Prompt: Write a short story combining two genres. (I picked Western meets Lovecraft; Word count: 259)
When Warren Dixon struck oil ten miles outside town, things boomed. Speculators came by the dozens, bought property, staked claims. Many good people—the lucky ones—got out with more than they’d spent on their homesteads. Many more, unfortunately, were caught in the frenzy and dug up their backyards rather than accept the going rate.
Most of what happened could have been avoided if what had been discovered had been verified as oil....
Dixon honestly thought the black substance oozing up from his ranchland was oil. He’d seen it in Kilgore and elsewhere; he sincerely thought he was doing his neighbors a favor, encouraging them to dig, fill whatever barrels, wheelbarrows, even canning jars were handy. In many ways it behaved like oil. It burned; well, smoked a lot. It lubricated better than anything the railroad had seen before; Clint McKittridge, local rail baron, couldn’t get enough of the stuff.
Like oil, it didn’t envelop buildings and reduce them to their greasy, smoking foundations in a matter of hours.
It didn’t skeletonize livestock, either, then come back and gnaw the bones to nothing. Why should it, since those aren’t properties of oil.
It didn’t liquify iron-horses and the rails they ran on, since oil doesn’t do that, either.
And, like oil, it didn’t slither out of barrels and invade its victims’ airways, resulting in silent, screamless deaths.
...at least not at first.
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