Darkness on the Edge of Town

by Brian Keene

  “You?” I was stunned. “You hate guns.”

  “True,” Cranston agreed. “I’m a pacifist. But there’s a time for peace and there’s a time for war, and right now, it’s time for war. I’ll be right back.”

  “Don’t bother,” Russ said. “We can’t shoot them all. There’s too many of them.”

  “If we kill enough of them, then I guarantee you that the others will lose heart.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “They might be totally overcome by now.”

  “Well, I’ll take the chance.”

  Before we could respond, Anna’s cries grew louder.

  “God punished the rest of the world, but he gave us a second chance. We must honor God. We must follow His law so that the darkness shall be lifted, and then we can repopulate the planet as Noah and his family did in their time. We must do as the Lord commands. His word tells us specifically what to do with witches.”

  “Oh no,” Russ wheezed. “Oh, hell no…”

  T poured gasoline into a two-liter soda bottle and tossed it into one of the sputtering burn barrels. The fire blazed quickly, erupting over the rim. The tow truck’s driver started the engine and backed up slowly, positioning Dez over the barrel. He dangled there, shrieking as the flames licked at his feet. Then they lowered him into the fire. The flames raced up his pants, and then his shirt caught fire. Then his hair. It happened quicker than I thought it would. Looking back on it now, I have to wonder if they’d drenched him in gasoline beforehand. Despite the quickness, it took him forever to die. The rubber soles on his shoes melted and dripped. His skin sizzled and smoked. His eyes bubbled and steamed in their sockets.

  Dez’s screams lasted a very long time.

  The stench lasted even longer.

  Not once did I consider helping him. I don’t think that any of us did, other than Cranston volunteering to get the handguns—and that was more out of self-preservation than a desire to help Dez. Maybe Russ and Christy thought about it, but if so, they kept it to themselves. Maybe you think less of me for that, but I don’t care. I’m done with trying to help people. There’s no point. I mean, what’s the sense in being a hero when there’s no one left to save? Oh sure, I could have saved his life—repaid the favor for him saving mine, but for what? So that he could slowly starve to death here in Walden?

  Maybe by not acting, I did him a favor.

  Or maybe it was just the darkness, chewing away at my spirit, trying to convince me to go to the edge of town and step into its hungry embrace.

  I do know this. I regretted not letting Cranston get the guns before. We could have ended Dez’s suffering with one shot.

  The crowd cheered and laughed. They hung around until Dez was nothing more than a smoking skeleton. Then they slowly drifted away, talking and chatting with one another as if they’d just watched a high school football game or a movie at the multiplex. We expected them to storm our building that night, but they didn’t. Maybe their bloodlust was sated with Dez’s death, or maybe they honestly believed that once he was gone, the darkness would go away.

  Of course, the darkness didn’t go away, and once they’d killed Dez, the mob grew a little braver. The crowd lurking around outside our home has grown since then. Each time I peek out the window, there are more and more of them down there, listening to T and Mario and Anna. Not the throng that turned out to roast Dez, but a solid group of core regulars who never seem to go home. I’ve considered that maybe Cranston was right. Maybe I should take a potshot at one of them from the rooftop, but I’m afraid that if I actually hit one of them, it will be like putting a match to a pile of gasoline-soaked rags. And besides, Russ says we shouldn’t waste our ammunition.

  Chances are, we’re going to need it for what comes next.

  Cranston turned traitor before the fire that consumed Dez had even died down. Maybe it was too much for him. I don’t know. We assumed that he’d gone to get the guns. When he didn’t come back, we searched for him. He snuck out through the storm doors before we could stop him. We managed to chain them up again before anyone got inside, but the damage was already done. The cracks in our facade were showing, and the mob seemed to gain strength from it. I figured they’d kill Cranston, but instead, they welcomed him into their midst. All he had to do was turn against us—right there in the street for everyone to see his repentance at siding with us, the people who had assisted the witch in bringing the darkness to town.

  Russ is right. We need to save ammunition.

  I need to save at least one bullet for Cranston. That fucker deserves it more than anyone, as far as I’m concerned. He was our friend. We had his back. Now he’s one of them. One of the crazies. So yeah, one of these bullets has his fucking name on it.

  And I guess I should save two more bullets for me and Christy.

  Just in case.

  Russ is finished packing—he’s traveling light—and Christy’s awake now, so we’re ready to go. I told them I needed five more minutes to finish this up.

  The idea was mine. It’s not a good idea. But it’s all I could come up with.

  Yeah, maybe I’ve given up on saving anybody else, but that doesn’t mean I’ve given up on us, too. I can’t. There’s a part of me deep down inside that would like to, but I just can’t do it.

  I have to believe that Dez was wrong. Yes, the darkness is alive. I’ve seen that for myself. And yes, it does indeed seem to feed off us. There was nothing left of Drew and Clay and all the others. Hell, who knows? Maybe he was even right about the universe before this universe and all of that Labyrinth bullshit. Maybe all of it is true. Maybe God is nothing more than another villain—the biggest villain of them all. Maybe in another reality, I’m president of the United States of America. Or a rock-and-roll god. Or maybe Christy and I are married. Maybe we’re happy. It could be, right? I mean, Dez knew his shit when it came to keeping the darkness out of this town.

  But darkness crept into town anyway, despite his precautions. A different kind of darkness. Maybe it’s connected to the darkness outside or maybe it’s just the darkness of the human soul. I don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter. The fact is, the darkness will kill us if we stay here just as surely as if we left.

  But there may be a way out. That’s what I’m thinking.

  Dez said that the rest of the planet had already been consumed, right? That all the energy had been sucked out of it, except for us here in Walden. Now, I don’t know a lot about planetary physics and shit like that, but consider—if all of the planet’s energy were gone, wouldn’t we be dead by now anyway, regardless of whatever magic spell keeps the darkness at bay? Isn’t it energy that holds the planet together and keeps it turning? And then there are the stars. Russ said it was like the stars weren’t there anymore, but if so, again—wouldn’t we be dead? We orbit around the sun. If the sun were gone, then it stands to reason that it would be five hundred million degrees below zero right now. So, like I said earlier, what’s keeping us warm?

  There has to be something left. There has to.

  How do I know? Because we should be dead and we’re not. We’re not dead yet. If we were dead, then there would be no reason to go on. I wouldn’t keep fighting to survive, struggling against all odds no matter how many times I’ve swore that I’d stop. No matter how many times I wanted to throw in the towel and give up. If we were already dead, then I wouldn’t want to live so goddamned bad.

  Back in Dez’s shed, the night he told me the truth about all of this, he said something that stuck with me: “It’s not a circle. It’s a square. It goes all around the town and up into the sky.”

  That got me thinking about what was around us, and above us and, most importantly, what was below us. Deep beneath the town.

  When the idea first occurred to me, I wanted to go out to the edge of town, stand next to the darkness, and dig a hole in the ground, just to test my theory. I couldn’t, of course. Not with that mob outside. But even without that field test, I’m sure that I’m right. Here’s the thing—th
e darkness has to stop at some point. It can’t go all the way through the ground, down to the planet’s core and then out the bottom side of the world. At some point, there has to be an end to it all—an edge to the darkness. If it’s a living being, then it has to have finite dimensions, right?

  And if so, then all we have to do is find that edge and skirt around it.

  My plan is simple. Russ, Christy, and I are going to sneak into the back alley. T and Anna have posted guards there, but we’re hoping we can kill them before they raise the alarm. There’s a manhole cover near the far end of the alley, right between the Chinese restaurant and the mailbox on the corner. We’re going to get down inside the sewer and navigate the pipes until we reach the edge of town. The main pipe extends far beyond the town limits. It carries our waste water and sewage several miles away to the treatment plant in the next town. It’s a labyrinth, but not like the one Dez talked about. The maze of pipes goes under the highway and out into the hills and forests. The pipes are very deep. Hopefully, the darkness doesn’t reach that far underground.

  Hopefully, there’s light at the end of that sewer tunnel.

  We can’t be all there is. There has to be someone—something—left out there.

  If you found this notebook and you’re reading it, then that means one of two things: Either you’re trapped in Walden, too, or the crisis is over and the darkness has passed. If it’s the first, feel free to follow us. I don’t know where we’re going, but it has to be better than this. That’s probably not the answer you’re looking for, and I’m sorry about that, but it’s all I can offer you. There’s no way to tie this up nice and neat and put a pretty little bow on it. Either we’ll get away, or we won’t. And if you follow along behind, then you’ll find out for yourself.

  Anyway…

  We’re leaving now. We’re going out into the darkness.

  And if it turns out that Christy was right all along, and we are already dead, then I guess we’ll go out of the darkness and into the light. And that would be okay, too. I don’t care where the light leads. I’d just like to see it one more time.

  Good-bye.

  Acknowledgments

  This time around, thanks go to my family, Don D’Auria and everyone else at Leisure Books, Alex McVey, Larry Roberts, Shane Ryan Staley, Robert Mingee, Drunken Tentacle Productions, Alethea Kontis, “Big” Joe Maynard, Joe “Tomokato” Branson, Dave “Meteornotes” Thomas, Tod Clark, Kelli Dunlap, Mark Sylva, Bob and Jen Ford, Jesus and Cathy Gonzalez, Geoff and Deb Cooper, and, as always, to my loyal readers and those crazy bastards on the Brian Keene.com forum.

  High Praise for the Chilling Prose of Brian Keene!

  URBAN GOTHIC

  “None of his work is more frightening than his latest novel, Urban Gothic…This is Keene at his best, and it seems he has only just started.”

  —The Horror Review

  “…His work is raw, gritty, and often brilliant, and his latest novel, Urban Gothic, is no exception. Urban Gothic is a tour de force in shock horror. Read it if you dare.”

  —Dark Scribe Magazine

  CASTAWAYS

  “Relentlessly frightening and viscerally brutal, Castaways combines nonstop action with an old school horror abandon that gives readers scarce time to come up for air.”

  —Dark Scribe Magazine

  “You’ve got all the things here a horror fan craves: the violence, the mayhem, and the blood and guts. Much like Laymon, Keene provides all kinds of thrills here…But Keene has his own voice, too, one just as good as the late great master, Richard Laymon.”

  —SFRevu

  GHOST WALK

  “Keene returns to creepy LeHorn’s Hollow with enthusiasm and with a formidable chunk of evil in Nodens…Keene demonstrates an authoritative grasp on primal fears and on a rural America cut off from the mainstream.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Keene has easily grown to be my favorite writer, and until he proves that he can no longer write anything good anymore, he most likely will hold that title for a long time. Ghost Walk is another one of Keene’s books to add to the pile of greatness.”

  —The Horror Review

  DARK HOLLOW

  “Keene keeps getting better and better. Given how damn good he was to start with…soon, he will become a juggernaut.”

  —The Horror Fiction Review

  DEAD SEA

  “Delivering enough shudders and gore to satisfy any fan of the genre, Keene proves he’s still a lead player in the zombie horror cavalcade.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  GHOUL

  “If Brian Keene’s books were music, they would occupy a working class, hard-earned space between Bruce Springsteen, Eminem, and Johnny Cash.”

  —John Skipp, New York Times bestselling author

  THE CONQUEROR WORMS

  “Keene delivers [a] wild, gruesome page-turner…the enormity of Keene’s pulp horror imagination, and his success in bringing the reader over the top with him, is both rare and wonderful.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  CITY OF THE DEAD

  “Brian Keene’s name should be up there with King, Koontz and Barker. He’s without a doubt one of the best horror writers ever.”

  —The Horror Review

  THE RISING

  “…The Rising, is a postapocalyptic narrative that revels in its blunt and visceral descriptions of the undead.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Hoping for a good night’s sleep? Stay away from The Rising. It’ll keep you awake, then fill your dreams with lurching, hungry corpses wanting to eat you.”

  —Richard Laymon, author of Flesh

  Other Leisure Books by Brian Keene:

  URBAN GOTHIC

  CASTAWAYS

  GHOST WALK

  DARK HOLLOW

  DEAD SEA

  GHOUL

  THE CONQUEROR WORMS

  CITY OF THE DEAD

  THE RISING

  Copyright

  A LEISURE BOOK®

  February 2010

  Published by

  Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  200 Madison Avenue

  New York, NY 10016

  Copyright © 2010 by Brian Keene

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

  E-ISBN: 978-1-4285-0812-5

  The name “Leisure Books” and the stylized “L” with design are trademarks of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Visit us online at www.dorchesterpub.com.