Horror - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. Blighted Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

BLIGHTED

The dust along the side of the road was thick and yellow under the mid-morning sun. Lou Jacobs glanced down at his shoes often and felt a little worse every time. He hadn’t had money for a polish in six years. Six years he’d been tightening his belt, patching his clothes himself, and letting his once good black boots go grey with dust and wear.

Whole world was going to hell, but there’d been a time not so long ago when the village of Vern looked on the up and up. They had the fishing pond, a small train depot, the motel, the mercantile, a horse track, and the orphanage. The government funded orphanage was to fund the rest. Big plans fourteen months from complete economic collapse. The mercantile existed now as a co-op, the motel served up moonshine and rooms so loaded with lice, bed bugs, and rats, only those passing through ever bothered. Not that most of the locals had two orange cents to rub together. The horse track was empty, no racing, no gambling. The train depot crawled with hobos who’d wander door-to-door looking to trade work for food and finding all the work called for, leaving off on the next slow-moving car they could catch. The fishing pond remained and became private, a locals only spot that rarely offered any big catches. The orphanage remained and employed four women and four men to mind thirty-nine boys and girls under the age of fourteen, most being toddlers or younger. Women came from all over to drop off children—ones they’d had themselves, ones they’d bought through the newspaper during more prosperous times.

Lou had eaten a single egg and a crust of bread smeared with pig grease for breakfast and was on his way to the pond with his pole and his creel. He had a small lot of farmland that was mostly stones and clay and bald patches. He kept chickens and pigs: six chickens and two pigs. Raccoons and coyotes had been an issue for years until he cleaned out the cellar and opened the storm door to the animals. The house stank. The shit and piss smell permeated into just about everything. But he never had a wife, never had children, only had himself and he could stand a bit of scent.

Lou reached the lane into the former horse track and paused a minute. On opening day he’d won a dollar betting on a horse named Chester. Back then Vern had close to five hundred residents and looked to be on the grow.

He closed his eyes and pictured himself taking all that he had left, including the deed to his farm, his livestock trailing behind him on rope leashes. He wouldn’t even take a look at the horses or the jockeys and he’d bet it all on whichever horse had the worst odds, then he’d wink, knowing every horse had its day. That horse would stumble out of the gate and play catch-up for four corners before surging like lightening on the final straightaway. The others in attendance would lift him up, carry him back to the betting window where he’d claim enough money to live on easy street until he died.

Lou motor-boated his lips and then continued southbound on County Road #6 toward the pond and the center of Vern.

—

Filthy, filthy swine, Walter Musgrove thought as he passed the hobos who lay about drunk or wishing to be drunk, awaiting the next train. The train wouldn’t stop in Vern, but it would be slowed down. Human waste matter, I ought to fetch my Remington and fire upon your scrawny frames.

Walter owned a very large home north of town. He also owned the horse track and two diners in towns doing better than Vern. Vern, the mess he’d stepped into and had planned to retire in. Vern, the village that had trapped him like a rabbit in a snare after the markets crashed. Most of his money was in properties after his stocks became worthless, meaning he couldn’t relocate until he sold. He couldn’t sell until a buyer came along, and be damned if he was going to move anything for losses.

Fifty-six was no young man, but with age he’d learned patience, even if he couldn’t learn to like the pitiful residents of this hog waller. To keep the imbecilic residents from pestering him, and to keep the wretched hobos at a distance, Walter walked everywhere he had to be and complained with the commonfolk about coyotes and snakes and raccoons and losses and hunger and mediocre fish. The rail went directly behind his home, fifty feet from door to track, and Walter paid railway men to toss care packages off trains every month so that none of the locals saw his reality.

“Damn this lot,” he said as he looked at the dust clinging to the polish of his shoes. “Damn all these low-breed contemptible morons.”

Walter quickened his pace, heading north into Vern proper and to the mercantile next to the fishing pond.

—

A Dodge truck with wooden racks on the bed pulled up behind Lou and stopped. Two men sat in the cab. Both were dirty with faded wide-brimmed hats. Both wore patched overalls and had cigarettes burning in the corners of their mouths. The driver looked to be older, his whiskers white and the wrinkles around his eyes deep and well defined. It was the man in the passenger’s seat who spoke.

“Say there, you in the market for sheep?”

Lou leaned back to give the sheep a better look, despite that he was in the market for no more livestock unless it was as a seller. Still, a man doesn’t have much beyond his pride or the public opinion tethered to it.

“How much you needing?” Lou said.

The driver paused a minute, biting his lower lip, exhaling deeply enough to send the embers of his cigarette off like fireflies. “Two dollar.”

Lou swallowed and wished he’d never bullshitted these men. “That’s a fine price for a buyer. I’m sorry I asked.”

The driver snorted and faced forward, handled the tall gearshift. The man riding passenger said, “You ain’t no different from nobody else. I’d a asked myself.”

The dodge rolled on and Lou gave a wave from within the dust cloud and exhaust plume. He felt bad for those men a minute or two, but no more. They had a truck. Probably they had families. As much as he liked to fake the comfort of bachelorhood, he was lonely ten nights out of ten when he rolled into his shit-stinking bedsheets and slept to a serenade of rooting hogs.

Ahead, the truck pulled into the mercantile lot, but Les Brinkley stepped out, pulling the door closed behind him. The men never parked the truck and were back on the road in a matter of seconds. Working as a co-op, there’d be no shortage of local livestock for sale if any new money ever wandered into town. Vern certainly didn’t need any sheep.

Further on, the truck paused only a moment. Lou squinted and made out Walter Musgrove.

“Good luck getting anything but a sneer out a that spiv.”

—

Walter held his breath until he cleared the dust and exhaust of the farm truck. He looked back over his shoulder before continuing and saw that the truck had pulled up his driveway. If those men got out, they’d meet his dogs if they were unlucky; if they were lucky, they’d meet his semi-secret housekeeper. She lived in the home with him and stayed out of sight as best she could. Whenever anybody spotted her, she’d say she was his niece and came once a month to help with cleaning. That was only part of the ruse. Walter had all but emptied the front rooms of the home and confessed to any unwanted guests that times were tough for everybody. Just as soon as things finally picked up again, he’d move the furniture and art back where it belonged.

Most of that art his wife had picked out in Europe and America. She was French and spoke with an accent that drove the younger version of himself crazy. It seemed like forever ago now, her being dead seemed a lot fresher, though it had been eleven years.

The truck came rolling out of his laneway and he smiled a bit. Filthy beggars, he thought as he pushed on closer to the village center. Vern had taken getting used to in a number of ways, but no more than in accepting that a gelatinous purple blob lay in a vacant lot next to the orphanage. The superstitious locals had drawn a thick square of salt around it to keep it from moving too far.

Story was, a meteor landed some five hundred years ago, and the local Indian tribe covered it up, salted the land, and hightailed it out of there. It wasn’t until a man bought the lot a thousand years later and broke ground. The blob rose to envelop two construction laborers in a matter of seconds. After that, men shot the blob, burned the blob, tried to drown the blob, but nothing affected it, so they asked an old Polish woman and she suggested salt. Since then, for thirty some years, locals had drawn a salt box to keep the blob in place. Though, Walter didn’t wholly believe anything he heard from the locals. He also didn’t know who had the job of driving thirty miles to the coast and boiling down water from the Pacific, and was surprised nobody had asked him for money to keep the operation funded.

Who knew what would happen if that damned thing got out. Walter thought probably nothing.

—

Lou cast his line for the first time with a dew worm wrapped around a hook and a cork bobber to keep it afloat a couple feet below the surf. For now he was standing in the trampled grass, but soon he’d have to sit and rest his stiff and crunchy joints. It was a surprise that nobody else was out fishing. Then again he hadn’t caught anything worth keeping in his last five visits. It would turn around and somebody had to be the first to note the fish running down stream again, might as well be him.

Distantly, he heard children from the yard behind the orphanage. Nothing seemed to carry like the sound of laughter. It made him think of his siblings—now dead—and how they’d run their happy mother ragged with tomfoolery. Many a times they’d cried laughing. When home, his father would get into it with great whooping gales between gasps for air.

Nothing much like laughter.

Aside from screaming.

Lou held his breath and looked back toward the orphanage—he’d been seeing the blob so long it hardly registered. It registered today, it registered now. It had pulled itself across the salt barrier and was almost to the orphanage lawn. Three caterwauling infants sat in the path while a dozen or so children looked on. Lou blanched in a shade of horror.

“Dear god,” he said and pushed to his feet. “Dear god. Somebody! It’s moved! Somebody, help those kids!”

The village felt vacated, lifeless. Just how much time was there until those kids were devoured? He dropped his fishing pole and started walking, and then jogging, looking left and right, everywhere for someone to help. During the day, five adults minded those orphans, so where the hell were they?

“Somebody!”

The blob was slow, but it was closing in on those kids. Lou tried to push it. He’d heard what had happened to the construction workers and didn’t doubt it at all, so how in the hell was some oaf with pigs and chickens living in his storm cellar going to save anyone?

He quit jogging and watched in complete and utter terror.

Those kids would be eaten, they’d have their skin sucked off and their insides liquefied. He’d bear witness to this atrocity…and would people say he just stood there, like a coward?

Lou bit his lip, started walking again, and then jogging. Nobody was coming and that blob wasn’t five feet away from that trio of infants. He began moving his body like he was sprinting, anyone seeing him would think him slow but willing. Nobody would call him a coward.

—

Forcing his housekeeper to give up the bastard child he’d fathered did not mean Walter wanted to see any of his spawn devoured by a gelatinous purple blob. He came out of the mercantile, tobacco in his shirt pocket and imported newspaper beneath his arm and did not think when he saw what he saw. He simply ran. He ran hard and fast. In seconds he blew by Lou and was to the blob. He skirted the thing to the right and for a moment, the blob relented its focus on the infants, aiming instead for him. Walter detoured a few steps.

The blob gave up on him and grew tendrils that reached for the infants anew.

“No!” Walter shouted and worked his old body as hard as was possible.

From the back of the orphanage, one of the employees shouted a nonsense sound, finally aware of what was happening.

One tendril touched a little boy’s rosy cheek, burning a hole in the flesh, putting the reek of barbequed pork on the air. Walter reached the kid, bent, and tossed them across the lawn. The blob latched onto Walter’s feet, and he fell to his knees. Oh the agony of it. He grabbed the next infant—uncertain of which belonged to him—and tossed her. She landed and rolled like a lumpy soccer ball. The blob crept up his calves, searing away flesh. Walter screamed as he grabbed and flung the final nearby child. The blob climbed him, reaching tendrils that branded his neck, chest, and cheek with burn tattoos that would come to shine like glass.

The orphanage employees came out with salt and began pouring it over the blob. Instantly it retracted from its hold on Walter, leaving behind white, white bones that smoked and steamed in the hot mid-morning air. Walter passed out only a moment after Lou reached the scene looking more shocked than spent.

—

The village was lively, the hotel busy with customers and gossip. Walter had been sent to a hospital in the city. His legs were fleshless above mid-thigh, but the wounds had been cauterized. It wasn’t until the majority were deep into the corn whiskey and the potato moonshine that anyone acknowledged the likelihood that one of those children Walter had saved was his own.

“Doesn’t matter,” Lou said, drunk and slurring, “man’s a hero!”

That night, after the residents returned to their beds and lay their foggy heads on pillows, the dusty fields took on green hues and the assumed dead flora began flowering healthy, fat grains. Pasture grasses sprouted like bamboo. Animals mated with endless success.

—

Walter returned to Vern two months after the incident. His housekeeper had picked out the proper child and hired a replacement for herself. Though she wouldn’t be Mrs. Walter Musgrove, she would be a mother to his child. The girl he’d tossed was his—thankfully unmarred by the blob or the crash of his necessary rashness.

“Who are all these people?” he said.

The village proper was busy with life. The hotel and mercantile both had full lots. The pond had dozens of swimmers stretched out, floating in the sun. The blob was back in its square.

The driver glanced over his shoulder, coy smile playing upon his lips. “It’s the resurgence of Vern!”

The country’s economy, the world’s economy in fact, remained in peril, but in spite of the never-ending depression, the village of Vern had turned it all around.

“And what caused such a grand change?” Walter said.

The driver shrugged his shoulders. Out the window, everything was green and vibrant. Men, women, and children milled about in new clothing. Even the animals seemed happier.

They pulled into the Musgrove laneway and a wheelchair awaited Walter. As did his child and her mother. They stood smiling. She in a new dress, the babe tight against her chest, though looking a bit heavy for the act. The driver and the new housekeeper situated Walter into the chair.

“Winnifred,” Walter said to the mother of his daughter, “I’ve come to a decision. I’d like to adopt all of them.”

“All of them, sir?” she said.

“From the orphanage.”

“Oh…that is not possible, sir.”

“And why not?” Walter grabbed the wheels of his chair to halt his motion. He was not a man who liked to hear no.

“If we feed it, it feeds us.”

Walter’s expression tightened and his brows came together. “Feed what?”

Winnifred said nothing more, only turned down her head. The new housekeeper then explained the simple act of sacrifice that kept Vern green and happy and smiling, which also kept the blob in its place.

XX