Dead Horizon by Carl Hose Page A

less than half the market value, and the land it sat on had come free with the package. A man wasn’t ever going to find a deal like that again, so the stinking corpses could hang out all they wanted, so long as they stayed off his property.
    But Cora never shut up. She complained all the time, day in and day out. Her apprehension weighed on Alan’s nerves as the days drifted past. In fact, she got to be a real pain in the ass when it came right down to it, always bitching about this or that, never happy that she was finally in her own home, away from the trailer park trash neighbors she used to hate so much.
    It made a guy feel unappreciated, but nonetheless, Alan went about his daily routine. He figured she’d eventually come around. One day she’d see how he worked his ass off every day just to make her life as good and comfortable as he could possibly make it. One day she’d appreciate his efforts, by God, because it was a wife’s duty to appreciate the efforts of a good man.
    And Alan did work hard. He was an office man—a nine to fiver—and he got up every morning with a cup of coffee and his briefcase. He went to the office and put his time in pushing papers and making deals, and he came home at night to relax in his new home and all its implied success. A man doesn’t give up something like that without putting up a fight.
    Morning by morning, though, Alan saw the neighborhood beginning to deteriorate at a dramatic pace. What was once a beautiful community built around a large, clear lake was becoming a haven for misfits. Cora’s nagging intensified, and the worst part of it was, Alan found it harder to counter her complaints with anything positive.
    Jonesville was definitely getting worse. Alan started seeing his neighbor, John Miller, who lived half a mile down the road, dragging his trash can to the curb every morning for a trash truck that didn’t run any more. John never wore anything but his briefs, which were now colored with piss and shit stains. A couple of times Alan had even seen John’s pasty dick sticking out through the open fly in front of his briefs.
    Alan did his best to ignore the things he saw. He still refused to give up his house and his property by the lake, both symbols of all he’d worked so hard to provide for his family. If he had to live among freaks, so be it, because there was no way in hell he’d let them take his success.
    “The neighborhood is falling apart, Alan,” Cora said one morning. “Do you really want to stay here?”
    He was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the morning paper as he drank his second cup of coffee. “I’ve said it numerous times, dear, I will not let the riff-raff run me away from my home.”
    He didn’t go to work that morning. He made a trip to the nearest big town, Fayetteville, and visited the library. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for at first. He began to dig through some old boxes in a dusty back room. He found a collection of old microfiche and sorted through it. Several of them were marked with the words Jonesboro History. Alan found the matronly librarian and asked how he could view the microfiche. She showed him to a back room equipped with an old phonograph, an outdated computer, and a microfiche reader. He thanked her and went to work viewing the microfiche sheets.
    What he saw was a revelation to him. A shock to his system. He had not been aware of the dark and traumatic history of his precious Jonesville.
    The truth unfolded before his eyes as he scanned old newspaper clippings and articles detailing the contamination of a town called Jonesboro. After several attempts to clean up the chemical contamination in Jonesboro, during which time many of the residents died of toxic infections, the state government declared the town a disaster area and ordered immediate evacuation.
    The government eventually flooded Jonesboro, houses and dead residents alike. Signs posted around the outskirts of the massive man-made lake warned