Havoc had taken over the city; in one block of Hollywood Boulevard there were three robberies and all the perpetrators escaped. The phone lines to the police station were tied up completely, 911 was nothing but a joke, impossible to get any response from.
The streets had taken on the ambience of Dodge City, the only law was the law of the gun or the club or the knife. Leather clad rockers with half shaved heads and safety pins through their nose gathered in groups and marched down the street kicking in windows and hoping someone would try to stop them.
Traffic was stopped on the boulevard, empty cars filled the street where people had been dragged out and robbed or raped. Several cars still had the bodies of people with battered skulls hunched over their steering wheels. Every twenty yards or so you could see where small groups gathered around one of the cars, yelling and whooping as the screams of a woman being gang raped filled the night.
Hollywood Boulevard looked the way it does on Halloween only this time the monsters were real. There were dead bodies lying in the back streets and alleys, police cruisers empty with no cops in sight. They had all run, when they saw how futile it had become to try to keep up. The police chopper fled the scene when they were shot at with automatic weapons and the National Guard was on their way.
There was no radio or television coverage because nobody had the balls or was crazy enough to try to enter the war zone. The street people had taken over and their army was growing, all they needed was organization, all they needed was a leader, all they needed was a purpose, a cause to belong to, something to believe in and they could become unstoppable.
The Player had spread it's darkness on their souls and they responded just as desired. Already primed for the Preacher to take them by the hand and lead them to brotherhood and acceptance, to become something more, they were ready and Childs was preparing his assault on mankind. Soon his people with the missing fingers would be on the street gathering up the ones who had already succumbed to the Player. These were the easy ones, the ones the Player could affect simply by irradiating the area, just by making it blacker. Soon the Player would shut down all the computer systems in the police department. It was a dark day indeed and it was getting darker by the moment and somehow through the darkness that penetrated the hearts of these people there was the sound of laughter.
Unrequited lunatic laughter.