06/24/2020 Snippet, HOLDOUTS.

Continuing on!

I hate abandoned supermarkets. I’ve never been in one which wasn’t dangerous, one way or the other. This one looked more like the ‘jagged metal edges’ type than the ‘nest of savages’ one, or at least it didn’t smell like the latter. Once you get a whiff of that combination of old crap, rancid meat, and stale piss, you never forget it. It doesn’t matter if it’s feral vampires or humans, either. The smell doesn’t change.

Oh, the supermarket smelled like somebody died: both in the old days, and just recently. But the smell wasn’t being renewed regularly. I turned to Sax as we picked our way to the place where the feral was shot. “Why was somebody in here, anyway? And where’s his interview?”

“I don’t know, Special Agent,” Sax replied. “For both questions. Whoever found the feral made an anonymous call from a pay phone. The operator said it was a woman, probably an adult, and that she got off the phone really quickly.”

“Damn,” I said. “Well, there’s progress for you.” Not every town up here in the north had rebuilt enough infrastructure to have pay phones.