Day 1,942

We thought the outbreak was just a plague that wiped out most of humanity, something of a cross between the classic bubonic and the more modern strains of influenza. As far as we knew the first symptoms were basically a death a sentence and left the world to rot, save for the few of us whose immune systems didn't crumple like wet tissues.

With nobody to run the world, to make sure all the essential communications were online, how were we meant to know that this was just stage one? How could we have known that this was planned population control gone rogue and that the next stage was cellular reanimation? Or that the third stage was some kind of super quick, super intense dehydration that left all the infected little more than piles of nutrient-rich dirt?

Shame the people who had all the answers didn't survive like we did. If even of of them was still around we wouldn't have had to hunt for the answers amongst huge swathes of bloated corpses gently walking about and bumping into everything like honey-drunk bees.

Now we're choking on the dust storms caused by stage three but at least we're just regular dead.

Day 1,941

I had an imaginary friend when I was a child, one that lasted long into my teenage years. I learnt to stop talking about him when I was eight, when I was deemed to be too old. Now most people, or so I'm told, forget their imaginary friends and they fade away into memories.

Mine did not.

In fact, mine remained a permanent fixture in my childhood bedroom and continued to speak to me and guide me whenever I was there. Whether it was visiting my parents for the holidays or using their home as a pitstop between friends places, he was always there and always waiting to tell me another story.

They were mostly variants on classic fairy tales - little red riding hood's parents left her to die in the woods and the wolves raised her, sleeping beauty was left to rot by a kingdom that was scared of her fae-bestowed traits, a half-drowned prince fell in love with the siren that failed to kill him and sold his soul to become a fish-like abomination so that they could be together forever.

Occasionally though, on the same three days every year, he'd tell me a story about the children who used to call my bedroom their own. The one that ran away from strange shadows and into oncoming traffic, the one who mistook rat poison for sugar or the one who ran away into the city never to return.

As I grew older my imaginary friend seemed to grow more irritable with my very existence, like I should have been the fourth child in his morbid list but I was too stupid to die. I didn't think he'd actually try to kill me until I woke up to smoke burning my eyes and throat and my parents screaming for me outside while sirens drew closer and closer.

I thought I was surrounded by smoke at first until it stood up. Apparently it carried me outside before heading back into the blazing house for good. Among all the ruins and ash of our former home they found bones, hundreds of children's bones all tangled up like they'd been clawing at each other.

That was when I knew I'd found my imaginary friend and all the lost children at once.

And though the house has since been rebuilt, I haven't heard him once.

Day 1,940

They're blaming wolves for the attacks but we hunted them to extinction over 200 years ago. They say some must have survived or escaped from a nearby zoo because there's no dog big enough to do that much damage to a body and not leave a single trace aside from the musky scent of a predator.

We tried using scent hounds to track it down but they refused to leave the cars. When we eventually managed to drag the dogs out and give them the scent but they just spun in circles and barked - it was all around us. That meant we were either very close to the alleged wolf or it had marked the place recently.

When the body count was nearly at twenty the attack pattern changed. It usually shredded the torso and ate most of the meat from the body before leaving but for some reason it let someone live. They managed to crawl from the woods to the side of a road where they were found an hour or so later.

When they were recovered enough to talk again they raved on about the trees opening wide and teeth made from bark and that there was a greater being in the forest - clawing its way up through the ground - that frightened the trees until they let go and he was able to make his escape.

Day 1,939

There's something out in the night sky that likes to latch onto your fears and make them into monstrous reality. Hundreds have died and no matter how much we study it, we're never any closer to stopping it. Every weapon we've tried just seems to dissolve midair or worse, it creates someone's fear and we have to abandon the site again.

We did find that it's only good with tangible fears and, luckily for me, my fear is being left by everyone I know and love and it hasn't figured out how to work that into a creature. It tries though, every now and then I'll see something in the distance that looks like someone I know running from me but nothing too bad really.

You know when you're a kid and you think your parents aren't scared of anything? I always thought my dad was like that, ex-military and tougher than anything else on earth. Then he met the creature while we were walking back from a local bar and I got to see what kind of man he really was.

His fear wore a bloodied uniform and was almost a human save for one arm which looked like it was some kind of gun. It 'fired' teeth and something acidic at us, crying out something that sounded like dad's name with every shot. When it seemed to run out of 'ammo' it collapsed and wept and shrieked to high heavens.

Dad had been pale before that but he managed to mutter out "He's calling the generals." and it made sense that he knew what his fear was doing. They always know what their fears are doing even if it looks like nothing more than a tantrum to the rest of us.

Sure enough within a few minutes the ground started shaking and great uniformed columns fell from the night sky. Legs, I realised. They started beating dad's fear to death, slowly and brutally as my dad started to cry and beg them to stop.

He called his fear a name corporal something-or-other and said it was all his fault. The generals didn't stop until the fear was little more than a pile of twitching red pulp. Then they turned to face dad and started to walk forward. I've never seen him move so fast in my life.

He doesn't go out at night now but the creature brings his fear to him when it feels like it. Dad still won't tell me who the corporal was or why it was being killed because of something he did but I get the feeling that somewhere back when he was on duty he let someone else take the blame for him, or maybe they chose to cover for him, and they were moved to a more dangerous area.

They died because of him and he's still terrified that if the truth gets out, they'll send him out to die too.

Day 1,938

They said the Brinkholt Kettles were caused when a couple of old mineshafts collapsed after hitting an underground river. Now its left five pitch black ponds that are either full of dead miners or gigantic man-eating eels depending on who you ask.

I've seen a thing or two in my visits there and back, nothing too drastic but nothing that can be explained. Most folks around here have a tale or so to tell and some have little souvenirs they'll bring out if theuve had one cider too many.

My experiences were mostly benevolent, only one person died which is a damn sight better than most outcomes. Better still, I hardly knew the fellow so I didn't get any unwanted knocking on my door and awkward questions.

Not to sound heartless, mind you, but I did give him a fair warning about the kettles and he chose to try his luck and mine by fishing there after dark. No local in their right mind would do that normally but I'd been paid well enough in booze to ease my concerns.

We should have left when the water started to churn and boil and speak to us in dead men's cries for help but we couldn't find it in ourselves to move. Somehow I think that would have made things worse.

After a while of hearing these poor souls screaming and crying out their heads started to rise up from the depths, blood-slick and water-bloated and all facing us. The boat felt absolutely pitiful against all of them.

I don't know who started swaying first but I do know that the fellow with me, the new-in-town one had this genius idea to begin with, was still and silent as a rock. Probably why they went for him.

All I can say for certain is that I went home alone and his house was emptied a few weeks later. There wasn't a funeral here for him, not officially anyway, but we all had a silent pint in his honour and poured one into the kettles to appease his poor soul. 

Day 1,937

It was midnight and the gulls were swarming. We watched them from the safety of the hotel bar and silently counted the number of guests to see if anyone had been lost or gained. We hoped for neither but expected the former.

We thought it was rain at first, the uneven spattering that echoed between the hastily parked cars. It wasn't until someone shone their phone torch out of the window that we saw how red the ground was becoming.

Seemed like the gulls found a straggler or two, not that we'd heard anything but they're awfully quiet just before they strike. We were all so shaken at the sight that we stopped trying to count our numbers and headed off to our rooms before the staff had even finished checking for open windows and other potential entry points.

I was one of the lucky ones. No trouble all night for me. Can't say the same for the rest of us. We were down eight by breakfast, not that I heard anything mind you, but there were a few wounded among us and one person I didn't recognise from the night before.

Day 1,936

Every year when we hear the bells toll out on the moors where the old church used to stand, we are compelled. Everyone has their own compulsions ranging from boiling water to pulling out a set number of teeth and like all things they're mostly good with a hearty splash of just plain wrong thrown in.

My compulsion changed last year and I never told anyone. We're not supposed to talk about them full stop but some are more public than others. Mine has always been a private one - cutting out exactly three floorboards and burning them in the cellar furnace.

Last year I found myself walking out to the old church and waiting for Jacinda to come and carve her name the stones as she was compelled to. I waited for her and I ambushed her and I cut her into three pieces.

I was so used to burning wood that I made sure to keep a lighter and liquid fuel in my pockets. It came in handy when I took her down to the crypt and burnt her.

It's unspoken but agreed that if we kill after the bells toll then we aren't responsible for it. Doesn't mean I'll ever say that I know where Jacinda is or what happened.

I don't know who ill meet at the old church tonight but I know they won't leave. I've made sure that Jacinda's knife is already sharpened and waiting for me. 

Day 1,935

We ate until our stomachs ached, until our skin felt too tight to hold us together, until all we felt was nausea. We thought that keeping hunger at bay meant keeping us safe but one-by-one our friends and neighbours fell and our isolated little community shrank to twelve of us, all hidden away in the catacombs beneath town hall.

We'd hoped the others wouldn't be able to smell us among all the bones we used to barricade ourselves in and all the rats we'd killed to fill in the gaps. The food should have lasted us for months but after the first night one of us was already turning.

He said his head hurt and when one of us went to look they confirmed that branches were already coming out of his scalp. From there it would be a three day descent into agony as more and more branches would sprout until hi head was little more than a mess of rust-coloured sticks and a snapping mouth.

After the transformation is finished their first instinct is to lash out at the closest piece of meat, spreading the contagion and feeding the host. We thought he might go for all the rats, their blood was all we could smell down there.

He went for his son instead - blood seeking blood - and tore his little throat wide open. The rest of us fled for deeper tunnels but I hung back, I'd been feeling an itch beneath my scalp so I figured I'd end up next anyway. I saw more branches shoot out from his son's severed neck and understood.

We were already good a dead, we should have waited for the others to free us.

Day 1,934

When the angels finally came they didn't intend to save us - they didn't even believe we had souls despite out endless protests which gradually morphed into pleading then begging them screaming as their beautiful lights reduced us to our basest components.

Oxygen was the first, coming out as a sharp gasp when the lights hit and tore it out of you.

Carbon was next, scattered little coal-like pebbles that sunk to the ground.

Hydrogen comes along somewhere in the order but weighs less than a soul and makes no sound.

Nitrogen is easier to spot, the angels use it in their lights to drive the oxygen out of you.

Calcium is one of the last ones, all the scorched bones that were trampled when we tried to flee.

Phosphorus comes next and lies beside our bones in a fine powder that melts away with rain.

The angels broke our bodies and tried to remake humanity forgetting one thing- we're mostly water and we lived on all around them. We were in the rivers and the seas and the rain that watered their crops and the puddles beneath their feet and the water their new creations drank.

If there's one thing they forgot about us it's that we don't die quietly.

And with enough time we'll remind them and they'll strike us down and we'll return again.

Because we've done all this before and every time they grow complacent and forget.

Day 1,933

The lighthouse was what we noticed first, facing inland and unnaturally still. It felt like we were looking at a predator that had something vulnerable in its sight though all we could see was the same harbour town we always came home to.

We'd been out at sea for so long that the news never reached us til we were too close to shore to do anything but dock. All those distorted stone figures were once human and didn't seem to realise they'd changed. They still treated us like they always had, though the lighthouse seemed to glare at us all the while.

We couldn't get out of there fast enough, with enough supplies to last us til we hit the continent where we hoped to find actual humans and non-sentient lighthouses. As always, nothing ever goes to plan at sea and she threw everything she had at us, making us nearly two weeks overdue.

By then it was too late and whatever had taken our home had spread to the shoreline towns. Only difference is that out lighthouses were built into the surrounding rock and these modern ones found a way to make their foundations propel them towards whatever they perceived to be danger.

We can't tell them apart, you know. The ones that kill and the ones that are just humans in another shell. We ended up trailing a particularly vicious lighthouse with a keener killer instinct than a half-starved tiger and more teeth than a dentist's basement.

It keeps us safe and in return we maintain it, like birds picking fleas from the backs of elephants. Only birds grow old and die and we've been around far longer than any human ought to be able to and it's been so long since we last saw anyone with flesh and meat.

But as long as we've got a light, we'll be safe.

Safe until we turn to stone too.

Then the hunt's on us.

Day 1,932

The elders say there's nothing beyond the fields, it just drops off like the tropical reefs we read about in the schoolhouse. We're all like those tiny fish that live inside anemones and underneath greater fish but the elders never elaborate on what these greater fish are.

All I know is they're not quite right. There is something beyond the fields and it's far more than the depthless oceans they compared it to. One of them must have stuck around long enough to see the goliath eyes that slowly blink at you from the fog.

None of them stayed until both eyes opened and its whole head began to move forward. It already knew my name - knew everything about me. Didn't have a name for itself though, said it was older than any name we could think to give it.

It'll be coming closer tonight, I've invited it back to the village to ask the elders to let us cross over with it. Apparently the lands on the other side are an absolute paradise and I won't be denied paradise because a bunch of old people are scared of change.

I asked it if we'll need to bring anything with us and it said we wouldn't have need for anything when we cross over. We wouldn't even need clothes but I argued for propriety's sake we'd all be wearing something. It grudgingly agreed, didn't like the idea of us having anything other than our own skin.

If I were a wiser man I'd have been suspicious but I wasn't and I was so damn trusting I promised not to tell anyone that it was coming. Not that they'd have stood a chance anyway but there might have been other survivors if I'd only said something.

But I didn't. I trusted it and told it when we'd all be in the village centre to celebrate the new year. The fog rolled in first and I knew that it was coming. It barely stood out against the night sky, we only noticed it when a couple of embers lit it up enough for us to see not just those eyes but the gaping jaws beneath them.

They were gone before they could even scream, sucked straight into those impossibly rotating, never ending or beginning jaws until I was the last one standing. It thanked me and I could hear the screams of the villagers still caught between its teeth.

Day 1,931

I know we were told not to look at the rocking chair but I swear I saw someone sitting in it. Their feet were mangled and bleeding, their hands weren't much better and I couldn't bring myself to look any higher but that doesn't matter now.

Not when I can see those same feet poking out from under my bed every night. Now when those same hands put my keys in my pocket before I leave the house like they know how forgetful I am, like they're not just in my house but they're also in my head.

Day 1,930

Everything was all wrong - they weren't supposed to be here so early in the season. Not til first snowfall which wasn't due for another month according to the weatherman. They should have been heading for the surface, barely nearing the top, and yet there they were - crouched over enough of a deer carcass to keep them busy while we crept past.

Most of their eyes were either shut against the harsher surface light or focussed on their meal but a couple were trained on us. All it would take was one step too fast, too crooked or too near and they'd all lash out. Nobody wanted to add to their feast.

My nanna once told me of a trick to appease them that didn't involve a loss of life or limb. All you had to do was cut off about half a foot of hair and place it by their right paw. A harmless sacrifice to remind them that this was their time of year, their chance to reign for a while as we slunk around the outskirts of their territory.

It would have been a good strategy too but the for the fact that none of us really had hair. Lucas was the one who thought to use the horse's mane and tail, calming her with one hand while we both cut off as much as we possibly could. We didn't think there'd be any harm in offering a bit more than nana said.

We should have known better than to accidentally render them indebted them to us. They owed us blood and they were eager to repay us with interest. For five days we were trapped in our own homes as they gathered outside with foxes and fawns to offer us liquid life as payment.

Day 1,929

He never told you what it was, just handed you a greasy bottle and told you to take as much as you needed and, with the world on its last legs, you downed half the burning liquid in one gulp. It burned your throat and eyes and made everything soft around the edges and the less you saw the safer you felt so you took another swig.

He didn't say anything - didn't even look at you slowly losing your sobriety in favour of sanity though both would be gone before long. The fact that you still realised this meant you weren't drunk enough but before you could have a third go he gently put his hand over yours and stayed the bottle still.

Another portal had opened up in the sky and the initial scouts were flooding out to swarm and devour. You both sat there in silence and stillness as the world screamed around you. Once the swarm had returned he let your hand go and you resumed your descent to the elusive bottom of the bottle

The portal stabilised and another colossal beast flowed out like a river made of meat and claws. You handed the bottle back and watched as he finished it, your vision just as swirled and distorted as the air around the portal. It was hard to say which was making you more nauseous.

It would only be a matter of time before you'd either be spotted by returning scouts or by a beast or maybe you'd get lucky and drown in a pool of your own vomit with some guy you met three hours ago who now felt like the only person you ever really knew.

Either way, you were ready to go and judging by the way he was swaying, he'd be joining you.

Day 1,928

It acted... different to how we expected. From the old documents we found in the wreck of Professor Keller's study it was supposed to be nocturnal and unlikely to harm humans but when we found it in the old abbey it had already begun to assemble its nest.

It's hard to say what was worse - the mangled corpses or the swarming flies or the stench or sight of the creature slowly rising up from the nest, shaking bone fragments and clumps of viscera from its tangled mane. Against all better judgement I crouched and made my way closer, I felt I had to carry on the Professor's research.

From my new hiding place crouched behind a load-bearing pile of bodies I caught glimpses of its face as it turned its head this way and that, scenting the air and displaying a rather intimidating set of gnarled teeth. Its eyes were a glossy white with faint grey pupils that I assumed were cataracts.

I was so entrenched in my studying I scarcely paid attention to the way its head seemed to sway closer and closer to me. I didn't even notice how it was slowly angling its entire body towards me. I did start to notice the way the corpses all seemed to be meshed together, almost breathing in an organic web rather than the mutilated heap I first assumed.

One of the corpses opened an eye and hissed out "Keep still, it sees you."

Day 1,927

We huddled together in the lifeboat and watched the waves drowning the ship we'd called home ever since the oceans first swarmed the continents and left them as little more than islands and corpses far as they eye could see. Ours was a small group - only eighty or so - who'd been blessed enough to be on a well-stocked cruise that was far enough out that the tsunamis did little more than lightly swat at the hull.

We should have been on there with them when it went down. Over the past few months the others had become more family to us than the flesh and blood we left behind on land. Now they swam with everyone else, at least we hoped they'd swim and see us and we'd be a group again but they never surfaced.

Not even their bodies surfaced, the whole ship was just dragged down to the depths along with everything else we ever knew and it was just the three of us with all the supplies we'd smuggled over the night before the engines seized and the ocean came flooding in and now...

Now we're drifting with no compass, no light, no heat and in a few days we'll have no food.

Hope the ocean takes us before we have to resort to whatever meat fights the least.

Somehow I think I'll be the last to go - the sea's always hated me.

Day 1,926

By the time she woke up the sirens were blaring at level 4 and the floor around her was slick with blood. Everything hurt as she slowly propped herself up and looked around for her colleagues who should have either dragged her along with them or killed her for slowing them down. It was protocol.

All she saw was blood pouring from open doorways, the source hidden and the sirens too loud to hear if anything was moving nearby. Repressing a groan of pain she forced herself to stand, nearly sliping several times but eventually ending up leaning against a wall, trying to peer round the doorframe and failing.

On the bright side she must have been alone - if anything had escaped containment and lingered long enough to see her then she'd already be dead. They must have lost her scent among all the blood and assumed she'd been taken down already.

Her luck ran out as she realised that the sirens were switching to level 5 and all the lights were powering down, diverting power to the main generator to overload it and send the whole base spiralling into an inescapable inferno.

She was moving too slowly to make it to an emergency cancellation switch or an exit or anywhere other than the end of the hallway she'd woken up in. to make matters worse there were worrying sounds between each blare of the siren.

She was no longer alone.

Day 1,925

We'd been hearing them for weeks whenever we passed by drains or roadside gullies, those whispered howls that reminded us all of drowning wolves, the faint glimpses of movement in the watery shadows. There was something down there and it was curious.

Our suspicions were confirmed when the bodycam from a missing sanitation cleaner was found washed up on the riverbanks some eighteen miles from his last known location. He'd been set to find a blockage beneath the police station and never came back.

The footage was fairly routine at first - he radioed in to his colleagues, reporting clear access over here and a potential problem for later over there until he found the blockage. It was organic, that much was certain, like a beaver dam only made up of tiny bones, clumps of hair and meat and then he spotted a familiar scrap of fabric poking out over the top.

As far as uniforms go, the city cleaners have a very distinct shade of blue that's meant to make them seem friendlier and easy to recognise therefore easier to thank for all their hard work. It also makes it easier to spot among browny-red debris.

He reported it as he climbed up the blockage, just to make sure he was seeing things and that the others sent out in the area hadn't slipped their mask off and passed out from all the toxic fumes in the air. One sharp tug and the fabric was freed enough for him to see all the teeth marks and missing meat on bloated arm that was very much not attached to anyone.

He cried out in shock and dropped the arm - both sounds were deafening. That's when the whispering howls picked up and the blockage started to get up, throwing him back and dislodging the camera. The remaining footage shows him running from countless stick-like limbs.

His cries for help die out slowly as he is overwhelmed by whatever's beneath the city.

Day 1,924

Something keeps coming out of the sea every winter.

Something big.

Something that nobody manages to report so it may as well be fiction.


All I know for sure is that it hates dry land and eats whatever it catches.Not people though, never anything that would make enough of a fuss to give it any grief. At least that's the feeling you get when it eyes you up on a particularly rainy day before dragging itself towards pigeons instead.

It's probably big enough to eat a full grown man whole but somewhere along the line it learnt we fight back too much. Judging by the sword that's still stuck behind one of its bony fins I'd say it didn't take too long to learn either.


We don't buy cats any more. We've moved the shelters further inland and tried everything we can to discourage birds from settling during winter but they still come and they're never fast enough and the bowling green's been stained red so often we might as well dye the grass and be done with it.

But no, we just pretend it isn't there while never fully turning away from it. Always keeping it in eyesight but never within arm's reach just in case. I doubt any hardman's little knife would do anywhere near the amount of damage an old sword would and I don't think t knows that yet.


Until it figures out how much weaker we all are, we're safe.

Day 1,923

She stumbled through the courtyard desperately trying to get a glimpse of someone - anyone- but all she could make out were the faint outlines of plants and dropped coats. Unnamed insects seemed to swarm just outside her field of vision yet she heard no complaints from the uppity guests and the music flowed just as freely as it had from the very start.

After a few near-falls and mumbled apologies to the numerous statues that dotted the courtyard, she eventually found the door to the main house. It took a fair bit of force to open the door and once she'd practically wrenched it from its hinges she was bombarded with a dense swarm of insects, her ears filled with their monotonous droning and her eyes stung by countless chintanous bodies.

Once they'd finished fleeing she found herself at the threshold of the ballroom. The musicians cowered on their stage, frantically playing whichever songs sounded closest to the insects own cacophony while countless guests slowly writhed beneath the same heaving swarms that had passed her by.

A quick glance told her that there would be no survivors by dawn, save for maybe a couple of violinists. It seemed a safer bet to take her chances heading back home than wait for a cluster to be done with their current meal and decide she'd be a suitable second course.

As the fog faded with the approaching sun she saw the bloodbath she'd delicately blundered past in her haste to make it to the gathering. All the statues were mostly cocooned guests and the dropped coats were very much still on their owners shrivelled bodies.

The slow walk back to her carriage was a quiet parade of death that terminated in the crumpled corpses of her footmen. They hadn't even spared the horses yet she had been left untouched, undesired even by swarms so bloodthirsty they'd licked the ground beneath the empty horse-skins dry.

She could still hear them droning in the distance, leaving silence wherever they went.

And there she was - silent herself and without purpose.

So she followed the shadows of the swarms, hoping and dreading to find others like her.

Day 1,922

When the power went out at the gas station, you were told to go into the basement and reset the circuit breaker. You were not expected to come back and you know you haven't been the same since. Everyone knows you haven't been the same since but they can't see what's changed.

The changes began the second you set foot in the basement, something in the air worms its way into your ears and into your mind itself. The little whispers led you to a cable leading out of the circuit breaker and told you to follow it to the source of the power outage.

By the time you realised just how long you'd been walking and just how far away the basement now was, you no longer felt the fear your normal self would have felt. Instead you only wanted to press onward and fulfill your original instructions - bring the power back.

So you followed the cable through broken doors, through air so thick with dust that you could barely breathe, through empty storage room after empty storage room and down more stairs than you could count until you reached the source.

It pulsed  - happy to see a living being and one that had managed to survive the journey down. With a sharp writhing movement it freed the cable from beneath its mass and power flowed once more. A faint staticky voice on your employee radio thanked you and told you to come back up.

You don't remember having an employee radio before and nobody else seemed to have one when you returned. None of them seemed happy at your return either. Perhaps the source was meant to kill you, perhaps you were meant to die along the way or perhaps you were simply meant to turn the circuit breaker back on.

Day 1,921

I heard we used to tattoo just our skin, barely scraping a few dermal layers if you can believe it. Makes more sense now to tattoo right into the bone - makes it easier to ID someone when you can check their leftovers against the database.

Of course we all wish we'd never have to visit the morgue once a week to try and verify fragmented bodies who don't match any missing persons but at least most were verified by the end of the month. Shame about the rest but at the end of the day we'd all rather live on than risk our lives for the dead.

I found my Aunt Mara's skull in the glowing belly of an Astorfen and you don't see me trying to kill the damned thing to bring her bones back home. There'd be no point in even trying. What chance do I, a 5'5 piece of nothing, stand against an 11' behemoth of a creature who sees me as little more than a light meal?

I'd join Aunt Mara before I could gather the breath to scream for help that'd be too sensible to bother coming to my aid and then we'd be down yet another hand. Slowly dissolving in the translucent belly of an Astorfen doesn't really appeal to me, but then again I've always been a bit fussy.

Day 1,920

From the distance, mostly obscured by mist, it looked like a water tower, one of those brutalist concrete lumps that looked painfully out of place so far into the countryside. The nearest town was over fifty miles away which made it all the stranger to see one in the middle of nowhere and nothing.

The way the road curved around the forest made it look like the tower was still the same size even though we were moving away from it, kind of like the way the moon follows your car. It wasn't until we got to the end of the forest that we noticed that it was actually moving.

It almost seemed to gallop on concrete stands that were surprisingly graceful given their blockish appearance. The mist began to clear the further away from the forest we got and its upper half started coming into view. It was definitely not man-made.

The road shuddered with its every step as it gained ground so rapidly that our only thought was to speed up, to get to a sharp enough corner and run into the forest to hide. We hoped it was more interested in the car than the fragile people inside.

And we were right.

Right beside its leg and desperately trying not to move or breathe too loudly or do anything to draw attention to ourselves but still, we were right. It crushed the car with ease and lowered its torso, smooth concrete splitting into countless jagged shards that pierced and lifted the car in one swift movement.

We were showered with little metallic shards as it quite happily ate our only method of transportation, slowly walking back to its original position. We must have waited for a good hour before we reached for our phones and tried to call a cab.

Unsurprisingly nobody would come out to us but one helpful company told us there was a bus stop a few miles onward and that we'd be able to get a bus safely there. None of them mentioned the thing masquerading as a water tower but I heard the way their breath froze when we told them where we were.

The bus stop was a lot further than they said and the bus was more of a rectangular tank covered in fake foliage but we made it to the next town alive. We even managed to get a car for next to nothing, probably out of pity but it got us away from there.

Now whenever I see a water tower I can't help but wonder if its watching me drive past, hungry and impatient.

Day 1,919

Nobody was quite sure if you were alive - you weren't sure you were alive and yet they insisted on keeping the cardiac monitor on. It hadn't shown anything for weeks but your lungs were moving and your brain was still sending out signals but they weren't normal.

In all honesty you were kind of glad they were keeping you there, it seemed like a better idea than being buried while you were awake, or at least as awake as you can get when you spend most of your time flitting between being inside your body peering through closed eyelids and floating somewhere near the ceiling.

One of the nurses could see you which made you feel better until you realised they were the one keeping you there. Every morning - 0530 hours sharp - they would swing by to do your observations and take several vials of your blood before administering a little something else.

You used to think it was for testing or medicating you in the hopes that you'd snap out of it eventually but when they looked up at you and winked as the needle went in you just knew it wouldn't end well. Or rather it would be your end and nobody would know why.

You'd be another slab of meat in the morgue, in a coffin, in a grave and you'd be watching it all.

Day 1,918

It's hard to say when or where I picked it up or if it's been dormant inside me all my life. All I know for sure is that I went to bed with a stomach ache and started losing a lot of weight over the next few weeks. All the symptoms pointed to a tapeworm but I know it can't possibly be that simple.

I can hear its thoughts like they're my own and it's always so very hungry. I'm used to it now - I barely flinch when it tells me I should gouge someone's eyes out with my keys and pop them into my mouth. Apparently they'd taste just like grapes.

I buy grapes to help ease its eyeball-cravings but that's just a fraction of its overall appetite. More often than not the things it asks for involve murdering someone or several someones and eating regular food only shuts it up for an hour or two at most.

All I dream about is taking great bites out of chubby cheeks or carving a juicy slice of thigh or crunching teeth like boiled sweets. Every now and then I'll look at someone and feel a sharp pang of hunger. I'll think how delicious they look and it makes me feel like a monster.

And the thing in my body only cheers me on.

Day 1,917

As long as we're wearing a VR headset, it thinks we're its children. It talks with us in the voice chat and we all play along. We've seen what it does to people who have their human heads on show and nobody wants to end up like them - reddish pulp that still clings to Mother's limbs.

While it thinks we're its children, not just people who happened to be testing a new VR kit around the time that Mother landed, we're safe. When she realises that her kids burnt up in the atmosphere and rain down on us all as a faint drizzle of ash, we'll be doomed.

She's not bad as far as mother's go. She thinks we're playing around when we eat food (I mean we're pretending that we're pretending to eat but that's neither here nor there) and its hilarious that we bathe and sleep and duck behind trees and into empty buildings to pee.

I don't know how long we can survive like this, sooner or later someone's going to get hurt and bleed and she'll see the blood and know we aren't her real children and she'll crush us all. But until then she's our Mother and we're happy to follow her around our new home.

Day 1,916

My reflection showed me in a well-lit room looking a little more tired than I'd like and a little older than I'd ever admit. Worn around the edges as my nan would say, smothering her pores in yet another anti-ageing cream that didn't have any effect other than giving her skin an oil-slick iridescent sheen.

My reflection showed the bathroom around me, yellow-tinged from a lightbulb that should have been changed some three or four years ago. The glass cover was always full of insects that had the uncanny tendency to look like little people from the right angle.

My reflection showed me, or at least a version of me that looked similar enough that I could believe it was me. It seemed to move a fraction quicker, like it knew what I was going to do before I'd even thought to do it. Like I was the one inside the mirror instead.

My reflection showed me in a well-lit room but I never turned the light on.

Day 1,915

They might have been just around the corner from our school but we never went near the bungalows. Some kids would spend every break they could watching strange hands move the curtains so stranger eyes could peer past. They were obsessed with whoever or whatever lived there.

We might have stared, we might have thrown things into their immaculate gardens but we never set foot there. Nothing thrown was worth the risks involved in getting it back. If it went over the threshold it was as good as dead to us.

At least that's what we told each other, making silent promises to never throw anything that was actually valuable to us. That ended when Gavin moved to the area and decided that anyone who bothered with the bungalows was a freak and deserved everything they got.

His out-of-town newness and confidence soon earned him a pack of like-minded boys who made it their day's goal to make us go as close to the bungalows as possible. Step by step they forced us closer and closer to those unnaturally perfect doors that seemed to vibrate on their hinges like they were seconds away from being yanked open.

And then one day one was. Her name was Sara and she'd gotten closer than any of us had before. Close enough that she didn't stand a chance when that grey arm shot out and hauled her inside before she could take a deep enough breath to scream.

The teachers didn't believe we'd be stupid enough to trespass and not one single adult checked the bungalows when they finally reported Sara missing. They're just as scared as we are, maybe even more so. Maybe they know exactly what lives there and what it does.

All we know is that Sara's still alive and becoming less human by the day.

We've seen enough glances of her past the curtains to note how she's changing.

We've found enough desiccated mice on our doorsteps to know they let her leave.

Day 1,914

The dream begins with you and her at the base of an ornate staircase in a house you've only ever seen in blurred photos, taken hastily as the photographer runs for their life. She is talking to you but all you hear is your heartbeat, loud and tremulous and so fast you fear that it'll leap from your throat if you try to reply.

But of course she expects you to reply and grows impatient quicker than you anticipated. Before you can swallow your pulse back down to speak she's already five steps ahead and you're losing her to the darkness that seems to slowly swarm across the lobby.

You find her crouched down at the top of the staircase, desperately motioning for you to duck down and join her as she peers around a heave bookshelf to the hallway beyond. She hears something you don't and she looks utterly terrified, lips trembling as she turns her head towards you.

You strain your ears, desperately trying to hear over the sound of your heartbeat and failing. As you go to peer around the bookshelf she shoves past you and runs back down the stairs to an open door on the left that you somehow know leads to the ballroom

She's always in a ballroom when she dies. You're always at the doorway, frozen in fear and begging yourself to wake up. By now you know better than to rush to her like you usually do, you know you won't wake up until you finally hear something that isn't your heartbeat.

The moist rattle of her last breath pulls you awake no matter where you are in that bloody house.

Day 1,913

I used to hate staying behind while everyone else went out to take samples of the colossal war-mechs to see how fast the alien bacteriophage was consuming and adapting them. We didn't know what they were being altered to become, we still don't.

All I knew was that staying behind to catalogue samples and enter them one-by-one into the system was the absolute bane of my existence and all my existence amounted to at that point. I mean, I knew how dangerous it was to go outside and how easily you could become contaminated and overwhelmed by the phage but at least you died doing something.

That soon changed when someone didn't secure their samples properly and set it free on us all. It tore through the field agents like a hot knife through butter while those of us who'd been exposed to its weakened, microscopic form were pretty much vaccinated against it.

Shame we didn't realise sooner but how could we have known when the phage is a literal alien creation? By the time we were fully aware of our immunity, the others were little less than those tall calcified spires, still weeping pus from their bodies failed attempts to fight back.

And we moved on, forgoing the clunky suits and barely-operational breathing kits in favour of mobile labs and miniature analysers. Our colleagues were the last formerly-human samples we collected before we stopped looking out and started looking in.

After three months of study we concluded that we weren't human either.

Day 1,912

It's been five weeks now and they're still finding fresh bodies out in the fields. The farmland belonged to Burtenshaw who continued to deny having anything to do with all the corpses they kept finding and after a few nights of monitoring him and his family, he was ruled out as suspect.

Still didn't stop the dead from turning up every morning. You could turn your back for a literal second, hear a wet thud and there'd be another one all hacked up and lying there in a pool of their own drying blood like they'd been there all night.

We didn't think to look up until one of the newer officers heard faint laughter coming from somewhere over their head and had the misfortune of discovering exactly what had killed almost thirty-eight people and tossed them into the corn like they were just trash.

If you squinted it looked mostly like a storm cloud and there were plenty of those about, though the weather forecast said we should be having clear skies. If it hadn't been for that one perceptive officer we might never have realised that they weren't clouds and they hadn't been clouds all this time.