29:16:04:59 by Joshua Johnson Page B

table, walking like I belonged and making sure I was as casual as possible. The night was filled with chatter, a virtual squawk box.
    I forgot how crazy it got Downtown. It was so much livelier than where Olivia and I lived. Olivia would have loved this. If she were here, she’d have the time of her life talking and dancing the night away. Sadly, it would never happen. She was linked to me, and I was linked to dirty lies.
                  A variety of instruments covered the tabletop. There was freshly grown food, and spirits that would punch me down into the ground if I partook. There were several flashlights, one that I pocketed, and a lantern in the middle that kept the shadows away. A hooded sweatshirt hung on the back of one of the chairs. I put the sweatshirt on and lifted the hood over my head, finding a certain calm with my cloaked image.
                  I didn’t want to waste time if the party came back and found a stranger taking their things they so carelessly left unattended. I managed to keep my calm and not just run through the crowd. I had to exit the party without drawing attention to myself in the crowd of intoxicated youths.
                  The strings of a guitar played from somewhere up ahead. People danced underneath a dead tree whose limbs reached out in all directions. Lit candles were placed among the branches, and an eerie glow illuminated the air. It was hauntingly beautiful: the slow dancing, the dead tree with its lights, and the guitar player strumming his instrument to an unhurried, passionate song. For half a second I forgot why I was there, wanting to dance to the slow melody. But those red numbers set me right back on course.
                  “Here’s to Adam!” a voice saluted. I passed a table surrounded by six or seven faces all raising a glass to the air.
                  “Here, here!” a woman exclaimed. She tilted her glass downward, and spilled some whiskey on the ground. “One last drink. Drink up. Drink up.” She started to cry. The others either tried to consul her or shed tears of their own.
                  Was Adam a name I could remember? It wasn’t exactly ringing a bell. Not that I would really remember all the names here; it’d been nearly two years since the beginning. Yet even knowing that another had walked into the darkness it brought me back to the time when I had witnessed the turning .
                  Back during The Forgetting, there was a thousand of us. In those early days we starved, disease was rampant, and dozens were shot. But that didn’t even account for the majority of the people who disappeared. That belonged to something inexplicable.
                  These people had built this settlement close to the swirling mass of clouds near the city’s midpoint, nicknaming it for what it was: Downtown. It did rain enough in this area, therefore drinking water was most likely the reason for staying so close to these clouds.
    I was there, trying to bargain off items for supplies, before I was ever hated, when it happened for the first time. Screams erupted just outside, and panic evolved into full mayhem. I ran to where the shouting was the loudest: at the barrier.
                  The barrier was the border that separated the lighted world from the darkened mass of clouds that never moved out from the center of the city. A twenty-six year old woman, the person turning, or so we later called the process, was already past the barrier, the invisible blockade.
    I tried to pass through the barrier myself but a lingering pain started in my head and traveled my spine before curling my toes. My skin radiated with heat, and it felt like I was melting from the inside out. I couldn’t open my eyes, and it would only get worse after that.
                  But this dark walker, as we had called them thereafter, moved through the barrier with ease. They