Darkness on the Edge of Town

The whole damn town is going nuts. You wouldn’t believe some of the other shit I saw today.”

“Like what?”

“Well, there was a fat naked guy standing in the middle of the street, clutching a beer and shouting at anyone who would listen to him. I had to swerve to keep from running the stupid son of a bitch over. He didn’t even blink. Saw another guy chasing a dog with a rake. A little kid—couldn’t have been more than eight or nine—swinging a kitten by the tail. No sign of his parents. He was just going round and round in a circle. The cat was screaming. Not howling, but screaming.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah. And that ain’t all. I saw a woman jogging with her iPod—except that she was covered in what looked like either mud or dried blood, and she only had one shoe on. Lots of looting. People taking shit from other people’s houses. There was a guy standing in front of the comic book store wearing a mask and a bedsheet tied around him. Guess he finally gets to play superhero. And I saw a couple doing a sixty-nine in a front yard, oblivious to anything going on around them. Probably the weirdest thing, though, was this guy I saw pushing a shopping cart filled with nothing but cans of…”

I held up my hand and stopped him.

“Let me guess. Shaving cream?”

Tony laughed. “How did you know?”

“He seems to get around.”