Bank

Out in the countryside, shooting enthusiasts often find a dedicated spot and turn it into an improvised target range. Those areas are remote, unpopulated, and surrounded by hills, so there's little risk of stray bullets harming anyone down-range. Once such unofficial spot was chosen deep in the woods near my Kentucky home. A massive wall of moss seemed to offer the perfect backdrop to plink away, while the bullets would just embedded themselves into the hillside. My friends and I referred to the place as 'the bank'.

Our running joke was to say to our wives: "I need to run to 'the bank', to leave a 'lead deposit." I'm sure it got very old but to their credit, none of our spouses divorced us for it. Most afternoons in the summer heat, my buddies and I would spend a half hour or so peppering the hillside with various caliber projectiles. It was our 'rural living' hobby.

On one particularly intense shooting session, we noticed a strange dark substance oozing from many of the impact points in the bank. The liquid was thick and oily, with a reddish tint. Of course my friends and I just cracked jokes at first about the unexplained phenomenon. It was odd, but not a reason to spend a lot of time investigating. One of them even quoted the 'Beverly Hillbillies' theme song about: "one day Uncle Jed was shootin' at some food, and up from the ground came a bubblin' crude."

We laughed at the absurd idea but the dark viscous fluid was definitely leaking out of the hill from our 'redneck assault'. After a while, the substance would dry up, but then it would just pour out the next spot we fired at. After a number of occasions where this occurred, it was increasingly difficult to ignore any longer. I brought a shovel to 'the bank' and started digging around one of the blackened ooze spots. I wasn't sure what I'd find but I was determined to locate the source of the draining substance.

A couple others chipped in and we made decent headway into the side of the hillside but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. It was getting late so we decided to abandon the excavation, and get our daily target practice in. That night we saw a significantly greater amount of the oily hillside discharge than on any of our previous experiences. As the sun went down, the last vestiges of fading sunlight crept between the trees. At that point, it was too difficult to see our improvised targets and we called it 'a day'.

It was then that one of my buddies claimed he felt the ground move under his feet. We live in coal mining country and dynamite blasting is common but our shooting spot was a long way from any of the mines. Also, it wasn't a common practice to set off explosive charges that late at night. We ribbed him about knocking back too many beers before he came out to the range. His answer was classic Chet. He said that even drunk, he was still the best shot among us, and damned if he wasn't right! We had to hand it to him. Chet was an expert marksman. None of us thought any more about his silly earthquake claims. It was time to go home.

The next evening, I got off work before the others did so I headed to 'the bank' to get in a little bit of practice before they arrived. With my trusty AR in the back seat, I drove to the remote spot and parked my pickup. Immediately I knew something was horribly wrong but my brain couldn't process it right away. 'The bank' was completely gone. As a matter of fact, a massive swath of the entire hillside was missing!

I could tell it hadn't been worked by excavators or bulldozers. There were no mechanical tracks present and the missing section of the hill ended with a perfect separation of undisturbed soil. Beyond that was a bloody crater! Some massive creature had been embedded into the side of the mountain! I shutter to think what would've happened if it awakened during our target practice, and also what would happen if this massive beast is still nearby. Heaven help us all.