Averting his gaze from the carnage below, he saw Misty mounting the invention first. The Sheriff gave her a hand up. Yule held his end of the bridge firmly in place.

Misty clutched the rungs with her good hand, dragging herself forward in increments. Her bandaged nub slid along the ladder's outer track, helping keep her balanced. Once begun, she did not cease nor slow her motion even a bit. She kept her eyes fixed on Yule and never downward – just the way he'd told her. Even with the ladder bouncing and wiggling as she traversed the expanse, she kept her eyes straight-forward and un-blinking. At last, Misty came barreling off the contraption and squeezed Yule tight. She kissed his cheeks and then she patted his breast and his neck and his arms.

“Yule, are you hurt? You're covered from boot-to-nose in blood!”

“I am well now,” he whispered, and then they embraced while the Doctor and the Sheriff and a whole congregation of flesh-feasters watched. Behind him, the baby softly squealed. Perhaps, thought Yule, this was the moment they were all three married to each other.

She nuzzled against his collarbone. He could have sat there awhile, but the Doc was already pointing out across the road to warn them. “We've got the next coming on over.”

At the other end of the invention the Bearded Lady was summoning her courage.

“Come along now!” Yule called, and he passed Misty off upon Dude, who lapped the tears from her cheeks.

Yule stabilized his end of the ladder and the Beard came crawling out onto the slatted crossing. It bowed to accommodate her mass. Yule was only guessing at her femininity. Truth be told, he couldn't suss her sex for the life of him. She was broad-shouldered and fur-laden as a feller, but her movements were refined and graceful; downright ladylike. As she reached the mid-point, the invention creaked and the Beard screamed. The timbre of her terror sealed it for Yule – that Beard was a woman.

Over his shoulder, the babe kicked up a giggling ruckus.

“Whose kid is this?” Misty asked, rushing to scoop up the babe.

Yule had no breath to answer. In the middle of the thoroughfare, the invention broke. Beneath, the Damned howled.

The Beard dropped into their eager clutches. Man or woman – she was brimming with blood. The mob tore her apart. Her torso erupted as if a charge had been detonated in her womb. In no time at all her meat was strung out upon the road. Didn't matter if the Beard had been a guy or a gal – her guts were gruesome garlands hung from claw-to-claw and mouth-to-mouth. She came apart at indignant intervals, at the crotch and armpits, and a false-bosom spilled in the dirt, solving the mystery once and for all.

The Beard's screaming was only cut short by the removal of her lungs.

The Doctor cried out for his deity to save them.

With the babe still in her arms, Misty pressed against Yule's shoulder and shrieked in his ear. They huddled together but neither could be consoled. The Beard was evaporating down there. The supper bell had rung and from the far-ends of the thoroughfare the famished masses shambled in faster, heeding its call.

“Goddammit,” Yule cussed.

The plan had gone awry and fucking fast. Yule saw that sentiment reflected in the still-marooned Sheriff's hollow stare. The invention splayed out, forming a many-runged “V” across the road, propped up at each extreme by the balcony and the loft. The clever gears in Yule's skull ground to a halt in the Beard's viscera. He could devise no escape route for the Sheriff.

In that instant, the Sheriff swung over the railing and dropped from the balcony. His boots thudded onto the road. The far half of Yule's invention slid from the balcony and banged against the dirt outside the bordello. Reason was returned some to Yule. He snatched the length of ladder which still hung from the loft before it too could fall, knowing that the Sheriff’s lone hope was to ascend.

The babe was the only one in the loft breathing. The grown folk were rapt by the Sheriff's ordeal. It was lucky the Beard had been a man-sized meal, because the flock's dedication to devouring her allowed the Lawman to proceed unnoticed a moment. Righting himself with his pistol in hand, he sped across the thoroughfare. Yule held fast to his part of the ladder while its sheared, broken end was knocked about by the shamblers below in the rush. He couldn't hold on much longer. It was already slipping away.

“Hurry on up!” he cried hoarsely.

The swilling paused for less than a second. A solitary ghoul lifted its snout and caught the Lawman's scent. Then the Damned were coming from all-abouts; out from the bordello and Yule's showroom, out from the Butcher's adjacent – all of them streaming toward the Sheriff.

The Sheriff drew down on one of the creeps rustling Yule's ladder and put a bullet in its brain. Then he blew its partner's head off, too. They fell in a twitching heap. The Lawman planted his boot on the freshly-murdered carrion-mound and vaulted onto the ladder.

As he came scrambling up, a shambler suddenly grabbed his ankle and the Lawman kicked his boot clean off to shake free. Yule saw desperation etched all over the Sheriff's face and couldn't help but recall the Lawman's past, how he'd had swum out from an avalanche, how he'd nearly been drowned once by the suck of quicksand. When the Sheriff finally spilled into the loft he was gasping for air. Doc helped drag him away from the ledge and Yule kicked the broken invention away. It toppled onto the flock and they tossed it aside for it was not something which could be et.

Still gasping for air, the Sheriff said, “That might have gone better – but thank the Lord for ye, Yule Sherwin.”

“Please don't...” Yule began. He stared down at the road. The shamblers were ambling back into his shop. The Beard was almost all gone. “Please don't mention it, Sheriff – and not to our Lord, in particular.”

Yule looked around the room. They four – five and six if he counted the dog and the babe – might have been the only survivors in town.

The question was, for just how long?

Downstairs his showroom was more infested with each passing moment. At some point the sheer volume of the shamblers would overflow the barricade. He wondered if ghouls had wormed around back yet to better assault the structure from both sides. If they hadn't already, Yule figured they would soon. In the loft, the whole fellowship was silent. Even the dog had ceased its stressed panting. The babe had gone to sleep. The Doctor was mouthing a silent prayer.

Out loud he concluded, “Amen.” And then with ragged urgency he asked, “What now? Where ought we run?”

“I'd reckon to the east.” Yule said. “Or at least not West – not by a course which passes that Lawless Camp.”

“Shit.” Misty shook her head. “Is there anyone left alive?”

And the Lawman counted, “One, at the very least.” He pointed off over the yonder rooftops. “Behind the palisade.”

The survivors became silent again while surveying the impenetrable Westman Compound. Across the intervening divide Red Junction was a wasteland. Shreds of trouser and flannel were plastered to the dirt by loose, dried guts. Independent of bodies, arms and legs and ribs and skulls were heaped in gross mounds. Spikes of bone stuck out like porcupine quills. Shamblers sifted through the wreckage like fellers panning for Color. It was Biblical decimation, the kind God alone could condone.

But out beyond the killing fields, Westman's palisades were proving impervious. In the early-morning light, their sharpened-timber tips were gleaming and the tall beams were black as obsidian. From their elevated vantage, and without the loft's wall to impede their view, the survivors could see him, even – the Devil Rex Westman. The eye of his cigar flared in the window of his cabin's top-story. He had been watching them the whole while. Squinting, Yule could suss out a sparkle as Westman tilted a shot-glass of whiskey.

Misty said what they were all thinking, “That prick deserves sanctuary least-of-fucking-all.”

“Well put,” the Doctor concurred.

“Most,” thirded the Lawman.

Yule looked them each in the eye. It is said that the eyes are the best windows by which a man's soul might be viewed – but Yule didn't see much. Their eyes were all foggy from remembering, their conscious-selves drawn from their bodies and back toward times gone-by.

Misty, he supposed, was reliving a scene so similar to Red Junction's demise: her poor, accursed Indian kin.

The Sheriff was no doubt repeating the blood-oath he'd first sworn so long ago to the genuine Sterling Penrose. He'd taken that oath every day since and Yule knew it.

The Doctor was hollow, too – lost in past-lives and nostalgia, no doubt.

All of them; long ago murdered by Rex Westman. Yule included, he reckoned – though he was the odd-man out. He didn't really mind having been killed recently. He wasn't so fond of that old Yule Sherwin. He was sorta grateful the former him had been erased.

He studied his fellow survivors.

“The quarantine,” he breathed. “You said it must be imposed by fire.”

“Pardon?” the Lawman piped up.

“The sick ought be contained to this valley alone.” Doc said, coming out of his reverie. Nodding his head, he rose to his feet. “And the best medicine is sometimes the torch.”

“Even palisades fear fire,” Yule surmised. “Mayhap we ought draw the fuse to Westman’s door. Burn him out. I've a whole cask filled with lacquer down below – fitted with a spigot for easy dispensing.”

“Burn him out,” Misty echoed. Yule helped her stand. “When that compound crumbles to ash, I'd sure be pleased if I could be the one guns that fucker down.”

“I’ve known him many years,” Doc explained. “He’s a moveable plague. If we don’t shut him down now, I guarantee he will revisit this sick upon others. Same as he did to your Indians, girl. Same as he did to them, so’s he could seize their territory and trap their beavers. For fucking commerce! I tell you three: we ought burn the town with him in it. We ain’t arsonists, we ain’t assassins – we ought act as instruments of medicine! But we’d better make damn sure he burns along with this town – anything less and we’ll have treated the symptom alone.”

“Then it is settled?” Yule asked.

His fellow survivors answered in their own ways: the men nodding, the dog panting, and Misty whispering, “Let’s fuckin’ get ‘im”.