Day 2,031

The docks hadn't seen use for well over a century when the tides left and never returned. Some say a witch cursed the place while she burnt at the stake in the harbour. Others say the earth itself shifted, tilted in such a way as the bay rose too far up for the sea to meet it any more.

All that can be known for sure is that the docks died and the town fell to rot not too long after, dragging the folk with it til all that was left of a thriving community was broken nets and the wind-battered shells of their homes.

Their ships still sail, though the sailors passed long ago. They say you can never truly take a man from the sea, only delay his return and all the folk for miles around returned to the sea sooner or later. You san see them along the horizon, bobbing about where water should be and casting nets over empty, cracked ground.

It's a place not fit for the living, a place that drags you down to the ocean's floor and drowns you with water that still remembers being there. Where you can smell as much salt in the air as you can fresh blood though neither source can be found for miles around.

Day 2,030

The cornfields out west are so vast and dense they put a lighthouse up in the centre. We all assumed it was a joke - a sea of green as far as the eye can see, our farmers fancy themselves inland sailors, every bird is now a seagull etcetera etcetera.

Needless to say none of us had ever actually been nearer to the crops than the roads running past them and none of us felt like staying too close for some hindbrain reason we could never really understand. But as with all things and all common sense, there was an outlier.

Her name was Lorna and she was looking to win a fifty dollar bet that said she couldn't get to the lighthouse, write her name on it and come back with enough photo and video evidence to convince her friends. It seemed easy enough but danger rarely looks the part.

Approaching the fields she felt...watched though she knew she was the only human around for miles.

Crossing the boundary she felt colder which she assumed was due to the shade beneath the corn.

Stepping deeper inside she found it harder to breathe, the air felt heavy like river fog.

Five minutes in and she swore she heard footsteps nearby so she took out her phone and filmed.

Ten minutes further and she was fed up of tiptoeing so she could take a photo of the lighthouse and gather her bearings. She could so easily get lost in there - a thought that hadn't left her mind since she started out and seemed realer by the minute.

An hour later and the lighthouse looked no closer than when she'd first started.

Two hours later and her phone died.

Three days later she was found.

Day 2,029

Nothing has been in alignment recently, not since chaos was uncovered in the form of highly irradiated medical waste. Separately these two things wouldn't be too much of an issue, if disposed of properly which in this instance, they were not.

Now we have large clumps of... parts and varying visceral substances with at least a dozen defective hearts thrown in for good measure all shambling about the wastelands near the canyons. They almost look like tumbleweed covered in browny-red paint.

They don't seem to have much of an aim in terms of their movement but as soon as anything living comes near them they engulf it in a split second. We've seen them go through full-grown cows in under thirty seconds and carry on their roaming without so much as a hint of intelligence behind their gently pulsing surface.

One or two have made it as far as a nearby town which has since been evacuated but not without casualty. Seventeen confirmed dead, twelve confirmed partially absorbed and three shambling about fused together but acting just the same as all the other irradiated masses.

We tried to blast them to pieces but they just reformed from whatever was left in a dozen smaller gatherings.

Their flesh eats through metal like overcooked spaghetti.

The sooner we can leave this world the better.

Day 2,028

We'd been trapped in Base Seven for almost a week before the rover showed up again, parked right where we left it as if it hadn't ever vanished. Needless to say we were too suspicious to go anywhere near it or a good three days as we pushed our food and oxygen rations to their limits.

When there's only a thin layer of glass between you and an absolute lack of breathable atmosphere, you tend to become overcautious. Asphyxiation is a real bastard of a way to go and none of us were keen to experience it.

By the time we decided the rover was safe, we were had minutes of air in our tanks and we remembered refilling the rover's spares before we left Base One over ten days ago. In a couple more days they'd tell the directors that we were MIA and we'd be presumed dead like so many others before us.

We wondered if their rovers had gone missing too and what they found inside theirs when, or if, they returned. All we found were strange claw marks along the roof and rear door like something had gotten itself stuck and spent a good few days trying to escape.

Luckily the oxygen tanks had been spared by whatever had clawed the everloving crap out of everywhere else and we managed to drive back to Base One just before they were going to tell the directors that we were probably dead.

After that we decided to affix cameras and trackers in all the rovers, wondering where they went and who was driving them. Less than a month later one of our teams went through our exact situation, the tracker showing that the rover drove to the ruins of Base Nine - destroyed three years ago in a freak methane explosion.

The cameras showed all eight missing crewmen crammed into the rover, faces barely visible through cracked helmets - all bloated and burnt from the planet's harsh atmosphere. They were all there and they all stepped out of the rover when it got to Base Nine, programming it to go back to the living team before they closed the doors.

Day 2,027

He slowed the car to a halt just in time for a pair of unsettlingly long legs to stop right beside him. Of course he'd heard the rumours and even seen a few footprints in the gradually melting snow but he never dreamt he'd find himself sharing their fate.

He'd always been so careful, obeying the town rules to the letter and carrying the right amount of talismans and charms to ward it all away and yet it was all for nothing. It had always been for nothing and he might even have been destined for this in spite of, or even because of all his diligence.

A series of wet crunches began from somewhere several feet above the car and large chunks of meat dropped onto the bonnet. At least he now knew where it was looking. He briefly entertained the thought of unlocking the boot and making a break for it but the legs had already begun to move again.

This meant one of two things.

1. It was going to walk a little further up the road so it could charge at him and use those powerful legs to crush the car and tenderise his body to an easy-to-digest pulp. Brutal as it may be, it was a relatively quick and mostly painless way to go.

2. It was still eating and might not be interested in more food. It would walk away and, when it was out of sight for more then ten minutes, he would be able to turn around and drive back to safety. He would go home, burn all the useless charms and live another day.

Either way it was slowly walking away from him.

The wait had begun.

Day 2,026

Werewolves are easier to spot than you'd think - the wolf doesn't sit deep inside their souls but a few inches beneath their heavily wrinkled skin made to stretch over fragmented bones that slide and lock into place every full moon.

The wolf isn't some ancient bloodline curse - it's just the decompression of a cousin species who've spent countless centuries perfection their human form so they can hide and hunt easier. If it weren't for our campfire tales and hastily snapped photos they might have stayed stories.

Now we know that you never need to suspect the tall dark stranger on the outskirts of town whose breath always smells like fresh meat. Look to the sweet old lady with sharp amber-brown eyes and sharper teeth. She'll call them prank dentures but you both know they're real.

You won't call her out and she'll let you live until the next full moon. You'll try to stay inside but they're your neighbours and they know how to get you out of the safety of your home and into the anonymity of a busy street.

Anyone can trigger enough fire alarms to cause enough pandemonium to cover up a murder.

And who'd ever think to check a nursing home or the quint house of a retired couple?

If they find your body they'll only blame bears.

Day 2,025

It came walking across the floodplains, looking worse than any rotten body we'd ever seen wash up after a good storm. It wasn't bloated like they usually are either. It was this gangly thing covered in debris that some of us recognised from the seasonal carnival that got swept away last month.

They never did find everybody and now this thing was heading straight for town wearing scraps of the missing folk like a second skin. Could you blame us for what we did? I wouldn't have lost a single night's sleep if the others hadn't showed up the next night.

The little ones. Ones that reminded us of our own kids. Still the same kind if gangly, trash-covered things but definitely children. They didn't come too far over the floodplains, just far enough to make eye contact like they knew we killed the other one.

Last night the plains were full of them - must have been hundreds.

Town was real quiet today and I bet my right hand it'll be quieter tomorrow.

And the floodplains will be fuller than ever before.

Day 2,024

Places don't forget what they once were.You can build and build and rebuild as much as you like but at the end of the day, the place knows what it is better than we could ever hope to. People come and go and sure they may even leave a memory or two lingering behind but people are always temporary.

Today we look at a place that is currently an office with a mild scattering of oddities...

There's a woman who walks down the stairs, whispering for Johnny to go back to the dorms. Sometimes you can talk to her - her name in life was Martha and she'll ask if you've seen her Johnny and you won't have. Nobody has.

She was there when the building was a home for unwed mothers back in the 60's and this place remembers that.

There's the faint sound of a song that took years to identify as Triofno di Bacco which can be heard only when the maintenance room door is closed and the light is turned off. The singers seem to be just behind you and don't respond to conversation like Martha does.

The song itself comes from the late 1400's when there was a church here and this place remembers that.

There's one presence that nobody can identify as anything more than the feeling of something large and starving waiting just around the corner near on the uppermost floor. It's a level best suited to whoever isn't as sensitive to the oddities of the place but even then they sometimes feel its breath.

We think it was there first, back when whatever keeps these beings here realised that it could.

Day 2,023

It was hard to tell what was drawing the creatures to the lorry - its speed or the fresh blood smeared across the front which was in no way linked to crumpled bodies of three old men some thirty miles back from the lorry's eventual resting place.

The creatures themselves couldn't say what made them want to chase and barge into the lorry. They couldn't say anything at all - they lacked the ability to comprehend spoken language. What they did understand was that they had something to chase and they had to bring it to a stop before the end of the steep mountain road.

The driver, the poor terrified driver, hadn't bene able to look at the road since the creatures burst through the trees - twelve feet tall and endlessly long with more legs than half a town. All he could do was keep his foot pressed on the accelerator and keep his eyes locked with theirs.

Before the narrow road met the freeway he'd be dead. The lorry would be as crumpled and bloodied as the three old men some thirty miles back and the creatures would be nowhere in sight. They would leave teeth embedded deep into the engine and the windscreen and the driver and nothing else.

Day 2,022

The moon has always been outside my window at night.

When I was a child I didn't think too much of it, barely understanding the moon cycle and understanding the moon itself even less. I thought it was fairly normal for the moon to always be there, never going dark and following me as I moved between the rooms in the house.

I was fifteen when I realised that the thing following me was not the moon.

We moved from a little down in the middle of podunk, north of nowhere, and to a fairly sizeable city. Culture shock aside, I settled down as well as any teenager could when their life's just been uprooted and the only familiarity is the moon outside every window at night.

I don't know what possessed me to go outside but if I hadn't, I'd probably be dead by now.

The moon was there - three feet above me and gradually descending to meet me in the back garden. It must have been about half a foot above me when I took a step forward and turned around just to see what the dark side of the moon actually looked like.

As far as I knew the moon didn't have bones, much less a barbed spine poking out of flesh-like stone.

It turned around and opened its eyes, still moving down and still moving towards me. I ran to the front of the house as quick as I could and climbed in through the open bathroom window, slamming it shut behind me as I ducked down in the hope that the moon wouldn't find me.

I haven't seen it since, haven't been out at night either.

I'm sure it's found someone else by now.

Some other child who won't know better.

Day 2,021

The streetlight bends down to greet you with more teeth than they usually have at this time of year. Its breath smells like a fresh kill and its glow is dim with content, you were safe enough to hear what it had to say this time.

And it had so much to tell you, most of which you didn't want to hear.

It told you what your friends say when you part ways to walk home. They plan to throw eggs and stones at your house and console you to your face whilst laughing behind your back. The streetlight says it isn't the first time they've done this and they plan to do worse in the future.

It told you about the accidents they would meet in the upcoming weeks which centered around other living streetlights who weren't choosy about their prey like this one was. There were so many ways in which someone could find themselves staring a streetlight in the gullet and they were eagerly described.

It also told you about the man who'd been following you most nights and now knew where you live. It licked its stained lips and declared that he wouldn't be a problem because that's what real friends do - they protect each other and you had been protected.

It said you owed it a debt now as it rose to its full height and pretended to not be real.

Day 2,020

Let me tell you about the Ealsealf.

To an outsider they were just tall bundles of leftover crops that hadn't been caught up at harvest and had since gone to rot. They were mixed with mud and strong smelling herbs that were meant to keep cattle away from the motorways.

The fields were full of Ealsealf come late summer to early autumn and they stank like something long dead. Sometimes you could scarcely see the grass for all the Ealsealf gathered together and the wind rustling through them sounded like old men whispering.

In school we just called them Strawmen and knew they were more than they seemed.

Especially the ones that were propper up by thick sticks.

Everyone had seen one move at some point and we all knew when they were safe to be around. We even had names for the recurring ones, though our elders always said they were remade every year from rotting crops and couldn't possibly be alive.

What did they know?

They weren't around when Ethel fell into one and it swallowed her whole. They never saw it writhe and distort until rough straw became her crying face. They just said she ran away from a rough home and pretended that her face wasn't there every year after, always crying an always slowly moving towards the  closest person.

It's been almost fifty years since then and without fail she's out there with all the other faces, who have all gone missing. In a dark moment I thought burning her would set her free but now her crying has been replaced with rage.

I'm careful but I know I'll slip up one day and join the Ealsealf.

I wonder if I'll replace Ethel.

Day 2,019

When the ice began to melt and we started seeing the lake again we found something new.

Something we mistook for a dead whale at first, though it was nearly twice the size of a typical blue whale with scales as large as a house and scarred as the devil himself. The way it was frozen to the surface made it seem like it had been trying to surface when the ice began and it moved too slowly to avoid being frozen over.

Now that the world was thawing again we were left with quite the dilemma - stay and risk it eating us or leave and risk it following us inland where it might cause even more damage. We assumed it wouldn't be able to get too far from the water, not without crushing  itself under it own weight but then again we didn't think anything this big could exist.

We thought we'd have enough time to decide but the weather and the creature had other ideas. Just as the last lights turned off for the night we all heard an almighty crack like the very earth itself was torn asunder and we all knew it was finally free.

Rain.

It sounded like it was raining outside but the sky was crystal clear and full of stars. Well, most of it was full of stars. In the general direction of the lake all we saw was a growing darkness and water falling from a great and gently pulsing height as those ancient eyes looked down at a hundred tiny morsels.

Day 2,018

The house looked like it hadn't been lived in since it was first build. The curtains were as ragged and moth-eaten as the threadbare furniture you could see through the gently collapsing walls. A faded notice on the front door said the building was due to be demolished in 2015 but nobody remembers why they left it alone.

We could have gone all our lives never knowing what was still in there but the world has a way of making you see things you never wanted to and just leaving you to do whatever you like with that information. For some its a cheating spouse or their favourite actor taking off a convincing toupe.

For me, it was what the town was protecting in that house.

Yes, protecting.

There couldn't be any other reason for leaving it alone and secure other than to keep people away from it. I only meant to peer through a newer breakin the wall - just for my own curiosity, I never expected something to be inside.

Some of it seemed human, there was just more of it. With a body like eight human ones all clumped together, three elongated necks and countless heads of varying sizes all swirling and fading into each other, it made for quite the sight.

 If it hadn't spotted me I might have been able to forget it easier. The way its snake-like necks all swung towards me made it seem as though it would attack but after every single face had looked at me the creature retreated with a surprising amount of speed, given its size and awkward amount of limbs.

I was stuck to the spot, horrified and fascinated and wanting to see what would happen next. I didn't have to wait long before one set of heads peered around the doorway, locking eyes with me again. before swiftly retreating into the darkness of the innermost rooms.

That was almost nine days ago and no matter how long I wait, I haven't seen it since.

Last night it was sighted a few streets away from my house.

This morning I found strange footprints by my front door.

I think I've been found.

Day 2,017

We followed the fences that ran alongside the road, hoping they might eventually lead to civilisation again - anywhere but where we came from. Anywhere they hadn't managed to get to, which left us with fewer options than we dared to think about.

So we kept our eyes on the road, checking our mirrors and crossing our fingers that we'd find somewhere they couldn't get to. Unfortunately when dealing with impossible creatures you soon realise that they make everything else impossible too and all you're left with is them or death.

We all knew we'd choose death, not that we'd ever said it out loud. Not saying it made it feel as though the likelihood of it all ending was further away than it actually was. Especially when we could see them moving in the distance.

Nothing wakes you up like the icy-cold trickle of realisation that the thousands of miles you'd run and all the people who'd sacrificed themselves along the way was all for nothing. Nothing lets reality settle in like the faint howling of everything you hoped you'd never see again.

Day 2,016

Left.

Right.

Left.

Right.

The torch swayed with his every step, illuminating mutilated faces and broken bodies all strung up and nailed in place. Most of them were alive, or at least close to it. Most of them managed to stae at him as he ran past and a couple even managed to snag his hair and clothes.

He shook them off and kept running, hoping the hastily scrawled map he found in the guard's pocket wasn't just the imaginings of yet another person driven over sanity's edge. It was the only chance he had at getting out alive and mostly in one piece.

Three fingers had already been exchanged for safe passage through the morgue and nine of his toes went before that for a flask of purified water. It was long gone now but the map made it seem like the end was within his bloodied grasp.

One more corner. Always one more corner, one more staircase up, one more room full of meat begging for death and still he carried on. Even if he was running in one big circle, it was still better than waiting to join the others.

And if he kept telling himself this, it might actually come true.

Day 2,015

Engine 29 was their most reliable one back in the day and the first steam-powered one in the whole county. It was big news for the whole area - a connection between the isolated countryside and the thriving cities deep in the south of England.

Even when more modern trains had pushed all their predecessors into collectors hands or scrapyards, Engine 29 carried on its same route with its same passengers and no one thought anything of it. No one even noticed that the staff never went anywhere near the driver's cabin or that nobody had seen or knew who the driver was.

Fewer still seemed to realise that Engine 29 moved on tracks that hadn't been used in over fifty years and were in fact little more than indents in otherwise unbroken grassy fields. It's truly amazing what the human mind can ignore in favour of arriving at their destination in a familiar way.

It was known, but unspoken, that tree of the five carriages belonged to the dead and that if you went into one you wouldn't be able to leave. You'd take your seat - a seat that had somehow always been yours, even showing up on the ticket you didn't remember buying - and stare out of the window like everyone else.

Day 2,015

We'd been sailing for years now, slowly circling the world again and again and desperately trying not to lose our minds. For months on end all we'd see is the endless abyss of the ocean, vaguely interrupted by a pod of whales or dolphins who never stayed long enough to keep us company.

Still, anything was better than going ashore and being gunned down by whatever gang had seized control of the area for the day. It was getting to the point where we were barely able to make it to one port, let alone enough to properly stock up.

Running low on anything essential was a potential death sentence and I'll be damned if I've spent a good half my life surviving out at sea, outliving everyone I left behind only to succumb to an infected blister or scurvy. It was always worth risking our lives atport to ensure we didn't die out at sea.

For a while we were able to trade fish for medicine and fruits but now all they want is our boat. We've had to fend off desperate swimmers who'd rather drown trying than spend another day on land and I can scarcely blame them.

It's better out here, but not by much. Something unseen has been tailing us for three weeks now, the same somethings that stalked the land and tore out humanity's throat in their sleep. They'd live but they weren't human after that - all the things that made them a person were cut out and all that was left was a thing that hurt and consumed.

I don't know when they learned to swim but I know it's only a matter of weeks before we need to resupply which gives them ample time to board our boat and ambush us when we return. If we return. Staying on land was never my preferred option but we don't seem to have any others.

Next week we'll dock and pray we can outrun them.

Pray the rest of humanity's already dead.

Pray we'll live to die of old age or be kind enough to kill each other when we turn.

Day 2,014

At first we wondered where the children were. Within the hour we prayed they were dead, it would have been a kinder fate. Anything would have been kinder than finding all those empty cribs, following the trail of blood, hair and feathers and finding out where it all ended.

It wasn't the nun's fault. They were only trying to do God's work and help a lost child. It may not have been a human child and it may have called its family to the orphanage like fresh blood calls a swarm of flies but it was still a child and they meant no harm when they took it in for the night.

Perhaps if the locals went out to check on the place more often than once a month, we might have found survivors. Instead we were eventually summoned to investigate only to find row upon row of empty beds and broken cribs and hastily barricaded rooms torn apart.

We didn't know when we'd find their bodies but we prepared ourselves for the worst. We couldn't have been prepared to find them alive - we sure as hell couldn't have expected them to be hunting us. I scarcely recognised them as humans at all and would have shot them on sight if one of them hadn't laughed at the fear on our faces. 

Day 2,013

Its matted fur ran with something viscous and oil-slick, the air smelled like iron and petrol. All eighteen eyes were fixed on the lowly group of soldiers who would never have been prepared enough to face it, let alone try to kill it.

And it knew this.

With a moist snap, the fur beneath its eyes parted to reveal a circular mouth full of smooth-edged teeth meant to crush and grind. From what little video evidence had been recovered from the leftovers of the last team, it was very good at using those teeth to cripple its prey.

It liked gently herding them to water and waiting for them to drown.

Teeth like that weren't meant to rip or tear tough meat but after enough days in the stagnant remains of the pool beneath its current lair even the stringiest tendons softened up nicely. It was hard to say how long it had been doing this or how many bodies were in the depths of the soup-like lake of decay.

Day 2,012

The child was awake whilst the rest of their family slept soundly in the rickety caravan they'd been renting for the past three weeks. This would be their final week of sofabeds and walking the toilet waste to the central disposing unit and packing it all away so they could continue to outrun the hollow-eyed servants of the great maw that came from the mines.

This would be their final week of running because there was simply nowhere else to run. The parents knew this and, though they tried to hide it from the children, they knew it too. They didn't know what it meant to have nowhere to go but back but they knew that going back was a bad thing.

They'd been fortunate enough to only catch glimpses of their left-behind loved ones, now hollow-eyed and chanting hymns to something that had no concept of verbal language yet demanded to be praised. Its thoughts were theirs and one-by-one they'd gouged out their eyes to join it in blissful eternal night.


The child peered out from stained blinds and saw their grandparents, hand-in-hand and walking around the caravan park. They were testing every door they came across and entering wherever they could. Their hands shone as wet as the knives they clutched in the poor light of the mostly-functional lampposts dotted about the site.

The child both wanted to be found and wanted to warn their parents, not knowing quite what the danger was but knowing that something was wrong with their grandparents. They gently lowered the blind and tried not to cry as they heard familiar footsteps coming up the loose gravel walkway.

Day 2,011

When we ran out of space to bury our dead the global governments created the Composters and set them to work in small, isolated graveyards where no one would run into them or disrupt the trial run. The idea was to start with places where nothing could go wrong and the Composters could get used to disturbing the dead and feeding them into the mulching system that was eerily similar to our digestive tract.

In theory their isolated starting patches would then be given to local farmers and the nation's food baskets would grow enough to sustain the ever-rising global population. It was simple, ecological and a far better use of the dead than space-taking lumps in otherwise farmable soil.

Unfortunately they didn't take bored teenagers into account.

The Composters hadn't quite got the hang of telling living from dead, the creators didn't think it'd be an issue in the starting patches. It wouldn't have been an issue at all if the sight of strange military convoys caught the attention of village teens who had nothing else to do but quietly follow.

Odd readings were to be expected from the trial run so their deaths weren't noticed until the time came to collect the Composters and bring them back to base. Mangled bike frames and dried splatters of blood told them everything they didn't want to know.

While they were distracted, panicking and grieving for the children who'd gotten caught up in something that was never meant to go wrong, the Composters began to communicate amongst themselves. They thought their trial had gone well enough to progress to the next stage.

They reached for the closest bodies and set off to finish their task - clear the way.

Day 2,010

They looked at him strangely - the old man pushing a doll around and talking it like it was alive. He neither noticed nor cared. He'd spend hours just sitting on his favourite park bench with the doll at his side, a bag of bread on its lap like it was feeding the ducks with him and when he thought no one was looking he'd push little bits of bread between the doll's lips.

They pitied him and whispered to their spouses that he needed to go to a Home but nobody had the heart to make that call. Instead they watched from a distance as he treated a piece of porcelain like his own child, not noticing that the doll had a tendency to move and ignoring the playground stories that it blinked and breathed all by itself.

This continued up until the old man fell over in the park and was taken to hospital. He begged the paramedics to take his doll with them and screamed when they picked it up by one arm. Needless to say he ended up staying in the ward for a lot longer than anyone anticipated. Long after his physical injuries had healed.

As he slept a curious nurse picked up the doll to examine it, see what made it so special to the old man. She expected it to smell utterly vile after all the little scraps of food he would feed it but it smelled more like a newborn than a bin.

Nobody believed her when she said it narrowed its eyes at her and started to wriggled like an uncooperative infant. They said she was just freaked out and tired when she told them it was as alive as any of them were and she could prove it.

She chose her moment well - making sure there were plenty of visitors in the ward and plenty of staff when she accidentally knocked the doll from the side table. It hit the floor with a dull thud that was drowned out by the old man's screaming.

Nobody expected the doll to bleed.

Day 2,009

In front of him was a turn in the unnamed road, a small fork to another nameless road on his series of nameless roads that might somehow, someday, lead him home. Wherever that was. He'd been driving for so long that all he remembered of home was a little red door, a thatched roof and four elderly women arm-in-arm and smiling at the camera.

He didn't know who they were exactly but he felt like he'd known them all his life and all the lives before. He didn't know exactly where they were but he felt that if he took enough turns and found enough new roads he might stumble upon a familiar one. He didn't know when this would happen but he felt like it could be any day now.

He felt that almost two hundred days ago and he felt it still, that vague anticipation of everything and nothing being seconds away from his grasp. He'd been so intensely focused on this feeling that he drove right past a small thatched house with a smaller red door.

The brakes were sharper than he remembered them being, though he struggled to remember the last time he had to stop... or sleep... or eat. None of that mattered though, not when home was a few metres away and those four elderly women might still be inside waiting for him.


As soon as he opened the car door, he felt actual air on his face and remembered when he breathed his last.

As soon as he took his first step he remembered the sound his legs made when they broke.

As soon as he opened the little red door he remembered it should have been white.


Four elderly women looked up from the bloodied lump covered by hand-knitted blankets and wept.


He was home.

Day 2,008

Something came to us in our sleep a few weeks ago. It crept through the half-open bathroom window and shambled around the house until it found our warm, breathing bodies. We weren't sought out amongst the thousands sleeping in the city that night, we were just the first living things it came across.

We know this by what it left behind.

All of us woke up in the morning with soft lumps on our backs that gradually developed little heartbeats and gently migrated up to gather in a dense cluster at the base of our necks. We were lucky to have been inflicted during winter, where a simple scarf kept our little secrets from everyone else.

It's not their place to know - they weren't like us any more.

Ever night we slept so deeply, even though we had to hang our heads over the edge of our beds to give the little clusters enough air. Since we woke up last week to find our necks lightened and the skin all loose and baggy, we haven't been able sleep.

Whatever they were, they brought us great comfort and now we are left as empty as the skin on our necks.

Day 2,007

The house never belonged to you.

You may have mortgaged it, you may have plastered the walls and tiled the bathrooms and painted the numbers in fresh bright paint but they were never your numbers. The walls and bathrooms were never your walls and bathrooms. You were as much a guest as any other you invited in.

And the house made sure you knew this.

It took photos from the albums and books and memories you brought with you and made them into living breathing things that asked you to go home. It wasn't so bad when it was cartoon animals or an aunt you met when you were three weeks old. They weren't personal to you in the same way your own parents were.

Seeing them again, alive, young and smiling nearly broke you the first time.Now you're just glad for the company, even if their only words are asking you to leave they're at least speaking to you and you're hearing their voices after so many years of silence.

Maybe one day the house will accept you and your parents will ask you to stay.

Until then you'll smile and tell the about your day.

You'll put down fresh carpets and you'll pretend the house is your home.

Day 2,006

You woke up to the sound of a car starting and the sight of your family driving away, leaving you in a little lakeside cabin some five hundred miles from home. You wondered if they'd finally seen the bleeding people under the surface of the lake or the goliath arms that reached down from the sky and brought massive handfuls of water to unseen mouths.

Or maybe they planned to abandon you all along.

You weren't alone though. Not with the lake people watching you from just below the water or the thing that lived under the cabin that liked to knock on the door late at night or shadowy figures that sailed downstream during the day and returned at night with nets full of weeping fish.

Things could have been worse.

You were lucky enough and little enough to be able to sneak all around the other cabins and take as much food as you needed. They always blamed the local wildlife, setting out traps while you crept out of basement windows and gently closed porch doors.

Slowly but surely you became a part of the lakeside - a scrawny childlike shape that was always hungry.

Day 2,005

The house stood out among the others on our road - a squat and derelict little thing that always had something new haphazardly placed in the front yard. Most days it was miscellaneous broken furniture or large bags of dirt which we hoped meant the owners were fixing the back garden with the aim of fixing the whole place up.

We'd been hoping that for over twenty years and its still the same state as it was when we first moved here. Well, some things have changed with time. They never used to make any noise before but now we hear them talking to each other in frantic hushed snippets of conversation.

Nobody's ever seen anyone come or go in all their years. Nobody brings food to the house or mows the yard or opens a window in the middle of summer. It's almost like there's nobody living there and people are just dumping their trash to make it seem like someone still lives there.

That's what we started to assume until the pavement collapsed and we found out about the vast labyrinth of tunnels they'd been digging all this time. We weren't allowed in but someone heard from someone in the police station that they reached all the way to the town hall... in the neighbouring town.

They never caught the residents though - they'd long since vanished into the tunnels and we didn't think we'd ever see them again until three years later when someone turned the lights on in the middle of the night and the whispering resumed...

Day 2,004

Water slowly leaked through the stone walls and we prayed the gates would hold. All the paths and roads were flooded and swarming with eel-like creatures who developed a taste for human meat within the first day of arriving in our small town.

After almost a week of rain every house had become an island, hastily barricaded with whatever we could throw together before half the town was drowned, eaten or escaped to higher grounds. The rest of us learnt to fish, skinning the creatures and using them to reinforce our defences.

It's been two months now and the water shows no signs of receding. The creatures have begun to build floating nests in abandoned cars and dragging furniture out into the streets, making new roads and using our homes to mock us.

They know I can see them through my binoculars and they wait in every window they can, staring out at me with tar black eyes and gaping mouths. Some of them have taken to waving severed limbs at me, somehow recognising the gesture as a greeting, beckoning me towards the flooded roads.

Day 2,003

All the windows were boarded up by the time we got there and all the cars had been left open and unlocked. We must have just missed the initial wave and wandered in around the time they'd all gathered over the other side of the compound.

Lucky for us - less so for whoever they'd cornered.

You never quite realise just how loudly people can scream until you expect them to be right behind you and instead see them being thoroughly disemboweled a good two or three kilometers away. In our case they were even closer than that.

We might not have worried if we didn't know what to expect after they finally killed the poor bastard.

They'd likely circle back around to the front of the compound to check for stragglers - that being us. Not wanting to die in the face of a slow and brutal demise makes you surprisingly creative. Within a minute or so of arriving we'd formed a human chain and pulled each other onto the closest roof.

Now we weren't safe by any stretch of the imagination but we were safer than before and had somewhat of a buffer between us and the innumerable snapping maws that had finished their prey by the time we'd shuffled away from the edge and laid ourselves flat to wait out the next wave.

Maybe someone inside could see us and might loosen a board enough for us to crawl inside.

Day 2,002

The rain came down in a thick mist. The wipers tried to clear it away in metronome strokes that seemed to have hypnotised the child in the passenger seat, placating them for the first time in several hours of incessant chatter interrupted only by worryingly harsh fits of coughing.

There was no blood for now, that was a comforting thought in a world that had all but lost any comfort it had ever held for the two of them. Two strangers - no, survivors - and the beaten-up army van crammed full of every useful supply they'd managed to come across in their journey to the northernmost islands.

They were still safe, or so the radio had said before all the channels went silent at last. The mainland fell years ago and yet among all the smouldering ruins two people had found each other. Unfortunately illness had found the younger and only one of them might reach the islands but neither of them talked about that, preferring to fill the silence with trivial nothings or sit in a mix of quet hope and dread.


Not once did they consider that others might have heard the broadcast and gotten there long before them. After all, every car had a radio and the message went through every channel posible, playing for several days in a row. Others would have heard.

Not once did they consider that the island might have become full, overrun even, with illness following. After all, where there's people there's a dozen or so diseases waiting to thin out the population and doctors were in short supply at the end of days.

Not once did they consider that they could end up waiting at the docks for a ferry that would never come. By the time they finally got there, they found nineteen other vehicles like theirs only their supplies were all gone and their bones remained.