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.