“So be it.” Yule took a baby-blanket from the bassinet. He tied it to another and fashioned a sort of sling beneath his jacket. The child fit snugly inside, close to his heart. “Now we should ride. The peace this cabin implies is a false one. The shamblers could come upon us any second and we would be trapped like rats.”

Back outside, Doc hung the lamp upon the porch. The horses were untied and they began to mount, but Yule had trouble.

“Trade me your gun,” he said. He was encumbered by the baby. The pistol would be less unwieldy than the rifle. He and the Doctor exchanged arms.

Climbing aboard the Appaloosa, Doc said, “If we ride downhill with the crick on our right we're sure to happen upon the Lawless Camp.”

They headed out into the woods. Before long the lamplight was a distant memory. The creek became their lone landmark against the blackness, whispering a secret curse they two alone could fully comprehend. Around them, the wilderness was depraved. The forest groaned like an empty belly. It had so many eyes. A dozen men or more were dying out there by the sounds of it; the sopping, crunching sounds of it. Whatever sanctuary the cabin had offered was already a thing of the past.

And while the woods were impenetrably black, Yule's thoughts were turning even darker. With his one hand he cocked the pistol – just in case.

“Darker than a mule's crack out here,” the Doctor said quietly. Yule flinched. Doc was invisible despite riding very nearby.

But the sound of his voice had done it. A branch snapped, then another, and then the whole vicinity rustled sinisterly. Yule had not imagined the forest's many eyes. They had in fact been watching, all this time. Neither man said another word to the other. Instead, their horses each got an earful and a boot-heel.

The stamping of their hooves at least drowned out the forest's awful ambiance. Pine quills stung Yule's cheeks and ears. The many fingers of the forest scratched at his jacket. He squeezed his eyes shut and leaned in against the paint. He held his new child tightly. The babe did not cry, nor did it squirm during their exodus. Yule wasn’t so quiet.

He was caught in a mighty current, hollering like a heathen painted for war. He thought his own voice powerfully loud and then he realized – the Doctor had joined him in his crazed chorus. Together they screamed down the mountainside. Twisting past snarls unseen by either man, the horses would determine whether their company lived or died.

When next he dared to open his eyes and have a gander, Yule saw his prayers had been answered. The forest was thinning – and the sky above had turned muddy violet. Night was fading like an old bruise. He could see the Appaloosa trotting along over yonder. Doc was grinning atop it. They angled toward one another. All of them, man and horse alike, gulped for air something fierce. Then the horses took up grazing. The babe remained sound asleep. Yule shook his head.

“That was some ride,” he said.

“It causes me no shame to admit,” Doc said, “that I lost an ocean of piss out there.”

They shared a good laugh – nervous but not so paranoid.

“We've put the worst behind us,” Yule guessed. “We're out of the woods.”

“And up ahead,” Doc said. “The Lawless Camp.”

The forest had been hacked back here. In the clearing a decrepit wagon-train had circled one last time and then quit. Their wheels were sunk halfway into the dirt. Twisting weeds tangled between their wooden spokes. This was the immoral end of the indigent line. In the center of the ringed wagons, the Lawlesss had erected their dejected shanties. Some were simple, log-crafted huts. Those were the most civilized. More often, the camp consisted of cruder shacks; segments of corrugated iron, or shingle-patches stolen from shed-roofs, slanted against lengths of rotten ply-wood. They made bricks with baked mud. It was a scavenged village and at its far perimeter, the creek snickered.

“Nobody's home,” Yule noticed.

“There will be guns,” was all Doc said. He interrupted the Appaloosa's grazing, urging it to giddy-up once again. The paint wasn't so receptive. It kept feeding on the tall grass.

“Hold up!” Yule called after him. “My mount won't budge!”

But the Doctor was single-minded. He never looked back. By the time Yule got the paint going, Doc was already entering the ring of petrified wagons. Yule lost sight of him behind their husks.

He shouted again, “Hold up, Sanders!”

Doc didn't answer. Yule listened, but all he could hear was the paint’s trot. Arriving at the edge of camp, he reckoned nothing were quieter than the hours after Armageddon. He rode past the stalled wagon train and the Doctor was just sitting there. He had dropped the rifle and wasn't dismounting to retrieve it.

Before Yule could ask what the Doc was up to, his own voice was stolen. The sun was rising on dismembered carnage. The meat was everywhere; sometimes bare and bloodless, pale spears of shin and thigh-bones; sometimes still clothed in bloody flannel; oftentimes too mangled to be recognized as any part of a man. Yule saw a trough bursting with criss-crossed arms and legs. The limbs were stacked like firewood. Turning away from that, he saw a pen of mostly-et pygmy goats. They had fur in patches only. Their eyes were all slurped out. Yule sorta envied them.

“The sun risen should make the search for arms easier—” Doc began.

“But the sun risen only hurts mine eyes worse,” Yule finished.

“Aye.”

“You mean to keep at it?” Yule asked.

“Reckon so.”

The Appaloosa went forward at Doc's behest, carefully plotting its steps. In life the men of this encampment had been outlaws, rustlers, hide-cutters, brigands and killers – and in death they were still finding new decrees to violate. Some were dead with their eyes wide open and their teeth bared. Some were heads alone. Yule saw men face-down in the mud with the backs of their skulls exposed. Their spongy organs were strewn all over, battered in dirt like cod at a fish-fry. The lone signature of life was the buzzing of flies.

“This is no camp,” Yule said beneath his breath while Doc rode on ahead. “This is a mass grave.”

By its very essence, déjà vu infuses the moment with a sense of destiny – and Yule swooned in his saddle. Something was ominously familiar. It was the baby slung against his side. Same as he and Emma's boy had been – the babe was cold to the touch. Yule stopped the paint. His heart rattled in his ribcage. It was an awful junction; his warm heart pumping upside the cold husk of the dead child.

“Make it stop,” he whispered. “Merciful Lord, make mine heart stop.”

But that deity was not present, and Yule went right on living.

Destiny? Fate? Fucking shams, same as that cocksucker God.

The Doctor cried from aways up yonder, "Guns! Guns! Eur-fuckin-reka!"

Yule could only watch. The Doctor had dismounted and was scrambling toward a rotten shanty. Yule saw what Doc had seen: a pair of pistols sticking butt-out from the belt of a dead man who had come to rest half-in and half-out of the crude dwelling. A rough-edged flap of rawhide hung in the doorway, concealing whatever else was lurking inside.

Yule urged the paint trot ahead. The babe rubbed against him. It felt like a brick.

Doc grabbed the dead man's boots and yanked the corpse out of the shanty. It came sliding out fast – too fast – because it was, in fact, only half-a-corpse. It was a set of chaps and legs which had lost its upper-self altogether. Its innards draped out from the place where its abdomen was interrupted. The ease with which the body was extracted took Doc by surprise. He yelped and his momentum overcame him. Thudding onto his rump, he still clutched the half-outlaw's boots. Dust and flies blew up into the dead air. The rawhide flap swayed in the shanty's doorway.

Without warning, the babe shrieked against Yule's breast. It squirmed in the sling. The stone had rolled away from its tomb! It was revived! All at once, the stone rolled off Yule’s heart, too. The babe was alive, the Lord was in fact merciful, and Yule was giggling.

But only for a moment, for the camp too was then suddenly resurrected.

First it was a hissing, slithering sound – like a den of trespassed vipers. The whole encampment rustled and shifted. The blood and the marble hunks of fatty meat shimmered in the dawn-sun. A shambling horde was rising all around them, casting off the rigid corpse-parts of the prior night's supping. Every putrid nook and cruel cranny proved a hiding place for cannibals; cannibals reanimated by the babe's hungry cries.

Yule was returned from the brink. He urged the paint to hurry up toward the Appaloosa. Doc had his guns finally, but he threw them down just as quick. Weeping, he fell on his knees. There were no rounds in either pistol. The old man hung his head while the shamblers pressed in from every angle. Yule jumped down from his horse and dragged the Doctor to his feet.

“They are all about us!” He cried. Then, listening to the bleating of the babe, he hauled the Doctor aloft. “But we will not die here.”

“They’re all about us,” The Doctor repeated. “They are all the fuck about us.”

“On your horse!” Sherwin demanded. He shoved the Doctor against the Appaloosa and shouted in his ear. “Right now!”

But Doc stared straight through Yule at the fiends approaching and whispered, “If you've still two bullets in that gun, you might apply one first to mine brain then the other to thine own – suicide for our preventative care.”

“I'll have no part of your pact.” Calm as a prophet ought, Yule said, “I’m going back to Red Junction, Doc. I’ll get the girl. And you shall see to your quarantine.”

The hump-backed shamblers were retarded by their hunger. It consumed their reason first. They smacked against the ramshackle shanties and busted the crude erections into pine splinters and crumbled mud-bricks. All around, the camp was being crushed flat. The ring of flesh-eaters crept closer and Yule had the sense that he and Doc were caught in a great drain where all the evil in creation was swirling. They were smack dab in the eye of a vortex and time was running out.

Luckily, devising plans was always easy for Yule Sherwin. He was accomplished at riddles and designs a-plenty: the mental acrobatics of implementing his abstract carpentry; the fusing of pragmatic engineering and creative fancy. There was not a puzzle in existence which was beyond Yule's ability to suss. The riddle-at-hand had but one answer and he formulated it fast.

He stuck his pistol against Doc's head. The babe was screaming for milk.

“Get on your fucking horse.”

The Doctor obeyed him and mounted the Appaloosa. Yule cradled the child and swung up onto his paint.

He barked, “Git-ye-up!” and set his heel into the paint's ribs. It reared and lurched forward and he slapped the Appaloosa's hind as he fled past. The Doctor's great mare was stoked. The entire camp collapsed upon them. Yule felt their palms, clammy from blood. The Damned clawed at his thighs and raked his horse. He booted the horde back as well as he could. He snapped the paint's reins – and then his plan came to fruition.

The Appaloosa flew past with the stunned Doctor bouncing haphazardly in the saddle. Yule followed in the swath cut by the Appaloosa's vamoosal. Suddenly, he was deafened by the obscene syncopation of hooves on hard-packed meat. A cloud of sopping Earth was kicked-up by the Doc's mare. The hard-charging Appaloosa emulsified the fiends, spattering the paint's breast and Yule's own face with steaming gore.

But even as he was being spackled from head-to-toe in the warm, sanguine pulp, Yule thought, “Just as planned and executed to perfection.”

The heathen-bred Appaloosa possessed a savage heart and Yule had reckoned it knew when to dispense the utmost violence. He had reckoned correctly.

As they emerged from the camp, Yule was caked in the blood of his crushed foes the way a victorious gladiator would envy. The Doctor regained his senses and clung to his pommel. They fled a long time without looking back. When at last the Doc did turn over his shoulder to ensure they had put enough distance between them and that place, Yule saw that the old man's face was streaked by tears.

“Thank you, Yule Sherwin,” he blubbered, “for not indulging my suicidal request – and instead saving me.”

That nothing is ever what it seems – that sad fact is the untenable truth, Yule figured. He saw it in the Doc's watery eyes, that same rendezvous with fate he had himself experienced. It was the culmination of fear and hope and each man with their tolerances perpetually in-flux.

He wondered suddenly if Doc had ever really been a Doc, at all. The Sheriff was not really a Sheriff, after-all. Had the men of the Lawless Camp ever really been anything other than creeps and fiends?

Yule Sherwin chuckled and shook his head.

Two bullets yet remained in his pistol.

Had he ever been a coward?

Or was he always a brave and able man, forced by false notions of fate to wear a sheepish disguise?