“I was planning to.”
“Well you’ll forgive me for not buying that. This way, you won’t get what you want unless I get what I want, and what I want is to be rid of you.”
She shrugs. “Plenty of other towns. Plenty of livelier places. You have nothing to worry about.”
“Good.”
“Funny though.”
I wait for her continue.
She sighs dramatically. “I would have thought as this town’s sworn protector you’d have asked to have your dead friends brought back and to have all the misfortune undone. Above all, I expected you to ask for escape yourself.”
I raise my glass in a toast and offer her a sardonic grin. “I have escaped.”
Chapter Twenty One
“Why aren’t you saying anything?”
Iris is looking out the passenger side window, at the silent houses hurrying past, the deserted streets whizzing by. There should be children playing here, their laughter echoing around the neighborhood. There should be adults standing in the doorways or sitting on the stoops, watching with dreamy eyes the vagaries of a youth they once knew and would kill to know again. There should be smoke from the chimneys, lights in the windows, but there are only houses, and the breeze, and a bruised horizon to suggest the sun has ever visited this town. “There’s nothin’ to say,” she tells Kyle.
“Well…” Kyle, still stiff-necked, but no longer in agony, frowns, struggling to understand how he is here, and why Iris won’t talk to him.
“Just drive, ok? We can talk later.”
He doesn’t respond, knows she doesn’t want him to, and that confuses him. He has remembered his meeting with Cadaver, recalls how the confidence he brought with him, its weight similar to the gun in his pocket, fled once he was given the chance to express it before someone who could make it so. Hate persisted, but his determination evaporated as he finally realized the power he held in his hands, the magnitude of what he was planning to do, what he could do. In the end, uncertainty stopped him. As Cadaver stood patiently before him, a figure made of dust and shadow, he could not determine whether he was condemning his father to death just so he could get out of Milestone, or because he really believed the old man deserved to die. And that doubt was enough to drain his resolve. Assaulted by memories of life before the hate, he wept and fell to his knees. Cadaver hadn’t seem at all surprised, leading Kyle to wonder if he had anything to do with the sudden sequence of sentimental flashbacks. In the end, he hadn’t known, but was left alone in the room to mull over the possibilities. He could still sell his father out and get away from Milestone. It wasn’t too late, but even as he told himself that, he knew that it was. Once in a man’s life is enough to consider betraying his own blood. He could try leaving on his own, a thought that filled him with such inexplicable dread, he quickly dismissed it, and the rational explanation it demanded as to why this was so. The third option was to stay, and die here, and it was as he was imagining this, maybe five or six more decades in a town without life or color, that the fourth and final option began to make itself known.
He could stay and die here now, ending the torment and the confusion, ending a life that seemed frozen in an unhappy moment that might last forever. And it would let his father know that they had both failed each other.
“Faster,” Iris tells him, interrupting his thoughts at the perfect time. Any further and they might have claimed him, left him the same gibbering wreck he was when Cadaver impassively handed him the length of rope.
“I’m going as fast as I can. And what the hell is wrong with you anyway?”
“You’re what’s wrong with me.”
“Why?” Because I’m a dead man walking, he almost answers for her, to fill the silence where her own response should be. But he swallows his words and concentrates on the road, the lights spearing through the dark. Eddie’s, she told him, and that was enough. Without knowing how, and too afraid to attribute it to some sense picked up during his brief walking tour of death, he knows they’re supposed to head to Eddie’s, and that he will find his father there.
That scares him.
Everyone gets to die. Few get to die and have to answer for it later, at least not to the living.
A twinge of dull pain across his throat makes him lift a hand from the steering wheel. He has already checked for marks and there are none, but the skin there feels stretched and smooth, like a healed burn. He should be dead; he isn’t, but something inside him hasn’t returned with him. There’s a cold empty space where his hate should be, and its absence has left him confused, without identity, as if in dying, he lost the only part of him that knew how to survive, the engine that kept him running.
They pass beneath the dark black rectangle of a set of broken traffic lights, swinging in the strengthening breeze. Beyond it, the street is deathly quiet, a deserted movie set. Vacant, lifeless.
Something dashes out in front of the car. With a hoarse cry of surprise, Kyle jams on the brakes and the car screeches to a halt, smoke from the tires rushing ahead of them, becoming fleeing ghosts in the headlights. But he isn’t looking at those ghosts, he’s looking at the deer that’s standing there, staring in at him, a glimmer in its oily eye.
“Fucking thing,” he says, and takes a breath that scratches at his throat. “I didn’t even…” He trails off with a shake of his head.
“Look,” Iris says, nodding pointedly.
The deer hasn’t moved, but beyond it, Kyle sees that it isn’t alone. “Jesus.” There must be a hundred of them, or more, all of them racing in from the road out of town, stumbling and leaping over each other in their haste. It’s an incongruous scene. Deer are not often seen in town unless they’re dead, their legs sticking out of the back of some hunter’s flatbed. “Looks like they’re running from something.”
“Or toward somethin’,” Iris says.
Brody drives, the night like a dark bubble around the car. He’s hunched over the wheel, sweating and waiting, just waiting for something to jump out in front of him, maybe a vulture made of razorblades or a clown made of fog, or some other trick the town keeps stashed up its sleeve to torment those desperate to escape it. The car makes clunking noises beneath his feet and there’s a barely visible stream of smoke coming from something under the hood, but that’s okay, that’s all right, he’s still moving and that’s what counts. A hawk feather suspended from the mirror by a black leather thong flutters toward him, then away, trying to distract him, trying to coax his eyes from the road so he’ll crash, maybe end up sinking in a quagmire where the sand sings as it takes you down. This godforsaken place has pushed him about as far as he can go. It’s taken his woman and run him through the grinder, and all he wants now is to be gone. Prayers tinged with reluctant promises of reform suggest themselves as a viable way to kill the time until he hits the edge of town, but he’s not quite ready for that yet. Him and the Almighty haven’t exactly been on speaking terms over the past four years or so, and there’s a good reason for that. Brody doesn’t like the uncaring sonofabitch, not after losing so many people he loved, and figures if God has any sense, he’ll feel the same.
Black tangled trees race past the car in a blur.
Brody blinks sweat from his eyes, wipes a sleeve down his chin where something has tickled him. The interior of the car feels awful small and getting smaller, and a glimpse of his reflection, lit only by the ghoulish green glow from the dash, forces him to keep his eyes on the windshield.
And then.,.there, up ahead, a sign, a big white sign with black letters, and Brody eases his foot off the gas. Hope tenses his muscles. The placard is the only pale sight in a night thick with dark, and as he lets the car coast up to it and stop, a smile splits his face. It reads: