And just past it, she sees the place: Swifty's Tavern.

Neon beer signs glow bright against the storm-tossed, late-night sky. The bar is a bug light, and she is the fly (fat from feeding off death). She makes a bee-line for the place.

Her mouth can taste it already.

Inside, the bar is like the unholy child of a lumberjack and a biker wriggling free from some wretched womb. Dark wood. Animal heads. Chrome rims. Concrete floor.

"An oasis," Miriam says out loud.

The place isn't busy. A few truckers sit at a table, playing cards around a foamy pitcher. Bikers mill around a lone pool table toward the back. Flies orbit a mess of old cheese fries that have dried into a shellacked mound to the left of the door. Iron Butterfly growls from the jukebox. Inna Gadda Da BlahBlah, Baby.

She sees the bar, its edges bordered with heavy gauge chain.

It will be her home, she decides, until they evict her.

She tells the bartender, who looks like a pile of uncooked Pillsbury dough stuffed into a dirty black T-shirt, that she needs a drink.

"Fifteen minutes until close," he mumbles, and then adds: "Little girl."

"Cut the 'little girl' shit, paleface. If I only have fifteen minutes, then I want whiskey. Your cheapest and shittiest. Think lighter fluid mixed with coyote piss. And you can put a shot glass down, but if you're amenable to it, then I'd damn sure like to pour my own."

He stares at her for untold seconds, then finally shrugs. "Sure. Whatever."

Paleface plunks down what might have once been a plastic jug for antifreeze, and from the look of the murky whiskey within, antifreeze might be the healthier choice. He waves away a haze of gnats. They're probably getting high off the vapors.

He uncaps it. He leans back coughing, and rubs his eyes. The smell – or, really, the sensation – hits Miriam a few seconds later.

"It feels like someone is pissing in my eyes," she says. "And up my nose."

"Buddy of mine across the Tennessee border makes it. He uses old oil drums instead of oak barrels. He calls it bourbon, but I dunno."

"And it's cheap?"

"Nobody'll ever drink it. Whole jug'll go to you for five bucks, you want it."

It smells like it'd burn barnacles off a boat hull; she can't imagine what it will do to her insides. She needs that. She needs to purge. She slaps down a five-spot, and then taps the bar.

"Then all I need is the glass."

Paleface thunks a shot glass next to the fiver, then grabs the money with a greasy hand.

Miriam takes the antifreeze jug and tops off the glass. Liquid spills on the bar, and she's surprised it doesn't eat through the lacquer.

She stares into the muddy whiskey. Flecks of something float at the top. But something else floats to the top, too: Louis. His face. Two ruined eyes. A mouth moaning her name.