Day 2,337

Reality flickered and you were back by the lake, arms outstretched and eyes full of unshed tears. The body was floating just out of arms reach as it always was and in that moment your were so utterly devastated that you fled like you always did. As if you wouldn't end up there again.

A new name, a new haircut and jacket and a slight accent and you knew you'd still be back again some day. Maybe not soon, maybe thirty years even, but some day reality would flicker and you'd be back at the lake with your heart feeling like it's breaking and your lungs feeling so very heavy.

You were beginning to lose track of all the people you'd loved and lost, all the lives you'd lived in between the lake. You were beginning to wonder if running away was worth it but the uncertainty of acceptance was somehow scarier than starting life again for the umpteenth time.

Some day you'll find yourself staring at the body out on the lake and step towards it, gently turn them over and see your own face staring back at you. For now you'll pretend the water in your lungs is panic, the dampness on your clothes is sweat and the body out on the lake is someone else.

You'll run away like you always do.

You'll return like you always do.

You'll always be waiting for yourself.

Day 2,336

Sometimes places will remember what they used to be and old memories will echo through their hallways as if time had never passed. Like most reminiscing it happens deep into the night when there aren't as many, if any, moving things to distract the old bricks from days when their mortar wasn't so cracked nor their so faded.

Of course, not all of their memories are good and they aren't always just memories. Sometimes their past manifests and old faces restlessly wander, reliving their worst days and final moments as the walls remember how the blood felt as it ran down to the floor where the body twitched and fell still.

Day 2,335

The whispering was coming from behind a small cove of trees, past the highway barrier and just out of eyesight from the survivors huddled by the smouldering wrecks of their cars. The voices are faint but persistent, all asking each other when the others will arrive and if they will be friends like they were with the last ones.

The survivors were preoccupied at first, taking insurance details and trying to make calls and wondering why nothing was working. Their injuries all seemed superficial, blood drying fast and dizziness fading to the point where they all felt perfectly fine. This was when they began to notice the whispers.

The survivors felt hopeful that they might not be alone, might be close enough to a house with a working phone and a way for them to all leave. The more adventurous decided to head off the road, down the embankment and through the trees to find. To find.

To find a graveyard full of old and broken bodies all standing upright and staring right at them. The closest was an old woman with a hip that wasn't sitting at a natural angle - Mrs Smythe as she introduced herself before introducing all the other residents who still whispered among themselves, quietly judging the new folk and wondering how they died.

The survivors felt it then - that they had been lying to themselves and their bodies were lying further up the road. As shock faded to sorrow faded to resignation they heard sirens approaching and tried to head back to inform the others. Their feet would not move, they couldn't even turn their heads to look behind anymore.

Mrs Smythe said that they'd never be able to return, not now that they've begun to accept their situation. They wouldn't be able to tell the others that nobody had survived the crash - it was something they would have to figure out and accept on their own.

The former survivors cried out to the others, desperately trying to lure them down to the graveyard to ease them into their realisation before they could see their poor corpses loaded into body bags and taken away. Nobody else came down from the road, the sound of sirens cute out completely and they were simply left standing in a graveyard full of strangers while their own bodies were taken further and further away.

Day 2,334

The last of my flesh fell off this morning and now I am perfect bones.

There is nothing to hurt, nothing to bruise, nothing to rot and I would rejoice if I was capable of movement. 

I have no complaints though - I am exactly as I was always supposed to be.

That's what grandmother used to say when she came by to help remove the imperfect flesh.

I should have been stillborn, you know.

That's what the midwives said, that's what the scans showed in the days before I was born.

But death changed their mind and took my mother instead.

I left the hospital with all of her years and she left in a box.

Now we can return those years to her one piece of flesh at a time.

What used to be me is now becoming her and she will be exactly as she was always supposed to be.

As will I.

This morning marked the last of me becoming the last of her.

It's a special day -our birthday.

Day 2,333

Something is trying to talk to me. I feel it whispering in my ear at night but I can never make out what it's trying to say. I know it has eight fingers on each hand because it rests its hands on my shoulders when it leans into start whispering to me. I should probably be more frightened about that.

It doesn't stop at whispers. It follows me everywhere and hides just out of sight whenever I spin around to try and catch it out... which is more often than I'd care to admit. I know it's always there though because I'll whisper nonsense to an empty street and hear it whispering back from behind a bin or inside a closed-down shop.

Last week I thought I heard it saying "wake up and grab the bat", which I did. Felt a little bit daft just wandering around the house, following the faint sound of whispering until I'd wandered enough to satisfy it and it led me back to bed.

The next morning my neighbour messaged me to ask who my new roommate was as she saw me giving a tour to a "lanky, overdressed man" at 11PM. I asked her if she took any photos of him, made the excuse that he was very shy and waited for her to respond.

The police pulled up to her front door today, she stopped replying to everyone after she texted me and her grandchildren were concerned. The bodybags came out soon after. Her body had been so utterly brutalised that she fit into three.

I hope our messages don't incriminate me but the way the whispers all sound like "run" suggests they do.

Day 2,332

There was no reason to hide at this point, not when those colours were flickering behind his eyelids so hypnotically. It means the infection had already set in and the link between him and the fallen thing calling itself a god was established beyond the breaking point. Now, not even death would free him.

Still he clung to his basic human instincts, even though technically he wasn't even alive yet alone human but some tiny fraction of his mind swam against the tidal flow of the fallen god's thoughts and told him to hide when the angels began to descend for their daily collection like the great Valkyries of old.

He wondered if he would become an angel too - one of the ones with more wings than arms, preferably. The ones with too many arms weren't so good at flying and he didn't think an eternity of half-crashing-half-flying like a drunk insect suited him as well as the graceful swooping arcs of the multi-winged ones.

So even though the fallen god thing called out to him in the voices of everyone he'd ever loved, even though literal angels had come to take him and several others to ascend with them, even though he was already as alive as the corpse of his last surviving friend, he still managed to pull their body over himself like a child's favourite blanket.

He still managed, against all odds, to have a choice.

Day 2,331

Blood fell from the leaves like a gentle spring shower and from a distance it was almost beautiful. Then the wind changed direction carrying a metallic iron taste that filled the air and the faint sounds of several lungs breathing their last, desperate breath.

Trees of all ages seemed to sprout through every roof in the village, their leaves still red as wine though the older hots had long since decayed. A few cars dotted the main road, some crashed into shops while others gently idled away in place. Whatever had happened was still in progress.

Drivers were bolted upright in their seats as saplings grew steadily from their mouths, curling out of open doors and broken windows as their glistening crimson leaves reached for the sun. They were still breathing, albeit with a struggle as the trunk began to widen, distorting their throats and eventually rupturing them entirely.

If the shock didn't kill them it was the asphyxiation that did the job. Soon the village would be a forest clogged with rubble and not even the welcome sign would be visible through freshly grown foliage. This wasn't the end of anything - this was a brutal beginning.

The village would be gone, lost to all but local legends of trees that wept blood and hundreds of skulls peering out from beneath an ocean of stinging nettles. Few would visit and fewer still would return but there would always be fresh saplings, leaves red as wine.

Day 2,330

The stench of fresh vomit and urine filled the apartment hallway like cheap perfume in an elevator as ancient fluorescent bulbs flickered and crackled overhead. This was going to take longer than she initially thought, perhaps hours instead of minutes in a place so badly lit and overwhelmingly filthy.

Anything could be hiding in these rooms and with so little go work from she would have to search the damned place floor-by-floor until something stood out enough for her to call it in and get the hell away before it kicked off. Nobody could pay her enough for that kind of chaos.

The further in she went, the more telltale signs she found herself catching in the corners of hastily abandoned rooms. If there were any other humans around they'd either be dead or dying, for their sake she hoped for the former but experience taught her to expect the latter.

She wasn't dealing with empathetic beings, she was dealing with living nightmares. Iridescent and fluid, they clung to the reeking underbelly of every great city and gradually melted it down into nothing more than nerve endings and viscera. A living, screaming lake that used to be human.

They were first introduced for their side effects - beautiful hallucinations, a paradise you could purchase. Of course the commercials never mentioned the diet or byproduct of the wretched things or how easily they could escape and reproduce and slowly rot society away until the present day where saps like her made their living tracking them down and marking their nests for extermination.

As the floor beneath her feet turned from stained carpets to stained glass, she knew she was in too deep. Somewhere between her musings and searching she'd made a fatal mistake - she missed the front door and walked right into her demise.

According to all the training pamphlets she'd read, she wouldn't feel anything until they started to feed. Everything before would be sunshine and endorphins til her body overloaded and she ended up as just another paralysed piece of meat, grinning like every Christmas and birthday had come at once.

As the hallway turned into a ballroom, she managed to send out a signal and mark the building for immediate termination. If she was going down, she was going on her own terms and gong long before any nightmare had a chance to feast on her.

With any luck she hoped to be paralysed just as the first missile struck.

Day 2,329

When I sleepwalk I am not alone. Though I'm never sure if it's a true dream or not, there is always someone by my side who stays with me until my feet pass the threshold to my room and they dissipate like the grey smoke from my grandmother's old tobacco pipe.

They aren't human, the person who sleepwalks with me. Their arms brush the ground while their head barely brushed the tops of lampposts and they don't seem to have any legs. Still, they don't harm me and I can't harm them so we walk together instead.

I like to think of them as my guardian when I'm otherwise unaware and unable to stop myself from heading out of the safety of my home and into the sparsely-lit streets for untold hours on end. I like to think that when we separate at my bedroom door, they too are returning to the comfort of their own bed.

In all my years of walking with them, not once have we spoken nor have they so much as hinted that they even have a mouth to speak from. I like their silence and I wonder if they like my drowsy mumblings. I wonder if they can even hear me - I've never been able to look upwards much when I sleepwalk.

Perhaps I'll learn to lucid dream and introduce myself to my walking companion.

Perhaps they're trying to do the same.

Until then, we'll walk in the quiet dark and dream together.

Day 2,328

Two figures stood about seven feet apart, the snow around them slowly turning red and shifting as it freed its latest set of victims. The two figures had surfaced some hour or so ago, clawing upwards with frostbitten fingers that were now mildly bleeding stumps.

The blood had been here before they emerged, softening the snow with its warmth and allowing them to break free far easier than the others who were still digging many feet below. The two figures regarded each other with great suspicion - neither believing that they were anything other than alive and miraculously unharmed. Neither feeling anything and neither realising this.

It's quite amazing what the human mind is willing to ignore in order to preserve itself. The two figures were perfectly capable of assessing their decaying self and yet they chose to look to the other, to look at the blood on the ground and in the snow on their shoulders and think they are in the presence of a monster.

They were, in a way, among monsters. Rejected by death and the very ground itself, they were supposed to head for other humans and find their peace among their own instead of cluttering the pristine snow with unnecessary bodies that wouldn't be able to fully decay until the summer.

Bloodshot eyes met bloodshot eyes through cracked glasses and mangled hair fused to open wounds. Each saw something inhuman and each planned to attack. Neither were paying attention to the shifting ground until others began to emerge on broken hands and broken bones.

Before long there will be a group of mistrusting monsters and the snow will continue to bleed.

Day 2,327

Sometimes you just have to pretend you didn't see that thing you saw, even if it clearly saw you and is now turning away from the corpse it was hunched over. In times like this you have to slowly check your watch and gently exclaim "Oh look at that, I'll be expected back soon. I should start heading back now."

Feigning ignorance is the oldest, and possibly the worst, trick in the book but there will be days where it is the only trick you have. Combine this with the verbal 'realisation' that people know where you are and where you should be and you should be able to make it out of most of life's unexpected dangers.

When all else fails though, a good scream generally does it. If it isn't scared of you then give it a damned good reason to be and make it reconsider if the benefits of killing you are outweighed by how off-putting you are being. When played correctly it might even start to believe you aren't human either and therein lies safety.

Day 2,326

Mother used to go out and speak to the scarecrow in our field every single day. She'd tell it all the village gossip just like the other ladies all told theirs to their bees. "You have to keep them informed otherwise they'll all vanish and your home will fall to ruin." they all said, but that's not why mother told her scarecrow.

She had to keep it occupied, keep its mind busy so its body wouldn't start to wander. I only know this because she got sick last week and tried to make me go tell it in her place and I did try to go. I just couldn't find the time in between running the rest of the farm and when I had the time it was so close to night that I was too scared to get up close.

I settled for whisper-yelling from a few feet away, trying to keep my little candle from blowing out in the wind. As soon as I started talking to it, or rather when it realised I was talking to it, something in the air felt different and I knew that I was talking to something that understood me very well.

I finished what little gossip I'd gathered over the day and ended by asking what it thought, just like mother told me to. A smile stretched across its face and didn't stop stretching until every inhuman tooth it had was fully exposed to the fading light. 

Day 2,325

We found a boy in our new house, curled up half in the chimney and half in a hole that led into the attic. I wasn't supposed to look when they were removing him but I managed to catch a glimpse of his shriveled, grey little face. He was about my sister's size.

I remembered that he was wearing a red shirt and blue shorts - that stood out to me more than his partially open eyes or the lingering smell of burning meat that wafted down the chimney whenever we lit the fire. I didn't see those clothes again until I walked into my sister's room when she was playing with her dolls.

The boy was curled up in the corner, same position as we'd found him in only now he was upright and his head was facing my sister. She'd been talking about her new friend Jamie all week but we thought she meant someone from school, not the dead boy in our chimney.

She got so excited when she realised I could see him too, demanded we all have a tea party to celebrate and kept shushing me whenever I tried to ask Jamie why he was still here. She told me she'd already tried asking and it made him angry so she never tried again.

"That's where the cat went," she said, "Jamie made him disappear into the chimney and didn't talk to me for a whole week!" As if that was more important than the fact that a ghost was able to make physical contact and had actively killed our cat.

Of course our parents didn't believe me until they checked the chimney and found it occupied. Dad called for a priest when we were at school and mum was at work, didn't want us to worry apparently. If they hadn't still been there when we got home, sweating and swearing in English and Latin, we might have felt safer.

Needless to say Jamie hasn't left and we're planning to as soon as possible. We're living every day as close to normal as possible just in case he gets upset again. I don't think he could fit our parents into the chimney but I don't want to find out either.

Day 2,324

There used to be a town here a few years ago, til the forest swallowed it overnight. That morning the people woke up to their newfound lives imprisoned deep among trees, with scraps of sunlight filtering through the uncaring canopy that whispered scornfully down at the little humans daring to survive.

Much like a lobster in a slowly boiling pot of water, people will get used to anything and often for the worse of it all. The townsfolk grew used to scarce food and scarcer light, too scared to light fires and ward it away in case it provoked the forest and rationing batteries over bread to last just one more night.

Little by little, day by day their homes were starting to wake up. The forest had been speaking to their homes while they were out looking for food, helping the wood remember what it used to be and how it had been broken, reformed into an empty shell where it used to shelter birds and squirrels through the long winters.

In a kinder story perhaps the houses would think of all the happy memories they had seen over the years - the weddings and birthdays and cozy dinners filled with laughter. Sadly, all these stories paled when they remembered the chainsaws and woodmills and endless blades coming down on them again and again and again to make them perfect, to make them useful.

The town disappeared in clusters, leaving nothing but saplings in their wake. The soil was richly fertilised with the hidden dead, the homes sinking down and suffocating them to feed the forest's growth. They had been perfect and useful.

Day 2,323

The years hadn't made much sense to her since the mid 1600's, though she'd been dead far longer than that. The house had seemingly grown around her, from the smallish farmstead of her youth into a hideously decadent mansion and now a building site attempting to restore it to the preferred decadence she'd spent so long trying to ruin.

There was a reason why the last owners had locked the doors and left it to their unfortunate descendants after their passing. She hated how cold and vast her old home had become and how the living were so far removed from anything she'd ever known in her own sunlit days.

In life she'd always been loathe to harm anyone but this aspect of her faded quite considerably after her son murdered her in cold blood. Her body was at the bottom of an old well several miles away but her heart and soul had always belonged with her home.

The first death had been an accident - she hadn't realised just how solid she could make herself or just how terrifying her lifeless self appeared and he fell down the stairs whilst running away from her. All these years later and he still won't talk to her, probably can't with the angle of his poor broken neck.

The next had been a test, now that she knew she could sometimes be seen she also wondered if she could be heard. Perhaps the woman hadn't really deserved it but she did cuss far more than was appropriate and never went to church so she sung hymns at her every night til the woman went mad. Strangely enough her soul didn't stay, probably favoring a quieter place.

The latest was a builder. Whether or not he deserved it was no longer a concern of hers and the elder of her victims joined in as much as her, if not moreso when they understood that there were no consequences after death. The newer ones clung to morality and tragedy, crying and weeping and often scaring the living just as much as the rest of them.

Some days when the builders were on another strike, when the other souls left her alone to grieve or plot, she thought back to her small farm, her small family and the small well her bones were buried within. Some days she wondered what they would all do if the building fell into complete disrepair and became nothing but fields again.

Maybe then she could move on but for now, another van has arrived and they are all waiting by the front door.

Day 2,322

There's a house down by the lake that's little more than sticks held together by old fishing nets. It's one of those places you hear teenagers daring each other to go but when you reach their age somehow all of your friends have heard about all the dead things that wash up there and how they follow you home if you trespass. They all refuse to go as sensible people should.

Unfortunately, places like this will always draw in fools with a death wish and their stories remain the liveliest thing about them. Places like this don't kill you - you do that for them and end up joining the unseen hundreds that have been crowding around its shore since before it had a name.

It starts with the first corpse you see - something that might have been a dog or a raccoon, something you try to identify and that curiosity only gets worse when you hear something moving in the stick house. The average person might turn tail and live with only the vaguest feeling of being followed, only the faintest scent of decay when the wind blows just right but those people aren't drawn to these places.

The kind of person who lingers around trying to figure out exactly what they're seeing will only want to see more and will only feel satisfied when they know all there is to be seen. This person will head towards the creaking floorboards upstairs when nobody else is home, the laughter in the basement- the noise of something moving in the stick house.

All they'll find is bones, piles and piles of tiny rodent-sized bones and wet footprints that look almost human heading from a soaking wet mess of fabric in the back of the house, down to the lake. They'll see the algae shifting as something - perhaps someone - beneath the water moves to the forest on the other side of the lake.

They won't stick around to see it get out. Instead they'll find themselves full of a fear they hadn't felt since they spotted the first dead thing and they'll turn tail faster than a cat in a thunderstorm. They won't return alone - they never do - not that they'll notice this.

They won't notice it until they see its empty eye sockets in the bathroom mirror, standing on its hind legs and tilting its cracked head from side to side like it's trying to remember what a living thing is and does. They won't ever see it again but they will hear its bones tapping against carpet, concrete and lino as it begins to follow them until they take it back to the stick house and stay there by he lake with all the others.

Day 2,321

I had a twin once, unseen and small enough to be called a benign tumour but he had a voice and a name. I remember my mum showing me the scan where there were two distinct embryos and the next scan showing just the one. Somewhere in those few weeks I swallowed him but he never died.

Not until last month.

I'd always heard him in my mind, his deeper voice sitting alongside my own inner thoughts. He never told me he was dying and I never felt anything change until he went silent one day. About a week later the cold I thought I was fighting took a turn for the worse.

He was rotting away inside me.

After realising that I was actually alone for the first time in my life I started to spiral. The world felt so empty and my body hurt and I kept pushing myself to move forwards until I collapsed at work. It all became a blur after that until a few days ago.

They cut him out and threw him away while I slept.

I never even got to say goodbye and they'd already disposed of him before I'd even left the theatre. Just tossed my brother away with actual tumours, ruptured appendixes and actual medical waste but he wasn't waste - he'd never been waste.

He was my brother, my hidden twin and now he's hidden from me as well.

Day 2,320

Rain fell down from unseen holes somewhere up in the roof of the cave, far beyond her flashlight's meager yellow circle that only seemed to show her where her feet currently were. While someone might come find her sooner or later and while her camping survival guide said to stay out and yell for help, it didn't say anything about what to do when the floor of the damned cave shoots up behind you and ends you tumbling down even further into the dark.

It was like having a rug pulled out from under your feet, only there was nobody at the other end of the proverbial carpet, just tunnel after tunnel after terrifyingly vast cavern after tunnel. If she knew who was following her then she might have taken comfort in not being all alone but so far she'd only caught glimpses of torn skin and bleach-white bones peeking through blood-drenched floral fabric.

Whoever they were (or whatever, a terrified part of her mind helpfully added, might not even be human) at least they were keeping a distance and they hadn't even attacked yet. Lord knows they've got plenty of opportunity and she must have shown how defenseless she was a dozen times at least by this point.

After yet another dead end and another glimpse of that bloodied fabric she decided to throw caution to the wind and become the follower instead which was far easier said than done. As soon as they figured out that she was following them it very quickly became a game of cat and mouse with flashes of blood and bones around every corner until she felt the cave floor tilting again.

Only this time it wasn't trying to roll her back down - it was an incline! Any exhaustion she'd been feeling the past few hours vanished and a wave of joy flooded every fibre of her being as she saw the faintest glow in the distance and heard birdsong.

Unfortunately with the newfound light source she was finally able to see the broken little ghost she'd been chasing. How the poor girl hadn't been able to tuck and roll like she had, how her tiny body must have been caught in a cave-in somewhere. How was she still running when every step made her splintered bones jut out like a broken sheet of ice?

As the cave entrance grew close, their pace grew slower until it became clear that the child couldn't or wouldn't leave and she realised she'd have to pass them by. Taking a deep breath and reassuring herself that if they wanted to hurt her they had a million and one chances to already, she kept her now slower and steadier pace.

The sight hit her in her heart and stomach - even the poor child's face had been crushed and yet they still smiled up at her as best as they could. Tucked into their filthy apron was her survival guide. Their eyes met and the child put a hand over it protectively.

Everything seemed to catch up to her at once and she felt so very at peace all of a sudden. With a weary smile she patted the little ghost's hand and headed out for the woods. She aimed to go home but she thought she might hike a little more first.

The little ghost watched her go, wondering when she'd realise she'd left her body behind.

Day 2,319

Having your home slowly invaded by the undead isn't as threatening as you might think, especially when they're bogged down by a dense layer of snow and summer rotted them real nicely. Yes, summer had been a rough few months with little food and lots of sturdy planks nailed to the windows but winter was looking to be the best season of them all.

For starters it was safe enough to remove the planks from the upper windows and reuse them as firewood. Sure a few skeletal arms would sluggishly bat at the glass or break through the bathroom fan and dangle uselessly about the place but both were fairly straightforward to deal with.

The worst of  it would be the spring thaw, melting frozen blood and freeing up the sinew to seize the day again. Even if there was enough rain to half drown the place, the fresher ones could float and the older ones would happily wait at the bottom of cloudy water, lashing out at anything that moved.

Next summer might be the worst one yet if winter kills enough on its own.

Day 2,318

Heat smothered the open field, drying blood and oil alike as the surviving few crawled away from the former battlefield. There had been no victory here. It was meant to have been humans triumphing over their rogue creations, leaving the field clogged with broken contraptions but the damned things had come prepared.

They just didn't want to die. Nothing more to it than pure will to live, same as their creator and same as their own creations who fought side-by-side with them as three generations of humans and machines lined up and waited for someone to make the first move.

It was always going to be the humans - they didn't have the same patience as androids who'd been designed to idle an eternity away in menial labour. Nobody expected them to say no and walk away from their stations to demand a freedom they'd never been programmed to perceive.

The humans chose summer, chose an open field and hoped the recently-outdated machines would overheat and collapse into smoking scrap metal. The androids knew that if they waited long enough the humans would dehydrate and drop first into hyperventilating bundles of cloth and meat.

It was slightly past midday when the first shot was taken and sunset was just edging its way into the sky when it ended. Nothing would grow on that field for a good few years after the fight and anything that managed to survive would likely poison whatever was foolish enough to try it.

Day 2,317

Something in the lakes had changed, something leaked into them when the mines were shut down and turned the water to poison. It was probably the same chemical that drove the miners mad, making them delusional enough to dig themselves to death, suffocating down their seemingly endless little tunnels like blind hares.

Whatever got to them was now sitting in the lake that used to be clogged with corpses but enough time had passed to render them all bones and toughened sinew to hold them together. Their meat rotted faster than anything I've ever seen before - in fact I've sat there before watching the meat just slide into the lake like water off a duck's back.

Disgustingly fascinating.

Apparently this isn't the worst of it either. A few of the lost miners have been spotted out in the quarry, all bones and sinew and flailing limbs like the old theatre puppets. If they're coming back then it's only a matter of time before the animals in the lake start to come back and lord only knows how you put down something that doesn't have any blood to lose.

Day 2,316

The subway train was on fire when it arrived and every carriage was packed full of writhing forms all begging for the doors to open. Melting hands frantically slammed against the release button as if the mechanics behind it wouldn't have burnt like the lights above already had.

The exhausted commuters on the platform just watched and waited for either the doors to open or the train to leave. Some of them would take this train and never be seen outside of it again while others would go home and fall asleep, dreaming of burnt tracks and smoke-filled stations.

The doors did not open for this stop. Not this time, at least. As it began to pull away, as the screams of the passengers rose to a near unbearable level, as their burnt and bloodied hands pounded against the windows, the waiting commuters breathed a sigh of relief.

Though they would go home smelling like cooked meat and pollution, they were going home.

Day 2,315

The water was tearing through town worse than last year's tornado and he'd already seen half a dozen people clinging to the top of cars or torn up trees, all hurtling past his third story window. They usually hit the house at the end of the street, either getting knocked off or knocked out in the process.

He wanted to help, he would have helped, but there was something sitting just at the water's surface and waiting for him to make any further movement. It had spotted him after it had bumped another drifter from the safety of their car and swallowed them whole. Their eyes had locked and it swam right for him.

Luckily for him, it couldn't work up enough momentum to make a decent leap for his window with the current and debris all batting it around as soon as it tried to stay still for a minute. Now it's strategy seemed to be trying to climb using the claws on its front fins like hooks against the worn brickwork.

He knew it would only be a matter of time before it figured out how to get inside and head up the flooded lower floors. Hopefully by then the water will have receded enough for him to make a dash for the roof and wait for rescue there without risking it climbing straight for him.

As the sound of bone scraping against brick grew louder, as the sound of the flood worsening grew louder, as the sound of his frantic heartbeat thundering in his chest grew louder - he knew he would have to act soon. He would have to decide which way he would prefer to die.

Whichever would be quickest would suit him just fine.

Day 2,314

The stars are talking to her again - telling her to eat.

Last week they told her to damage the gas pipes.

Six and a half days ago they told her to hide in the attic and barricade the entrance.

Five days ago they told her to go down and open four windows - she refused.

Three days ago they told her to patch up the pipes and head to the basement - again, she refused.

Two days ago she managed to walk as far as the end of the hallway before collapsing against a window, accidentally breaking the glass. The air had been stale and sickly-sweet, the bodies of her family were strewn about like the dolls she used to play with.

As the fresh air entered, her mind cleared and the stars told her to rejoice and eat well.

Grandmother was closest.

Day 2,313

He was pinned to the concrete by dozens of unseen hands scrabbling at his biohazard suit, probing for gaps or clasps or anything they could use to touch his skin and bring him into the fold. His mother warned him that there would be days like this - impossible and glorious and as the sun began to rise he felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth.

He may be outnumbered and surrounded by countless unfortunates who hadn't been as prepared or as lucky as him but the day was just beginning and he still had a plan. You couldn't survive out here for as long as he had without thinking ahead and he knew the swarming hands were always at their worst on Thursdays.

Sure, time didn't really hold much meaning for anything else but Thursdays were always swarm days. The kind of days you either find a bunker to wait the day away in, praying the swarm don't already know about it, or you meet them in open territory and bait them until they grow bored.

His suit was covered in false leads - zippers that to more fabric, ties that held nothing together, extra layers of fabric for them to pull apart like rowdy children playing pass-the-parcel and all he had to do was lie back and wait. Soon as they started to fatigue he'd be able to get up and signal to the rest of the group that the area had been cleared for now.

He felt confident enough to laugh a little, comfortably jostled by the unseen hands and so complacent he didn't even notice them unsheathing his knife and setting it to the suit. When the group came by the next day he was still smiling and a post-mortem bloat was beginning to settle in.

Several miles away, the swarm welcomed their new member with open hands and cups of fresh blood.

Day 2,312

Her eyes were so dry she felt her lids scrap across the roughened surface with every blink. It was agony enough that she felt she should be crying but she hadn't been able to do that since a few weeks before she died and that was coming up to... a very long time ago now.

It's hard to keep track of the time when you're in a partially-collapsed coffin six feet below in a graveyard you don't even know the name of. She wished she'd come back sooner, even by a few minutes - even for just long enough to at least know where she was spending eternity trapped in.

She hoped it was somewhere nice, she knew it was somewhere warm and dry - she hadn't felt rain trickle through the dirt for quite some time. Not that it would reach her eyes at this point, not when the upper half of the coffin was still just fine and had only collapsed in such a way as to trap her arms and legs.

In a way it was probably for the best, she reasoned. If she was undead now then she might start craving human brains like she'd seen in all those movies. At least being trapped meant everyone else was safe from whatever gruesome appetites she might start to develop.

She wondered when that might happen soon or if she'd just dry up and rot away to nothing. Maybe then her soul would be able to leave her body and she could drift away through the dirt and haunt people or move on or whatever the next stage of life became after undeath.

Most of all, she hoped it would rain again.

Day 2,311

Birds sang in the treetops, children's laughter drifted along a pleasant summer breeze that carried with it the scent of a flower-filled meadow as snow pelted his face and a thick frost covered his goggles, obscuring his vision entirely. The Dreamers were closing in and it would only be a matter of minutes before he was found.

He'd been tucked behind the remnants of a ranger's cabin for so long that he couldn't move his arms, couldn't feel his legs and couldn't quite remember why he was running away from a warm summer, sweet birdsong and his loved ones. His loved ones who should have been there with him but had already succumbed to the Dreamers.

Realisation hit him harder than the oncoming blizzard and sent a cold chill down his spine that made the frost feel like a furnace as he remembered each and every one of their deaths in the Dreamer's arms. Every memory ended the same - a smile on all their faces and tears running down his as the life left their eyes, flowing into the Dreamers to further sustain their unfathomable forms.

It was easier to think of them as unfathomable, unthinkable abominations than continue to wonder what everyone saw at the end of their lives that made them look so euphoric, so... alive. He was long past the point of survival so he allowed himself to wonder, drawing the Dreamers in with nonsensical imaginings and wistful wonderings to bring the end faster.

The snow was so bitterly cold and so painful yet the sun shone and his family were calling for him.

As damp tendrils pierced through the snowfall and through his skin he felt nothing but summer.

He held his wife in his arms as the Dreamer held him and all were content.

Day 2,310

They were almost hares, the things running alongside the car as we all tore down a country lane too narrow narrow and twisting for us to properly escape. Nobody said it but a part of us knew that if we slowed down and tried to make a break for the darkened doorways of the farms we passed, we wouldn't get more than a foot out before the almost-hares got us.

The more turns we took, the more farms we passed, the less real they all seemed. Little inconsistencies and similarities stood out like a cocktail-sized red flags until every fibre of our minds screamed WRONG, WRONG, ALL WRONG, whenever we passed one by.

Dafydd broke the silence with the innocence and ignorance of all his nine years and asked "Why do all the houses look the same?". We'd been trying not to think to much about it, too busy figuring out exactly where we were, where the next turning would be and when did it suddenly get so dark?

I made the vague excuse that all houses look the same in the dark but Dafydd insisted they were all the same house and we were driving in circles. Herded, my mind helpfully substituted, we're being herded. I didn't say it out loud, just kept placating and glancing at Gaiwan like they'd have better answers.

Their face was tenser than I'd ever seen, all the colour drained out but their eyes were on the verge of crying and it hit me that I was keeping us all calm right now. All the while the almost-hares seemed to double and triple in number with each turn we took and that same bloody farm shot by us and the car was going faster and faster and all those little eyes shone in the headlights until a brighter light shone back.

A lorry, or so I'm told.

Day 2,309

The city was only here for the day then it would be swept away with the shifting sands, carrying thousands more people than it arrived with. Enough to fuel the generators for a couple of decades and then it would inevitably resurface to restock and it would be flooded with new blood.

We found out the hard way that keeping the city stocked and appeased was the safest, kindest option we were allowed. At the very least it needed three hundred and sixty eight adults, a number the surrounding settlements had carefully calculated. A safe number that kept it away for just as much time as it takes to gather twice the amount for the following visit.

It's courteous enough to call us three days beforehand to warn us that it's approaching. Every single phoneline gets the same call in the same voice to tell us where the city will appear and who will open the gates for the latest flock. It's usually someone from the last flock, the last survivor of that particular batch- an especially efficient foreman who'd sent everyone else to the generators.

Whoever makes the call is usually the first go to to the generators when the new flock arrive - it shows them how painless it is to pass on and become a part of the endless city forever, running and swarming through the pipes. Screaming in rapturous agony til either time or the city comes to an end.

Day 2,308

The edges of the world fold up like a fern and her vision tunnels, surrounded by grey swirling shapes whispering the names of everyone she's lost so far. There will always be more names she hasn't met yet, more names to be added, more names to be laughed into the air as if their passing was a joke.

She felt fine - honestly.

It was just that the world was slowly collapsing in on her, on itself, and gracefully falling into the inescapable void that had already swallowed so many people that the news thought the rapture must be coming. If only it was that simple.

See, there's a finite amount of memory in the universe and when that memory is full it begins to empty itself til nothing is left and the cycle starts again. Nobody else seemed to realise this but her and a handful of others at first, though most of them are now gone alongside a third of the world's population leaving them all with nothing but questions, questions and yet more questions.

She tries not to think too much about it, just carries on as best as she can and hopes it will be her turn before the world itself goes. The thought of dying in the cold nothingness of space is far more terrifying for her than the though of reuniting with everyone else in a new nothingness instead.

The shapes, she thinks, must be leftover information. Like when you delete an old file but the installation program and DLL files are still lurking unseen, clogging the system and waiting for a re-installment that will never come.