293 - The Boys (1946)

The victorious boys of 1946 return to Night Vale, and they are eating the town. They climb the sides of buildings at impossible speeds, hooting in tones that exist outside any known musical scale. They devour wheat fields, then the wheat byproducts, then the entire contents of Seth Peters’ farm. They tear apart Susie Q’s Burgers and More, support beam by support beam, as the phone line goes dead with a blood-curdling scream. They pick up the radio station itself, and then they eat the narrator, Cecil Gershwin Palmer, along with the building. They eat the desert, the mountains, the United States, the oceans, the moon, the sun, every star, the void between stars, and the entire observable universe. Then they keep going, past the point where anyone could observe them.

The episode is an archived broadcast from the long summer of 1946, presented by the disembodied voice of Leonard Burton, who exists only while speaking. Cecil is missing. Leonard is not alarmed, exactly, but suggests the listeners might start looking. The archive recording is introduced as a curiosity from the past—the Second Great War had just ended, the shattered youth were stumbling home to a country that had learned to go on without them, and ahead lay the prosperity of the American century. Leonard envies the simplicity of a generation that called everything “great,” even when they meant it was bad.