He crosses the wide beach furtively. Foggy days like this are a gift - he can forage during daylight rather than at night - but he still needs to take care. He doesn’t want to be seen.
He stretches his hearing to the limit, but fog muffles sound as well as vision. Finding food will mean taking chances, but then, it always does.
It’s been decades since the waters of Cheviot made him their own, but the price of discovery remains the same: he can live forever beneath the waves, emerging only when he will not be seen; or he can be Harold Holt.
~
image: Angelica East
text: Loki Carbis
One of his anxiety dreams is that the sea disappears. He goes to the beach as usual, strips down and walks out. But he just keeps walking, away from what used to be the shore, looking for the tide-line. He walks until he can’t see the city anymore. It’s just a damp, compacted desert in every direction.
Some mornings he doesn’t quite wake up until he’s there in it, and the water clamps around him, and the ache, the shocking pain of cold, is so thorough he can feel it in his eyeballs.
Then, when he’s released from it, he can start his day. Numb but alive.
~
image: Angelica East
text: Kate Whitfield
One by one, they came lurching up out of the ocean and onto the shore; trusting to the early morning fog to mask their almost-human features until there were too many of them to be resisted. It was 6.35am. The end of humanity had begun.
~
image: Angelica East
text: Richard Watts
