The Natives worship dirt itself, because they believe their ancestors were birthed directly from the Earth. Despite his Christian upbringing, Yule Sherwin reckoned the heathens were probably right. He knew firsthand how it felt, anyway. He too had surely emerged from the mountain as a feller hewn of stone and blood.

“You owe me a rifle,” he said. He inspected the pistol he was carrying, estimating the straightness of its barrel by squinting one eye shut and aiming the gun out yonder at nothing.

“Don't I know it,” Doc answered. He had dismounted to sift through the remnants of some chewed cowboys. Even with the dawn-star fully risen, there was no sussing precisely just how many men had died here. Between the Lawless Camp and Red Junction the road had been marked with discarded carcasses, some absent their scattered parts like the aftermath of an unintended dynamiting, stray hands and jaws and scraps of scalps.

“No luck?” Yule asked.

“I'm notin' a pattern.” Doc wiped his hands clean on his shirt and headed back toward his mare. “Each gun I find is empty. These fellers took their shots but it just weren't enough.”

“We'd best make the most of our two rounds then, eh?” Yule tucked the pistol in the front of his trousers and started his paint along the path.

“Wait up, Sherwin.”

Up yonder was the end of the line. Red Junction's planked storefronts had their shutters drawn, but a different sort of commerce was occurring up and down the thoroughfare. Gangs of shamblers heaped to feed upon the fallen. Other, solitary grotesques limped along, all of them suffering the same profane tics in their quest for blood – lunging at every moving thing, even their fellow ghouls, indiscriminate as rabid wolves. They groaned, utterly inarticulate yet capable of expressing immense hunger, same as a rumbling belly.

“Ain't no way we can keep on this road,” the Doctor observed.

“We'll go by the alley.” Yule steered his paint off the trail.

The narrow alleyway would only accept the horses if they rode single-file. Peering ahead revealed the residue of the prior night's tumult. A crate was smashed behind Zeke & Son's Prospector Supply. Pans and sifters were stamped flat. Yule saw no horses tied behind the shops. He figured it could have been a sign that the proprietors had managed to mount and escape, but it seemed more likely to him that the horses had been et up whole – bones and all. Neighboring Yule's shop on the near side, the Butcher's place had its rear door wide open. Perhaps the Butcher had fled in such a hurry he'd forgotten to shut it, or maybe it was ajar because the Damned had forced their way inside. What if they were still there?

Yule realized the voice of his mind was slipping back into hopeless morbidity.

“See anything?” Doc asked.

“Zilch,” Yule whispered, “but we ought mind that unlatched rear-entry at the Butcher's – no telling what may be looming within.”

“Reckon you can shut that kid up?”

The babe cried like a perturbed duckling. It had tuckered itself out during their flight from the Lawless Camp, but the squall had started up again once Red Junction became visible. The child squawked and suckled at nothing. Yule cradled it more securely, insulating its cries with his jacket.

“You satisfied?” he asked, looking back. Doc nodded. His skin was pale and his eyes were red from rubbing.

They rode into the alley, passing behind the Post Office and the Prospector Supply. The horses swerved as much as the narrow way would allow, hoping to avoid trampling the disheveled pans and sifters. They made their way around while only stepping on a few. The tinny crumpling sound of the hoof-crimped pans wasn't so unlike the babe's hushed mewing. As they neared Yule's shop it came time to confront the dark hollow of the Butcher's place. He aimed his pistol at the opening. He cocked it and peeked inside, scanning the dim interior for signs of life, or worse – Undeath.

The backroom of the Butcher's shop had once served as cold-storage. Half-melted bricks of ice were scattered haphazardly on the floor like miniature glaciers. Steam was rising from the puddles. A few primal cuts were still hung from the ceiling by hooks: fat-backs, beef rounds and whole rib-cages. Other cuts had been wrenched down from their stations and had been et in their mostly-frozen state.

Yule traced a line of linked sausages, dotting across the planked floor, until they finally disappeared into the mouth of a cold, prone fiend. The creep's eyes were frozen open and the sausages lolled out of its open maw like a ludicrous tongue. Yule's trigger-finger flexed but only for a moment. The creep posed no immediate threat. It was plainly dead, a victim of its own ecstatic binge. It had gorged till its abdomen burst. The glutton's guts poured out from the cavity. Yule belched up a mouthful of sour bile. He re-swallowed it. The glutton's fissured belly was pure putridity, like a rotten, mushy gourd – but even worse was the uncanny similarity between the creep's intestines and the sausage-rope.

“Christ,” Yule cursed.

“Goddamn,” Doc concurred.

The babe squealed gaily.

Yule climbed down from his horse. Keeping hold if its reins, he led it to the door of his woodworks while soothing the babe with whispered sweet-nothings.

“The lacquer is within my workshop,” he said.

“Let's get inside.” The Doctor lowered himself off the Appaloosa.

At the threshold, Yule pulled open half of the bisected, barn-style door and stole a peek inside. His heart beat once, pushing blood to his body's every extreme. His imagination acted even faster.

Before he could perceive the shadowy workshop for what it truly was, he envisioned a spectrum of progressively darker possibilities. Misty might still be asleep. She might have awakened and watched through the porthole in his loft as the massacre of Red Junction played out. She'd be inconsolably terrified.

Or, she might be dead.

Misty might be ripped open. Her pieces might be spread throughout his workshop. Her whole reservoir of blood might be drained and sopped up by the sawdust on the floor.

Or might be, Misty was still being et right then. It might come to pass in the next moment that he would stumble upon a posse in his own workshop – a posse of familiar-looking ghouls, fellers he used to know – each with a portion of Misty. The babe giggled.

Yule blinked his eyes and they were wet. He squinted into the workshop and the shadows stirred. Then he heard Dude growling.

“At-a-boy!” Yule dragged his paint inside the workshop. Quietly, he praised Dude for being, “Such a good boy!”

But Dude stayed in the shadows and kept snarling at his master.

“The dog thinks you're one of them.” Doc brought the Appaloosa inside. “You ought wash that blood off ye.”

Yule had never bothered to wipe his brow, even. He had ridden behind the Appaloosa to make way out of the Lawless Camp and he reckoned he was still wearing their gore as a kind of trophy. He spit in each of his palms, rubbed them together and then against his own cheeks.

“It's me, boy.” The dog inched toward its master. He sniffed the bloody crevices of Yule's jacket and trousers. He whined. Yule opened his coat and let Dude get a whiff of the baby. He said, “Meet your new sibling.” Dude was satisfied with the results of his snout-led inspection. His master was no ghoul. Next he went and nosed the paint, his old friend. Cautiously, he approached the massive Appaloosa.

“Where's Misty?” Yule asked. When the dog did not reply, he turned to the Doctor. “Do you reckon she's still slept?”

“I can't say,” Doc explained. “We were gone longer than I'd thought we'd be – though I did dose the girl something fierce and ether certainly aids one in sleeping.”

Yule maneuvered through the cramped workshop, intent on the spiraling staircase. He twisted past his incomplete works. This was a sepulcher of his own cobbling. The prefabricated coffin-parts mocked him from over yonder. It was too late to be ashamed of his sloth. Wasn't any use. The world had ended and nullified all those contracts he had failed to live up to.

Only one oath worth honoring did remain.

Yule started up the stairs. The baby was not making a sound.

Dude quit sniffing the Appaloosa's shoes. He whined and chased after his master.

Yule wondered, hadn't he shut the door connecting the workshop to the showroom before he and Doc left town?

Surely he had.

Then why did he notice it cracked a few inches as he was climbing the staircase?

He kept ascending, hoping against hope, cautiously calling. “Misty?”

The sun shone into the loft through the octagonal porthole. Coming up the stairs, Yule saw where the pane was interrupted in its center by the perfectly circular bullet-hole. He had bored it himself when he shot Rex Westman just two nights past, but that might as well have been a lifetime ago. The light shone through the fractured pane the way it ought through a prism. Asymmetric solar runes decorated the floor, glinting more brightly than regular sunlight. At first and for a merciful moment, Yule was blinded by those dancing lights.

But then – the bed was empty.

And its blankets – gone.

And lastly but not least – Misty had vanished, too.

“Misty?” he pleaded.

But he knew better. She was gone and he was again to blame. Just like Emma. Just like his boy. Yule found them in his mural and his eyes stung. He sat on the edge of the bed and slipped off his jacket. Unslinging the babe from his side, he laid it flat on the mattress. The child stared up at him, unblinking and silent.

“I dosed her something fierce,” the Doctor said as he slunk into the loft.

“The door downstairs was cracked,” Yule muttered. “I know it was not that way when we rode out.”

“She can't have made it far.”

“If that ain't the indisputable truth,” Yule said.

“I'm sorry, Yule.”

“Why didn't you give her a proper dose?”

“Pardon?”

“Did you want the ether for yourself?”

“Now Yule—”

“Was that it, you old fucking quack?”

Dude stretched himself out on his back and let his tongue flop from his mouth. It was his most adorable trick, but Yule did not even notice. He shot up from the bed and confronted the Doctor.

“I'm sorry!” Doc wept. The shamblers out on the road moaned in-kind, imitating his sadness. He held his hands up to guard his head, and Yule grabbed him by the wrists.

Yule Sherwin stood at the brink of murder.