Misty couldn't react. She couldn't even think. Right beside her, the ringmaster's ribcage was bare in places, visible through tears in his red coat. The creep straddling his waist was fishing out organs by the fistful. Rex Westman worked the hammer on his forty-five and blew the head clean off the creep who had wrenched out Ben's internal workings. Then Westman gunned a second fiend the same way – and then a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth. He paused to reload. His cyclops cowered beside him with his own pistol trembling and a tell-tale shadow of piss upon his crotch. The Sheriff came out of nowhere, clearing a path for himself with a hail of sparks and gunsmoke. Walking backwards, he stepped up onto the stage beside Misty, fumbling to reload his pistol with spare ammunition from his belt-loops. Two bullets slipped from his fingers and stuck in the blood.

He howled, “Mother-of-fuck!”

Misty reached to retrieve the Sheriff's rounds but her hand was caught. The ringmaster's assassin had moved on to her. Lunging, he tackled Misty and together they rolled off the lip of the stage. They bumped against the crumpled, headless corpse of the fiend who had bitten Ben Bitten and came to a rest. Misty found herself on her stomach with the ringmaster's assassin mounting her from behind. His breath was on the nape of her neck and his jaws would be next. She tried to push herself up onto her hands and knees but there was no hope. The whole world shook and gruesome syrup poured over her shoulders, rivuleting around to the front of her neck. That so much blood could come out of her seemed impossible.

Then suddenly, the creep on her back wasn't fighting anymore. Misty twisted from beneath him just in time to see the tomahawk before it was withdrawn, leaving only the final spurts of the fiend's expiration.

Just as he had when he found her on the bank of the Clackamas, Smiles on River had saved her – but this time he did so with Tom Savage's murderous keen. He wiped his hatchet clean on the thigh of his trousers. Misty reckoned he weren't that little Indian boy no more, but perhaps some of her old friend still remained.

He pulled her up by her elbow and said, “The time for running is now.”

“They're invading every nook-and-cranny,” Rex Westman replied as if Tom had been addressing him. He stooped to pluck the Sheriff's fumbled ammo from the stage. Passing the bloody slugs to the lawman, he said, “Get a grip, Junior.”

“Upstairs?” the Sheriff chimed in while reloading his pistol. “Could we move through the Madame's chamber and over yonder balcony or mayhap onto and across the roof into a back alley or—”

“No good,” the cyclops cut him off. He nodded, imploring them with his lone eye to follow his line of sight and witness the grand staircase.

The bottle-neck of the staircase was heaped with meat and crawling with ghouls. The swarm washed over men and saloon-girls alike. They died like squashed beetles, arms and legs jutting out through the banister at unnatural angles; pink, foamy innards puffing out through the cracks in their fleshy carapaces. The carnage was mashed together till there were no longer individual corpses. They became a singular carcass which stretched the whole length of the stairs. The ghouls went wild in the pulp.

The stairs were just as the cyclops had described them – no good. But there was something else over there, beneath the staircase.

Misty said out loud, “The laundry...”

The hard-assed, blood-soaked fellers on the stage turned and looked to her. Rex asked, “Come again?”

“The laundry! I know a way up without taking the steps – from the laundry there beneath the staircase – there's a chute where Madame tosses down linens from her chamber.”

“Where?”

“There, behind the stairs…” Misty replied, directing Rex's attention toward the open doorway of a chamber just below the staircase.

A scantily-clad gypsy was struggling to drag Extra Special inside the laundry. Extra was unconscious and her apparatus had become askew, twisting the already uncanny center-tit till it bulged deliriously like an over-filled wineskin. The Missing Link stood sentry, wielding a shotgun with its barrel sawed-off to accommodate his stature.

The staircase overhead was lousy with ghouls still partaking of the feast. Globs of human wreckage rained down, distracting creeps who might otherwise intercept the gypsy before she could pull Extra Special across the threshold. The fiends fell on their knees and slurped at the floor. The laundry looked to be a sanctuary, ringed by the decimated run-off of the grand staircase. The creeps weren't crossing that red line.

Misty reckoned it were something like a miracle performed by an anti-Christ.

Rex got moving without any more words. The cyclops was close on his heels. Tom Savage and the Sheriff were the only gentlemen among them – each accepting one of Misty's arms over their shoulder and helping her along.

Ben Bitten returned to lucidity just in time to see them go. He cried, “You can't leave me!” But it was too late then. He was going to have to look out for his self.

Misty did her best block out his pleas while Tom and the Sheriff ferried her across the gore-slicked stage. She tried to focus all her attention upon the laundry, instead. Extra Special had been dragged inside till only her ankles and feet protruded across the threshold, but then another member of the freak-show, the Bearded Woman, came barreling out.

“Link!” she screamed.

Misty’s heart sank. The laundry had already been invaded. The Missing Link whirled around with his sawed-off shotgun – but not in time.

Misty saw the gypsy who’d been dragging Extra Special thud onto the floor just outside the doorway. She’d been ambushed and tackled by a buck naked fiend. He had weird stripes, and Misty quickly sussed that they were scars from some old flogging.

But before Misty could suss any other thing, the gypsy girl was pried open. The whip-striped fiend punched clean through the girl’s ribcage, wrenching out spongy lung tissue. Next she knew, Misty had slipped her arm from the Sheriff’s shoulder and subsequently slid Tom Savage’s gun from his holster. He didn’t try to stop her. As they stepped down off the stage, she stuck the pistol at the whipped fiend and pulled the trigger. Her hand was instantly numb. A gun had never been so loud. Her eyes stung. The fiend collapsed atop the gypsy girl’s corpse, mostly headless. For good measure, the Missing Link stuck his shotgun flush against the dead creep and blew its corpse further apart. Tom Savage gently took his gun back, and returned it to his belt.

“You shoot well,” he said calmly.

The whole posse hurried through the staircase’s run-off and into the laundry. Bringing up the rear, the Bearded Woman slammed the door and held it shut with all of her broad-shouldered frame. But in that last instant before the door closed, Misty caught a glimpse of the parlor. Everybody out there was dead, covered from head-to-toe in the blood-sheen. Their deep-red souls evacuated, billowing toward Heaven, coughing up a crimson haze inside the bordello. Misty closed her eyes, but she reckoned she might never stop seeing red.

For the first time in recent memory, though, Misty heard something other than fellers dying. It was the sound of everyone in the laundry breathing – mayhap for the first time in a spell. Then it was the sound of her teeth chattering.

“It will be alright,” Tom Savage whispered close to her ear.

“How can you know that?”

Tom didn’t answer, but she felt a mite better, anyway. In the far corner of the darkened laundry chamber, Ruby the chimpanzee gibbered inside her crate and it was an almost playful noise.

Misty was downright grateful for the reprieve, but it wasn’t long before Rex ruined it like he did everything.

“Quiet the primate or I shit-you-not,” he barked. “I will fucking gun it.”

The Missing Link cooed to the crate in a weird, clicking tongue. Then he said in heavily-accented English, “She be scared, jah? All we be scared. She no diff'nt.”

Misty realized the laundry wasn't how she remembered. Madame must have given the carnies permission to stash their cargo here. On one wall their trunks and boxes were stacked to the ceiling. The other side of the room was mounded as usual with soiled whore's clothes and bed-sheets. There should have been a window at the far end of the chamber but it was blocked by more crates. Three candlesticks had been arranged single-file atop an over-turned laundry basin where a poker spread had been abandoned. They provided the only light save that which crept in between the door and its frame. Extra Special was sprawled on the floor, skin too pale to be remotely warm – even with the benefit of the buttery candle-light. The Bearded Woman's hairy bosom heaved with sobs.

Rex looked up, “Where is this fucking chute?”

He scooped up one of the candles and scoured the laundry.

“I should gun you,” the Sheriff growled.

“Fuck off.” Squeezing her by the wrist of her hurt paw, Rex snatched Misty and dragged her to his side. “Tell me where the chute is, whore.”

“There!” She pointed. “Built plum into the wall! You're gonna have to move some of these boxes.”

He tossed her aside and she plunged into the dirty laundry.

“Sam!” Rex rattled off commands like he was waging a war, “Get ye a goddamned candle and hold it up here – I can't even see where mine hand is. Who has bullets? You have shells for that shotgun, little monkey? Listen up. Shoot for their fucking eyes. Tom, barricade the door with the trunks I displace. Give him a hand, Sheriff. Beard! Hush your weepy fucking cunt already!”

Sam lifted a candle in its brass fitting, burning away the shadows while his boss surveyed the predicament. Rex huffed. The boxes were stacked nearly to the ceiling and along the whole length of the wall. There was scarcely floorspace to arrange them any other way.

“Where exactly is this fucking chute?” Rex demanded. “Behind which column of these crates?”

Misty heard the Sheriff mutter, “I should have gunned you the first time we met.”

She tried to direct Rex’s search but could offer no better guidance than, “I reckon it's just in the middle someplace.”

“Why don't you grab a candle already, Sheriff?” Rex said as he began dismantling the stacked boxes. “You ain't gonna gun me. If you thought you were quick enough you'd have made your move sometime in the past two years.”

The Bearded Woman leaned against the door to keep would-be intruders at-bay and whimpered, “What is with this wicked town?”

And the door shook in its frame.

The Bearded Woman screamed and shoved harder to keep it closed. The fiend outside hammered and brayed abhorrently. The Beard blabbered; her rouge and eyeliner streamed down her cheeks before reconvening as clumps in her bushy chin-growth. She melted against the door and it kept her upright more than she kept it closed. Rex shoved a trunk across the floor to Tom, who in turn handed it off to the Sheriff. Weeping, the Bearded Gal shook her head disbelievingly as she backed away to make space for the first block of their barricade. The Sheriff situated the trunk flush against the door, but right then the creep on the other side punched his fist clean through.

His blind appendage forced itself bicep-deep into the room. The knuckles were pulp. Its indiscriminate claw raked the air wildly. It fell upon the closest at hand, the Sheriff still setting the foundation of their bulwark – and clenched a fistful of his collar. The creep wanted to pull him out through that fist-sized hole, but instead the Sheriff's knees banged against the trunk and he tripped forward. His ear ground against the door. The creep kept on yanking, slamming the Sherrif's cheek hard against the wood. The Beard was screaming up a storm. Misty sunk into the laundry sacks and wished she knew a proper prayer.

The Sheriff drew his pistol and stuck it point-blank upside the door. He squeezed the trigger twice in quick succession and the laundry turned deaf. Misty could just hear herself breathing and didn't cotton much to the shaky sound of it – but the Sheriff had bought himself a reprieve. Pulling away, he fell rump-first to the floor. The creep had only been delayed. His arm re-penetrated the chamber and flailed for its next victim. It insinuated further through the breach, boring a wider opening and subsequently gouging itself on the splintered fissure.

Misty saw the shadows inside the laundry stir. Tom Savage navigated the treacherous dark trappings of the chamber with preternatural agility. His tomahawk struck like lightning. The rush of wind stirred by its descent extinguished all but Sam the cyclops's candle. Now, save for a single orb of light, the laundry was pitch black. Tom snapped the hatchet toward the ceiling and then chopped once more. The chamber was sprayed by the limb's violent detachment – and then a shaft of light from the parlor shone in through the porthole which the freshly-severed appendage had punched. The One-Armed Intruder flung himself against the door and his bashing shook it in its frame. With his spare hand, Tom drew the pistol from his hip. He stuck the barrel out through the hole and let the creep have it in the face. The muzzle-flare reflected in Tom's dark eyes.

The Sheriff scrambled to his feet and accepted a crate from Rex. He and Tom lifted it into place atop the other. A third box blocked out the light which the door's sundering had let seep inside. Now, the laundry was dark and cold as the blood of the Damned. At least the parlor seemed a little farther away behind that ramshackle barricade. For that Misty was most obliged.