Darkness on the Edge of Town - By Brian Keene Page 0,1

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 fucking dead.

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

We don’t try to leave town anymore. Nobody 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 fucking 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 fucking 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 bumps 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 fucking pain in the ass. Plus, some dickhead 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. Hell, we took stuff, too. But in our case, it was stuff that we needed. Who takes all of the fucking 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