Chapter Six

Nightfall went unnoticed by Polk Buckhorn, since he'd passed out an hour before sundown.

By sheer luck, he'd happened across a small cattle ranch a few hours' ride north of Carter's Refuge; after a few moments of weary speculation, he'd decided to take a chance on the odds that the owners wouldn't notice a stranger sleeping one off in their barn. They hadn't so far, and that was good enough for him.

Currently, he was dreaming of the Long Branch Saloon: a place that had made a powerful - if hazy - impression upon his subconscious. He was just starting to enjoy himself when Wyatt Earp entered the tavern and announced that Abraham Lincoln had passed a ban on whiskey, and that this left no choice but to close Dodge City down forever. The saloon was going to be turned into a museum, and Earp explained that Buck was going to be kept aboard as the star exhibit; he realized at this point that his glass had been filled with embalming fluid rather than alcohol, but for some reason he couldn't seem to stop drinking.

Buck groaned softly in his sleep. He'd had this dream before, and it wasn't one of his favorites.

A hundred miles away, in the deep desert, Dancing Bird was having a different kind of dream: the kind that his Gods had always used to speak to him. He'd tried to stop having them, but without much success.

In his dream, he found himself walking a long and winding road. Looking to the horizon, he saw that he was approaching a crossroads; there, Coyote was waiting for him. A long moment passed in silence before Dancing Bird finally spoke.

"I suppose that you're going to scold me," Dancing Bird said flatly.

Coyote sat up on his haunches; as always, he seemed to be grinning.

"And what makes you think that I'd do that?" the spirit inquired.

Dancing Bird scoffed, and Coyote managed to look slightly embarrassed.

"I have cast off the old ways," Dancing Bird growled. "I have abandoned my people in their darkest hour."

"Have you?" mused Coyote. "And why have you done that?"

Dancing Bird threw his arms to the heavens.

"Because they deserve better," he snarled. "If I have nothing but false hope to offer them, then they're better off without me."

Coyote's eyes had somehow become sadder than Dancing Bird's own, and the priest found his anger failing.

"Go on, then," he sighed. "Rebuke me, if you must."

To Dancing Bird's shock, Coyote turned to stare into the distance.

"I will not," said the spirit, "because you're right. We're dying, and our ways with us. There's no point in pretending otherwise."

The response wasn't the one that Dancing Bird had expected; it was infinitely worse, in fact.

Meanwhile, Melody Chamberlain was wide awake. The good people of Baker's Stake had been most accommodating, and the news was better than any that she could have hoped for. Assuming that the mayor's thugs had been telling the truth - and she'd given them every reason to do so - she was no more than a few weeks behind her target.

Normally good news would've made for a good night's sleep, but this wasn't just another bounty. She'd been waiting a long time for this particular face to show up on a "Wanted" poster; the word was already out that she'd claimed this one for her own, and anyone who knew both the business and what was good for them would respect that claim. She smiled to herself in the darkness, imagining the encounter so near in her future.

A few minutes later, Melody finally gave up on sleep and began saddling her horse.

The monster wasn't sleeping, either. He never slept.

The creature hadn't encountered any signs of human life since the chance encounter on his first day in the desert, though his search had grown increasingly frantic in the intervening time. Now he found himself lying in a pool of moonlight, wrestling with a sensation that was entirely new to him.

He was, he had discovered, depressed.

He had initially been delighted to have found himself loosed, in all his fury, upon the mortal world. So far, however, all of his fury had gone more or less to waste; despite his limited intelligence, he was unable to avoid the conclusion that he seemed to have been loosed upon the absolute middle of nowhere. He had massacred the one startled vagrant, had wandered a bit, and then had ravaged a few of the cacti, mostly out of frustration. He couldn't help but feel, in his own vague way, as if he were meant for bigger and better things.

He was filled with savage instincts, and they were telling him that he had been made to sow discord, calamity, and sorrow. Judging solely from his experiences thus far, he was beginning to doubt that anyone would notice.

Some nearby wolves began braying at the moon, and the creature found himself taking up their lament.

At precisely the same moment, Michael Evans awoke in a cold sweat.

His surroundings were unfamiliar, and he struggled for a moment with a sense of disorientation before managing to place himself. He was in a private box aboard an overnight train; why he was here was less clear, now that he finally allowed himself to consider the question. The last few days had been like a fever dream; he'd been acting on a strange impulse, never stopping to fully consider his actions. In retrospect, it was hard to ignore the obvious conclusion, which was that his occupation had finally gotten to be too much for him.

He happened to glance at the newspaper in his lap, and saw little there to encourage him. Seemingly random passages of text had been underlined; frantic notes had been scribbled into the margins. He could vaguely recall having done all of these things, and he moaned inwardly. The risk of a nervous breakdown was widely recognized as one of the major occupational hazards of his profession, but he hadn't realized how close to the edge he'd been until now.

Evans suddenly realized that this moment of clarity might turn out to be short-lived; struggling not to panic, he began making plans for his return to Maryland. The newspaper beckoned him, and he tried - without success - to ignore it. He appeared to have emphasized one headline in particular above all of the others, and he found himself reading it, despite himself.

His jaw dropped; his mind went numb. He read the headline again, and then a third time; a moment later, he found himself reading the article below it.

The story was a rather whimsical feature, and not particularly newsworthy; the editor had probably chosen it purely for filler, dropping it into the last page of the paper in the hopes that some of the readers might find it amusing. The article told the story of a Virginia-born lawyer who - a week previously - had apparently quite blandly declared himself the Antichrist, and had gotten as far as announcing his intention to run for political office before being bundled off to an asylum.

Evans realized that he was babbling nonsense to himself, and was profoundly grateful for the fact that there was nobody around to notice.

A group of New York Theosophists claimed to have discovered proof that modern man had descended from Atlanteans; this had made page five. On page two was an article detailing the tragic suicides of a cult of Spiritualists, who claimed to have been warned of an impending disaster by the spirit of the biblical prophet Samuel. After another hour of reading, Evans no longer doubted his sanity; it was the rest of the world that he was worried about.

He couldn't have explained how, but he knew what needed to be done. Evans gritted his teeth, put the newspaper aside, and resolved to try to get back to sleep.

The train pressed onward, into the west.

Chapter Five

A few hundred miles further to the southwest, the sun was only now finally setting. In the town of Baker's Stake, this meant that the day shift had ended.

The town consisted of a ring of shabby buildings perching at the edge of a ragged crater; in the depths below, machinery lay dormant for the night. The buildings themselves gave the impression of having been scraped together in a hurry from whatever materials had been handy, and this was exactly the case; the people who'd built them had been too busy digging the hole in the center of town to have been overly concerned with aesthetics. When the last of the silver had been mined out, the town had been almost immediately abandoned; Baker's Stake might have become a ghost town, had the last few stragglers not struck oil.

The town had been renovated since then, although it had somehow managed to lose none of its ramshackle appearance. Many of the scattered hovels had been repurposed or torn down, and now the citizens lived in communal sleeping quarters. There was a company store, as well as various buildings to house all manner of supplies. At the edge of town stood a well-constructed estate - the home of the oil baron who had bought Baker's Stake, and who now called himself the mayor.

The workers were returning from the quarry now, and the streets were filled with exhausted men, trudging listlessly towards their beds. Only in the vicinity of the tavern were the streets curiously empty; the workers seemed to avoid the building unconsciously, but diligently nonetheless. The tavern was where the mayor's hired muscle went to blow off steam, and those were not the sort of people that one mingled with by choice.

A few of the mayor's thugs had been mercenaries prior to finding employment here, but most had been criminals; in Baker's Stake, however, they were the law. The role reversal had never lost its novelty for most of them, and bullying the workers was a favorite pastime; the mayor discouraged the practice in theory, but tended to look the other way as long as no permanent damage was done to his work force. The workers had learned long ago that it was wisest to keep a low profile.

They didn't know it yet, but Melody Chamberlain had just arrived in town - and keeping a low profile was precisely the last thing on her agenda. We'll get back to her in a moment.

For the time being, things in the tavern were following their usual routine. Games of cards and dice were in progress at nearly every table; raucous conversations filled the smoky air, most of them focusing on daring exploits and unlikely conquests. Most of the men were well on their way to being drunk; things might have gone better for them if they hadn't been, but it's not especially likely.

The doors swung open, and a young woman swaggered into the tavern.

She was probably in her mid-twenties, although her flinty eyes and chiseled features made her look older. Her hair was mostly bunched up under a wide-brimmed hat, but a few straw-colored braids had found their way out from underneath it. She was dressed like a man, but she couldn't have passed for one - nor was she trying to.

A sudden silence filled the tavern, and the men gave each other meaningful glances; this was a working town, and women were a rare sight. Meanwhile, the girl's gaze darted intensely from one face to another, her eyes blazing from beneath a furrowed brow. She didn't appear to see whatever she'd been looking for, and a distantly irritated expression flickered across her face. After a moment's contemplation, she sniffed and spat - to the surprise of a few of the men - and then crossed the room to an empty bar stool without so much as a word or a second glance.

The silence over the tavern developed into an ugly hush; all of the conversations were taking place in whispers now, and their content was not pleasant. The girl nursed a glass of whiskey in silence, seemingly oblivious to the increasingly charged atmosphere around her. Meanwhile the bartender had begun, very slowly, to back away from her. Nobody else was in a position to see her lips moving silently as she counted out the seconds under her breath.

She began to reach slowly into her long jacket as the count reached seventeen; at the same time, the town's enforcers had chosen a representative. The unlucky man strode boldly towards her, leering, as his compatriots chuckled evilly behind him; a meaty hand descended towards the girl's shoulder, but stopped short as she spun around to grab it at the wrist. A second later he was on the ground, howling and clutching at the hilt protruding from his gut. The girl was suddenly standing, one boot resting on the man's chest; she stared at the men with one eyebrow raised, her face set in an utterly humorless smile.

There was an awful lot of commotion, and a number of things seemed to happen all at once. The men rose to their feet as one, shouting incoherently, knocking over a number of tables in the process. Those of them who still had some presence of mind began fumbling for their holsters; there was a sound like a string of fireworks being set off - only much louder - and then the men who had been reaching for their weapons were lying stone still on the floor. None of them had fired a shot; meanwhile, a smoking revolver seemed to have materialized in the girl's hands.

Just like that, the commotion had ended. The surviving men stood as still as statues, with only the moaning of their stabbed compatriot breaking the silence. Another thing had happened very suddenly, which was that they had all become very, very sober.

The girl's expression hadn't changed; after a moment, she finally spoke.

"Sit down," she said simply.

The men dropped into their seats, their eyes still fixed on the wounded man under her foot. She followed their gaze, and her expression changed to one of mock surprise as she considered her would-be assailant, as if she had forgotten about him. As she looked away, one of the thugs in the back began reaching surreptitiously towards his hip; a moment later he fell to the floor with a bullet in his head.

"Hands on the table," barked the girl.

The men obeyed. The girl cast one more steely glance over her audience, and then casually holstered her pistol and crouched to recover her knife. The men collectively winced as she pulled the blade free; she stared at it for a moment, considering it as if she'd never seen it before. The men craned forward to watch her, and her eyes lifted to meet their gaze; the blade flashed, and suddenly the man beneath her was terribly silent.

The men gaped as she rose slowly to her feet, wiping either side of the blade across her arm as she did so; in doing so, she drew attention to the collection of ochre stripes staining her left sleeve. The men's eyes widened, and for a moment there was a strained silence.

"Now that I'm sure that I have your full attention," said Melody suddenly, "I was hoping that we could have a talk."

The men gaped at her as she sank onto a bar stool, leaning back against the bar with casual ease. She returned her knife to the folds of her jacket; the hand returned once again with a pistol in it, which she pointed lazily in the general direction of the surviving enforcers. With the other hand, she reached across the bar and grabbed her glass, taking a long pull from it before speaking again.

"I'm looking for a friend of mine," she drawled conversationally. "I'm told that he passed through here not too long ago, and I was hoping that you gentlemen might be so kind as to help me find him."

She swirled the whiskey around, frowning slightly, and stared over the top of her glass as she continued.

"Not a friend, exactly; an acquaintance, I guess you might say. The thing is..."

She trailed off, seeming briefly lost in thought. After a moment she smiled again, much to the horror of those watching.

"You see, this acquaintance of mine owes me a debt," she said conspiratorially. "One that I have every intention of collecting."

The mayor burst through the door at that moment, a reproachful shout dying on his lips as he took in the scene at a glance. His thugs stared beseechingly at him as he inched back out the door; Melody pressed on as if she hadn't noticed.

"I'm well aware of the sort of lives that you've led," she continued, "and so I'm sure that every one of you knows exactly what's going to happen here."

The smile disappeared from her face instantly, and her eyes turned to ice.

"I won't insult your intelligence by pretending that I have any intention of letting you live if you tell me what I want to know," she said, "because I'm sure that you know better."

She finished her drink in one gulp, and then stood, assuming a businesslike posture.

"The only real question," she explained quietly, "is how long it is going to take you to die."

Chapter Four

As desolate as the land around Fort Asher may have been, it was still a paradise compared to the wastes that began just a few dozen miles to the southwest.

Here, the land was all red stone, twisted by some unseen hand into bizarre and unlikely shapes. A thin layer of grime - more dust than sand - covered the rock. Not even the pathetic prairie grasses could find purchase in this place; what vegetation survived here was chiefly limited to a parched brownish moss. The silence was nearly absolute, broken only by the wind.

Further west, the land spread and flattened; the bizarre loops and arches of stone gave way to pillars, and those to towering mesas - great mounds of stone rising inexplicably from the otherwise featureless terrain, as if left there by an absent-minded god. The soil was fairer here, and tiny forests of shrubs grew in the shadows of those truncated mountains; the contrast of green foliage against the red stone was startling, unearthly.

From a distance, one would have been unlikely to notice the narrow ramp running up the side of one mesa in particular. Only upon careful examination would an observer have spotted the shallow steps carved into the stone of that ramp.

A pueblo village, invisible from below, sat upon the plateau at the top of the steps. It was here that the Ajiashathat lived.

They lived here, but it was not their home; they hadn't built it, but the people who had weren't using it any more. The Ajiashathat had been made to leave their home many years ago, and had lived for a while in a place not unlike Fort Asher. They lived here now because it was a good place to hide, and because it was against the law for them to be living outside of a reservation.

When they had first encountered the Spanish, they had been startled - not by having made contact with white men, but by having made contact with another people. When the explorers had asked them what they called themselves, they hadn't understood the question; the name by which their people were known, "Ajiashathat," was a result of that misunderstanding. In their language, the word meant "human beings."

Perhaps because they had lived in total isolation for as long as they could remember, the Ajiashathat were a unique people with unique beliefs; their culture had been the subject of Michael Evans' doctoral thesis, coincidentally. They believed, for instance, that the Gods had created the world especially for them, and that their religious rituals allowed the world to continue existing.

The people were attending to the preparations for one such ritual presently. This was proving to be more problematic than anyone had anticipated.

The problem was that the Ajiashathat had but one living shaman, and he had refused to perform the ceremony.

His name was Shinawenashkitat, which meant "Dancing Bird." He was old, grizzled, and wiry. He had seen too much of life, had enjoyed little of it, and had taken to being problematic as one of his only joys in the twilight of his life.

At present, the people were making a grave mistake, which was that they were trying to be reasonable with him. Very patiently, they reminded him that the ritual of blessing had always been performed at the harvest time - for as long as human beings had existed - and that a good yield of corn could only come as a result of the proper observances. Just as patiently, Dancing Bird reminded the people that they had no corn; tempers flared at this point, and the conversation quickly took a nasty turn.

Eventually the people prevailed upon him, and by sunset the preparations had been completed. The people gathered in the town's communal circle, awaiting the beginning of the service. Their quiet song rose to the heavens; as dusk fell, their prayers were answered. The God of the Harvest swooped from the shadows and into the center of the circle, were he began the elaborately choreographed ceremony that would ensure a bountiful yield.

Only a few minutes into the ritual, the God's dancing had become increasingly listless. At one point he nearly tripped over the hem of his robe; he barely managed to stay on his feet, and his solemn litany was interrupted by a barrage of venomous curses.

The God of the Harvest stopped dancing. He tore off his ornate wooden mask, and he was only Dancing Bird again. He stared for a moment at the people sitting in reverent silence around him, and their expectant faces told him that they were waiting for him to perform the dedication which would mark the end of the ceremony.

Dancing Bird took a deep, shuddering breath, and then began to deliver what was sure to be his final sermon.

"You are all very, very stupid," he began.

He turned slowly, his eyes blazing, and made sure that he'd captured everyone's attention before proceeding.

"For more than seventy years I have represented you before the Gods; you have demanded it of me. For the last ten of those years, I have resisted. I have told you that I do not wish to speak for the Gods, but you have insisted. If I do not perform the ceremonies, you have told me, then the Gods will desert us."

Dancing Bird tore off his robes and threw them into the fire.

"Have the Gods not deserted us?" he demanded.

There was silence around the circle. Someone towards the back let out an embarrassed cough, and then immediately wished that he hadn't.

"I tell you the truth now," Dancing Bird growled. "If our Gods had any power to lend you, then none of this would have happened in the first place."

The shaman's face began to flush a deep red as his voice grew progressively louder, rising quickly to a shriek. The crowd collectively glanced at one another, dread written on their faces.

"I am a fraud," Dancing Bird announced. "How is it that you still seek my intercession, when I have done nothing but deceive you your whole lives?"

An elder came forward and attempted to calm Dancing Bird, but he would have none of it.

"You should be throwing rocks at me!" he snarled.

Another elder had pinned Dancing Bird's arms behind his back, and was attempting to drag him away. A murmur was beginning to build within the crowd, and the overall tone was not friendly.

"You should be chasing me out of the village!" he screamed.

A dog pile was forming around Dancing Bird now, but his voice still came howling from the center of it.

"Well, I've had enough, and I'm not going to do it any more! I'm leaving, do you hear me? If you're too foolish to drive me into exile, then I'll exile myself!"

The people were shouting now, but Dancing Bird's voice rose above the clamor.

"I'm leaving tonight, and I'm never coming back, because you're all so stupid that I can't stand the sight of you!"

An hour later, Dancing Bird had gotten his wish. The people had thrown rocks at him, and had chased him out of the village. With a grin on his face and a slight limp in his step, he trudged away from the last remnant of his people, never to return.

Chapter Three

The sun seemed to rise reluctantly on Fort Asher, as if it were afraid of what it might see.

The land here had been set aside as a reservation simply because nobody else had wanted it, and it was easy to see why not. Little in the way of life was to be found here; rain was plentiful enough, but the soil could support little more than prickly grasses. It had rained all through the night, in fact; the collection of shabby huts that dotted the plain were soaked through, and the ground had been turned to sludge.

In a clearing towards the back of the camp, a haggard man dug in the mud.

At a glance, most people would have correctly marked him as a man of learning; he had the bookish appearance, the spectacles, the fine clothes - splattered now with a thick coating of mud. From his gaunt build and haunted expression, most of his fellow scholars would immediately have guessed that he was an anthropologist.

The man's name was Michael Evans, and his occupation wasn't one that lent itself to a cheerful outlook on life.

Evans had come to Fort Asher intending to study the traditional lifestyles and beliefs of the Bangishin, a people originally native to the Northwest Territories. He had found fewer than a dozen of them alive, sharing a reservation with seven other dying tribes. Most of them had fallen to smallpox within ten years of their first contact with European settlers. Of those who'd survived, many more had been lost in the long march from their homeland in Wisconsin to the Indian Territory, more casualties of Jackson's Indian Removal Act. The rest had died here; either of despair, or due to the squalor of their conditions.

Evans had failed to comprehend this last detail at first, since the supplies provided by the government should have been enough to provide adequate food and shelter for the people. Upon further investigation, he'd discovered to his shock that the agents in charge of distributing the supplies had instead been selling the majority to passing settlers. His letter of complaint to the regional governor had received a polite reply advising him to mind his business.

Likewise, his attempts to learn about the traditional habits of the Bangishin had failed - for none of the survivors had known what those had been. The elders had been the hardest hit by plague and poverty, and they'd died without passing on their knowledge. Those who'd survived hadn't bothered, for it had seemed to them as if the world were coming to an end. Those who remained in these days had known only the reservation. In the space of a few generations, all of the Bangishin's long history had quite simply been forgotten.

And here was Evans, digging in the mud - digging a grave for the last man among them.

He returned to Maryland a week later, only to find that he'd stayed with the Bangishin longer than he'd intended to. Almost a year had passed since he'd left home, and civilization seemed alien to him now. For the first few days, he attributed his feeling of strangeness to culture shock; as time passed, however, he began to develop a deepening sense that something was very much out of the ordinary.

At last, Evans managed to place what it was that was the cause of his malaise: the fact that everyone he met seemed to share in his uneasiness. Everybody was testy and restless, but nobody seemed to know why. Despite himself, he found a bizarre conviction taking root in his mind.

Like the Elders of the Bangishin, he began to believe that the world was coming to an end.

Chapter Two

While unusual things were busy happening in the desert, the town of Carter's Refuge - a few dozen miles to the southwest - was right in the middle of an extremely ordinary day.

There was nothing the least bit unusual about the town. It had one ordinary main street, which ran past rows of very ordinary storefronts. A row of ordinary horses were tied to posts in front of the town's very ordinary saloon, from whence could be heard the very ordinary sound of an extremely ordinary piano.

If you were to picture a typical Wild Western town... well, you'd have exactly the right idea.

Describing the inside of the tavern is almost a waste. It had the usual bar, the usual serving girls, the usual raucous patrons - some of whom were about to find themselves in the one usual cell of the town's usual jail.

Towards the back of the saloon, Polk Buckhorn stared into the bottom of a glass.

His friends would have called him Buck, except that he didn't have any. This was partly because he was a drifter, and mostly because he was a rotten bastard.

He'd been sober for four days now - a personal record, as best as he could recall - and he'd decided to celebrate the occasion with a drink. He was sloppy drunk now, and in a mean mood; this was quite possibly the least unusual thing in the history of usual things.

If you were to take the spare parts that were left over after making a hideous nightmare thing and arrange them into the rough shape of a man, you'd get something not unlike Polk Buckhorn. He wasn't sitting in his chair so much as he appeared to have collapsed into it; never had a collection of such powerful limbs looked so much like a heap of debris. His hair was matted; his clothes were torn. He was forty, but could have passed for sixty; he had the drawn face of a man whom life had treated unkindly, and who was inclined to bear a grudge.

In all fairness to Buck, his appearance was currently somewhat more wretched than usual, if only by a matter of degrees. This was largely as a result of the fact that he had just arrived in town after a week spent lost in the desert; bad directions were at least partly to blame for this, but habitual drunkenness had not improved the situation. He'd eaten his horse on the fourth day, which was all the more upsetting for the fact that he couldn't honestly claim it as a personal low. His short-lived period of sobriety had been the result of poor rationing.

After the worst of the tremors and nausea had passed, he'd found himself surprisingly clear-headed - which, as it turned out, had only made things worse. Sobriety had made it easier to appreciate the hopelessness of his situation; even worse, it had made it harder to avoid taking stock of his life.

He'd thought of asking himself how it had come to this, but soon dismissed this entire train of thought as a self-indulgent platitude. His memories of the last few years were fairly vague, but he was reasonably certain that he'd hit rock bottom somewhere midway through the previous decade, and that he'd been holding a fairly steady course ever since.

Buck had spent most of his life on the fringes of society, doing the kinds of odd jobs that presented themselves to a man with a gun and the will to use it, occasionally dabbling in petty crime to supplement his meager income. As the frontier had been pushed back, he'd been pushed back along with it - partly because he didn't much care for what most people called civilization, but mostly for the sake of trying to outrun his reputation. He'd been called a lot of things in his life, few of them complementary; there were, however, some people who still called him "the fastest gun in the West." He was able to find work mostly because enough of those people failed to mention the fact that he was as likely as not to forget what he'd been hired to do when he'd been drinking, which he invariably had.

Now it was 1885, and Buck was running out of frontiers to flee to. The days of the Homestead Act were a distant memory; the slow trickle of settlers into the West had become an exodus, and nowadays the only thing standing between any greenhorn Yankee and the Great Plains was the cost of a train ticket. The Wild West had been domesticated, turned into a tourist attraction. Buck's days were coming to an end - in a very immediate and literal sense, judging from his current predicament. That thought bothered him more than he'd expected it to, and he found himself quite suddenly weeping, the tears leaving tracks in the layer of dust caking his face.

His brief burst of self-pity wore itself down quickly, leaving Buck's more typical feeling of dull resentment in its wake. It wasn't as if he had an awful lot to live for, which was some comfort. Having resigned himself to his fate, Buck had lifted his eyes at last, and had finally noticed the town of Carter's Refuge squatting no more than half a mile away.

It was the sort of town for which he would hardly have spared a second glance, not so very long ago; he'd been through a lot lately, though, and he'd found himself staring at the town with fresh eyes. It was a very ordinary town - the sort of place that people only passed through on their way to somewhere else - but something about it had stopped him short. It seemed like the most typical Western town imaginable, and that fact alone made it a rarity in this day and age.

Strange thoughts had begun flickering across Buck's mind. He'd begun thinking of himself as being "on the wagon." He'd started thinking in terms of "fresh starts" and "new beginnings."

He'd frightened some of the townsfolk pretty badly - pouncing on random passersby and asking if they knew who he was, and grinning too intensely when they'd answered in the negative.

Finally, as the shock began to wear off, he'd noticed that the town's residents had retreated to the safety of their homes, and were now watching him warily from behind heavily barricaded doors. He'd realized what he must look like, and decided that he couldn't blame them. The scene had suddenly been a very familiar one, and reality had begun to reassert itself. The local sheriff had come by to suggest that he get on about his business, and had added a black eye to Buck's already haggard appearance just to reinforce the point.

This had been two hours and eight glasses of bourbon ago; the memory of the last week was already dissolving into a blessedly dreamlike haze, and any possibility of self-reflection went with it. Polk Buckhorn stared into the bottom of his glass, drunkenly considering his options. After a few more minutes of contemplation, he managed to arrive at a solution that he liked.

Buck stood, robbed the saloon, shot the sheriff, stole a horse, and left the town of Carter's Refuge behind him.

Chapter One

It happened in the desert. It began there, at least.

Picture an endless expanse of rolling dunes, stretching off into infinity. The sun beats down from a cloudless sky, scorching the earth below, veiling the horizon behind a flickering haze superheated air. Nowhere does even a hint of life impose itself upon the stillness of the scene; all is silence, emptiness, and oppressive heat.

Are you picturing it? Good.

This wasn't that sort of desert. It was a desert not by merit of vast swathes of sand, but merely by way of a lack of rainfall; one good watering, and it could've been a prairie. It was not desolate, it was not empty, it was not lifeless. At best, it managed to be a bit scruffy. It wasn't a desert of the sort that people build pyramids in, but of the sort that they put on postcards.

All of the really impressive deserts have names, but this desert had none. Nobody liked it enough to give it one. The region within which it was situated had been called Nueva California by the Spanish, and later the Mexicans; they had been glad to sell it to the Americans, who'd made it a part of the Territory of New Mexico. It had been known - briefly - as the Confederate Territory of Arizona, and at least part of the name had stuck. An older people had called the land by a different name, but few enough of them were alive to remember it. Nobody, save the truly desperate, called it "home."

This is not to say that the desert was utterly uninhabited. It was filled with the small, furtive sounds of small, furtive creatures eking a modest living out of the arid landscape. It was midafternoon now, and the air was filled with the quiet harmony of their conversations. Insects provided the chorus, their wings trilling as they flitted between the pink blossoms of the tall, flowering cacti. Small, drab brown birds peeped at one another from the branches of pathetically malnourished scrub bushes, pausing only occasionally to eat the insects. From overhead came the cry of a hunting bird, a mere speck in the cloudless sky; this was followed shortly by the tiny scurrying sounds of rodents diving for cover.

There was the sound of reality tearing itself open. This was unusual, the first unusual thing that had happened in the nameless desert since long before human feet had ever trod there. It wasn't the most unusual thing that was going to happen today, and the desert held its breath in anticipation.

There was a popping sound, and a shambling abomination blinked in the sunlight.

The beast looked as if he had been stitched together in a hurry from the leftover parts of other animals; whoever had done the job had clearly gotten carried away. The mind responsible for designing this creature had apparently been fixated on savage talons and slavering jaws, and seemed to have reasoned that more were better; limbs and heads had been stuck on wherever there was room for them, with no apparent regard for grace. He looked like something that was supposed to look very dangerous, but the design couldn't possibly have been practical; at the moment, the creature was having a hard time standing up without eviscerating himself.

The creature finally rose to what must have been an upright position, although his bizarre anatomy made it difficult to be certain. Standing, he dominated the landscape. He towered over the cacti, over the craggy stones, over the tortoise picking his way lazily from one shrub to another. Not having anything more impressive to tower over diminished the beast somewhat, and irritation played its way across each of his faces in turn.

He surveyed the landscape around him, apparently looking for his bearings. Like so many who had come before, he was rather disappointed.

The beast's legs tangled as he turned in a slow, laborious circle, his eyes hopeful; the terrain behind him was no more interesting, and his faces fell. A dry wind kicked up the dust around his collection of feet. The wrens, having recovered from their initial shock, watched him with vague interest.

He tried howling blasphemies from seven mouths, but nobody seemed impressed. After a moment, he sat, lowing disconsolately. A bird perched on him momentarily, and then remembered something that it needed desperately to be doing somewhere else.

The beast sat for a while, apparently lost in bitter reminiscences. An hour or so passed.

Finally, against all odds, the beast spotted something out of the ordinary: a cloud of dust being kicked up on the horizon, a clear sign of human activity. He sprang joyously to his feet, wounding himself only mildly in the process, and loped off towards the disturbance, bouncing like an eager puppy as he went.

A few minutes later he returned to the desert, his coat covered in matted blood, self-satisfied expressions on each of his faces. His collection of limbs, it seemed, were more practical than they appeared.

Act One

"Nothing is more basic to the telling of a Western Apache story than identifying the geographical locations at which events in the story unfold. For unless Apache listeners are able to picture a physical setting for narrated events... the events themselves will be difficult to imagine. This is because events in the narrative will seem to happen nowhere, and such an idea, Apaches assert, is preposterous and disquieting. Placeless events are an impossibility; everything that happens must happen somewhere."

-Keith H. Basso, from Wisdom Sits in Places

What's Going On Here?

So I was talking to Lester the other day, and he convinced me that I need to be writing. I made the mistake of letting him decide what I would write, and he settled on a Louis L'Amour Western. It seemed like a terrible idea at first, but I've found myself warming up to the concept the more that I've thought about it. Long story short, I'm apparently writing a novel; maybe a short story, depending on how long the novelty holds. Since planning ahead is for nerds, I've decided to jump in blind and make it up as I go - writing a chapter at a time, with only a rough concept of where any of it is going. Since I needed a way to keep Lester apprised of my progress, I decided to set this whole Blog thing up. So: tune in to watch Adams write a book!