Status Updates From Appalachian Horror

When I woke again, it was black save for one beam of moonlight slicing its way across the floor, and unsteadily I went to the window. By my guess, it was past midnight, and all the usual surroundings of the farm--the trees, the wagons and plows, the chicken coup--were mere shadowy shapes in the dark, their familiarity rendered alien by the night.

I woke to the sound of someone knocking on the front door. It wasn’t an urgent sound, but a polite and steady fourbeat, not unlike a neighbor had come up for a cup of sugar. The storm was still rolling, and the night was a long way from passing through to morning. I stood up from the chair and drew my revolver from the cushion.

We hadn’t even gone a full mile when my back window shattered. I heard barking dogs, shouting, and more gunshots. I drove faster. More shots hit the car. I felt, rather than heard, one of my tires blow, causing us to skid into a guard rail. My front bumper was stuck in the twisted metal. We weren’t going to be able to drive out of here.

Robin planned on taking hundreds of pictures in Chamlett. Look at the poverty in Appalachia. See the cracked, scarred hands of the old women. Hovels in the hills with corrugated tin walls. The thick smoke rising from breaking chimneys. A region mired in its own filth, a people mistaking their own death throes for survival.

It looked ridiculously small, but neither one of them were about to complain. It was the first shelter they had seen since straying off the Appalachian Trail and, although they weren’t about say it, both men wondered if this was a sign that they had finally stumbled back onto it. They were asleep as soon as they lay down. And they both dreamed of dead things.

When they finally reached the shelf of rock, their bodies doused in sweat and their legs laced with burning, copper wires, they were disheartened to see that they had already used up most of the day’s light. Worse still, the scene before them was a seamless, hilly carpet of forest that stretched in all directions to a horizon that looked to be a hundred lifetimes away.

The night passed badly for both men. They lied awake for most the night, listening to the wind hammer at their flimsy tents and to a spattering of flint-like rain that drifted over a shade or two past midnight. And then there was the screaming. The crying. The wailing. Some of it was distant and barely audible in the wind, but some of it was closer to home. Neither one of them went out to investigate.

He shivered and hugged his knees tighter to his chest. No; there was no point getting into a fight. He didn’t want to be out here alone. They were quiet for a while, listening to the breeze and the occasional creeping footfall of unseen wildlife. The shadows lengthened and started to encroach upon the clearing, pooling like spreading blood.