Free Long Holler Road - A Dark Southern Thriller by David Lee Malone Page B

shirts off and tied their undershirts over their noses. Goodman walked slowly up to the barrel, took his foot, let out a grunt and pushed it over. The sight of what came gushing out, caused Yates to puke again. Goodman joined him this time.                                                                                                                                The bones were evident. They were bleached white, but mostly still intact. The rest of the contents looked like a combination of dissolved internal organs, blood, and other unidentifiable liquids, which is exactly what it was.
      “I guess that’s some kind of acid that dissolved those bodies,” Goodman told Yates when they were finally able to speak again. “I’m not about to open the other one.”
      Yates looked at Goodman. All the color had drained from his face. If Yates could have seen himself, he would have seen that he was as white as a ghost, too.
      “We better radio the sheriff,” he said.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER TWELVE
                               
      I was in the back yard, almost finished with the mowing, when I saw Daddy come driving up the hill to our house like a bat out of hell. He and Paul, one of our hired hands, had just finished the evening milking at our dairy farm. We lived about three miles from the farm at momma’s insistence. She didn’t want to have to walk outside every day and smell cow manure and have to contend with the flies.
      My daddy was about as laid back as any man you ever saw and I figured it must have been something earth shattering for him to drive up like he did and start for the house in a trot. He wasn’t much of a trotter, unless he was chasing an old ornery cow. I shut off the mower and ran inside to see what had happened.
      When I opened the back door, Daddy was about as animated as he ever gets. He was telling momma something and was using hand gestures, something else he didn’t do much unless he was really excited.
      “They were all over the place, Rachel,” he was saying, “sheriffs cars, state troopers, and city police from Collinwood and Fort Kane.” Fort Kane was the county seat and the biggest town in Putnam County.
      “What happened, Daddy?” I asked, beginning to get excited about the prospects of some major crime in our community.
      “It looks like they found two bodies on Hugh Williams place,” he said, never taking his eyes off momma.
      “You mean dead bodies, Daddy?” I asked, my pulse starting to race.
      “What kind of bodies do you think I mean, George?” Me and Daddy were both named George, but I had the honor and distinction of putting Jr. at the end.
      “Did you see them?”
      “No, I didn’t see them. They were decomposed. It seems they had been dissolved in some sort of acid. They found them in fifty-five gallon drums.”
      “Hush that talk, George,” Momma said. “He don’t need to be hearin’ about that sort of thing.”
      “He’s almost fifteen, Rachel. You can’t keep him under your coattail forever, one of these days…..”
      I immediately stopped listening to what Daddy was saying when I heard about the drums. The first thing that ran through my mind was what me and Glenn had seen last Saturday afternoon. The two men loading the barrels in the back of that truck. Could this be the same drums we had seen? I started getting that feeling of what they call “butterflies in your stomach.”
      “Well, Junior. Do you want to ride with me or not?”
      “Ah, yeah…. I mean, sure I do. Can we take Glenn with us?”
      “Call him now and tell him to be ready,” Daddy said. “Him and Roscoe may already be there. About half the people in Long Hollow are.”
      I ran to the phone and dialed Glenn’s number. It rang several times before Priscilla,