The Impending Darkness by Justin Thomas Squires

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SUMMARY: If you don't like cliff hangers you will hate this story. I wrote it becuase it seems like a peice of art to me. It has some creepy aspects to it.

Part One: The cloud that covers the city.

  And there it stood. A force that carried the darkness of the night and the morbid feeling of death. In his view stood the ever gaining darkness, waiting to digest the rest of the world. No one knew what it was or why it was present. But it kept growing. It had grown for weeks, and no one understood. One day it had just appeared, this dark cloud of... of just blackness. The sky now dim do to the burden of the cloud. In the distance, you could here explosions, gunfire, and even screams. This of course was beyond the cloud. Some people had dared to venture inside the darkness, none have yet returned.
Norman just stood there and watched it, amazed at what was happening. It seemed to advance fifty feet every day, or night. No one knew exactly when it advanced, somehow they could not see it advance. It just did. The poor people who had no idea that it would advance would be engulfed by it, usually as they slept. But it kept coming.
The people of the city had formed caravans, they advanced every night, just enough to keep around two thousand yards of distance between them and the cloud. Every one had left their belongings behind, taking what they could in their vehicles. Every night the massive caravan would set up camp. There was an estimated four thousand people in this particular caravan, and everyday more people joined as the caravan traveled further into the city. Sooner or later they would reach the Brooklyn bridge.
There were those who stayed behind, who could not bare to leave their homes. Some stayed and prepared to fight. The thing was, no one knew if there was anything to fight at all. No one knew what was happening behind the thick cloud of darkness. By the sounds of things, it seemed as if a massive battle was taking place, the rumbling of explosions, and what sounded like gun fire. But it could have been anything, a storm inside causing explosions, or anything else imaginable. The thing that made many people loose hope was the fact that no one had returned out from the cloud, no one. So that led to the assumption people were in there, and people were dying.
Three days ago, the army had passed the caravan. The head of the artillery told us to keep doing what we were doing, and for no one to enter the cloud. He said the government was just as confused as the rest of us. They also did not know what was on the other side. The army then marched into the cloud. Norman watched them as they went by, each soldier marched without hope. Each one holding the look of nervousness upon their face. They might as well have been marching to their deaths. The army had also taken in two tanks. As the tanks passed, Norman wondered if they would be yet another sound of explosion in the daily symphony of boom and bang. That again was three days ago, and Norman had yet to witness a single soldier escape the madness.
"Just what the hell is it?" he though to himself as he griped his holstered handgun. Maybe soon he would find out. This day was the day of judgment for Norman, judgment on himself.