Interlude: Where the Sidewalk Ends
It lay barren in the dank, hellish wasteland, a dividing line between the civilized world and the cavernous wilds that stretched deep into the bowels of our dying earth. A simple border, where concrete gave way to ashen granite, smoothed over by a thousand years' worth of erosion. Few ever crossed the line. Those who did, never came back. Rumors had circulated through the Sub-Kyoto community, of creatures lurking in the dark, ominous, unblinking eyes staring coldly from the dark void into the light-filled city. Hungry eyes. The maddened, bloodshot eyes of some wounded animal, bent double in the throes of starvation. Most of these tales were dismissed as balderdash, "it's like you're fearing the wind itself, things you can't see" one official told an unnerved crowd that had mobbed down to the mayor's office. The group left, disgusted at his blindness. Gale force, they reasoned, could be more deadly, and still unseen, than anything that they, and he, could ever imagine.
Around three weeks later, a group of teenagers, after a night of grief drinking rancid beer (the pub was virtually the only places in town that still made a profit at the time), convinced themselves that they were the ones that would answer the silent plea of the citizens of Sub-Kyoto, and go to the place where the sidewalk ended. Their hope, according to the bartender, was to find the menacing eyes so ingrained into our town's sub-consciousness and destroy them, so that they would find peace once again. And so, kegs in hand, the five boys drunk enough to believe their idea salient, and destitute enough to willingly throw their fleeting lives at the clawed feet of darkness, wandered out into the night, towards the forbidden border between light, and dark.
We found their bodies two days later while out on patrol, hidden amoungst the wreckage of a residential complex that had been bombed by a street gang some time earlier. Their skin, mutilated as it was, was a unearthly shade of pale, as if they had already been prepared for burial by the local coroner. No blood was found on any of their surface wounds, although all sustained traumatic head injuries, apparently from being thrown to the cave floor by whatever lurked in those shadows. But what frightened us the most about the incident was that, upon a genetic analysis of some of the remaining tissue found at the scene, none of the DNA of the group was original. It was as if the entire genetic code of those unfortunate boys had been completely restructured. From that point forward all traffic past the edge of town was controlled strictly, not that anyone would dare befall the same fate as Sub-Kyoto's would-be saviors.
We never talked much about the darkness after that incident. Its maw, and whatever lurked inside of it, became just another unpleasant, accepted fact of life under the earth's surface. When the lab finished analysis, my team and I went out for a few drinks. As we made our way from the makeshift lab to the pub a throng of people towards the town square, mourning the boy's passage, kept us from taking the most direct path. Instead, we skirted the crowded main streets, which inexorably put us around ten meters from where the city gave way to darkness. I was deep in conversation with Alastair about what had occurred, and why the bodies needed to be burned, when I saw a slight glint from the mouth of the cave, but, when I shook him to take a look, it had retreated back into the darkness. And I swear, to this day, I can recall hearing a low, drawn-out laugh echoing menacingly into my own comlink, emanating a few meters away, where the sidewalk ended.