Henderson, TN

Just got back from a nest cleaning in Henderson, TN.

Henderson is a shit-splat town about 20 miles south of Jackson. This town had - I swear to God - one stoplight. And I'm fairly sure that spotlight was only there to prevent commuters from passing through the town without noticing.

I've been noticing increasing vamp activity in rural agricultural towns in the past couple of years. I can see the appeal; these towns have more than enough people for a successful feeding season, and without the nuisance of properly-equipped law enforcement.

It's how vulgaris vamps are geting out to these bumfuck towns that baffles me. U.S. vamp activity has been, up until recently, restricted to large cities: nests form in abandoned tenements, and vamps tend to stick within 10 or 12 miles of their point of origin. They're not really smart enough to steal cars or drive, and I'd have noticed the inevitable rash of interstate train deaths if they were riding the rails, so how are they spreading?

This nest in Henderson was definitely a city vamp off-shoot; while most of the residents of Henderson wear endless combinations of plaid and denim, the alpha vamp of this nest was wearing a battered DKNY coat and Bally loafers. Whoever this meatbag was in life, he wasn't from Henderson. The beta and theta vamps were a little more vague; in jeans and t-shirts, they could have come in from Memphis or originated in Henderson. But from the delta on down, it was all hillbilly.

The extermination was no biggie. I met Cole and Swoop in Jackson, and we pulled a typical drag-and-burn. They were staying in a rotted-out mobile home right off the main road, and it crumpled quick. If they'd been further into the forest, we might have had sunlight problems, but as it was, the whole thing took about 20 minutes. And, of course, we didn't have to deal with carcasses, because the fires took care of that.

Like I said, the clean was a piece of cake; it's this migration pattern that's really starting to give me the willies. It used to be, we couldn't eradicate them all, but we could generally contain the threat and predict, within 50 miles or so, the next outbreak based on hypothetical infection patterns we had generated by contacts at the CDC. Now something - or somebody - is defying these patterns, and it's fucking me off.