Say 2,789

I never saw where the body ended up, only that their blood tainted the town's water supply for a good few months after their disappearance. I never saw exactly what killed them, only that it wasn't even remotely human and likely hadn't been human for a very long time.

I never clearly saw what happened that night but I was there when they were killed by something my eyes refused to recognise. I suppose in a way my mind was trying to protect me and in doing so left me without answers to all the questions the police insisted on asking me.

They think it was me that lured them out there, killed them and hid their body but they can't find any motive. They won't find any motive - their killer is beyond such human things as reason and I doubt that any of the 'brave' officers would stand a snowball's chance in hell against it.

Lord knows they'll find out soon enough of the keep digging. 

Dayy 2,788

The bird had taken far too long to catch but you needed the read its entrails to help you figure out your next move. In all the years since the oceans had fled and returned in a series of cataclysmic tsunamis that all but wiped the world clean, entrails had always led you to food, shelter and safety.

Birds were becoming scarcer in the last few months, whether that was due to you having sailed too far from what little land was left or if they were simply dying out as well, was hard to say. All you knew was that you needed them and they were somehow aware of your ill intent.

This latest one seemed to spite you and want to make things difficult, even in death. Its blood ran towards the horizon but the guts themselves pointed back to where you came from, where you'd been running from ever since your last group had all turned on each other and indulged in cannibalism.

Perhaps they were all dead and there was nobody left to chase after you.

Perhaps you needed to follow the blood and keep on never looking back.

Perhaps you were meant to follow neither and simply die as you were.

The setting sun decided for you as you bunkered down for the night and tethered the boat to the edge of an old rollercoaster. Tomorrow you would see where the blood and entrails chose and if they couldn't choose by then, you'd just have to find another bird and try again.

Day 2,787

There were five of us originally, now there's just me and the skeletal remains of the other four hunting me down to complete the set. I don't understand how they're still chasing me when I threw the bloody amulet into the sea,I don't know how to stop them but I do know they can't swim.

That's the only thing keeping me safe at the moment.

Ever since a near-death experience in Cairo eight months ago, I've been living from a boat a few miles offshore. It's not so bad but it's lonely and I keep hearing the other's voices echoing from somewhere beneath the ship, trying to convince me to meet them at the docks and finish what was started.

Seems the amulet is following me, and it'll only be a matter of time before it meets my hands again.

Day 2,786

It was a fragment of something much greater, appearing as the broken-off hand of a statue to human eyes and by all accounts it was a perfectly ordinary object. Ordinary to the point of all but vanishing to most eyes.

And to a scant few, it was a god.

It was a guide, a hand that led them down long dark tunnels and through pitch black lakes that had been stagnant since before the continents split. It needed their legs, their lungs, their blood all bared and spilling over an altar as old as the world itself.

If there were any markings on it, they'd been worn to nothing by the devoted hands of a hundred thousand chosen, all nothing more than bones now. Bones somewhere deeper than bones had any right to be.

Bones that ached to hold the hand once more. 

Day 2,785

Hair flowed from the neckhole of the hung-up nightgown, thick and dark, tangled as a wild animal's pelt.  She could only gaze on in disbelief as more and more hair spilled over the neckline and a withered head quietly rose up looking nonchalant, like nothing was wrong at all.

She held her gaze steady as its eyes, dry and withered as the rest of its face, glanced about the room before landing on her huddled form. They held eye contact for what felt like hours as more and more of its body extended from within the nightgown.

Arms ending in branch-like clusters of claw-tipped hands swung from the delicate lace of the sleeves as a thick, bulbous torso slowly fell to the floor. It reminded her of a worm almost, or a slug made from pig's meat - all blotchy red and sweaty as if holding its body inside the flimsy nightgown had exhausted it.

She hoped it was exhausted but the way its eyes were locked onto the pulse in her throat suggested otherwise.

Day 2,784

It only came outside once we'd killed the giant it had lived within for all these centuries, this friendsome creature that gave itself a name and called itself our friend up until the point where we trusted it freely enough to not raise a fuss when it began to pick us off one-by-wretched-one.

It even gave us something new to blame - a creature we'd not been able to catch by sight or trap. It said this creature had also come from the giant and was an evil mimicry of our friend, one that it fought every spare second it spent away from us.

And, fools that we were, we believed it. We believed it right up until a handful of parishioners arrived a little too early to church and saw our alleged friend swallowing the Vicar down like a snake. They ran screaming and the alleged friend hasn't been since.

But it's still out there.

People are still going missing.

If I'm being honest with myself, not a one of us stands a chance if we continue to stay.

Day 2,783

It's been calling out to me from the fields for weeks now, begging me in every voice it tore from my dreams.

Begging me to step outside and face it - face them - one last time. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm no coward and I'm not afraid to face the people I've killed but that thing isn't a person - I don't know what it's capable of and it seems to be very aware of what I'm capable of. I never go into a fight without knowing what my chances of winning are and this feels like it'd be the end of me.

I have to stay alive, I have to keep removing these things hiding in the husks of long dead people before they can make husks of everyone around them. I suppose it's technically not killing if they're already dead but I don't especially fancy discussing the semantics with the less-then-thrilled authorities.

Not that I can even reach out to any at the moment - whatever's out there is jamming the signals.

I'm alone with it and it's alone with me, asking me to accept death.

Day 2,782

By the time the city had finally fallen silent they were the only ones left alive, surrounded by broken buildings and broken bodies piled all around their bunker doors like a cat leaving grotesque half-eaten things as gifts to the greater beings that reside with it.

Much like a cat leaving a gift, this was a message.

They hadn't so much survived as they'd managed to amuse the chaos enough to live a little while longer. As long as they kept the unseen eyes interested in their continued existence but not so interested that they felt the need to make themselves known like they had when they ended the rest of the world.

Cautiously stepping over concrete and corpses, the last humans headed outside again.

Day 2,781

As the knots and whorls in the wooden doorframe began to form faces and as those faces began to scream and beg him to leave, he realised he was in deeper trouble than he'd previously thought. The house had seemed so perfectly vacant, with the owners having left for a vacation some two days ago towing suitcases that suggested they'd be gone for a couple weeks at least.

It had seemed like the perfect time to make a move and come out several hundred, if not a thousand, pounds richer in the process. It had seemed so perfectly normal, a little eerie with all the taxidermied mythological creatures but he assumed that rich people were quirky like that.

Then the doorframe had grown faces and screamed at him.

Turning towards the staircase behind, he caught sight of something worm-like and vast ducking back down, eyes meeting clusters of eyes for a heart stopping yet brief moment. The faces had fallen silent at the sight of the creature, as had he. Both hoping that it wasn't interested in pursuing this hunt and both knowing that it was already too late to run or hide.

Some small sliver of his mind that wasn't  quite as mad with hysteria recognised it from the hallway below.

Day 2,780

We didn't know the moon had died til it began to fall apart and send the tides, and our entire world, into chaos. It's hard to imagine that something we've stood upon is - was - a living, breathing thing much less once that we've brought back inorganic samples of, misrecognising the shell as simple rock and the cyanobacteria as a separate living organism rather than part of a complex and dying biology.

It must have been dying for longer than humanity had been around, long enough that our species had only ever seen it as a light in the sky, a possible meteor that had struck the world, killed the dinosaurs and gotten caught in orbit. Now we were faced with the irrefutable proof that creatures as large as it could happily eist in the harsh void of space.

Now we are faced with a world without tides.

A world where the sky is that much darker and lonelier.

A world slowly showered by the corpse of a long-dead giant.

Day 2,779

We watched it kill him in the light of the dim candle the letter told us to stay beside so that we might make it til morning. We heard him begging for help that we wouldn't run to fetch this time, we heard his throat tear open and heard his cries fade to wet coughs to silence.

Then it turned its gaze upon us, his blood running down its familiar face as we realised who had saved us - both in writing the letter and killing him. We held its gaze, quietly trying to convey our gratitude without drawo any further attention to our vulnerable selves.

With a hissed out snarl it leapt through the doorway.

In the morning it returned wearing its human face. 

And we fell back into mother's arms. 

Day 2,778

We were only playing, I remember telling the policeman who was trying his best not to cry with me while his colleagues began the search for the rest of my friend... his son. We thought we were all safe in the woods by the estate, we thought we could get away with a game of Manhunt before our parents got back, we thought it was safe.

The last time I saw my friend alive, he was running for river as a countdown was yelled out behind us. The half of him we found was bone dry though, not even any blood pooling around him. They never found the other half, not even after sending in divers all week.

We all said we didn't see what happened but one of us lied. She had to - nobody would believe her if she said he flew up into the air and just tore himself apart, his blood vanishing as soon as it left his little body. She only told us what she saw a few months later, when she had the words and had run out of tears.

All of us agreed to never tell another living soul and I would have kept that promise too. Only she went missing last week and only half of her was found, no blood and no sign of the other half just like that day. Her sister, who was with us that day as well, hasn't been seen for three days now but they're assuming she's out searching.

I'm sure they'll find her soon.

I'm even surer that I'll be next.

Day 2,777

The grey ground twisted and writhed as soon as the disinfectant hit it and the sticky pus-like sap hissed and burnt as the contamination was cured. It was sad to see a contamination quite as bad as this but such things were fast becoming the new norm since the burnings were halted over environmental concerns... as if the dirt turning to discoloured pulsing flesh was more acceptable than smoke.

In all fairness, the disinfectants worked almost as well only instead of making the ground utterly inhospitable to the contamination, it just staved off the worst of it. Disinfected areas became safer quicker than burnt ones and reduced a lot of property damage but the risk of the contamination passing onto more mammalian organisms tripled.

Something that nobody wanted to consider, of course. Grim possibilities are preferably kept as possibilities but if any of the researchers started showing up a little pallid and shaky, nothing was said nor were their sly biopsy results written down.

Whether the contagion was influencing them or they simply stopped caring about death, who can say.

But at the very end of it all they were guilty.

Guilty and dead as freshly burnt grass.

Day 2,776

Whatever had killed him either didn't, or couldn't eat the skin. It was animalistic enough to have killed him brutally and bathed the walls with his blood but intelligent enough to try and hide the actual evidence under the bed much like... like a child hiding candy wrappers.

Was she dealing with some child-monster?

Would that be better or worse than a full grown one?

One the one hand it was likely smaller than her and might be easier to kill but on the other hand could she find it in herself to kill a child? Even if the child was a killer itself, did she have the same ability to look a living being in the eyes and end their life?

She wouldn't have too long to ponder this moral quandary.

She never checked the rest of the room to make sure if was safe to enter.

And as the door shut and locked behind her, she'd never get the chance to check anything again.

Day 2,775

She bit back a scream as she realised the pale writhing things on the side of the bathtub weren't maggots, they were his toes. He'd clearly forgotten to dispose of them which now left her with a dilemma - throw them in the trash and hope he thought he'd done that, confront him and reassure him that she still loved him even if he was undead or run away and hope he never found her again.

All so tempting.

All so daunting.

All so busy flickering around her mind that she didn't even notice him creeping up behind her.

Day 2,774

Of all the places to be when the dead reanimated, a hospital was one of the worst. Easiest to hide in at least, every door locked and within a matter of minutes there was enough blood in the air to hide a living pulse behind thin plywood.

Lucky for the little pulse hiding amongst cleaning supplies, trying not to jump at every snarl and scream in the air, waiting as the sound of bare feet shuffling through viscera faded as the undead left in search of fresh prey. The little pulse was left alone.

The little pulse was hungry and cold and scared but none of these were enough to make it leave just yet. They fell asleep to the sound of sirens and crashing metal in the distance, tossing and turning enough to spill a few bottles in their sleep.

The little pulse woke up pulseless and starving, clouded eyes staring at nothing as clumsy bloated hands banged at the closet door.  They didn't tire and were repaid for their efforts as a taller little pulse opened the door and was met with their ravenous fate.

Day 2,773

It floated just beneath the surface of the lake, milk white eyes darting around as if it would see all the terrified cave divers crouching on the rocks a few feet away. Their stuttered breath fogged the air around them as the colossal creature scented the air with a forked tongue as grey as its gelatinous flesh.

It switched between drifting closer then further away, as if drawn by a tide or maybe just playing with its food. Seeing if it could outlast them or if they'd choose to throw one of their own down and sacrifice them for the survival of the group as a whole.

It's lower eyes crinkled as if it was smiling at them. It could smell their desperation and exhaustion growing.

They'd make their move soon and it would feast enough to sustain it til the next group came.

There was always a next group, curious to see if the legends of a cave monster were true.

Day 2,772

Our ancestors had locked the bunker behind them and forbidden all kin and descendants to ever open it again. We were never told why but as the air turned sour and the world around us started a new cycle of decay we had no choice but to try and return to its safety once more.

We only wanted to survive just like they had, we never could have imagined that some of them had never left. They refused to open the doors to us and claimed we were too tainted by the unclean outside to be let in, that we would jeopardise their survival for our own.

When we returned back to our settlement nearby, a vote was made to storm the bunker or leave it and die with dignity under the ashen sky. I voted for the latter but most others voted to storm the bunker, even if it meant killing our cousin folk and breaking our ancestor's promises - they were desperate to survive too.

I and a handful of others refused to join the storming party, choosing to setup dying grounds instead, to make our final days comfortable and joyful rather than risk it in bloodshed to obtain shelter in a place that might not even work once the storming was done.

It's been silent out there for several days now, no signs of life since the initial explosive breach.

Our handful is now only me and the smiling bodies of my kin.

I'll die with my eyes keeping watch for the others return.

Day 2,771

I kept trying not to put my finger on what was wrong with the room and just carry on cleaning it but you can only ignore wallpaper with teeth for so long before you start to panic. I just needed to finish hoovering the floor, dusting the shelves and take out the trash which would have been so much easier without the sound of grinding and snapping teeth whenever I got too close to a wall.

The damned stuff tried to bite the power cable to the hoover more times than I could count, not that I especially wanted to think about how strong a bite the teeth might have. It was made all the worse when I started dusting and found that somewhere between the rows of teeth was some nose equivalent.

In other words - the walls sneezed.

Sure it's kinda funny in hindsight but at the time I damned near abandoned the office and my job altogether. I wasn't being paid enough to deal with that level of oddity. Still, I opened the window, finished the dusting quick as I could and booked it out of there with the trash in hand.

I forgot to close the window but the client never mentioned it when I showed up in the morning to collect my pay, in fact they tried to arrange a weekly appointment to maintain their space. It was one of the few times that I've turned a job down but I just couldn't stop thinking about what would happen if I got caught by those teeth.

Day 2,770

They were the burnt and the everliving.

As much the product of a curse as they were a blessing.

One last remnant of our little town's unsavoury past. 

You'd drive past them in the summer, cranking your radio to drown out their screams but it never seemed to work much. Still, it felt better than the alternative or sitting in a hot and silent car while they hurl themselves past you in search of the river.

None of them can ever find it, whether that'd due to their burnt out eyes or their curse is hard to say but none of them have ever made it to the river in the three hundred years of their cursed existence. There's been many an attempt at herding them towards the river but it's an impossible task.

Truly, nothing's harder than trying not to catch the burning while you're driving a bunch of undead burning folks towards what might just be their salvation... or final damnation. Again, without ever having one of them touch the river we can't really say what would happen.

The rain doesn't affect them much, that much we do know. Sure it calms them down and makes the air around them all hazy but they still burn. They do whimper rather than scream which is... somehow worse than the screaming. When they whimper you start to make out what they've been trying to say all these years.

And it ain't pleasant things.

Day 2,769

They say there's a wild boar out in the woods that wants to be a human so badly that it has the face of a man. They say it even chose a human name and if you call it out the boar will head towards you. You've got to be careful that it doesn't see you though or it'll get struck with jealousy and run you down for being everything it isn't.

As far as campfire stories go, the Boarman was a good one for creeping out children and was great for teens to start chanting The Name til someone ran crying to the grownups and the rest of the evening became too supervised for more youthful cruelty.

Even I used to tell the story to the younger kids at family gatherings once a year. There always seemed to be a few new cousins who'd never heard of it before and it became a rite of passage to go out into the woods and chant The Name while the adults were too boozed out to notice us.

It changed this year when my cousin Jay came back from college crueller than we remembered. He said brought back a boarskin and said he was going to make this year truly unforgettable by wearing it and jumping out at the whichever of the young cousins dared to call out The Name.

We called him an ass and made him keep the skin in his truck. A few drinks down the line he must have snuck out with it and sure enough he leapt out at one of the kids who'd been ballsy enough to go out and say The Name. Howled up a storm when Jay ambushed him.

The kid's dad came staggering out of the gathering, rifle in hand and shot Jay stone cold down. He was so boozed out he didn't even know what he'd done til we dragged him back to the main group, crying and screaming that Jay was dead.

By the time any of the adults were sober enough to help, Jay's body was gone and a boarskin remained where he fell. It wasn't the one he'd been wearing either, this one was a different colour completely and far fresher. We knew what it was but none of us dared to say, claimed Jay ran away instead.

There's no gathering planned this year but sometimes I drive by that house, just to see if he's come back.

Day 2,768

It pushed and pushed and pushed until his eyes were finally freed from their sockets, quickly replaced by the parasites own as his were left to hang about his cheeks. If he were any less effected by the paralytic enzymes it had been slowly releasing over the week, he might have screamed.

Instead he stood swaying and quietly choking on the unnameable thing lodging itself in his eye sockets and pressing into his frontal lobe as it squirmed and settled down. By the time it seemed to give a final sigh before going still, the damage was irreparable.

Half his body felt weak but overall he felt calm, unsteady on his feet but ready to move wherever he felt the eyes pointing him. Maybe he could get close enough to somebody else and persuade it to jump ship to a more suitable host? Maybe he could learn to live with these new eyes.

Either way, he felt himself being drawn back to bed, eyes and viscera wetting the pillow beneath his head.

Day 2,767

He didn't mean to make eye contact with it but now with every blink of his sore watery eyes, it took a step closer. It was cradling something that was soaking wet, each droplet a resounding crash in the otherwise perfect silence of the night.

A part of him already knew exactly what was inside the small bundle it cradled, but he didn't dare speak or move in case it either vanished and took the bundle away for good or worse - seized him with it and disappeared them both away. His husband would be distraught and with no-one around to spill the truth he'd be painted as a runaway and a kidnapper.

But their child's life was so precariously safe as long as he kept it in eyesight til sunrise. He just had to stop blinking and not move, not so much as a twitch or gasp. He just had to pray that their child was washed and sleeping.

The thought of any alternative brought him closer to tears, closer to losing.

Day 2,766

The crops have turned to bones this year. It wouldn't be so bad if it was the odd bone crop but the whole field's turned. The barley is encased in a dense chitinous exoskeleton that we don't dare to try and cull before the harvest, knowing that beneath the soil their organs are still underdeveloped enough that we could risk it if we had enough backing.

Unfortunately last year a few dozen people partook in the bone harvest and whatever it's done to them has spread to the rest of their families as well, likely hidden in food during their many gatherings over the winter months. When it comes to voting in a cull against an outbreak of the bone harvest, we know they'll sway the vote against us.

In the long run it might not be too bad, we can always pay an out-of-towner bunch to burn the fields and set us back to ground zero in time for tilling the soil afresh and planting for next year. It's just the short-term we have to contend with and that's a good few miles worse.

You see, once the bone harvest's organs are ripe and ready, they uproot themselves and set a dozen fragmented seeds in their place before heading toward anything vaguely meaty. Could be birds, cattle or unawares people but once they've locked on and set their spurs upright, a man's as good as dead.

Day 2, 765

The thrum of the cargo train seemed to fill her chest as it thundered past, thickening the mist of rain that hadn't stopped for three weeks and soaking her further to the bone, not that she could feel it. She hadn't felt much for several days now and was trying not to think about it.

Nobody around her has noticed anything unusual but she knew they were dead as well, she'd just held out longer somehow. The more she thought about all their deaths, the less connected she felt to reality, the thinner the tether between her and her mundane existence seemed, the closer the swirling void seemed to be.

So it was better to take a deep (if unnecessary) breath and keep waiting for her train to arrive while remaining as alive as she could in her dull afterlife. The same breathing techniques that had managed her anxiety in life now maintained her current state better than most others.

She'd see them in the distance, gliding up into the miasmic chaos that had enveloped the sky around the same time that the rains came and the vast majority of the world immediately perished. Maybe she'd perished alongside them, after all she couldn't remember the last time she'd needed to eat or go food shopping.

She briefly wondered if the shops were still open, if people even bothered to go there without the old need to sustain a living form. As her train pulled in, already crammed with souls who were either continuing their daily journeys or simply existing within the space, she made a mental note to visit her local shops and see if there was anybody there.

Outside the train, the rains fell onto the sizzling remains of what used to live there.

And the uncaring world carried on.

Day 2,764

It was dark when I woke up and everyone else was dead. Aside from fresh bodies, there was no sign of the Cearcetung itself. I only survived by sheer luck of having found the safest place to sleep in the old storeroom and being a deep enough sleeper that the massacre hadn't so much as stirred me in the vent.

I had to move Mr Simmonds out of the way to get out again, mentally making a note to either roll him back or find something else to cover my entry point in case either the Cearcetung or its carrion fledglings came back to pick at their latest kill.

Unlikely as that was. They like their meat to be a little more grey than the poor folks who'd let me travel with them these past few weeks. If this had happened during the early days of the attacks I might have grieved but now they're all just more meat among rotting meat piles left all over the damned world.

I did as I usually did when I outlived a group - I took their supplies, checked that the coast was clear and headed out to the closest place a Cearcetung would hate to be. In this instance it was a partially sectioned-off bend in the river. The water was too deep for those creatures but plenty shallow for me to wade across.

So I spent their main active hours on a little inflatable raft while they tore about the shoreline trying to reach me with their unsettlingly long arms until they gave up and went back to their meat piles. A couple tried to camp by the river but my water pistol put them off enough that I had safe passage back to my vent.

Don't know how long I'll spend here but any night I live through is a night well spent.

2,763

In hindsight following the bloodied handprints that were smeared along the walls probably wasn't the best idea but it was the only sign of life I'd seen for weeks. I'd have settled for being chased by an Amalgam at that point but as the handprints were definitely human in appearance I assumed there was another survivor I could potentially help and befriend and not be so damned alone in this all.

I was wrong, but it was nice to hope for a little while.

It was decidedly less nice to have to navigate my way back out of the office block with a one-handed amalgam trying to hunt me down and rip me into whatever parts it felt it lacked. Luckily the handprints and blood trail were enough to bring me back to the ground level where I could sprint out into the streets and jump under a car til it passed me by.

In a way I'm glad that I followed it and found it because now I at least have something going on with my life.

Sure it's a tireless creature and an inevitable death but it's better than before.

A relentless enemy is still a kind of company.

Day 2,762

 It was the kind of place where if the walls started to weep blood, nobody would bat an eyelid. The kind of place you hope you'll only ever read about. The kind of place she found herself driving towards in the slim hope that someone or something in there might be able to get rid of the haint that had already killed her siblings.

They'd all been involved in the child's death but they were all children at the time, scarcely out of school and messing around a half frozen river with their friends. Nine of them had gone out to play and only eight returned with their missing friend returning to take them all back with him some twenty years later.

From what she could find in the brief moments of peaceful research she'd managed, his bones had been found. Instead of burying them the police had confiscated them as "evidence" and ever since, the kid's restless soul had gradually corrupted into a malicious haint that sought to bring all of the "witnesses" into death with him.

She wasn't the last one left, no there were still three others much closer to home than she was, but she was the only one who'd known about the haint and got out before he set his sights on her. Now she was heading to a godforsaken nightmare of a village known only as Gristlehill Upon Stour to find someone known only as Nana.

If the haint don't find her first, she might just survive this long enough to see his bones buried.

Day 2,761

Gnarled hands reached up from somewhere deep beneath the salvaged shipwreck, desperately trying to pull it back down again. They battled against the crane's grip, nearly tipping the rescue vessel past the point of recovery and only stopping when an old cannonball dislodged, colliding with a hand on its way back down to the depths.

Then and only then was the shipwreck let go, the gnarled hands resting just below the surface of the water, ready to snatch it back up if given the chance. The crew chose to proceed slowly and carefully, inching the shipwreck onto the vessel's specialised platform so they could at least recover some of the artefacts before releasing it back to whatever creature was patiently waiting for its return.

Beneath the water, a mother waited for her children to make their way back into her arms, their crib resting above the water and surrounded by unknowing food. If they wanted her children they she'd give them exactly what they deserved and have her arms full of happy fat little infants in no time.

Perhaps she'd take his new crib and leave the survivors with the old one.

After all, her children were growing so fast.

They were due for an upgrade.

Day 2,760

It may have been half flooded but it was safer than waiting for death to find them up on the surface. As long as they stayed relatively close to the water, they'd have somewhere to hide. The vulturesque creatures roaming the skies, and devouring any vaguely meat-thing in their way, couldn't swim.

Most people chose to hide in basements or on boats already and after months of re-boarding their windows and hiding underneath beds and broken furniture, most of the safest places were already taken so a closed-off subway station was as good as they were going to get.

They tried not to think about the bodies they'd passed on the way or the one they hauled out of the flooded tunnel to keep their sanctuary somewhat clean. The meat (it was better to think of it as meat and ignore the way their clouded eyes seemed to follow you around the room) would make a decent enough distraction if it ever came to it.

As sirens screamed through the near deafening sound of leathery wings beating against each other, they huddled by the stagnant water and hoped for the best, already knowing what the worst was. Already knowing that something had killed in this tunnel before and could easily do so again.

Already hearing it coming back.