[alyasa]

As crypto and his two ladies were copulating in some off-community secluded area; and Joel Switzer was lying in wait for God knows what, porkmarras was still chewing ineccesantly on the brains of his former friend Pookie; and the remnants of the board had organized themselves into a semi-orderly form of ramshackle defence force - their fires of love and celebration now nothing more than distant, vauge shadows of thoughts - while Daycare Nation stumbled about aimlessly, mumbling incoherently about some long-forgotten favourite album that his mangled consciousness refused to let go of; and HaydenAsche's zombified corpse instinctively crawled around for cigarettes; while all of this was transpiring, the island alive with its own energy and activity; sharks and all notwithstanding; there came something most peculiar; most singular.

It rolled in from the sea; tearing up through the shore and the trees on the shore, like a massive beachfront invasion, except it had no legs or mouth or hands or ears or eyes. No corporeal state that was evident, in fact. With it came strange, unearthly sounds that were felt more than heard, and quick flashes of something dark and swift - unrecognizable - that was terrifying in its briefness; implying inhuman speed and danger. It came without warning or sign; quietly unceasing; pushing through the island and enveloping every inch; blanketing the ground and the trees and the even the sky, it seemed. All became grey; the sun, which until now, everyone had taken for granted; dissipated; its energy gone, subsumed by the grey. The sky became a dim memory and the ground was a dangerously shifting blur of bleakness. Some of the female and younger board members screamed out when they couldn't see the other board members. It was hard to even see their own hands in front of their face.

With it, too, came the cold - chill and unrelenting - crushing their bones with icy fingers and breathing deadly whispers of wintry breezes down their spines. They - all of them on the island - began to feel the quiet, unsettling sensation of a spiritual, primal fear that rode in with it, stalking the island; their newest arrival; something none of them wished to see, wished to even acknowledge - but which they all knew was there, they all could feel its damning stare, as it rode along the shore, breathing and waiting - something they would run from, if only they could find a way off the island. For, rolling in from the sea; swiftly and suddenly; was the greyest and deepest mist any of them had ever seen; and it choked the island like an over-enthusiastic lover and chilled the bones of all the people, who whimpered and whispered in awe of its might; its grey, bleak might. But far more terrible than that; far more chilling and disquieting; was the newest arrival on the island; that came in with the mist, also quiet, also unrelenting. They knew who - or what - it was, there was unspoken agreement within the terrified, glistening eyes of the remaining survivors.

Day had turned into night; grey night; and Death himself rode into the trees of the island.