The remnants of colorful signage across it were green with mildew and decay, and weeds coiled around everything. It had been what modern urban planners would call a “retail park” when they first broke ground in the 1980s—a site for a big-box store surrounded by the flat expanse of a parking lot, where locals and soldiers from the army base alike would have been able to get cheap consumer goods and cheaper groceries. But that never really came to pass, and Deadline’s one and only mega-mart suffered a slow, lingering death that eventually left it vacant and empty. In retrospect, it had been the first sign of the town’s impending collapse, although no one living there wanted to accept that. Some of the worst storms of the century had punched holes in the sheet-metal roof during the bitter winters a few years back, and now nobody dared to venture inside the empty shell. The place was shuttered up, each great patch of thick fiberboard across the doors and windows emblazoned with a sun-faded sign warning that the building was unsafe.
