Steve Shell

took off his coat and his hat and lay down still breathing in a coffin carved from a cold ebony wood.

The box was etched inside and out in the alien script that adorned the new town sign.

The same fell tongue that had cracked the earth was still groaned and trembled beneath the foundations and with a nod to his boys, E.P.

was sealed up.

and lowered into the widening crack of the breach as the ground crept and shook.

And when the chains lowering the coffin were pulled taut, and he could be lowered no further, and it seemed like the whole damn hill was going to fold into itself, Conrad turned to Benuel, and without so much as a hurried breath, slashed his younger sibling's throat with the hunting knife.

Conrad tossed his bleeding brother after their father's casket into the roaring darkness, and silence fell across the town.

In the gathering dusk on Coal Hill, the employees of the Barrow Mining Company were still gathered, rooted in the place where they had listened to E.P.

's address.

Their mouths hung slack, and their eyes stretched wide, cast skyward.

Alight the color of rotten plums blossoming in those dilated black portals.

The dust or soot or whatever it was that had issued from the breach swept through the unresistant crowd like a swarm of locusts, moving through each body in turn to consume blood and soft tissue and carve out the living soul that resided in each.

creating empty vessels for the Barrow family to work its will upon the world and leaving them as hollow as hollow can be.

And with its capital thus established, the Barrow Mining Company set its sights on... Expansion.

Throughout the 1800s, barrow operations spread throughout the hills and hollers of Appalachia like a blight.

Absorbing smaller mines and acquiring adjacent land from the people who'd settled there by whatever means proved necessary, and for some families it didn't take much truth to tell.

Frontier life was hard, breaking the backs and hearts of a goodly number of folks who pushed west in search of a place they could put down roots and call their own.

Flash a little coin their way, enough say to let them return to the more established cities back east, and they were more than happy to cede their claim to a land that had never wanted them here in the first place.

Others, though.

Others had managed to carve out a home for themselves in this unforgiving land, settling into the mountains like a hand into a glove, and those would require a different approach.