The Blue Bucket Mine Fallout

The screams of Zeke's Ghosthunters posse cut off just like that.
     "What the brown gravy??!"
     Annie Youngblood walked toward Erin the way one might walk if there was a bear right on their heels. She placed her feet precisely among the scattered rocks that littered the entrance of the legendary Blue Bucket Mine, southwest Idaho.
     She kept her head up, her hands white-knuckled fists.
     "I saw something," Annie whispered as if whatever she saw might hear her.
     And do something awful to her.
     The hair rose on the back of Erin's stumpy neck. Far down that dark, twisted tunnel, that led to the wall of stone and earth flying bullets had dislodged during the Owyhee Wars, flashed a small light. It could have been a phone's tiny…Nope.
     A shape lurched toward her and Annie, dragging something in its slow wake. Some kind of animal in no hurry at all?
     A strange, low gurgle echoed off the braced walls, though the wood had rotted in places. The Oywhees were rightly called the high desert, but decay and mold won after decades had passed. A squelch, the sounds magnified to terrible clearness, rushed at both women.
     Zeke called out.
     Please God no! and something giggled before the wet sounds of biting started.
     "Erin! We have to help them. Erin. ERIN."
     "Yeah. Sure," Erin said, as she watched that lurching shadow drag itself toward them, with no light able to reach the eyes. Maybe it had no eyes. Maybe it had no face
     "Great brown gravy bowls, let's get to the van. Call for the cops."
     "Annie, darling," Erin turned to her best friend on the planet, unaware she grinned so widely she had split her upper lip. "No signal up here by Silver City, Idaho, home to dreams of gold and ghosts aplenty. What is that? WHAT IS THAT?"
     "Stop being hysterical! You're the practical one. What do we do?"
     "Fuck if I know," Erin said, not caring at all that their modest podcast would get dinged for having swear words. She yet recorded all this.
     Coffee and Ghosts would have a real wowser of an episode, you betcha, and bless your heart.
     "Wouldn't it be dreams of silver? They took more silver out of this ground than the Comstock Lode…"
     Annie snapped her jaw shut, backed away from the maw of the old caved-in mine, full of dead men from long ago and far away.
     The lurching shape began to take form.
     A very tall, thin man, with long, long arms, one spider-fingered hand wrapped about the hair of, oh, Zeke Brannigan, ghost hunter supreme.
      Except poor ole Zeke looked dead, with his gaping mouth, rolled up eyes and chunks missing from his naked, very thin body. Other hulking shadows began to move forward, dragging their burdens of dead modern men and one woman who did Zeke's sound when he worked in the field. Olivia Dardenelle, infamous for her dalliance with a married hate-spewing Jesus-centric senator from the Show-Me State, would now be tabloid fodder for the way she died. One could almost pity this posse of poseurs and fake ghostologists.
     "Erin, get rocks. Rocks. Erin! Pick up a rock."
     Erin bent and dreamily chose a nice smooth stone, which fit her hand just so. Annie had a chunk of something dark gray in her shaking fist.
     The Ghosthunter van waited down the side of the mountain, about a mile away. Erin knew her track and field days were far behind her. In fact, she had never been a track and field anything, so bumbling toward a van Zeke himself had locked would be stupid.
     "This isn't funny. This is sick. Ketchup and dummies and makeup."
     Annie had decided to take charge, play heroine, be the one facing down an entire wall of orcs with only a bow and a well-tossed head. Hurrah?
     The tall man stopped, his face more a suggestion of tattered rotted skin strips and dull moldy bones. A strange light-free pair of black eyes stuffed deep into the brittle eye sockets peered at Annie. Each eye held something like glee in the center.
     Not a hawk screamed overhead. Not a butterfly fluttered past. Even the slight wind had stopped, as if holding its breath. The sky seemed strange, a cloud-free sterile blue that seemed more winter than early summer. No squirrels chittered and raced about. The world had gone dead and still.
     "We shot at each other in the dark. Found the motherlode. You can't eat the motherlode. Hungry," the corpse-ghost breathed out, dropping Zeke.
     The thud held a ghastly wetness to it. It echoed along the tunnel these men had dug once upon a time in the wilds of Idaho.
     Erin clutched her rock, her mind spitting out that yes, the miners had shot each other under the ground in some weird war over mines and land. The red light on her portable digital recorder calmed her, soothed her. It was all make believe. Some joke by slick hucksters trying to bilk the public. Yeppers!
     "Hungry," the others added, their voices a rasping chorus of rocks against rocks.
     The stench of raw fresh blood reached Erin's nose. Fake blood did not smell like pennies and iron.
     Zeke and his posse had not survived this encounter with the Ghosts of Silver City. Because these are real, thought Erin, with another thought right after that. What if we're dead, too? Fuck no, that was too absurd and expected.
     "Let's go," Annie tugged at Erin, smiling at the watchful creature, who casually peeled a strip of flesh from Zeke's face and slurped it down.
     He even sucked the blood off his fingers. It was so oddly sexual and revolting and fascinating.
     "Stay. It's pretty down there. Diamonds and rubies and emeralds. Come with us."
     "Wow. Gee! Erin…?"
     Erin blinked, looked away from that rotting face, away from that tongue that resembled black Swiss cheese. It swiped at the moldy teeth that yet chewed on poor Zeke's skin.
     "Annie, don't be rude," Erin took a deep breath, another, until the fog in her head cleared just a tiny bit. "Why did you kill them? And eat them? Why now?"
     "Shhh. Hungry. We're all hungry. They broke through the rocks. Hungry hungry hungry!"
     "Erin!"
     Erin allowed Annie to back her down the path that led to the locked van.
     "Rubies," the ghost cannibal said, reaching out a lengthy arm toward the two.
     The others crowded behind what had to be their leader, reaching out their decomposed arms, grinning. They all had black eyes with the same glee, a hellish glee, a glee of dark, awful places full of pain and sadistic, never-ending grief. Laughing as the lions ate you alive was the closest Erin could get to naming that glee.
     Both walked toward where they thought the van had been parked. The ghosts followed them, as if unaware they belonged in the Blue Bucket Mine, safely tucked away from the living.
     Neither said a word, the crunching of many feet a horror in both ears.
     crunch crunch coming to rip you to pieces oh my
     Erin stumbled down toward the gravel road but could not hear any sounds of a vehicle. People rode up here on horseback, in their four-wheel drives, on their side-by-sides. This was a popular place to go. Silver City could be explored and enjoyed by the whole family, gosh darn it!
     Why was there no birds, no bugs, no wildlife? Why did it seem the entire world had died?
     Erin stopped and the stalking herd of miner ghosts stopped.
     Annie pulled at her arm, trying to be polite to the ghosts by nodding and smiling at them, yet insistent with her grasping fingers that Erin move away right the hell now.
     "I think it's too late," Erin turned to her friend, saw Annie's face clawed to ribbons, one blue eye gone, the other a bloody mess.
    "No. No, it's not. We keep walking, friend. We got a podcast to do. We're Coffee and Ghosts, by the gravy boats of my grandmothers. We're getting popular. People like us. Goddamn it."
     Annie put her head down, her hands on her hips as she tried to breathe.
     "Goddamn it, no. No. Get out of here, Erin. Go."
     Erin stood on the road, before backing away from her dead friend and the cast of some dumb musical about Halloween bit players.
     "Tell what happened here, Erin. How Zeke and this really cool podcaster lady died by real actual cannibal ghosts. Our best episode yet!"
     Annie sat on the road as Erin moved further away.
     The other ghosts stood on the edge of that road, like a strange honor guard. One by one they faded, until only the first one remained.
     His face was no longer tatters and desecrated bones. He was just an ordinary man who had been turned into something feral and starving in a savage, unforgiving mass grave. He hunkered down by Annie, whispered in her ear. She shuddered, but got up, followed after him until Erin could not see either one.
     Erin began to walk. A hawk soared overhead. Crickets called from the long, stringy grasses. A squirrel scolded her from a nearby pine. Get somewhere safe. She yet clutched her portable recorder.

***

     Erin kept her eyes closed. She sat across from Idaho State cops.
     "That's the truth."
     "You are looking at some serious charges…"
     "Great. I can show you the mine. You have the van? My device??!!"
     The two sighed. They sighed as one exasperated male dealing with some hysterical, probably murderous female.
     "Miss Caffrey, the Blue Bucket Mine does not exist. It's a legend. We sent people up there. The ground is a bit torn up but there's no mine there. We found human remains covered with rocks. Your device had nothing on it but static. Care to explain, again?"
     Erin had to concede the ghosts had won. For now.
     "Can I get a lawyer? I'm not telling you two jackalopes another goddamn gravy boating thing!"
     A throat cleared. A small laugh reached her ears.
    Erin opened her eyes and Annie waved at her from behind the two cops.
     And then Annie was gone, a weird hiccup in the time-space continuum, or perhaps some hallucination brought on by stress and being threatened with the death penalty or…
     Fuck it. Ghosts were real.
     Ghosts were real.