Canary in the Coal mine

I say canary in the coal mine because it is an old method of sending down a canary to a mine and then bringing it back up. It it comes back dead, it means there is too much CO2 and they workers can't go down. It is a form of early warning system. The same thing is true about finding a headless child in the road as you walk by. This serves as an early warning system them simply means "you're a long way from the coast so you might want to hurry".

This just so happens to be the sharpest, most graphic scene so far and it isn't even put into so much detail. It's like reading A child called "it" where there is very little detail in terms of the setting and the events but it is not hard to picture what is going on.

Another early warning system I noticed earlier was the falling ash. Even though they did not make very much of it, it may have been the most dangerous piece in the story. If this turns out to be radioactive material, then they will not live very long at all. The only warnings that these tow are actually taking into account are those that affect them inmediately. Like a seeing a group of people walking in the distance or that dead kid on the floor. They want to avoid human contact as much as possible and with good reason. But that doesn't meant it's the only thing they should avoid.