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The South Will Rise Again…and Again - A Short Short

(Life has intruded and rearranged our schedule yet again…I’m standing in for author Justine Musk today with a short-short based in my fictional North Carolina town of Old Mill, home of (among others) The Not Quite Right Reverende Cletus J. Diggs.)

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About five miles outside the Old Mill City limits, the old town dump rose in heaps and mounds, barely concealed from old highway 35 by a rotting wooden fence.  The place had been closed for years, replaced by one of the modern county facilities with multiple dumpsters and a giant hydraulic compactor, but it would be years before they managed to haul away all the refuse and clear the land that had held the garbage for so long.  It was a project, and as most rural NC projects were - it was largely ignored.

Now and then, a truckload was removed, and something was unearthed.  There was a lot of history in and around Old Mill, a town that had stood on the edge of The Great Dismal Swamp since Colonial times, and the further they got toward the center, the more surprising the garbage.  Not that the men moving it noticed.  They came in with a back-hoe, loaded their dump truck, and headed off to the new facilities to process the trash.

Now, with moonlight filtering down through the trees, planted years before to help obscure the eyesore the dump had become, a patch of earth was bare for the first time in two hundred years.  When a small mound of dirt crumbled, no one was there to see.  Moments later, when something poked through, scrabbled for purchase in the soft earth, and crumbled it, those ancient, skeletal fingers played to an audience of none.

The ground came alive with motion.  At first it looked like an infestation, rippling up from beneath the soil, but soon, as more and more earth and garbage was displaced, faces appeared.  Arms reached up and levered dormant flesh from the cold grip of North Carolina soil.  A couple still wore tattered remnants of uniforms.  One hacked his way free with a rusted sword, climbing out to stumble, trying to balance without a missing leg.

They turned toward the glow of light from Old Mill, winking at them in the distance.  The moonlight reflected off white bone and trickling trails of dirt and silt that fell away like cascades of crystal.

Then the silence was broken.

Sitting in a tree over the fence in an old hunting blind meant to overlook the fields beyond, Jasper poked Bobby Lee in the side with an elbow.

“There!” he said.   ”What’d I tell you?”

Bobby Lee grunted and stared.  “I’ll be damned,” he said.

“Happens every time they move a truckload,” Jasper said.  “Quick.”

Bobby Lee leaned down and picked up his 30/30.  Japser already had his shotgun ready.

“Remember,” Jasper whispered.  “Just like in the movies…head shots.”

Bobby Lee didn’t wait to talk about it, he took aim on a slowly shambling figure in a rebel cap, headed for the gate of the dump.  He pulled the trigger, and the skeleton’s head shattered…the body crumbling back to dust.

“Hoo Ha,” he muttered.   Then he turned to Jasper, who was taking aim on his second target, a big grin on his face.

“Better hurry,” Jasper said.  “They get out it’s hell chasin’ ‘em all down.”

Bobby Lee took aim again and nodded.

“You sure were right, Jaz,” he said.  “This is a HELL of a lot better than hunting rats.”

Later that evening they clambered into Bobby Lee’s pickup and headed back to town.  The dump was silent.  On the rear bumper of the truck, a faded sticker proclaimed: “The South Will Rise Again…”

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