by Nick Younker
They both shared a laugh. There was no doubt in their minds that Allen Morgan got lucky last night and it was going to be a scandal, especially when Burnley found out about it. Not that Burnley himself hadn’t had a few one-nighters with Alice in their golden years as well. She loved both of them. But that was just their speculation, of course, and they stayed out of it.
***
7
The pain was back! Harry Keethers had already eaten twice today and now he wanted more. He had scratched his fingertips and his toenails to the point that they were sharp as paring knives. Everyone inside and outside the Stow had done the same, and they were all feeling the same pain. The pain was lurching up inside of them, and judging by the smell, there was no more bodies coming anytime soon.
Harry walked outside just to check, but he was right. The river had not sent any more bodies to feed them. Not that he should have expected it to start with — but he also did not expect to be turned into a monster on a cold October morning in 1993.
He wasn’t going to roam the streets and kill people, so what else could he hold out hope for? He expected this beast of a river to feed them. It changed them, so now it could feed them as well!
Suicide.
It wasn’t the only thought that was going through his mind. He did not want to do what he was craving at the moment. Killing people was not in his DNA. But his body felt the pain and the hunger much in the same way a lion would when it saw a gazelle grazing on the land.
He thought back to all those vampire movies he watched on TV or in the cinema over the years. He remembered thinking to himself, why can’t they just not kill people? They’re immortal; it’s not like they can die. They can just not kill people and keep on living. But the movies always explained it like the vampires were driven by the hunger. It overpowered their consciences. Or when they became vampires, they lost their souls and they didn’t care if people died.
But he knew, then. It was naïve of him to have ever thought that way. It was in their nature to do that, just like it was in a lion’s nature to hunt down its prey and destroy it. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
Not only could he not will himself into it, but he was physically unable to do it. His body was too weak. All of their bodies were weak. All the people at the Stow looked like patients in a geriatric ward.
Harry leaned against the wall of the Stow with his hand and when he squeezed it, he didn’t even realize that his nails cut through the wood. They were so sharp that it required no force. They just cut right through it, like a knife through hot butter.
He took a long look at his hand and those nails. There was nothing natural about them. He felt the tip of his index finger with his left hand and it immediately drew blood.
“Help us!” a voice said from behind him, causing him to whip around.
It was Connie Brown, whose husband Darvin was leaning against the wall behind them. Neither one had eaten anything that came off the river that morning and their bodies were so extremely fragile and malnourished that they could easily be mistaken for a picture of people suffering famine on the cover of National Geographic.
Harry was startled, but relieved to see it was them and not Linton Derr. He reached up to put his hand on her shoulder and gasped a sigh of relief, not realizing he had squeezed her shoulder.
She had the same look of pain on her face. She started to squeal in pain and when Harry pulled his hand back, it was covered in blood. Blood started filling her shirt. Her squealing stopped and slowly, she started to lose her footing and fell. Harry tried to grab her but he was to weak and she fell all the way to the dock planking.
Connie Brown was dead. The wound that his nails made on her back had caused her so much pain that her heart had given out.
Darvin Brown made his way over to his wife as quickly as he could, but it was slower than the average granny. His body was weaker than hers and he kneeled to retrieve her. He hadn’t realized that she was dead. He just sat there and held her. Quietly. Like there was no surprise in the matter, just grief and anxiety. Her passing slowly crept over him, but he wouldn’t let go. He did not cry or yell. He wished he could simply slip away with her.
Other people were starting to crowd around them on the ground, forming a huddle of sorts. They wiped the snot from their faces and the tears from their eyes. Their bodies were reacting to the pain rapidly, and some were even slobbering. Their blankets were wet from bodily fluids, and their symptoms looked like the combination of a cold, a flu and chickenpox, with deeply pale skin and red blotches.
Then it just happened. They all descended on Connie Brown at the same time. They tore Darvin away and he whimpered like a little boy being pulled from his mother on the first day of kindergarten. He screamed the best he could, but his body was too weak. A man tried to bite Connie, but his teeth just broke off on her flesh. They were too weak and her body had not been tenderized by decomposition or the river.
Everyone stopped at the same time, watching the man hold his bloody teeth in his hand as if he had just been punched by the varsity quarterback. They looked at him in shock and felt their own teeth. They wiggled them like little kids do just before they lose their baby teeth. They were all loose.
The small crowd sat there on their haunches and wondered what they were going to do. Darvin Brown tried to muscle his way back through them, making about as much progress as a rabbit does in the contortions of a boa constrictor.
Harry Keethers squatted down beside Connie and checked her pulse.
She’s dead. There’s no doubt about it.
Then he reached down and ran his fingernail along her abdomen slowly, as if he were performing a medical procedure. The others started to do the same and soon, there was a frenzy of slashes that broke away what little meat was left on her body, and they didn’t have to bite. They just put it in their mouths and swallowed. Chunk after chunk slid down their gullets, the same way a seagull eats fish.
When it was over, her bloodstained bones and tendons were the only things that remained. They had eaten her whole. Her skeletal carcass lay there in a pool of blood on the dock planks. Some were licking the blood off the deck, but the stain still remained.
A man pulled her remains off the dock into the channel and she slowly sank to the bottom, disappearing in the murky river water.
That’s when another dead body floated to the surface. It was another drifter. A floater who had just arrived in town for processing there at the all-new Stow Bar & Meat Processing Plant.
Under his breath, Harry cursed the river with all his vigor. It was playing games with them. Maybe it was trying to teach them how to survive. How to hunt and kill for themselves. If it had floated that body fifteen minutes earlier, Connie Brown would still be alive. He would not have the blood of the living on his hands and he would not have the death of a good person on his conscience. But that ominous river had tricked them into killing. It had forced them to pursue their true nature and just like in the animal kingdom, only the strong would survive. That was going to be the theme moving forward and Harry knew it.
He looked back and saw Darvin Brown lying flat on his back with his hand over his chest. His heart had given out and he was dead now, too. Darvin was dead and Harry was the one responsible for him. He had murdered two innocent people and there was nothing that could change that now. Harry was a monster. Even worse, he was a creeper.
***
8
Rush Amiano had parked the big four-wheel drive truck on the edge of the sinkhole and he followed Joe, Noah and Dean down the steep hill to the entrance. They pulled away the clay and driftwood and hurried through the entrance before putting it back. The water rushed in furiously until they re-plugged the hole. It was more rank this time than they remembered. It smelled like rotten fish and overbearing mildew, mixed in with a coppery odor.
One thing that Joe knew for sure was that they needed to get in and out fast, before Siders circled back around. He may not have known they were down there at the
moment, but he would see the truck when he made his way back to his houseboat and know for sure. If that happened, then they were goners.
Joe led the way with a flashlight from the busted storage bin. They did not have their helmets from last time because they had stashed them on the backside of Floating Asshole. It didn’t really matter, though. They were expecting to be in and out of there in no time at all.
They made their way down the steep shaft track in the mine. It wasn’t very high, so Rush had to squat as they descended it. The bottom of the coal tunnel was nearly half a mile, so the walk was quite uncomfortable for him.
Once they hit the bottom, though, they faced a new challenge. The bottom of the mine was filled with nasty water that had seeped through the sinkhole. It was going to be a mess trying to find the dead girl in there with only one flashlight in the stone cold darkness. The smell of coal was the only thing that overpowered the rancid odor of the water. That, and the mildew emanating off the walls of the long-forgotten mine.
“Now where do we look?” Noah wondered.
Joe looked around with the flashlight to try to find a likely spot where Siders could have left her. He saw the old elevator compartment, but nothing was inside of the open doors. The elevator shaft had been filled in and sealed off from above, so there was no way Siders could have stuck her in there, either.
They waded through the water and walked just far enough to try to find some obvious areas where he could have hidden the girl’s body, but she could have been anywhere in the enormous mine that was once a staging area for the old Oarshire mining operations.
A sign on the wall read: “OARSHIRE MINING COMPANY WANTS TO REMIND ALL OF ITS EMPLOYEES THAT SAFETY IS OUR NUMBER ONE PRIORITY.”
That’s when they heard a thunderous crash that sounded like lightning hitting a large steel building. It shook the walls of the mine and several boulder-sized rocks fell from the high ceiling in the staging area. The crash, whatever it was, had shaken the entire area.
Joe shone the light up the mine shaft track, and they all saw water running down it in a slow stream that started flowing faster and faster. The walls of the mine started making noise that sounded a lot like the metal of a tall building bending and stretching, as if it were trying to get comfortable.
More rocks started falling and an area directly behind them suddenly crashed in.
Rush scooped the boys up and started running toward the old elevator compartment. He dropped Noah and Joe but they caught up with him and Dean.
“Get to the elevator! This mine is coming down and the whole TC is going to cave in!” Rush yelled at the boys.
“Okay!” Joe yelled back at him as he struggled to wade through the water. It had filled the area to their chest and they were half-running, half-drifting toward the elevator capsule. Only about 50 more feet.
Another collapse toward the middle of the mine’s staging area. It threw Noah and Joe off balance, but they quickly regained their footing after the near-miss of a gigantic, coal-stained stone.
The water was up to their chins now and they weren’t running, but rather swimming in the foul flow of rancid water.
More rocks fell from the ceiling and another loud crash indicated that areas of the mine’s upward track tunnel had stretched to fill in with sinkage.
Judging by their proximity underground, Rush estimated that they were directly underneath the East Jamison High School, which educated the teenagers of Fogstow and Derbie both on the west side of town, just off Highway 66.
Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be on top of this mess right now! Rush thought to himself as he furiously made his way to the open elevator shaft.
He still had Dean in his arms and the last time he turned around, Joe and Noah were not far behind.
Almost there!
Another crash followed by another. Again and again! The mine was collapsing in on itself. Not just one section, but the whole damn thing! It ran all the way from the sinkhole on the southwest side of town, directly under the high school on the west side and bypassed the Highland district altogether. But it still ran the entire length of the TC, at least to the north side of the TC were Rush last saw the old airshaft that he and his friends went down when they were kids.
He finally reached the elevator shaft and sat Dean down. He didn’t realize at the moment, but Dean was in such a state of shock that he was completely unresponsive. His claustrophobia had stricken him into a panic and his breathing was labored.
Rush turned to look back for Joe and Noah and they were fighting the water to get to them. The surface of the elevator capsule was elevated and the water level inside it was considerably lower.
Noah was in the lead and Joe was directly behind him.
The slow cracking sound made an easily identifiable flexing sound, and all at the same moment, the entire mine caved in. Rush was looking at Noah and Joe swimming toward them, Joe’s light fluttering with the movement of his little arms as he tried to keep his head above water. The next moment they were gone. In their places were boulders the size of small cars.
Dirt filled between the boulders that buried the two boys and musky odors sprayed out of them. The cave-in caused the water level in the elevator compartment to rise almost to the top of its ceiling.
Rush screamed for Noah and Joe over and over again. He floated to the top of elevator capsule. He reached down for Dean and finally found him, pulling him to the top of the capsule.
They had less than six inches of area to breathe in. It was completely dark and Dean was unconscious. Rush couldn’t even tell if he was breathing. He wrapped him in his arms and kept trying to feel for a breath, all while holding him above the water.
“Stay with me, man! Dean! Stay with me!” Rush screamed at him while he fought to catch some air himself. It was almost completely dark inside the capsule. The only exception was a small light above it that was peeking through.
Rush struggled violently to keep himself and Dean both afloat in the elevator capsule. The top of the elevator and the shaft had been filled in after the mine closed, so there was little hope of escaping through it.
He was tiring out quickly. He needed something to brace himself against so he could rest while he held them up. But there was nothing.
When he had thought before about a moment like this, when there was little to no hope for survival, Rush had once imagined himself praying to God. But that is not what occupied his mind at that moment. All he could see was the image of little Joel and Noah being crushed by boulders. It kept playing over and over in his mind as his fight to stay above the water level, just six inches below the ceiling of the elevator capsule, started to weaken. They were trapped.
There was no hope for escape. They were all going to be entombed in that mine. But still, the image of Joe and Noah kept running through his mind. He did not want to let Dean die, but a certain feeling of inevitability was creeping into his mind as the mine crash continued to roar thunderously from above.
He would have given anything to have had a fighting chance in the TC with these boys instead of being buried alive in this coal mine.
***
9
Shane Duncan Siders had made his way to the sinkhole, directly behind the truck Rush Amiano and the three boys were in. He hadn’t quite kept up with them, but he would find out soon enough just where they were going.
As if it wasn’t enough that he had given that Joe Terrance kid life. That little pissant had to meddle in his affairs and become some sort of small-town hero. He knew all about Joe and his friends. He had watched them all from a distance for years. But now, that little bastard had betrayed him and he needed to see that things got taken care of.
It took him nearly fifteen minutes to reach the sinkhole, and sure enough, that truck was parked right at the edge of the damned thing. None of the boys were around, and that could only mean one thing. They were down in the mine. Down somewhere they didn’t belong.
Siders approached the edge of the sinkhole and pondered
what the hell he was going to do to take care of this. If he went down there, he would have to kill all four of those boys, and it might not be an easy task. There’s no telling what those little assholes were armed with and the situation might not end in his favor.
He took a seat at the edge of the cliff and thought over his options. He looked around at the gray sky and thought to himself that today was just like any other day. How could he have let it go so far? How could he have let it get so out of hand? He had never been this careless before.
Deer ran across the opposite side of the sinkhole on the open land. Hunters were out in full force and the deer would be scattering all over the place, which usually meant more roadkill for people to pick up.
The Jeffries.
It would be a cold day in hell before their kind would get another shot at living in these parts. He had already taken care of that.
He stood up, turned around and saw a few wild rabbits scuttling around the brush at the edge of the bluff trail in the distance. Then it occurred to him. The answer was right in front of his face.
He opened the door of the truck and looked to see if the keys were in it.
Nothing.
But the nice thing about these older model trucks was that you could jam the steering column and unlock the safety switch to put it in gear.
He pulled the gear lever down and stepped out of the truck. That damn thing might have weighed a ton or two, but he was able to push it, just a few feet at a time. He had to reach high to keep hold of the steering wheel, but eventually, he was able to get it to the edge of the cliff.
One more push and that beast of a truck was going to take a plunge right down the sinkhole, directly on top of the mine entrance.
A smile spread across his face and he gave it one last shove.
The monster truck with its enormous mud tires trailed hastily down the sidewall of the sinkhole and when it crashed into the entrance, it went directly through and plowed into the mine, opening up a gigantic hole. The pit water rushed over the sunken truck like Niagara Falls and damn near emptied the sinkhole.
