“Get!” Junior shouted in his most baritone voice. “Get! Go!”

Sterling was no longer screaming. Junior fired the pistol into the night but the cougar was gone. He loaded two more from the box of bullets and hurried back over to guard Sterling.

The marshal was frothing. Junior turned him onto his side and fluid flowed out from his mouth. He sucked wind and then expressed more vomit into the dirt. His diaphragm contracted to an unholy extent. He was drowning in sick. Seizing, he arched his back and made a saturated sound – like the whole of the Cimarron River had emptied into his lungs.

Junior Darby couldn't just stand by and watch that man drown.

He thought he might faint.

Was it all a bad dream? Wasn't it too unreal?

Nightmare or not, he owed Sterling his life. The hour had suddenly arrived when he might return the favor. He leaned forward, his hand beneath Sterling’s head – till they were eye-to-eye – and then nose-to-nose – and then mouth-to-mouth. He blew into Sterling's toxic hole and breathed for them both.

Junior lifted his head and blinked the tears away. This was no dream.

He pressed his palm on the marshal's chest and felt his heart beat once. Then it was done. He touched the marshal's star, still pinned to Penrose's gooey breast.

The cougar roared in the pitch-black and the whole mountainside quivered. It echoed ten-fold and the horses snorted, stamping their hooves. Breaking from their tethers, they fled into the night. Junior felt the quicksand pulling him down again, but that was not quite right—

The entire Earth was collapsing in upon itself. The cougar’s voice was bringing down the mountain. The marshal was swallowed by it, and Junior watched him swept away by the slide. The corpse was smooth in its descent, back arched so that its eyes could meet Junior's up until it disappeared beneath the dirt. If it wasn't the most real dream he’d ever known, then it must have been the most dreamlike reality. He looked up the mountain and saw the sinister silhouettes of boulders tumbling from above and whole trees uprooted, spinning like toothpicks. Junior tried to outrun the avalanche, to reach some boundary out in the darkness – but his boots sunk into the mountain-turned-quicksand.

“Gad-fucking-zooks!” he wailed and struggled to get free – but it was hopeless.

He had one last second to exist on Earth, and he spent it gawking at the marshal's star. He was still clutching it in his hand. A scrap of Sterling's putrid shirt was still pinned to it.

Jagged projectiles whistled past at ludicrous speed. He felt the wind sliced just an inch from his face. He dropped to his knees and covered his head – and the earth gulped him whole. It encased him under immense pressure and the mountain flowed with him inside. It was the Cimarron all over again. He was drowning in dirt. All around him he heard the boom of impacts. He imagined the screaming plunge of boulders and tall, ancient pines pulverizing the hillside. He went over and over, doing cartwheels inside the avalanche. His skin turned raw as the sand and twigs and bugs and rocks all churned with him in their midst.

Then the thunder of the impacts slowed. The flow decelerated. There was a suspended sensation, like the whole mass had struck something and hung up – and then a rush like a breaking wave. He felt the air for a moment on his face. He struggled to project himself in the direction he fathomed as up. He breathed. He clawed and dragged himself forward, still buried to the waist. His head on a swivel, it appeared he'd traveled maybe fifty feet down the mountain. It was tough to suss without any landmarks left standing. It felt like he'd fallen all the way back to Albuquerque.

Junior wormed himself free and collapsed upon his stomach. He sucked wind and trembled. The dust hung thick, white-washing the night. He closed his eyes and rolled onto his back. He patted himself and searched for gashes or compound fractures – a shin-bone stuck through the meat of his calf or a branch impaled in his gut – but he was whole. Just scratched, bruised and stung – abrasions all relatively mild.

He squinted back up the mountainside, to where the camp had been – or at least to where he could best guess it had been. He looked for some sign of Sterling, but there was none. The mountain was settling still. Stragglers; pebbles tinkling their way down; trees groaning underground. Junior closed his eyes, and all he could see was Sterling's choking face. He squeezed the marshal's star, still clenched in his fist. Then all Junior could do was fall asleep atop the loose dirt.

The cougar's hellish growl awoke him come morning, and a shadow blotted out the sun. Without warning, cold water was splashing onto his face. A feather brushed his cheek and a horse snorted nearby. A stranger was stooping beside him, tilting a canteen against Junior's lips.

“White man lives.” The stranger spoke with a cadence indicating savagery. “Some lucky white man – mountain come down on him. Drink.”

Junior sucked at the waterskin till it was dry.

“I'm much obliged,” Junior said, wiping his mouth. His eyes were slow to adjust, but as they focused the stranger became clear. He was a heathen dressed in a white man's get-up – a pin-striped jacket and a filthy top-hat. “I reckon I'd have died if you hadn't come along.”

“Tom saw sunlight reflected by your star.” He pointed to the marshal's badge – still clutched in Junior's fist. He said, “Tom might have rode past if Tom not see glint on star.”

“And from the grave – you steal me from Death once more,” Junior whispered. The hairs on his arms pricked up in eerie acknowledgment of Sterling Penrose's final gesture.

“What's that? I cannot hear you.” Leaning nearer, Tom Savage said, “Speak up, Marshal.”

That was when Junior Darby perished and Sterling Penrose was reborn.

“You have U.S. Marshall Sterling Penrose eternally in your debt,” Junior said.

“Tom knows that name. You are the new sheriff. Constable in Buena Vista tells Tom that Marshal was riding in with a deputy. Where is deputy?”

“The ravine is now his tomb.” Junior had said. It had been almost two years since he had proclaimed his own death. All those months later he repeated it to Yule Sherwin as they came back to town. “The ravine is now his tomb.”

“You tell a tough tale to swallow, Penrose.” Yule was too flabbergasted to form much more of an answer. “Should I call you that, still? Or would you prefer to be called by your honest name?”

“I’ve no objection to either,” he replied, “so long as you put ‘Sheriff’ in front.”

Some days a man must merely imagine whiskey and it makes him drunk. Yule Sherwin's world was spun amok but the Sheriff would not shut up. He told Yule how he had spent the past two years searching for a sign of Sterling's daughter, Abigail – but he reckoned she was buried someplace in the valley. He further reckoned Rex Westman had always known his true identity. Rex didn't care who the law was really, so long as he held an ace in the hole.

“Or, could be Rex never really wanted Law, at all,” Sheriff Junior Darby said. “Could be Rex never needed Sterling. Could be he just needed his sick buried under the mountain – so's it could ferment. So he could keep a well of poison on-hand. What do you think of that, Yule Sherwin?”

“I think I've been hearing the call of whiskey for some time and shall heed it soon as I am able,” Yule answered.

They had arrived back in Red Junction a little while after dark, and the thoroughfare was buzzing. They tied their horses outside the jail. The Sheriff gave the men milling in the road a long, hard look.

“What is it?” Yule asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Come inside and have a drink,” the Sheriff said. “Do please let me chew your ear a while longer, but inside – away from fellers unknown.”

“Maybe just one,” Yule said. Wrung out as an old bar rag, he was saddle-sore, scared and sober – all conditions which could only be remedied by whiskey. He followed the Sheriff into the jailhouse.

The sound of blood is distinct. But merely being heard does not satisfy blood. It pours itself into the listener's ear and crawls along his canals. For some men it is warm honey, and for others it is an infestation of fire-ants. Yule didn't want to drink, any more. He wanted only to box his hands over his ears. The sheriff had his pistol drawn before the door could close behind them. They had stumbled upon orchestral bleeding – a symphony of mashing. Something awful was awry in the lock-up. It was the death knell of a garroted hog – its throat gashed, snorting over its severed arteries. It was such a sopping chorus, just listening a second drenched the ears.

“What in God's name?” Yule asked.

The Sheriff held his gun in one hand and rifled through his desk with the other. He dug out his key-ring. Without looking away from that corridor which linked the office to the lock-up he said, “Sounds like we can safely diagnose what's been ailing that Meeks boy.”

“You mean...?” Yule did not dare complete his thought, but the Sheriff finished it for him, anyway:

“The same sick as you seen in Madame’s kid. The Sterling Flu.”

He crept toward the corridor. Yule followed behind. The only thing worse than seeing the lock-up for himself would have been being left alone in the office. Drawing nearer, Yule discerned another voice amidst the gore-chorus – a crackling hiss, raspy as a decapitated viper.

Coming around the corner into the lock-up they were struck by the sour odor of undone intestines and half-digested vittles. The Meeks brothers were a writhing lump of humanity locked in an incestuous embrace. Grappling like carnal wrestlers, one atop the other from behind. The bottom Meeks flailed his arms and legs in an ever-expanding pool of blood, carving angels the way children play in snow. The top Meeks mounted his twin, straddled him at the hips and might have just been nuzzling at his neck – but for the blood everywhere. The sum of that blood was greater than the parts of any man. The top Meeks was the boss hog, rooting for morsels in his brother's meat. Lumps of tissue large-and-small littered the cell's floor – not merely flesh-wads, but organs as well. Yule saw translucent guts which had been wrenched out from the trunk of that miserable Meeks. He saw ribs exposed and dewy with blood. The gore seeped out of the cell and intended to permeate everything. It was all enough to paralyze Yule, but he watched the sheriff's boots trudge through the quagmire till he stood before the cell's door.

“Meeks!” The sheriff's voice echoed in the lock-up. “Cease this instant your fucking consumption!”

The ruddy-cheeked Meeks lifted his head and a strand of silvery-putridity slithered from between his lips. Then he went right back to devouring his twin. Yule could hear himself praying but the words were coming out all wrong.

“Down in the valley walks the shadow of Death,” he chanted, “evil knowing no fear.”

Then the thunder rolled, amplified by the lock-up's cramped acoustics. Sparks spat from the sheriff's gun. Yule could no longer hear himself murdering the prayer. A woman was weeping nearby, but her cries were muted after such close-quarters gun-play. He fell to his knees in the blood. The top Meeks splashed-down and stared at Yule with three eyes – one bore between the others by the sheriff's bullet. Gunsmoke seeped out from the Meeks's nostrils and Yule could taste it in his own, too. The sulfur stung his eyes. There was no lady weeping. It had been he himself, all along.

Languid carnage hung in the air, drizzling onto the floor. Nothing profusely awful ever happens fast. Horror is a thorough undertaking, deliberately unraveling. Yule never could look away.