Christopher Buehlman - Those Across the River

He was also our friend from high school years, but not grade school. During grade school he had run with the neighborhood kids who bullied us for being Catholics. His parents were harsh Lutherans and he hated them and hated how poor his father was and always had something to prove, but he was a guy who always needed to be part of the dominant tribe. His allegiances against the neighborhood Catholics began to shift as more Poles, Italians and Slovenians moved in, and shifted completely by the time the war broke out in 1914 and everything German was suspect. Karl Eicher became an unfortunate name to have. Now he was a minority. Now he needed the three awkward guys with glasses who went to the hoity-toity Catholic school.

He was a good guy to know, though.

He could get dirty pictures.

And he loved to fight.

When I went to find him, he was in Gary, Indiana, standing with the other day laborers by the docks. Right where Granny said he would be. He looked rough. He looked like the last guy you’d pick for anything but a cheap killing. I guess that’s what I was after.

His face lit up when he saw me, not from affection, but because I was dressed decently and he knew he’d get a beer and a sandwich.

He was right.

Karl Eicher.

I hadn’t kept up with him the way Granny had.

I lost touch with him in 1917.

In the war, he went with the Marines and, because he was little and mean, they used him to go into dugouts and tunnels. He ended up with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart in Belleau Wood. I think it was a high point for him.

Granny told me how rough things had been for Eicher; that he had twice hit Granny up for money and that he had sent it. The war had sat on him hard and he couldn’t keep work long. He sailed for a while, then went to D.C. with the bonus army in ’32 and got teargassed with the other vets looking for the money the government owed them.

I had nothing to lose telling him what happened.

He had nothing to lose hearing me out, nothing but the rumble in his stomach.

He chewed his pastrami and nodded noncommittally, washing it down with the last of his beer.

I got up and got him another one.

Then I did what Granny suggested.

“You don’t have to believe me, Karl. But if you come along and do what I ask, no matter how crazy it sounds, when we come back, I’ll give you my car.”

THE TRIP SOUTH seemed short. We were all glad to see the snowy farms of Indiana and Ohio behind us and to be able to crack the windows to smoke. We didn’t talk very much at first, but by the time we hit Kentucky, Karl Eicher and I had become drinking buddies; we drank Old Crow out of a bag until we started swerving and Granny made us stop for coffee. He drove us into Georgia, but I took over when we got close.

Then the mood changed.

We all felt it.

WHITBROW WAS DEAD.

Those across the river had killed it.

The toe of the corpse was the Nobles’ filling station, overgrown with brown weeds and stripped of anything valuable. White, painted letters on the busted window advertised:

FREE PECANS WITH FILL-Up

The last p had been made smaller to fit because the painter had not measured it. Ursie Noble had not measured it.

The Canary House had been vandalized.

It had not been burned, as I expected, but all the windows had been busted out and the doors taken away. All the furniture was gone, even the porch swing, and someone had been using the living area as a dump.

A family of raccoons were nesting in the pantry, the doors and hinges of which had been stripped.

Upstairs was worse.

Upstairs was personal.

Someone had written WHORE on the wall of our bedroom and left the bones of a pig on the remains of the mattress. The mattress had been cut to shreds. Some prudent scavenger had made off with the headboard.

The office wasn’t as raw, but it was still hurtful. My rolltop desk was gone, of course, and the bottle of Drambuie I had stashed in it had been drained and left upside down on the sill. Someone large had taken a shit in the corner. I hope the SOB really mashed his thumb moving that desk.

What was truly funny about this was that I didn’t know if the monsters in the woods or the good citizens of Whitbrow had done these things.

Granny helped me clear out the living room and get the pig out of the bedroom, and, before I could propose another remedy, Eicher shot the raccoons.

Granny and I scowled at him, and left him to pitch the bodies out himself, which he did, muttering all the while about filthy little cunts and rabies.

He didn’t need silver bullets to kill them, but that’s what they got.

That’s the only kind of bullet we had.

And we had a lot of them.

We got our sleeping rolls and camped and waited.

I STAYED OUT of sight in the house for the next few days. Granny immediately went to Atlanta for supplies, then came back and sequestered himself in the cellar, working practically round the clock. Eicher took a stroll through town. Eicher told me that it looked like the Huns had been through; everything was boarded up and overgrown and he never saw a soul.

Not a soul.

Someone had written GOD HELP US on the courthouse.

Whitbrow had ceased to exist.

FIVE DAYS AFTER we got there, it sprinkled, and then that turned to snow that didn’t last. Granny was already done with his awful work in the basement lab he had built, and it was just a question of waiting for the full moon.

When it came, we got out of town for the night. Rented a room in Morgan’s only hotel. Drank bourbon. Played poker for silver bullets. Talked crassly about neighborhood girls. You wouldn’t think we were all pushing forty. It was so good to be with old friends, to have something to do, to be in motion.

I actually slept well.

WE GOT UP early that morning and had a stroke of luck.

It warmed up.

A hard rain came and looked like it meant to stay.

We left Morgan, passed Whitbrow and drove to a point in the road that the survey maps I had ordered showed would give us quicker access to Megiddo Woods than going through town. We parked the car and got the gear out, but we didn’t suit up until we were out of sight. Three men in surplus army gear and gas masks will tend to attract attention. Especially when all of them have rifles and pistols and shovels and one of them is carrying a rack of mason jars on his back.

Six mason jars full of brown, oily liquid.

Mason jars filled with mustard gas of very high quality, brewed up by the youngest of the men who helped perfect its use as an American weapon in 1917.

THIS IS HOW the idea came to me.

After I left Kentucky, I had checked myself into a Southside Chicago flophouse and filled the bathtub with beer. I promised myself not to leave until I had died or drank it all. I didn’t tell my brother I was in town. I sat with my .45 on my lap, listening to the radio; before long I nibbled on the end of it and might have squeezed the trigger, except that I wanted to finish Hector and the others more than myself.

That’s when I figured it out.

How to kill them.

Silver was too hard to deliver; they saw you coming. They smelled you. They were fast. And silver was dicey; Dora had survived a gut-shot. But burning would work. Martin said fire killed them. Martin used fire when they cornered him. And Hector had a brand on his chest, and burns on his arms from his days as a blacksmith. None of that had healed back.

The last piece of the puzzle came while I tickled the beard on my chin with the barrel. I laughed! I set the gun on my nightstand and paced around in the frigid room.

Yes!

Martin’s cough from those damned strong cigarettes. His lungs weren’t healing themselves. Their lungs could burn and they could die that way. I could make them cough and drown in their own fluids, like those poor wrecked bastards in the gas wards. Even if they lived, they would never be right. They would be easy hunting.