It was my third day at the depot when the cause of my death came into view. At that point my demise was still several weeks off, and the time I had remaining would include monsters, travel, strange phenomena, and more than one gunfight. But I didn’t know any of that yet. At that point I just knew I was hot and hungry.

In the morning of that day I noticed a shape on the horizon, just north of the railroad line that disappeared east into desert infinity. It was just the tiniest black form, but against the blinding white of the cracked clay earth and empty blue sky it stood out. With the sun rising behind it, I could pick out no details but the vaguely defined shape. I sat and watched for about a half an hour as it slowly became a much larger shape. By the end of an hour it became two silhouettes, one taller than the other, and a few minutes later it became one again. Was it a person and an animal? A man and a mount of some kind? Two people sometimes walking in file? I couldn’t tell, but the shape moved steadily, relentlessly toward my location.

There wasn’t much else to do but watch the shadow on the horizon approach. I had to shield my eyes against the brutal sun and hot, dusty wind to look, but I fixated on that form like a laser. Two days without any human contact did wonders for my powers of concentration. Maybe whoever was coming could answer some questions.

I call it the depot, because most of it looked like an Old West rail station. Most, but not all. The building in which I first awoke resembled nothing so much as an American gas station from the nineteen fifties, except it was impossibly old, as if it had been abandoned for centuries rather than decades. The glass from the windows and hoses from the rusted pumps were long gone and the collapsed shelves inside were denuded of goods. No cash register was present, and I could not even guess where one might once have been.

The empty storefront faced south toward an east-west dirt road that terminated not far to the east, or what I decided was east since that was where the sun rose each morning. Other than the gas pumps and the road, there was very little to see out of the front of the gas station. Beyond the road lay only an empty expanse of pale, cracked earth stretching to a vanishing point. If one looked left or right the view was much the same, with the only additions being the parallel lines of a railroad track stretching to the eastern horizon and, in the other direction, a similar vista of a railroad line headed west, although this time accompanied by a dusty dirt road.

If you walked out of the back door of the gas station, however, you would face not only a railroad line but the other five structures that comprised this lonely relic of civilization. The first was a red adobe hut with its doorway and sole window covered by weathered wooden planks. Next to this was a raised train platform, with an adjacent water cistern, ready to refill the tanks of a passing steam engine, but seemingly dry and unmaintained. A few feet beyond this was a rail maintenance shed with a short rail spur running into the shed’s barred front doors, and beside the shed was a disused well pump. On the shed was a sign, two lines of carefully handwritten text in no alphabet I could recognize. It was the only writing I could see and, despite being indecipherable, the red letters on white background communicated a clear message: KEEP OUT.

As far as I knew I had been in that place my entire life. I had memories of a time before, but those seemed distant, unreal, like a dream from which I had just awakened. Isolation can have that effect. Maybe I had been birthed fully grown and dressed on the floor of the abandoned gas station. No wallet, no keys, the only item accompanying me besides my clothes and shoes was my acoustic guitar in its case.

At about the two-hour mark it became clear what the shape on the horizon was: a person and a pack animal, a donkey or a mule. At about that same time the shape got company. Three more figures were approaching from the west on the dirt road, moving fast, riders most likely.

Feast or famine. No company for three days and now four guests. I didn’t know what to do, but it felt like I should gather my meager belongings. To the guitar I had added a bucket and a sharp stick. The water pump, unbelievably, still worked and on my first day I had managed to get it going with many difficult presses of the handle. It produced a few small spurts of brownish, sulfur-smelling water. Unfortunately, I could not move the handle and cup my hands to catch the water at the same time, so I went in search of a container.

I didn’t look in the rail shed. I’m not sure why. That sign just seemed very official. This led me to an attempt to break through wood planks on the mudbrick hut. After kicking my way through a particularly fragile board, I was able to get a good grip on the others blocking the doorway and pry them off one by one. This was sweaty work in the heat of the day and I knew I was losing water from my body that I could not afford.

Inside the adobe hut was no escape from the heat, but some relief from the sun. It took my eyes several minutes to adjust from the outside to the dim interior. Inside was one large room with the splintered remains of some furniture and, in one corner, a small metal bucket. I tried not to think about what the hut’s previous occupants had used the bucket for, and picked it up. I also grabbed a piece of what had likely been a wooden chair that had a sharp point on one end. I had visions of hunting food with my new weapon. Nevermind the fact I had seen no other living thing since my arrival. The water, smelly as it was, proved drinkable. My thirst satiated, I got busy with the business of waiting.

When the sun went down that first day, it was still hot. But at least the moonless night offered some entertainment in the form of the most impressive sky full of stars I had seen in a long time. Shortly after graduating college, some friends and I took a camping trip near Boone in the North Carolina mountains. There, in the woods, away from any artificial light sources and no doubt enhanced by some excellent marijuana, the stars had been mesmerizing. The most intricate and surreal painting I had ever seen, stretched across the sky. That was the only memory I had that rivalled the sky that first night at the depot.

A memory? Yeah, I guess the time before this had been real after all. My memories, however, offered no explanation of how I got here. The last of my old memories was driving back from a gig in the suburbs outside of Raleigh, a sad bar where middle-aged women asked me to play Top 40 hits from thirty years prior. There had been snow, and then ice, and then falling, and then I was here.

Did I crash? Was this the afterlife? If so it was a disappointment. And I felt pretty hot and hungry for a ghost. Maybe someone had dragged me from the wreck of my car, put me on a plane and flew me, still unconscious, to an East African ghost town just to abandon me on the floor of a disused petrol station. That made sense, right?

Then a horrible thought entered my mind unbidden. Was Alicia in the car when I crashed?! No, no. I clearly remember dropping her off at her home near the bar. I was on my way to my home when all this started.

The second day had mostly been spent dozing. The heat and lack of energy made curling up on the floor of the station with my shirt as a pillow seem like the most appealing option. The second night had been cold, likely this was also due to my hunger. I tried to pick out some constellations in the sky and I even thought I had found Orion’s belt for a moment. But I had never been much for astronomy, and even if I found a star pattern I recognized, I did not know enough to use it to suss out my location. Anyway, I had a growing suspicion that the stars here were different from the stars at home.

Dawn on the third day brings us to about where I started this story: three fast riders coming towards me from the west, one slow person, probably on foot, coming from the east. The eastern visitor still had the sun at his back, making it hard to see much, but with the ones coming from the west I could start to pick out details.

They were riding horses, big horses and they looked like cowboys, movie cowboys with wide hats, leather chaps and pointy boots with spurs sticking out of the sturrups. One appeared to be holding a rifle. They were definitely riding fast. Their mounts were leaving a huge dust cloud in their wake.

I had my bucket and stick, and I laid them next to the gas station back door. I headed inside to grab my guitar. My only shirt was also still in a ball on the floor from my last nap and I hastily threw it on, buttoning it and tucking the tails into my jeans. Before lifting the guitar case, I opened it to inspect the instrument, the first time I had looked at it since arriving. I touched the neck for a second before snapping the case shut and carrying it out the back door. I turned the corner —and I ran head first into the chest of one of the riders.

“Well where did this one come from?” a gravelly voice asked as powerful arms grabbed me. The riders must have veered off the road and approached from the rear while I was in the gas station. ‘Gravelly’ does not do the voice justice. The voice sounded as if its owner had spent the last few hours gargling molten road tar. His hands were large and coarse too, like I had two worn-out welding gloves holding me.

While I struggled against his grip I got a good look at my captor and his companions. Cow-BOYs might not have been the right word, as the three individuals I faced did not seem quite human. Or if they were human, they had faced some very rough living. They were tall. I’m about five-foot ten inches and I came up only to the chest of the one in front of me. His friends seemed no smaller. They weren’t skinny either. Each was proportional and there seemed to be powerful muscles concealed beneath their dirty western wear.

And their FACES! Each was different, gruesome in its own way. The one holding me had only one eye. The other side of his face was a giant crusty growth. I knew the name for such an appendage, a keloid. I remembered the word from a documentary about Hiroshima I saw on PBS. The one with the rifle was bald, with patches of reptilian patterned skin on his face and scalp, like the scales of a snake. The last one was noseless. It looked as if his nose had just rotted away leaving the bone and nostril holes exposed. Perhaps to compensate for this, he wore a large bushy mustache.

The bald one spoke next, with a voice surprisingly deep and forceful for his serpentine appearance. “Is this the tin breast?”

“I reckon not.” snapped the moustached one. “A Marshal would have a badge and a gun. This one only has a guitar.”

“So what do we do with him?” asked the one-eyed desperado, his grip tightening.

“Tie him up and put him with the horses.” said the noseless one, who was already focusing on the shape approaching from the east. “We’ll see how fast he can run in a minute. Labor or food, he’ll find his place.”

A length of twine appeared and One-Eye began to bind my wrists. This gave me a moment to reflect on how strange it was that these mutant vaqueros spoke English. Was this some kind of post-apocalyptic future? Was I a time traveller? When he knelt to finish the knot I could look over his shoulder and see where they had hitched their horses to one the columns at the far end of the rail platform, near the cistern. With my arms immobilized, he began to drag me in that direction.

“Here he comes!” yelled the bald one, squinting into the distance.

The shape coming from the east was now obviously a man, riding an ass. He was still silhouetted by the sun, but I could clearly make out the shape of a flat round-brimmed hat, and a coat fluttering in the wind.

I felt a blow to my back and I fell to the ground as my captor moved to take his place beside his two companions. The Snakeskin had raised his rifle. Mustache and Keloid produced revolvers, big heavy ones with hexagonal barrels and curved handles. Growing up my father had referred to this kind of pistol as a ‘hogleg’ when he saw one on television. Until I saw those big, meaty, ugly weapons in those big, meaty, ugly hands that metaphor had never made sense. They both lifted the guns to their eye line, taking aim at the rider.

“Hang fire,” said No-Nose. “He's too far off. We want to make the first shots count.”

I feel a little bad calling them things like ‘Snakeskin’ and ‘No-nose’, but they would all be dead before I could learn their actual names.

The rider continued forward at the same slow pace.

“Hold a little longer, he’s almost in range.”

The tension must have gotten to Snakehead and he fired a round. Immediately the other two emptied their pistols in the direction of the rider, while the rifleman worked the lever of his weapon, popping off another six shots. The noise was incredible and big puffs of gray smoke emerged from the weapons with each round fired. There was no way these thugs could see what they were firing at by the last shot.

When the shooting was done and the smoke had dissipated, the rider still sat atop the beast and the mule continued slowly forward. The rider had not fallen. The monster cowboys were now quite obviously concerned, looking between each other as they hastily reloaded their weapons. The pistols folded in half, popping the spent shell casing loose to be replaced, while the rifleman hastily fed new rounds into a slot on the side of his rifle. As the mule came closer it became obvious that it had been hit several times and it staggered slowly and painfully toward the group before its forelegs finally gave out and it spilled its passenger into the dirt.

The rider was not a person. It was a long rifle, the long kind like I had seen in the Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary. It was poking out of a saddle bag, butt up with a riding crop laced through the trigger guard to form a makeshift cross, canted to one side. A grey coat and wide brimmed hat were draped over the cross to give the appearance of a mounted rider. The raiders had been shooting at a scarecrow.

They hardly had time to process this information when another shot came —this one quieter, higher pitched— and the one-eyed creature’s brains exploded out the side of his head. The shot must have come from the adobe hut on our left and, realizing this, the two remaining gunmen pivoted and unloaded a fusillade of bullets into the small structure as I dashed toward the safety of the gas station’s back door. Neither tried to stop me. I was completely forgotten.

My body protected by the station’s back wall, I peaked around the edge of the door frame to follow the action. It was suddenly very quiet again. After expending their guns and reloading again, the one without a nose looked at the one with the rifle and nodded toward the hut. The planks I had removed from the hut’s doorway lay on the ground, but with the window still boarded up it was impossible to see more than a couple feet into the hut’s shadowy interior. The snake-skinned rifleman hesitated for a second and then reluctantly approached the building in a low crouch with his rifle leveled and his cheek pressed to the stock. With careful, timid steps he crossed the threshold and entered the darkness.

Almost immediately his body came flying back out the door, propelled by what must have been the blast of a shotgun. He came to rest at the last gunman’s feet, body and face punctured with steaming metal pellets and sightless eyes looking up to the sky.

I had never seen anyone killed before, and I had now seen two die in the last five minutes. Even if they weren’t quite human they were still people. They could talk and use tools and feel fear. Some of my friends from highschool had been sent to fight in Vietnam. A lot of them had seen things and came back changed. I had never had to worry. My family had enough money that I was always certain a college deferment was waiting for me.

I knew I should be in shock, but in truth the whole thing felt so unreal I wasn't even really afraid. It was like watching a particularly loud, unpleasant movie. I mean, I had enough of a sense of self-preservation to get behind cover, but the visceral fear, the sick feeling in your gut. I didn’t feel that. Not yet.

In contrast, even from behind, I could tell Mustache was panicking. He was visibly shaking and stealing glances at the horses tied up at the cistern. But he kept his pistol focused on the hut’s doorway.

It was then I saw the Marshal for the first time. A man emerged from the door of the adobe hut, clad entirely in gray. Dusty gray square-toed boots led to faded gray trousers below a gray vest over a shirt that probably once had been white, but had been worn by time and the elements to a uniform gray with the rest of the outfit. He was slim and tall, but not tall to the absurd size of the gunmen he faced. His face appeared to have several days of beard growth on it. Beneath this his features were hawk-like but not fragile. The weathered skin of his face was pulled taunt over sharp bones.

He was a series of ambiguities. His ethnicity I couldn’t tell you. Though looking mostly European, the man had skin just a few shades too dark to be clearly caucasian, and his eyes had a hint of an almond shape. His hair was a thick mess of black and white waves and the stubble on his face was similarly colored. Like his race, his age was indeterminate. If you told me he was thirty or fifty, I would have believed either. What was certain was the grim focus on his face, and the unwavering manner in which he held aloft his revolver.

“Put away the artillery and you can ride off” the man in gray said. His voice was deep, but oddly quiet. “I will let this be a misunderstanding.”

“Your kind aren’t known for letting things go,” said the raider.

“And you’d feel honor bound to hunt me down, even though your people started all this.”

The raider let a bunch of air flow out his mouth and stump of a nose. It was less a sigh than the sound of a deflating balloon.

“That I would.” he nodded, looking down at his fallen companion with the facial growth, “Eye for an eye.”

The man in gray held a moment. “Fair enough,” he said.

Another shot, and a spurt of bright red blood lept from the last rider’s neck. He fell to the ground and squirmed for a minute, grabbing at his throat. Then he lay still.

I stood up and stepped out from the safety of the doorframe, my wrists still bound. The man in gray ignored me, and walked over to the mule. The beast lay on its side, shuddering in agony. He knelt by the animal, gently stroked its face and muzzle to comfort it, and then carefully put the barrel of his gun against the creature's head and put a round into its skull.

Standing, he delicately opened the cylinder of the handgun, gracefully removed three empty shells and inserted new rounds from his cartridge belt in their place. He then slid his weapon into a drop-leg holster on his right thigh. He retrieved his hat and frock coat from the ground and donned them. The fresh bullet wounds didn’t seem to be the only holes in the garments. He grabbed his rifle and saddlebags off the animal’s carcass and carried them over to the bodies of the gunmen. Depositing the items on the ground, he began to go through the riders’ pockets. He separated the firearms, ammunition, canteens and tobacco from the rest of dead men’s gear and threw them beside the saddle.

As he worked, I hesitantly walked over to him, held out my bound arms and asked, “Little help?”

He paused his search and looked me in the eye for the first time. His eyes were gray like his clothes, and like his clothes they revealed nothing about his nature. He hiked up his left pant leg and withdrew a knife from his boot. He sliced the twine holding me and returned to his work.

I was lost for a moment, standing next to him just trying to look non-threatening.

“L-L-Listen,” I stammered, “thanks for helping me there. What were those guys?”

“Bandits, I think..” he said, not looking up.

That was not what I meant, but for the moment my hunger outweighed my curiosity. “I-I hate to ask, but do you have anything I could eat? I’ve been here three days.”

“There is some food in the saddlebag.”

I went and found several strips of bacon and a hard biscuit wrapped in wax paper. There was also a small metal canteen, but it had been pierced by a bullet. I greedily choked down the meat and bread dry, gagging a bit as I did so. The bacon was so chewy it more resembled jerky, but after three days of starvation it was paradise.

He had finished stripping the bodies of goods and was now exploring the station. I called after him, “Those guys didn’t seem quite human.”

“Beyond the frontier the land can change a person, given time.” was his reply. He walked over to the rail shed and tossed aside the warning sign I had dutifully obeyed.

I started to walk toward him. “My name’s Greg Tolson, do you have a name?”

If he heard me he gave no outward sign of it. He swung the doors of the rail shed open and disappeared inside.

I called after him. “So I guess I’m having one of those magical wardrobe, fall into a fantasy world kind of things, huh? Well this sure as shit ain’t Narnia.”

I chuckled at my own joke. The sound from the shed was the screeching noise of metal on metal.

Out of the building came the contraption making the noise. It was a flat wooden platform about the size of a pickup truck bed laid atop railroad wheels like a train car. In the center of the platform was an arm with handles extending on the sides, presumably the device used to propel the handcar. It rumbled down the branch line, slid over the junction and came to rest on the main railroad track. The man in gray walked out of the shed behind the car.

I called to him. “Hey I really appreciate what you did there. I owe you.”

“More raiders will come.” he said, not acknowledging my comment at all,

“One of their number missing could go unnoticed, but three will prompt a search. You are free to stay here, but I would not recommend it. You can come with me if you choose as long as you agree to listen to what I say. We should leave soon or there will be more violence.”

“They knew you were coming,” I said. “They were looking for you.”

“They have eyes in the desert.”

“Well I’m definitely coming with you.” The thought of being left behind at the depot filled me with a fear greater than all the shooting I had just seen. “But where are we going”

“West.” he said

“West.” I answered.

He nodded, “Is there water?”

“Yes,” I said, eager to seem helpful, “The pump is rusty, but it works.”

“Take the canteens and the waterskins and fill them then.”

I nodded. The three canteens on the ground I recognized, and I assumed the two sacks with caps on the end were waterskins. I dutifully obeyed the gray man’s instructions and began filling the canteens with smelly water under the spout. It was awkward work. I found that to fill the skins I had to first fill my dented bucket and then pour the water into the skin. My companion busied himself loading the rest of his supplies on the handcar along with what he had stripped off the dead.

“These guys,” I decided I would try another question, “They called you marshal; what is that?”

“You can call me Marshal, if you like. Just please hurry.”

I carried the water containers to the handcar, and turned back to grab the rest of my things. As I lifted my guitar case, I noticed the glint from the twin barrels of a side-by-side shotgun, laying just inside the doorway of the mudbrick hut. I turned to snatch it up as well, but the Marshal called to me from the handcart.

“Leave the shotgun, I’ve no more shells.”

I ran to the handcar and hopped aboard. The Marshal took one of the bandit pistols and handed it to me. Unsure what to do with it, I stuck it in the waistband of my pants like I had seen in the movies. The metal was warm from the sun and the gunfight. It burned the bottom of my belly a bit. I pretended not to notice.

“This arm propels the car,” the Marshal explained, pointing to the lever in the middle, “It’s called a walking beam. You push it forward and back to make the cart go. This lever is direction, tilt it the way you want to go, the center position is a break.”

Without waiting for me to confirm understanding he jumped to the ground. I eyed the seesaw like device with suspicion. This looked like a lot of work.

“What about the horses? Wouldn’t they be faster?”

“We’re bringing the horses.” he called over his shoulder.

The Marshal untied the three mounts from the cistern and brought them over to the handcar. He secured their reins to metal hasps attached to the corners of the platform, two on one side, one on the other. He walked again to the back of the car and began to push. I started to work the walking beam back and forth. The car rolled backwards a bit, pushing against the Marshal, but I realized the mistake and switched the control lever in the opposite direction. The car reversed. When we began to gain speed, the Marshal lifted himself on board.

I was at the back of the car, facing the direction of travel. I assumed he would take a position on the other side of the walking beam and help me power the cart. Instead he sat, cross legged at the front corner of the platform facing back the way we came, with his long rifle lying across his lap. He was going to keep watch while I pushed.

Flies, appearing from nowhere, had already started to gather on the corpses we left behind us. Over my shoulder, I watched the gas station, the rail platform and the rest of the structures grow small in the distance. I was free from the depot, I had a six-gun shoved under my belt, a stomach full of bacon and I had just escaped a run-in with bandits. I felt like a character in one of those cheap paperbacks you buy on an airport layover. Adrenaline is an incredible high. Whatever else happened, this was one hell of an adventure.