06/20/2020 Snippet, HOLDOUTS.

Back to this.

I spoke up. “On the bright side, you did do the right thing to call us in.” I talk better when I’m moving, so I stood. If they had been rude enough to have us meet in a room with an outside window I might have made a show of peering out of it. So I moved to the head of the table instead. How was it the head of the table? Because I was standing there, obviously.

“I gotta say,” I went on, “that it’s nice that things aren’t messed up from here to gone, for once. No, really! Pam and I, we’ve had cases where they had feral lairs ready to swarm. Remember Grand Forks?” The grimness around the table confirmed for me that they, indeed, remembered Grand Forks. “Yeah. Three thousand dead, and if the local Reclamation bureau had called us in a week earlier all those people might still be alive. So you got that going for you. We’re not out of time.

“But the clock is ticking.”