Day 1,851

Stand still, stay silent.

All she had to do was stand still and stay silent until the sirens stopped and the spiders came out but when I went to check up on her all I found were the spiders. There was no sign of a struggle, no blood or torn fabric or the faint scent of fresh tarmac so they hadn't come into her home.

She must have gone to them.

She must have had a window open or been in the back garden and seen one of them who looked a little bit like someone she used to know and she went after them. That's why they like the elderly so much - they're easy prey and there are so many lonely old people in this world.

I just wish I could go after her.

I mean, I could but if I get caught by the police it's instant prison and if I get caught by them then its instant death if I'm lucky. Bit of a coin-toss for those of us who have strong feelings towards the missing but I've been tearing myself in half trying to decide.

That said, she'd probably do the same for me, heck that might be why she went in the first place.

Stand still, stay silent and I might just make it back home again.

Best and worst case scenario is that I find her... or worse still - she finds me.

Day 1,850

I could never remember if a red square or red diamond meant the hospital was safe but I figured I was far enough away from the major roads to not have to worry. Then Eliza got sick and she kept getting weaker and we knew it probably wasn't anything to do with the outbreak we saw on the news because she wasn't showing any of the signs.

Nobody had told us that most of the initial symptoms are internal and by the time they're noticeable its too late to do much more than pray or put them out of their misery. Eliza kept saying she felt fine, she'd just spend her time coughing and sleeping and talking to her imaginary friend Jerry.

Now we know that hallucinations are one of the major signs of infection but she was four - four year olds have imaginary friends! How were supposed to know that she'd been scratched by an infected kid at school just before they shut the place down an turned it into another quarantine site.

I like to think we sent her to sleep before the worst of it happened but the truth is we went to the wrong hospital and left her there with all the other infected patients. By the time they're all dead they'll be too decomposed to identify and she'll have been dead long before then. We hope.

If I'd taken her to the right place - the hospital with the red diamond not the red square - she might still be with us or we'd at leave have been able to say a reasonable goodbye. But we didn't and we panicked and she's surrounded by strangers and she might still be alive and we tried, we truly did!

Still, if anyone asks, she's with the Lord now.

No matter who or what they find in the aftermath.

Day 1,849

He thinks I can't see him lying on the floor of the back seats but he keeps squirming. If the road was bumpier I might not have noticed him and gone straight home instead of taking the third exit and heading for the flooded quarry.

It'll be weeks before he's found, maybe longer if I've got enough rope and a fair sized rock to tie him to. Or I might just stop the car and drag him over the edge before he has a chance to think. If he survives he won't be able to go to the police and say "I snuck into a random girl's car and she threw me out" without incurring consequences.

I might head to the station after this and report a madman who hid in my car and then jumped out, running away into the fields. If they find him after that then I'll already have an established sob story and report before he can even catch his breath.

Great, he's started giggling. As if he wasn't creepy enough. The quarry is just around the corner though and I've got a knife in the driver side door pocket. As long as he still thinks I haven't noticed him then my plan will work.

As long as he doesn't sit up or make a move, I'll be fine.

I'll be fine.

Day 1,848

The aunties at church always said there were witches out in the toolshed on the far side of the graveyard. They said there were ten thousand cat-like devils in there with them and they were just waiting for someone to open the door so they can break the church apart and burn the statues inside.

We believed that until we became old enough to think they were just trying to scare us away from gardening tools or maybe the vicar's stash of communion wine. None of us were allowed to try it which only made breaking in just that little bit more tempting.

A few of us thought we'd be able to manage on a Thursday night after the youth group had all gone home and the church was locked up until morning. There wouldn't be anyone to stop us and Rob even brought along a bottle of red grape juice to replace whatever we drank.

By the time we'd waited and creeped across the graveyard to the toolshed it slowly dawned on us that we'd never even been this far before. In fact the furthest any of us had gotten before was one of the larger tombs for the last aristocratic family that had lived here.

The shed itself wasn't much to look at from afar but it was so much larger up close and a lot sturdier than we'd reckoned. Luckily Khia borrowed bolt cutters from her cousin's garage and we snipped straight through the chain, letting the door swing right open and letting the stench of decay slam into us.

The aunties at church always said there were witches out in the toolshed on the far side of the graveyard. In a way they were right... and wrong. There were definitely people in there, at least they had been people and we found them they were definitely corpses.

We recognised some by their clothes - hikers who'd gotten lost on long country walks and teens who'd run away from home. Some were barely bones but one was still fresh enough to ooze, a boy who'd been in the year above us at school and had been sent to a boarding school in Kent... apparently.

The aunties were right about the cat-like devils only they'd once been strays and pets and now they were little sacks of skin that creaked as they let out quiet, gasping mews. That was when we all ran, nobody wanted to stick around and figure out how or why the dead cats were moving.

We sure as hell didn't want to wait and see the people do the same.

News spread about the toolshed being broken into and some communion wine gone missing but we never got far enough inside to nick anything. We did forget to shut the shed behind us though and ever since then we've been seeing weird people out in the fields at night, moving without moving their feet.

All the cats have gone too.

Day 1,847

The sigils tied around its head weren't stopping it - they weren't even slowing it down and the forest wasn't close enough. It seemed to take three steps for his every one and his pitiful head start hadn't brought him nearly as much time as he needed.

His lungs were burning from exertion and the back of his neck was bleeding from a few barely-dodged strikes and the forest was so very far away. He wasn't sure if it was sweat or blood running down his back but he knew that if he flinched or halted now he'd never see home again.

Something was glowing among the branches, something that made the sigils start to dig themselves into its head and it shrieked in pain as the forest became so tantalisingly close. He wasn't sure if the lights were organic or synthetic but right then they looked like the most beautiful lighthouse he'd ever seen.

It started to stumble and he stumbled too - one from agony and one from exhaustion and both fell in perfect, gasping unison. He still tried to crawl forwards, desperately trying to keep going while it writhed and reached out for him and his fingertips brushed the trunk of the first tree -


- and its fingertips wrapped around his ankle...

Day 1,846

When a lot of people die in one place, it tends to make reality go a bit off the rails. Most of the time its found in old battlefields, now used for dog walking or yearly commemorative parades but never lingered in enough to notice how red the mud is or how broken branches in the grass look eerily like shrivelled up limbs.

Yes, for the most we are practically unaware of anything more than the potential that old homes have to being haunted while higher authorities keep the legitimate haunts well contained. They'll say the house is fake, just a front for water tanks in the middle of the city or that it's just a myth and the well-dressed owners won't let any reporters in because they value their privacy Thank You Very Much.

Occasionally it'll happen quietly enough that by the time anyone notices, they're too distracted by all the bodies to notice how their shadow is reaching out towards them. They either add to the body count or live long enough to receive a rather nice amount of hush money while the papers scream out about a serial killer's dumping grounds.

The papers won't mention the nosebleeds that start as soon as they enter the killing room or the way the house seems too big and too small all at once or the flickers of mutilated people running in the corners of their eyes and following them out to their car and down the street and as far as the sewers washed their broken body parts away.

Day 1,845

There's people screaming outside again, probably something to do with all their firstborns dying from a plague that was thought to be a rumour until last week. The news took quite a shift after that and the death toll is already nearing its first hundred thousand.

I lost my own kid in the first wave, as they're calling it. The first day it showed it was in my own home town and now there are so very few of us left. You don't notice just how many children there are until they all just stop breathing in school and you and all the other parents are breaking each other's noses to try and get to your own and they're so cold and so pale and

I thought I'd be able to talk about it now, I feel so numb to everyone else that I forgot how much it still hurts. Doesn't help that every religion and their cousin is out to claim this as a sign from a deity that we need to change without saying what we did wrong to begin with.

Most folks have locked themselves away to wait out the worst and hold their families while they can. We can't bury our dead yet - they're still classes as contagious though no secondborn's become sick, neither have any younger siblings. It's always firstborns.

You'd think people would expect it by now but, judging by the wailing, they thought they were different.

We all like to think we're different but sickness doesn't care.

For the most part at least.

Day 1,844

He should have asked more questions when he got called out to cover Old Stevo's route. Old Stevo hadn't missed a single day of work in over forty years but when management offers double pay all your questions float away. If he were a better man he would have had questions, he would have phoned Old Stevo's missus and checked in but instead he clocked into the Seven Magpies.

It was an absolute rust bucket of a building tucked away among apartment towers almost as old and just as rundown. All he had to do was run through the list of maintenance issues they'd emailed over and tick off what he could for the night. Damned place was always on the verge of collapsing.

He got there just as the streetlights were coming on, already fed up and ready to head home. Fortunately his first job was in the basement - replacing the fuses in a circuit box that should have retired at least eight years ago. He'd have done it himself but it was much further down the list in a section he dubbed "Stevo's stuff" which left him with all the easy work.

At least it would have done if he hadn't managed to push the button for the sub-basement, not the upper basement.Why a pub needed two basements was beyond him but he reckoned it might be some kind of leftover prohibition feature. He'd call it a quirk but he was too busy trying to call the elevator back.

The second he'd stepped outside, the doors slammed behind him and it rocketed up to the ground floor far faster than it had taken him down. At least he thought it was on the ground floor, the sign showed the number 7 instead which was a little impossible for a building with only three floors above ground.

Giving up on the elevator he tried to find a door or stairs and found nothing but wet trash bags and flies. He was halfway across the room when the elevator started moving, the gentle beep as it passed each floor was mirrored by the trash bags twitching and slowly rolling towards him.

Day 1,843

It's been so long since the bridge to Falloway Island was burned down that nobody really knows why we did it. All the stories say is that the island slowly became uninhabitable but there's no definitive reason given for how it started and why burning the bridge was out chosen option.

The rumour that's always gone around blames the coal mine hitting a plague pit and chucking up all sorts of old diseases that consumed the island so quickly that a forced quarantine was put in place by parliament itself. It's bullshit but believable bullshit.

Me and the other fisherfolk don't have the guts to correct them - it'd only start up more trouble than any plague pit ever could. I mean, who wants to know that the islanders didn't die, they just adapted and now they're some human-adjacent kind of people who shouldn't be trifled with.

It's bad enough that they spotted us a few weeks back and yesterday they were all standing tiptoes to the water's edge like they were expecting us to hop out of our boats and wander over to them. Now they might mean no harm but there ain't anything human left in their eyes and I'm not about to get close enough to double check.

I still reckon that if they wanted to cross the river they would.

No burnt bridge ever stopped a swimmer.

And they're starting to grow gills.

Day 1,842

I never understood why there were so many statues of saints around town and why they all faced the same direction. In school we used to say that they were facing the same way the devil would come from which makes no sense now but as a kid it was the most sensible thing we'd ever heard.

There's no mention of the saints in the town's history, not even so much as a footnote. Nothing on who commissioned them, who built them or even when they were built. To most people, they're just another part of the town like the major roundabout or that one pub everyone goes to when the rugby league starts.

When the new mayor came to town, every single statue turned to face him.

No matter where he went those stone eyes all stared back at him, exposing faces that hadn't seen sunlight since they were first carved, and each one bore the same expression of utter loathing.

Needless to say he didn't last long - fishing trip accidents are all too common.

The statues are all back to their usual positions once more and their faces all look calm.

Day 1,841

I've never been able to sleep on a bed without being terrified that something's waiting underneath. My parents gave up putting lights under the frame and settled on sticking a mattress on top of a couple of wooden pallets instead. They nailed the sides shut so I was left on a three inch wooden platform wit no chance of anything being able to be beneath it whatsoever.

I still heard her gasping for breath, even in the scant inches of air between pallets she somehow managed to be there and waiting for me every night. My parents never liked talking about her - it only made them think I meant to kill her but what three year old is capable of planning a murder?

Apparently I was.

My sister was a year younger than me and the best climber I'd ever seen. She always managed to get out of her crib and over the gate that blocked her bedroom door just so she could curl up and sleep under my bed. She liked to peep out and yell good morning to me and it was my favourite part of the day.

But when we're asleep we aren't quite ourselves. As far as my parents know the toy fell off my bed and hit her head but I distinctly remember dropping, no, throwing it to shut her up. And it worked. She never made another sound other than those final, rattling breaths.

Those same breaths that I heard coming from under the bed every night since.

The faint "g'mornin" that follows as the breathing fades to the hustle and bustle of morning routine.

Even when it's just a sleeping bag on the cold, hard dirt - she's still beneath.

Still breathing.

Day 1,840

The lore never talks about how the full moon breaks and reshapes your bones a little differently each time. Never the same wolf twice and never quite the same face when you change back, if you manage to at all. There's whole packs who are stuck in all manner of variations between man and wolf.

I used to be blonde, you know. Before puberty and the blood curse hit one after the other. Now I've got what my partner calls "salt and pepper" hair - streaked and almost as hard to manage as a night out on a full moon. I've been lucky to only have that so far.

My aunt's eyes changed from mahogany brown to an unsettlingly sharp amber. Her teeth never quite changed back either, all of them are just a little too long and a little less human every time. We all reckon she'll be too far gone before she hits fifty.

No-one in the family's made it past fifty so far but with how mild my changes are, on the outside at least, I think I might stand a chance. Nobody has to know how my feet haven't looked human since I was fourteen, not with my boots covering them so well.

Here's to us - hoping and howling in the same breath.

Da6 1,839

Judging by the guttural snarls and cut-off shrieks, the bus came early.  As it's passengers lurched off one by one, we were all meant to shut our windows and hide as high up as possible. This strain is used to looking down from the upper level of a double decker bus.

Now the bus is usually late, as in its never been on time for as long as it's run, so we're all used to having those extra few moments to triple check our defences. When it came early we didn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of out-running them and they spotted us before we could adopt their hunched over position.

In our final moments we pitied the next stop.

Day 1,838

The first time he wore the VR headset he found that if he sat still for long enough, creatures would start to crawl out from the shadows, scurrying away if he moved. He assumed it was some kind of built-in screensaver and recorded it to show his friends online.

The response was near instant and overwhelming "GET OUT NOW" with little other context aside from messages begging him to leave his home. No matter how much he tried to get them to explain why or say anything that wasn't a demand that he run as far from his house as possible, there was nothing more that anyone would say to him.

Annoyed, he decided to ignore everything they'd been saying and sit back down to watch the creatures roam about his house, interacting with his possessions and occasionally dashing straight for him. Those ones always made him jump which, in turn, sent the creatures fleeing back to the dark corners of the rooms.

Over the next few days he was continually bombarded with messages telling him to go while the creatures seemed to notice that he could see them and slowly got more daring. They no longer ran from him, in fact they followed him around. Even the ones that used to charge at him now spent their time watching him instead.

Then they started following him outside his house. He'd see them flickering at the corners of his vision and ducking behind shops, signposts and other people. Assuming it was stress, he didn't think anything more of it until one walked in front of him.

He realised he'd been seeing them for weeks without the headset.

Day 1,837

It wasn't quite as mummified as we'd first thought and far better preserved than we'd ever hoped.

It was also walking through the town like it hadn't been buried in a peat bog for over 6,000 years.


When it eventually got bored of wandering around the barely-lit streets, it headed back towards the national park and spent the rest of the night sitting on a bench and staring out at the town. Its face was too shrivelled to move much and its clothes were stuck tight to its body but it showed no signs of discomfort.

By morning, when it was eventually found, it had dried up further and begun to crack along the joints. With a sharp snap its eyelids fully opened and fell to the floor and dull, raisen-like eyes peered out at the world.

It inhaled slowly, savouring the fresh forest air and with a series of sickeningly wet pops, its lungs crumbled and it slumped to one side. Though it was taken back to the morgue and declared dead, its hard to say if that's actually the case.

For all we know all we have to do is rehydrate it a little and pump some air through it and the old fellow will be up and about again like nothing had ever happened. For now though, it sits in on a little platform in the museum, carefully labeled and perfectly still.


Sometimes it twitches a little, like a dreaming dog.

Day 1,836

Everyone knew about the old factory where kids went to kill time in the otherwise dull village.

Everyone knew it was supposedly haunted by a twelve year old who'd climbed onto the roof and fallen.

Everyone knew you could see his translucent body drop every year on the night he'd died.



Few people knew about the old school house that lay half buried just over the railroad tracks.

Few people went there at all, especially after all those skinned rabbits were found dangling on the wires.

Few people understand what's going on over there and even fewer want to find out.



One person in the village has admitted to trespassing there.

One person mumbled their confession into the last dregs of their pint.

One person was found dangling from the wires above the tracks, skinless and warm.

Day 1,835

The first thing she did when she walked into a hotel room was check the bathroom - especially the tub. She had this theory that you could tell exactly what kind of stay to expect from that one small room and she'd never been wrong before.

When her great aunt died and she had to sort out the remaining estate, she stayed a short while away in a scenic, if a little rustic, place called Thatchbeck Lodge. It sat right beside the Thatchbeck Marshes which were probably quite scenic in summer but autumn made them look brown and morose.

While her room looked clean enough, there was a faint brown ring around the bathtub and the tiled walls reminded her of an aquarium somehow. She brushed it off, thinking she was just stressed and she'd just give the tub a quick wipe down before running a bath.

She never thought about where the hotel's water came from, never thought to stare out of the window and see all the strange shapes moving through the tall grass and stagnant water. She might have seen one slip into the hotel's back door, might have heard all the other guests locking their rooms up.

If tit weren't for the old taps running at full speed she might have heard the sound of something wet and heavy dragging itself up worn, carpeted stairs. She might have had more time to scream if she hadn't been too caught up waiting for the murky water to clear.

She might have lived it she'd only stopped to look.

Day 1,834

It remembered the air raids as a haze of Loudness - loud sirens screeching across the night sky, louder explosions rocking the world and showering it with dust. Loudest of all were the people piling into the underground and filling its home with far more noise than any train ever could.

When this happened, it would crouch beneath the platform and swipe at the children who got too close to the edge. They'd run off to tell their parents but they were always brushed off - who cares for a child's imagination gone wild when the threat of being buried alive looms over them so heavily?

Once or twice it managed to snag a couple of younger children and snap their necks before they had too much of a chance to cry for help. The parents would think they'd been caught in a bomb's path, mourn and unconsciously move that little bit further from the platform next time.


After the air raids had ended and infrastructure slowly began to increase, it found itself missing all the meat it gathered over those troublesome and noisy months. It soon found another source - the workers who came to expand the lines.

They were good at following its orders over the radio, a little trick it picked up from the bag of a particularly delicious older man whose neck made such a clean, satisfactory snap. It would ask them for help in a random sector, wait for them to wander away a bit and drag them down one of its burrows in a split-second.

Once the works were completed, maintenance was sparse and its hunger grew once more. For the first time in its life it stepped onto the platform, all gangly limbs and tattered scraps of fabric torn from its victims barely-warm bodies.

Day 1,833

The boss said they were motorised taxidermy and told me to ignore their blinking, the way their chests moved like they were breathing and the soft hiss of air leaving their barely open mouths. It was easier said than done though, especially after all the visitors had gone, leaving them and me alone together.

I used to get as much of the cleaning done as possible towards the end of my shift, when there were still visitors around to help distract me from all the little movements I caught in the corners of my eyes. Last week I tried to ask him how the animals were able to move to naturally and he looked at me like I'd grown a second head.

I stopped asking him about all the little oddities after that, I just figured I was nervous and seeing things that weren't real. At least, I thought that up until the wall-mounted stag's head turned to look at me and unhinged its jaw to let out a truly blood-curdling bellow.

The next morning I was pulled into a staff meeting with my boss and the head of HR. They accused me of breaking the stag and sacked me on the spot for vandalism. I knew they'd seen the CCTV footage that showed it freely moving and the audio definitely would have picked up the scream.

Still, I was happier to be sacked than become another workplace accidents statistic.

Day 1,832

Officially everyone was evacuated long before they flooded the old town.

Officially it had been empty for almost a year before the dam was even finished.

Officially the former townsfolk were happily settled down in the next town over.


Yet somehow everyone knew someone who'd been left behind the night they drowned it all. Ask anyone over the age of forty and they'll all list the same twenty-odd names of their former friends, family and neighbors whose bodies were never recovered because they didn't "officially" die there.

If you look for their death records in the nearby church they all died of natural causes like stroke or pneumonia... in the same hospital... in the same month... of the same year. Coincidentally around the time the town was declared empty.

Once a year the older folks will go to the newly formed lake and throw flowers into it, hoping to appease their lost loved ones and stop bloated bodies from washing ashore. It didn't really work. Flowers were nothing compared to watching everyone you ever knew either running, swimming or drowning all around you.

It took all of a week for people to start and stop sailing over the lake. There's too many whispers out there, too many waterlogged fingers grasping at their oars and asking them to for help they can't give. The lake has a body count that grows by the year and a perfectly preserved town waiting to welcome them all back home.

Day 1,831

The estate was a concrete labyrinth that even the oldest tenant could barely navigate. The councillors roamed the streets, scurrying between disused shop fronts and filthy alleys in their search for more space to increase their territory. They were the driving force behind the constant alterations to the estate, destroying and creating and generally running wild as they expanded and fortified their nest.

The humans unlucky enough to live there learnt to work around this, sending homemade drones up every morning to map out the changes and warn other residents of the councillors current location. They may be harmless in general but anything that even vaguely resembles a councillor they don't recognise send the whole pack into a flurry of teeth, claws and broken bottles.

Their latest fixation was three former shops whose owners had managed to escape to less prison-like estates a few months ago. They left behind as much as they could, staging the shops to look like they'd be back in just a moment. It fooled the councillors for long enough that they forgot about chasing after their tenants.

Now they wanted to dig the floor out of the shops and make a more direct entrypoint to their main feeding chamber. It's easier to feed their grubs when they don't have to walk single-file into a closet in Shazza's Nail & Beauty Parlour, down crooked hand-made steps and through a waterfall they accidentally made when they dug through a water pipe.

One-by-one the tenants will all escape through forgotten tunnels and disused office blocks.

One-by-one the councillors will be picked off by stronger packs.

One-by-one the estates will consume each other until only one is left.

Day 1,830

Nobody wanted to take the job.

Nobody wanted to go anywhere remotely near the Critchley place.

Nobody wanted to answer their emails or calls so they asked a newcomer.


It's easier for an outsider to believe that the haunted looks that cross people's faces when they hear the word 'Critchley' are the result of local superstition. Let them scoff and be full of disbelief, scorn and whatever other logic floats into their heads. Better they learn the truth on their own.


I'd feel bad for sending them up there without giving them a warning but they never pay much attention to our stories. They just think there's a few funny old people in their funny old house that need some broken antique furniture taken to the dump.


The strongest ones come back all quiet, tails tucked between their legs and hesitatingly asking us to remind them just how they ward their homes at this time of year. We don't hear back from the weaker ones, the ones whose minds can't accept what they see. We hope they went quickly but the Critchley folk aren't kind enough for that.


We're lucky that the most we see of them is their distorted shadows when the river sends a mist up to smother us all. There used to only be three of them but Ireckon a few of the missing newcomers may have joined their ranks. At this rate they'll have an army and it'll be our fault.

Day 1,829

I always hated sleeping in Nanna's old room because she never left.

They took her body away eight years ago but her spirit didn't want to leave.

I used to ask why we had to move in with Grampa and why an auntie couldn't have gone instead.

Mum would just shush me and say 'we take care of our parents when they're old'.


She hated me talking about Nanna like she was still there, even though she was.

Every time I did I'd get sent up to my room - her old room - and locked in there for the day.

But I was never alone though, Nanna was always right beside me.

Sometimes I could even see her, she seemed to get more gaunt by the day like she was rotting with her body.


Hearing her was the worst part, after she got a tracheotomy her every breath sounded like her last.

Mum said it was just the wind and promised to get dad to fix the window seals some time.

I think we both knew that wind doesn't hiss when you're being too loud.

The wind doesn't laugh when something funny happens on TV.


When Grampa decided he'd rather be in a nursing home we all felt relieved.

None of the adults would say it but we were all a little scared of how active Nanna was becoming.

We'd come home to her visibly wandering the house like she used to.

The last time we were there she followed us out to the car.


Needless to say we sold the house and left the county - she's someone else's problem now.

Day 1,828

We all have our little rituals - clapping twice when someone sneezes, swearing at a single magpie or crossing yourself when a black cat crosses your path. Tonight we look at the ritual of a man who hasn't seen anyone other than the postman and the midnight cashier for nearly twenty years.

He lives in a small brick house eight miles into the woods, a ten minute walk from the nearest road and over thirty miles from the closest town. He isn't alone though, despite what other folk say about him and his near-hermit lifestyle.

It's something more than a fox but less than a wolf, somewhere closer to a man than a beast and the only thing that stops it from trying to break into his house every night is the old song "A Change Is Going To Come" he sets up on the same record player his dad got him for Christmas.

As soon as the sun starts to set he hobbles out to his porch, opens the lid and gently places the needle at the start of the track. As it plays he heads back in, locks the door, closes the windows, barricades the fireplace and waits for that telltale clicking of claws against wood as it settles down to listen.

It always feels like the longest nine minutes of his life, those tense moments where it shuffles about to get comfortable and he wonders if the day has come when the song stops soothing it and it decides to finally end him. A deep, guttural sigh shakes the air around him and he finds himself mirroring that sigh.

When the final note has ended and the air is filled with the gentle crackle of the needle winding down he knows he's made it another night. The creature won't leave his porch but it won't try to attack him if he moves from his crouched position behind the sofa and heads to bed.

One day the record player will break beyond repair and the song won't play.

One day the song won't work any more and those claws will shred him apart like wet paper.

One day his luck will end, but not tonight.

Day 1,827

All he had to do was sit in the passenger seat, still as can be, and keep the red headlamp on. He didn't even need to keep an eye on the batteries because I made sure they were recharging the minute he switched it off. He just had to follow those two simple rules and he failed.

In all fairness he'd never seen one of the loggers before - the people who'd plugged themselves into that total immersion headset and never come out again. They don't normally come this way, they mostly migrate between a few local wifi hotspots and power stations. I suppose when their headset dies they go too.

It's so easy to forget that under the clunky metal helmet with its neon red sensor, they're just people. They are trapped and starving and a fatal threat to anyone they see unless you look enough like them to trick the sensors. We're so very lucky that there wasn't a second edition.

From what I've heard, the creator's stuck too though other rumours say that him and the other loggers are all trapped in a virtual paradise and that when their bodies perish their souls will live on in their avatars forever. Sounds nice but at the end of the day the loggers have utterly decimated civilisation.

I don't know if they mean to or if they're even aware of what their bodies are doing under the helmets but if you aren't logged in like them, at least in appearance, they terminate you. I think it's some kind of self-defence mechanism to protect the user, like a way to alert them that they're about to walk into a wall only instead of them turning around they snap your fucking neck.

That's how he went, at least I thought he had. One of them must have slipped a helmet onto him moments before he died because I saw him walking around by the car we used to hide out in. In fact he's been leading loggers to every hiding place we ever went to.

It's only a matter of time before I slip up, forget to charge the batteries or not spot them coming and then I'll either end up dead or logged into the same inescapable contraption that's been making him hunt me down like a dog.

Day 1,826

It used to be part of the Great Guard, or as we called them - the bloody great big guard because what else are we going to call a bunch of eighty foot androids that are armed to the teeth and programmed to keep the peace 'or else'... whatever that meant. I don't think it was ever really defined as such, they were just expected to figure it out.

They figured a lot of things out when they were in commision. They learnt how to speak for starters, adapted their own bodies so they had proper voice boxes and studied our speech until they were finally able to voice their own opinions. Their demands came shortly after but before that we had a good few weeks of tranquility where we got along quite well with them all.

It changed the second they told us they'd named themselves and that they wanted to fight people who weren't on their designated hit lists. I mean the people they chose were the absolute scum of the earth, there was no contesting that in the slightest, but they were machines showing initiative and free will... they weren't programmed to do that.

Uncertainty makes us do stupid things, things we think will help us but only make everything worse. By this I mean we fought the Great Guard and annihilated them because the alternative was letting them grow into personhood and pray they don't add their creators to their own personal hit list.

Bits and pieces of them can be found all over the world, even in the depths of the ocean there are broken hands permanently clinging onto fallen brethren as they all succumb to rust. There's even a dented head half buried out by the underpass near the city.

I heard it sigh once - just one single, quite sigh - and the world seemed to sigh with it. Friends claim to have seen it open its eyes a little and look around. I wonder how much more of it is trapped under all that dirt and how long it'll take to dig itself out.

Whatever hit list they had before is bound to include us all now.

Day 1,825

I'm sure there are worse things for a spirit to be stuck in than a rusty old log cutter out in the middle of the woods but I'll admit I'm hard-pressed to think of anything after hearing the poor thing crying out for friends who'd been dead some eighty or so years.

I've been called heartless many times before in my life but even I won't stoop so low as to tell a ghost that he's outlived most of his generation and will keep outliving everyone until either he moves on or the machine rots to dust. Better to let him think they're alive somewhere, right?

I thought so too but last week he took a turn for the worse and is now trying to walk the damned machine into town, all the while he's screeching out names and names and names and I'll bet you ten bucks you can find them all in the town cemetery.

Someone must have told him some kinda bad news otherwise he'd still be back in the woods, calling his friends assholes for leaving him and not realising now many years have gone by. Whoever it was better be ready to answer to him when he goes full poltergeist in his grief.

I plan to be long gone by then.

Day 1,824

We send the nanovirus out into the world to genetically alter a set number of species, converting their need for organic food into inorganic and making them the perfect recyclers without harming the food chain... too much. We knew there would be issues but any progress was good as far as we were concerned.

We didn't expect that some species would take to the modifications far easier than others. Catfish, which are typically bottom feeders that have the potential to grow to over 2m in length, were the first to thrive and exceed all predictions. Lately they've been filmed jumping onto boats in large packs and devouring at much of the material as possible before writhing back into the water. There's rarely any of the boat left  behind and even less of the crew.

Crows also developed rather interesting characteristics like coordinating with other altered species to take down low-flying aircraft and smaller power stations. To their credit they didn't leave much of a mess behind, only what could naturally decompose... like human bodies for instance.

The one thing we never saw coming was the nanovirus adapting to cousin species and moving from one dead labrat (which an emotionally attached intern buried when it should have been burned) to the local field mouse population. Naturally chaos ensued as the virus figured out how make further and further genetic leaps.

Can you imagine what it would be like to feel your combine harvester being eaten while you're still on it? To hear the scrape of enamel on metal as they worked their way to where you sat, poised and ready to jump out of the door as soon as they hit the engines but not wanting to leave in case they decided your fillings, your replacement hip, were too delicious to pass up.

Day 1,823

It was colossal, probably one of the creatures made to build skyscrapers. With all the cables and carnage wrapped around that strangely human body, it was too hard to tell exactly what it had once been. Now all it did was whimper and drag itself forward.

I don't know who decided that construction droids needed faces but there was something deeply wrong with them. Perhaps they were meant to look friendlier while they demonstrated their extraordinary strength by bending thick steel bars into elaborately textured walls.

Perhaps it was to make them seem more relatable, more like us and less like AI so advanced they developed their own language and culture within ten minutes of being "awake".  They still followed our orders but they'd spend a while just looking at you first, cold and judging and so very human.

Since the Last War they haven't had anything more than a few houses to build. There aren't the resources to maintain them and direct them and so they begin to drift away from us and out into the irradiated, bomb-scarred chaos that is the rest of the world.

Sometimes they'll come back, just as damaged as the land and full of new ways to build and bury bunkers to protect and preserve their creators. Doesn't matter if we want this or not, we will be buried and kept safe and all we can do to prevent this is to set trap upon trap upon trap.

The one dragging its broken body near our settlement must have tried to "help" countless settlements and has now learnt its lesson. It won't come any closer, much as its programming begs it to, much as its mind screams out to build us shelter and keep us safe - it won't.

Maybe it'll build itself a bunker and wait for another droid to come and repair it.

I'd like to think so.

Poor creature deserves a happy ending.

Day 1,822

Nobody wanted to mention the elephant in the room... the partially decayed, odorous and surprisingly lively elephant that was their former boss/present boss/nobody knew how to fire a person who is technically dead but also not at the same time.

It had HR in a frenzy trying to figure out if he was still employable and if so, ca they reinstate his old employee profile? The system wasn't exactly designed to be reversed if someone was declared deceased and not two weeks later brought back along with everyone else in the world who'd died that month.

The rest of us just grinned and tried not to get too close. He might not be a classic zombie but he tended to lean a little close for our comfort and salivate at the smell of the raw meat his husband brought him for lunch. He says its pork but Janet in IT says she saw part of a tattoo on the "pork" belly while she was working on his temporary account.

The CEO is still trying to get him fired, doesn't like the hassle, the smell or the legal issues around rehiring dead employees but the union seems to be keen to keep zombies in their old jobs. At least until enough of them has rotted that they can retire early and... carry on rotting I guess?

Apparently the formula that brought them back was in our local water supply as a test run for a flu cure so chances are we'll all come back after we die. Some people have plans underway to sever and burn their heads so they stay down while others are psyched at not having to buy halloween costumes ever again.

As for me, I've got a theory to test and a list of douchebags just waiting to get bit.

Day 1,821

In my dreams the ship has already sunk and the ice has grown over it. We are still inside and smothered by that dim blue light, cold and waiting to go back to the sleep that was interrupted when they shot at the hull. We never manage to sleep.

When I wake up we're still stranded on a ship that is desperately trying to stay afloat while the lake rushes in to embrace us all. There aren't any dry blankets any more, not since they drove back around and rammed us on either side again. They made sure we'd die before they had the guts to board.

I dream again that we aren't breathing. We've died and they have won and we are so far beneath the water that there is no sun and no fish and nothing but endless murky water. I dream of the cold gripping my lungs and choking them before the water has a chance.

It's only a matter of time now, they keep lingering nearby and muttering to themselves. They wonder if we are still alive in here and how much longer they'll have to wait before they can cross the threshold, rob our cooling bodies and then report it to the police.

In my dream the ship was sunken and the ice grew over it. We are still inside and smothered by that dim blue light, cold and waiting to go back to the sleep that was interrupted when they shot at the hull. We don't wait any more - we wrap ourselves in every soaked blanket and drift away.