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SUMMARY: These short pieces fit between already posted stories and catch Carol's tale up to where "Carol 6" takes place. With apologies, the first scene actually fits on the night of her arrival, before she is delivered to the group home.

Deputy Harris does not stop the teen when she gets into the front seat of the car. She is not exactly a criminal at this point. She is en route to Mrs. Hape's Home For Girls until Child Services figures out what to do with her.

She smiles at him like she just won an argument when he slides into the driver's seat beside her, but says nothing. She is waiting for him. She wants him to admit she was right; that things are stranger than he has ever seen, and she is the least strange thing among them.

The best he manages is a long sigh as he pulls away from the curb. Monee is a small town. Everything in it is only a few minutes away from everything else. If he had anything to say to her, he would not have waited until now.

She seems happy enough with the silence. She does not say anything, or even seem surprised, when he pulls up in front of Reid's funeral home instead of Mrs. Hapes. When he gets out, she follows suit.

"We had to put them here," he explains as he holds open the door for her. "They're not happy about it. Government's on the way in."

She stiffens, but still says nothing. She lets him guide her through the wide, pastel corridors past the viewing parlors and through the double doors to the office area, and then further into the chilly rooms where the work of preparing the dead is done.

Purcell is here, as usual. He is eating a sandwich. How he can do that this close to dead bodies is more than Harris can figure out. The bald man looks up at them when they come through the door. More exactly, he looks at her. Purcell is a lonely man.

"Can you show us all the bodies I booked in today?" Harris asks, in part to protect the girl from Purcell's overeager assessment.

"Yeah, yeah." Purcell stands quickly, wiping crumbs off his fingers onto his white coat.

She rolls her eyes after his back is turned and the two of them are waiting for him to crack open the walk-in cooler. She rocks on the balls of her feet a little. Harris thinks that is a sign of amusement for her.

Purcell leads them inside the tiny metal room, pulling the sheet wraps off of the bulks on several shelves and the one gurney inside. The gurney holds the young man who got his throat pierced by the claws of the chopped up female. The other man is on the back shelf behind him. Purcell reaches across to reveal his face to the two before walking back to the door to give the two room to come in.

By far the largest masses in the room are the monsters. They barely fit into the spaces allowed for them. The male and oldest female are bending the metal below them.

At first she just stands there, as if waiting for a question. Harris gestures to them in general dismay. "They're not human," he says plainly.

"Of course they're not human. They're barely bipedal."

"What are they?"

She does not move to examine them closer. "I don't know the species. The region of space they are most likely from is called Far Sys." She translates this to English. "Far Deep System. It's a quarter of the way around the rim and out near the edge of the galaxy.