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.