He had a face Yule wasn’t apt to easily forget. If a man were bound and dragged behind a horse a spell he might end up looking that way. Rooting around the forest had eroded him. His lips and cheeks had been thrashed and the wounds were caked in dirt. The nose was worn away entirely, the nostrils ground down to a singular cavity, the hollow of which had also been hard-packed with grit, scabs and pine-needles. The moon shone down without relent. The eyes were gone, the sockets cruddy. Fawn blood dripped from his chin.

And next he knew, Yule was hurtling through the forest with the rifle clutched in both hands, bashing it back-and-forth to clear the way ahead. It was too dark just then to see or think. He fled aimlessly. When he quit hollering to catch his breath, he heard the predator crashing through the brush behind him. Up ahead he heard the Doctor scurrying through the forest. Yule veered in that direction, trusting the old quack's sense of direction more than his own.

Off yonder Yule could ascertain the edge of the denser woods and, just beyond that, moon-sparks dancing upon the creek. He saw Doc's shadow emerge and tracing the old man's route led Yule to where the horses were tethered. At last, he saw the outline of the Appaloosa and the humbler silhouette of his own pony. His heart was suddenly full. Tear-drops appeared at the corners of his eyes but coursed back toward his ears rather than down his cheeks. He couldn’t remember having ever run so swiftly. By the time he reached the forest's thinning border he was damned near laughing out loud.

Up ahead, Doc didn't sound so relieved. Cursing loudly, he stuck his boot in the stirrup but the Appaloosa was spooked. She spun and the old Doc couldn't keep his grip. He went down hard; the blow must have knocked him windless because the swearing stopped mid-sentence.

Yule hurdled the creek, making a bee-line for his own horse. He heard the predator splashing across just an instant after. By the time he reached the paint he had the rifle cracked open and ready for loading. He plunged his hand inside the saddle-bag, fanning his fingers to find a bullet – but it was already too late. No way could he get a bullet in that rifle before the predator overcame him. Yule braced for impact, pressing against his pony's broadside, clenching his eyes shut – and when the Doctor's hollers began echoing in his ears, Yule mistook them a second for his own.

The predator had deemed Doc the easier prey. A part of Yule wanted to mount up and ride out without looking back, save his own hide – but as he was removing his hand from the saddlebag, the cold bullets brushed his fingers.

Eyes still shut, Yule Sherwin slammed a round into the rifle and closed the break. He turned about and drew blindly. When he finally braved a look-see he did so down the barrel of the long-arm.

What he was about to witness was a murder. The Doctor was pinned on his back. The predator had him straddled. His jaw splayed open, obtuse as a serpent's, leaking fawn's blood and drool. Beneath him, the Doctor screamed. The tussle stirred clouds of dust, pale against the darkness. Yule could scarcely suss the difference between the masses of the two men. He couldn't draw a bead on the predator without risking friendly fire.

Down the barrel of the gun, Doc fought to keep his arms outstretched, to keep some distance between his throat and the creep's teeth – but his defense was faltering fast. He wedged one elbow against his own gut, leveraging a flat palm against the predator's sternum. The maw kept muscling its way down. The space between them was collapsing. The struggle was already coming to an end. Doc's hollering was suddenly different. He was bawling. He was done crying havoc and was on to plain old crying.

Yule had to take the shot right then.

The bullet struck before the muzzle-flare could even fade. The air became lousy from brains blown out. Yule had pegged the creep square between the crud-packed eye-sockets. The crater vomited pulpy viscera. Doc was hollering at the top of his lungs and then he was not. Instead, he was gagging on liquefied pink-matter and egg-shell bits of ivory skull. The predator convulsed atop him and then was limp. His head tilted forward and the wound pushed out more swollen brain like a mule making dung.

Doc rolled out from under the body and retched, cramming dirt in his craw the way a man gone loco in the desert quenches thirst by drinking sand. Yule hustled over. He tucked the rifle under his arm and passed the Doctor his flask.

“It's whiskey,” he said.

“God bless ye.”

They passed the flask back-and-forth a few times. Doc used the last splash of whiskey to wash his face. Then they mounted and rode out, back across the Baltimorean's pasture and all those bizarrely et carcasses. Through the gate, they rejoined the trail. Returning to Red Junction wouldn't take them hardly the time riding out had. From there it was all downhill.

Many anguished voices welled in the woods. Sparks from distant gunfire off in the pitch-black forest etched fleeting constellations. The flash from the muzzles would fade away and, after an interval, Yule would finally hear the report. The mountainside reeked of sulfur. They were riding through a battlefield.

“I reckon I owe you for my life,” Doc said.

“Do you?” Yule had his doubts. Seemed to him his every attempt at heroism went awry. Same as when he struck out to pursue wealth, leaving Emma pregnant and alone; or when he whisked Misty away from the peril in Red Junction, ultimately delivering her to Fat Angus and his cannibal crony. “Have I saved your life?” he whispered. “Or have I more accurately ended it?”

“Pardon?”

“If the whole mountain is poisoned from merely drinking the water...”

“Then I'm up shit creek, alright.” The Doctor struck a match and lit a smoke. He drew upon it, adding, “And furthermore I do reckon my boat has sprung a gusher of a fuckin' leak. Gonna have to bail it by hand else I'm apt to sink quick as a stone.”

“You're taking it real well.”

“That's 'cause I've already mourned much as I'm gonna. I've known since I first seen that crick.” Doc sucked his smoke and said matter-of-factly, “We're all done for. Don't reckon it's gonna come any sooner for me solely on account of swallering that creep's fluids.”

“Oh.”

Now that the conversation was over, Yule disappeared inside his own head. The voices in there were more awful even than the cries of folk being murdered out in the woods. He kept hearing Doc's words repeating, “We're all done for....we're all done for....we're all done for....”

Sounded about right to Yule Sherwin. He felt done for, for sure.

Suddenly, he was alone upon the path. The Doctor had fallen back and Yule couldn't even hear the Appaloosa's hooves any longer. He had been so preoccupied with his own thoughts that he had not noticed. He halted the paint and turned it broadside on the path. The path backward was strangled by criss-crossing, serpentine shadows. This night was a slithering thing. Sherwin blinked his eyes. He could fathom nothing with them but the sparks cast by ordinance off in the distance.

“Sanders?” Yule whispered, and instantly winced – for even whispering seemed too loud. Gulping, he summoned what manliness his globes could muster to call little more loudly, “Doc?”

Doc did not reply. Instead the only answer was the breeze, stirring the scrub. Shivers spread down Yule's shoulders, his arm-hairs alive with eerie tingling, as if they were each tiny dowsing rods designed to divine the location of evil.

The fear was, what if Doc had already turned into one of them?

Yule eased his paint back uphill a few paces. Squinting, he could just make out the shadowy outline of the Appaloosa. It wasn't budging. There was no trace of Doc. He wasn't in the saddle where he belonged. The moaning out in the wilderness seemed less remote than it had a second earlier. Yule's hands trembled. It seemed his entire bladder was trying to seep out through his piss-hole.

The fear was, what if Doc had abandoned his horse to better stalk for blood?

The Appaloosa flapped its lips and Yule flinched.

“Sanders?” he ventured. “Where've you gotten to you goddamned quack?”

“I'm right here,” the Doctor croaked.

To Yule’s horror, the Doc was on foot beside him. His voice came as such a shock that a dribble of urine escaped inside Yule's trousers before he could clench himself shut.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

Doc replied, “Lend me your rifle, Sherwin.”

“I think not.”

“Do you not see the trail ahead? How it becomes a writhing thing?”

“I see for shit and you likewise without a torch.”

“Give me the rifle.”

Yule turned his paint back downhill and urged it to get-along but Doc was too quick. Snatching the bridle, he brought the paint to a halt. Before Yule could seize upon the rifle it too was sliding away, dragged by the barrel.

Yule could barely call upon the breath to say, “No!” He pawed at the rifle's stock but it was no use. Doc wrestled it away and Yule was utterly disarmed.

“For fuck's sake!” Doc leveled the barrel and growled, “Gaze yonder! Gaze yonder upon the fucking path!”

Yonder seemed a place defined more by Yule’s morbid imagination than any earthly sense. Demons were supping up yonder, squirming in the deepest bruises of midnight shadows – or was he manifesting these nightmares himself? Was that the breeze? Or was it the sound of flesh being slurped, the scraping of meat from bone? Was the wailing in the woods moving toward him, or had he been riding headlong toward it?

The muzzle flashed and Sherwin beheld the scene by its glare. A wagon was capsized on the road ahead. The canopies had been torn and dead men were spilling out like intestines from a dire, gaping hernia. Not all of them were dead; some were still struggling, tangled in the canvas canopies. Sharp-elbowed ghouls hunkered over them, inflicting the whole spectrum of carnivorous decimation. By rifle-light Yule saw them prying, picking, ripping and gnawing. He was able to match sounds with their origins. Here were the men moaning – not off yonder. And there was no breeze; there never had been. There was only the hiss of the damned.

Doc took a second shot and Yule realized the carnage was not contained to the road. He saw the brush trembling all about and half-a-horse being dragged away. His paint was backing off without his command. The domes of equine carcasses were mounded upon the trail-side like monstrous scarabs. Stray lengths of innards had been chewed, stretched and tossed. Some guts were piled in coils. Blood flooded the ruts and crevices at the edge of the trail and pale hands clambered to cup it in their palms and drink it down. The shamblers were everywhere. They made mud with the moisture of the gore and wore it upon their whole-selves. The blood, the dead men, the half-ponies, the creeps and, worst of all, the live men; all of it a rotten cornucopia. When Yule thought it could not possibly get more horrible, the light from the muzzle faded. Night was then darker by magnitudes. The moaning was not so loud, any more. The gnashing and slurping was drowning it out.

“There will never be enough bullets,” Doc said.

“Reckon we are running low already,” Yule agreed. He could only state the obvious. He was too numb for further thought.