Day 940

The spider in my brain wants coffee. Wary of pandering to its addiction I oblige with decaf and try not to draw too much attention as I ask for a straw with my drink. The barista gives me a silent questioning look but grants me a single straw anyway as she has done three times a day, six days a week and nine years in a row. From there I find the most sheltered corner to huddle away in before I try to feed the straw into the port behind my ear as surreptitiously as possible.

Judging by the lack of commenting from the nearby people I have succeeded in feeding the spider in my brain, satiating it once more and saving myself from its ire. It can be such a hateful little creature I can scarcely stand to be conscious unless it's either satisfied or distracted otherwise it deliberately jerks its legs about "trying to get comfy" and sends me off into a whirlwind of seizures and absolute sensory haywire.

The spider in my brain has been quiet for too long. It usually comments on how the coffee tasted, tries to wheedle its way into having another cup or even an espresso. I can't feel its abdomen moving while it digests the coffee, giving me an unwanted boost in energy for the next three hours or so. No, this time the spider in my brain isn't saying or doing anything at all and I know something must be wrong.

My first instinct is to blame the barista, maybe she made the coffee too strong for the spider to handle or maybe she poisoned it. Maybe she's known about the spider all these years and has been waiting for the right time to come when she can get it right where it's most open - its craving for coffee.

While wait patiently in line to speak with the treacherous barista the person behind me taps my shoulder saying in a quiet, terrified voice, "there's a spider behind your ear." and I want to reply that the spider is actually in my ear, or rather sitting between my brain and skull but my hand is automatically cupping the port-side of my head.

I feel damp fur, long spindly legs and sticky webbing leading into the port. My hand retreats, covered in blood.

Day 939

It was the kind of snow that seeped into your bones and froze you to the core. The kind that stuck your eyelashes together and made your lips a deathly shade of blue. It was the kind of snow that had a body count in the thousands and it was heading right for us, murmuring false promises of a gentle sleep forever.

The news had called it "The Storm to End All Storms" and they hadn't been too far off. Wherever it touched it left no survivors, at least none that had been heard from so far. Half a year in and it had utterly decimated North America, Europe and it was slowly working its way through Asia. Its smaller twin wasn't reported by any major western news channel, they'd all gone dead weeks before it hit online. According to the first reports it had taken South America and was now moving onto Africa.

At first it didn't make sense that these two storms would be able to maintain their size, temperature or carry on moving at such a steady speed, seemingly out to conquer the world and yet there they were and there we were, huddled together in the subway system as far down the disused rails as we could get.

The final broadcasts from France had told us that the storm could feel heat, liked to leech it out of you nice and slow until you were this ice-covered fetal-positioned corpse. All radio stations are either dead or on repeat, the internet isn't looking much better. So far the known survivors from storm-touched countries have dropped from several hundred thousand to barely one hundred and still falling.

There's not much food left down here, the rats are freezing to death right in front of us. I can see the icicles forming over their shrivelling eyes but at least they don't scream. Maybe they're freezing from the inside out? I'm not sure that's a better way to go than outside-in but at this rate I won't be waiting much longer to find out - I haven't been able to feel my legs for days now and it's spreading fast.

Day 938

At first Katie tripped over the concealed entrance, thinking it was a badger den until she shone her torch down and saw that the walls were tiled. Not re-purposed tiles, not like something had just stacked them up until it had conveniently formed a perfectly smooth tunnel that looked more like a grubby kitchen wall than a possible animal's hidey-hole.

When she poked her head inside it smelled like dirt, no badger musk or the faint breathing/scrabbling sounds that you'd expect from a den that's very much in use. Surely by now they'd have smelled or heard her anyway and come to tear her face off for being so close to their home? This alone was almost enough for her to decide to crawl further inside and see if there was anything interesting inside.

When she spotted a bottle of furniture polish at the far end, her mind was made up. She began to shuffle further inside, determined to figure out what could possibly be down there, who had made their home in the woods and disguise it as a hole in the ground. They might even be famous or it might be some abandoned government project. Either way what adventure!

The tunnel was bigger than it looked at first, she was able to crawl into it with minimal strain and only vaguely worrying that it might never end or it might end in someone's basement. Strangely it took several sharp turns as though it would turn right back in on itself and by her estimations it should have but instead it steepened into a crude staircase that was also tiled - the same tiles as the tunnel but messier, as though they'd been done in a rush.

She made it as many as five steps down before her hand met a smooth slope and slid out from underneath her sending her phone skittering into the dark.  Taking a deep breath she followed it, thinking that she might be able to use it and call for help when she reached whatever end the slide met.

She never saw the broken tiles coming but she sure as hell felt them.
It was the last thing she felt as she fell on top of a pile of old bones that were mostly animal.

Day 937

I had to watch as the rollercoaster didn't stop on its second run. Instead it began to speed up with twenty children strapped tightly in paired carriages, my own child with them. At first everyone thought the ride manager was just letting the kids have a longer ride which would have been sweet of him were it not for the fact that his frantic button mashing in the control booth that signalled that this was not planned at all.

My little girl was just as excited as the rest of them, shrieking in her shrill voice that pierced the air and my ears no matter where along the tracks she was. After the fifth loop parents began to pester the ride manager to let the ride end already. They all had places to be, other things to spoil their kids with and this ride was boring to them. Honestly the entire theme park was boring until this happened.

It was on the brink of closing for good before the rollercoaster malfunctioned. The darn thing just kept speeding and speeding and speeding until all the children stopped making any noise and flopped listlessly around each corner, my own daughter among them with her little eyes glazed over and her shrieking finally at an end.

The park staff tried their hardest to slow the ride but they found the sabotaged controls too late. Three hours in and the train managed to derail itself and crush all the little children in a smoking snakey wreck of metal and meat. Just like a car crash, you want to look away but you can't.

I especially had to watch, after all I'd worked so hard to set it all up in the first place.

Day 936

Noah's sign said read:

Will work for food!
Can do landscaping, building, renovating!

And so he'd expected that the first time somebody would ask him to work for them that he'd be doing something basic like repairing a garden wall or setting up a fountain. When the stranger had approached him they'd just offered him £8,000 in exchange for him closing and locking all the doors in their old house.

Of course he'd been suspicious, as any same person would, and of course he'd accepted, as any broke person would. He could afford to rent a room for a while with that money and get food too so within an hour he was being driven to the stranger's house, £1,000 in his pocket as cash and the rest waiting for him when he got back.

The house was several miles out of town and surrounded by deep woods, isolated enough to make him reconsider the offer. The stranger, having introduced himself as Alfred Barker, claimed he'd just divorced his "monster of a husband" and wanted to secure the house before he sold it. The place had too many bad memories for him to do it himself and it all made sense to Noah at the time so he didn't question it any further.

He didn't wonder why Alfred refused to go within half a mile of the place, pulling into a nearby car park for some touristy sight off the highway before telling him to head down the small path nearby and keep going. He even gave Noah a bulky torch as he'd shut off the electricity to the place and the set of keys, each with a small label attached to make the job even easier.

Despite the path being more overgrown than it should be for a "recent" divorce, he carried on with the thought of a cosy hotel room and decent food outweighing the way Alfred had looked so scared when Noah was walking away. It could have been that as an older man Alfred was just worried about whatever expensive things he might have left behind and thought Noah would steal them (the thought had crossed his mind but he felt morally above that) or perhaps he just didn't like the dark?

The house itself was much larger than he'd been told, three storeys high with a massive conservatory on one side. He knew he'd be there for quite some time just orienting himself and figuring out how he'd lock all the doors without locking himself into a corner. Perhaps starting from one corner and working his way around until he hit the main hallways would work? Yes, he decided, it would.

He left the front door unlocked behind him, mindful that it was at least an escape route, before he set off on the left side first to close off the reception area, living rooms, kitchen and conservatory. Despite the torch he missed the large footprints along the floor in the deep gloom of the place, leading from the back door and circling the ground floor.

He spotted them going upstairs and thought they must be a way to scare off intruders with the way they looked like human feet that ended in tiny hands for toes. What a joke! He followed them around the upper floors, locking the doors behind him as he went and not thinking about how they now lead down the stairs where he'd only seen one set of them on the way up.

It wasn't until he'd closed the last door - the downstairs hall door leading to the front entrance room - that he noticed there were no prints at all in there and that the glass windows on either side of the door looked... different. One seemed to show a silhouette of a large figure that flinched from his torchlight and dashed to the back of the room. He heard them banging on the door,trying to break it open and wisely decided to flee, locking the front door behind him.

He ran the rest of the way to Alfred's car, praying it would still be there.

Day 935

In our town when we vote for our local council we don't have an elected party and a non-elected party, we have the new council and the payment for the boon that's been keeping the town safe and economically stable all these years. The deal itself isn't discussed, we only know that no disaster can touch us as long as the losing party does their part and gives up their lives for the greater good.

Of course this has been put to the test, the last council party (this year's payment, unsurprisingly) suggested that we spare the other side just to see if we had finally paid off our debt. It was a major factor in them coming into power to be honest, we all wanted to know if we could stop the bloody tradition and spare whichever poor bastards got dragged into politics to begin with.

The day after they won, the other party was still alive. We were all alive and feeling confident until the weather forecast predicted a countrywide heatwave and forest fires with our town being right at the centre of the heatwave. Despite it being late autumn the next day felt like we'd been dropped into the desert.

Some people enjoyed it at first, until the sudden shift in temperature began to wreak havoc on the local agriculture causing a nationwide shortage in all sorts of vegetables. The ensuing panic lead to food prices shooting up and for the first time in over seven hundred years our town experienced financial hardship. For the first time family-run shops began to close and people thought about moving to a more stable and cheaper area.

That was when the losing party began to vanish, not that anyone cared much. It seemed like the more of them went, the better it got for the rest of us to the point where several hunting groups were formed to take care of the last few party members (there's really no other way to say it - we hunted them down like rabbits).

None of them begged for their lives, not one. They knew they would have to die eventually as soon as they decided to get into politics - it's just a fact of life around here. That and their continued existence meant that practically everyone they was suffering needlessly. It made the whole ordeal much more bearable for the rest of us.

I mean, it's hard to feel guilt when they want to die.

Day 934

When the library flooded, the books began to leak. It wasn't just the ink running but the entire story flowed right off the pages, seeping into the ground to form a new story full of intermingled words, plots and genres. Beneath the drowning town a new story was beginning full of heroes and villains deadlier than they could even begin to imagine.

All this new story needed was to be given a form, another book or even a body to reside in. The new story wanted to be told to as many ears as it possibly could. It wanted to be remembered by any means possible. The only vessels it could immediately find were too full of water to use, too dead or thoughtless animals.

No, none of these would do and the story was sinking ever faster through the drenched ground, slowly losing itself as it shifted and rewrote, edited out whole chunks of itself to become compact and dense enough to hopefully stay somewhere near the surface and not dissipate to some strung out sentence buried deep beneath the world.

And so it remained for the most part, a thick pool of tar-like words so closely packed together they ceased to be anything like the books they came from. Whatever it edited out seeped into the water table, flowing throughout the country and into the population as stray sentences and creative bursts that slowly consumed the minds of whoever drank the unfiltered water.

It was called a literary hysteria as perfectly ordinary people's personalities took sharp turns and morphed around the varying characters whose books had been tossed aside by the main mass. Thousands upon thousand of people began to not just believe but become these characters, their bodies forcibly changed by a source they couldn't find.

All the while the main body of the story sat waiting for fresh pages to writhe onto so that it could become itself once more, bigger and better than ever. The story didn't care for what its editing was doing, it had no moral code which was a key part of its plot and the overarching themes it had of questioning all forms of alleged morality and free will.

It had no idea that it was slowly but surely causing the end of the world nor would it have cared.

Day 933

"There are many of us like you," he stammered, desperately trying to keep the creature (he refused to think of it as a troll, they didn't exist) occupied long enough for the sun to rise. It tilted its bulbous grey head as if it were thinking and hopefully considering believing the human, or at least trying to figure out if he was actually like it or just in a costume (which he was).

In the man's defence he had only been planning to go to his mate Dave's party by the lake near the edge of the woods. Dave had promised this girl he liked was going to be there and he just had to go along and talk to her for bloody once man, you can't just pine at her from a distance because that's what creepy guys do. "Don't be that guy," Dave said, "It's the best shot you've got to chat her up without coming off as the mouth-breathing social cucumber that you actually are."

With these great words of advice he decided to go as a troll, thinking it would at least be a funny conversation starter and an excuse for the way he argued when he got a bit too tipsy. Skin smothered in grey body paint, plastic horns firmly on his head and a keyboard slung around his neck he'd been all prepared to have a decent night out.

Then he took the wrong turning, heading left into the older part of the woods instead of right towards the lake and recently established café/bar/public events building. Where there should have been a path that ran shallowly alongside the woods his instead went right through the dense undergrowth, barely restrained by frequent pruning by the wildlife management team.

When he should have arrived at the lake he instead arrived at a long stone bridge that instantly reminded him of some medieval relic. At this point he should have realised that he'd taken the wrong turning and, as little as he came to the lake, even in the setting light he was blatantly not in the right place. Sadly he really didn't come to the lake that often and thus his mistake remained mere confusion and niggling doubt.

Thinking that perhaps he was only a few minutes more from the lake (albeit panicked thoughts and desperate hope that he wasn't lost) he convinced himself to carry on further. The path on the other side of the bridge looked a lot darker than the one he was currently on, the setting sun drifting through the trees gave it an eerie reddish glow that certainly didn't help his nerves.

He'd gotten less than halfway across the bridge before he heard the sound of stone and water gently hitting stone, felt the bridge shake slightly as if a sudden weight had been added to it and turned around to find what looked to be rocks roughly clumped together to resemble a person. Moss and pond weed clung wherever it could, giving the creature a distinctly aquatic look and scent.

The only thing that stood out particularly harshly against the otherwise natural appearance of the creature was its eyes. They were almost the size of his head, barely fitting onto the lumpy greyish head of whatever was in front of him (not a troll, they just don't exist, ignore the fact that you're probably on its bridge).

It didn't try to attack him right away, firstly it tried to talk to him. Perhaps it was confused by his painted grey skin and unusual horn colour, maybe it had really bad eyesight? Either way when he replied in English ("I-I'm sorry but I didn't quite catch that?") its eyes narrowed, head lowered and it let out a deep growl that seemed to resonate through the bridge below him.

And that brings us near to the beginning wherein his first thought was to convince the creature that he was like it only a different species - a sub species even. Surely it had to know what that was? As it tilted its head from side to side, eyes still narrow and growl still ongoing albeit quieter, he began to walk towards it with his palms open and in plain view - universal body language for harmless.

It backed up and allowed him to begin heading back to the car park, surviving the night seemed the best outcome for the time being. He'd hoped it would head back under the bridge or wherever it had been lurking before he came traipsing along but to his misfortune it had decided to follow him. Closely.

His every footstep echoed with its heavier stone thuds as they both went back towards the more civilised area of the woods. He wondered what it would do if he went the other path, if that was the one that ended up at the lake. Would he seem cooler with this creature tagging along behind him or would it try and eat somebody.

As he finally arrived at his car, unlocking it without a second thought for maintaining his guise as a fellow creature (still not calling it a troll) the growling which had been quite up until that point returned in full force as it began to snarl and stand taller. He desperately began trying to convince it that he was still like it, that he was just a little different.

"There are many of us like you," he stammered, desperately trying to keep the creature (he refused to think of it as a troll, they didn't exist) occupied long enough for the sun to rise. It tilted its bulbous grey head as if it were thinking and hopefully considering believing the human, or at least trying to figure out if he was actually like it or just in a costume (which he was).

Day 932

The things that count as funeral rites are surprisingly flexible. Even just a tip of the hat is enough to settle a soul in its place when all life is gone and all ties to the living are severed. These minute gestures or grand ceremonies are what keep the dead in their place and give us a distinct separation from them. In this we all get our peace, whether we deserve it or not.

But not everyone gets a funeral rite, not everyone can. There have been countless souls who are still bound to their bodies, who have died alone and their corpses left in anonymity, undiscovered for centuries while everything that is their consciousness remains stuck inside a rotting corpse, tethered to whichever place it remains.

Unfortunately if the body remains in several pieces (as it may be should any wildlife get to it) the soul becomes what is known as an orb. A small shred of the person it once was, now more free but less conscious if who it was and what it is doing.

Worse still if the body is in one piece and is anywhere near another living human. The hatred they can gather over the years is lethal without a doubt. It would be a mercy if they were to kill quickly and unsurprising for them to make company for themselves.

Day 931

I have vivid memories of walking along the beach, ankle deep in the ocean while my parents sit under a large umbrella. Mum smiles and waves to me while dad's too busy reading his favourite book to notice anything else. My siblings are further in the water splashing each other.

I remember this like it had just happened, though it's impossible. The seven seas dried up centuries ago, I don't even know if it was the same shade of green that I remember after all green is such a rare colour nowadays. Vanishing months after the seven seas, it took most of the world with it and most of our culture too.

Cacti are just about the only thing to survive, that and the trillions upon countless trillions of bacteria that we use to make what little food we can. We survive and that's about all we do, maintaining our groups fills our every waking minute as we constantly check with each other to see who is surviving and who isn't.

It's always cause for a big celebration when someone finally dies, it means we can eat real meat but it only seems to happen every ten years or so. I'd call it planned and consider discussing it with the group but honestly it's too good to pass up the chance to eat anything that isn't some cacti-fungal soup abomination with a side of cactus juice or camel milk. The poor creatures apparently had lumps on their backs full or water but I've never seen one with anything but the usual bony spine.

It's only been five years since Linda died but I'm still craving real meat so much my mouth aches just thinking about it. There's no way we'd ever kill a camel for meat - they're too precious a resource at this point but people are more. More common, more annoying and more easily killed than one of those hulking great beasts.

It can't be that hard to fake a natural death surely?

Day 930

It wasn't meat, meat-based animals couldn't bite through an engine block like that. Funny how the most unusual creatures often look just like the regular ones we know and love, at least the reported cases of these monsters in disguise have risen to the point where they are seen as just another part of life. Like getting caught in the rain or losing a sock.

The one I saw resembled a flock of sparrows that moved in perfect unison, pecking at whatever they felt like and flying a few feet back when I got too close. Nothing else about them seemed too off or un-birdlike until they swarmed around one of the cars in the nearby scrapyard and demolished its innards within a minute. They flew off just as normally as birds do, swooping and scattering as if they did this every day.

Of course encountering these odd creatures, the pretenders as they are called, isn't as harmless as my own situation. The casualties have remained at four hundred and fifty seven for the past five weeks and (all deities willing) it might stay that way. There would be less deaths if it was easier to tell the creatures from the animals any other way than dissecting them to reveal their machine-based interior.

Some people swear that the key to telling if something is a pretender is to check their eyes - apparently pretender's eyes have a distinct metallic sheen to them though this remains to be proven. For the most part the best way to tell is to examine their behaviour for signs of unusual strength, dexterity or intelligence. From there the best option is to act like you don't know that they are fake and hope they don't realise you are as much of a pretender as they are.

Nobody knows who made them or how many there are, all attempts to capture the creatures have ended in severe structural damage in the best case scenarios. They just don't want to be kept and, unlike most meat-based animals, they have the means to ensure their freedom with no regard to the trail of bodies they leave behind.

Day 929

The smokers hang out on the top staircase right by the door to the roof. They claim it's well ventilated enough that they aren't posing a fire risk and sheltered enough that they can smoke in any weather without risking their health. They don't mention that the smoke was there before them, clinging to the ceiling and wrapping around their lungs as they stood on the floor below. It reached for them like a mother going to embrace her child, bringing them up to the top of the stairs and enfolding them in a grey-tinged haze.

The smoke doesn't smell of anything, not even the many months of cigarette fumes that add to the general mass of the smoke carry any kind of scent.

They don't mention this.

The drunks hide behind the skips in the basement, hastily sipping from their concealed "water" bottles and mugs of "herbal" tea. They were their long before the smokers by the roof, the basement has always been a place to forget and to find comradeship. Water dripping from the old pipes mimics the tears shed in secrecy, never talked about but understood in full by people who have gone through the same and worse and survived enough to tell the tale. The drunks function enough to continue being allowed to work in the building and to come into the basement for their routine emotional purge.

They have always been down there, rarely surfacing from the puddles of piss, cheap liquor and rainwater long enough to be remembered by anyone else.

We don't mention them.

Day 928

They'd lied to her when they said the ultrasound wasn't too bad. Though the midwife offered to block the screen from her sight so she wouldn't see the result as she always had, there was something in the back of her mind that compelled her to look and see what she was carrying. It was probably the parasitic creature she'd seen in the diagrams - she'd been told that some develop the telepathy before birth.

Out of the nine billion people around the world, almost two billion still considered the parasites to be the next evolutionary stage and eight countries declared them a protected species. As soon as people were aware that they were hosts they'd either panic or rejoice, after all they'd be bringing the next generation into the world or so everyone had thought.

Twenty five years after the first recorded parasite was born, the majority were now fully grown by human standards and far less human than they'd been at birth.The horns were the first thing to grow, spiralling out from their face alongside their tusks (and every tooth eventually grew to be a husk, forcing their mouths to remain open at all times) and distorting whatever humanity their faces had possessed

 If the host was particularly unlucky the parasite would begin to grow the horns in utero, rupturing them from the inside out. Aborting the parasites was not only illegal but punishable by death. Still some went that way when ultrasounds began to show the slightest sign of early, rapid growth.

She'd been a host for almost seven months, with the average birth occurring at ten months and never wanted to look at the ultrasound before this one. Though it was likely that the parasite just wanted her to feel affection for it and be more likely to raise it rather than deliver it to the eager hands of the government, some slim part of her mind wanted to believe that it might care for her as its mother.

In all her years she'd never seen a parasite up close, barely glanced at them on the news and tried to live life as normally as she could even after she was confronted with the reality that she was a host as unwillingly picked as all the rest. Now there she was, lying on an uncomfortable hospital bed, stomach covered in cold slime and a lump on the screen with miniature wings flapping gently, the spikes soft for now but known to harden to diamond-sharp blades if the host's heartbeat gets too fast, preparing it to tear its way to safety.

Day 927

In my office the managers aren't human, they're more like a vaguely humanoid entity that subsides solely on coffee and printer ink. This isn't a mean remark about them, they are literally a taupe-coloured haze of sickly smelling smog surrounding several formal suits that communicate via scented post-it notes and emails. It certainly made for an interesting interview.

Other than an unusual and vaguely eldritch entity for a manager the office is fairly a standard small copyrighting company. The only downside is the high turnover rate and large portion of the company's income set aside for police bribes which are growing more and more necessary as the usual officers increase their demands to compensate for the steadily increasing missing persons cases.

So far we've lost twelve to the management's scheme known to the rest of us as the penalty row. It may look like your average line of desks, monitors hooked up as normal,everything neatly in place and otherwise totally unassuming but for the security cameras stationed just behind each chair, pointing directly down onto the work-spaces.

It's where you got moved to if you'd done something wrong usually but from time to time our dear management liked to place a supervisor there for a week or two or until they "left" just to shake things up a little and keep everyone productively on their toes. On the bright side when you're on it everyone treats you so much better and offers to do everything they can for you in the hopes that you'll be sent back to your original desk.

I've been there once before and it isn't all that bad I'll admit, though that might be because I was sent back to my desk after  three months of tension and trying to get my last will and testament sorted and signed just in case. I only made five spelling mistakes and missed a single comma in one contract but that's enough to sentence you to the penalty row and potentially worse.

I remember my final week there so clearly, the three people to my left had all "left" and a further person left each day that week. Nine altogether, a record purge for our company that cost us the majority of our "emergency" fund and lead to management having to hire a new accounting team. It's sick to even think it but thanks to them continuing to screw up I live another week.

Doesn't matter if they did it all on purpose as an attempt to expose management, it would never have worked.

Day 926

There was a tally chart in the staff room of West Uxlade that was kept behind an anatomical poster. It wasn't something the doctors knew about, nor the paramedics, the receptionists, the visiting social workers - not even the police were aware. Only the nurses knew and that's how it was kept through shifting ranks and whatever job changes life threw at them. Only the nurses knew.

It wasn't the fact that they kept a tally of their patients that could have cause them any issues, it's that they kept a tally of which doctor had "accidentally" killed which patient. Theirs wasn't officially or legally allowed to be a centre for euthanasia but when you write the charts for a living you learn how to fake a natural death and which staff members would be most sympathetic to the situation.

For the first few times it was all about mistakes being made to the elderly who had no-one to miss them or report unusual behaviour in the days prior to their death. That didn't last long, there were just too many people suffering through unnecessary months of agony that they could stop. And so they moved onwards and upwards, from the terminal ward to the cancer ward to the children's ward.

Wherever a mercy was needed the doctors would ask a nurse to report a "Code Patch" which used to mean fixing the situation at hand, be it a complaint or a particularly difficult condition requiring multiple doctors present. Once the doctors decided to bring mercy back into their wards "Code Patch" then stood for covering it up, making everything neat and tidy once more by hiding what they'd done.

The nurses never spoke when they showed trainees the tally, only met their gaze with a kind of stern sadness. While a doctor prescribes the medicine, says what will be done and how and when - the nurses are the ones who carry it out. Underneath every patient's name in tiny letters are the names of the doctor, the nurse and the patient's final words.

Sometimes a local newspaper will suspect something about the high death toll only for their "inside source" at the hospital to claim it's because some people come in too late for anything more than a comfortable bed to end in. People have always had their suspicions, nurses don't always listen and relatives just want the best for each other when faced with death.

Still, nobody wants to stop the mercies.

Nobody really wants to.

They're an act of kindness.

Truly.

Day 925

The boat tour had gotten off to a rocky start and with the approaching storm things didn't look like they'd improve. They were meant to head out to a reef several miles from the coast to spend two hours diving followed by a stop on a nearby island for lunch and ending back at the pier. So far the boat had pulled into the pier too fast nearly breaking it, the captain had tried to play it off as a joke but his breath stank of cheap whiskey and he vomited on a would-be passenger who had the sense to walk away.

For the rest they were taken completely off course, ending up twenty miles from the reef by one passenger's rough calculations. There was an island nearby but the captain swore it shouldn't be there, sadly he was overruled by his passengers and they docked at the sturdy concrete pier with only a slight crash. No matter how passionately the captain insisted they leave and that the predicted storm could isolate them or flood the island and sink them all, he was ignored as his passengers spread out to find a local place to shelter and plan their next move.

The thing they couldn't see from the ocean was just how decrepit the buildings looked inside and how unusual it was for this region to have so many concrete houses, or indeed any concrete houses at all as the most common resource was wood. They also couldn't possibly have seen the way the houses shifted and twitched with impatience, smelling the incoming group and wanting to eat.

It was so utterly silent on the island, even the ocean waves seemed muted by something that they couldn't quite place. It was something close by, that much they all agreed on as the hairs on the backs of their necks rose in unison and the feeling of countless eyes staring at them made them huddle just that little bit closer, unconsciously seeking protection from something yet to be seen.

The captain shouted at the group from the alleged safety of the boat, saying something about the windows are the eyes of the home before ducking into the lower deck and shutting the door behind him with a muted thud. Though the group felt nervous and isolated on the island's seemingly deserted street they felt worse about going back into the boat of someone clearly too drunk to get them home safely.

After one person spoke up and declared that they could just wait in the cafe nearby the group's minds were made up. When the cafe's door practically threw itself open the second the handle was touched the group were startled enough to take a few steps away from the buildings, barely beginning to notice the way the other windows were now full of tempting goods and vague human forms.

The windows were both clear and misty in unusual ways so that the food and expensive items were in perfect view while the people inside moved about like they were surrounded by fog. One brave fool tried to duck their head into the shoe shop next to the cafe only to be pulled in by one of the blurry people.

Their screams seemed to break the tense silence that had been smothering them all as they struggled and thrashed about, eventually breaking free and breaking through the glass door, bleeding heavily from several deep wounds and missing their left hand. They babbled on about how the people were teeth dressed in bones and rags and that the island was hungry before fainting from the shock.

The passengers couldn't get back to the boat fast enough, roughly dragging the wounded person behind them, uncaring that their remaining fingers had all been caught by the paving stones on the street on the way to the boat. Not a single one of them noticed the tiny pebbles caught in their shoes,somehow gripping the soles tightly and gradually rolling upwards to meet their unprotected flesh.

Their boat never arrived back to the pier, washing up further down the beach almost three months later full of stones and naked bones. The door leading to the lower deck was covered with deep scratch marks on the inside and heavily dented as though someone had been throwing themselves at it for hours. The captain's finger-bones were embedded in the handle, holding it shut against the people who'd been trapped below. The rest of his body was never found.

Day 924

The old mansion by Creechwood upon Thames was open to the public on the conditions that they only visit once and that they never take anything from there, not even from the gift shop. These rules were set in place after the first signs of dimensional shifting were tracked down to that exact place, making it the largest rift in the northern hemisphere.

It was hardly the only dimensional rift around but most others were only big enough to allow basic particle transfers, maybe pull the occasional insect or small bird inside but rarely enough to allow for a human to cross let alone return in the same day. Rifts like these are fairly commonplace, we walk through them daily without batting an eyelid, maybe losing a few skin cells or strands of hair but nothing we'd miss.

The larger ones, the Big Three as they are known, those are to be used carefully and only once per place. Too many uses by the same person risks them being torn to shreds in the process, known as Sidana's Principle (so named after Doctor Sidana traversed the Jaipur rift for a fourth time he was seen to split like wet tissue paper). Despite strict scrutinising of anyone who wants to cross the rift, several slip through each year and are torn to pieces just as the late Doctor Sidana was.

 All of this just to see the other side, the alleged "mirror Earth" which is proven to not be Earth at all but a planet more akin to Mars in temperature and colouration. Even the sky in the rift is the same ruddy brown as the dirt and plants, as though it was painted by a man with only three colours. Still it was as alien a world as humans could hope to come across without traversing the lightyears by shuttle and it was far cheaper to head to one of the Big Three and walk around in the breathable air of somewhere existing in the same place as Earth but not the same dimension.

Creechwood upon Thames was the only rift that showed signs of mergeance with the other side and thud nothing was allowed off the premesis in case of contamination. This information, the high fine and the countless warning signs all about the mansion still weren't enough to deter theft. The ruddy brown colouration of the rift began to appear all over the world.

People thought it was some kind of rust that was eating away at the multitude of metals all around them, not thinking to look at their stolen leaves and strips of wallpaper. The strength of the Creechwood rift seemed to boost any other rift it came into contact with, even those in passing now leading to eight known rifts almost the same size as the Big Three but in less convenient places like schools and in one case the base of an underground station's escalator.

There are no known ways to stop the rifts, to close or otherwise block any transfer between them. While no beings have been confirmed in the rift, sightings of strange plants seeming to have humanoid faces are increasing as though they have been migrating towards the larger rifts all this time. Perhaps we've even been tempting them, showing them how to get through by traipsing about carelessly. either way there are now so many portals large enough for a person to get through - too many for any local authority to watch over. Who knows what's slipped through by now?

Day 923

Every creature we used to fear in the early days of mankind has been forced to adapt as we have grown and changed. With enough time they cease to resemble anything from our oldest stories with some moving beyond the physical altogether, roaming as code within the obscurest regions of the internet.

We used to call them Will-O'-The-Wisps, nasty little tricksters they were and still are. They used to be little flickers of light floating along the darkest paths waiting to lure unsuspecting travellers into dangerous ground in the hopes that they would die. Despite their minuscule size, they were strictly carnivorous, often merging into feeding frenzies resembling a bonfire.

Now they lurk inside of adverts, namely whatever the internet browser assesses as their user's top interests. They slip inside of the pretty pictures, between the brackets and undetectable to the average user, waiting to lure you to their website - their portal. Ever hear that staring at a screen is bad for your eyesight? It's them feeding on you, albeit very slowly and through your optic nerves to get to your delicious, blood rich brain.

This brings us delightfully on to vampires, now known mostly for their eccentricity and failure to blend in as humans when met in person. They thrive online, their victims met through shady missed connections that sound vague enough to be anyone but with that little detail thrown in to entice someone with their preferred blood type.

Appearance-wise they've lost their old features, their thickly furred skin, the ears positioned at the top of their head and their bulging black eyes. They've toned down, mimicking our ape-ish ancestry though they themselves are descended from something more akin to a bat.We were never too wrong about them.

We were wrong about trolls, they weren't the clumsy warm-blooded fools who could be tricked by goats but nor were they gigantic stony beasts. They were somewhere in between, these beings twice the size of a man but with a mind much calmer and slower. They didn't live in caves exactly, they were the sides of mountains come to life, so to speak. Born from something in the underground streams or so they claimed.

Now they are landslides and avalanches when their colonies move to lower and warmer ground. They are collapsing mines and sinkholes as they relocate to somewhere quieter, having finally realised that humans now live where they originally settled. They may be slow to make decisions but they move faster than a sports car on nitrous oxide, leaving behind new cracks in paving slabs and fresh roadkill wherever their feet land.

Everything we wrote about in our folklore is changing to keep up with us and eventually surpass us.

Day 922

Recognising the dead is becoming harder and harder for reasons beyond our current knowledge. To make a long story short - they just don't look dead any more, at least not the more recently deceased. There's a lack of ghostly pallor, feathered wisps of ethereal energy floating to and from them - not so much as a single inhuman or otherworldy thing about the vast majority of them.

Recent cases of employers hiring the recently deceased are on the rise which is difficult for all involved. It makes one wonder if it counts as discrimination to fire somebody for being dead, a state which they can't change?  The answer isn't very forthcoming and brings to the table countless new ethical questions on the consciousness of the dead and what their presence means for those among the living who believe in an afterlife.

The dead always manage to shift the all attempts to ask about their current state of being and sudden desire to have a job with such skill that it often takes one a moment to remember the original point or question. The dead simply don't want us to know anything about being dead, they just want to keep living as though they were still among us, or so it would seem.

The only sure fire ways to tell if someone is a member of the recently deceased community nowadays is to either shine a light directly at them as it passes through them,diffusing their realistic form to their baser, hazy appearance. Of course this is considered incredibly rude to do and often triggers poltergeist behaviour, resulting so far in thirty eight cases of injury and five deaths.

It's not like anything can be done for the time being - we can hardly arrest a semi-incorporeal spirit!

Day 921

The average human is born with two full sets of teeth. The average human then proceeds to grow and lose the primary set before the permanent adult set grow in (four wisdom teeth included). The average human has around seven fillings and 3.28 decayed or missing permanent teeth, give or take the minority of exceptions.

More recently (as of 1998, to be precise) around 1/300 adults develop a condition called Lazaradentinitus, more commonly known as Shark Jaw Syndrome. The only known symptoms of this so far are a lack of pigmentation in the adult's gums, rapid tooth loss and rapid regrowth. These regrown teeth are far more frail and loose than their original permanent set, making them far more likely to be broken or even ingrown in some cases.

These newer sets of teeth are much harder to spot on an x-ray than an original set of adult teeth in a child, in fact they don't seem to be made of enamel at all but some hybrid mixture of semi-petrified flesh with an enamel-like coating more akin to the thickness of a fingernail than solid tooth. As a result of the petrification, the gums and surrounding skin are often discoloured, usually with a distinct shade of grey which further lends the disease to the moniker of "Shark Jaws".

While everyone over the age of eighteen is advised to keep a close eye on the colour of their gums and report any signs of change, there have been 102 casualties directly linked to the condition with a potential 38 others whose cause of death can't be confirmed as solely Shark Jaws Syndrome. The most frequent ways in which the patients die are either an undetected infection that's managed to spread to the brain or close enough to cause severe nerve damage and seizures or they choke to death in their sleep as they inhale their own teeth.

Day 920

The old cement silos overlooked the town from their vantage point at the point locally known as Valley Rise. Every Saturday evening and all through the night lights could be seen flashing at the top before settling in pairs to watch the town for the remainder of the night. It wasn't really talked about by the older generations, that sort of thing was left to rest in peace as it should.

The younger generations didn't like to let a mystery go unexplored and so they would dare each other at school until a small group had formed the courage to trespass past the barbed wire fence and to the top of the silos. They didn't talk about what they found, only that it was sad and needed to be left alone. This continued for several generations, the silos growing rustier by the year with no plans to have them taken down in the foreseeable future.

As with anything unusual and abandoned, somebody got the idea to fly a drone inside as far as they could just to see what was going on. Even if it was something as boring as a prank carried out through the years it would at least mean they had footage to share and an explanation at last. They were too young to know better, to think about everything people had said after coming from there, to put two and two together to make sense of it all.

After the initial dash across Valley Rise, through the fence she set-up as quick as she could - the last thing she wanted was to be caught by patrolling security with a half assembled drone in her lap. Hiding underneath the main staircase she began to explore from the relative safety of her position, not paying much attention to the way the dust on the floor moved behind her as though someone was kicking it irritably.

She reached the top of the silo with relative ease, spotting odd patterns on the floor like somebody had been pacing around a certain space a few feet from her, the kind of pattern you'd only see from the top of the main staircase. Thinking it to be the wind swirling about the circular chamber (and not realising that despite it being windy outside the air inside was utterly still), she moved on to a smaller opening she'd seen on the way up, hopefully the way to the roof.

It turned out to be a series of ladders and platforms, over thirty roughly, that lead far further up than the main staircase had. As her drone climbed she faintly heard the sounds of hands slapping the rails as though somebody was climbing up just beneath her drone but the camera showed nothing below but the gradual descent to the ground floor.

The sounds continued to follow her drone until she reached the top. At that point she swore she heard the hands slip and a series of sickening cracks fade like a sack had been dropped down. The drone's camera still showed nothing so she took it out of a hover and through the open roof door only to be near blinded by several torch beams shining right at the screen, blaring into her eyes.

As the bright spots in her vision cleared she saw six children holding torches and one lone torch lying on the ground near the roof's edge. The group were all dressed like they'd stepped out of one of the old vintage movies, their clunky torches only adding to the effect. None of them spoke, they just stared at her for a few tense moments before turning around to search for something, their beams flickering about all over the place.

Not once did they shine their light at the lone torch and they didn't respond when she used the drone's microphone to point it out to them. Just as she began to grow bored of the children ignoring her they all turned simultaneously and began walking towards the roof's edge. She called out and tried to make them turn back by flying the drone right at them but it went through them. All at once they placed their torches on the ground, the lone one turning off by itself. They all lifted their left leg and gracefully fell from the edge, leaving their torches to stand watch over the town.

Day 919

The people of Wall Town - despite being the frontier between what survived to form a new civilisation and what was trapped outside - were nothing like the thriving populace inside. It would be more accurate to say that they were a potent mixture of feral, furious and faster than anything looking so human had the right to be. Still, they stopped everyone outside from coming in and they did it too well for anybody inside to complain.

The people of Wall Town knew their lot in the new life, knew that if they continued to photograph the corpses of whatever strayed too close or filmed the killings they would be left alone by the inner dwellers. They were rarely visited by anyone from inside to the extent that their environmental exposure and altered appearance made the two groups seem more like two utterly separate species.

With their thicker skin all wrinkled and leathery like a tortoise, their tougher nails kept filed to lethal points and a digestive system that could put a vulture's to shame, they were truly made for their environment in the cramped cells along the outer walls of the alleged last remnants of civilisation.

In contrast the inner dwellers were made for foraging, not fighting, with their keener and bulbous eyes, their broad shovel-hands and flat herbivore teeth. They kept plants, whatever not-them-creatures would feed on those plants and ate both as often as possible. Of course they considered this to be the defining point that made them a more civil people than the wall dwellers who didn't farm or forage, they fought and fed on anything. It was barbaric to the surprisingly delicate sensibilities of the inner dwellers.

In spite of the disputes and annoyed attitudes of both wall and inner dwellers, both were glad to not be near the gate that acted as a meeting place, trading centre and weak point for their precious civilisation. The gates themselves had only ever opened once to allow for elephants to be brought inside, though in opening it crushed the majority of the dwellers who had crafted flimsy fabric homes around and inside the enormous hinges.

Their blood stains never faded and their dwellings were never replaced. That was the thing about the gate dwellers, they held a fearsome reverence of all life, being the ones who dealt with the wider variety of it on a regular basis. Nobody was turned down to trade and precious little was refused. there was always something to be made of a given item and they were a crafty people whose vocal chords extended deep down into their chest to allow them to bellow their offers for miles around, their arms thrice the length of their body with multiple joints to keep their wares away from thieving hands.

The last point of civilisation endured, though humanity was long gone.

Day 918

He only went in to have his tonsils taken out, he said, and that was as much as he knew. Nobody had told him any different so he assumed there was a delay or that he was still being prepared for the surgery, not knowing that a tonsillectomy was meant to take 20 minutes. But he wasn't there for that.

He had been told by his doctor that he had a problem with his tonsils and that he had to go to a specialist hospital straight away. They were so quick about getting him there, he kept telling us, which wasn't bad when he'd only gone in with a persistent sore throat. As the weeks went on he'd started to say more about his problem, how he swears he checked it himself but doesn't know quite what he saw, only that he kept thinking of hedgehogs when he tried to remember it.

We all had similar problems and they aren't telling us what's going on. We check each other when we can and all we know after is that yes we checked and yes we saw something but we have no idea what. I only came in when I started losing all vision in one eye, leaving me currently dealing with these dark tendrils curling about the room when I take the eye patch off.

They never did anything else but cover up the problem, it's just what they do here it seems. They put a blanket over whatever is wrong with us and wait until we drop or vanish. I've not seen somebody vanish just yet but the lady in the next room told me that her roommate had vanished just as they were heading for the cafeteria. The poor woman's body had wriggled and flopped about in the air, then all she talks about is her grandmother's pincushion.

Most of us know that we have the same thing, though several are still in denial and claim they're due for their surgical consultation any day now. I don't think it's entirely their own thoughts doing this, it tends to be the ones with headaches and backaches that don't think right. They don't stand very well, generally flopping about listlessly, limbs twitching uncontrollably while all they actually talk about is how their foot itches or something else utterly inane.

More and more people have been coming in recently and the staff are now wearing full hazmat suits. I don't think it'll help them much - half of them are convinced that we're all here to see some great doctor who will cure us all without knowing what we originally came here for. They sound as certain as the brain and spine patients, they sound as sleepy as them too.

I don't know what they - what we are becoming but I don't think they've been human for quite some time.

Day 917

The morning after the storm, the village of Lesser Nailmarsh found out just how cluttered the countryside could be. It wasn't just the usual post-storm debris, not just branches on the roads and garden gnomes in the trees, it was the dead again. A bloody nuisance really.

This hadn't happened for over two hundred years but in such a small community it was talked about as regularly as the Sunday sermons. Whenever there was a storm incoming there would be group meetings in the church hall where they'd do whatever the old books had done to keep the dead down the last time.

They thought it had been working but they'd made a mistake this time. That's all it ever takes you know, one wrong word or a half-arsed gesture and then suddenly every coffin that has ever been left within the village's grounds is now not only on the surface of wherever it was left but also open and full of water.

It was a disturbing sight for many of the folk living near the church, more so for those living beside the woods. The church grounds had been used for burying the local dead for as long as the river had run and the usage of that exact acre boomed when the Catholic church saw fit to consecrate it.

Of course there was a time when it was meant only for the wealthy and the rest were buried in boxes beside the woods, as close to the spiritually "safe" grounds as they could get without getting into trouble. Presently it meant that a fair few folk woke up to shoddily built coffins leaking faintly grey water all over their floors while the grinning dead beckoned them closer.

They didn't record what went wrong, only their desperate attempts to send the dead back to where they should be- bodies below, souls above. They did record in graphic detail exactly how the dead moved around in the water and, if the coffins were close enough to touch, shift between graves as though they were swimming in an endless oceanic abyss.

The dead were always smiling, always waving and beckoning like it was just another day for them and perhaps it was, most of them had probably seen the previous rising and knew the drill, Some mimicked the ceremony in groups further down into the unfathomable depths contained within the coffins while others poked at the water, testing their boundaries and waiting for the ceremony to be done right.

Day 916

There is always an order to things, whether we want there to be or not. Everything we do is in and for order, much as we may dislike it, not realise it and even knowingly accept it. The universe likes order, likes things to be As They Should Be and not a particle otherwise. Humans, on the other hand, have a tendency to disrupt this which leads to consequences we never seem to link to our chaos at the time.

For instance, a tree that has been in the middle of a grassy field, standing utterly alone for several thousand years and not growing a single inch. Human see - human remove and begin to plough the field. As a direct result of this, the accumulated energies within the tree are released and spread as blight throughout the planted crops. The humans relying on the crops die off and their energy is drawn to the centre if the field where a tree begins to sprout again.

This time it has a "curse" to keep it there, untouched for as many years as human memory lasts for.

Another instance- a cave whose stalagmites and stalactites bear a striking resemblance to teeth as they end not with graceful spires but flat like a molar tooth. Every year since the cave was discovered somebody chipped away a chunk of stalagmite or stalactite, every year a different one and slowly creating a mouth of fangs where a herbivore's once was. It shouldn't have been so surprising when the cave set out for blood, whispering to people about treasure further inside and crushing them like overripe pears.

If it couldn't go back to How It Should Be then it must go forward and become something new.

Our final example is the house that has always been there and always had an old woman living there. Even when she was hanged as a witch over 150 years ago someone almost exactly like her moved in "from across the county". "A dear old friend" come to mourn or celebrate the passing of the former old woman who lived there. Though the house and the old woman may have changed, they have always been.

The best way to keep something in one place is to adapt it enough that the rest of us don't notice it.

Day 915

Mirrored lifts are becoming more and more common as the rifts between dimensions grow thinner, not that the average person would notice of course. It's the kind of thing you glance at from the corner of your eyes if you know what you're looking for and when to stop looking.

Really it's a skill you pick up if you spend enough time around mirrors, more specifically ones that are parallel. The infinite loop they reflect isn't just light bouncing to and fro, it's always slightly off the further you look past yourself and the longer you stare for until all you can see if the minor irregularities between the reflected versions of yourself.

It varies from minor delays in movements (just a fraction of a second off but enough to make a difference), variations in eye colour by a few shades and even height differences of a few centimetres. Never enough for you to notice at a brief glance, and something in our biology makes us want to not stare too long at these infinite loops of ourselves, but enough that when you do notice you never stop seeing it.

In every shop window you walk past, every aisle of mirrors you encounter you'll see these people that look almost like you. They are real, that's what gets people the first few times they experience this but they are very much alive just like you. They have their own rich and detailed lives and from their perspective you are the irregularity they are trying to live parallel to.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't pay them any attention at all, on the contrary if they notice you noticing them they tend to react worse than you. There are ones who do it in the places you can't see,where in their dimension there are no mirrors. Sometimes that version of you will vanish entirely as they retreat to a reflectionless void out of fear.

These are the ones you should worry about, when they decide to come back they come back with a purpose. They make themselves the only existing variant one way or another. Very few cases of this have been recorded but they remain graphic enough to warn the rest of us into being more watchful.

Look out for the signs(aside from a reflection vanishing for long periods of time and suddenly reappearing much closer than they should be). The way your reflections stop moving when you do or move towards you are the biggest warnings - the ones you get before they strike and eliminate you as a variant. Early warnings are down to your reflection maintaining eye contact when you turn your back or if they are carrying a bag that you aren't.

Be informed and be safe.

Don't make eye contact and be prepared to run.

Good luck.

Day 914

The theatre had been modelled on a beehive, that much was certain, and though it had remained disused for the last fifty years local urban explorers had declared it utterly unique for a plethora of reasons. Whatever footage they took would go viral within the hour, the public craved their next upload from the comfort and safety of their seats.

Though the stunning architecture was the official selling point of their videos (not to mention the subsequent tourism to their town from people who just wanted a glimpse of the theatre) the main reason their videos garnered so much attention was that they managed to include the old workers.

Now they weren't old as in former employees - they still believed the theatre was up and running in perfect order, showing the classical, timeless plays of their age. the fact that they were little more than yellow goop holding a skeleton together with the tattered and slowly dissolving remains of their uniforms trapped inside like a fly in amber, was another matter altogether.

Affectionately dubbed "honeys" they liked to lead the local explorers around, offering them seats which they had to decline each time for fear that they might never be able to leave them again. There were enough bodies lying about the place to confirm that the honeys didn't mean to be malicious but the death toll was around seventy eight and (unfortunately) rising each year.

There was always someone who had a genius way to get unstuck from the chairs or to survive whatever food and drink they were given. Despite there being no success in these endeavours, the thought that it might still be possible was enough to keep these fools coming in with sticky spray remover, covered in foil, holding trick cups and trick bowls that let their contents pour out harmlessly to the floor.

The theatre had been modelled on a beehive, that much was certain, and whatever the architect had done to the place, it was becoming less and less recognisable as anything else.

Day 913

The first thing she noticed was just how blue the water was. How could any natural liquid be so startlingly turquoise, so unrealistically vibrant yet be in at the back of the same grotto she and her friends used to play in when they were children. It wasn't just a trick of the florescent lighting, that was for damn sure, as her colleague showed her a sample he'd taken that still retained the same colour as the rest of the water.

It had been fenced off back when she was a child but now she had been invited back with an official purpose. The unusual fish sighted darting between what appeared to be old mining equipment and some kind of rusted scaffolding had prompted more questions than the local council had been prepared to answer, especially given that theirs had never been a mining community.

The water was found to be dangerously acidic, barely contained within the glass sample tube and far too harsh to consider doing a personal dive. The fish however seemed perfectly content to laze about and even float just beneath the surface, showcasing their full ten foot length in some cases. Otherwise they acted as normally as any cave dwelling fish with no natural predators, until her team tried to feed one.

It was suggested that they lure one close enough that it could be netted and samples taken to further study them without killing what appeared to be a rare and unclassified species. Chum was made from other local fish (non-cave dwelling, of course) and brought in by the bucket so the team could try and sample as many fish as possible.

The first time they tried they were at such an angle that they never got near the head end of the fish, just managing to grab tissue samples and a scale or two along by its tail. The second and third fish went much the same before they redistributed the chum so that they'd be able to get teeth and gum samples for the first time.

None of them expected that these fish had evolved alongside humans for countless centuries and that they had once preyed upon humans on a scale so colossal that stories of them were still well known, albeit skewered ones. They looked nothing like the movies or paintings - they were much worse.

Inside the fourth fishes' mouth was a human head, it was rudimentary and unresponsive to sound but still opened and closed its smaller mouth in time with the fishes' outer mouth to eat. The eyes were possibly light sensitive organs, there wasn't much chance of them being able to haul the hulking creature on shore to further investigate it.

While the outer mouth had no teeth it appeared to use small muscular contractions to pull food in like a fleshy conveyor belt while the inner mouth had incredibly human-looking teeth that bit and chewed the food.The head was even able to twist and turn to properly shred the chum into smaller digestible pieces.

She wasn't quite sure how to tell her bosses that she'd found mermaids.

Day 912

The ghosts won't stay still anymore, they are all on the move. Normally they stick to whatever place lingers strongest in their memory and in some cases are utterly incapable of doing much more than standing still in their spot. Recently even they are leaving their self-designated areas.

To the common person this mass migration of the restless dead is utterly inconsequential, after all the vast majority of therm are either near impossible to see or incapable of changing from the orb state. A living human may experience the occasional paranormal-esque event such as electrical malfunctions and blood stains in impossible places but otherwise the dead won't leave much of a physical trace.

The appropriate authorities are tracking the migration who seem to be heading towards the ocean. Infrared cameras have pinpointed their trail merging from their individual global routes into one large stream. Leading experts in souls and the dead believe that they will head to one of two places renowned for their other-worldly qualities.

The first predicted area is the Bermuda Triangle which is believed to be a central hub for the dead and as such their conglomeration attracts more fatalities and disappearances than any other established haunting ground. Though it has often been suspected that the ghostly attractions are based on high electromagnetism in the area, no set theory has been agreed on.

The second predicted place is over 8,000 miles away but as the mass migration is coalescing somewhere between the two, it could go either way. The Mariana Trench is often seen as the ultimate end point within the ocean, within the world as some would say. A veritable graveyard over 1,000 feet long and barely over 40 feet wide - the greatest possible depth. The leading theory behind this as the possible end goal of the migration is the sheer amount of decay and detritus, having accumulated over potentially millions of years, and now having finally tipped the scale to something that our dead crave.

Of course these are only theories and though the dead still move they are continually being monitored as best as we can. Technology doesn't always work around the dead so for what we claim know they have already reached their destination and we are just observing the stragglers. After all, the dead have always outnumbered the living, now more than ever.

Day 911

There haven't been birds in the sky for years now, not so much as a single flutter of feathers across the horizon or the harsh screams of seagulls battling mid-air over scraps of food. They aren't nesting in the trees or hedges or cliffs, they aren't anywhere to be seen above us.

The same goes for the  man-made and sky-bound. Planes, helicopters, drones - if it was made to fly it is nowhere to be found. The airport doors are beginning to rust from disuse, we don't even try to forage in them. Their large glass windows are too exposed and the temptation to fly is always there.

There are still insects,the little flying ones, only now they crawl. Whole swarms of flies, bees and even butterflies all walk like the rest of us. Their primitive little minds still capable of understanding the danger we are all in and how all our lives depend upon remaining ground-bound.

There's nothing in the sky because it's all hiding down here with us.