MANNING COMMENCES INVESTIGATION, CLIENTS ANONYMOUS

Soldier of fortune, retired, or nearly so, black ops agent and ghoul extraordinary, Charley Manning begins his investigation:

The warehouse reeked of rot and death, a pungence much stronger in that confined space than the everyday odor of putrefaction that ghouls encountered on the everyday streets of Planet Earth. Decapitated ghoul bodies lay scattered on the green linoleum-tiled floor. The Buck Stops Here game show flickered silently on a large TV set mounted on one wall. A set on the opposite wall was dark. Tattered sofas and plush chairs, a card table with an abandoned cribbage game on it, a coffee station, cabinets loaded with videos, and the i-pads lying about suggested the room had been a social area. A 24 count cribbage hand lay face up on the card table. Blood pools on the floor under the necks of the corpses revealed that the deceased were posties and preebies. The pools beneath the posties were smaller because of a postie’s thicker, slower-flowing blood.

The next two very large rooms were filled with bunk beds, cots, folding chairs and free standing closets. Several washrooms and group showering facilities opened off the obvious sleeping quarters. More bodies in those two rooms than in the front room. Some had been decapitated in their sleep, never arising from their cots. Their eyes, if they still had them, were closed in sleep on the pillows. Manning’s first conclusion was that this facility was…had been, he corrected himself…a disintegrarium. Adding to that impression were the headless corpses still strapped in the restraining chairs used in disintegrariums to keep mad posties from attacking one another and attendants. The next very large room erased Manning’s first impression. 

Enjoy!