The Human Angle

What a road! What filthy, dismal, blinding rain! And, by the ghost of old Horace Greeley, what an idiotic, impossible assignment!
John Shellinger cursed the steamy windshield from which a monotonous wiper flipped raindrops. He stared through the dripping, half-clear triangle of glass and tried to guess which was broken country road and which was the overgrown brown vegetation of autumn. He might have passed the slowly moving line of murderous men stretching to right and left across country and road; he might have angled off into a side-road and be heading off into completely forsaken land. But he didn’t think he had.
What an assignment!
“Get the human angle on this vampire hunt,” Randall had ordered. “All the other news services will be giving it the hill-billy twist, medieval superstitution messing up the atomic world. What dumb jerks these dumb jerks are! You stay off that line. Find yourself a weepy individual slant on bloodsucking and sob me about three thousand words. And keep your expense account down—you just can’t work a big swindle sheet out of that kind of agricultural slum.”
So I saddles my convertible, Shellinger thought morosely, and I tools off to the pappy-mammy country where nobody speaks to strangers nohow “specially now, ’cause the vampire done got to three young ’uns already.” And nobody will tell me the names of those three kids or whether any of them are still alive; and Randall’s wires keep asking when I’ll start sending usable copy; and I still can’t find one loquacious Louise in the whole country. Wouldn’t even have known of this cross-country hunt if I hadn’t begun to wonder where all the men in town had disappeared to on such an unappetizing, rainy evening.
The road was bad in second, but it was impossible in almost any other gear. The ruts weren’t doing the springs any good, either. Shellinger rubbed moisture off the glass with his handkerchief and wished he had another pair of headlights. He could hardly see.