Jared

Even if the rumours that had recently gathered about their heads had no basis in fact, they were still upsetting regardless, and that they had and they were thus doubly so had not escaped the young Jared's attention. The protestors had begun gathering on their lawn a week ago, and every day the crowd spread and swelled like an unattended campfire.

In order to get to work his father and his uncle, who slept in the same bed in the corner of the living room, on the same side of the wall as the telly, had to use a tunnel they'd built in the basement - it took them to next door's basement and the neighbours were on holiday. For the first few days of this new arrangement they hadn't found the keys to the front door and had guiltily climbed out of a back window and snaked off down the block, hoping to remain unseen amongst the protestors. Then, when they had found the keys, they listened to the answer machine by accident (or design - it depends how highly one rates both the intelligence of cats and their manipulative appetite for drama) and discovered that it was in this house that the rumour began to spread, by the mouths of these neighbours, from door to door and street to street.

In the wake of this grim epiphany, Jared's dad and uncle had stopped caring about things like: feeding the cats, watering the plants, avoiding harming the cats, keeping the plants upright in sunlight, keeping the fridge door closed, keeping milk out of the television, keeping the front door to the house locked, not trailing mud about the house, and so on. So when this morning they stuck their heads out of the tunnel and climbed up the stairs, past a pair of swinging feline corpses and the flies feasting upon them, it should have been no great surprise to find a trio of men gathered around the fridge door looking at a map of the local area.

Jared's dad and uncle exchanged a look of silent tension. Jared's uncle put a finger to his lips. The three men were debating directions.
"... clearly three miles that way," said Keith.
"That way?" asked Clive, incredulous. "But we're here!"
"Even if we're not there," said Geoff, "and we're here, where Keith says, then it is neither three miles that way nor the other!"
"Maybe we should ask some of those protestors," suggested Keith after they'd paused to take all this in. "I wonder what they're protesting about?"
"Oh, haven't you heard, it's something to do with-"

Jared's dad coughed.

Ghedalia Tazartes - Tazartes' Transports [08] (from Tazartes' Transports)