The Quest for the Mini-Bottles of Cinnamon Fireball Liquor

The Quest for the Mini-Bottles of Cinnamon Fireball Liquor

(Part One)

by Steve Gearhart

There are many ways to get to Edgewater, Maryland...not that anyone would willingly want to actually go there.

Edgewater started as a small fishing village. Everyone knew each other and went to one of the two churches every Sunday. There were no stop lights but plenty of white, picket fences. This was a place where people were called folks and they were so friendly and lovely. Just a hamlet of nice neighbors who woke up every morning to an achingly beautiful Chesapeake Bay universe.

Edgewater is one of those Bay locales where it almost became one of those quaint waterway towns. Edgewater almost became a home to multiple bed and breakfasts where the pancakes had fruit in them, the fish and crabs were fresh and the bread was always home-made. Edgewater almost became one of those clean, tourist towns that the rich seem to find and make their own.

However...the rich never made it there; the rednecks found it first. 

Now, the once, white-washed piers are packed with grimy fishing boats. Piloted by hairy, pot-bellied men who max the volume out when that one country song about the stripper who worked a pole in a bar off the highway exit died due to a meth overdose comes on the radio. 

Their loud boats slowly cruising out into the oil-polluted waters. Hard-working men who are already drunk by eight in the morning, resplendent in their filthy caps and wife-beater shirts with ketchup and Lord-only-knows-what-else stains, trying to make sure they don't crash their boats onto the tiny beaches.  

The beachfront itself is about three feet wide and littered with cigarette butts, condoms and a syringe every twenty feet or so. Garbage from the piers wash up on the tiny shores. Only the brave, heroin heroes of Edgewater will lay down their towels on the crusty sand to sunbathe.

There are many ways into the dead-end town of Edgewater. Most of the sad sacks who decided to live in this redneck paradise often find themselves coming into town via one of the two major roads. Roads that actually have asphalt on them. The potholes even get repaired.

However...sometimes, a person can get lost. Sometimes, some poor schmuck from outside of Washington DC takes a wrong turn and gets confused. Trying to use a side-road to turn off of, certain that it will take them back to the highway and civilization. 

That person will drive down a back road very slowly. A road like Mill Swamp Road. The road itself is only partially paved. A lot of potholes. But there is a lot of green on either side. It's breathtaking. For a moment, the driver forgets being frustrated at having made a wrong turn.

The lost driver gets distracted in the verdant beauty of the green surrounding the road. Huge trunks packed together, stretching high into the sky. The branches are lush with the leaves of so many different types of trees. They creep out over the road, creating interesting shadows in the wind, playing with the light of the warm sun.

And these thick forests will suddenly give way to great, open fields. The grass is emerald and grows high. At certain points of the day, the driver may get a glimpse of deer grazing. Or perhaps spot a hawk flying with the blue sky and perfectly white clouds above it. 

These awe-inspiring views are suddenly ripped away as the lost driver comes across a pocket of the redneck apocalypse. 

Dead lands of hatred for nature thrust themselves out in scenes of angry, rusted metal. Fields of discarded, hateful, half-assed and petty dreams. Trucks and cars that will never enjoy being driven at full-throttle up on concrete blocks. So many unremembered metal shards hiding in the brown and chemically changed dirt ready to give a deadly dose of tetanus and lockjaw to the unwary traveler.

And as the lost driver recoils from the sight of mangled and diseased land, he or she may come across something odd. An oddity off to the side of Mill Swamp Road. An oddity that triggers an automatic response within the lost driver that is as old as mankind.

The most basic of instincts will suddenly appear in the lost driver's brain, a warning of do NOT stop, keep moving, this thing you are seeing is odd, curious and somehow odious, keep moving, keep moving, KEEP MOVING!!!

That odd thing will be a man.

A man who calls himself...Car. 

(AUTHOR'S NOTE: this story is NOT entirely fictional. You have been warned.)