Day 1,058

Her radio was broken, she could tell that just by the way she'd landed. There was no way she'd even be able to get out of the mess that was her tangled parachute, let alone climb further up the cliff to grab the remains of her bag and the spare radio she'd packed inside it.

Below her, barely visible through the smothering fog, was a veritable ocean of a forest that stretched out to the horizon. If she weren't trapped halfway up a cliff with her parachute wedged precariously between overhanging craggy rocks, it might even have been beautiful.

As it presently stood, the sun was setting and she was quickly running out of options that didn't involve risking a long fall, climbing in the dark or waiting for the tattered and tangled fabric to finally tear and let her drop to a doubtlessly messy conclusion.

With mixed degrees of finality, trepidation and a little bit of desperation, she managed to haul herself up to the small overhang where the bulk of her parachute was caught. It would be enough to sit on for the night and likely hold until morning when she could better assess her situation and attempt a proper escape to safety, or at least relative safety.

At some point during the night she had dozed off, waking sharply with the sun barely peering above the trees and the feeling that she was being watched. The fog below her still obscured the details of the forest but it had lessened somewhat, allowing her to faintly make out a shape that was most certainly not a tree.

It looked almost like somebody had taken a human head, increased the size a dozen or so times and then stuck it on the end of a stick to admire it. As her eyes continued to adjust to the dim light she began to make out more details of the odd shape, mainly noting that it was moving closer towards her.

Day 1,057

There was something ancient in the woods, something that had escaped the prying eyes of humanity long enough that they'd forgotten that it had ever escaped in the first place. Even as it moved from forest to forest, using the back-country lanes to its advantage, it had been so rarely spotted that there was no longer any name for it. Not even a footnote in the most obscure local lorebooks.

When it rediscovered humans accidentally, it found them far better prey than it remembered. They tasted sweeter, were juicier and so much slower. It began to follow smaller groups around the woods, creeping between the dense canopy until someone wandered just that little bit too far from the others. It always struck too fast for them to so much as gasp out in surprise, let alone cry out for backup.

Nearly twenty years passed before the first of its multitude of victims were found by a young child who climbed a dead tree and found a half-eaten corpse in the hollow trunk. With the police being called to the scene shortly after, with more and more bodies being found each and every day, with the missing persons lists dwindling every hour as the dead were named, the creature found itself surrounded by too many things to eat.

That was when it made its mistake. It jumped into the middle of a forensics team, unaware that armed officers were close enough to hear their shrieks of terror and pain, abruptly ending in wet gurgles as their throats were clamped down in its large blunt teeth.

It had never been shot before that day and was never seen after, having fled in a blur of feathers and fur the second the first bullet struck. Nobody quite knew what they'd seen or where it went, only that they'd been left with nine fresh corpses afterwards.

Day 1,056

The campus was home to a series of large lakes that were rumoured to be interconnected, though there was no physical proof of this and all of the lakes were declared stagnant some hundred or so years ago. Aside from the recent addition of large fountains in their centres that kept the water circulating and reduce the algae, there only interesting thing about the lakes was their utter lack of wildlife. No birds had ever been seen near the lakes, not so much as a single sparrow flying overhead.

Around the campus they were nicknamed the Jenny's Sisters from the old English legends of the water-dwelling creature known as Jenny Greenteeth. A few older professors liked to jokingly claim that the lakes were teeming with Greenteeths, all hungrily snatching at any source of meat that stayed about for too long.

It was all seen as a quirk of the university until an entire biology class went missing after they attempted to cross one of the larger lakes by boat. A mix of human and wooden remains were found scattered all around the shore, almost forming a perfect circle as though something was marking out its territory. No divers were sent into the lake to find the rest of the bodies, no official cause of death was publicly released although the victim's families all report that they have been given closure.

A photography student attempted to set up a series of cameras around this lake overnight, claiming they were going to capture the algae in the moonlight. Its been five months and they haven't come out of the darkroom, their classmates deliver them food enough to keep them going until the staff can figure out what to do.

They still won't say what was in their photographs, only that there was so much beneath the lake.

Day 1,055

Through the dead tree a few miles into the woods, he could see a world burning. People ran shrieking, aflame and very much alive while he just stood there and watched, unsure if he could believe is eyes and unwilling to try and rationalise what he was witnessing.

He never told anybody about it, how could he? Who would believe that portals could exist, let alone be found in such an otherwise utterly unassuming place as a tree? For months he visited, trying to gleam some kind of answer from the people inside but none of them seemed to be able to hear him over their own screams.

It was as if there was a never-ending supply of victims for this world to burn and for a time he called it Hell.  It became an object of fascination for him to such an extent that he set up camp there, falling asleep to the sounds of countless people burning alive, helpless to save themselves.

Day 1,054

It was the second great ice age and according to every temperature reading across the global survivor's network, it was finally coming to an end. Every day it rose by a degree, white began to fade away and the frozen plant life deep below it saw their first glimpses of sunlight in almost eight hundred years.

For the first few weeks everything seemed fine, the preparations needed to switch all camps from underground thermo-bunkers to submersible house-pods were well underway. Nobody thought that there might be more than just frozen fungi revealed by the great thaw. Nobody thought about the countless living creatures who hadn't made it to the shelters in time.

As the ice fled, the first few thousand corpses began to float towards the surface, propelled by harsh currants and hurtling towards the gathering house-pods. From the distance it looked like the dead were coming to avenge themselves, remembering their deaths some eight hundred or so years ago and wanting to be amongst the living once more.

Removing all windows from the pods only did so much, after all they still had to sail through what was now being called The Bone Sea for all the rapidly decaying bodies that clogged almost every inch of the shallower waters. What little sea life that had clung onto their existence over the second great ice age now found itself suffocating in the ammonia-laced waters.

Day 1,053

The last humans left alive in England were barely teenagers, unsurprisingly. Their generation had grown up knowing that the end of the world was coming soon, their teachers taught them all that they could in the hopes that most would survive and another generation would remain to resurrect civilisation.

These children had no such plans.

What they had known as civilisation had meant them being cooped up in sweaty lead-lined rooms, told time and time again that every adult before them had somehow screwed up the planet and it was their duty to fix it all or they would die.

It wasn't exactly inspiring, to say the least.

As much as they had been prepared, countless doomsday scenarios drilled into their heads until they could spew all seventy-six major survival aids word-for-word, they were still unprepared for a world without people. A world now full of birdsong and silence, roads crowded with cars that nobody would drive again and cities reeking of rotting food from restaurants whose patrons went in the night like almost everyone else.

The children took nothing from the cities they walked through, intent on reaching the wilderness.

Humanity's last hope wanted nothing to do with their past, choosing instead to make themselves something newer, better, greater than anything before them. The children chose to embrace the end of all that they'd known with open arms and in return it took what little semblance of humanity they had left.

They became the next best thing - from them came the unimaginable and behind them the world wept.

Day 1,052

In that moment there were three things she knew to be certain.

1. The heat haze that made the desert horizon shimmer also made the cliffs appear further away.
2. Kay wouldn't be able to stop in time.
3. She didn't have enough time to warn them that they were too close.

In that moment she did what she believed to be the best option and destroyed her comm system. The governors would believe it to be sabotage if she looked beaten enough and she'd live to see another day in spite of her failure leading to the deaths of the governor's favourite recon team.

She was found unconscious and bleeding, just as she'd planned, and spared, just as she'd planned. Unfortunately she didn't plan on the governors counting this as an act of devotion and self-sacrifice, nor did she plan on them asking her to assemble a team to hunt down the saboteurs who dared to interrupt their reconnaissance missions.

There were several ways in which she saw herself taking this opportunity.

She could assign herself to hunt them down as an "act of vengeance" and gather enough supplies to make it to one of the rival bases, join them and survive a while longer. However should the governors discover her plot she would be hunted to death, possibly leading to the genocide of an entirely innocent faction in the process.

She could pick the best of the best and have them hunt a rival faction to death, gaining further favour within the governors and further cementing herself within their core. However this would make her even more of a target than she already was and more factions would notice her as a person of importance instead of a mere errand runner.

She could also pick the worst of the worst and send them off to their deaths, making the faction stronger but risking her own life if their deaths were deemed "unnecessary". However she might also be praised for strengthening the faction, the governors despised the unnecessary and should she become that or cause it then her life was as good as forfeit.

No matter how she was swiftly she was running out of time, she still found the chance to pray for the recon team she'd killed. She prayed for her own soul as much as theirs, finding no answers from above and wondering how long she could delay before she had to make the choice that would likely end her own life.