Currency of Souls by Kealan Patrick Burke

Hendricks saw his father smile a lot.
    A breeze against the window makes the curtains shift a little. There is no keeping it out. The house is old and draughty. Upstairs, Queenie's asleep, piled beneath enough covers to ensure she stays warm. She's not alone though. Never alone. She's got the cancer to keep her company, infecting her dreams with its promises of death, eating away at her brain while she snatches as much peace from her final days as she's permitted. For Hendricks, who despite his profession can do nothing but sedate her and feed her painkillers in near-lethal doses, it's become a lottery. First, he wonders if this morning will be the one he goes up to the room to find her dead. Then he wonders, if she does wake up, will she attack him, or scream hysterically because she's forgotten who he is? And lastly, he wonders if today's the day he takes that shotgun down and puts them both out of their misery once and for all.
    He intends for it to happen, accepts that it must. The gun's loaded, ready to go. It's just a matter of when, and how many bullets he'll need. The thought does not disturb him. He has watched his beautiful wife lapse into psychotic rages and foul-mouthed fits for almost two years now. He has sat with her while she wept, and thanked the Almighty Jesus for her spells of lucidity and apparent health. For the past two weeks, there have been no episodes, no late night panic attacks or spells of spouting gibberish like a possessed thing. It's almost as if she's been his, and his alone. As if he hasn't had to share her with a parasite.
    The lull won't last though. It never does, and he fears that this is merely the calm before the final devastating storm that takes her for good. If it does so before he takes that shotgun down, so be it, but he has no intention of surviving her.
    There is a knock on the door. It surprises him, jerks the cup in his hand and sends tea sloshing over the side. He grumbles, checks his watch, then rises, sets the cup aside, and casts a final glance at the shadow over the mantel.
     
     
     
    Chapter Ten
     
     
    Though Milestone's creeping toward dawn, it always feels like deep night on Winter Street, and if you're looking for sunshine, you'd best look up on over the roofs and not through the windows.
    Time was you came here for your groceries, or for a haircut, or for some new clothes to impress your latest date. If you wanted the fancy stuff, you'd have to carry your ass clear into Saddleback, which I've always thought is a long haul just to spend twice as much as you would in Milestone for more or less the same damn thing. Doesn't matter now though. These days, you come here to get laid or listen to the wisdom of Horace Dudds, one of only three town drunks who haven't yet realized the town's died around them. The others are Maggie, Horace's unofficial girlfriend, and Kirk Vess, though he tends to wander and isn't welcome on Horace and Maggie's turf. Apparently they have standards he doesn't meet. Politics of the homeless, I guess. If Maggie has a second name, she has never seen fit to reveal it, and no one ever asks. I guess we all figure when you've got nothing else to call your own, no one will begrudge you keeping your name to yourself.
    I pull up outside a narrow gray building that looks like something from an angry child's drawing with its funny angles and not-quite-straight edges, boarded up windows and trash stuffed in the wide cracks between the short run of steps leading to main door. Through the gaps in the boards nailed over the store's plate glass window, a blinking florescent light shows a bunch of mannequins stripped of their clothes, and lewdly posed so they look like they've been frozen mid-orgy. A faded wooden plaque above the door bears the legend THE HOUSE OF IRIS.
    On the opposite side of the road stands what used to be a clothing store for children before people stopped having them. Beneath the tattered red-and-white striped awning, sit two figures huddled