Milestone: The Collected Stories: Milestone, #1

INTRODUCTION

DERRY, MAINE; ELM HAVEN, and Green Town, Illinois; Milburn, New York, all places in which terrible things have happened, and all places that, outside of the imaginations of their creators (Stephen King, Dan Simmons, Ray Bradbury, and Peter Straub, respectively), do not exist in real life, or at least, not by those names. I have no doubt that those authors used real places as the templates for their creations. Parts of King’s Derry seem a lot like parts of Bangor, Maine. Bradbury’s Green Town shares characteristics with Waukegan, Illinois, where he grew up. And in much the same way, my own terrible town is based in part on Delaware, Ohio, where I spent seven years after coming to the US from Ireland. It represents the place in which my life took a dramatic turn, where an exciting and terrifying new chapter began. It was, you could say, a critical Milestone. I’ve set many of my stories there—The Turtle Boy among them—and have been as faithful as I could be to represent it fairly and accurately (necessary geographical liberties notwithstanding.) But when it came time to write Saturday Night at Eddie’s, the setting didn’t quite fit. Delaware was a lovely town, and not nearly as rundown or near-death as I’ve made it in Milestone, but by the time I moved away, there were already signs of economic decay—vacant storefronts, an increase in the amount of homeless and unemployed navigating the crumbling sidewalks—so common in towns of its type in this day and age. So, rather than represent the town as a ruin it had not yet become, I made it one on the page, keeping the downtown structure intact while fast-forwarding to a future I sincerely hoped it would avoid. I haven’t been back there since, but in the years after I left, I’ve traveled the country and found towns that better fit the Milestone mold, and surpass it in terms of dereliction. And when you learn that people still live in these ghost towns, once thriving mining communities now all but abandoned, it’s hard not to wonder what life must be like for these holdouts, what keeps them there, or what brought that once prospering town to ruin.

Milestone exists as a petri dish for both the best and worst mankind has to offer, all of them overseen by a sentience that defies categorization. If forced, you might call it a minor god, an outcast deity, as marooned in the great nowhere as the souls held within its thrall. I have tried within these stories to shrink matters of sin, morality, religion, worship, divine intervention and attribution down into a snowglobe. Whether good or evil, or some combination of both, Milestone’s motives depend, and are directly related, to those of the people who exist within its borders. In that regard, it functions as a microcosmic reflection of the real world. We are too quick to lay the blame for all the world’s ills on some cosmic entity, and equally quick to depend on it for salvation, when our gaze might be better served directed inward rather than out, something easier preached than practiced. Accountability is a long, dark road few are brave enough to take.

So is the road to Milestone.

INCLUDED IN THIS BOOK, you’ll find all the Milestone stories I’ve written to date. Although Saturday Night at Eddie’s was later expanded into the full novel Currency of Souls, I have opted only to include the latter, shorter version, as I think it’s a tighter, more focused version of that story. The Milestone stories are presented here in the order in which they take place.

I sincerely hope you enjoy them, and thank you for visiting.

I no less sincerely hope you can find your way back out.

- Kealan Patrick Burke

March 2014

​THE WITCH

ON THE NIGHT HE CAME upon the witch, Bryce Carrigan was patrolling alone, and drinking a bottle of Buckwheat Prime Beer, a local brew that tasted like someone had wrung their dirty socks into a dish full of rainwater, but sure got your head spinning. It was also cheap, and with the ever-present threat of unemployment looming like a goddamn thundercloud over his head (already their police force had been reduced from five men to two—three, if you included the dispatcher, Sheila Graham, who might as well have been a man—in the past year), not to mention a baby on the way, that made it the beer of choice. Besides, after you’d had the first one, the taste got a little better, but then he assumed that was true of most vile things.

It was a pleasant night, cooler than it had been in some time, and Bryce drove the back roads with the radio low and the window down, allowing the breeze to flow into the car. His stomach was a little shaky, a feeling he blamed squarely on the greasy burritos he’d wolfed down at Iris’s place. The woman could fuck like a champion but damned if the food hadn’t tasted like two sheets of rolled up newspaper painted with an egg yolk. Still, he hadn’t complained. Being with child, his wife wasn’t all that eager to let him have a poke—was downright against it to tell the truth—so he didn’t see the harm in going elsewhere to get his lay as long as it didn’t become a habit. And like the beer, the whore was cheap too. He liked that. Liked it even more that she wasn’t judgmental.

Eyes half-closed, he was reflecting on Iris’s pale, willowy body looming over him as he ran his hands down her over her small breasts, the slight, soft intake of breath when she came (or pretended to, for all he knew), when it registered that there was something in the road ahead. He frowned, eased his foot off the gas and squinted for a moment, knowing what he was looking for out there in the night and hoping like hell he wouldn’t find it.

Fuck.

It was, at is so often was in this goddamn town, a wrecked car.

Quickly tossing the beer bottle out the window and into the tall grass at the side of the road, he brought the patrol car to a halt. The unoiled brakes squealed in protest. For a moment he just sat there trying to talk himself out of the buzz, then he popped the glove box and rummaged around until he found a pack of gum with a stick still left inside the crumpled package. He sighed through his nose and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he chewed. He was in no hurry. He could see how damaged the car was and it looked bad enough that he doubted he was going to find anything other than a mangled corpse inside the steaming wreck.

Eight, he thought, with a slow shake of his head. This one makes eight so far this year, and it’s not even winter. That was when the snow and ice came, the nights got longer, and the number of accidents doubled, though it was hard to call them accidents when nothing appeared to have caused them. Deer, mostly, was Sheriff Dale Underwood’s opinion. They like that patch of road. And though Bryce never contradicted his boss, he had also never seen a deer that could cause the kind of damage that was done to these cars. But Dale’s theory was better than his own, because it didn’t involve the supernatural, so it made him feel better to go along with it. Otherwise, he’d have to start thinking about invisible barriers around the town that chose who got in and who got out, and that made no sense at all. So if the front of those wrecks made it seem as if they’d run right into a brick wall at sixty miles an hour, well, then it was probably just one hell of a big deer, like Dale said.

He snatched up the radio. Dispatch, this is Bryce. Sheila, you there?

Where else would I be? she droned back.

I don’t know. Getting hormone injections? We have a wreck out here on the north side of town.

Well, fuck me and good for you! The usual place?

Right on the border, yeah.

Bodies?

Haven’t checked yet, but it’s bad enough. I’ll get back to you once I’ve had a look. Might as well call Dan Haldeman and get the tow truck out here. Damn wreck’s right in the middle of the road.

Anything else?

Not for the minute. He hung the radio back on the cradle.

Grabbing a flashlight from beneath the passenger seat, he paused to make sure his gun was in his holster. Frequently he forgot the damn thing at the station, despite Dale chastising him about it more times than he could count. On those occasions, Bryce had to resist the urge to remind his boss than in the four years he’d been a deputy, he’d only had cause to discharge the weapon three times outside of the shooting range, and not once had the gun been pointed at anything bigger than a coyote. Guns made him uncomfortable, which was why he’d sought out the job of a deputy in a town so quiet it seemed unlikely he’d ever need to use one.

Sounds like a story I’ll be telling the boys at your funeral while we raise a toast over your shot-up corpse, Dale had said, and the point had been made clear.

Now, gun securely snapped into his holster, Bryce stepped from the car.

He hitched up his belt and felt it wedge against his gut. He was putting on weight, the probable result of eating Iris’s greasy cooking. He made a mental note to be careful not to let it get out of hand in case Sarah got suspicious, though he could always fall back on the old stereotype and claim he was eating one too many doughnuts while on duty. If Sarah gave it any thought at all, however, she’d remember that there hadn’t been a place to buy doughnuts in Milestone since the night Benny Caldwell of Benny’s Bakery went nuts, stuffed his wife in the oven, set it to 425 and then blew his brains out with a .357 Magnum.

Sighing, Bryce raised the flashlight and ran the beam over the wreck.

The only sounds in the night were the hissing of the steam from beneath the crumpled up hood of the car, which by the decal on the twisted grille appeared to be a Dodge something-or-other, and the arrhythmic ticking of cooling metal.

Christ, he muttered, approaching with a caution that was not customary in such situations but which he felt, without knowing why, was advisable in this one. Sheriff Underwood would have called that gut instinct and smiled at him in a fatherly way. Bryce himself smiled a little at the thought, but it quickly faded. That instinct, of which Dale would be so proud, was a red neon sign flashing a single word in his mind: TROUBLE. He didn’t know why, and that bothered him even more. Nothing about this scenario looked any different from the others he’d had to deal with. But the wariness within him was so strong he paused to consider going back to the car and radioing the station again. But what would he say? Hey Sheriff? Any chance you could tool on out here? I’ve got the heebies.  That was if Sheila, their tremendously overweight and foulmouthed dispatcher, even bothered to pass the message along to Dale. Obnoxious as she was, she seemed to have a keen sense for situations that required her to hoist herself up off her chair and waddle into the Sheriff’s office. And he had a feeling this situation would not qualify. At least, not yet. Which meant, for now, he was alone.

Get on with it, you big baby.

He started walking again.

If somebody was alive in the wreck and not too badly hurt, he’d radio for Doctor Hendricks. For worse, someone would end up having to ferry the injured party to the Sisters of Mercy Hospital in Saddleback. And if it was a stiff, they’d attempt to ID the body, call the police department nearest the person’s address so the next of kin could be notified, assuming they had any (which, in Bryce’s experience, they never did—the dead always seemed to be not only strangers, but loners too, which Bryce thought was pretty odd in itself, as if Milestone was some kind of suicide magnet for friendless out-of-towners), then bring it on over to Hendricks for preparation in his basement mortuary. After that, it was on to the Morning Rose Cemetery and a burial presided over by Reverend Lewis, who would do his best to look sincere as he muttered something profoundly obscure and, with a gnarled hand, sliced the air over the grave into quarters. All very routine. Then Bryce would go back to the station, file the report, and tell Sheila all the gory details, while Dale observed him from his desk, searching for a sign that the sight of the body had troubled Bryce more than he was letting on.

Hello? he called to the night.

In the beginning, such sights had bothered him. The only corpse Bryce had ever seen up until that point had been his father’s, and that had looked like a wax dummy someone had laid in the casket as a joke. He had felt no connection to that fake-looking thing, and in a way it had comforted him, told him the shell didn’t matter, only what it had once contained. Had he come upon his father’s mangled Buick and found the old man with his chest pulverized from the force of the steering wheel, his eyes bugging out as his insides were forced up into his throat, his severed foot lying sideways on the road and still wearing its loafer, well, that would have been different. Then, he might have screamed and clawed his own eyes out. Though when it came to the first accident scene, he hadn’t reacted that way at all. Instead, he’d just nodded at Dale when asked if he was all right, then he’d smiled, said something he couldn’t remember, and vomited copiously all over the elder man’s shirt and shoes. It was the look of irritation on the Sheriff’s face, which to the man’s credit he quickly shed in favor of concern, that yanked Bryce back from the edge of the precipice upon which he’d been teetering, ready to plummet into stark raving madness. Because from the beginning, Dale Underwood had been someone he’d wanted to impress, a man who commanded respect and had little trouble getting it—a man like his father. That look, there and then gone, was all it took to steady him.

But later, in the dark, when sleep was further away than the moon, Dale had not been there to talk him back from the edge of the abyss where the seething mass of shattered human bodies tumbled endlessly upward, their mouths open and screaming. But he’d been there the next day, ready with a speech reminding Bryce what he already knew: They’re just bodies, son, flesh and blood machines to carry the soul around. Once the soul goes, the body’s just like an abandoned car, and not much good to anyone anymore. What you see out there won’t be pretty because the pretty part’s up in Heaven playin’ horseshoes with the Almighty.

Funny that he should remember those words now, Bryce thought, because the car in the middle of the road was abandoned too. Broken glass crunching beneath his boots, he tried the driver side door. It was not locked, but the collision (with what?) had warped it sufficiently that it wouldn’t budge. He poked his head in through the glassless window and inspected the interior of the vehicle, his flashlight beam alighting on a deployed airbag smeared with blood.

The breeze tickled the hair on the back of his neck and slipped down the back of his shirt. Bryce shivered and did a quick three hundred-and-sixty degree sweep with the flashlight just in case it was something else, but saw nothing. He turned back to the car, noting the veritable mountain of fast food wrappers littered in the passenger side footwell. The glove box was hanging open like an idiot’s mouth, the interior light glowing a dull amber. It had coughed its contents out onto the passenger seat, and Bryce could make out a package of unopened tissues and a tire-pressure gauge among the explosion of papers. He made a note to check those papers for some identifying documentation if the owner turned out to have wandered off, and then drew his focus back to the driver seat. Fragments of glass glittered in the light as he poked his head further into the car and angled the beam to the left and down, illuminating the darkness beneath the dashboard.

There was a pair of shoes under there. White sneakers speckled with blood, the laces untied, as if the driver had removed them for comfort. He couldn’t be sure, but judging by the size of them, he guessed the driver had been a woman. A cursory check of the backseat revealed nothing but more trash, some old clothes, and a stuffed teddy bear with one of its black button eyes missing lying on the floor. The sight of it leering myopically up at him gave him the creeps and he reversed course, backing out of the car and giving the tall grass behind him another sweep of the light. He was looking for a trail, some sign that the driver had walked, crawled, or been flung into the field, but the grass hadn’t been trampled. In the breeze, it stirred lazily as if responding to the light.

Bryce made his way around the back of the car, and that’s where he found the woman.

Startled, he stopped in his tracks. Time to call Dale, he thought, but made no move to do so.

Ma’am?

The high, swollen moon had illuminated a glittering path of broken glass on the dark road. Within the myriad cobalt sparks, the woman knelt and keened to herself, occasionally jerking forward to stab at something on the asphalt. She wore what appeared to be a hospital gown, white with a pattern of small dark shapes. Flowers, probably, or something equally innocuous, intended to make you feel as if things were dandy when just the fact that you had to wear it meant they most certainly weren’t. Through the gap in the back of the material, he could see the shadowed bumps of her spine and when she spasmed forward to jab at the road, her bare ass was exposed. If she was aware of this, it didn’t seem to bother her. Nevertheless, Bryce averted his gaze in case she suddenly snapped her head around to look at him.

TROUBLE.

Ma’am, he said, the peculiarity of the situation forcing his hand to the butt of his gun, because it had occurred to him that there was nothing to suggest that the woman hadn’t escaped from a mental home, like something from an urban legend, intent on murdering anyone and anything that crossed her path. Certainly her behavior indicated that she was unstable, but he knew it could just as easily be shock. The gown, however, tilted his suspicions toward the former theory.

The woman’s long dark hair hung in her face. He couldn’t tell from here if she was injured, but assuming she’d been driving, the blood on the airbag suggested as much, so he made his way back to the patrol car, leaned in through the window and grabbed the radio.

Dispatch, this is Bryce.

Go ahead, Lone Ranger, Sheila droned. You got a body for us?

Yeah, but it’s currently walking around dressed in a hospital gown.

Huh. That’s new. I’m guessing you want Dale.

He thought about this for a moment. He did want Dale, if only so he wouldn’t be stuck out here alone in the unnatural quiet with a potentially psychopathic woman, but he knew it would look a damn sight better if he took care of this himself. Of course, if the woman did turn out to be a lunatic and attacked him, he would regret not taking the opportunity to summon the Sheriff while the