A Touch of Spring Fever

Amos McBride, like his father, Truitt and his great-aunt, Tildy had the sight. It seemed to run in the family. Amos supposed it was a gift, if gift was the right word for it. Sometimes his people just knew things; handy things like when to plant, when to harvest, what the weather might be. They knew life in the Great Smokey Mountains where existence is a slow, predictable and comforting cycle. That’s the way it had always been; how they thought it always would be. That is until the spring of 1905 until the strangers came and brought with them a new knowing. The first victim was a pig; the second a man, and that was only the beginning. An old and violent evil had returned. Rising undead from legends and spilling down the dark, forested slope the life spread like a blood-thirsty contagion through the farming community below. One by one, Amos watched his neighbors fall to an onslaught of murderous strangers only to rise again in a monstrous rebirth. Side by side with his father and brother, Amos stood between the life he had always known and the terrifying new reality emerging from the shadows. Come hell or high water they would stand their ground. It didn’t take the sight to know that nothing would ever be the same again.