Day 1,766

I met a god in the car park behind Stirchbourne Scrapyard, the bit by the fence that has all those little broken bits that the foxes use to get in and out of the forest. I'd just finished locking the place up and was heading to my bike when I met its eyes through the metal links.

They were damned big eyes to, attached to the largest stag I'd ever seen. At least, it was shaped mostly like a stag... with broken TV antennas for horns and gaping holes in its body where wires and pulsing meat showed through.

When it spoke, it spoke into my head like how your inner voice does only I had no control over what it was saying and it had an awful lot to say. It mainly wanted to talk about one of my colleagues, an older guy who was as slow to work as he was angry and he was damned slow.

The god wanted to know all about him, something about the guy had caught its interest and not in a good way... not with how it kept licking its lips and salivating like it was thinking about an  all expenses paid, all-you-can-eat buffet.

I'd never cared much for the lad so I sort of told the god where he lived, it also sort of walked through my memories like it was taking a stroll round the park on a Sunday so I don't think I had much of a choice, it at all. I just tried to forget about the meeting and cycled home as fast as I could.

Then the guy didn't show up for his shift the next day... or the day after that or the day after that and the day after that we heard he'd gone missing. Now I can't say for sure that it was the stag/god/thing but it's too coincidental.

It likes to wait for me now whenever I'm closing up all alone.

It has more names for me, more people it likes.

It still won't tell me what it does with them.

Day 1,765

The townsfolk have been reporting strange noises for a few months now. Around the same time as this, people go missing and their trails always lead out into the woods before vanishing entirely. It's like they get sucked up into another dimension or something.

And then it nearly happened to me.

I thought it was my friend at first - their face was unmistakably familiar to me, peering out over the top of the bushes at the end of my grandparent's garden. I answered their calls, not noticing how shiny their hair was, how it glistened in the evening sun like it was made of scales, and not noticing how their mouth wasn't moving right until they rose up.

Eight legs rose with them and a bulbous arachnoid head followed after, abdomen tilting about as my friend's voice continued to call out to me from behind twitching fangs that were easily as long as my forearm. It made no further movements, seemingly trying to entice me to walk towards it.

I'll admit I made a downright ungodly noise and let out a string of words that would have seen me grounded for weeks before I pegged it back to my grandparent's house and bolted all the windows and doors. The spider that wore my friend's head was somehow everywhere at once, tapping the glass with its skinny legs and asking me to come out and play.

Day 1,764

It started with dolphins getting caught in fishing nets, plastic straws in a turtle's nose and it gradually snowballed into uncleanable oil spills that engulfed entire oceans. Every beach looked volcanic and iridescent under a sun that only grew hotter every day.

Further inland people began waking up tangled in old shopping bags and food wrappers, trawler nets wrapped around their legs and cutting deep into their legs. It took mere hours before some influencer tried to call it fashion, badly editing the trail of blood they left behind in their latest daily vlog.

It grew worse as the days progressed, as food grew scarce and the rain came down blacker than coal. People were suffocating in their sleep - lungs full of plastic that was fresh from the factory, mould growing out of their eyes and mouths in thick green clumps, broken bed springs puncturing their backs.

This was the end of days and there would be no survivors, the world had given up fighting back and was now embracing every corrupted piece of the filth that humanity had spawned. Our creations were turning against us and not just driving us to the brink of extinction - they were shoving us headfirst into absolute oblivion.

Day 1,763

We are only lucid in the water, only clear headed when we are almost completely submerged. The second we set foot on land our minds become clouded and full of hunger, full of unquenchable thirst and we barely remember what we do until we are back in the water again.

It doesn't have to be a river or a pond - even an old mall fountain will do. That's where I've been for the past six years. I'm thirty miles out from the closest town and since the mall started sinking into the floodplains I've been able to roam about a bit.

There's nobody else here of course but the change in scenery is... nice. A few of the computers in the internet cafe still work, flooding and all, and fish have started making their home here too so I've got food and entertainment and things could be worse.

I've heard of others who tried to move upstream only to get caught up in mudslides or droughts or take the wrong underground stream and aren't ever seen again. An abandoned mall is certainly not the worst it could be but it doesn't compare to a nice townside river.

They have food and company and plenty of chances to bring more people down to the water to spend the rest of their lives. Sounds like heaven to me but even with the expanded floodplains I'm hundreds of miles from a decent townside river.

Soon as I set foot onto land my mind would be gone and I'd only remember flashes of eyes full of fear, blood painting every surface and the moist crunch a body makes when you slam their head to the ground one too many times.

Until a better plan comes along I'll stick to arranging drug deals in the car park outside.

No hits so far but someone will bite the bait.

We fishermen are patient if nothing else.

Day 1,762

I never mind lookout duty. I like to watch the infected roaming about and try to piece together what their lives were before they turned. Most of the time it's just guesswork but every now and then I'll see something that looks like someone I once knew or an obvious story pop up.

Like the other day when I saw an older woman and an child walking hand-in-hand, or rather their hands had been fused together with a thick crusty layer of the pus that oozes from every orifice on the infected. They were both dressed fairly well and somehow still wearing party hats.

I imagined their last day as that child's second birthday celebration  - one they had to move indoors once the sirens went off and one that ended abruptly when one child with a weird bruise on their arm and a snotty nose took a sharp turn for the worse and attacked everyone in sight.

The mum grabs her baby amidst all the chaos and they make a run for it but little does she know, the kid's already been infected. Not by a bite but by holding hands with the infected kid a while back. Germs and children are a deadly combination and one that exists right under our noses.

When mum finds out that her kid is infected she's heartbroken but ultimately decides to stay no matter what happens. She doesn't want her little boy left alone in the world and much as she doesn't want to lose herself to the infection she doesn't want to lose him even more.

As the symptoms hit and the boy starts to flail and writhe in agony she dries his tears with a kiss to his cheeks and seals her own fate. She holds him through the worst of it and encourages him to stand again when he feels a bit better. There's always a lull before it hits in full force.

It was actually touching to think this might have happened and to see them still holding hands. In spite of all the death caused by the infection, people still cared for their own. I spent a good three days watching them walk about and it made me smile for the first time in what felt like years.

And then the mother caught her foot in a pothole and wrenched her arm forward to propel herself out of it. The pus connecting their hands broke with a sickeningly wet crunch and the kid went flying in the other direction. She kept on walking, oblivious to the little grey hands reaching out for her and the hauntingly human crying of the child she left behind.

Day 1,761

We saw the bunkers from the safety of our boat. Most of them seemed to have survived but they're all seventy something feet below sea level... at our last count. There's been plenty of rain since so I reckon there's at least a dozen feet more on top of that.

My dad chose to keep us out of the bunkers, said we'd survive on our modified tanker with plenty of fish and whatever seedlings he'd smuggled away the past few years. He said someone needed to keep an eye on things from the surface and that is now down to us.

I don't even know if the people in the bunkers want us to look out for them but here we are, watching the air stacks for any signs of distress and helping wherever we can. We can't get anybody out, not now that they're so far down, but we can send food parcels and medicine down.

Bunker WestPointJ is my favourite. They rigged a drone to deliver messages up to us to reassure us that all is well and to ask for fresh vegetables when we have any spare. In return they broadcast about us to the other bunkers, acting as a relay for thousands of survivors.

We used to get called all over the place, barely any time to rest between helping one bunker or another but now things a lot quieter. Dad says its because the thrill of surface survivors has worn off but he sends a lot more messages to WestPointJ and he's never happy with their replies.

I think it has something to do with the smoke we've been seeing from the air stacks or the darkness spreading out into the water below and into the fish, making their meat black and gooey. Something is happening right beneath our feet, too far down to understand and too far down to stop.

Day 1,760

Old houses were made for hiding secrets. Letters beneath the floorboards, a dumbwaiter behind the wallpaper, a pair of children in the chimney. Old houses are built on death and secrecy and they know that, they are moulded and fueled by it and we call that haunting and ghosts.

New buildings are somehow... worse.

There's no floorboards to pry open, revealing documents that could shame your family for centuries to come. Instead there are sturdy and practical stone tiles on a concrete base above sturdy and practical metal raft foundations. No room for the dead anywhere near the floor, maybe a corpse or two tumbled into the concrete slurry deep beneath the house but not close enough to haunt it.

There's no dumbwaiters hidden behind peeling wallpaper that will lead you to a hidden part of the attic that isn't on any blueprint. There's no need for them now, not when public elevators are used and vandalised in equal measure, not to mention how attics are homes in their own right - small and cheap and a lifeline for the poorly paid masses.

There's no chimneys, no need for old fireplaces when electric ones have the same aesthetic without the risk of suffocating a bird or a pair of orphan chimney sweeps whose malnourished little bodies wouldn't be found until the old place was demolished to make way for new apartments.

For all that they lack, for all the old souls who can't find purchase in their smooth, fibre optic drenched walls or in their soulless minimalistic dining rooms, something older still finds a way to make it home. Something so utterly unhuman that lack of nature and comfort draws it through from its own dimension and into our own.

We call it a bad internet connection, cheaply made hardware that doesn't make it past the week. We call it that new house feeling, pretending we feel so uneasy because we aren't used to the feeling of incomprehensible eyes studying us through pale beige walls and tasteful marble inlays.

We are so much closer to death than we have ever been before.