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.”

"It`s like the darkness is infecting us," Christy said. "Getting inside our heads and hearts and making us dark, too."
Russ shook his haid but said nothing.
"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe this is just human nature. Maybe this is how we start acting when our backs are to the wall. I would think that`s more likely -- if not exactly reassuring."
"No," Russ replied. "We`re better than that. I don`t give a shit how scared we are. We can`t start turning on each other."
"No," I agreed. "We can`t. But we almost did. So what does that tell us?"

It`s hard to describe something that`s not describable, but fuck it -- I`ll give it a shot. Imagine that you`re sitting in a dark room at night with no lights or candles or anything else for a source of light. Imagine that there`s darkness all around you. Total and complete darkness. Okay? Now imagine that just beyond that darkness is a different kind of darkness, blacker than the rest of the darkness around you. It seems to have substance, even though you know it doesn`t. It`s like tar or India ink. It ripples when you look at it out of the corner of your eye, or maybe it seems to shimmer. You can see the change with your nacked eye -- the razor line where mere gloom changes into obsidian.
That`s what it was like, standing there in the middle of the road.

In truth, I was starting to get a little scared. As males, we`re sort of genetically programmed to protect our significant others. When we don`t succeed, it`s a terrible feeling. You feel helpless and not worthy of their love, even if they don`t feel that way about you themselves. I wanted Christy to be safe, but I didn`t know what I was protecting her from or how to do it. I think it was the not knowing that was the worst. If I`d just known what was going on and what we were dealing with, I could have handled it. I could have done whatever I need to for us. But not knowring, there really was no way to prepare.