Darkness on the Edge of Town.

by Brian Keene.

CHAPTER ONE

In the beginning...

That's how stories always start, right? In the beginning? I guess mine should start that way, too.

In the beginning was the word. I know this because the Bible tells me so. The Bible tells me a lot of things. It says that Jesus loves me, and that you shouldn't suffer a witch to live, and in the beginning was the word.

Words have power. So do names.

It might sound like I'm rambling, but this is important stuff, so remember it. Names. Words. Witches. I'll come back to all of this later, if there's time. Who knows? It just might save your life. I wouldn't have believed that a month ago, but I do now. Things have changed.

My name is Robbie Higgins. There. Now you have power over me. It's Rob or Robbie to my friends. Robert to the cops or my teachers or anyone else who has ever ha.s.sled me.

Anyway, in the beginning was the word, and it existed alone in the darkness. The Bible tells us that, too-tells us about the darkness. And this wasn't just regular darkness either. No, sir. This was the complete and total absence of light-a darkness so deep and dense that it would have made your eyes hurt. A heavy darkness. Thick. At least, that's how I imagine it was. I mean, I can look out my window for inspiration and see the darkness pretty f.u.c.king clearly. I can't see much of anything else, but I can see the darkness.

According to the Bible, here's how it all went down. You've got the word and the darkness and not much else. The two of them are just sort of hanging out together. The word and the darkness, chilling together in the void. And then the word says, "Let there be Light," and there was. And things continued just fine after that, for the most part.

Then, millennia later, some a.s.shole comes along and f.u.c.ks it all up. Someone else says another word, maybe a bad word or a different word, maybe, "Let there be Darkness again," and in doing so, effectively reverses the entire act of Creation-erasing the light. No, not just erasing it. Obliterating it. The light is f.u.c.king gone, man. Light doesn't exist anymore.

And who knows? Maybe we don't either.

Christy says that we're all dead. That's her theory anyway. She says it explains everything-why the phones don't work, why there's no electricity, no contact with the outside world, no television or radio signals, why we can't see anything out there beyond the darkness and, most importantly, why n.o.body new has come into town since it all began, and why none of the people who went out into the darkness have returned. Christy says that we're all dead and this is limbo. Purgatory. We can't move on to Heaven or h.e.l.l, because we're trapped here. Stranded. According to Christy, this is why ghosts always hang around the place where they died-because the darkness prevents them from leaving.

The problem is, Christy does a lot of drugs-or did, up until she ran out of them-so her conclusions are kind of suspect. Now, don't get me wrong. She wasn't into the hard stuff. She never did heroin or meth or anything like that. She just loved smoking weed and enjoyed the occasional line of c.o.ke or a tab of Ecstasy. So did I, truth be told. In any case, my point is this. Scientific method is not Christy's strong suit. But I love her anyway-and not just because she's got a great set of t.i.ts. Before the darkness, she made me smile every day. She made me happy. For guys like me, that's rarer than you might think.

Christy's wrong. We're not dead. I know this because dead people don't die. And every single person who has left town since the darkness descended, every single one of us who ventured out into that black s.p.a.ce, has ended up dead. You can't die if you're already dead. So, that means they weren't dead and they weren't ghosts. They didn't die or become a ghost until after after they left town. they left town.

Of course, Christy disagrees with me. She says I'm just speculating. Well, f.u.c.k that noise. I know know, man.

I know.

Sure, I didn't see them die. Not personally. I mean, you can't see anything beyond the barrier. But I heard heard them. Heard them die. I heard their screams. them. Heard them die. I heard their screams.

And the other sounds. The sounds the darkness makes.

Sometimes it whispers. If you stand too close to it, right there on the edge where the candlelight is swallowed by shadow, the darkness talks to you in a voice not its own-a voice you've probably heard before. A lover. A parent. A friend.

Ghosts.

But the darkness does a lot more than just talk. If chattering was all it did, we could just put cotton in our ears and be done with it.

The darkness bites. The darkness has teeth-sharp, obsidian fangs that you can't see. But they're there, just the same. The darkness has teeth, and it's waiting to chew us up until there's nothing left. The darkness kills us if we venture out into it, and if it can do that, then we ain't f.u.c.king dead.

Therefore, the darkness is alive, and so are we.

We don't try to leave town anymore. n.o.body does. But staying here has become a problem, too, because this town has gotten teeth of its own. The darkness is getting inside us now, and the results aren't pretty.

We have a plan-me, Christy, and Russ. I'm a little apprehensive about it, because the last time I came up with a plan, a lot of people ended up dead as a result of it, and I became sort of a pariah afterward. That was early on in the siege. I've avoided trying to be a leader since then. But the three of us came up with this new idea today. It's not necessarily a good plan, and it probably won't work, but our options are pretty f.u.c.king limited at this point. We came up with the plan after what happened with poor Dez. That was the last straw-the final indication that things will not be returning to normal. Game f.u.c.king over, man.

Anyway, we'll be leaving soon, but before we do, I figured maybe I should leave some kind of record. An accounting, just in case. So I'm writing it all down in this notebook, and I'll leave it here before we take off. I guess I should tell you about everything that led to this. Tell the entire story from the beginning.

Names. Words. Witches.

Darkness.

In the beginning...

CHAPTER TWO

I'm not sure how long we've been here because I quit looking at calendars a long time ago and my cell phone won't give me the date-or anything else. The battery is dead, and I've got no way to charge it. Before the battery died, I'd occasionally flip the phone open, scroll through my contacts, and try calling people, but it never worked. There was no recorded message telling me their numbers were out of service or one of those short beeps you get when the cell phone you're calling from is out of range of a tower. The phone didn't even ring. Each time I tried, it was like placing a call to the afterlife. All I heard was the sound of nothing.

Judging by the length of my beard and hair, I'm guessing we've been trapped here about a month, give or take a few days. I'd never had a beard before. I hated the way it felt after a few weeks-itchy and tight, and all those little ingrown hair b.u.mps that popped up beneath it, red and swollen and full of pus. But I'm too lazy to boil water, and shaving without hot water is a f.u.c.king pain in the a.s.s. Plus, some d.i.c.khead looted all the shaving cream from both the grocery store and the convenience store. Then, not satisfied with that, they took the shaving cream from all of the abandoned houses. Who does that? Food, batteries, and water I can understand. h.e.l.l, we took stuff, too. But in our case, it was stuff that we needed. Who takes all of the f.u.c.king shaving cream? And so methodically, too. Taking the time to go house to house and abscond with it? I mean, that's just crazy.

But there are crazy people everywhere these days, and stealing shaving cream is the least of their bizarre behavior.

Anyway, I guess it doesn't really matter how long we've been here. All that matters is how this all began and what's happened since then.

What happened was this. Early one Wednesday morning in late September, me and Christy and everyone else in the bucolic little town of Walden, Virginia, woke up and found out that the rest of the world was gone.

Not destroyed, mind you, but gone.

Just...gone.

Walden was still there. That hadn't changed. Our homes and stores and schools, our pets and loved ones, our cherished keepsakes and personal belongings, our streets and sidewalks-all of those still existed. But the outside world, everything beyond the town limits, had been replaced by an unbroken wall of black. A curtain of darkness surrounded the town. It stretched east and west, from the sign on Route 711 that said You Are Now Entering Walden, Population 11,873 You Are Now Entering Walden, Population 11,873, to the rocky, tree-covered hills behind the senior high school, and north and south from the Texaco station on Maple Avenue, to the vacant lot behind the half-empty strip mall on Tenth Street. Everything inside that radius still existed. Everything beyond those boundaries had been swallowed up by a heavy, impenetrable darkness. It was dark inside the town limits, too, but not as thick as on the exterior. Inside Walden, it just looked like night. Out on the edge of town, the blackness seemed deeper. Denser, like congealing grease or motor oil.

Some folks didn't even notice the darkness at first. They woke up to find that the power, gas, water, and other utilities were off. That was alarming, of course. But it wasn't until they stumbled outside to see if their neighbors were having the same problem that they discovered what was really happening-except that none of us was sure just what that was.

Personally, at first, I thought it was an eclipse, but Russ nixed that idea. He said that if it had been an eclipse, he'd have known about it, and I didn't doubt that. Russ lives in the one-bedroom apartment above Christy and me. He's an amateur astronomer and before the darkness came, he spent most nights up on the roof, staring at the stars through his telescope and b.i.t.c.hing about all the streetlamps. He said they caused light pollution and made it hard for him to see anything clearly.

These days he doesn't have to worry about light pollution anymore. The only problem is, there's nothing in the sky for him to see. The stars are gone. He says it's like staring into a pool of tar.

House by house, apartment by apartment, Walden woke up to find out that sunrise had been canceled. Their reactions were interesting. A few people insisted that it wasn't a big deal. They were convinced the darkness was just some freak weather occurrence, some bizarre atmospheric phenomenon that would dissipate in a few hours. They climbed into their cars and trucks and sport utility vehicles, and started off on the day's commute. Other people caught one glimpse of the darkness, then panicked and decided to flee. They chalked it up to everything from a terrorist attack to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ himself, back to judge us all, and then they loaded up their cars and trucks and sped away, convinced it was the end of the world.

Here's what I don't get about either of these groups. The first group, the ones who went to work like it was just any other day-what the f.u.c.k were they thinking? I mean, how much of a f.u.c.king drone do you have to be to just go about your regular, everyday business like that, ignoring the reality of what's happening around you? Were they that consumed with their mortgage payments and promotions that they willingly just blanked out everything else, hoping that once they arrived at work, the world would right itself again? And the second group, the people who were convinced it was Judgment Day and fled-where the h.e.l.l were they going? If Jesus really had come back to judge us all, were they rushing off to meet him, or were they trying to hide? If it really was the end of the world, then what possible destination did they have in mind? What place wouldn't be impacted by the planet's destruction? Think about that for a moment, because it's important. Where do you go to hide from the end of the world?

In both cases-those who took it in stride and those who freaked out-they drove out of town and into the darkness.

None of them were ever seen again.

That was how we first found out that the darkness had teeth.

Back again. I took a break from writing this and finished off the last of my whiskey. Basil Hayden's Kentucky bourbon. Christy got me a bottle of it for my birthday. d.a.m.n good stuff. Expensive as all h.e.l.l, but worth every penny. I drank the last because I figured if I was going to write all this out, I should have a little bit of a buzz to get me through it. Grease the wheels, you know? Face my fears, because a lot of what I'm going to tell you is pretty f.u.c.king grim. And now my whiskey's gone.

Want to hear something funny? Even without the fact that there's no trash pickup day anymore, I'm reluctant to throw away the empty bottle. Booze is even scarcer than shaving cream these days. Walden was always a dry town, and the only place within the city limits that served liquor was the local Knights of Columbus hall-and you had to be a member to drink there. Not surprisingly, when the looting started, one of the first things to disappear was the booze.

The Knights of Columbus got hit first, of course. Then people raided empty houses-and sometimes they broke into houses that weren't empty-and cleaned those out, too. These days, a bottle of Smirnoff or Jim Beam is better than cash.

h.e.l.l, anything is better than cash. The only thing you can do with paper money is burn it to stay warm. Doing so is more psychological than anything else because the temperature in town never fluctuates. Sometimes it just feels good to be warm. So people burn their paper money.

Liquor keeps you warm, too, and without all that annoying smoke or the risk of burning your house down while you sleep. Like I said, Jim Beam rules over the green. And coins? The only thing you can do with coins is put them in pipe bombs. They make excellent shrapnel.

But I don't want to throw the empty bottle away. I'd like to cap it, and then once in a while, I could unscrew the lid and smell the leftover vapors. Breathe what once had been. But I guess that, like everything else, they'd eventually vanish.

It's nighttime again. There's no way to tell what time of day it is, really, unless you own a battery-operated clock or a watch that still works. Daylight is a thing of the past. I'm going by my internal alarm clock, and that's telling me it's around ten o'clock at night.

I've always been a night owl. It's when I'm most awake. Alive. Part of that is because, until recently, I worked second shift at Giovanni's Pizza. The pizza parlor, a little redbrick building, used to sit just past the outskirts of town. Now it's part of the darkness. When I worked there, I came in at three in the afternoon and made deliveries until eleven most nights-later if there was something special like the Super Bowl or New Year's Eve. When my shift was finished, I was usually wide awake, jazzed up on Red Bull and coffee and Mountain Dew. So I'd stay awake until dawn, playing video games or talking to Christy if she was still awake. She usually tried to stay up until I got home, but it was tough on her. She worked part time at the little New Age shop downtown, and her shifts were generally during the day. But we made it work.

I used to love the night. The darkness was like an old friend. I embraced it. Welcomed it. Nighttime was peaceful and serene and calming. It hummed with its own energy and possibilities.

I don't feel that way anymore, and now the darkness hums with something else.

Since back in the day when we were still cavemen, wandering around picking bugs out of one another's hair and trying not to get eaten by saber-tooth tigers, mankind has been afraid of the dark. I never understood why, until now.

I'm sitting here whistling a tune by Flogging Molly and wishing there was still electricity so I could listen to my iPod. I'd f.u.c.king kill to hear some music again-something other than Cranston down on the first floor strumming away on his warped, out-of-tune guitar, or the local juvenile delinquents rapping bad hip-hop to one another around the rusty burn barrel on the sidewalk. Yeah, I could go for some Flogging Molly right now. Or Tiger Army. Or The Dropkick Murphys. A little bit of that would chase the darkness away.

No. No, it wouldn't. Who the h.e.l.l am I kidding? Music's no good. The darkness would just swallow that up, too.

Okay, I've stalled long enough, and this whiskey buzz ain't gonna last forever. If I'm going to tell you about this s.h.i.t, I suppose I should get down to business. Christy is sleeping in the next room, and Russ is upstairs packing for the trip. We try to avoid one another these days, so that none of us gets angry. We can't risk turning on one another, and the slightest perceived insult could easily lead to that. See, the darkness amps up our negative emotions. You might not understand that now, but you will.

There's not much time left. Soon as Christy wakes up, we're leaving.

Hopefully, we can keep the outer darkness at bay just a little bit longer.

And keep the darkness inside us at bay, as well.

CHAPTER THREE

You know those coming-of-age books and movies? The ones where a bunch of plucky kids have all kinds of adventures during the summer, and it ends up being a major turning point in their lives? They defeat the monster, bully, bad guy, abusive parent, insert your own antagonist here, and afterward, they are changed forever as a result of that confrontation, and when they look back on it as adults, they realize how it shaped and molded them?

Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. I mean, who hasn't seen one of those movies or read one of those books? We all love that kind of story because we can all identify with it. We've all been kids, and we've all faced our own monsters.

Here's the thing about those stories, though. Ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of the time, they take place in a small town and in a simpler time-usually the fifties or the sixties. Back when things were supposedly more gentle and innocent. I mean, it's a real slice of Americana, isn't it? All you need to do is add some baseball and apple pie. Coming-of-age stories are supposed to represent America at its core-everything that is good and decent and moral about us as a nation.

But they're not really all that accurate anymore, are they? In those stories, everybody knows everyone else in town. People say h.e.l.lo when they pa.s.s one another on the street. The town has a real sense of history-the populace knows who founded it and when and why, and all the things that have happened there since. Can you say the same thing about where you live?

Before all of this, Walden wasn't like that. Yes, we were your stereotypical small town, but we were also a town of strangers. I can count on two hands the number of people I actually knew here. Christy and Russ. Cranston downstairs. My boss at the pizza place and the other delivery drivers. And Dez. But Dez doesn't count because everyone in Walden knew who he was. You couldn't miss him. He was the only homeless guy in town-by choice, really. Because of that, everyone knew Dez. He was the exception.

In Walden you didn't stop and talk to people on the street about the events in your lives. Oh sure, maybe you nodded, acknowledging their presence. Maybe you even commented on the weather or asked for the time of day. But that was all. There was no five-and-dime store selling chocolate malts or comic books off a squeaky spinner rack. No kindly pharmacist dispensing medicine and grandfatherly advice in equal measure. No mom-and-pop stores of any kind because those were a thing of the past. The only things that existed in Walden were the same cardboard-cutout chain stores you found in every other American town-Wal-Mart, Kmart, McDonald's, Best Buy, Burger King, Staples, Red Lobster, Bath & Body Works, Barnes & n.o.ble, Ba.s.s Pro Shops, Target, Subway, and a Starbucks on every corner. That might seem like a lot for a population of just over eleven thousand, but there were other small towns nearby and we'd become their hub. The only independently owned businesses in town, other than the new age health-food store and the comic book shop, were the Lutheran, Methodist, and Catholic churches-and they didn't see much traffic.

I bet it was the same everywhere in America. Those old coming-of-age stories are a lie.

Fire-hall bean suppers and pancake breakfasts weren't the hub of social activity, and families didn't gather around the dinner table or the television because the kids were online and the parents were divorced or working two jobs. At traffic lights, drivers were unknown to the motorists in other cars. A yellow signal meant speed up rather than slow down. Doctors didn't make house calls because the insurance companies wouldn't let them. The local waitresses didn't know their customers' names or ask them if they wanted the "usual." Kids didn't ride their bikes all over town or build forts in the woods because parents didn't let their kids do things like that anymore. In the twenty-first century, your next-door neighbor was somebody you didn't know, and they might have been a child molester or a serial killer, so you let your kids stray as far as the backyard, and even then, it was under your watchful eye.

Isn't it strange? Before the darkness, this was supposed to be the information age. People talked about the planet being a global f.u.c.king village. We lived in a world where you could hop online and play chess with some guy in Australia or have virtual s.e.x with a woman you'd never met and never would would meet because she lived in Scotland-and maybe, just maybe, she wasn't even a woman but a dude pretending to be female. But despite breaking down all those social and global barriers, more than ever, we were a nation of strangers. Of secrets. We knew somebody online who we'd never met in person. Knew them by their screen name and their avatar, and called them a friend, but we didn't know the people who lived next door. We hung out with people on message boards rather than at the bar. We didn't drop off apple pies when our neighbors were sick or compare lawn-mowing techniques over the white picket fence. We didn't know what our neighbors were up to behind closed doors or what they were really like in private. meet because she lived in Scotland-and maybe, just maybe, she wasn't even a woman but a dude pretending to be female. But despite breaking down all those social and global barriers, more than ever, we were a nation of strangers. Of secrets. We knew somebody online who we'd never met in person. Knew them by their screen name and their avatar, and called them a friend, but we didn't know the people who lived next door. We hung out with people on message boards rather than at the bar. We didn't drop off apple pies when our neighbors were sick or compare lawn-mowing techniques over the white picket fence. We didn't know what our neighbors were up to behind closed doors or what they were really like in private.

Until the darkness came. Then everybody unmasked. Everybody showed their real faces because it just didn't matter anymore. And in most cases, their real faces were ugly and monstrous. Not evil. Not really. Evil is too strong of a word. Evil is nothing more than an idea, a moniker we use to describe things that are otherwise indescribable. Anytime we can't explain a person's actions, we attribute them to evil. But all the s.h.i.t that went down after the darkness came-calling it evil would have been too easy. It was brutal and savage, but it wasn't evil. It was just humans being. Like that? Pretty clever, if I do say so myself. Gallows f.u.c.king humor.

But it's true. All the rapes and murders and arson and everything else that's happened since the darkness arrived-it was all just humans being human. People reverting back to type. Turning primitive. Devolving back to how we behaved when we were still afraid of the dark. It didn't happen right away. At first we were all too scared, and we still had hope. But by the first long night, when that hope ran out and all we had left was fear, things went downhill quick.

I can't tell you what everyone else did because I don't know their stories. I can only tell you what happened to us. What we saw and heard and experienced ourselves.

In the beginning.

I went to bed late that morning-around three A.M. A.M.-because I'd been wrapped up in playing a video game. Christy was in the living room watching Headline News and eating a bowl of cereal. She'd just smoked some weed. I remember drifting off to the smell of her bong smoke wafting into the bedroom from beneath the closed door and the distant drone of the television. One of the anchors was prattling on about ten new fashions or some such bulls.h.i.t, and I was wondering how that qualified as news. Then I fell asleep.

She woke me a few hours later. I was groggy and grumpy, and it took me a while to actually open my eyes. She kept shaking me, insisting that I get up. When I finally did, I became alert pretty fast. There was something in Christy's tone that alarmed me. She sounded worried. Not scared. Being scared came later. But she was definitely concerned about something.

I sat up and rubbed my bleary eyes. "What's wrong?"

"Outside," she said, breathless. "You've got to see it."

"What?"

"Just hurry!" She jumped up and ran out of the room.

Yawning, I climbed out of bed and scratched my b.a.l.l.s. I heard a few car horns honking outside and voices raised in concern, but no sirens or alarms or anything. I sniffed the air but didn't smell smoke.

"This better be worth it, Christy."

She didn't respond.