I'd like to start off by saying that I don't have a fucking clue why I'm posting this on /x/, or, really, at all. Maybe I'm afraid of dying, or something. The events described in this story happened a month and a half ago, in Shanondale (Shannondale?), West Virginia, although I typed this up about two weeks ago. I just haven't really had the guts to post this until what happened yesterday.
The story starts in late September, when my family went to go visit our relatives, who invited us up to celebrate one of them (Desiree) getting like two-thousand bucks in some scratch-off lottery thing. They live in this really fucking shitty part of Shanondale that people from Charles Town, Shepherdstown and Ranson (basically the least rednecky parts of WV) like to call "Squalor Holler."
It's way up on the mountain, and exactly like how everyone pictures it when they hear about it - nothing but ramshackle shacks, rusty-ass rebuilt trailers, everything fucking covered in decades-old Christmas decorations because they're all too busy being smelly rednecks to ever clean up. Real deliverance shit, just no rivers or canoes. The relatives we were visiting are absolutely confirmed inbreeders, all cousins fucking each other. We don't refer to them as aunt, uncle, whatever, just relatives. Not terrible people or anything, just absolutely cartoonish, depressing hillbilly stereotypes.
So anyway, we're up here in this godforsaken trailer, it sucks. There's like eight of them, plus me, my dad, my mom, and my sister. About two hours in, my mom takes my cell phone so that I can "focus on the family time together" (which is bullshit, all we did the whole time was eat TV dinners and be forced to watch Nascar and shit). After like six hours of this shit, about ten minutes before we're supposed to leave, it starts raining.
We know how treacherous the roads can get up on the mountain, so we decide to wait for the rain to die down. Flash forward two hours later, it's fucking dark as hell, ten o'clock, and there's a flood warning for the area. I have my phone back by this time (no reception, though, of course), I'm playing Tetris and Texas Hold 'Em and stuff, when suddenly I hear my dad start losing his shit in the next room.
I walk over, and it turns out that they let slip that they'd buried their kid, Thomas, outside, and apparently were afraid the rain would wash up his body or some other horseshit. The kid was like six, he was attacked by a dog, and they never told the cops. Just fucking buried him like he was a family pet. My dad's flipping his shit, and rightfully so, because, you know, we live in the 21st century and all. So our relatives all say they'll sort it all out in the morning.
My parents tell me and my sister to stay in the same room as them during the night, and we do. None of us really suspected that they'd killed Thomas or anything, since they're really peaceful - they didn't even own any guns aside from this one old-timey double-barrel shotgun they had on a mantle. Nevertheless, we were creeped the fuck out, and intended to tell the cops in the morning once we got to town.
So, it was like three in the morning, I couldn't sleep. Power had gone out for the fifth time or so, and I'm not able to charge my dead phone. Worst part is, I could see Thomas's little grave right outside the window. Little cross on it and everything, and I assumed the kid couldn't have been buried deep at all since they were so worried about him just washing up out of the grave. So I was just fixated on it, kept being drawn to looking out the window. And then I saw the fucking worst thing in my life.
