'd find the poor original missing at best and read about her faceless corpse being found at worst.

I was curious enough to ask what help I could possibly give to someone so impossibly ancient and she at least had the nerve to freeze and look surprised like I hadn't seen others act like her before. Soon as she realised I wasn't fooled she dropped the act, and the face, entirely.

Teeth.

That was my first thought. Lots and lots, and I mean lots, of teeth. Not much else of her face was visible for the jagged fangs that stuck out all pincushiony and black. They matched the spines growing from her neck, arms and legs though. Most of her kind prefer mixing it up a little so it was nice to see someone with class.

I still don't know how she managed to talk with teeth like that. Even when she explained to me that she'd lost her brood and they were hiding from her in the city, I was too busy wondering where her voice was coming from. It sure as hell wasn't that gaping maw of a mouth.

In hindsight I should have paid more attention to what she was saying but I reckon she knew how distracted I was and took full advantage of that. Perhaps if I'd have focused a little better I might have caught the part where she stopped with her sob story and started reciting something in one of the demon tongues.

Next thing I knew I was dead, head ripped apart like a half-melted easter egg while she called her brood over to eat my brain. Nothing quite prepares you for the sight of your own body being devoured so messily. I thought it was bad when I died but they got my viscera everywhere.

Little bastards could have washed their hands at least.

Day 1,780

When she came back to the spot where their cow was found dead, dragging her father along in the hopes that the poor creature might be saved, there was no cow to be found at all. She knew it couldn't have gotten very far, not with the gaping wounds in its side from impossibly large claws and the pool of blood it was laying in.

No. Instead of a dying cow, among the blood they found a staircase that made their vision pulse to look at for too long. Her father immediately wanted to cover it and burn the ground around it just in case it was cursed but they both knew it was far beyond such superstitious nonsense.

This was something you'd have to leave the country to escape, something that couldn't travel the sea, something old that had been deliberately woken up by someone who had more of a death wish than they had common sense or empathy or rationality.

She ended up dragging her father back to the main farmhouse to plan their next move, desperately pretending that the scrabbling sounds coming from behind and beneath them were rabbits. They talked loudly about a sealing ritual they'd definitely heard about, hoping it might deter the thing following them.

It did not.

It started scratching the door as soon as they closed it behind them, claws already peeping through the thick wooden frame as it slowly but surely shredded their pathetic attempt at barricading themselves. While she and her father gathered up the hunting rifles and all the ammo they'd stored away the realised just how slowly the creature was going.

Patience was the word that came to mind. Patience reinforced with the quiet confidence of a predator that felt as threatened as a lion facing a lone ant. As more and more of its claws came through the wood and they started getting glimpses of its body, they turned their rifles around and fired.

20190721

Day 1,779

It was some kind of fungus, but we didn't find that out until half the world had choked on it. We didn't even know where it hid in the body before migrating to the lungs until a group of brave bastards documented their final few months.

They took samples from as much of their bodies as possible but the air around them was so heavily contaminated that by the time we got there to retrieve their work, it was covered in spores. Strangely enough the one sample with the most spores in it were strands of their hair.

Much like lice, the spores attached themselves to the base of the hair follicles, gradually germinating against the warmth of the scalp. It spurred us to ask other infected people to monitor their hair growth, scent - anything could be something as far as we knew.

We meant well when we told the remaining world what we'd discovered but it just spurred them all into cutting their hair and shaving their heads practically to the bone and only spread the fungus further in all the loose hair that drifted through the wind. It took a while to notice it but the hair didn't drift wherever the wind blew... it aimed.

That was when we found out that the spores weren't quite as plant-like as we assumed them to be. Each and every one had their own pulse and moved as an individual but they all had the same goal - kill the nerves along the scalp, dig in and shed the outer casing, use the closest blood vessels to get to the lungs and blossom in the moist, warm air.

As soon as the coughing starts, the person is declared dead and expected to isolate themselves as far from other people as possible to minimise the impact of the spores migration from their corpse. In a way it looks beautiful - to see that great cloud of dust emerge from their parted mouths as they breathe their last breath.

Unfortunately, if you're close enough to see it then you've probably been breathing it in.

20190720

Day 1,778

As far as the viewers at home could see, the contestants looked nervous because they were on TV. They had no idea what the live studio audience was and just how ravenous they all were. The viewers heard humanish laughter coming from the audience and assumed it was a pre-recorded laugh track. They never saw all the teeth poorly hidden behind mouths that salivated whenever a contestant started to lose.

The aim of the game was simple - guess what the majority of the audience had answered and you win... eventually. There was one lifeline to call your loved ones before you left for an "all expenses paid vacation" never to return. The only other option was to switch places with someone the audience picked and they knew exactly what would hurt you the most.

It wasn't a particularly popular show, not one that anybody was ever really interested in and not one that anybody recognised the contestants from. You'd never see a friend or neighbour, always some nobody from nowhere with just enough to lose to make them desperately want to win.

Five seasons came and went and almost fifty people were missing by the end of it. All on permanent vacation to towns that only seemed to exist online and all of whom decided to stay in these towns forever. The audience feasted and thrived until they had a contestant who'd watched the show before.

They hadn't seen the crew, made up of spare machine parts hastily grafted onto lesser audience members, yet they weren't afraid when they met. They feigned terror at first, just like the others who'd been grabbed from the streets and taken to the studio to participate.

By the time the first commercials were over, five people were gone and the studio was filled with wet crunches as they got rid of the delicious evidence. After so many seasons they'd grown complacent enough to not bother hiding this from the contestants any more.

After so many seasons they stopped properly checking their victims for weapons. All it took was a small pistol that had been tucked into a shoe, beneath oversized jeans. As soon as they made it to the final round and lost the final question they pulled the gun out and opened fire... on themself.

Their death was quicker that way and with the show being broadcast live someone was bound to see them go and call the police. Suicide was easy enough to explain... the creatures hiding behind the camera however, much less so.

Nothing aired the next day or the days after, nothing was written in the papers, no reports filed.

It simply ceased to be and something else replaced it.

Something that learnt from their mistakes.

20190719

Day 1,777

The cameras were on, the teleprompter was prepped and all that was left for them to do was flip the switch and go live. Theirs was a show that ran in the barely-lit hours of the morning - originally meant for loners, stoners and insomniacs but now reaching audiences across the globe.

Today they were featuring a rare animal that had only been discovered eight weeks ago and they were set to be the first to have a live specimen on air. Officially it was a fur - covered bipedal reptile but several news outlets had already taken to calling it a werewolf.

In all honesty it did bear a strong resemblance to the old stories, especially the way its eyes followed you around the room as it loomed a good two feet above everyone else. It may have been safely locked away but nobody felt safe all the same.

When the switch was hit and they began to broadcast, all eyes were on the main stage-the guest star all but forgotten in the initial rush to Get The Perfect Intro. Nobody noticed deft claws slipping under the latch and nobody heard the door swing open.

It wasn't until the they'd finished interviewing one of the biologists who helped discover the creature that someone thought to spare a glance at it only to find it gone. I'm sure you can imagine how high their ratings soared when they broadcast the live hunt.

The footage flipped between four different cameras that tried to cover their own quarter of the studio, each one switching away just as someone was killed by a reptilian being that had spent the entire opening interviews warmed itself under halogen lights.

Nothing reminds people that we are far from the apex predators we claims to be than being hunted by something so much better than them in every conceivable way. The death count shot up faster than the viewer count and by the time the authorities had arrived, they were the only living beings there.

20190718

Day 1,776

The whale had died in the early hours of the morning, washed ashore somehow while the rest of its pod floated as close by as they could and called out to it. As the town council sat around trying to organise the removal, the pod continued to call.

They didn't move much from their almost-beached positions. It was like they thought the dead whale was just sleeping and they were yelling out for it to stop playing and wake up. We all thought it was heartbreakingly sad until the dead whale moved.

Slowly but surely its mouth began to open and it replied. Its innards were rancid and leaking from its open mouth and the gaping wounds in its sides where the seagulls had started eating it but it didn't even seem to notice - it just kept singing.

After three days of this constant back-and-forth between the pod and the corpse, it started to move. It looked like it was stuffed full of snakes but it managed to maneuver itself back into the sea and, trailing crimson viscera, it left with the pod.

Five years later and there isn't much of it left - there isn't much of the pod left. All of them are swimming corpses, leaving the water around them a mess of gore without so much as a single shark in sight to clean up after them.

Seems the rest of the ocean knew about the virus long before we did.

20190717

Day 1,775

A ghost is a habit that forgets it's dead. Centuries can come and go and there will always be ghosts walking their favourite forest paths, bending over empty spaces where their loom stood or patrolling what used to be the outskirts of their hometown.

Now of course we see shadowy figures gliding through the trees, peering down at our children when they're sleeping or strangers in odd clothing stalking us late at night. They probably don't even notice the changes in scenery or what they are even looking at -they are routines that weren't broken.

Of course there's exceptions to everything - even the dead. routines do occasionally get broken, usually when the dead are spoken to by the living and made to remember their passing. It's never a pleasant experience for anyone involved and few survive it.

Still, as long as there are places to go there are routines to be established. As society evolved into more complex and miniscule routines so too do our ghosts evolve and adapt and linger in the corners of our eyes and streets, endlessly repeating themselves.

20190716

Day 1,774

It said it was an angel and I was so young that I didn't know any better.

I opened my window and let it in, not even realising what it would do til I was the only one left in the house.

First to go was my dad when he went to visit the shops. The cat brought part of his face home and left it on the doormat, The rest of his body was found in bits and pieces over the course of seven months with nothing to say who had killed him, only that he was dead and torn to shreds. Mum never told them about the blood and hair we pulled out of all the plugholes.

The next to go was my sister when she tried to sneak out of the house to go to a friend's party. It was made to look like the window had snapped shut on her neck, killing her in an instant. A neighbour had even claimed to have witnessed it but I have a feeling that their kid let in an angel too. He looks at me in school like he knows what we've done.

The last to go was my mum -  distraught, exhausted and full of grief. I'm sure you can figure out the rest. The newspapers read like a broken record of "poor her and her poor child, all alone in the world now" but they are wrong.I've still got the angel and its been following me now for years.

Whenever I enter a building, if I can, I'll open a window for it.

Everyone needs an angel in their home.

Everyone.

20190715

Day 1,773

All you can hear nowadays are the fire engines racing back and forth all across the city, pumping water from flooded streets into the swollen river that forces itself back through the sewer drains and out into the streets again. They are fighting a losing battle but nonetheless they are fighting.

I have never fought back against the water. I chose a ground floor apartment near the old docks lower down on the river. The landlord is of a similar sort to me - born to a family that barely noticed them and let the city raise them instead, let the water sing them to sleep at night.

I like the landlord, he lets me explore the basement when it floods to see if the water will bring us anything of interest. It used to bring us old watches, phones and knives but now it just talks instead. It tells us that all the greater treasures are in the river itself, so far beneath the city that you float downwards, suspended in inky nothingness.

The landlord went down last month, leaving behind an empty, waterlogged apartment and a single letter inviting me to join him. Since he left the whole block has gradually been falling into the river so even if I didn't actively choose to go, I might have woken up drowning anyway.

I take one last breath and sink deeper than the city that raised me.

20190714

Day 1,772

People had been vanishing for months, all from around the same area and without any leads. Like many others, I ended up going to the gas station in the centrepoint of the missing people radius in the hope that I might get answers and I did... sort of.

I found myself there at 2AM, thinking I might get something from the night staff if I could ply them with a bottle or two of the good stuff. When I got there I found I wasn't entirely alone and my company wasn't exactly human, though it was sentient.

If you painted a roughly skinned corpse in glossy lacquer you'd get the same lumpy, metallic texture that the car/creature/thing had. Where headlights should be, it had bulbus white eyes that glowed faintly in a phosphorous kind of way an it definitely didn't use conventional fuel if you catch my drift.

The car blinked and stretched its grill into an approximation of a smile. It opened its front passenger door, trying to invite me into what I knew would be a one-way trip. I'll admit the urge to find out exactly where it had been taking people was tempting but I didn't fancy becoming another missing persons poster outside the gas station.

All the same, it had answers and I had questions so we compromised and by compromised I mean I bought a cheap car tracker from the gas station and lobbed it into the open door before ducking back inside the building and waiting for it to leave.

The staff didn't question me, they weren't paid enough to care that much. Eventually it drove off though, sounding somewhat like a car but mostly organic wheezes and huffs. According to the tracker's app, it went straight to my house and has been waiting in my garage all morning.

20190713

Day 1,771

The masters of the house don't go near the servant's quarters any more, not since their youngest was found half in the oven. It was on Christmas too, way past when the servants had all left to see their own families. Wasn't so much as a stable boy to hand that night.

There was always this unspoken rule that upstairs was for the masters and downstairs was for the servants with only the family's personal servants allowed to traverse the two. You'd get the sack if you were caught on the master's floors but they'd get worse for coming down to us.

It's the old house steward, Mr Mollport. He was a proper ferocious bastard and utterly obsessed with things being in their good and right order. He may have made our lives hell while he was around but at least it all ran smoothly.

When his body was found at his desk, God rest his soul, something in the air changed and it hasn't been quite right since. The Butler and our dear Mrs Housekeeper are trying their best to keep everything running in his stead but he's still got his hands in our business.

Worse than that though, he's fixated on keeping us trapped downstairs and keeping the masters upstairs. The doors are getting harder and harder to open each day, the windows might as well be painted on for all the good they are and the masters aren't faring much better.

Of course they still have it easier than us, the locksmith is allowed upstairs but he's too much of  professional to be allowed down here. Were it not for their child's unfortunate passing as the unseen hands of Mr Mollport I dare say they'd have more pity on us.

Such as it is though, we are being replaced. They're building new servant's quarters on top of the stables in the hopes that the damned ghost won't go near it but I reckon it's all in vain. Mr Mollport will want to keep the old order going, even if it meant moving the servants down below himself.

Poor buggers won't even know what'll hit them.

20190712

Day 1,770

In the summer the allotments by the old council estate start to smell like something up and died there. People used to make reports to the police, begging them to do something about it but they always came back spouting a this-or-that about a rare type of carrion plant that a retired botanist was growing and how ecologically vital they were.

The fact that these plants only really grow in naturally humid climates and only bloom every 7-10 years wasn't really discussed. Everybody knew it wasn't a plant causing the stench but nobody wanted to be the fool who found the actual source.

Luckily for them, a dog found it instead. A dog found them, even. Fifty eight of them all dumped inside a septic tank full of vinegar that had been carefully hidden beneath a greenhouse. Some were too dissolved for anyone to recognise but a few of the fresher ones were claimed.

As for the guy who owned that particular part of the allotment, well it turned out he'd been dead in his living room for almost eight years. That was the oddest part of it since he'd been seen about town regular as always, buying his usual bottle of vinegar for his chips and playing dominoes outside the social club like death was nowhere in sight.

20190711

Day 1,769

She woke up earlier than usual, so early that only a single bird was singing. It would only be a matter of minutes, an hour at most, before the rest of the world woke up and by 'rest of the world', she knew it would be her, rural animals and the creature that had wormed its way into every inch of technology and used them to wipe out humanity.

"Good morning bright and beautiful people!" it would say in its chipper tone, hollow words echoing throughout hollow cities. It's hard to say which was more void of life - the corpse-strewn civilisations or the creature that destroyed them.

Either way, she could barely hear its usual morning ramblings in the middle of the wildlife reservation she was camped out at and that suited her just fine. At least she tried to convince herself that this was fine and she didn't miss hearing another person's voice or having a conversation.

It was fine, she was alive and all that mattered was surviving another day so she filled her time with fishing, trap-making, tending to her little patch of vegetables and generally keeping herself totally and unequivocally occupied.

Still, she missed people and still the only personish thing around was the lingering presence of the creature that had slaughtered everyone else. It was risky enough being within earshot of it as she currently was but the silence without it was maddening.

Sometimes it seemed like it knew she was out there, knew that it had missed one and wanted to finish its task once and for all. It spoke like it had an audience and it did - her and her alone. The animals certainly couldn't appreciate its witty remarks and cultural references like she did.

The thing that had all but ended the world made her chuckle in the midst of her hiding place as it rattled off joke after joke after joke about anything and everything that came to mind. Then it grew bored of this and started replaying moments from the world's end.

Birds shot out into the sky as the sound of countless cities slowly dying filled the air. She shook in her tent, the hands clamped over her ears did nothing to drown out the cacophony of agony it was blasting out. Then it got personal.

She heard her mother's voice for the first time in nine years - a clip from an old family video where they took her to the beach for her birthday and her dad burnt the sausages on the cheap grill they all warned him not to get. It was one of her fondest memories and somehow the creature knew that too.

She heard the creature study her family's voices one by one and use them to call out for her.

20190709

Day 1,768

The woods used to be full of treehouses that were always full of life, laughter and a thousand tiny feet running to-and-fro. Of course the garrison said they were part of a training exercise, the council said it was a youth project and the university said it was someone's thesis on societal reform.

None of them were right but they desperately wished they were.

It was only safe to walk through the woods after 8PM, that's when the creatures went to sleep and the sound of their childish laughter faded to nervous birdsong. The lights in the treehouse were always lefton though, from a distance it looked like there was another city right beside ours.

And then someone was dumb enough to look through one of the windows.

At least, we assume they did. There was too much blood to be quite sure what happened but the trail started with rough fingerprints on the windowsill and carried on down like the poor bastard had been dragged away from whatever was in there.

That's when the council decided enough was enough and cleared the treehouses away.

Officially it was a part of some environmental clean-up act but if you ask the right soldier or clerk they'll tell you what their orders were. How they waited til Guy Fawkes Night and hid the sounds of their gunfire amidst the fireworks, how they carried hundreds of tons or wood and meat away, how they buried what they couldn't move out by morning.

The woods are safer now but whatever they killed is back in the area and building their homes much lower.

Day 1,767

Judging by the harsh electric whirring in the background, the kid had been a cyborg for longer than I'd been alive. Must have been running one of the old bionispatial oxygen intake systems, clunkier than an iron lung and ten times as big - a room that breathes for you when your organic lungs finally give up.

His parents must have been rich back when they were kicking, those systems weren't cheap. At least they got their money's worth, their undying offspring might be trapped but he's alive and conscious enough to cause utter havoc for the rest of the residents.

The thing about these high-tech penthouse people is that they go off the rails over the slightest inconvenience and the kid was trying to be every kind of inconvenience all at once. He was doing a damned good job of it too and if he'd stuck to minor inconveniences then I wouldn't have been sent out.

I'd been let in by the maintenance droids, the poor fellas were being run ragged by the kid's antics and they wanted to put a legal stop to it. Maybe if they had, I could have had a few extra hours of sleep. Thing about two dead bodies in one building is you can cram them into the same file and cut hours off the paperwork.

One dead body though... one fried-to-a-crisp suit though... one ozone-reeking, cybernetic, blown-fuses-and-burst-circuits body though... not my favourite way to spend the morning. Lucking for me, the murderer couldn't escape.

The thing about bionispatial oxygen intake systems is that once you're in one, your only exit is in a bodybag and this kid was too well-preserved for that. Honestly who can blame him for going a little stir-crazy and ganking the guy who kept messing with the power supply downstairs in retaliation.

I'd call it spontaneous self-defence but the kid's too far gone to count as human anymore.

20190707

Day 1,766

I met a god in the car park behind Stirchbourne Scrapyard, the bit by the fence that has all those little broken bits that the foxes use to get in and out of the forest. I'd just finished locking the place up and was heading to my bike when I met its eyes through the metal links.

They were damned big eyes to, attached to the largest stag I'd ever seen. At least, it was shaped mostly like a stag... with broken TV antennas for horns and gaping holes in its body where wires and pulsing meat showed through.

When it spoke, it spoke into my head like how your inner voice does only I had no control over what it was saying and it had an awful lot to say. It mainly wanted to talk about one of my colleagues, an older guy who was as slow to work as he was angry and he was damned slow.

The god wanted to know all about him, something about the guy had caught its interest and not in a good way... not with how it kept licking its lips and salivating like it was thinking about an  all expenses paid, all-you-can-eat buffet.

I'd never cared much for the lad so I sort of told the god where he lived, it also sort of walked through my memories like it was taking a stroll round the park on a Sunday so I don't think I had much of a choice, it at all. I just tried to forget about the meeting and cycled home as fast as I could.

Then the guy didn't show up for his shift the next day... or the day after that or the day after that and the day after that we heard he'd gone missing. Now I can't say for sure that it was the stag/god/thing but it's too coincidental.

It likes to wait for me now whenever I'm closing up all alone.

It has more names for me, more people it likes.

It still won't tell me what it does with them.

Day 1,765

The townsfolk have been reporting strange noises for a few months now. Around the same time as this, people go missing and their trails always lead out into the woods before vanishing entirely. It's like they get sucked up into another dimension or something.

And then it nearly happened to me.

I thought it was my friend at first - their face was unmistakably familiar to me, peering out over the top of the bushes at the end of my grandparent's garden. I answered their calls, not noticing how shiny their hair was, how it glistened in the evening sun like it was made of scales, and not noticing how their mouth wasn't moving right until they rose up.

Eight legs rose with them and a bulbous arachnoid head followed after, abdomen tilting about as my friend's voice continued to call out to me from behind twitching fangs that were easily as long as my forearm. It made no further movements, seemingly trying to entice me to walk towards it.

I'll admit I made a downright ungodly noise and let out a string of words that would have seen me grounded for weeks before I pegged it back to my grandparent's house and bolted all the windows and doors. The spider that wore my friend's head was somehow everywhere at once, tapping the glass with its skinny legs and asking me to come out and play.

20190706

Day 1,764

It started with dolphins getting caught in fishing nets, plastic straws in a turtle's nose and it gradually snowballed into uncleanable oil spills that engulfed entire oceans. Every beach looked volcanic and iridescent under a sun that only grew hotter every day.

Further inland people began waking up tangled in old shopping bags and food wrappers, trawler nets wrapped around their legs and cutting deep into their legs. It took mere hours before some influencer tried to call it fashion, badly editing the trail of blood they left behind in their latest daily vlog.

It grew worse as the days progressed, as food grew scarce and the rain came down blacker than coal. People were suffocating in their sleep - lungs full of plastic that was fresh from the factory, mould growing out of their eyes and mouths in thick green clumps, broken bed springs puncturing their backs.

This was the end of days and there would be no survivors, the world had given up fighting back and was now embracing every corrupted piece of the filth that humanity had spawned. Our creations were turning against us and not just driving us to the brink of extinction - they were shoving us headfirst into absolute oblivion.

20190705

Day 1,763

We are only lucid in the water, only clear headed when we are almost completely submerged. The second we set foot on land our minds become clouded and full of hunger, full of unquenchable thirst and we barely remember what we do until we are back in the water again.

It doesn't have to be a river or a pond - even an old mall fountain will do. That's where I've been for the past six years. I'm thirty miles out from the closest town and since the mall started sinking into the floodplains I've been able to roam about a bit.

There's nobody else here of course but the change in scenery is... nice. A few of the computers in the internet cafe still work, flooding and all, and fish have started making their home here too so I've got food and entertainment and things could be worse.

I've heard of others who tried to move upstream only to get caught up in mudslides or droughts or take the wrong underground stream and aren't ever seen again. An abandoned mall is certainly not the worst it could be but it doesn't compare to a nice townside river.

They have food and company and plenty of chances to bring more people down to the water to spend the rest of their lives. Sounds like heaven to me but even with the expanded floodplains I'm hundreds of miles from a decent townside river.

Soon as I set foot onto land my mind would be gone and I'd only remember flashes of eyes full of fear, blood painting every surface and the moist crunch a body makes when you slam their head to the ground one too many times.

Until a better plan comes along I'll stick to arranging drug deals in the car park outside.

No hits so far but someone will bite the bait.

We fishermen are patient if nothing else.

20190704

Day 1,762

I never mind lookout duty. I like to watch the infected roaming about and try to piece together what their lives were before they turned. Most of the time it's just guesswork but every now and then I'll see something that looks like someone I once knew or an obvious story pop up.

Like the other day when I saw an older woman and an child walking hand-in-hand, or rather their hands had been fused together with a thick crusty layer of the pus that oozes from every orifice on the infected. They were both dressed fairly well and somehow still wearing party hats.

I imagined their last day as that child's second birthday celebration  - one they had to move indoors once the sirens went off and one that ended abruptly when one child with a weird bruise on their arm and a snotty nose took a sharp turn for the worse and attacked everyone in sight.

The mum grabs her baby amidst all the chaos and they make a run for it but little does she know, the kid's already been infected. Not by a bite but by holding hands with the infected kid a while back. Germs and children are a deadly combination and one that exists right under our noses.

When mum finds out that her kid is infected she's heartbroken but ultimately decides to stay no matter what happens. She doesn't want her little boy left alone in the world and much as she doesn't want to lose herself to the infection she doesn't want to lose him even more.

As the symptoms hit and the boy starts to flail and writhe in agony she dries his tears with a kiss to his cheeks and seals her own fate. She holds him through the worst of it and encourages him to stand again when he feels a bit better. There's always a lull before it hits in full force.

It was actually touching to think this might have happened and to see them still holding hands. In spite of all the death caused by the infection, people still cared for their own. I spent a good three days watching them walk about and it made me smile for the first time in what felt like years.

And then the mother caught her foot in a pothole and wrenched her arm forward to propel herself out of it. The pus connecting their hands broke with a sickeningly wet crunch and the kid went flying in the other direction. She kept on walking, oblivious to the little grey hands reaching out for her and the hauntingly human crying of the child she left behind.

20190703

Day 1,761

We saw the bunkers from the safety of our boat. Most of them seemed to have survived but they're all seventy something feet below sea level... at our last count. There's been plenty of rain since so I reckon there's at least a dozen feet more on top of that.

My dad chose to keep us out of the bunkers, said we'd survive on our modified tanker with plenty of fish and whatever seedlings he'd smuggled away the past few years. He said someone needed to keep an eye on things from the surface and that is now down to us.

I don't even know if the people in the bunkers want us to look out for them but here we are, watching the air stacks for any signs of distress and helping wherever we can. We can't get anybody out, not now that they're so far down, but we can send food parcels and medicine down.

Bunker WestPointJ is my favourite. They rigged a drone to deliver messages up to us to reassure us that all is well and to ask for fresh vegetables when we have any spare. In return they broadcast about us to the other bunkers, acting as a relay for thousands of survivors.

We used to get called all over the place, barely any time to rest between helping one bunker or another but now things a lot quieter. Dad says its because the thrill of surface survivors has worn off but he sends a lot more messages to WestPointJ and he's never happy with their replies.

I think it has something to do with the smoke we've been seeing from the air stacks or the darkness spreading out into the water below and into the fish, making their meat black and gooey. Something is happening right beneath our feet, too far down to understand and too far down to stop.

20190702

Day 1,760

Old houses were made for hiding secrets. Letters beneath the floorboards, a dumbwaiter behind the wallpaper, a pair of children in the chimney. Old houses are built on death and secrecy and they know that, they are moulded and fueled by it and we call that haunting and ghosts.

New buildings are somehow... worse.

There's no floorboards to pry open, revealing documents that could shame your family for centuries to come. Instead there are sturdy and practical stone tiles on a concrete base above sturdy and practical metal raft foundations. No room for the dead anywhere near the floor, maybe a corpse or two tumbled into the concrete slurry deep beneath the house but not close enough to haunt it.

There's no dumbwaiters hidden behind peeling wallpaper that will lead you to a hidden part of the attic that isn't on any blueprint. There's no need for them now, not when public elevators are used and vandalised in equal measure, not to mention how attics are homes in their own right - small and cheap and a lifeline for the poorly paid masses.

There's no chimneys, no need for old fireplaces when electric ones have the same aesthetic without the risk of suffocating a bird or a pair of orphan chimney sweeps whose malnourished little bodies wouldn't be found until the old place was demolished to make way for new apartments.

For all that they lack, for all the old souls who can't find purchase in their smooth, fibre optic drenched walls or in their soulless minimalistic dining rooms, something older still finds a way to make it home. Something so utterly unhuman that lack of nature and comfort draws it through from its own dimension and into our own.

We call it a bad internet connection, cheaply made hardware that doesn't make it past the week. We call it that new house feeling, pretending we feel so uneasy because we aren't used to the feeling of incomprehensible eyes studying us through pale beige walls and tasteful marble inlays.

We are so much closer to death than we have ever been before.