Day 1,485

All the fish we catch are dead, no matter how far out we go or how deep the lines are dropped it's always the same.

There's never any bite marks or signs of trauma or even the slightest hint of rot.

It's like they just stopped working.

We can only hope it's just the fish.

Day 1,484

It either lived between the icebergs or it had been trapped there. Either way time and humanity's accidental interference had set it free to roam the ocean floor once more. That was when the islands began disappearing, one by one dozen.

It certainly shocked the world when the largest iceberg in recorded history suddenly split but the ensuing shock-wave wasn't attributed to something organic, not at that point at least. Neither was the overnight loss of three minor islands in the Zemlya Frantsa-Iosifa archipelago to the north of Russia.

Rising sea levels attributed to the separation of the iceberg were blamed for the archipelago gradually vanishing while their government didn't report that the islands themselves were utterly gone. They hadn't sunk, they looked to have been torn from the seabed itself.

When this was leaked, the world began to consider the idea of a more... organic reason. They didn't expect to find an answer, much less have the poor dying souls record and share their demise as their final act before yet another island was lost.

The timestamp on the footage showed midday yet the sky was pitch black and the ocean was nowhere in sight. The sky began closing in, ridged clouds coming into focus until they resembled the roof of a colossal mouth whose teeth were nowhere in sight.

It took them days to die, their vlogs and hysteria being broadcast for the world to see until one by one they fell into a black liquid that dissolved them on contact. Within a week the island fell silent and the world held its breath, evacuating all islands until humanity was huddled in the centres of the major continents, waiting for the next disappearance and wondering how much bigger this creature would grow before the mainlands stopped being safe.

Day 1,483

As the sound of drilling filled my ears all I could wonder was how did they manage to find me.

There are seventy official bases in Antarctica, mostly research facilities from the major global powers with a few security and medical centres for good measure. The base I found myself in wasn't supposed to be on any map nor known by any government as a precaution.

When the world ends you want doctors and scientists to start it all back up again and that's just what I was there for. We may not have seen it coming but we were as prepared for it as any other bunch of paranoid, overly certified eccentrics with more grant money than we could possibly throw at our research.

It wasn't a virus, the machines didn't rise up against us and neither did the dead. We were all but wiped out by the stars themselves. Half the world smothered in a blistering inferno, struggling to comprehend the level of absolute destruction and causing more deaths by reacting with chaos and panic while a few of us planned our escape.

Now here in the last remaining bastion of humanity I am soon to be confronted by all that we left behind. The nuclear plants went into meltdown last month so whoever, or whatever, is trying to get in will not be kind and might not even be human at all.

Wish me luck or a swift death.

Day 1,482

The mouth seemed to stretch on into the night, a never-ending maw filled with teeth so sharp they cut through the clouds. The gums were grey and wrinkled as the mouse you found in that long forgotten trap when you were five. It smelled pretty similar as well - that musty, meaty, lingering at the back of your throat kind of smell, the one that stuck to your clothes for days after.

If there would even be days after this.

You knew that if you looked close enough you'd be able to see that the shifting shadows were actually thousands of hands all reaching out for you, all belonging to things shaped like everyone you ever knew and loved and they were all begging for you to join them.

Something in the back of your mind knew you were one of the last ones left...

Day 1,481

It was a virus, a glitch in the system that brought the whole world to its knees in just five hours. Grandad says it serves them right for playing God and becoming more machine than man but he still drinks to forget losing mum and dad.

He may have shielded my eyes but I still heard their translator implants burst while their internal communicators spread throughout their body in a wave of blood-soaked grey. It's not the kind of sound you forget, even the smell lingers on in your mind years later.

I still see them from time to time standing at the precipice of the broken bridge with thousands of other tech-consumed drones. Sometimes I wave and the older drones wave back, the ones I think might have adapted to the virus or aren't as consumed by it.

My parents never wave back, nor do they sleep, eat or even move from their post. I asked Grandad if he thought that they'd rusted and become frozen like the tin man from the old Oz books. He just tells me to keep my eyes away from all those dead faces and to move on with my life.

How does he expect me to do that when there's twelve of us trapped on an island surrounded b y all the boats we burned and broke to stop the drone from following us? Nothing could possibly distract me from the fact that I'll probably die here while my mindless parents are staring down with nothing in their eyes but the unnatural glow of their ocular LEDs.

Day 1,480

Tucked away in the middle of the city, in a small courtyard behind the Lucky Sparrow Laundromat and Fast Vinnie's Gym, was a statue of a dog. There was no inscription on the raised platform, no mention of its creation and nothing overly unusual about it other than the thick layer of rust that covered its every inch in a thick layer of leaking, crumbling russet.

Nobody seemed to pay much attention to the statue, preferring to think that it was just an iron dog surrounded by a puddle of fresh rust and totally nothing to do with the missing people who were all last seen around this area. No, it was just a statue.

Until it was seen walking back to its pedestal...

Day 1,479

We jumped from light to light, relishing each brief moment in the utter darkness that spilled between the lampposts with pure childish glee. In those brief moments we were nine again and all of the world's monsters were practically unseen so we could happily pretend they didn't exist.

Now we see them running beside us, just outside of the dingy circles of light. Close enough to snatch us if we slow down but just far enough away to lure us into a false sense of security. As long as we were mostly underneath the lampposts we were safe, at least they let us think that.

Lord only knows how many corpses we must have run past, Lord only cares too. By now they're as shocking as finding hair on your head and as common too. We don't even try to look for people anymore, if you're late then everybody assumes you're, well... late.