It rained for five days straight. Dead things got deader. Creek folk hunkered inside their houses, peering out from pale faces. Pierson stood by his window watching water wreak havoc with the land. He’d been living in the holler for fifteen years, had arrived out of nowhere and bought the old Rash place. He lived alone, made his living in a way none of us could comprehend, maybe doing something online.
I’d been watching Pierson for about half a year to that point. Curiosity, force of habit: call it what you want. I used to do reconnaissance. Haven’t done much of anything for some time.
Pierson drove out of the holler once a month in his big green Range Rover, old enough to fit in with other vehicles around here but still a damn nice vehicle. Once he’d cleared the holler, I’d waltz down to his place and do a little snooping. There were old photos in a shoebox let me know Pierson had once had a family. Good looking big boned wife. A son with a head too big for his body. He had a Smith & Wesson Performance Center Model M&P R8 case made me think he might have been police at one time and made me wonder where the actual gun was at.
He’d always come back late at night, when it was too dark to see what he was doing. He’d work under cover of darkness.
The rain was hard and heavy, and for the first few days no one minded it. That kind of downpour was normal this time of year, though it swelled the river and threatened to flood the houses closest by.
By the third day everyone was well sick of the rain, surly. We’d turned into a bunch of grouchy bears. It was the time of Pierson’s monthly trip out of the holler, but he didn’t go anywhere. I saw his face standing by the window. Pale but not pale like the rest of us.
On the fifth day of rain, everything waterlogged as a drowned dog, I watched Pierson walk out the front door of the old Rash place. But not moving toward his Range Rover the way he normally would. He wore a modern brand of rainjacket, was all bundled up in a watch cap and black boots. He looked up and around the way a guilty man does before walking around to the side of his place.
I fetched my hunting rifle and followed a small game trail to get a closer look.
After a while, I noticed the well was overflowing, water seeping up from out of the dark hole usually covered by a metal plate. The metal plate had been pushed away from the hole by the force of the water spreading all over the yard. Everything rises after a while. You wait long enough and everything comes back.
Pierson stood back from the well watching it overflow, obviously expecting something.
And then it happened. The earth disgorged its dead, or rather his dead: one body after another, naked as the day they were born, men and women and children, a whole grotesquerie of them, a few dozen bodies at least. They were all pale but some of the oldest ones were blue and as soaked through as cranberries in a cranberry bog. Body after body came up, splurping out of that well, gangly-limbed, their knees and shoulders like burnished knots. I was sure they’d all been shot in the head, by that Smith & Wesson no doubt. Pierson sat there watching them come forth from the earth, probably wondering how he was going to stuff them back down into it.
I realized as I watched that those bodies were not just bodies, they were people who’d lived in the towns within a three hours drive of the holler, with their own problems and passions and peculiarities.
The waters just kept rising. I had a decision to make: call the cops or handle the business on my own. You can probably guess that we have no need for the law up here.
~ fin ~
Jamey Gallagher lives in Baltimore and teaches at the Community College of Baltimore County. His stories have been published in many venues, including Punk Noir Magazine, Poverty House, Bull Fiction, and LIT Magazine. His collection, American Animism, will be published in 2025, and he’s currently looking for a home for his noir/crime collection.
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