and the horde , in the blackout of the city night , illumined only by the headlights of the car , everywhere descending and roiling against one another like maggots in the belly of a dead cat , the grimmest and most degenerate manifestation of this blighted humanity on this blighted earth-beasts of our lost pasts , spilling out of whatever hell we have made for them like the army of the damned , choked and gagging and rotted and crusty and eminently pathetic , yes , brutally , conspicuously , outrageously pathetic .