Rex had never slowed in his task. He kept on hoisting boxes and barrels out of his way without any regard for the creep whose arm had come inside the chamber. He was obsessed with finding the chute. Tom and the Sheriff were struggling to keep up the pace. The cyclops dodged this way and that to keep out of Rex's way while also providing him with candlelight.

“Your boss has lost his shit.” The Sheriff quit moving boxes and popped the cylinder from his pistol. He worked at reloading it with what bullets remained in his belt-loops. He turned to Tom. “This chute is a goddamned myth.”

Misty could hear the Bearded Woman sobbing into her cupped palms. In the far corner of the chamber, Ruby the chimpanzee mimicked her misery out of either empathy or mocking – Misty reckoned only the primate knew for certain.

Then the stacked barricade jostled. Panic seized Misty for a moment, but the fiend out there didn't want in. It was an opportunistic cannibal, settling for a hunk of the fallen, one-armed intruder. Its frenzy was palpable even from the other side of the bulwark. The volume of its supping was absurd. Misty reckoned it was the noise, the slurping and sucking, which drove the Sheriff over the edge.

He cocked his pistol and aimed it at Rex. He uttered, “Turn around so I can kill you.”

The Bearded Woman shut up and quit crying.

Rex's only reply was, “Give it a rest, Junior.”

“Turn around or I swear I'll gun you in the back.”

“Do it, Sheriff.” It took a second for Misty to recognize her own voice. There was nothing left to lose, and her words were firm. “These creeps are all his doin’ – and he’s done it before! He wiped out a whole tribe of heath—” She winced and caught herself. “He killed a tribe of proud natives called the Appaloosas. I was there and I fucking seen it! You gotta hear the honesty in my voice, mister! And I wager he murdered them for mere pelts. Beaver pelts. Give me the gun, Sheriff. I’ll fucking do him for you!”

“Turn around!” The Sheriff held his pistol at arm’s length, nearly pressing it against the back of Westman’s head.

But Rex still wasn't paying him nor Misty any mind. He kept piecing apart the stacked crates, searching out the chute, explaining, “Nah Junior, you ain't gonna gun nobody. We as one are a-marchin' toward death here – and I don't sense you've got the nerve to quicken the pace for us all.”

Tom Savage grabbed the lawman up by the arms and shoulders, lifted him off his feet a moment and held him in a full-nelson. Rex looked back over his shoulder and shook his head. He set aside the last crate from a stack but the chute was still not there.

He turned to face Misty and asked, “Where the fuck is it, girl?”

“It ought be right in front of your ugly fucking face,” she snarled.

“Well it ain't!” He spun back around and struck a blow against the wall. The wood cracked and his fist jabbed into a hollow behind the paneling. He scoured the wall, groping its surface desperately like a caved-in spelunker. Near the floor he found a wooden protuberance, the lip of a concealed hatch – and he tugged it upward to uncover the laundry chute. Rex laughed and proclaimed it, “Eureka!”

Sam held his candle nearby. Sure enough there was the passage, just as Misty had described.

“I'll be...” the Sheriff trailed off.

“Fucking told you so,” said Misty.

After studying the chute for just a moment, Rex turned to the Missing Link in his dark corner, “Get up it, tiny negro. Your stature is the best-suited to explore ahead and ensure the passage is secure.”

Without argument, the Missing Link waddled over to the chute's open hatch. The portal was less than half a man's height but would accommodate Link well enough. He went inside, splaying his stubby arms and legs far as he was able and shimmying up the chute. Ruby gibbered, pleading in chimp-speak for him to return. Aside from the primate, everyone held their breath and listened for some sign of the Missing Link's progress.

“Oi!” At last, they heard the soft, muffled thuds of the Link's fumbling. He called from inside the chute, “The passage be blocked by anutha' hatch. It be locked maybe, from the other side—”

A shotgun boomed. Then the laundry flashed white. Sparks rained down inside the chute like falling stars. Thunder roiled out from the opening, reeking of sulfur as if the chute itself were flatulent. The Missing Link cascaded limply to the floor and the gust stirred up by his descent blew out the last candle. The chamber was instantly and utterly pitch-black, save for the eerie rose pallor cast by what light could slither under the parlor door and reflect off Extra Special's blood.

The Bearded Woman cried out in the darkness, “Link!”

Another blast shone its light down the chute, starkly illuminating the laundry for one fleeting moment, as if a photographer had splashed flash-powder to capture the scene with his camera. Misty caught a glimpse of the Missing Link, his face pulverized by buckshot. The Beard screamed.

Ruby the chimp howled. The chamber was flooded by her primal tantrum. Then there was another voice. It was Madame upstairs in her chamber, shouting hysteric commands down the laundry chute.

“Madame!” the Sheriff cried out. “Do not shoot! We mean you no harm!”

His voice only caused Madame to rant more loudly and with less coherence. Misty wanted to call out to her but it weren't no use. Madame wouldn't hear a thing over her own indecipherable hollering and the chimp's fit.

Then Misty couldn't hear a thing because Rex shot the chimpanzee dead. Moments later, his forty-five boomed again. The room was lit by its muzzle. He was aiming at the ceiling. Once the shooting was over the room was dark again. All of sudden, Madame wasn't making any more noise, either.

“You killed her,” Sam the cyclops muttered.

“She was in our way,” Rex explained. He turned toward the girls. “Ladies first. Get up it.”

Misty and the Bearded Lady filed to the chute like good hostages. Misty went shimmying up first with a hand from the Beard. The Beard was broad-shouldered as any feller but was nonetheless able to maneuver the corridor. She was slowed more by her unchecked sobbing than her girth. The four men followed. Westman brought up the rear, birthing himself from the chute with his gun-in-hand.

In the chamber above, Madame was sprawled on the floor wearing nothing but her slip. In the small of her back a rose had bloomed where Westman’s bullet had gone straight through-and-through her. The shotgun was broken open at the stock and a pair of shells were clutched in her death-grip. The antiquities of her chamber were all askew. The door which led to the parlor was heavily fortified. Lamps and curios and an armoire were toppled and wedged to keep out intruders.

Building that barricade must have taken Madame hours, Misty thought. There was no way she had only erected it that evening when hell had broken loose. Madame must have put it together in advance, sometime last night after sending Misty away. It must have been built to keep Rex Westman out.

Well it hadn't done that.

At the far end of Madame's room the French doors were open onto the balcony. Tom Savage ventured outside and had a gander at the thoroughfare. Westman followed with the cyclops at his side. The Sheriff went along, too. Misty staggered after the men, leaving the Bearded Gal to weep alone.

The four men separated and assumed positions at the railing. They were struck dumb in the presence of the apocalypse. Shambling fiends stalked the road from one end of town to the other. At intervals the creeps gathered like nursing hogs and slurped at the dug-out under-bellies of side-ways horses. In the faraway dark gun-fire crackled and echoed. The bordello's massacre spilled into the street and attracted a mob of snarling ghouls. Rex lifted himself, leaned over the railing and craned his neck to gain a view of his home base. Then he lowered himself, resumed his place at the railing and sighed, pondering the road.

“Travel by this route does not seem well-advised,” the Sheriff said.

A woman was screaming somewhere in the night, and then she was not.

Misty wondered, where was Yule right then? Were he harmed or worse? Would she ever see him again? Probably not.

“You got a plan?” Westman asked, turning to face the lawman. He popped the cylinder from his forty-five and renewed its lethal chambers.

“I haven't any at all,” the Sheriff answered.

Rex and Tom exchanged a knowing nod. The Indian surveyed the road.

“I've men and guns in that compound – and my torches do still burn,” Westman added. “It is the most fortified building in town. Come here, Sam.”

The cyclops startled at the sound of his own name spoken. He slunk up to his boss like a dog who's been kicked too many times before.

“The road, Westman.” The Sheriff looked out over the devastation. “We might outrun them but we might not, too – and then what? There's scores of the Damned here. Perhaps we ought wait and see if they don't disperse of their own accord? At least to some degree? Perhaps we ought wait for the sun?”

“Give me your gun,” Rex said, turning to the cyclops. Sam passed him his pistol. “Have rounds, too?”

“Sure boss, but—”

Westman interrupted him. “Hand them over.”

Rex held out his palm and took the bullets. He inspected the pistol before pocketing it and the extra ammo. Tom Savage sprung up onto the balcony's railing acrobatically.

“What are you going to do?” the Sheriff asked, suspicion in his voice.

Westman replied, “The way I see it, Sheriff, all we need is a momentary distraction.”

He whirled around and shoved the cyclops in the chest. Sam struck the railing and the sudden shock left him incapable of defending himself. The Sheriff was flat-footed and reached to catch him – but it was already too late. The cyclops' momentum forced him over the edge and he toppled backward and headlong. Misty sped forward, despite herself, and clung to the railing. In the street below, Sam was rolling groggily in the dust blown up by his fall. The swarming ghouls snorted the air and tasted his scent. The road hissed with hungry whispers.

The Sheriff drew his pistol but they were already upon poor Sam. They et him alive from every angle.

Tom Savage lowered himself deliberately over the railing, dropping to the road lightly as a shadow. Westman went over in a blur. His boots thudded hard but he remained upright. As the ghouls were lured by Sam’s irresistible distress, the Heathen and his boss sprinted for the crossroads. Westman's escape plan had worked.

Misty saw the Sheriff turn his pistol at Rex's back but his hand shook. She reckoned that was it. Westman was going to get away. The Sheriff couldn't gun him in the back. The Sheriff just weren't that sort of feller.

“Gun him!” She cried. “Please fucking gun him!”

At the crossroads, Rex veered right and made way for his compound – but Tom kept on running, right out of town.

Sam the cyclops was down there screaming. The swarm tore off his arms and legs. Too noble to back-shoot Rex, the Sheriff turned his gun toward the road instead. He stared down the sights of his pistol into Sam's lone, wide eye – and he squeezed the trigger.