Day 2,457

They lurch through the village's winding roads, dragging their cast iron censers behind them as they weep and chatter fragmented hymns into the night's cold air. They dress like nuns but there isn't a church on the whole island, hasn't been since the vikings briefly invaded in 1176 and razed it all to the ground.

We don't know where they came from or where they hide away when the morning comes. We don't know who sent them or what they want. We don't even know if they're actually human or if they're wearing human skins to try and get closer to us.

It's not worked so far - nobody's daft enough to get remotely within arm's reach of the damned things but we've still lost five to the fumes leaking from their censers. The gas looks like wood smoke but doesn't smell of anything and for all we know it's still lingers in the air long after sunrise.

They don't seem to be interested in looking through windows or walking through open doorways, it seems like they just want to patrol the village and make their little noises. If it weren't for the censers we'd happily let them roam but now we've got to figure out if we call the mainland police or the church.

Day 2,456

I don't remember where the knife came from or even the moment I held it but Lord how I remember the way it felt to plunge it right into his heart. Between the third and fourth rib then aim up and push til their eyes go cloudy and they stop struggling - just like mother taught me.

I think she taught me that, I remember it being said in her voice every night before bed, even when she was away. Maybe she never told me that, maybe it was always some part of me that kept repeating it to myself as a comfort, as a way to remind myself that I always had an option.

He hadn't done anything especially against me. It wasn't like I was holding a grudge or avenging someone, I just found myself holding the knife and hearing mother's words and the life faded from his eyes like fog over a field first thing in the morning. He was so perfectly still for the first time in a long time.

Maybe that's why I did it - to bring him back to that calm and still child I grew up with, to bring everything back to how it used to be when we were children and all we had to concern ourselves with was whether or not there was something to eat at the end of the day.

I must has sat with him for hours. Long enough that his body had gone stone cold by the time someone called the police. Before all their chaos unfolded it was just us in that peaceful, still,silent moment - cold and warm, alone and together, alive and dead.

Day 2,455

From a distance they looked like divers only they seemed to float through the fog rather than swim through it. We thought they were kites at first, eerie and strangely realistic ones and far too early in the year for Halloween but we didn't for a moment think they might actually be living beings.

They definitely weren't human, that much we know. For starters their eyes are far too bulbous and pressed tightly against the goggles that seem to meld into their skin. Even the re-breathers they 'wear' look organic and gently twitch in time to the heartbeat that echoes all around them.

Did I mention they were about twelve feet tall including the flippers that definitely had veins running through them? They were as human as a shadow and we thought they were just as harmless until their heads lolled to one side, revealing surprisingly large and well camouflaged jaws with enough teeth to make a shark blush.

One-by-one they dropped over the closest human to them and snapped shut, severing the meat and letting their lower half fall to the ground with a muffled thud. That alone was enough to send almost everyone into a panic and make us all head for the closest open door, not realising they were penning themselves in.

Me and a few others hid under bushes, parked cars and even the fresh remains of their initial victims. As the screaming rose and rose and rose up all around us we made silent eye contact and hoped we'd all be able to escape once the feeding frenzy was done.

But when the screaming stopped, the divers just drifted back up and began to patrol instead. It was like they could sense us within the fog but couldn't quite pin us down. I dread to think how long we waited in our hiding places, desperately trying to become as silent as the divers above, painfully aware of how loud our breathing was.

I don't know what drew them away or even which direction they took.

I don't know if it was something worse than them or the lure of fresh prey.

All I know is that we lived and there hasn't been a day of fog since.

Day 2,454

It was the latest in organi-tech about thirty years ago and now it was little more than a condemned man, unable to eat, sleep, feel pain or die. They were called Repeaters - godawful aberrations made from 'willing' death row inmates and enough cable to choke the world thrice over.

Their sole purpose had been to manually fuel the signals from one remote airbase to another, their bodies emptied of all their organs and replaced with just enough circuitry to keep them running til judgement day. It was easier and cheaper than sending out for engineers every time the signals dipped, the Repeaters would just pull their tool section out and repair it themselves.

Most of them had either broken down naturally or broken themselves down (which led to some legal confusion as to whether this was corporate sabotage or suicide). Some had even been taken apart for mercy's sake by charities desperate to see their loved ones rest in peace but there would always be a few forgotten ones.

In life he was known as John Smith, a serial killer who hid in plain sight under a plain name for twenty years until he gave himself up to justice when the thrill of evading capture wore off. If he were still all human he'd be eighty seven years old but officially he died as soon as he woke up in Repeater Station J48.

The airbase he transmitted to had long since been out of commission but they still hadn't come to disconnect him. He barely noticed time passing him by, drifting between stasis and repairs without so much as a blip until the Repeaters on either end of him were cut and he was left without a signal to send or receive.

For the first time in thirty years he opened his mouth.

For the first time in thirty years he screamed.

Day 2,453

The harsh desert sun rises over a city that hasn't felt its warmth in over a thousand years, the inhabitants within begin to stir as a gentle wind welcomes them to the surface once more. There is nothing else for hundreds of miles and their awakening will go as unnoticed as it did the last time and the time before that and the time before that.

Joints creak gradually regain their flexibility as the city steps outside to greet neighbours they haven't seen since a sandstorm forced them all inside and set off the curse that kept them alive and imprisoned. Any grudges they once held against each other, any bad blood between family has long since faded as much as the city's name in the annals of history.

Even their names had been forgotten and instead all they spoke of was how much they had missed the sun's warmth and the sweet taste of air in their lungs. Their voices were coarser than limestone, lungs ragged and worn from eons of filling up with sand and emptying it out as soon as the sun hit their brittle skin.

Tonight or tomorrow another storm will come and the city will be buried once more.

The desert will keep them hidden for another thousand or more years bring them back to the surface.

For now they dance and hold familiar faces close, praying the sun will never set and knowing it always will.

Day 2,452

Moss-coated rooftops peered out of the water like an alligator at sundown, ready to descend into the bayou's depths at the slightest hint of movement. We'd been trapped in our boat for three days now, unable to find our way back even though our maps said we were right outside our hotel.

We hadn't seen any living thing aside from the occasional swish of water as our gazes swept over something that was happier observing us than being observed itself. I'd caught glimpses of them in the corners of my eyes when we'd all been especially silent and motionless, it was like they were checking to see if we'd died yet.

They were disappointed all the while and after the first instance of my eyes meeting their inhuman eyes, we made sure that there was always someone keeping lookout. The boat couldn't take any more weight and we had no idea how much of they was hidden under the murky water back then.

When we came to the sunken town we made sure to let the boat drift in closer, made sure to crouch right down and try to avoid unwanted attention. That's when we spotted one of them sunning itself - it looked like a human peering out of a fish's mouth, if the fish had been wrapped in alligator skin. It spanned three separate rooftops and took off like lightning soon as it spotted us.

Lord but those eyes were familiar.

Three more days we spent drifting around the town, managing to find the odd waterlogged backpack with a few meager supplied that kept us alive long enough to eventually stumble back upon the port we left almost a week ago. They'd been looking for us all this time, almost assumed we'd sunk somewhere out there and said somebody must have been watching out for us.

As I looked back at the boat and saw those same eyes wink before sinking under, I reckoned they were right.

Day 2,451

They still haven't found what killed Dorothy Smythe and it's got her spirit more restless and violent than ever. If she'd died in a house she'd have been exorcised seven times over but it just had to kill her somewhere round the lake and tie her up with squirrel bones and stones until she sank.

Honestly if her spirit wasn't so restless and persistent we would never have found her down there but there's only so many times she can slam her drenched and bloated hands against innocent hikers backs or push them into the lake before you break out the ouija board and get some answers together.

To her credit she was very easy to talk to and we barely had to ask anything at all - she immediately said she was at the bottom of the lake, mentioned her bright pink boots and even managed to tell us when she'd been murdered. The one thing she couldn't seem to say was what did it.

We've tried to ask her ourselves but she'd either flip the board or throw it into the lake which has us all pretty puzzled. Is she trying to say there's something in the lake that killed her, tied her up and drowned her or is she flipping the board towards the surrounding forests to tell us that her killer's in there?

Last night she wouldn't even wait for us to say hi and ask, she just threw the ouija board into the woods and threw Moe into the lake. Nearly drowned the poor guy and all so I think that'll be the last of us trying to reason with her.

There's got to be some way to exorcise a spirit haunting the general area of a lake when their body's already cremated and scattered elsewhere. Our only other option aside from exorcising her is closing the lake off to visitors and hoping she just goes away which is too cowardly for my liking but it'd stop her from trying to drag other folk down there.

It's not like we got the wrong body - water damaged as it was, it still had her boots on.

We couldn't have found the wrong body, right?

Right?

Day 2,450

"And for the last time - they are not 'being saved and becoming closer to mother nature's ever-beating heart', they're joining a damned bio-cult and inhaling enough hive spores to put a entire town six feet under! That and that alone is why we revoked their trader's license for the farmer's market and no, it will not be given back, now good day to you!" he said through clenched teeth as he not-so-gently slammed the receiver down before turning to face the concerned pensioner who'd only wanted a quick word.

"Sorry about the delay there but I'm not having another bio-cult try and takeover the town - it's just not worth the detox and clean-up. You were here about bins, if I remember rightly?" which he did, one of the better side effects from the last bio-cult's brief but memorable reign over the island.

"Y-yes, if it's not too much trouble." she managed to get out, a little distracted and somewhat nervous at the thought of yet another takeover. "It's just that a swarm of not-raccoons have been getting into mine and 'trading' rubbish for human remains. Our Tony's tried everything to stop them - even spoke to their leader - but they like the current exchange so I was hoping you'd have a few of those special bins leftover from last season's hermit crab infestation?"

He excused himself to check the town hall's storage chambers, trying to forget the younger hermits who methodically disassembled his late uncle's remains to fortify their already grotesque shells. The sight of that familiar face tanned and stretched over harshly compacted and bizarrely shaped detritus was not an easy thing to forget but the buggers left soon after they brought in the new bins.

He swore every resident had been given one but knowing the oldies they'd either put it away and forgotten where it was or donated it to the last bio-cult. The dear old lady waiting for him had been one of their more prominent high priestesses of the great and powerful something-or-other. They tended to blur into one big mishmash of  'earthly, carnivorous, space deity' after the first four or five.

She was gone by the time he got back with a couple of bins in hand, leaving behind the overwhelming scent of rotting leaves and a small package labelled 'Mother Hagrah's Blessing' which he removed with a litter-picker and carefully placed it under the dark tree just behind the hall. Better to leave it for the dark ones to throw into the unending void than risk a bio hazard in the workplace - far less paperwork!

With that he washed his hands and set about printing his notes for the upcoming meeting.

Day 2,449

They're nesting on the satellites, whole swarms of them out there barely beyond the sky's limit but close enough to attack stray planes that forget their place and fly too close. Thousand have been lost, thousands have had their final moments broadcast to every available device as the swarm waits for the meat to cool before they tear into it.

Even now there are dozens of channels that have been taken out of the public's hands so we don't have to watch as our regularly scheduled viewing gets interrupted by yet another bloodshot and bloated body drifting towards several inhuman mouths.

Doesn't stop people from sneaking through their best attempts at security to feast their eyes on pure terror fading into death's silent arms. There are as many happy purveyors of these brutal deaths as there are murderers on the cusp of our fragile planet's atmosphere and all of them are very well fed.

Day 2,448

It was young enough that it hadn't settled on a shape yet, eyes and arms sprouting and reabsorbing as its gelatinous body walked/slithered/writhed across the road. Its flesh almost seemed to ripple, changing texture and opacity as its eyes and body drifted closer to the town.

Anything it saw it briefly became, selecting the most useful traits and discarding the rest. Every now and then a tendril would develop and lash out, dragging struggling creatures back to the body to be used for fuel and leaving the inedible remains in its trail.

Before it hit the town it managed to silently make its way into a trailer park on the outskirts. By the time it reached the town itself, it looked perfectly human if one could look past the indistinguishable clumps of viscera it held tightly to its chest and the blood smeared around its mouth.

It wasn't used to having so few teeth and such an upright form, choosing to stagger from side to side and occasionally drop to all fours and sprint to cover more ground. Were it any other time of the year there would be hysterics and it would have been shot dead before it could consume anyone else.

But it was Halloween and by the time its victims had been found it was already on a train to the next town.

It wore a someone else's face, carried someone else's bag and spoke with someone else's voice.

This form suited it just fine and for the first time in its brief life - it smiled.

Day 2,447

The child had no eyes but he still stared up at the sky as he floated some thirty meters in the air. He was lit periodically when the lighthouse's beam caught him each rotation but that didn't seem to bother him. Nothing did - not the light nor the storms nor the countless attempts of the lighthouse keepers to bring the child inside.

He simply couldn't be moved.

In the morning he'd be gone, he was always gone around the light's final sweep only to appear again not long after sundown. Always in the same position and always staring up at something only he could see. The keepers called him Charlie and began to talk to him instead of trying to reach him.

Until the lighthouse briefly showed them what the child was a part of.

Nature loves to adapt and nature loves to mimic before it kills. That was the only rational explanation the keeper's could come to after seeing row upon row upon endless row of yard long teeth and the gargantuan tongue that attached to Charlie's back.

The sky was especially bright that night - bright enough for them to see it sink back into the ocean.

They'd noticed how dark the waters were first thing in the mornings but they'd never put two-and-two together before. Not like this at least. Not in any way that would suggest that the floating child was the lure of some colossal angler-fish type creature that had developed a taste for human flesh over its unfathomably long lifetime.

It knew enough to give the child hair and clothes but not enough to give him eyes.

They continued to wonder to themselves if Charlie was actually a human trapped in the maw of a giant predatory fish or if he really was just a lure meant to keep on drawing them out until they were comfortable enough and close enough for his tiny hands to grab them and drag them into the eager embrace of thousands of teeth.

He still appeared by the lighthouse every night, only now the rest of the creature no longer bothered to hide.

Day 2,446

When the drought came and the riverbed dried up, the shorelines began to crumble and collapse and reveal the most unusual shapes curled around the tree roots. From a distance they looked like people, huddled together against an unknown assailant but upon closer inspection they were just roots.

At least, they were in daylight.

As soon as night fell they awoke and the hunt began.

Day 2,445

I don't dream anymore, instead my body wanders while my mind stays resting in my bed.

I don't wake up hazy-minded chasing fragmented dreams, instead I wake up with dirty feet and aching bones.

I don't look forward to going to bed, instead I spend my evenings locking doors and hiding the keys.

We go to sleep in our homes and wake up on someone else's roof, clutching handfuls of hair and blood and praying the other person is okay. I've taken to keeping my head shaved to avoid waking up to a pounding headache and a pillow covered in blood.

It's getting to the point where even during the day I find my mind staying present and my body daydreaming, feet straying from the familiar paths and taking me down somewhere only they seem to know while I cry and scream at strangers to stop me.

They do not. They're in the same boat as me - we all are. Our bodies have a purpose beyond our mind's knowing and we are left gasping for air to fill the lungs that ache while the legs keep running and running and running from something we can't even see but the body knows that it's there.

Day 2,444

It came here from the shoreline and got stuck in the pipes behind our house. They're meant to grow twelve feet tall in the wild but the poor little wretch is too wedged in to be found and freed so it'll likely starve or suffocate itself. Hard to say which is worse really when we'll end up with the stench of it rotting either way.

They're natural scavengers when they are where they're supposed to be, much as they look like the demented offspring of an orca and a crocodile that got stretched out like chewed up gum. Sure they've all got teeth bad enough to make a dentist weep but they don't kill.

If you fall asleep on the beach though, that's another story entirely. That's when you get all those lovely news reports on the murderous reef-crawlers and their unquenchable bloodthirsty nature as if they go on regular killing sprees instead of picking off the odd tourist once in a while.

Lord only knows why one of their young ended up caught in our pipes but I have this uneasy feeling that if we don't find it and get rid of it, we'll wake up to a whole swarm of them outside trying to find the bloody creature themselves and they won't care that we both want it freed and gone.

It's still wailing away out there, quieter than this morning so either it's running out of energy or they herd is close.

Day 2,443

I could see the dissolving remains of my date floating within its gelatinous body, eyes still wide open. It must have caught him by surprise but that didn't exactly surprise me being that he was from the city and arrived during their dormant season.

He never believed that the Trawlers were real, claimed all the photos were faked and it was all an elaborate prank against the newcomer. Looking back I'm surprised he hadn't been killed sooner, what with his fondness for long walks in the tall grass without checking for the worryingly familiar sight of those translucent torsos writhing their was across the old farmlands.

They're slow enough to not be an immediate threat from the front but anyone who's lived here a while knows the real danger comes from the proboscises they drag behind them - their namesake and main feeding strategy. Largest one found so far had a set that were twenty seven feet long, possibly longer but it gets hard to tell when they've got prey nestled in the lines,gradually being dragged towards the torso.

I never heard it get him, never saw him drop either. If I hadn't spotted his jacket in the Trawler's torso I might never have known for certain where he'd gone to. It was his idea to go for a romantic walk through the fields and to the beach on the other side, though I'd told him a dozen times that Trawler's had been seen in the area but I was ignored.

Won't be the last time a man ignores me but it'll be the last time he ignores me.

Day 2,442

He asked if I saw them too and I told him no. Perhaps if I had said yes he'd still be alive.

In the weeks before he went missing he'd spend every free moment drawing, writing or talking about the children in the walls. At least, he called them children. Near as the rest of us could make out he was describing something closer to bears with mange and broken teeth.

They all had names, normal human names that you'd expect to a teacher to call out at the start of class only nobody else had seen them at that point and they lived inside the walls. Not just his bedroom walls either, not just his house but every house.

He'd say that groups of them were assigned to each person, forming clans in response to us making or joining families. After he initially went missing each of us had a journal of his posted to us the following day with specific phrases highlighted and corrected.

Seems they weren't just aware of him observing them - they were encouraging it and trying to persuade him to cross through the walls and join them in exchange for one of theirs becoming free. It's hard to say if he did this willingly but the last night I saw him was the first night I saw them clearly.

You know how you stare at a wall for long enough and your mind makes faces out of nothing? I thought so too but then the face smiled and mouthed out my full name. Even when I brought my eyes back into focus I could still see it and slowly several others moved forward til we were surrounded.

He asked if I saw them too and I told him no but I've been seeing them on every wall ever since and even though they found his body last week I know the child that replaced him is still alive and close by. I know it from the strange handprints it leaves all over the windows in the morning.

I know it from the way the children in the walls smile at me.

I know it from the heavy breathing coming from under my bed.

Day 2,441

I can feel her waking up during the sermons, tiny fists pounding on the false floor that covers the baptismal pool where he drowned her. Nobody else reacts but I can see them jolting slightly as her panic and frustration increases and the pounding becomes a resounding beating against the thin laminate flooring.

It lasts until the hymns begin and the sermon draws to an end in uncomfortable silence.

She was baptised and murdered in March right in front of the whole church. I was the only one who noticed how the Vicar held her down for far too long and while she emerged seemingly fine I saw a colourless version of her fall back into the pool.

Her face was contorted in a silent scream while her body smiled and walked away to join her family.

Day 2,440

When the carriage was eventually recovered from that sinkhole downtown, it was completely empty. There were thirty-odd people in there when it all collapsed and they haven't been able to find so much as a left behind bag let alone a survivor. Just broken glass, twisted metal and dozens of messages scratched onto every available surface.

They'd only been trapped for four or five hours at most yet somehow they all managed to either fall down the sinkhole and close the carriage door behind them or vanish into thin air after writing about how the darkness was calling for them and there was something greater than a light at the end of the tunnel. Takes the absolute piss to be quite frank.

On the bright side it's thought to be the deepest sinkhole ever found in the country so the metro's got that going for them, not that any amount of publicity could ever compensate for the lives lost and lives disrupted by it all. To make matters weirder, not a single one of their probes has found the end or even any sign of an end to the damned thing.

What they have found are bones sticking out from the walls. At least three clumps are suspected plague pits but the others date back a few thousand years prior to the black death and far further down there are bones so fresh they could only have come from the missing passengers.

They've not even been gone a week yet there's nothing left of them but bare bones covered in teeth marks.

Day 2,439

The woman in blue came back again last week. She looked a lot worse than last time too - no longer holding her hand to her face to keep herself together, her arms hung limply by her sides. What little of her face that hadn't seeped entirely down her torso looked resigned.

Took nine priests to ward her off that time and even then we still lost three parishioners. The pavement is still stained even though the liquefied bodies only rested there for two, maybe three hours while the warding was ongoing. The council want to remove the afflicted slabs and replace them with sigil-engraved monuments but the grieving families want them left just as they are.

The thing about grief is how deeply it clouds your judgement and how stubborn it renders you in the face of what little remains of the deceased. We all know she'll be especially drawn to those slabs, using them as anchor points for her next visitation and destroying them would keep us all safer. But grief has led the mourners to camp out on top of the slabs so they can't be removed.

She's due in a few days so we'll soon see the end of this latest discord.

Day 2,438

We call them forest gods because it's easier to believe in something divine beyond our mortal comprehension than accept that we made innocent animals into the creatures that torment us. We cross ourselves, spit three times, spin counterclockwise - thousands of little rituals to make us feel safer whenever we see them as if anything other than luck permits us to live another day.

I've managed to survive seeing three forest gods in my life so far and with good will I might live to see more.

The first I saw when I was seven - the god of the hunt. Great big bastard of a stag with 19 tines, all pitch black and each tip resembling the end of a rifle. They say he gores you clean in half if you take more than your dues but being seven I hadn't taken more than a few pinecones.

I reckon that was my only saving grace back then. Certainly nowadays I've probably had about my fair share of venison and game meats but I always return the bones back to the forest's edge. Whether that helps or whether it's just another mundane ritual to make me feel better - who can say. For now it works and that's good enough for me.

The second god I saw was the fisherman - sort of a harvest god for fish. Looks like a cross between old paintings of sailors and some kind of heron - all long legs, longer beak and clawed wings that seize half a dozen fish in one sharp whip. It wore yellow oilskin robes and spoke to me in my uncle's voice - asked me if I'd been fishing that day and I replied in all truth that I had not.

Another saving grace, another right answer ad the right time and another day ending asleep in my own bed where I could have been fish food just as easily. Fisherman's not too bad as far as the gods go, though I suppose they're not a god for humans to begin with.

I saw the third god just yesterday morning when I heard an awful screeching and yowling coming from the back garden. A neighbour's cat got into a nest full of baby birds and I was barely in time to yank the bugger off and toss it over the fence before tending to the poor fledglings.

You know how a rat king is a mess of rats all joined at the tail? This was a fledgling king - a dozen or so gawping baby bird heads whose scraggly little necks all joined to the same bulbous little body. I know a forest god when I see one so I gently grabbed it and the nest and asked if I could take them deeper into the woods, away from the cats.

They sounded like a children's choir when they agreed on the condition that I give each head a few drops of my blood. It was a pretty fair deal considering it meant getting further away from the potential life threatening hazard that is a forest god. Half an hour's hike and half a pint of blood later and we're all happier for it.

I know there's hundreds more out there and, with any luck, I'll never see another as long as I live.

Day 2,437

Leave only footprints and memories, don't breathe deep enough to disturb the dust, count the scarecrows twice.

These rules were ingrained in her head before she'd even been on her first outing. The rules that kept them all safe enough to head to the farmlands were set by people who died so long ago that not even a gravestone is left. People whose names have long since been woven into fairytales so whimsical and watered down that only hindered the warnings they were originally meant to deliver.

She tried not to remember her first outing to the farmlands though every time she passed the ninth scarecrow she couldn't help but think back to the way its face split open, serrated teeth carving up his neck like they used to carve up lanterns on Hallows Eve. Its shirt was still stained by his blood and its crooked smile seemed to gloat at her.

These were minor details to the rest of the group, the older and more experienced were already weary of the bloodstained haints and all the lives lost along the years. She hoped she'd never become as hollow as them as they all stared out the windows,lips moving soundlessly as they counted the scarecrows and counted them again.

There seemed to be more than ever nowadays and each new face reminded her of someone the lost. Probably deliberate on the scarecrow's part - something to set them on edge before they'd even left the trucks. Something to distract them from the crawling ones and their diamond-sharp claws.

Day 2,436

This flesh is a memory, he thought as he continued to chew through the trembling belly of his dying friend. The initial screams had long since faded into wet whimpers as blood filled the same lungs that laughed with him just that morning. The meat on the face was becoming lax, he noted, soon the blood will turn sour.

He hadn't been like this before they arrived.

Something about the friend's childhood cabin by the lake, something in the water he reckoned, had made him this way but hadn't touched his friend. He was born anew as a starving infant of a thing - his dear friend now his first meal as the reality he once knew to be certainty now frayed and decayed to make way for the present.

Distantly past the harsh snap each rib made as he broke it free to gnaw off the meat, he heard others like him whispering their gentle welcomes. They wanted him to head outside and join them in the lake and he would. He would as soon as his friend no longer sustained him.

It would not be long.

Day 2,435

A kindness like yours only seems to attract the worst in people - the ones who latch onto the smallest shreds of decency and refuse to let go until either you are nothing or you lose patience and confirm their self-pitying view that all the world detests them.

A kindness like yours is as much a gift as it is a curse. Where most people would see a drowned creature and run, you set down a stale grain bar on the pond's edge and let the water draw it towards the heap of shivering fur and teeth whose gentle snarls faded as it began to eat.

A kindness like yours keeps the worst of the world in arm's reach - half trying to break your kindness as if wanting to help was a challenge to the universe itself, the other half hellbent on protecting you til their last breath. Some days their chaos swirled around you like a wretched miasma while other days were calm as the ocean before a storm.

In the middle of all this you were only a human slowly acquiring an army.

Soon you'll have enough to start making progress against the world.

A kindness like yours deserves to be shared to all.

Day 2,434

The Rot reached out inside the painting just as it did through the matching iron grating of the door to the right. It was hard to tell which had been created first- was The Rot a creature in its own right and the former owner of the manor had somehow trapped it here via his painting or had the nightmarish painting simply come to life one day?

It wasn't his problem to solve. He was only meant to rid the place of pests before the building team were due to come by and renovate the rest of it for sale. The Rot was more their problem than his and at first he doubted it would even do anything to him when fat,juicy rats kept running by.

Any chance it got, it swung those pustule-covered arms and lashed out at the rats, usually snaring one and knocking a couple more into the walls were they would lay in little heaps of panting fur until it had enough space in its mouth to cram another one in.

He kept out of arms reach and carried on setting traps like it was the most normal thing in the world while it slowly followed along behind him. As he made his way around he would stop every now and then to note down more rodent holes or droppings and prop the painting against a wall to see exactly where The Rot was in relation to him.

It was never very far behind, though the further they both traveled, the more disheveled both their appearances became. He was sweating bullets, arms and legs aching from keeping on the move without a single break for fear of The Rot catching up. The Rot accumulated rat's blood like a fresh coat of paint.

He barely made it out unscathed, hobbling his way to the front door in a daze, vaguely remembering to drop the painting by the front door as he locked it up seconds before The Rot arrived clutching a fresh rat in one hand and lazily waving at him with the other.

It wasn't his problem now, he thought, soon as the report gets turned in it'll be up to the builders to fix it.

Day 2,433

Its antlers grew like a diseased tree - black knot and black rot warping slender branches into burnt and decaying clumps that looked more like a handful of used matches than the forest's own crown and how the forest wept to see it stride. Every plant it passed bowed with remorse and each leaf it brushed by spilled sap like a widow's tears.

It was a kind of living memory, if you could call such an existence a life. All it seemed to do was wander and any animal unfortunate enough to witness it died soon after, the same diseased antlers sprouting from their foreheads regardless of species.

You could easily trace its path for the antlered corpses it left behind and the widow's sap that flowed so freely from the land around them. Now whilst nobody in their right mind would want to follow a creature more death-cursed than any banshee still alive, it was always helpful to know where it had been as it never seemed to retrace its steps.

So long as you didn't see the beast itself, the woods were safer than any town or city.

So long as you kept your head down and minded where the bodies lay.

So long as they weren't too fresh, you were safe.

Day 2,432

Boiling was the best way to describe the texture of its skin - boiling flesh. I watched the dim sunset sluggishly reflect off the rippling body as neck-less faces swam about the surface before submerging back into the beige mass. I'd been noticed by several of them but it hadn't made any further move towards me.

The turbulent mass at the front split into two mouths on stump stalks that bent in near opposite directions to feast on something I couldn't quite see from my poor vantage point. While I didn't see what it ate, I knew at the time that it was meat and it was fresh. Blood rolled down the stalks to be quickly lapped up by faces that tried to swarm as close to the head area as possible.

It seemed like every head wanted to join in on the feast but if any stayed for too long one of the forelimbs would shoot up and smack it away so the others could equally partake. In a way it was as fascinating as it was grotesque and all-in-all an absolute marvel of nature.

Now that I'm safely far away from it I can admit that it would be less unsettling and worrisome if it was a vegetarian. Though the marks it left along the torso and face of the stag it had caught were astoundingly unique and I daresay nothing else would ever be able to replicate such gauges at those angles.

For now it's thought to be the only one of its kind in the area, whether through a loss of its original territory, seeking out a mate or even just migrating. All we can say for sure is that at present we know that one exists with the potential for at least one more, judging by the carcasses that are being brought in for us to assess later this week.

They won't say how many bodies are incoming but they sounded terrified.

Day 2,431

We headed for the coast, arms full of bones that we hoped the sea would bring back to us as their former living selves. Everyone knew someone who'd brought someone back from the coastal towns, claiming they'd tossed an armful of decay and seen a breathing loved one wash ashore.

There were eighteen of us in the group that set out and thirty five returned. I got my son back, others came home with their spouses or siblings. The only person left out was Miriam who threw her twin sister's bones out to sea just like we did with our own and nobody washed ashore.

We were too caught up in our own miracles to ask if they were really our lost loved ones or if something in the sea was merely taking their form. If we'd put an ounce more thought into it we would have realised this long before we made the same mistake and set those bloodthirsty sea-demons loose.

Poor Miriam was utterly distraught at first but she was also the first to realise why. As far as the sea was concerned, she and the bones were the same and this if she lived then there was nobody to bring back. She was safe while the rest of us invited death and heartbreak into our homes for a second time.

I woke up to my dear little son ripping his father's throat out with teeth that looked like needles. Everything about him was changed - his eyes had become bulbous and hollow and nothing at all like the child I raised! I panicked and rushed outside to get help only to see half a dozen neighbors doing the same.

The rest weren't so lucky as us and none of us were as lucky as Miriam who'd gone to live with friends further inland. We all tried to follow her lead but most of us didn't make it. The things we brought back from our loved one's bones seem intent on bring us all back to the coast to finish this.

Lord knows they'll eventually succeed - we can't run forever.

Day 2,430

We thought he was only stage two when he was shot. We thought we had enough time to burn the body before the cooling meat drove the parasite to seek out a fresh host. We were almost within arm's reach when he erupted into a stage three creature - torso sliced apart to make way for the multitude of stronger, segmented legs that would harden in less than half an hour.

There wasn't any time to think, just act and hope it saved us from death or worse. I wasn't the one who threw that grenade and I refuse to state if my line of sight was clear enough to see who did but they're the only reason we're here and not on the list of casualties.

Nobody ever warns you just how badly the later stages of the parasite smell, how it's not just rotting flesh they leave behind but all the pus and bile the wretched host-body makes in its desperate attempts to expel the damned things. I'd take cleanup duty over recon any day - anything to avoid that stench when it's fresh.

We've never had a stage three manage to hide itself so well after the host has been neutralised. Damned things tend to burst out as soon as new movement is on the horizon, skittering and stabbing and spreading to more host-bodies til there's nothing in the immediate vicinity other than corpses and cocoons.

They'll be giving us our results back soon. I'm hoping for my usual all-clear but I found a tiny tear in my suit, possibly just wear and tear but most likely the stage three. We should have blown that place to kingdom come the minute we crossed the threshold.

My access to the organisation's database has already been revoked so I assume I passed this test - the only test I've passed since I was in school. To everyone who said I'd never amount to anything, I'm proud to say that we've proven you wrong. We've become so much more than we ever used to be.

We hope our squad will Become with us as well.

Day 2,429

The rules here are plain and simple - either wear your full gear or die. The newer among us complain at first, say it's way over the top considering we're just here to clear out an old asylum that's been abandoned since the 1910's. Rest of us tell them to suit up and shut up, with any luck they'll see reason sooner rather than later.

In the winter wasn't so bad you know - the thick overalls, hard hat, respirator, goggles and ear defenders kept you nice and cozy. When summer rolled around we were all prepared to quit within a week and nine of us had already fainted on the job. Management just waved the contracts we signed in our faces and said we'd be readily replaced.

Pay's too good in a job like this, that's how the bastards keep you hooked. So we kept on going, slipping crazy straws under our respirators, hiding flexible water bags and ice packets under our overalls - doing everything we could possibly think of to stay safe and stay awake enough to get the job done.

We should have started from the bottom up but all those stairs kept the blood going, kept us warm and, most importantly, kept us in as much daylight as possible. The rumours floating about the basement and the old fallout shelter inside were worse than any headless figure we'd seen out the corners of our eyes and we'd all seen a few of those in the past few months.

By the middle of summer we only had the basement left to do. Bloody complex was eight separate buildings all connected by a labyrinth of underground tunnels with a dozen off-shoots, dead ends and small rooms filled with things so damaged by the damp they were just heaps of sodden mush. Still, we signed up for this and we pressed on, suited to the nines and drowning in our own sweat.

I never asked his name when he arrived, I was just exhausted meat at that point and all I wanted was to go home, shower and sleep til the next shift. He was some bright eyed newbie who'd already complained about the amount of protective gear a dozen times before we'd even entered the building. I should have guessed he'd do something stupid and put us all in danger.

Somewhere between the basement's entrance and the third chamber in, he took off his ear defenders and left them hanging around his neck while he put cheap earbuds in and blasted his own tunes - completely disregarding the fact that the defenders are hooked to a mic in the respirators so we can all maintain contact. We didn't notice his radio silence until it was too late.

It was Davis that spotted him heading down the stars, following the signs to the fallout shelter. We all yelled and tried to get him to put the ear defenders back on til we saw a shadow peel itself off the wall and latch onto his back. That's when he died but management refused to declare him dead without a body to prove it.

So they sent us back down to retrieve him, knowing that if he'd triggered a feeding frenzy they were just adding fuel to the fire. Not that they cared - they'd already made us aware of just how replaceable we were as another newbie joined to to bring his predecessor above ground again.

I remember going down but I don't remember much past that, nothing visual just sensations. Someone holding my hand and trying to lead me away from the group, someone tugging at my hard hat, respirator and goggles. Someone's mouth pressed against my neck, smiling.

Then we were on the ground floor, lugging something in a rolled up carpet. Thee was blood all over us but none of us had been injured. Needless to say the new guy didn't come back for a second shift and management had the heart to give us a long weekend to process what we'd been through.

Next shift's tomorrow and we'll be down a man.

Day 2,428

Through the hole in the old parking lot, we could smell the sea and hear the cry of gulls. We hoped it was only seabirds but the rusty stains all around the pit left a lingering iron tang to the air that no manager could ever pass off as spilled paint, much as they try and they do it with all the fervor of a zealot.

The hole in the old parking lot is just a smallish sinkhole according to them. If you smell the sea or hear the gulls then you're clearly sniffing something or making it up because it's just a sinkhole. They tried to cover it in tarpaulin once, minimise and contain it was their plan. They only made things worse.

As anyone who's served under a manager before will tell you - never let them interfere beyond their limited scope of normality. Let them deal with angry customers and odd requests from HQ but don't let them remove the talismans beneath the tills or cover up the hole in the parking lot.

We lost eighteen cats and three children to it over the span of three days. Each had one eye placed delicately and deliberately around the hole, all gazing down at it like it held all the answers in the universe and for all we know, it could. A normal officer would bag them as evidence and seal the area off to investigate.

Our officers knew better and left the eyes there til they rotted, praying to nameless deities that it would be enough to undo the insult invoked by the tarp. For a few weeks it seemed to have worked - the air smelled like the sea again and screeching gulls pierced our ear drums and everything felt like it was okay again.

Today is different though.

Today the hole has moved.

Today the hole is inside the store and the air smells like death.

Day 2,427

Two things were certain at this point.

One - they weren't any closer to the city than when they first set off.

Two - they wouldn't die of hunger, though they hadn't eaten in half a year.

It was always in the distance and the road was singular, straight and spiraled off into countless labyrinthine towns and villages on either side. Tempting as it may have been to make a slight detour for food or rest, they knew that nothing human had lived there for a very long time.

Maybe tiny pockets of living, breathing humans still existed this far out but they had yet to see anything even vaguely humanoid passing them by. The last few seemed to wave and cheer then on though, which was both a comfort and a concern...

On the one hand it was nice to feel supported and like they were on the right track after all this time, all those months of doubt and frustration. If the locals thought they deserved to be congratulated then maybe they were almost there or at least halfway there and it would all be over soon.

On the other hand, humans aren't exactly welcome this far out so either the locals mistakenly think they aren't human or somewhere along the line they changed and are as inhuman as everyone outside. It would explain why they don't need to eat any more but other than that they felt as human as they'd always done.

From this, the arguments began. Everyone doubting each other's humanity whilst claiming they hadn't changed at all and all denying the truth that they were never human to begin with. They were the vehicle, the road - the journey given flesh.

They were never gong to reach the destination.