Day 2,700

The bandage had been soaked through for a few hours now but he couldn't bring himself to change it. What was the point when all the timescales said that if it hadn't healed by now then he'd likely turn in a matter of days, unless he died within the next ten hours or so.

An irrational, panicked part of his mind kept him from checking til the last hour as if delaying it would miraculously make it all go away and the scorching ache in his leg was all a figment of his overly tired mind. At least he was alone - nobody around for him to turn or to kill him before his time.

All he had to do was look and see if he'd need to use that last bullet he'd been saving for a rainy day. He peeled back the bandage with a hissed out exhale, praying that underneath all the pus the wound was somehow healing and knowing he was already a dead man.

Exactly half an hour later a single shot pierced the air and a body slumped to the ground, briefly still. Exactly five minutes later he got up and started to head for the front door, leaving blood and brains splattered on the wall behind.

Exactly three hours later he found his first victim.

Day 2,699

His smile dropped as his face began melting and churning and dread settled firmly in her stomach as she realised she'd been duped and the corpse in the hallway was the man she'd been waiting for. Hindsight was a beautiful and dreadful thing that now flooded her panicked mind with all the signs she'd wilfully missed in favour of a romantic evening.

Now she was in a strange man's apartment - no, a dead man's apartment - and whatever had killed him was casting off its human disguise which meant one of two things.

Either it was weak, it had overexerted itself maintaining the form of her former blind date and wasn't capable of staying human any longer.

Or...

It no longer needed to keep up a façade because she was to deep within the proverbial spider's web to do anything more than flutter her feeble wings and wait for the sting of teeth to her throat.

Backing away from the jerking, writhing form that had once been a reasonably attractive man, one she would have considered going on a second date with, she found her back meeting with a warm, tall surface. She looked up and up and up, craning her head right up to the ceiling to see her own face smiling down at her with far too many teeth.

She never even felt her neck snap, she simply blinked and fell.

Day 2,698

As grey ichor leaked sluggishly in place of tears, I found myself finally having to face the fact that he was gone. Weeks of ignoring the sickly-sweet scent of decay, the half-eaten rodents in the garbage and hoping I'd wake up one day to find him normal had all flown out the window.

He'd been different ever since he came back from that bachelor party/camping trip thing, they'd all come back a little quieter and a lot hungrier. We chalked it up to them not having packed enough food to last the trip but instead of settling back into normality they only grew stranger.

Seeing him cry, if I can even call it that when his body can't make tears any more, was when it really hit me that something bad had happened to the man I love. He can't even remember what it was - none of them can - but now they're all becoming the same kind of greyish, carnivorous creature.

We finally sat down and talked about it last night, coming up with plans for worst-case scenarios that I never wanted to consider. We've got plans for what to tell people if he and the others ever just up and vanish, plans for how to stop him if he tried to attack and eat me, plans for how to kill him and not go to prison for it.

He's so sweet to still be thinking about my safety and my freedom.

That's why I'm taking a small trip today, along with the few partners of his friends who won't give up either.

We're heading out to the woods and we're not coming back until we're all the same as them.

Day 2,697

As the sky boiled and writhed, they each prayed that they would die first.

It had been building up to this for years, countless tiny oddities and unusual weather patterns culminating in colossal ruptures all across the skies as the world fell to forces beyond its understanding. Bleeding, burning sky aside, each rupture was teeming with nigh indescribable creatures that frothed and howled at each other, fighting for a chance to reach into our world and snatch whatever life they could to cram inside their multitudinous maws.

Their bodies seemed as tempestuous and roiling as the miasma that flowed out from the ruptures, choking anything that couldn't run from it. With every blink of their terrified eyes, the few human survivors saw the creatures warp and distort and reform until they seemingly found an agreement and began to coalesce into something far larger, far less solid and full of teeth.

With a sound like sheet of gelatine being torn, the ruptures merged and the sky finally fell.

Day 2,696

It was listed as abandoned with unknown belongings inside, some inheritance argument that became too complicated and too expensive to continue so all partied left it to rot. And here they were some nineteen years later seeing what they could salvage, sell or scrap while they made plans to demolish the building itself. Condos were far more in style than eyesore old mansionettes.

Their locksmith was damned good at his job and let them in with scarcely a five minute wait. He peered around the hallway first before letting them pass through, hurriedly declining their request to follow in case there were more locked doors. He rattled off an excuse before driving away so fast his tyres scorched the road.

Neither of them could see what had caused the locksmith to flee at that point - speed is the nature of such things, speed and silence and eerily translucent skin. This they would find out in due time. Before that they had a list of rooms provided by the company, all detailed from the original blueprints, and a list of especially valuable items to keep an eye out for.

The hallway was as dusty and lifeless as the dining room and the primary kitchen and the secondary kitchen and the under-stair storage. All full of worthless household objects, all full of air so stale it left a fuzzy feeling on their tongues as they tried to keep going.

When they entered the lounge, the atmosphere seemed to change as if they'd just walked into the sightline of something very large and very hungry yet all they could see was a couple of worn sofas and an old TV set. The air seemed warmer and wetter here, condensation lightly settling on every surface and running down the old screen that showed them both and something flickering beside them.

The TV burst into life, static shrieking throughout the room til a child's voice cut it off.

Wait            something's    not                    right

Neither noticed translucent skin peeling itself away from the wall just beside them.

Neither would live long enough to name it.

Day 2,695

It was so dark that it took me a while to realise that the figure staggering towards us barely had a face and that the shirt they were wearing wasn't just red, it was covered in blood. Honestly I thought it was a miracle that they were even alive but now I know better than to consider the undeath anything other than a curse.

I hailed a taxi and drove them to the hospital, thinking they'd been attacked and praying they'd recover. In hindsight I should have finished the job myself and saved us eight years of desperately trying to survive against that which has already died.

I like to blame the poor lighting for my decision but I know that nobody really believes me and I don't blame them for hating me. If I'd just walked away the undeath might have just staggered out into a road and been further crushed, we might have carried on our normal lives.

It's hard to say whether they think I'm just a stupid would-be-Samaritan or an unwitting mass-murderer. Either way I keep my doors unlocked and I keep windows open just a crack, just enough that if anyone gets a vengeful thought in their head and wants to act on it or an undead walks in -  they can.

It's the least I can do.

Day 2,694

It ascended and his spine was the ladder it chose, vertebrae crushed beneath its claws and skin rippling as it reached his ribcage and the arrhythmic fluctuations of his terrified heart. No sound left his open mouth save for a soft exhale as one of its tendrils extended to pierce through his spinal chord, intent on reaching the cerebellum.

He collapsed like a puppet with cut strings, eyes still frantically looking around for help, arms and legs twitching frantically as it made itself comfortable and began to methodically split and expand its singular tendril til his brain was so heavily entwined with it that only death could separate them again.

As his body stopped moving and his heart slowed down with the help of a mild toxin the creature helpfully secreted into his bloodstream, he was finally able to sit upright. As his head moved he found that he felt like he was both himself and the creature and that it was also both itself and him.

And they had a new purpose.

Ignoring the way the skin along his back seemed to expand and contract with the breathing of another being, he was able to head home like nothing had ever happened. If he made a brief stop to an unmarked brown box half-buried in the woods and brought gifts back for his family then that was his business.

Day 3,693

Death truly becomes some people. My wife died about five days ago but she hasn't left me yet. She moves stiffly, joints not working like they had when her blood still ran but she never lets it hinder her from living her best lift. She was always a trooper like that. It's enough that sometimes I forget she ever died at all.

Even the maggots that fell from her mouth as she tossed her head and laughed were more like confetti or fireflies fluttering around her beautiful rotting visage, lured in just as I still was. Moths drawn to the dying flame that had once been the love of my life.

I don't know what she is any more. I still love her, she's still the same person I think but she should be dead and any time I try to broach the subject she just laughs and tells me she's the same as she's always been and it must have been a bad dream.

The maggots writhing beneath her skin and the flies crawling in and out of her ears tell a different story.

Day 2,692

Places like this were designed to be dimensional boundaries, if the stories are to be believed. A liminal nothingness full of dead ends, sharp drops and rooms just unnatural enough to turn your own mind against you and every flickering shadow that may or may not actually be there.

If you ask me what I believe then I'd say I believe we've been followed since we fell down here... but I like to think that I could be wrong. I like to think it's the predatory nature of the minds behind these labyrinths and the ways in which they demand trespassers like us suffer before we find the exit.

I know all the rooms look identical and the vast straw-yellow walls with soft brown carpeted floors seem like they'll never end but stopping is exactly what the architects wanted us to do. Stopping and giving up is as good as slitting our own throats and calling it a day.

I know it sounded like someone just threw something heavy and metal but it's far away enough that we'd hear them running before they can get to us. Just keep looking back and around, never leave a blind spot and keep moving forwards, or as forwards as you can.

I know it feels like we're only going down but we're still heading in the right direction - trust me. We'll hit a new area sooner or later and from there we'll find a way out. We might even find a window we can break and arm ourselves with the glass.

It'll be soon now, just a few more rooms and it'll change.

It'll all change.

Day 2,691

He soon found himself standing at a precipice - before him the endless night trapped within the forest and the promise he would be changed by it, behind him a house he could never call home again and a familiar warmth that would lull him into a complacency akin to that of a frog in slowly boiling water.

The baying laughter of the hounds was drawing in from all sides, warning that he would have to make his choice soon or all choice would be taken from him in a single and final bite of their wretchedly sharp teeth. Though he hadn't managed to live the life he'd always wanted he knew he could at least avoid this death.

All that remained was to ask himself whether he was ready to face the forest and the changes it would put his body and soul through, whether he would be able to withstand the pain and come back stronger than the hounds or if he would succumb and be consumed by them regardless. 

All that remained was to ask himself whether he would rather fall back into complacency and trudge through this existence after glimpsing the possibility of becoming so much more than the dreary human he'd always been. Would he ever feel normal again if he returned or would madness take him first?

He stared at both futures as the hounds howled with glee beside him and he leapt.

Da 2,690

She stood there, half in the shadows and smirking as he slowly bled to death. All his life he'd seen her in the corners of rooms and just outside of the streetlights, always too shaded to see but now he could see more of her than ever before, finding familial traits in her eerily ageless face.

His mother's eyes, uncle's dimples and grandfather's nose all so clearly present but damned if he could put a name to the face of the woman who'd haunted him his whole life. Not that it mattered as he realised how little of his body he could feel, how cold the room was and how far away she now seemed to be.

With a few more slow blinks, a sigh full of blood and a gentle slump, he was gone. He was gone and yet he was standing over himself, watching as the woman finally stepped fully out of the shadows and into the dying light of the fire he'd lit barely an hour earlier.

He noticed how unnatural all the faint wrinkles on her face looked just before the skin split completely, all humanity fleeing as her throat expanded, body twisted and hunkered down at his feet. One of her eyes seemed to stare at him while the other stared at his body for a few seconds.

In that moment he realised that he would be declared missing rather than dead - just like his mother, his uncle and his grandfather all before him - as the woman gently pulled his feet into her mouth, slowly but surely swallowing him whole before reassembling her face - now with his smile - and slipped back into the shadows for good.

Day 2,689

She thought it was a group of children playing in the bushes at first, until they stood up to reveal that all their faces were almost swimming across the flesh-like mass that tried to mimic the way she stood, failing miserably under its own unstable weight.

The cold didn't seem to effect in the slightest as it propped itself up enough to leap out at her, scattering snow and branches in a flurry of movement while she turned and fled, ever-mindful of the ice beneath her feet, ever-mindful that the safest place to be was probably the lake.

The deputy lived right on the shoreline and even if he wasn't at home, she could still hide out there and call for help. At least, she hoped she could. They tore through the frozen forest, one gasping for air while the cluster of others laughed and chattered to themselves, seemingly enjoying the pursuit.

As the trees thinned out and the barely-trod snow turned to well-worn muddy paths she knew she was close to safety. Within minutes she was running round the side of the house, nearly tripping over the bloodied and broken remains of the deputy, half dragged out the door and long gone by now.

She had no time to act as the cluster came hurtling down the dirt path after her so she chose to take matters into her own hands. She chose to run out onto the ice, hoping it would hold and not caring if it didn't - dying of her own accord was likely a kinder death than the poor deputy had faced.

The ice crackled and shook beneath her as the cluster followed and with a thunderous crack she fell.

The faces above the ice clustered around her, mocking her as as everything faded to black.

Day 2,688

As the floodwaters receded we found so much more than the missing ones - we also found what killed them.

Most of the bones tangled up in the mud and general debris leftover from the flood were human. Most were enough for us to identify them and return as much as we could to their families for burial. Most of them were human... but plenty were not.

At first we thought we'd found a new species of fish or river dolphin or mid-sized whale and then our guesses ran out when we found the first skull whose jagged jaw was still locked around a partially crushed human skull. In that moment we had more answers to more questions than we'd ever anticipated from a basic post flood clean-up.

The one that burned brightest, the one we never wanted to answer was what if there are more down there.

Day 2,687

They held their collective breathe as the herd passed them by, eerily silent save for the sound of their broken hooves against well-worn tarmac. Help was several hours away, this they were painfully aware of as flurries of texts were sent between the three homes, each separated by a few metres and a neatly trimmed hedge. Each praying they were quiet enough to let the herd pass in relative peace.

The world around them was old farming land and the herd had already made sure they were the only moving life out there, slaughtering the handful of cattle too slow or too stubborn for the barn. It would be hell to clean up afterwards, though blood does help the grass grow.

The putrid ichor that seeped through the fur of the herd in place of sweat would stain the land for decades.

Day 2,686

The phone closest to her rang, shattering the silence as the hovering figure slowly swung back around.

This was never supposed to happen - the forums all said the building had no power and no occupants but right from the start she felt like she was being watched. The figure had likely been following her since she climbed through the ground floor window, floating silently behind her save for the occasional drip of blood falling from the poor creature it clutched in its gnarled hands.

It might have been a rat or a squirrel, could even have been a cat for all she knew. Poor thing was so twisted and broken it just looked like a scrap of fur with half a small skull peeking out from between its fingers. Judging by the state of its clothing, this was hardly the first thing it had caught and it wouldn't be the last.

She only spotted it in a broken mirror halfway up the stairs, with it being almost opposite her on the flight just below with what little head it had peeping over the bannister. It didn't have any eyes, or much of a face in general, more a clump of flesh on top of a crooked neck which hung in a way that reminded her of a deflating balloon.

She thought she'd been doing so well, so clever to loop around it in an upstairs ballroom and head through the old reception to find the window she'd entered through again. What she hadn't expected was for someone several dozen miles away to flick one old switch out of curiosity and reconnect the power.

The phone closest to her rang, shattering the silence as the hovering figure slowly swung back around.

She was cornered with freedom one doorway away.

Day 2,685

As the lights shut off one-by-one and the sounds of children screaming grew louder, he knew he never should have come back. The reunion email should have set off alarms but all he saw was the promise of free alcohol and the chance to see the handful of people he'd cared about in school some twenty years ago.

Now as he found himself crouching behind the buffet table with a handful of surviving former classmates, peering through the upturned chocolate fountain at the carnage that had almost finished hauling itself up from beneath the gym's flooring, he wished he was anywhere else.

Anyone it touched seemed to collapse like a puppet with cut strings, immediately surrendering and folding into the mass of crying children that was steadily running out of victims. He'd never been much of a leader, or much of anything really, but before he could stop the words running he'd already told the others to follow him as they headed below the bleachers and down the janitor's tunnels.

Day 2,684

Hotels have always been a kind of liminal space so when she opened the slightly scuffed wardrobe and found a series of seemingly endless hallways, it felt about right. In the distance she could hear water and wondered if the hotel was hiding a swimming pool.

To the mind of a young child, few things seem impossible so as she happily strolled through identical hallway after identical hallway after vast empty room, she never found it strange how so much could fit into such a mid-sized hotel to begin with.

Every turn she took brought her closer and further from the sound of rushing water, seemingly at random. At times she began to feel frustrated enough to want to turn back but, as if the building could read her mind, some small new thing would be just around the corner - a bag of sweets or a cold drink - and she'd be right back on her quest.

A child's mind is an easily fooled thing thinking that empty air is food, believing whatever it needs to believe until all that's left is a half-starved shell still crawling towards the ever-enticing sound of water, still clinging onto a fantasy that never was.

And in those final minutes of life, the belief fades away and she sees the wardrobe her mother locked her in.

Day 2,683

We've been here a while now, me and the other man. He's already wasted his breath on apologies and now we just sit in our crumpled cars waiting for someone to realise we're still down here. You'd think skid marks and a broken railing would be enough of a giveaway but so far it's just us.

It's getting to the point where I feel like I've forgiven him for not noticing the black ice and skidding right into me, sending us both careening off the edge to our respective slow and brutal deaths. Lucky asshole died first from a tree branch at just the right angle to pierce the windscreen and his skull. I was left a few feet away, screaming for help til I passed out and woke up a ghost.

I keep saying we should try and stand on the road like those old stories about women in white gowns scaring drivers but he says something about the road doesn't feel safe anymore. I haven't forgiven him enough to trust a damned thing out of his mouth so  I take it upon myself to head up to the road and stir up attention - see if a decent burial will set us free.

Now that I'm up here I'm frozen, staring at every car that passes through me and feeling like every time it happens something is taken away from me. Maybe I had a family before I started driving up here. Maybe I was on my way home. Maybe there's nobody waiting for me at all.

Maybe this next car will finally be the end of me.

Day 2,682

When she came home from the funeral she found them sitting by the fireplace, warming their blueish grey hands as if warmth would reach them in death. For all she knew they could feel but something about the almost robotic motions they made suggested this was all an act, a way to self-comfort, rather than necessity.

She didn't say a word, nor did they. What could she even say to the children she'd only just buried that she hadn't already said at their dying bedside or their funeral? What comfort could she offer them other than the cold embrace of the graves she spent so long picking, making sure there would be flowers to soothe their souls and plenty of birds to sing them to sleep.

They say that anger is grief trying to rationalise itself and when she managed to make it to the kitchen, she realised she'd been grinding her teeth and trembling the whole time. How dare they come back after all she'd done to ensure they'd have peace. How dare they rob her of her time to mourn.

How dare they how dare they how dare they how dare they how dare they how dare they

As she snapped on her heel, storming towards the living room and the fireplace they'd been huddled around all she saw was a single bloodstained glove and a few small, snowy footprints leading back outside. Her breath came in staggered gasps as she tried to make it all make sense.

In the end she settled for tossing the glove on the fireplace and left for the graveyard, knife back in hand.

Day 2,681

The lighthouse in the distance flickered like the old tapes his grandmother played on her projector, twitching in and out of reality like a child playing with a lightswitch. Every time it came back it seemed to alter a little, gradually twisting into some deformed mockery of a building.

Parts of it jutted out like broken teeth lodged in an apple while others seemed to pulse in place as if something living was merging with brick and mortar. All he knew was that his children had gone inside and they might still be alive if he could find a way to cross the broken rocks and raging ocean where the road had been before all this chaos has begun.

Pulling his daughter's telescope from his pocket, he tried to catch a glimpse of something - anything - that would suggest he wasn't too late to save them. Every window was full of pale hands frantically beating at the glass but none of them were his children.

The figures running around the blaring light at the top weren't even human.

And so he had to concede, either they were dead, trapped inside or they'd now changed beyond his recognition.

And in that moment it was hard to say which felt like a worse fate.

Day 2,680

I've driven past the same dead deer five times now and with every pass it moves a little closer, becomes little more upright. Its head follows me like I was the one who ran it over and not the one who swerved out of the way as its fawn staggered out into the road.

Maybe if I'd stopped to chase it and hand it over to one of those wildlife rehab places I wouldn't be under whatever kind of curse this is. I swear if the next corner takes me right back to the start of this damned loop I'll get out and finish the damned deer off myself.

The next corner led straight into a tunnel that had never existed in the otherwise flat forest landscape and after it felt like the tunnel might never end they found themselves driving behind the same car that started this all by hitting whatever demon had been hiding within that deer.

They did what they felt would free them and rear-ended the other car, causing it to crash into a tree.

They woke up behind a smouldering wheel.

Day 2,679

The sky was a cluster of rundown apartment towers and she was up to her knees in ice-cold water, staring helplessly as the world began to fold in on her. As time-worn concrete came rushing towards her she managed to throw her hands over her head as if it would protect her from several thousand tonnes of building, cold air rushing towards her as she

did not die.

Breath shuddering though her lungs, she glanced around to find that a broken window had been her saving grace, jagged glass inches away from her bare legs. The room she was now encased within was empty and seeing it from this sideways perspective was unimaginably surreal for her.

As if something had let go, she found she was able to move her legs, gingerly stepping onto the wall below the window and wondering if she might be able to climb her way to an apartment on the other side and escape from the tower entirely.

With the water below her churning and the faint sounds of something laughing echoing in her ears, she set off.

Day 2,678

He didn't know I could see all the dead women staring at us in his living room, but I think he felt them watching us while I tried to remember how to watch a movie like a normal person who definitely wasn't sitting next to a serial killer. Just a regular, normal date between me and him and the seventeen dead women glaring at him.

There's no possible way I could have asked him about them without risking my own life so I kept my cool, said I'd text him and the I, pardon the pun, ghosted him. Luckily for me he never went to my house and had no idea where I lived - with any luck he never would.

Sometimes I'll see people with the odd soul following them from an unjust death - I'm followed by a goldfish I buried when I was six. Thought it was dead and it was not, poor thing suffocated so now most of my dreams are of bitterly dry air and crumpled shoeboxes.

I dread to think what kind of nightmares seventeen people would give you but he didn't seen to be affected by them at all... not sure if that made it better or worse to be quite honest. All I can say for certain was that I dodged one hell of a bullet and somebody sent an anonymous tip to the police to check out his back garden under his expensive planters. Unsurprisingly they were all there.

I swear one of these days I'll have a nice, normal date.

Day 2,677

She's at the window again, same as she always is in the evenings, only this time her arms and legs are covered in unblinking eyes. She doesn't blink either but that's hardly new - I don't even think she has eyelids at this point. She still has no tongue or lower jaw though, apparently a fox got to her before her body had been found.

She started appearing around a month after my friend begged me to lie to the cops for him and say he was with me all night and definitely not hitting someone with his car. His car must have been stolen cause I definitely remember picking him up and driving him to my place.

In my defence he never told me he'd hit someone, he just said he'd had a few too many drinks and crashed the car. She was younger than us, maybe a year or two younger than my own sister and a cyclist found her pinned to a tree by his car. Stone cold dead, arm outstretched for her phone which was halfway through the windscreen.

Now she stands outside my window every night, silently begging me to tell the truth.

Day 2,676

She woke up with a scream dying on her lips as the remembered where she was.

The faint dripping in the background wasn't the blood from her fiancé's slit throat hitting their bathroom tiles, it was only water falling from a leaking pipe. The sharp, cold ache in her bones wasn't from knives sticking out like a mockery of angel's wings, it was only the water seeping through her torn jacket and leeching what little warmth she had.

The snarling chanting in the distance remained the same.

On one hand it meant the bastards who'd slaughtered her family hadn't found her yet.

On the other hand, if they'd picked up the chanting again then they likely reckoned they had her cornered.

Rolling to her sore feet, she hobbled towards the pallets she'd stacked against her escape route, sliding them out of the way as quietly as possible, creeping into the tunnel and sliding the pallets back behind her. With every pained groan she supressed, every half-shuffled step that felt a little too loud, she prayed they were too far away to hear her.

Dau 2,675

His faint voice carried through the blizzard, begging me to follow him, while the lifeless eyes of his corpse stared up at me a few feet away. The snow had covered up any trace of what had killed him, only that it had tried to hide the body in a rush, fleeing as it fell to the ground.

It was that sudden flicker of colour in the stark white of the blizzard that had caught my attention and now something with his voice wanted to draw me away. Whether it wanted me dead or was trying to lure me away from whatever had killed him, I couldn't possibly say.

I did the most cowardly thing possible and ran back to the storage shed we'd previously been hiding in and curled up under a pile of tanned leather, begging and praying that I hadn't been seen and I'd survive until the storm cleared enough for me to run back to town for help.

As luck would have it, help found me instead - He found me instead.

Day 2,674

She'd been impaled from below, the angle of the branch jutting through her torso and the blood splattered on her dress made that clear. Unfortunately she was still moving, well, she was screaming and frantically writhing in place as if that would free her. It was a good attempt.

Not nearly enough to free her from the lake's tooth though, not that she'd known what it was when she went swimming... not that any of us thought that anyone would be daft enough to swim there. If we'd had the slightest inkling that she was about to do something so lethal we would have said something - honestly we would.

Thing is, nobody swims out in the lake's mouth - it's called The Lake's Mouth for god's sake. If that and the dozens of "Do Not Swim" signs aren't enough of a giveaway that there's something unnatural and hungry beneath the water then I don't know what else to do.

I mean when a tooth snares you there's nothing else anyone can do save for putting you out of your misery. I'd hate to be the one to do it, not when the lake seeps into my dreams to rage against me stealing its prey, begging and persuading me to take their place as recompense.

So this time I just watched from the safety or the shoreline as she slowly passed away into the silent water.

Day 2,673

The water was so dark that the windows showed our terrified expressions clear as mirrors while the train carried on as if the bridge hadn't collapsed and sent us all down the the bottom of the river, as if nothing had ever happened.

We didn't dare go near the doors in case the water finally broke through and sucked us all out to a certain death. We just sat in our seats, numb and staring at the faint shapes drifting passed that looked more and more human as minutes turned to hours with no end to the river in sight.

At some point the train began to turn, heading deeper and deeper, quickly going far beyond the deepest recorded point of the river to some new unknown depth. As our ears all began to pop against the pressure of these newfound depths the first person broke into frantic screams.

We all soon followed, howling and weeping and begging to wake up again.

It felt like hours passed us by in this state but for all we knew it could have been days.

Eventually we did calm down again, one-by-one returning our numb gazes to the windows, seeing only our grief-wrecked faces staring back and the faint shapes of other lost souls in the distance. They swam freely as if they were mocking us but none of us want to leave.

Leaving means accepting and we do not accept this death.

So the train carries on unseen tracks.

So we stare at our own reflections.

So in a way, we all live on.

Day 2,672

I've been having the dream ever since my friends and me slipped through the broken boards and into Tunnel Street. It had been blocked off for as long as we could remember, thick oak slabs cutting off the road and dense layers of barbed wire for what they couldn't be bothered to board up.

Nothing had ever seemed so tempting to us, so full of unpromised potential for hanging out and not getting caught. We all walked down the same street, seeing the same boarded windows, same locked doors and of course, we all saw the tunnel.

So why am I the only one having this dream?

I wake up and find myself at the top of the tunnel, only it's well-lit and there's a queue of people slowly climbing up rebar that's been roughly jammed into the rock to form a ladder. I have a gun and I shoot at the rebar to knock it out so they stay trapped down there.

And they aren't alone.

They scream and cry out in fear as these rat-like creatures swarm around them, dragging them back down the tunnel and out of my line of sight. A few of them linger by the rungs as if they're tempted to try and escape as well but others call them away.

I get the feeling that this has happened before and then I wake up.

My friends keep nagging me to go down there and join them, hanging out in the cavern above the tunnel to smoke and avoid the world. Something in the back of my mind says that if  go there, I'll end up reliving my dreams every night.

Only it won't be the faces of strangers, it'll be my friends.

Day 2,671

Him being dead wasn't the problem... him sitting in the middle of the congregation like he had when he was alive was far more of a concern. If our dear preacher hadn't stuttered and clutched at his heart like he was having an attack then we might have sat for the whole sermon ignorant of the dead man in our midst.

We'd all seen him wandering about for the last couple of weeks, going about his normal routes like we hadn't given him a pauper's burial and left flowers over his simple gravestone. I know the lone relation of his wasn't nearly as concerned as he ought to have been and I know these are connected somehow.

If either of the buggers was easier to pin down I'd have my answers by now but instead I catch glimpses of them both wandering in their respective distances, going about their respective days like nobody'd died or returned. It's infuriating beyond belief at this point and the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back was a dead man sitting on a pew he hadn't touched a day in his life.

He stood up when it became clear that the preacher was too shocked to continue and asked which of us had buried him. The few who'd done the kindness raised their hands and the dead man called them all his would-be murderers, his attempted killers who'd seen him asleep and thrown him in a grave without even trying to wake him first.

He'd woken up half-starved of air, clawed his way to the surface and set the ground back down before resuming his normal route, waiting for guilt to eat his killers alive and finding us uncaring as the dirt he'd nearly died in. He said he now found himself surrounded by all the devils hell seen fit to reject.

With that last damning sentence he walked out of the church, out of our town to never be seen again.

Whether he's dead or alive again, I do wish him well.

Day 2,670

We told them to take the path across the fields, making sure the train tracks were always on their left and making sure they never spoke to the people-shaped things that lived under the iron sleepers. You see, the ground beneath the tracks is hollow, just drops down dark as a tar pit and full of twice as many bones.

Lord knows what our ancestors made of those endless trenches but replacing the old iron stakes that stuck out like broken teeth in the hills was out solution. Iron hurtling over iron has kept the things down there awfully quiet and made us complacent enough to not realise that they'd been digging right under our feet.

Now we line our floors and windows with iron, carry nails in our pockets and between our teeth to ward the bastards off. Out-of-towners don't catch the memo til their cars are halfway down those cursed burrows and they're just as stranded as we all are.

So we do what we can.

We send them following the train tracks with nails clutched like a crucifix.

We try not to notice all the new scarecrows we'll see in the morning and the nails placed at our doorsteps.