Darkness on the Edge of Town Read Free Page A

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 & Noble, Bass 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 fucking village. We lived in a world where you could hop online and play chess with some guy in Australia or have virtual sex with a woman you’d never met and never 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.
    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 shit 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 fucking 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