Day 2,153

Don't speak, hold your breath, close whichever eye faces the pit and it won't follow you back home. At least, we hoped it wouldn't. Lord knows how many we knew kept these rules religiously and were still seen walking down into the pit, hand-in-hand with the creature masquerading as the devil himself.

Maybe our neighbours are liars who only follow the rituals when children are present to set a good example.

Maybe they miss one of the steps and that's all it takes to bring the devil down upon them.

Maybe the little rituals are just to placate us while it takes its time picking the next victim.

I've never said this out loud or even dared to write it down until today. On the drive back from school I accidentally made eye contact with it while we were driving past the pit and I don't know when it'll be coming for me but it will come.

Day 2,152

The fields on either side were deceptively empty of anything that would warrant such a sturdy iron gate and barbed-wire tipped fence running out as far as the eye could see. The only warning signs they'd seen on their hike were bright yellow triangles with a single eye in the centre, a red light below that was on for some of the signs they passed and no further explanation.

They figured it meant to be extra cautious in those areas, maybe bears or mountain lions were well known to that particular trail and less-than friendly to hikers. Whenever they encountered one of the lit-up signs they'd make sure to stop and browse their surroundings, not that they ever saw anything or thought that anything saw them.

When they reached the gate however, the air began to feel strange and they felt far more exposed out in the field than they had at any point in the woods. As they turned back they caught sight of something impossibly large sliding between the trees and knew no snake in the world could be that size.

It felt like they'd been holding their breath and crouching by the gate for hours by the time it finished passing by and they felt brave enough to rush back to civilisation. Every sign they passed was lit up bright red, flashing at them as they ran without caring to stop until they were back at the main nature centre, collapsing in front of a concerned employee whose pocket radio was going haywire.

After explaining what they saw they were dragged into the building and told to hide in the cupboards beneath the exhibitions while the shutters were locked and the door quietly closed. They heard other people climbing into cupboards and more doors closing and then... not quite silence.

Not quite silence in a wood context should mean faint birdsong, wind through the trees and maybe a river nearby but instead they heard a slow, deliberate, dragging movement like a sack full of gravel over rocks and dirt that was trying to be quieter than it was capable of.

The door was pushed open and the unbearably intense scent of wet earth and bone marrow filled the room. The image of a bright green eye intruded in their minds, darting left and right as memories of their childhood were pulled and pushed until there wasn't a corner of their minds it hadn't seen.

As suddenly as it came it left, taking priceless memories with it and leaving them feeling a little emptier.

Day 2,151

The phonograph in father's office keeps playing by itself. None of the songs sound like any of the cylinders he has on display - they barely sound like music at all and he refuses to believe me when I tell him that the names it says between all the strange instruments and guttural intonations are always found dead in the morning.

It seems to be picking them at random, I've certainly found no correlation myself save for the fact that they live in the nearby villages. The thought occurs to me that the connecting factor might be our manor or perhaps they've done business with father at some point in their lives but I can hardly ask him about this without implicating him as the source for their deaths.

I can only listen to it every night and hope it never says my name.

Day 2,150

When I was a kid we lived on the eighth floor in a series of apartment complexes and my window faced out onto one of the half-done floors on the new build. I'd spend hours after school watching them slowly turn concrete and metal into a home but as soon as the sun started to set I'd close my curtains and hide under the blankets til morning like I'd be safer that way.

Truth be told I just didn't want to think about the ghosts in those walls seeing me again or watching those same workers make more ghosts to protect the building. A part of me knew they'd done the same thing to our apartment too - buried someone half-dead in the walls and drowned them in concrete. There wasn't any other explanation for the knocking games I'd play with walls that had nothing on the other side but the sky.

I only saw them wandering about on the unfinished floors for some reason. It was like having people settled there made the ghosts settle too - gave them distractions enough to stop them from attacking the workers like they do on the unfinished floors.

Beneath all the fresh carpeting is blood-stained concrete, trails of handprints being dragged into the same walls they buried someone alive in. The ghosts never wanted for company, not when they figured out that not everyone could see them.

Day 2,149

The structure stood some fifty feet tall, made out of fairly decayed wood that struggled to contain the creature using it as a hiding place. There was an eye staring out at him in every window, bulbous and pressed so tightly against broken glass panes it made him wince just to look back at the poor thing.

There was no telling just how long it had been in there for but it was quite apparent that it was well and truly trapped. No doubt it would die unless he found a way to finish breaking the structure and free it for better or worse. Probably for worse, if the gentle revving of its stomach and grinding of unseen teeth were anything to go by.

Using heavy tools was out of the question when the thing inside might be all the more fragile for its skin not being properly exposed to the elements. It may be a half-starved-man-eating monster but they were rare enough to be considered endangered rather than endangering and leaving it to die may have been safe but it wasn't right.

So, crowbar in hand and fives hours of daylight left, he set about freeing it.

Day 2,148

The underground was flooded as soon as we found out they'd escaped the trains. The only good thing about an overly paranoid government is that they will have thought of a plan for any and every scenario, no matter how unlikely.

A group of people who'd gone into the underground during the blitz and become lost in a network of tunnels so vast we're still mapping them twelve years later is a highly unlikely scenario. The fact that these people only decided to surface because they were fleeing from leech-like humanoid creatures was something they never factored for.

As with all things though, we adapt. Whether that's to a world without light, a world where we're at the bottom of the food chain or a world we're trying to claw back from leech-like humanoid creatures who are far more intelligent than we ever gave them credit for - we adapt and overcome.

Trapping them on a closed circuit delayed the inevitable and allowed us a chance to study them remotely, occasionally separating a fairly empty carriage and dissecting whatever we found inside. Turns out that under all the mucus, jagged teeth and segmented flesh they're basically people.

Day 2,147

I met a serial killer at the bus stop when I was six and the only reason I didn't end up like the thirty other victims was because my hairband was green. Something as trivial as the colour of a small piece of rubber saved my life and made me realise that every tiny decision we make will impact our chances of coming home safe and sound.

All the other little girls he killed were eventually found with yellow hairbands to match their school dresses. It always struck me as odd that all the schools in our area had the same colour scheme as dictated by the governor's board.

When the killer was eventually revealed to be on said board, nobody was surprised. We'd all been narrowing down the options in our minds for months before the police even put two-and-two together. Personally I didn't pick the one they eventually blamed - I assumed the whole board was in on the killing and was working together.

It made more sense than a lone monster and when the killings got worse after the arrest I knew it was out of spite rather than aesthetics. When they changed the type of girl they wanted to kill I began dressing more masculine to slip under their radar.

I lost five friends before the entire board was taken in and the killings stopped altogether.

Even now I can't bring myself to wear a dress or grow my hair out.

How can I when that's what got them all killed?

Day 2,146

The tide was frozen and something was singing from beneath the still waves. It wasn't human - nothing that size could be human, though all we saw for a good while was a dark, vaguely scaled shape some ninety feet in length without accounting for the great tail that drifted down, settled somewhere on the ocean floor.

We didn't know if the creature had frozen the tides or if the frozen tides had made it surface, all we knew was that something in the back of our minds desperately wanted us to walk towards it. As crowded as the beach was, it was utterly silent save for the song drifting around us in the wind.

Nobody dared to move.

Nobody except a small child who made a break for the motionless waves and started to swim towards the source of the song. They almost made it but they grew tired and started to drown. Nobody - not even their family - came forward to help. We were all stuck in place and watching in horror and shame as the child gradually sunk.

As soon as they were fully under the singing stopped, the creature floated back to whatever depths it came from and the sound of waves breaking against sand filled the air. The sound of a mother weeping followed shortly after and the spell was broken.

Day 2,145

They only wander the moors in winter, when the snow piles too high for us to leave our homes and the world outside becomes theirs until the next thaw. They're hard to spot if you don't know what to look for but by now we're seasoned veterans and we won't lose anyone this year.

Blood clear as their skin, clear as fresh glass til they feed. You can tell exactly how hungry they are by what traces of blood and meat are still running through them, colouring them pink and red against a sea of pure white snow. As the old saying goes, red sky at night and all that.

They don't make any sound when they hunt, half-crouched-half-buried beneath the snow when the sun's at its peak and all you can see for miles is blinding white with clumps of grass and heather further distorting the trails they leave behind as they make their way towards you.

It's not as simple as avoiding going outside, not when they figured out how to open doors five years ago. Our best strategy at the moment is setting increasingly complex puzzles up around our homes and placing whatever livestock we can spare in the way.

If they're fed enough they go back over the moors, back to wherever they hide when spring comes.

Day 2,144

They flew within the toxic rain, feathers smoking from the intensely acidic fallout as their thousand eyes scanned the horizon for anything moving. We thought they were angels sent to save us from an environmental apocalypse of our own doing until they spotted us and made it their life's mission to wipe us all out.

Now we've come to know them as parasites for a much greater predator. The one that reaches into your mind and plucks at your thoughts like a harp, playing you right into the hands of the angels and while they feed on your flesh it devours your mind.

They used to leave the bones behind but since then they've taken to decorating themselves with our remnants. Our skulls are their helmets, our rib cages are their armour and our teeth are sewn into gloves, acting like rudimentary knuckle dusters.

Day 2,143

The only light for miles around was his cheap headlamp that barely dented the murky water, not showing what was in front of him until he was inches away from the ruins of the old village, broken bones or the hint of teeth and scales that had been stalking him since he lost track of the rope that led back to the relative safety of their boat.

He'd taken to guessing what it was as he tried not to panic and waste whatever air he had left. Too big to be a pike... alligator's aren't native to the country but could have escaped from a zoo somewhere nearby... not the right size or shape for a water snake... He had very few guesses left.

Over what felt like hours, but in reality was more like twenty minutes, he'd gone from steady and even swimming to jerky kicks that didn't seem to propel him anywhere. It was like he was stuck but he couldn't feel that he was caught on anything and couldn't see any obstacles around him, only broken walls and small fish hiding amongst the bones.

It must have been the fourth or fifth attempt to resurface, every other time somehow leading him to the floor instead. This time, however, he was successful and for a few blissful minutes his head was above the water, he could see the boat in the far distance and he took off his mask to yell to the others when

Pain.

Sharp. Searing. Rows upon rows of jagged teeth closing around his calf and dragging him back down with so little warning he was barely able to put his mask back on. The initial shock had slowed his reactions and the mask was too full of water to get a proper seal.

He started to choke as the ruins of the village rose to meet him and scales clouded his vision.

Day 2,142

The riverbed is bone dry and people are being drowned by something that swims in the shadows.

It was thought to be a human at first, a serial killer drowning the victims elsewhere and leaving their bodies in the dust and fishbones. This, of course, was accepted for a good while as anything that makes sense in the face of the impossible often is.

It was accepted for so long that profiles of the assumed killer were made, descriptions of suspicious individuals were generously provided by a nervous population and it was all thrown aside when a murder was witnessed in broad daylight by a large crowd and news crew.

There was nothing and no-one who could dispute what they saw, what they recorded. It was clear as the water that hadn't run for over thirty years that the only humans involved were the unfortunate score who'd gotten too close at just the right moment and been dragged to their deaths.

Seeing someone drown in air is a sight you never forget. Hearing water fill their lungs while they roll about in dirt and stones is so contradictory that the brain just doesn't comprehend what's being seen and decides it must be a joke somehow.

The last thing they heard was our laughter.

Day 2,141

You were in the place of lost things.

You were not a lost thing though.

Not then.

You walked through miles and miles of shelves stuffed to bursting, collapsing under their own weight like the beached whales you passed by on your way to the next place. You were always heading to the next place as told you to by whatever she images posted next.

Where she went, you followed.

Through the drone's forest, creeping beneath the barely slumbering hive mothers and pacifying the weeping brood with droplets of your blood. You were there some months ago but their clickwhispers still seemed to follow you. Perhaps you'd gained some loyalty there.

Beneath the thirty-seven bridges of the marshlands, using synthetic skin grafts as replacement filters when the stagnant air clogged the industrial-strength ones in your gas mask. Spores from the unhatched marshbird eggs stuck to your clothes like organic daggers, itching to sink into the thinnest skin on your body.

Wading through the dead men's lake, watching their not-so-dead corpses float beside you, following you as you were following her with perhaps a touch more hunger in their eyes and a touch less loneliness in their hearts. Sometimes they'd reach out to you, physically and verbally and it took all your strength to not return their embrace.

Now you were in the place of lost things. Where all the world's back pocket items seemed to fall. She was here yesterday and judging by the size of the place she might be here still, looking for a lost thing of hers like you were looking for her, lost thing that you were becoming and that she might already be.

Day 2,140

If she hadn't been the one to kill him, someone else would have and they wouldn't have been so kind about it. Hard as it was to do, it was harder still to pry the car keys from his broken hands - she had to cut off a few fingers in the end. She didn't shake at all when she was beating him to death but now he was truly gone and past the point of return, she found herself starting to break.

There was no time for it, she said to herself, desperately trying to stave off panic and grief and barely succeeding. The image of his broken face was stuck behind her eyelids and every blink threatened to spill all her tears. She wiped harshly at her eyes, stumbling out of the house and into the harsh mid-morning sun.

The car was right where he'd parked it last night, haphazardly against the curb. She made a break for it, praying that everybody else was too preoccupied with their own chaos to notice her escape. Her hands shook so much she nearly dropped the keys straight into the gutter but eventually she managed to unlock the door and fasten her seatbelt.

As soon as she turned the key in the ignition the sky erupted into inky darkness and the car's clock showed it was 01:49AM. When she turned it back she caught sight of him alive and walking into the house, calling out to her to hurry up. She was back before it all began, before he started showing the signs.

She was either going to have to relive it all again or drive off into a night somewhere in the future.

Day 2,139

The blood trails were impossible to avoid. It seemed like every turn she took there was another open door or staircase with yet more fresh crimson leading to somewhere she really didn't want to go. Still, after her fourth or fifth hallway and umpteenth set of trails in her peripherals she had to admit to herself that she was following them.

Unconsciously or not, she was going exactly where countless others had seemingly gone before and died somewhere along the line. She hadn't seen a body or even any signs of life aside from her own but the blood had to have come from somewhere... from someone or something or anything that meant she wasn't alone and wandering towards certain death.

Maybe she'd end up as a trail for the next person who thought they were going to wake up in the same hotel they fell asleep in only to wake up with a line of blood leading them down, down, ever downwards. She hoped her trail would be the last but the ones she was seeing looked fresher somehow and the faint scent of rotting meat was getting stronger.

Day 2,138

He started small, like they always did. One minor upgrade after another after another until his left hand was entirely augmented - not a single scrap of meat left and the bones were so heavily reinforced he might as well have been a mech.

Of course after the hand was done he needed a strengthened arm to support its new weight and a reinforced spine to counterbalance and so on and so forth. There was supposed to be a legal limit but money managed to bypass it all.

Last time I saw him, he only looked human from a distance. Up close you could see the fine wires in the optics that replaced his eyes, the lack of pores on his synthetic skin and the faint electrical whirring that accompanied his every movement.

At that stage there was nothing else to do, no more advancements to make short of uploading his consciousness to the cloud to interact with data completely freely. It was considered a form of suicide, to utterly abandon the shell that contained all that you were.

So of course, it being the next logical step, he invited us all to his final upgrade. It was far too similar to a funeral for my liking with close friends and the family who could stomach it all reading their fondest memories and acting like he was already gone.

The upload itself was over in a minute, his face reappearing on the eight foot screen to smile down at us.

We expected his body to slump over and power down like they did in the videos but he stayed standing for a good while before doing the unthinkable. He looked around, making eye contact with us all before walking away as his former consciousness screamed at him to stop from the confines of the screen.

I didn't stick around to find out what happened to the people that went after him. Didn't read any of the articles that said he'd been sighted all over the country, killing any animal he could and covering his body with their meat and fur.

Trying to make himself human again as if it would bring back his soul.

Day 2,137

I can hear them a few rows away, far closer than I'd like. They're calling out names, hoping one them will be mine or close enough to spook me into making a mistake and giving away my position. I wonder how many they've fooled this way and how many more they'll get before they decide to move on.

With any luck I'll make it back to the car park and with a little more luck there won't be any of them staking it out, waiting for survivors and picking them off just when they're at their most hopeful. I'd hate to be so close to freedom only to have one of these mostly-dead morons pull me into their ranks.

I only came here because my cousins were obsessed with corn mazes, something about them being quintessentially autumnal and how Halloween isn't complete without attending at least one of them. None of us had even heard of this one before but it was new and they needed someone to drive them.

I regret ever agreeing to this. I regret not noticing that anything was amiss and I regret not moving fast enough and I regret not knowing if my cousins are dead or alive or carrying a gun and heading my way and I regret spending so long crouched in this dead end thinking all this when I should be moving.

There's footsteps all around me, far more than there were before I began to panic and spiral.

Funny how I'm so calm now.

I wonder how much this will hurt.

Day 2,136

We didn't question the shrine we found in the woods. The virgin mother carved from ox bones, hair taken from our children and painted in autumn's oranges and reds. We didn't ask who put her there or why or if the church even knew about her - we just left our little tokens and left as soon as we came.

We didn't question when good things came our way afterwards. If our sick were healed and our fortune changed for the better we said nothing to the priests who always assumed we'd been praying to the same deity as them. Their assumptions and ignorance were for the best, we told ourselves.

We started questioning when someone left an offering instead of a smaller token. We wondered what they were after and how much they'd be willing to offer to the virgin mother in exchange for it. We'd always find out sooner or later and it was rarely good news.

We almost considered telling the church about her when someone offered her an entire horse. There is was all splayed and flayed and blood running into countless little grooves and drains we never noticed before. She was prepared to take whatever we offered and return exactly what the offer equalled.

That was the day before the shrine left us with nothing in her place save for a gaping hole in the ground and a pool of blood deeper and fresher than any mountain stream. A few made the mistake of drinking her water and they've not been right ever since.

We almost want her back but if this is what's been beneath her all this time, I dare say it's not worth the cost.

Day 2,135

I knew it would happen eventually but I never prepared myself to actually face the reality that the kids I teach have never seen, and will never see, the open sky. I knew that some day I'd have some bright eyed little thing asking about birds and clouds but I didn't think it'd be so soon.

We tell them the sky died and so we had to move underground away from the super hot sun that makes the whole world gross and sweaty. It was kinder than saying that the sky was somehow alive and we managed to kill it and now its rotting corpse is gently collapsing into the ground.

It's kinder to let them hear these stories and hope we'll figure out a way to get passed the dead sky and to the colonies on the moon and Mars... if they're still alive. Whatever's leaking from the dead thing we called the sky has completely blocked all inbound and outbound signals. We're sitting ducks.

And we're the luckier of many thousands of survivors. Up in our mountain in one of the thinner areas of the dead sky, where all that falls just slides to the valley below and the stench only reaches us when the wind blows in a certain way. Sure we're only this high up because the pus-like fluid the fallen parts secrete is toxic but we're alive for now.

We're alive and the sky is dead.

With any luck our air supply will outlast us but with more luck still, we may yet escape.

Day 2,134

He smiled at me with his outer face, lips gradually parting to reveal an infantesque head - the one that spoke whilst the outer one stared somewhere just over my left shoulder. It was hard to pay attention to his words when the sight of that newborn peering out from a jaw that shouldn't be able to unhinge quite so far was almost too much to bare.

I got the general gist of it - he called me his brother and used my dead twin's name, saying that I, that my twin, would soon grow to be as perfect as he is. The next great step for humanity is to turn our fragile meat-forms to armour for a much smaller, much more intelligent version of ourselves and eventually adapt the outer form to have thicker, more armour-like skin.

I wondered if this was why they weren't able to autopsy my brother when they eventually found him. I wondered if I might end up like him or if I was already on my way to becoming some inner thing watching myself become less and more all at once.

Later that night I took a flashlight and shone it at the back of my throat, not knowing what I would see and praying I wouldn't see anything at all. For a moment, barely a split-second, I thought I saw a pair of eyes peering around my tonsils before ducking further down my throat.

I'm afraid to open my mouth again - I don't know who or what will come out but it won't be me.

Day 2,133

It sat just outside of the campfire's range, teeth glistening in the flickering light. Occasionally its grey tongue would wipe across them, rekindling their shine and reminding us that we were depriving it of a meal by remaining stubbornly close to the fire.

Maybe if we'd spotted it following us sooner we might have been able to run back to the car and get to civilisation before nightfall instead of being stuck in the middle of nowhere praying that we'd last the night. Even the stained motel rooms we rejected the night before sounded like a better idea than the woods at that point.

Something tells me that even if we'd made it back to the motel or the city that night, it still would have followed us and found a buffet of unsuspecting idiots instead of just our group. We could have unleashed it on everyone much sooner than we did, not that the thought brings much comfort in the face of its latest bodycount.

I don't know when we fell asleep but we all woke up to bright sun, a dim campfire and deep set pawprints circling us all individually. All except the three people whose bodies were never recovered. The prints around their tents were bloodied and a trail of shredded fabric led deeper into the woods than any of us wanted to go.

We felt like cowards when we left but we were alive and that was more than we thought we'd be that night.

Day 2,132

We must have driven right past it almost every day and not even realised he'd been lying dead in there the whole time. The usual cheerful adverts all covered up with flowers and posters of his face, last known location and a contact number that nobody had ever rung.

Who would think to check for a missing person in their own office?

We didn't. Not when the building's main secretary showed the police footage of him heading out the evening he never came back. What she didn't show, what she never checked, was the footage about an hour later when he came back for his house keys, closing the office door behind him and never opening it again.

He was only found when the heating was repaired and the building was safe to inhabit again but by that point it had been three weeks and the stench of decay was finally too much for the steel door to contain. Even then it took a further week for the complaints to stack up enough for someone to unlock the door and come face-to-rotting-face with our missing uncle.

An accident they eventually said. Slipped, cracked his head on the corner of the table and the resulting hematoma killed him slowly. He would have been unconscious for most of it, all alone behind a locked steel door with us none the wiser back home waiting.

Day 2,131

For as long as I can remember people have always left empty baby carriers around town. My dad got me into the habit of checking any that I stumbled across just in case someone had left a child inside but thankfully the ones we checked were always empty.

When I was older and going out with my friends, they never checked and I used to hold back the impulse to peek over the tops, sneaking glimpses when they weren't looking so they wouldn't tease me about following a daft old superstition.

It was when we were heading out to a music festival in the fields outside the town that I looked into an empty carrier and saw milky blue eyes staring back at me from a shrivelled infant's face. Their skin was thinner than a paper-bag and creaked worryingly with every wheezing breath they took.

I don't know why I thought they were alive but the first thing I did was call my dad and ask him what I should do. He listened to me rambling on and on and interrupted me to say it was already too late and that I hadn't learned anything. Then he hung up.

When I looked back at the carrier the baby was gone, all that was left behind was its weather-worn onesie and the faint smell of decaying meat. That same smell followed me everywhere I went and every carrier I looked into had that same child staring back up at me, gasping for breath and fading to nothing as soon as I looked away.

Even though I've moved towns several times now I still see those carrier everywhere I go and it's always there waiting for me. A couple of times I lost my temper and tried to grab it, only for it to turn to dust in my hands. First time that happened I gasped in shock and breathed that dust right in.

I have a feeling that out of all the mistakes I've made in my life - that was the worst.

Day 2,130

He broke through the smouldering trees and out into the clearing, gasping for breath and begging to any deity listening that she'd still be there. He'd only been gone for a few hours and she'd only been dead for a day but the world was so twisted he figured anything could happen. 

As luck would have it she was almost exactly where he left her, half submerged in a stagnant runoff from the nearby swamp though the chains around her body had been moved. It could have been a lot worse, he rationalised, she could have left with the crowd that he'd been hiding from but she didn't. 

She'd stayed put... Mostly. Her head was now facing him which only made the angle of her broken neck that much more jarring. At least she was there though and not yet reaching for his throat and the temptingly vibrant jugular that thrummed with his erratic pulse.

Aside from his harsh breathing the air was eerily void of life.

This would not last long. 

Day 2,129

We drove in the vast emptiness beneath its ribs, counting vertebrae the size of houses and trying to keep our breathing even. It didn't matter how long the wretched thing had been dead for, not when you were driving over the densely compacted ashes of all the civilisations it had torched.

Undeath wasn't nearly as uncommon back when it was alive, in fact the towns it slaughtered sometimes picked themselves up and went right back to work afterwards... if it left their corpses charred. It soon learnt to reduce them to ashes and save itself the hassle of coming back to finish what it started.

Much like a dead bird will still cling to the branch it died on, tendons locked into place until it rots away to nothing, the dragon remained perfectly standing from the tip of its horns to the jagged spines on its tail. The only thing to have collapsed was the wings which had slowly lowered in its final moments and were now curled around it like it might still raise them and take flight.

None of us wanted to be there but the heat signature in the area had gone haywire the week before and the unspoken thought was that there was an egg buried somewhere under the bones and ash. We were lucky that this one had died of old age, we never stood a chance against anything more than a dying one.

But the further we drove in, the closer we got to the dragon's skull, the hotter it became.

Day 2,128

When they got up and began to walk it became very clear that they weren't horses anymore. For all we knew they'd never been horses at all and all we knew at that point was they had too many joints, too many mouths and eyes and a cry that sounded like a whole herd of elk being slaughtered.

And one of them had spotted us.

It walked over with the steady, patient pacing of a predator that's already got its prey wounded and cornered. All we could do was sit there frozen in fear, eyes darting about like there'd be a sudden way to escape that hadn't been there the last eight times we checked.

It stopped when it was close enough for us to smell the blood on its breath and see the maggots dancing in the congealed blood stuck to its fur. Of all the eyes on its face, only three were looking directly at us, the rest drifted around but mostly seemed to be watching somewhere behind and above us.

I was the idiot who just had to look back.

Once upon a time we had a cow on our little farm. Whatever had taken over the horses got the cow years ago and made it something truly wicked. As bloodthirsty and ruthless as a swarm of piranha with rabies with enough serrated teeth to match.

We'd chased it out into the open plains and shot it several months ago, thought we killed it too but the wounds were now somewhere between festering holes and more mouths on a body with too many mouths already. It wasn't breathing, probably hadn't since we killed it back then.

I don't know what god was looking out for us that day but whatever got the horses seems to be a different strain of monster that wants to protect us from all the others. That horse just stood there and stared at the cow til the damned creature turned tail and ran.

Now we're a horse farm. Like most of the newer ones we've never had to pay a penny for horse feed and we try not to think about where the blood comes from or whose bones we crush to sprinkle in the crop fields. Life's changed and we've had to change with it.

Day 2,127

Nobody knows exactly what they used to preserve him but he's as lifelike as the day he died two hundred years ago. He was only seven when he fell out of his favourite climbing tree and broke his neck, dying instantly - small mercies, as they say. This did nothing to comfort his parents.

Grief does strange things to the mind, it can so easily turn into obsessions over the most miniscule aspects of the deceased and in the child's case it became the notion that he should never rot. To have him decompose meant accepting his death and they were not prepared to do this.

For the rest of their lives he sat in a cradle inside a glass case, overshadowing his living siblings all their lives and now almost six generations later he's still just as perfect as his final day. Cheeks almost rosy, hair in neat curls and hands delicately folded over his cherished stuffed dog.

The only thing that spoils the otherwise staged sleep is that his skin is so pale you can still see his eyes through the lids. Those deep brown eyes, almost black until the midday sun hits and they become strikingly golden toned, following you around the room dedicated to his brief life and famous afterlife.

For some reason his parents never fully closed his eyes either, wanted him to be able to look out still. A sweet thought but less sweet when you're close enough to notice that the whites of his eyes still glisten and haven't decomposed at all. As if he's just blinked and you missed it.

To make matters worse, the security cameras installed by a late descendant managed to capture him moving. Not the movements you'd expect from a decaying corpse, not a trick of the light either. His hands flexed and adjusted their position about the neck of the stuffed dog, his nose crinkled like he was about to sneeze and then he was still again.

Day 2,126

We sent so many years believing ghosts were fake that we never noticed them gradually accumulating in the electric meshes we inadvertently created as we built our world up to a thriving technological empire. They were badly trapped in our cables and circuits and we had no idea.

Then they broke free.

Slowly at first, testing the boundaries and making sure they could hold something of a body outside of the wires. They were barely noticed for more years than we'd care to admit and by the time they were on our radar we were too late to do anything more than watch everything we'd built start to collapse.

They flooded the world and drowned millions in a wave of agonising energy that settled as soon as it began. We were left in scattered pockets in the furthest reaches from civilisation, slowly making our way back to the ruined metropoleis in the hope that there might be a way to seal them away again.

We found ourselves as trapped as they had been, hunted and chased by lethal waves of energy we could barely see. The only way to delay them was to bring the circuits back into their old uses, to force the current through and send them somewhere else.

It saved us but killed a great many other survivors. Our solace was that we were trying to fix it all, that's what we told ourselves to ease the guilt and what we told our children when they inevitably killed someone to live another day.

Day 2,125

The miners came before us, leaving trails through the fog and blood that were meant to lead us to safety. In reality they led us from one trail to another to another to yet another seemingly without an end in sight but it was better than joining the roaming bands of the questless ones.

The miners used enough symbols and sigils to fill an entire library so we just picked the three that looked the friendliest and hoped we weren't walking to our deaths. The chosen sigils have changed over the years as we found what they meant the hard way and lost dear companions to their truth.

The miners, we began to realise, might be leading us in a circle that encompassed the entire world. They might already all be dead and we're just following them to their grave to join them in whatever afterlife they managed to wander into.

For better or worse, we still follow the miners. We have yet to find a better purpose in all our years ,much as we've all tried. Whoever they were and wherever they're leading us to, nothing can be any worse than everything we've already passed.

Day 2,124

Tree stumps still smouldered amidst the downpour and the ash was soon washed away from all the bones, flowing into the mud that slowly pulled them back down into the ground they first erupted from. The few survivors huddled in the only building left vaguely standing in the silent moments left after the world had fallen into chaos.

Everyone knows how it's supposed to go in the movies - heroes swooping in with guns blazing and saving the day so well that the world just goes right back to how it was before. This hadn't happened. Their heroes were chosen by pure accident, cobbling their scattered information together and throwing whatever weapons they could make or salvage until there was nothing left to throw and nothing to throw it at.

Heroes do good deeds - they did the unspeakable and lived and that was all that mattered. Maybe if they repeated this often enough they might start to believe it but for now they were left in a dilapidated cabin surrounded by broken trees, broken bodies and fires too stubborn for the rain to extinguish.

Day 2,123

There was only one bridge between Salethorpe Island and the mainland until the spring floods last year. It may only be home to about thirty people but you'd be surprised at how quickly the local governments panicked and how desperate they were to regain contact with the islanders.

A friend of mine who works in the town council said they weren't giving out the full story but they were terrified. Apparently a top-level memo went around making all sorts of wild claims that boiled down to one thing - the islanders weren't human and the longer they were left alone, the more danger we were all in.

Fortunately for us all, a basic wood-and-rope bridge was set up within a week. Less fortunately, the five supply boats that had been sent over had all failed to return. The rough spring tides were blamed and no further investigation went into finding the missing crew.

I just wonder why they sent so many boats in the first place. I wonder if they were delivering supplies or if they were sacrificed to pacify whatever the hell is over there pretending to be human. I wonder what would have happened if we'd just let all contact drop and isolated the island altogether.

I hope this coming spring will be gentle enough that we'll never have to find out but in the meantime we'll all keep our eyes on the shore and bring any bones we find to the churchyard without alerting the police. Best to just let things rest and not cause any more of a fuss than need be.