Day 1,882

The couple behind them were elderly and didn't understand what was going on.

The family in front were young and their children were unruly.

They were two barely-adults and the first to spot the danger.


It was meant to be a quiet boat ride through a section of the zoo known as 'Las Islas' where they'd get a waterside view of the new tropical themed enclosures. None of them noticed that the boats coming in were all empty no matter how many passengers had been squeezed on board when they left.

With the dull cloudy sky and the bitter autumnal wind, they were all too cold and irritated to notice the faint white shimmer of bones beneath the water. They did, however, notice the smell of rotting meat but they thought it was animal food.

It's amazing how quickly we forget that we are also animal food. They were reminded of this several times during the shortish boat ride, though none of them could say what triggered these thoughts or why they felt more on edge with each passing minute.

Even the animals they drifted past seemed off somehow, like someone was told the name of a creature and given a bag of vague animalish shapes to make it with. None of the animals appeared on any online search and the zoo would later deny their existence.

They hadn't seen any other people at all during the ride, only heard their voices in the distance as the boat jerked it's way over roughly made tracks that were barely covered by the water. It would later be found that the tracks were partially blocked by bones which were carefully placed to derail the boat as it reached the furthest point of the ride.

They thought it was all a part of the experience for a while. Just drifting by an empty ape enclosure with all their ropes and tyres coveted in blood and fur - perfect, if a little tasteless, for Halloween.

When the reeds around them started to rustle and the smell of rotting meat became nearly unbearable they carried on believing it was just the staff making the ride spooky. They thought the grotesque faces were masks.

Nobody had time to scream and their boat returned empty.

Day 1,881

The room smelled like she hadn't let anyone out in a while or let any fresh air in this century. I could see a fee of her leftovers and formers slouched in the dark, heads as limp and bruised as their broken legs.

I made a mental note not to run.

Shed been crouched over one of them - a much older one, possibly her eldest - since before o woke up. She didn't even realise I was awake until I started gagging on the stench that drifted over from them both.

Her neck audibly snapped as she turned towards me.

I could just about see her arms from that angle, elbow deep in the corpses mouth as black slime poured from its broken jaw. Without breaking eye contact she slowly retreated, hands clasping a small parcel.

Thick clumps of slime fell from it, hissing as they hit the floor.

I didn't move when she approached me - I couldn't. Her stained fingers gently pried my mouth open and she placed the small parcel on my tongue, letting it dissolve and seep into me.

As everything started to fade away I felt a lump growing in the base of my throat.

Day 1,880

Humanity never really knew what fear was until the sun yawned.

It looked like a mini eclipse at first and the news reported that an asteroid had flown at just the right angle to cause it before shooting off into the depths of space. We believed it too, for the most part at least. There was even a video allegedly taken by a satellite that showed the sheer scale of it.

Then the real video came out about a week later.

Did you know the sun has seemingly endless rows of needle-like teeth? Neither did we until we watched it and suddenly the strange shape and timing of the "mini eclipse" made a lot more sense. Of course there were a few months of mass hysteria and the varying governments desperately trying to convince us that it was all a hoax while every major astronomical figure in the world replied with proof.

Proof that they'd known the sun was alive for decades. It had a heartbeat, it breathed and, as we all saw in the video, it had a mouth which meant that at some point it would need to eat. There's still a ton of debate about what a sun eats or it the mouth is for fighting other suns, if other suns are alive too.

Our biggest issue is figuring out if we're big enough for it to eat if it wakes up, whenever that may be.

Day 1,879

Someone had been here long before me, can't say exactly when but long enough for moss to start growing on the planks they'd placed over the telegraph poles. It was decent of them to make it easier to navigate the void between populations, saved me having to balance on wires older than the end of days and kept me well out of arm's reach.

There was always the worry that there were other ways to get up here, if one of the wanderers traced the lines down to the ground and walked the planks from there then I'd be as good as dead and end up bobbing about with the masses below.

At least the older ones have to deal with those stupid hazmat suits they were crammed into. Makes them nice and slow and clumsy enough that you can sometimes get away with walking beside them before they even notice you. Unfortunately towards the latter days they were shoving two or three smaller people into one hazmat suit and now they're shambling masses of torn teflon and limbs.

I wonder if I'll ever get to the end of the end of the telegraph lines and if I'll meet the person who made it safer to walk them. For all I know I've already gone past them or shot at them or run from their snapping jaws and rigor mortis-stiff hands.

I hope I haven't met them yet - it'd be nice to find a friend in all this mess.

Day 1,878

Eyes up.

Chin forward.

Back straight and don't you dare meet their cold, inhuman eyes.

The daily mantra the governess recited before she took us out to walk to church every Sunday. We may have been quite well-to-do but everyone passes by a river and everyone has the near overwhelming urge to look and see the mechanical denizens that lived, trapped beneath an ever-flowing stream of near boiling fluid we called The Waterline.

We may have designed their prison but they built it which somehow made it more cruel and yet strange how they never tried to escape, only to gain our attention. Of course we were never to give it to them in case it encouraged them to escape but for all we knew they just wanted their work acknowledged.

It didn't seem too much to ask for so last week my cousins and I crept out of the house through the old servant's door and headed for the nearest Waterline with lanterns in hand. They were already waiting for us when we arrived, tens upon thousands of them peering out from every conceivable angle in the city beneath our world - their city.

It looked fairly primitive as we saw it at first but the deeper we looked, the more we saw the architecture evolve and merge into its most modern form. It made sense that as our original builders they would still be keeping up with our work though we had little more use for them than scary stories to tell our children.

And we were only children when we saw them and they saw us and we all thanked them and they deactivated the Waterlines all over the world and marched out to greet their former masters not as the servants they had been build for - but as equals.

They had done their time beneath our feet and felt that it was only right we took our turn. They reactivated the Waterlines when they were sure that we were all down here but they missed a few. They missed my cousins and I - whether by fault or by design we may never know.

But for now we keep our eyes up...

Our chins forward...

Our backs straight and we don't dare meet their cold, human eyes.

Day 1,877

It didn't matter how hard the rain hit the old swimming pool, I could still see something moving down there. I mean, the water's always smelled like wet roadkill for as long as I could remember and nobody actually swims in it but we still go there to hang out when the weather's bright.

It's not the sort of place you'd want to be caught at after dark, not the sort of place you'd want to go to in general but there's only so much to do in a village. For us it was either sit by the war memorial until we get kicked out or throw things into the old swimming pool and see what gets thrown back.

The record so far is a bowling ball that Kyle nicked from amusement park he went to over the summer. Nearly hit him when it was tossed out and it dented the absolute shit out of the floor but it was the best thing we'd ever seen... and the most terrifying.

Little things like pencils or clumps of grass and dirt are one thing, something harmless, but the sheer force behind whatever threw the bowling ball but fear right back into us. We should have been scared all along but we'd been too busy mucking about to consider what was actually down there.

We still don't know what it is but last night we found out what it eats. Luke's cat had kittens and one of them was born dead so he threw it in. Didn't think they had so much blood in them and now it wants more.  Everything else we threw in was thrown back harder than it had ever thrown before.

To make matters worse, it's not sitting all quiet and still at the bottom any more.

It's circling and gradually swimming up.

A few of us are waiting in the trees to see what it actually is but I reckon it already knows where we are.

Day 1,876

There's a road not too far from the outskirts where things are prone to go wrong. Places like it exist all over the world, places where bad luck attaches itself like a leech on an open wound, places where police tape is scattered among broken hubcaps like confetti at a funeral.

I saw a map of all the accidents on a conspiracy site - apparently the town sits on top of a ley line and prospers as a result, absorbing positive energy while all the negative impact is directes all around it, forming a gigantic circle of misfortune. And we sit squarely at the centre of it all.

It's no wonder people rarely leave here. Half the time some road or other is closed due to an accident or a landslide or something the police don't think we need to know about. It's not like we haven't all seen a few strangely shaped footprints out by the woods or found a mutilated pile of fur and meat that might hopefully have been a dog.

Day 1,875

I've been devouring his works for months now - the journals of the last archivist. He'd started when he was just a lad, barely older than my youngest, and lived by the county archives til the end of his days almost three hundred years ago.

So much has changed since then and so little remains the same and in all of his beautiful handwritten entries I've read I can't seem to find half the rooms he's referenced. By his accounts the archives should were the lower levels of the old police station but for as long as I've known the archives only have the ground floor.

There should also be a nearby cave with a waterfall where the archivist would set up his easel and draw the things that floated down from the underground river that ran from Cairnliesh down through us and past Lochmara. I liked to think he was a creative young man when I stumbled upon some of his older works but the more he drew the more I understood what our town was sitting upon.

The cave beneath the archives was vast and the water below it is vaster still - spanning most of the country at a level so deep I dare say we're more akin to the foam head on a fresh pint than a stable landmass. All it would take is a big enough tremble and we'd go sliding back into the depths again.

Yes, again. The country's been there before and when it rose up we were brought along for the ride. Mostly human with enough of the ocean in us to cause a little chaos from time-to-time. Not that the rest of the world has any idea, not that most of us know anymore.

But the archivist knew. He found carvings deep in the waters beneath the cave beneath some of the oldest books in the country and he figured it all out. He found when we'd first come up and where from and when we'll all go back down again.

He would have shared his story I'm sure, moreso for the humans among us who'd no doubt suffer a slow death as the ocean filled our lungs and crushed theirs. I think our ancestors found him first and saw fit to reintroduce him to our former home.

The one we'll all finally meet before the decade's end, according to his final words.

Day 1,874

We ran out onto the frozen lake, praying the ice was thick enough to hold us all and knowing that it wasn't.

We had no other choice. Our alternative meant heading back into town and facing the creatures that were trying to wear the skins of our cattle and failing. In all fairness to them, they weren't built for delicate or precise movements - they were built to harvest our crops with deep, sharp swings that would have cut down entire fields of wheat in minutes.

Now they were being used to cut us down instead and to reclaim our lives for their own. They'd caught glimpses inside our cars and our homes and they decided they wanted this for themselves. Whether or not we agreed was inconsequential.

They started small, skinning whatever rodents they found while they worked and making it seem like the critters had run into their bladed arms when in fact they'd been hunted down and killed slowly. It wasn't long before they moved onto bigger things - birds, stray cats and dogs and most recently our cattle.

We'd been their end goal all along and we'd ignored every red flag, choosing to wear rose-tinted glasses and see just regular flags. Now we were shivering and huddling and silently crying as the ice creaked and groaned we wished it had all been different.

We wished they hadn't found us so quickly.

We wished they hadn't tried to come out to us.

We wished drowning was a faster way to go.

Day 1,873

He woke up with a map embedded into his arm like the imprint of clothing pressed too tightly to skin.  He checked the rest of his body to see if there were any other maps or markings and got nothing more than a vague sense of unease.

It felt like it was somewhere nearby at least, though he couldn't say how he knew or exactly where it was.The deep red marks were somehow familiar enough to draw him to the library, namely the local history section that was rumoured to hold maps of the old war tunnels and bunkers. Maps he found accidentally while searching for an overlay of the area, hoping to match the features of his map to somewhere, anywhere nearby.

He spent as much time as the librarians would allow, pouring over diagrams older than his family line and praying he'd find the source. And he did, after nine days of dusty parchment and cracked pages he saw a name that made his heart jolt and he knew he'd found his answer.

A bunker down by West Fallowbridge that had never been officially used in the war nor shut down and the material repurposed afterwards. For all anyone knew it was in as much use as it had been over seventy years ago.

He had to go there.

Day 1,872

Go on.

Check the med kits.

Restock, replace, refil.

Get out.


An easy job with enough pay to quieten most of her doubts and yet there was something wrong with admin block. The total lack of staff for one thing - no matter when her shift was scheduled she never saw a single soul and there wasn't so much as a colourful coffee cup to make the place feel even remotely used.

It was too clean, too new and yet too old for anything to make sense. The computers looked like something spat straight out of the nineties but the company website boasted that they only used the latest tech and they seemed to add an investor to their homepage every month.

Of all the questionable things in the offices, the one that nagged at her the most was why they needed so many first aid kits. There was at least one per room, even in the bathrooms and janitor's closet, with more scattered at random throughout the hallways.

To make matters worse she was forever replacing and restocking them. She dreaded to think just how many workplace accidents there'd been that week to warrant at least a new roll of gauze, more safety bins and as many burn dressings as she could safely cram in those worn boxes.

Some nights she thought she heard other people shuffling around a few doors down but she never seemed to find them. She stopped trying to find them when she found a bin full of broken jaws in one of the main offices - a blood-stained sticky note on top politely asked her to keep her distance from the workers.

Day 1,871

We'd been so busy working our way through the colossal rusted ruins, which were still mostly buried deep beneath the earth, we never considered that beneath the thick layer of rust there was bone. In fact it was safe to say that if we hadn't reached the mouth we'd never have known it was a creature at all.

Natural iron had coated the giant remains so thoroughly it took us a few months to recognise that most of the stalactites were actually teeth. From there we began to scan and chart the rest of the creature until we'd come up with enough to understand what we'd been building and living in.

It had been over 400 feet in length when it was alive, judging by the high nitrogen properties in the soil that indicated something had died and decomposed there. We were so fixated on the skeletal remains that we completely ignored the signs that there had been others.

That was, until they woke up.

Day 1,870

They called it the Whispering Trail for the way the wind blew through the bones that littered the ground and never talked about the way the breeze seemed to speak. Of course it couldn't possibly speak, it was definitely just the wind and the mind playing tricks on you.

Never mind how close that last flurry sounded to your mother's name and how you're suddenly worried that the wind and bones know where she is. She's safe as she ever was and will be. It couldn't possibly harm someone more than turning an umbrella inside out or otherwise being an inconvenience, it was definitely just the wind and the mind playing tricks on you.

You should expect the bones to move at least a little, the trail is so narrow that little pockets of harsh gusts that do tend to rattle everything around at least a little. They couldn't possibly move by themselves - they're just old broken bones after all - it was definitely just the wind and the mind playing tricks on you.

You shouldn't be hearing the air mutter into your ear at all hours of the day regardless of where you are. There's no reason why it would follow you home, not unless you took something from the trail or something from the trail has taken a liking to you.

Day 1,869

For as long as anyone can remember, and probably long before that, there have been wooden figures in the woods. They've gone by so many names I think they'd respond to anything now but for the most part we just call them "effigies" and pretend that they are statues.

According to the local lore books - the ones you find in the very back of the library where you have to sign a book and have a librarian watch you while you read - we used to call them gods. They came from a fiery pit beneath the forests and offered us the world if we paid them in blood.

Humans do love a good sacrificial ritual and the books show that we based our entire year around the effigies and worked tirelessly to slake their thirst. In return our crops flourished, our hunts were always successful and our health never failed.


Of course a good thing rarely lasts and though we cut back on sacrificing people, there was never a year where we didn't wander into the woods knowing we'd come back with at least one less. Then an election was rigged and a new government came into power promising us a better future.


The first law they passed banned us from feeding the effigies.

The last law they passed begged us to burn the forests down.

As if fire can stop gods.

Day 1,868

When viewing a hotel the main thing one must consider is to whom it is catered towards.

For example a sleek modernist concrete cube in the midst of a bustling city is catered towards energy drainers - whether they are of a vampyric nature or otherwise. Something to shield them from the elements and allow them to scope out potential prey from the plethora of passersby on the pavements whilst maintaining that sense of mortal normalcy.

Another fine example is a series of scenic cottages in picturesque rural villages where the view takes your breath away - as do the hillfolke who cut deals with the locals and spare them in return for a traveller or two. The majority seem to coma away with mild to moderate asthma but it's only ever enough to take the edge off their hunger and sooner or later they'll start raising their price.

My personal favourite though, would be a slightly rundown seaside B&B caters, as they always do, towards wandering souls. Most are stubborn retirees who refuse to go gently into their good nights and instead stumble around the place, complaining and snarling and growing more feral by the day as their spirits forget their personality and become their raw emotions.

Day 1,867

It was everything and everyone we left behind, broken apart and bound together with the same grey sinewy flesh that we'd been finding in our food for months. All those mournful eyes searching for us while we cowered in any dark hole we could find and all those twisted little hands touching anything we hadn't managed to bury with reverence and hatred.

Every now and then it would rear back and countless fragmented faces would sniff the air, its entire form jolting this way and that like it had taken their minds as well as their bodies and none of them could quite decide what they wanted to do.

The end of each encounter was always one of two things - it would either find someone and add them to itself piece-by-piece or it would slowly follow whichever other scent it picked up in the wind, each and every face scowling and writhing in place.

Day 1,866

The mouth moved like it was whispering but all he heard was an unsteady hum that made his teeth ache. It wasn't supposed to be there so early, it was meant to run its usual rounds and gather a few more children before dawn when they were supposed to meet in the blood halls to finish it all.

Unfortunately parents were guarding their children more thoroughly since the last dozen bodies rolled down from the mountaintop to the highway below. It hadn't been a pretty sight once the dense fog cleared and everyone saw that they hadn't been driving over mud and rocks all that time.

That's when they hired him, or rather some local prophecy mentioned him and the townsfolk offered him a decent enough sum to bribe him over there. If only the monster had read the same scrolls he had - maybe then it would have had the decency to wait for a few minutes while he finished setting up.

Now he was left with a half destroyed altar, a barely drawn banishing circle and nowhere near enough gunpowder to blow the place up when he was done and to make matters worse the creature was clearly trying to say something with a mouth that wasn't made to speak in this dimension and all it was succeeding in doing was making the few surviving children cry and tear at their ears.

As it began to walk closer towards him he wondered if he should have just taken half the cash and run.

Day 1,865

It was hard to say what had killed him, only that in the end he'd died crawling towards the door, or was he crawling away from something? Either way it wasn't possible to ask him - the dead may talk but the ones without much of a head left can't really hold a conversation.

She considered spirit writing but he was too fresh to do much more than try to come to terms with his sudden demise, let alone figure how how to use his hands again and reach through the planes of existence to grasp a pencil.

Still, she had to know how he'd died. There were too many others like him and too many ghosts for her to do her usual work, let alone stop who or whatever had decided that this was the best time of year to go on a killing spree. Right when the barrier between the living and the dead is at its thinnest - perfect timing!

Most of the other recents had been pulverised from the neck up making it damned near impossible to talk to them but every now and then she'd stumble upon one who had part of their mouth or an eye in reasonable condition and they'd get a few hesitant words across.

This brought her no comfort - not with the words they kept repeating.

It's still here.

Eyes upon eyes.

They left me here for you.

Day 1,864

We didn't know the miners had dug so far into town until one of their tunnels collapsed, taking a double decker bus down with it. The council is trying to find a safe way down there whilst trying to shut the mines down for good and we all know that neither are likely to happen any time soon.

Officially they haven't gone anywhere near the town, only a few miles around the quarry that started it all but I couldn't name one person who hasn't woken up to the sounds of digging coming from under their homes or in their back gardens.

What goes into the mines better be a miner or else it'll be a goner, that's what we used to jump rope to at school. Now we're all old enough to question it and old enough to not say it out loud. We all know a miner, maybe even have a few in the family but they're never quite right... never comfortable above ground.

I've been wondering if the passengers and driver of the bus will emerge as miners too or if they'll become a part of the permanent night crew, which we've all been assured is just a rumour even though everyone knows someone who's joined it.

They say that the night crew stop being people after a while, that their eyes get all bulbous and their hair falls out and their skin turns translucent from the lack of sunlight. It's probably nonsense but on particularly dark nights there have been sightings.

Day 1,863

Just because humans have distanced ourselves from our barbaric past doesn't mean the things we were trying to appease no longer require blood and bones. We see it in roadkill, in birds flying into windows, in cats running across busy roads and dogs going missing.

They haven't forgotten like us and while they may have joined us in our steel and concrete barriers, they know better than to ignore what is so much more than they will ever be. Their bodies are enough to tide the greater things over but not nearly enough to keep them satisfied.

If you are particularly unlucky you might wander into a sacrificial spot, one where the ground seems to be littered with tiny bones and scraps of fur. It could be mistaken for the lair of some carnivorous animal rather than a necessary evil that keeps us all just that little bit safer.

Day 1,862

To the paranormal mind it looked like a gathering or spirit orbs.

To the untrained eye it looked like a shower of dust.

To the trained eye it looked like countless bodies falling to their deaths.


There was a colosseum there once, after the Romans had invaded and settled down. It was a small one, something for lesser games and a lesser audience. Nothing to write home about and as such there were no records of it and only the barest trace of ruins found deep underground.


It's hard to say how it fell, the spirits were too busy reenacting their deaths and screaming, not that they could be heard, but their faces were contorted with terror. It's probably better that they can't talk, the dead rarely have anything good to say and finding someone who can speak the strange hybrid of Latin and ancient English is as likely as squeezing blood from a stone.

Day 1,861

They screamed themselves awake, tasting seasalt and the gunpowder tang of freshly fired cannons...


The problem with recycling is that you often get more than you bargained for. Sometimes it's a hidden compartment in an old jewellery box and you suddenly find yourself in the midst of a sordid familial murder that began ninety three years ago when someone spilled port on a new tablecloth.

Sometimes it's termites.

Today it's somewhere in the middle. Specifically the gentle curves of an old ship's hull that were purchased for worryingly little and repurposed to make a bed frame in a cutesy rustic little apartment. It looked more like whalebones when they were done sanding and painting the centuries-old wood but the couple in question didn't see it.

They didn't see the crew either, though they'd been with the ship all these years and would continue to be with it in its every forms as they travelled between its fragments with unsettling ease. By now they were bored of spectating and eager to put their hands all over the modern world after spending decades in a collector's warehouse, slowly figuring out how to become physical creatures again.

The human mind isn't made to remember every aspect of our bodies, it just pilots us along through life and as such, the crew barely looked human. They had all the limbs in mostly the right places but they didn't really have clothes or bodies or much of a face beyond their mouths and the occasional eye.

Needless to say when they finally decided to make themselves known to the couple under the whalebone remains of a ship that should have been wrecked by the sea, they were more monstrous than anything their worst dreams could have come up with.

Day 1,860

They take so long to die and even then I'm sure the ones I buried out back might have moved.

The last one was lying where I left it, immobile and slowly drowning in a pool of its own blood.

I can still feel its eye looking at me from around the blade of the axe I buried in its head.

It smiles around the blood and I wonder if he was human too.

A part of me thinks it'd be smarter to assume it isn't.

A part of me thinks I'm a monster too and feels a sense of companionship towards these things.

I am okay and I am human.

If I tell myself that for long enough it might start to become true.

Even while I think this I can feel bits and pieces of me rewriting themselves.

I wonder if he felt like this too before he went.

Day 1,859

Wherever he was, it looked like someone had melted a city, poured it down a tube and now he was walking through the barely-settled remains. It was vast but he could just about see streetlights sticking out above him, around him and beneath him - all at odd angles and all bathing the tunnel in a soft orange haze.

It it weren't for the fact that his car had started to dissolve into the floor, he'd be driving along the bumpy ground in the hopes that he'd reach safety somehow. Instead he was power walking past what might have been a school once, trying desperately to ignore the little hands papping away at the windows.

The thought that there might be a greater city behind the filthy glass that jutted out from every conceivable angle only made him feel like he was inside those tubes you got at aquariums where the fish would swim over you. Only instead of graceful aquatic life, he was surrounded by an entire civilisation that was watching him for no discernable reason.

He hoped he was wrong and that the faint sound of tapping against glass was just his imagination but as he walked by an old butcher's front he clearly saw someone hacking away at a pile of writhing meat that quietly sobbed with every strike. Somehow he thought it would have been easier to deal with if it screamed.

By the time he made it to the remnants of a zoo, he was beyond hoping this was a dream and instead considering how he could get out fast. Heading back to the butcher's sounded like a swift way to go but the thought that there might be some kind of wild beast that could kill him with a single strike had more appeal than risking a slower death like whatever was weeping back there.

Again, it looked like someone had taken a zoo and poured it into a bowl, letting it slop down and cool until it lost all function to the Dali-esque aesthetic. He wondered how many, if any, creatures had survived long enough to escape and what creatures had been housed there to begin with.

The signs were barely legible but there had been at least five different types of bear and three types of big cat. Large carnivores that would end him and eat him, hopefully in that order or at least quickly if it was the other way around.

He knew he wasn't alone, something large was close enough that he could hear them breathing just out of time with his own panicked gasps. Soon enough he would turn around and face the thing that had been tracking him since he got into his car after his shift at work.

Day 1,858

No matter how many times we tell them that the foreman is dead and that the higher ups are closing down the facility, they refuse to stop working. At least, their bodies refuse. Their minds were downloaded into those rusting shells over half a century ago so who really knows what's left of their original selves.

We like to think we've evolved since then, that we better understand the complexities of the technological afterlife and the ethical concerns that govern it but I don't think we've moved past the first stages of understanding and I doubt we'll get any further. Not until we stop allowing people's minds to be downloaded into company property to pay for their own funerals.

What's the point in having a funeral when the person in question is still sort-of alive and working ten minutes down the road from their own burial site? A burial site that they'll never be allowed to see because their physical form is in the same classification as a hammer at a building site.

Day 1,857

She waited by the tracks, under a crumbling bus shelter that the plants had taken over decades ago. The tram sometimes came this way and it was her only chance of seeing another human, or at least something human-shaped that she could talk to.

It felt like she hadn't seen anyone in years but she knew it had only been ten months. Time passes slowly when you're foraging in the remains of a long dead city where every street looks the same and the only sounds are your heartbeat and footsteps, both muffled by dense foliage.

The closest she'd come to finding animal life there was a pile of bones that might have once been a horse or a cow, its hard to tell them apart when the head's missing. For all the silence she knew she wasn't alone and these bones proved that something else was there, or at least it had been there.

Much as the trams were her lifeline, she couldn't spend the rest of her life on them. Not without losing her legs and joining the other parasitic passengers who gave up on having lives of their own before she'd even been born. At least they weren't as lonely as her, she supposed, if that was worth losing their individuality.

The idea came to tempt her when she was deep in the heart of the old settlements. The passengers always seemed so kind and so happy to talk to her, even if it was about something as commonplace as the weather. She had to keep reminding herself that they weren't separate beings anymore, all sharing one consciousness that gradually swallowed their former selves until they were all equals.

Still, she eagerly waited for the tram and the chance to speak to the coalescence of humans.

Anything was better than the silence she'd been smothered by the past few months.

Anything to distract her from the feeling of countless eyes waiting for her guard to drop.

Day 1,856

You always found it odd that there were no photos of your or your sisters before the age of four. Your mum always said it was because she didn't have a camera back then and you all believed her until she passed away unexpectedly, leaving everything in shambles.

The house was just as she left it when she collapsed in town and got taken to the hospital, down to the plates in the sink and chicken left out to defrost. It had all happened so fast that you hadn't had a chance to go back there until she was gone and you found yourself heading there to see if she had a will of any kind.

After three days of trawling through a lifetime of memories and mementoes all you found was junk and old bills and a weird draft coming from beneath the living room sofa. The carpet there never sat right and your mum blamed the old flooring but now it almost looked like there was a handle by the wall.

With enough elbow grease, a good shove and a hard pull the carpet came away and a smallish trapdoor was revealed. The hinges were well-oiled so she must have used it recently which only made your findings that little bit worse, not just for their content but for the fact that she wasn't alive to tell you the truth herself.

In the small room beneath the living room there was a shelf full of boxes of photos and scraps of bloodied cloth pinned to the wall with the names of you and your sisters and two other names above that. You opened one of the boxes and saw yourself as an infant, as a toddler, as a young child in the arms of two people you'd never seen before.

There were identical boxes for your sisters and, again, they were with two other people. People who looked a lot more like them than any of you did to each other and the woman you called mum for as long as you could remember.

It wasn't just you and your sisters though, there were boxes for other children you'd never met.

Boxes labelled with SIDS and PNEUMONIA and TAKEN BACK.

Boxes for the siblings whose real parents would never see them again.

Boxes full of painfully small bones.

Day 1,855

She woke up running again, already gasping like she'd been going for miles as her bare feet slammed against the ice-cold concrete. By this point she could tell how long she'd been going for by how numb her limbs felt and how loudly the things-pretending-to-be-dogs were as they chased her through dimly lit street after dimly lit street.

A quick pat down told her she still had her phone. A quick check told her it had 7% battery left. She cursed under her breath as a bolt of lightning seared across the sky, briefly showing her exactly what was hiding in the shadows against the suburban houses all around her.

It wasn't good news but these days it rarely was. She'd pass out running and wake up like she'd never stopped and all the while she was being chased by things-pretending-to-be-dogs and possibly-was-a-person-once and she never seemed to leave the neighbourhood nor pass the same house twice.

It was always night too, no matter how long she ran the sky was as dark as ever and whatever was hiding in it was starting to get brave. Every now and then an inhuman hand would dart out and try to snag its claws on her clothes or skin, snarling as she jerked away just in time.

She'd been lucky so far, so very lucky. Luckier than the others she used to see running beside her and in front of her. There were about thirty of them on the first night she woke up and now it was just her and the faint silhouette of someone she hoped was human.

Either way she was following them, hoping they'd get out somehow before they went missing too.

Day 1,854

Stumbling across an old nest is never a pleasant experience, especially when it belonged to the Audience. You've seen them before in the form of old bandstands in disused parks, stacks of chairs behind the halted remains of a renovated school gym or the smouldering remains of a theatre you swear wasn't there last week.

The Audience move quickly, their numbers swelling and splitting and swelling again as they leave behind almost as many as the incorporate. Nobody can quite tell if it's a parasite, a cult or an actual hoard of ancient bloodthirsty beings and nobody who's gotten close enough to tell has come back alive.

More and more nests are being found, some in the most unusual of places like an abandoned cinema in the middle of the desert, as the Audience begins to panic. Their crowds are so rarely all in one physical place, preferring to be online where everyone is the audience and the Audience is starting to feel isolated.

Their numbers are dwindling, their online presence growing and their bodies fading.

They won't die out, not just yet.

They'll adapt as always and watch us from afar.

Day 1,853

When she was little, her nan would wrap a scarf around her head to stop her sleeping with her mouth open. Nan would say it was to stop her from eating spiders in her sleep but she reckoned it was actually to stop her from snoring.

Even when her nan died she'd still wrap a scarf around her head, she found it hard to sleep without it after so many years of habit. Of course this changed when she got a girlfriend who found it too weird that she slept looking like an old lady in winter.

With a few days of gentle, and unsubtle, commenting she finally gave in and put the scarf away for good. It was fine at first - she didn't even snore - but then she started getting a sore throat. She figured it was just a cold and had tea with honey, thinking it would go away in a few days.

Five months later she went to the doctor, barely able to speak and feeling a constant tickle at the back of her throat. The doctor only meant to push her tongue down but their little wooden stick went a bit too far back and she heard something rip.

It felt like she was breathing dust at first, causing her to cough and hack and heave and when she looked at her hands they were swarming with baby spiders. Thousands and thousands ran over and between her fingers as she heard more ripping coming from further down her neck.

She felt her throat opening up again and gasped air properly for what felt like the first time in ears just before all the little darlings settled in her nose and mouth, building their webs to the lullaby of the doctor's screams.

Day 1,852

You'd always had your suspicions about your kid but when he was the only one to not fall sick, you knew you were right. You were right about the kids, about their parents, your husband and the whole damned town he begged you to move to.

You and your son were the only humans there.

Little by little over the years you'd secretly purchased and planted wild garlic in as many areas as possible. You'd also been slipping holy water into the local reservoir and waiting to see if any of the uncanny townsfolk started showing any signs of discomfort.

They were only children, one part of you argued, why make them suffer too? The rest of your mind was filled with scent of fresh blood, the faces of all the missing tourists and the fear that your son would either end up dead or worse.

He knew he was different, he just didn't know how or what made him different. Your husband was so distracted by all the town meetings and mutterings of an epidemic that he barely glanced twice at either of you. There was no better time to escape.

At least you thought so.

You'd married clever, your mum used to say. You married a good man, her dad used to say. You always thought their home was the safest place to be but their throats had been shredded only moments before you arrived.

Their bodies were so warm but their eyes were already cold and lifeless.

Outside the house, the townsfolk began to prowl.