Day 761

Nowhere in town was open, not for another hour or so.It was the worst time of day to get there, not to mention the most dangerous but when a bus comes you take it or risk it not coming back for another 3 hours. That's just how the buses work, through rain and snow and a suspected alternate dimension they come as and when and if they are able.

When walking through town early in the morning you must keep quiet, say nothing to anyone even if you recognise them - it's probably not them. god knows how many daft souls have fallen prey to the morning illusions thinking they're old friends or teachers when in actuality they're just the brain's electrical signals getting caught up in spider webs spun the previous night and not yet  cleared away by the council workers.

It doesn't matter if they reply or how long they hold a conversation for with unusually perfect civility, at some point they will try to shake your hand or offer a high five and you'll just get caught in their web and dragged up to the balconies where they nest.

If you can manage to remain silent past the spun illusions you might glimpse the shop keepers and sales assistants waking up from behind their counters as they begin to wash the remains of their dinner from the otherwise pristine floors. They are unsurprisingly adept at removing blood stains and picking tiny fragments of bone from carpet and uniform fibres alike but this early on the faint scent of blood and faeces still lingers around the older shops whose grounds tend to cling to those familiar things.

Some shops are open as early as 06:30, very few see the carnage behind their wide awake and expressive faces, perhaps a little too expressive as they check up on you every ten minutes or so, just in case they can catch you off guard. They are more cunning then their mid morning counterparts, still not entirely human but too similar for the tired shopper to really notice or care. Enough for them to have a quick snack before the day really begins and they must be on their most humanly kind behaviour.

If it wasn't for the council appointed cleaners, these towns could have been abandoned within hours of the day's start. Rubbish sacks of bones and innards would be piled up high on the sides of roads and shops, full to bursting and smelling like a fresh kill. The council cleaners race around during the ungodly early hours making sure the shop staff have been fed and are sated enough to work the day without any snacking incidents.

Before the cleaners were assigned their tasks and paid enough to keep them quiet, the shop floors would always be freshly washed wood or damp deep red carpets. The alleys between buildings and the underground maintenance chambers would slowly accumulate filth and bodily remains until the stench became overwhelming when the wind blew just right. Missing posters were plastered over every inch of anything that stood still enough to have papers stapled to it and the towns lived in despair, hunger and rot.

Now the councils have hired enough people to hide this all away, to move the bodies and leave notes with their loved ones saying that they'd taken a spontaneous vacation or gone out to the shops. The bodies would be fond eventually, after being altered enough that everyone would take it for a natural death.