Day 2,122

We're all waiting for sunset.

Us in the town square, slowly moving further into the centre as the light fades and them in the buildings, eyes beginning to glow and stomachs waking up. By the almanac we have about forty eight minutes to go until the light's faded enough for both groups to exchange their surroundings.

It's a kinder way of phrasing the manic dash that occurs when the automatic lights flick on in the buildings and the sun's low enough to not hurt their eyes. Of course we'll swipe at each other in passing, them with their teeth and claws and us with knives and whatever guns have the most ammo for now.

Out of our two groups, they're the only ones who know what their enemy looks like despite the fact that they've been hunting us for almost two years now. All we ever manage to see are glimpses of jagged talons and hands with too many fingers and knuckles and teeth. They leave drawings for us to find in the morning but lord only knows if that's what they look like or what they want us to think they look like.

They know us by name now. Not that they're built to speak like us. Not that it stops them from trying, howling rough syllables to the stars until a word begins to form and they catch it, clinging onto it until it becomes enough of a name for them to try and lure us outside into their night.

We're all exhausted from trying to outrun and outsmart and outlive each other and at this point we aren't even living. We're existing because we can't think of anything else to do or any other way to be other than one step ahead, one one foot in front of the other until we're down to one final survivor.

Day 2,121

She wakes up to the stench of fresh tar and prays the deafening silence means they're already dead.

The short distance between her sleeping bag inside the closet and the bedroom window feels entirely too long but even with the planks of wood nailed over the glass, she wouldn't be safe sleeping on the bed itself. Better to stay out of sight and out of mind.

Red light flickered through the gaps between the planks, sending harsh shadows across the room that leapt out at her from the corners of her eyes. Everything felt wrong somehow, like she'd been through this before and it hadn't gone well but she shook it off and rationalised to herself that she'd barely been awake for ten minutes.

The broken shards of mirror she'd assembled into a mobile by the window gave her a chance to check for danger before she'd made it even halfway across the room. So far they showed nothing, giving her the courage to make the final few crouched steps up to the glass to peer out at the newest roadworks.

It was easier to think of them like the old council-planned chaos of the older days. The days her parents looked back on with fondness and exasperation for delayed journeys and inconvenient diversions. She'd been too young to remember then as they were. Both the roads and her parents.

She hadn't seen them for five towns and hoped she wouldn't be seeing them outside, half-buried beneath tarmac with bleeding eyes begging for a merciful death she was too scared to provide. They rarely lasted an hour like that but god was it an awful way to go.

After a silent count to five she finally looked.

Day 2,120

As far as haunted buildings go, victorian school houses are prime material for a million different manifestations. From cruel headmasters to murdered children - every nook and cranny had the potential to give us the content we needed to go viral.

And we did go viral... just not for the reasons we initially hoped for.

The police thought we killed them and had the public convinced too for a fair while. Until it became obvious that there was no physical way for us to have killed them all at the exact same moment, whilst recording ourselves elsewhere and leaving no fingerprints...

Ryan was the first one to go. We lost track of him somewhere between 01:30 and 2:00 and found his hand near the bricked up room that used to be the main nursery. The police would later knock down the wall and find the rest of him neatly dissected and placed into twenty cradles.

Moe was next. He only went to smoke outside and take EMF readings of the playground. He was the first one to be found, skinned and mostly buried in the sandbox. How the police thought we could ever have done something so monstrous so quickly and neatly is beyond me.

Yasmine would have been next if we hadn't rounded the corner in time to see her floating about five feet up with blood pouring from her mouth. We'd clearly interrupted whatever was trying to kill her, probably the same thing that killed Ryan and Moe and we got it on tape.

The tape that was dismissed as tasteless film trickery and not crucial evidence of the most malevolent poltergeist since the Bell Witch herself. We still don't know who or what wanted us dead in there but the local authorities are in the process of knocking the while site down.

It's been about a week and they've already lost five people to "workplace accidents".

Day 2,119

It's hard to remember what having sight was like since the colony took over my body. Eyes weren't really necessary when the swarms could see for me so they ate my eyes and replaced them with solid nest walls to help protect the broodmother who now rests somewhere in my brain.

I feel her moving from time to time, sending sharp jolts of agony through me and disrupting my every function until she settles again. She's been moving a lot recently. I think one of her daughter's must have found her and is slowly eating away at her.

She will consume and replace her maker - the broodmother, just as her mother did before her and her mother before her for as long as the colony has existed within me. One day I'll get used to this upheaval but for now I try to brace myself and keep the damage caused by the seizures to a minimum, to protect the colony... my colony.

Nature is so beautiful.

Day 2,118

It lived in the old farmhouse out by the highway. A quiet little thing with eyes as big as dinner plates and skin as rough as the woodpile that had blocked the door for almost fifty years. People only seemed to know about it as kids, forgetting it as soon as they left the playground in the same instantaneous moment.

This was intentional.

It knew that kids were more likely to come by and try to free it, getting close enough for it to lash out and draw blood for it to feed on. They would tell their friends and draw up little groups of would-be heroes and it would always have a steady supply of food.

An adult would recognise it as a threat and chase it out or worse - dispose of it.

Reaching into their minds just as they're on the cusp of adolescence and removing all memory of its existence was child's play. Overnight all their scars from its teeth and claws became bike accidents and stray animals and all manner of mundane incidents.

And all the ones who had yet to age out of its diet would rally against it and it would feast.

Humans have always been cyclical beings. From waking in the morning and sleeping at night to bringing back fashions from forty years ago to making the same mistakes as our parents. No matter how far we go, we will always end up right back where we started.

For some this means yelling in their father's voice.

For others it means hunting the thing that lives in the woodhouse.

Day 2,117

Sometimes I find myself staring out of my bedroom window at the brick wall of the house next door while the lights flicker and the air gradually fills with the sounds of teeth chattering and a thousand voices mumbling half-garbled words. It's my house - it's been studying humans since the day it was built and now it's trying to speak to me.

It only seems to want to when nobody else is around, just me and the walls. For the most part the voices come from just below the windows but occasionally they'll follow me around the place. I have yet to make out a single word but I know sooner or later it'll finally get the hang of it.

Until then I'll wait and listen to it vocalising and screaming, hoping and dreading what its first word will be.

Day 2,116

We all remember burying Muddlehaven Avenue. We all knew someone who'd been left alive down there when the council finally admitted they couldn't find the source of the rot and declared the whole street a biohazard. Burying it - people and all - was a last resort we never thought we'd have to take.

It hasn't stopped the rot at all, merely given us more time to escape. Not that we want to, not when we can hear them all down there begging to be let out. We shouldn't be able to hear them through the mile and a half of concrete but somehow they sound like they're inches away from our ears.

Nan reckons they're ghosts now and we're just hearing their last few moments again and again and again like a broken record player. I know she's been out there trying to dig them out like countless nameless others and for all I know they've managed it.

They mean well - they only want to see their lost ones again and I can hardly blame them. If I was a braver man I'd go out there and join them, go out there and dig my lover out but I find myself sitting down and writing about it instead. I find myself standing at the back door, looking out at barbed wire and cracked concrete knowing that they might be alive down there.

I find myself with a clean shovel in hand, crying in my room and gong nowhere.

Day 2,115

You are awake and they already know.

It didn't matter that you were quiet, that you had run for hours trying to lose them in a maze of streets and alleys, that you had set up countless wards to detect and deter them. They were well aware of it all and humoured your struggles with the gentle exasperation of a weary parent.

This didn't mean that your death would be any less brutal than all the others before you. You weren't special in the slightest, just another human in a long list of humans they had killed before and would kill again and again and again until there are none left.

Then, and only then, they'll all move on.

For now though, there are plenty of people left alive and a set order for them to be killed in, unfathomable and seemingly random as it may be. Now is your turn, as it has been for the past five months, and you are running out of time, energy and places to hide.

You are awake and they already know.

Day 2,114

They say a soul can only rest when it's still so we try to bury as many of our dead as possible. Doesn't really matter if the ground is consecrated or not - a simple prayer works in a pinch but far as I know most of the dead tend to slip away pretty quickly as soon as the first spade of dirt hits bare skin.

Of course the general population want their deceased loved ones to have some kind of ceremony, even though the longer you stay outside the more likely you are to get attacked by the former people unfortunate enough to have been caught up in the initial blast.

Poor fellas are all sorts of deadly without even realising it. They set off radiation detectors nine blocks away and they don't even realise it half the time. They just want to go home, even if it means all their friends and neighbours slowly succumb to the intense radiation they're outputting and die horrifically slow deaths.

As for me, I'm glad to say I never had anyone to care about before this all started and I don't have anyone now. Life's just gotten busier and a little more dangerous but overall Tuesdays are still Tuesdays and the dead still need to be buried to stop their souls from bothering the rest of us.

Day 2,113

When they turned the old theatre into a pub they knew they'd be dealing with a few alleged ghosts, maybe a haunting or two but nothing prepared them for the reality of trying to work with the restless dead. The locals called them Haints and made sure to partake in a couple of superstitious rituals before entering or exiting the buildings just in case a Haint or two took a shine to them.

The first one the new owners found out about was Cesspit Cecil, aptly named for the putrid stench that's followed him every since he drunkenly fell into a cesspit round the back of the theatre. At least that's the current theory, with no record of him in any of the old staff lodgers and no newspaper articles to confirm his death they just went by what seemed right.

He liked trying to pull people backstage but he rarely managed to do much more than ruffle hair or untuck a shirt or two. Most folk know to take a seat whenever they smell him coming so nobody really knows what he'd do if he ever actually managed to get someone backstage and nobody wants to find out.

Aside from him there's also a lovely couple who can be seen in the hallway outside the upstairs staffroom. They hold hands, gaze deep into each others eyes and seem so sweet until someone tells you that he slit her throat and then his own because he got conscripted and couldn't stand to be apart from her.

They're one of the few Haints that have enough of themselves left to hold a conversation. That's how they found out that it was all her idea and they're actually quite happy to be ghosts together. As far as Haints go they're probably the nicest ones you'll ever meet.

Anyone's a saint compared to the grey man who guards the balcony late at night. He's the reason why the pub has to close between nine and eleven PM. They tried just closing off the balcony seat during that time but he started throwing things at the patrons below - leftover napkins, empty glasses and even knives from the storage rooms.

He made it very clear that those two hours are his and his alone. None of the other Haints seem to be around when he is, all just as scared as the rest of us when the staff have to herd everybody out into the street or garden area and pray that they aren't drunk enough to wander back in and face him.

Day 2,112

When I was a kid my parents used to freak out whenever the dog barked after dark. I always thought they didn't want to get into trouble with the neighbours by causing a ruckus at odd hours but when I mentioned it to them last week they looked shocked.

They called me daft and said that of all people I should remember what had gone on the clearest. I was the one who lost all my friends to the shapeless death that hid in the night sky. I was the one who saw them all die and had to live with that guilt.

Funny thing is I don't really remember it like that at all.

I know the night they mean, where we were at a school sleepover for our entire year group. Where I woke up in an empty room full of writhing sleeping bags and several police officers whispering and frantically gesturing at me from the fire escape doors.

I remember tiptoeing around everyone and I remember them making weird crunchy noises like they were all eating ice cubes or popping candy. I remember that there was a weird smell in the air, the same smell you get in the butcher's shop but ten times stronger.

Five hours after I'd crept outside, been wrapped up in a thick blanket and questioned, I was let go and my parents were given the card for a child psychiatrist. I never understood why they wanted me to go - I hadn't seen anything and at that point I was too young to understand where everyone had gone.

Or rather, that they were being eaten alive and I'd only survived by being so heavily asleep that the shapeless death thought I was already dead. It liked them alive enough to scream. Mum always said I slept like a corpse but she never said it again after that day.

We moved out of the area soon after, not wanting to stay where so many grieving parents think I should have died instead of their own child. Not that I heard about this until I went back there years later and faced absolute hatred from so many strangers whose survivor's guilt far outweighed my own.

The shapeless death is still around there, still picking people off whenever it fancies but it's never taken so many as it did that night. I guess it's had its main meal and is just snacking now. Cruel as it sounds to say that, crueller still for them blaming all those deaths on me and not the monster that killed themto begin with.

Day 2,111

It doesn't matter where I go or where I end the day, I'll always wake up in the bunker.

I've tried hitchhiking to other states, flying overseas and even sailing out as far as I can until there's nothing around me but sea and sky and it doesn't matter. I pass out when the sun sets and wake up right where I started - handcuffed to a leaking pipe in a bunker nobody even knows about.

Nobody but me and my best friend. The same best friend who knocked me out and cuffed me in the first place and I don't even know where she went but if I ever see her again I... don't even know what I'll do. I've been here for a fair while now and most days she's the last thing on my mind before I pass out and the first spark of rage when I wake up.

For me it's been five months of spending every day alternating between trying to break the cycle and giving up. I'm either burning my way through money that resets the next day like nothing happened or I'm waiting to die alone in a concrete box that's too isolated for anyone to hear me scream.

My family don't know that something's wrong and even if I manage to get home and tell them I know everything will reset the next day so sometimes I just pretend it's all fine so we can have one nice day before I have to go back there.

One day she'll come back and fix this mess but until then I'll keep running and waiting.

I'v got nothing else to do.

Day 2,110

When it first found her it wore her like a third sister's hand-me-downs - too loose in some places, too tight in others and overall entirely unflattering. Unfortunately flattery was the last thing on its mind, draining her spinal fluid to make way for its own developing body took priority.

Within a year it wore her like a sixteen year old wears a suit to prom - ill-fitting enough to notice but so bad that anyone would tell them to their face. Maybe they'll make snide remarks after the photos are printed in the school's monthly newspaper but they'll forget about it soon enough.

Within five years it wore her like well-loved slippers - frayed around the edges, truly past their prime but too comfortable t throw away for a fresh set. That would be its downfall. While the rest of its kind went through hosts like sunscreen in summer,it settled further inside, spreading out and draining her away to a bruised shell.

At ten years it had been with her for longer than any of its kind thought possible. Of course she was only skin at that point, not even her eyes or teeth remained and it couldn't possibly be seen by other humans but it no longer cared for the rest of humanity or even finding another host in order to survive.

It had been the-corpse-formerly-known-as-Deborah for ten years and it wanted to be nobody else.

Day 2,109

The phone died with a sharp electrical crack that sent a jolt through his arm and sent the phone hurtling down several flights of concrete stairs. He raced after it, trying to shake some semblance of feeling back into his arm and hoping it hadn't fallen past the lowest floor that was sealed off for all but maintenance.

As luck, both good and bad, would have it the phone had fallen past the lowest floor but just within eyesight. The normally locked wire fence door was wide open. He wanted to be suspicious but he wanted to get his phone and head back even more.

Unseen eyes locked onto him as soon as his foot crossed the threshold and the shadows began to giggle. Not that he noticed,not that he heard anything more than his own slightly faster than normal breath and not that he saw more than his phone edging into arm's reach.

He held his breath as he leant forward to grab it, the world seeming to hold its breath as well until he brought the screen up to his face, expecting to see it cracked and broken. Surprisingly it was perfectly fine, whole and undamaged and something moved just behind him.

As he tilted the screen to see behind him, thousands of faces stared back.

Day 2,108

After we left the tunnel the ground on either side of the road seemed to fall away, leaving nothing but clouds and distant mountains that looked close enough to touch. With my binoculars I could make out other cars on those far away roads, all being chased like us.

Their pursuers were just as ungodly as ours but in their own unique way, trading open sores and mouths teeming with maggots for jagged bark-like skin and harmonious fungal parasites where eyes should be. We seemed to be the only ones following a map, the only ones with binoculars - the only ones even remotely prepared to spend the rest of our days running away.

After a couple of hours of heading steadily higher, taking turns that only seemed to get sharper and almost turn back on ourselves, we managed to put enough distance between us and our pursuer to swap over. I was never allowed to drive, too good at keeping my eye open they said. Lack of depth perception and mountain roads are not good friends.

Still I was usually the one who noticed. From finding streams of fresh water to supply caches to a change in road texture - the others were too busy sleeping, driving or hovering in between to make a note of anything that wasn't directly in front or behind us.

I was the one who saw that the tarmac had given away to compressed dirt to gravestones. We weren't the first to be here but we figured we might be the last. Even managed to find the time to carve our own names on blank squares, just like the countless others before us.

For the first time in a long time, we were on the right track.

Day 2,107

For as long as I can remember, there have never been any people in my dreams. No animals, no voices other than mine echoing around in vast empty rooms, no distant figures running towards or away from me - there's only ever me. Just me.

My dreams were always empty... until they weren't.

I was back in one of the labyrinthine offices I sometimes dream about, all those millions of tiny cubicles with one identical plant in the corner, a dusty CRT monitor and a cup of lukewarm coffee that's always a little too close to the edge of the table.

Usually I wander around, drinking the coffee and trying to guess the passwords to the computers until I wake up. I was well into my routine when someone's voice rang out a sharp and worried sounding "Hello, who's there? Where are you?"

I didn't want to answer but he found me before I could hide.

He looked exhausted, scruffy and relieved. Said he hadn't seen another person for years and he'd given up hope until he saw the empty cups of coffee and dust-free screens. I never thought I was leaving a trail but he'd still managed to follow me.

Before I woke up I tried to ask his name, what came out instead was a garbled string of noise. He nodded and said that they don't let you get personal in this kind of space. We promised we'd try to find a way out together, or to at least find each other again but I haven't had that dream since.

It does make me wonder who else shares these empty dreams, if they're dreams at all.

Day 2,106

Smoke fills the room, stinging her eyes and making her cough til her lungs ache. Somewhere further inside the house, a baby cries but she won't go to it. Not after spending the last few hours barricading the nursery door and starting the fires.

It must have escaped from there somehow, possibly through the vent she couldn't reach beneath the cot. It seemed safer to go for the major exits and hope it was too big to fit anywhere else. Yet again she'd made an assumption and been proven wrong as she heard tiny fists beating against the door behind her

Day 2,105

Just when they thought they'd reached the bottom of the facility they found another stairwell, another door, another series of rooms or vast chamber full of broken vats large enough to hold an elephant. There was no official record of this place, no clues as to what had been studied or made, only yet more floors and yet more questions raised.

They knew one thing for certain - they were not alone. Something had been following them from within the vast network of vents since the first room. In fact it had knocked their prop away and let the door slam shut behind them, locking them in with nowhere to go but down.

Maybe it wanted them to find something right at the very depths of the facility. Maybe it wanted to lure them into its nest and kill them. Maybe it was just as curious and worried about them as they were about it. Nothing in any of the rooms so far had given them any answers.

For all they knew there was no end to the facility, no final chamber where everything would be explained and no way back outside. Turning back was as hopeless as taking the next stairwell they would inevitably find at the end of this latest room whose windows looked out onto pitch black water.

Strange shapes swam in the distance, rushing towards them whenever they shone their torches on the glass. Soon enough the windows were swarming with claws, teeth and incredibly long hair all battling to get to the light. As the first few cracks started to appear they ran for the next set of stairs, leaving the sound of breaking glass and wet, heaving gasps behind them.

The end was still not in sight.

Day 2,104

I don't know how my parents found that theme park but going there was the single worst decision of our lives. We haven't been able to find it since, no matter how many times we retrace our route there, how many hours we search the woods or how many forums we post on begging for any information people have on that place.

It's like it never existed but know it did - it took my little sister.

We were on one of those teacup rides where you control how fast it spins you, just me and her and one of the park mascots. There was one in every ride and we always seemed to sit in the same cart or row as one which we just thought was a weird coincidence.

She was there with me, begging for us to go faster and faster and then gloved hands yanked her away. I couldn't stop the ride, couldn't jump after her, couldn't do anything more than scream and try to fight against the mascot that grabbed my hands as soon as she was taken.

When the ride eventually stopped the mascot let go and went back to looking like a statue, just like they all did while I ran to find our parents. At first they didn't believe me but after a while of waking through the ride and nearby crowd looking for her, they began to panic too.

No matter how many times announcements were made on the tannoy, no matter how many other families we roped into helping us look we never found so much as a trace of her. When we went back the next day all we saw was a tarmac square where the car park had been and nothing else but the dense forest.

Day 2,103

The drowned forest wasn't somewhere you went to willingly, it was somewhere you woke up in when you had nowhere else to go. A place that looked familiar enough for you to navigate around but unfamiliar enough that you weren't able to find the way back out.

Along the way you'd meet other lost travellers who'd regard you with deep suspicion and after a while you'd do the same to them. Anyone and everyone could be an illusion hiding something much, much worse and the ways of knowing who was an actual human were so finicky and varied that it was easier and simpler to play like they were all out for your blood.

Occasionally you'd smell the sea or see a burnt out campsite full of broken, still smouldering tents. Both were signs that you were somehow further from the exit than ever before. In fact no matter which direction you headed, if you had no place in mind you'd only wind up deeper under the waves, breathing water like air and hoping the strange shadows above you were just boats.

Day 2,102

We finally had a summer dry enough to show the outlines of an old Roman fort in the field behind our school. The board thought that digging it up would give enough publicity to fund the school for years to come but they never stopped to consider exactly what they'd uncover.

Initial ground scans showed that there might be a chamber or two sealed shut and possibly perfectly preserved. That was their focus when the excavations began while we all crowded at the fences and watched them ignore carved warnings and break through ancient concrete.

At first only one person went down, just to have a quick peek. One soon turned to three and ten and soon the site was all but empty. Sooner still, it went silent and when we came back after classes had ended we realised that they'd been down there for well over three hours.

It was hard to see in the summer's harsh light but all the blood pouring out of the entryway left a pretty clear message that something had been disturbed and it was not happy. Over the next few days students would go missing and blood would continue to pour up the slope and onto the ground.

In the end it was easier for them to close the whole school down and relocate us all than try to bury it again.

Day 2,101

My Jamie always comes back to me, no matter how many times I kill him I know I'll open the front door the next morning and he'll be waiting there with a bunch of flowers and that sad, apologetic smile. I didn't used to mind it at all but now I'm old and tired and he's the same young man he's been for forty seven years.

The first time he died I was a wreck for months - utterly inconsolable and now I'd give anything for him to rest and stay at rest. I haven't been able to have a life since he started coming back from the dead. All I think about is how to give him a peaceful and eternal sleep and my own life never got to amount to anything.

I'll be retiring soon which means I'll be able to devote the rest of my life to ending his. Maybe if I die then he'll have no reason to come back but at this point I don't want to even think about spending an afterlife with him too. I can't even bring myself to feel angry any more.

I'm just so very tired.

Day 2,100

When the fog rolled in and the otherwise catatonic forests filled with unearthly screeching it was easy to see why the road around the mountain kept being abandoned. Anyone not inside a heavily fortified building might as well leap off into the clouds - they'd face a kinder death than the forest would provide.

Their bodies were never properly recovered, there were always pieces missing. Sometimes we'd find a new piece - a hand or their eyes - hanging from one of the trees near the end of the road or pinned to our doors with quills as long as our legs.

It used to be thought that there were prehistoric porcupines in the forests, as territorial as they were colossal and the roadworks had disturbed their otherwise isolated home. That all changed when one of the site cameras managed to record an attack.

To an outsider it might have been odd to install thermal cameras where the only people around were construction workers and where the wildlife was presumed to be theoretic only but it ended up being the key piece of evidence that got us our secure bunkers.

Now whenever the fog rolls in we can shut everything down and live to see another day instead of hoping they'd take someone else - anyone else but you. We might even live long enough to see what's on the other side of the fog, if there's anything at all.

Day 2,099

I remember when I used to work in my uncle's recycling plant which was officially just an environmentally beneficial hobby that he definitely didn't make any money from, especially not cash-in-hand from people who never told us their real names.

I started as a volunteer for the standard 2 weeks of work experience that my school demanded we do every year. At first it was pretty normal, just watching my uncle moving big piles of miscellaneous bags through a couple of different sorting machines and helping him move the final bags into the back of a lorry owned by a friend of his.

Everything changed when we were about halfway through shredding several huge bags of cans and the sound of metal-grinding-on-metal turned wet and... pulpy. Everything that came out was suddenly red and stank to high heavens like iron and puke.

My uncle told me to go take my lunch even though it was barely ten in the morning. I made out like I was eager to rush away but I kept close enough to hear him calling someone and yelling at them that they promised to not do this again. That he wasn't their butcher and that this one had better been dead first.

He told them to send in their cleaners, hung up and spun around so abruptly I didn't have time to duck back down. From then on he made me an official employee, said that the guy's blood was on both our hands and paid me well enough to not squeal when it happened again and again and again.

I've lost count of how many shady men have left us wriggling black bags and told us their clean-up crew would be there in an hour. My uncle hated it as much as I did but for very different reasons - I hated that we were killing people and couldn't say anything without incriminating ourselves... he hated it for the smell.

Day 2,098

When we cut the tree down we found that it was stuffed full of corpses. Old ones at that. Judging by their clothing people had been peeling the bark back and placing their dead inside for the last five hundred years and the most recent one's obituary was in the papers only last year.

We knew it was one of the oldest trees in the country, possibly the oldest, but there'd never been any record of this tradition in the whole damned world. At least it explained why the tree was dying - its core was literally rotting away and all the corpses were so tightly packed in that we couldn't even separate the oldest ones.

So we left them encased in that dense, red amber and buried them in their cluster. Funniest thing was that the newer bodies all had graves and there were bones in their graves. Not their bones of course but human bones dressed in their clothes nonetheless.

Since our unpleasant discovery all the other "oldest trees" have been placed under careful investigation and 24 hour watches. Ours never showed any signs of the bark being peeled away, there was never any smell and yet it was full to the brim with bodies.

There's no telling how many other trees are like this.

Day 2,097

Inside the streetlight's orange-tinted circle we see each other - gaunt and exhausted but alive.

Outside of the light we know the bodies are beginning to wake up and it'll only be a matter of time before they spot us. You know when you've been spotted - they scream, well they try to. I imagine it must be quite hard to make any sound when your vocal chords are so decayed.

They still manage to let out this guttural hissing cry that draws all the others in to surround our little pack of survivors. We've taken to cutting their throats during the day,when they're all back in their deathlike stasis and we're safe to roam about well-lit areas.

We found they don't seem to sleep at all if it's dark enough.

Day 2,096

Whatever it is, I can only see it when I'm not wearing my glasses. It's definitely grey and its limbs change length seemingly at will but other than that I have no idea if it has eyes or a mouth or anything resembling a face at all. I just know that it's grey and it knows I can see it.

It follows me around all day, slinking around mine and my coworker's legs like some kind of monstrous cat that only I can see. I have asked other people with glasses if they see anything odd without the but they all just joke about seeing blurry people and walking into everything.

Either they're telling the truth and I'm the only one who can see it or they're lying and this is bigger than I ever thought it could be. For all I know these things have been around for centuries and I'm the last to know. Maybe talking about them is what turns them from nuisance to nightmare.

Day 2,095

When the glacier retreated we were too busy to notice what it had left behind barely buried beneath the till. Years later geologists and glaciologists would wonder why there were gaping holes in the ground and what could have caused them.

Coincidentally all nearby settlements relocated several dozen miles away from the glacial anomalies, all in the same silent agreement that they wouldn't talk about what they'd seen. They wouldn't have been believed without proof and nobody was willing to go back there long enough to get any.

Eventually, after a handful of geologists vanished, the area would be declared to be resting on unstable ground and all missing persons would be deemed lost. It wasn't that they were lost, more that their bodies were in such a precarious place that they might as well be lost.

And that's saying nothing of the drag marks leading into the holes, the sparse bones that were freshly picked clean a few metres within and the overwhelming stench of blood lingering around the whole area.  If there were any survivors they were somewhere deep beneath the ground, deep in a vast warren that predates anything mankind has ever done.

And that's where they'll stay, more cost effective to declare them dead than start a manhunt.

Whatever was sighted around the anomalies didn't wander far enough to be anyone else's problem anyway.

Day 2,094

We call them Fragments, glitched out remnants of dead users whose accounts weren't close down properly. They're like a form of VR ghost, or the closest we'll get to a ghost that we can prove exists. You never used to see them as often as you do now but everything's gone a bit weird since the founder died a couple of months back.

It's like all the Fragments had been contained somewhere and now the floodgates are open and they're free to wander about in whatever loop they were in before they were originally reported. There's a absolute heap of controversy about the lack of anything being done about them now, mostly from people who're seeing loved ones doing whatever they did most in the VR site.

For some it's watching a video over and over and over again, for others its porn. It's bad enough to lose someone who means the world to you but to see them pop up on a list of "Top 10 X Rated Fragments" is a whole other kind of awful.

One thing most people haven't seemed to realise just yet is that the Fragments aren't stuck in place. they can relocate their looping to wherever their binary little minds want to. Our homes are packed to the gills with tech and more connected to the web than ever before, there's so many places for a Fragment to appear and so much chaos they can cause.

My brother's loop was the moment he broke a world record for speed-racing his favourite game. I'd find him in his favourite VR bar celebrating and throwing fake booze everywhere. Last night I found him launching cutlery out of the dishwasher and nearly got knifed.

I don't know if he'll be there tonight but I've unplugged everything just in case.