Consider this a teaser trailer.

Though I'm still in the process of getting my novel into printed form, I thought you fine folks might enjoy a sneak preview of what's to come.  I realize that I haven't given any details as to what it's about, nor have I even told you the title, and for that, I'm sorry.  Part of my silence has been due to me being paranoid about someone swiping my work before it's published, and the other part was an inability to settle on a decent name (the working title I'd been using when sending it out to agents and publishers was so generic that, when you type it into Amazon, 9,000 other books come up with the same title!).  However, after a lot of brain-wracking and some inspiration from my buddy Matt Erkhart, I think I've finally hit upon a title that sums up the work very well, yet hasn't been used hundreds of times already, and I've decided to unveil it here, along with the majority of the second chapter.  So cozy up to your screens, kids, and enjoy a taste of SWORDS & SIXGUNS: AN OUTLAW'S TALE, coming soon from...somewhere.

(A summation of the previous chapter: Richard Corrigan, a twenty-something outlaw in New Mexico, is thrown in jail after a botched bank robbery -- one partner got away, the other was killed. In addition to the head wound he'd sustained during the robbery attempt, he's later given a good thrashing by the sheriff while trying to escape jail, and consequently passes out from all the abuse. While unconscious, he was a dream where he's about to hanged, only to be saved by a mysterious cloaked figure, who then tells him he must travel south across the desert until he finds a strange black stone -- to Richard, it looks an awful lot like a tombstone. Not long after waking, his partner rescues him from jail, and the two of them head out into the night, with Richard doing his best to convince himself that it was just a weird dream.

It not until a little while later that he realizes they're traveling south...)

We stopped riding about an hour shy of sunrise.  There had been no sign so far that we were being followed, so we decided to let the horse rest a bit.  Reeves led the animal over to a patch of dry grass to feed while I sat on the ground and dug through his saddlebag, looking for a bottle of anything.  I found a half-full, unlabeled pint, took a swig, and deemed it good.  “How long you think before they find out I’m gone?” I called over to Reeves.

“Don’t know.  Maybe now, maybe by breakfast.”  He walked over and sat down next to me.  “Speaking of which, I’ve got some jerky in here somewhere.”  He began to look through the bag himself.  “You hungry?”

“I’ll stick with the booze.  I need something to numb the pain in my head.”

“You’re lucky you still have a head.”  He stopped rummaging for a moment, staring off across the open plain.  “Christ, I still can’t believe Kennedy’s dead.  We messed up real bad this time, Corrigan.  If Carson was here, he’d…”

“Carson’s not here,” I snapped, “and he’s never gonna be here again.  It’s been three years, so get used to it already.”  I took a long pull off the bottle.  “I’m sick to death of you dredging up his name every time we make one little mistake.”

“But this wasn’t just any mistake, we…”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Fine,” he said, and went back to looking for the jerky.  He finally found it, and the silence stretched out between us while he ate and I drank.  I knew that the alcohol wasn’t the best thing for me at the moment, but I was in so much pain that I didn’t give a damn.

After a few minutes, Reeves got chatty again.  “So, which way do you think we should head?” he asked.

“Anywhere but south.”

“But we’ve been goin’ south.  What’s wrong with it now?”

“I just don’t want to go any further that way, all right?”  I knocked back some more liquor.  “Dammit, Reeves, do you have to have a reason for everything?”

“In this case, yeah.  I think that bullet knocked your brain for a loop, Corrigan.  You’ve been actin’ strange ever since I busted you out.”

“I’m just tired and hurtin’ and sick of your whinin’.  Leave me be.”

“Richard…”

I realized then that he wasn’t going to let the matter drop.  We rarely called each other by our first names -- old habit.  “I had a really weird night before you showed up, Kyle,” I said as I placed the pint between us.  I then began to tell him about the dream I had, the things I saw…or rather what I thought I saw.  He just sat there and listened to me spill my guts.  When I finished, I turned to him and said, “Well?  Have I finally gone ‘round the bend or what?”

Now it was Reeves’s turn to take a swig off the bottle.  “I don’t know,” he said after a moment.  “The whole time we’ve known each other, you’ve always had bad dreams, but nothin’ so out of the ordinary.  I mean, you don’t believe all that shit was real or anything, do you?”

“Hell no!  But all the same, it was damned disturbing at the time, y’know?”  I gazed up at the pre-dawn sky -- most of the stars had disappeared from view, but I could still make out one or two in the growing light.  “I’ve dreamed before about dying, even wished for it quite a few times when I was awake, but this time…I was afraid, Kyle.”  He raised an eyebrow at that, but said nothing.  “I was afraid of death, of that guy in black, of that…that thing he showed me.  I just wanted him to shut up and let me go, but he kept on talkin’ and talkin’…”  I closed my eyes and rubbed my hands over my face.  “It felt real, every bit of it, maybe even more real than talking to you right now does.”

“Maybe we should quit,” he said after a while.

I dropped my hands to my lap and looked over at him.  “Come again?”

“I said we should quit.  Look, I don’t think you’re nuts, but you’re definitely starting to crack under the pressure.  It was hard enough on you last year when Stewart died, but now Kennedy’s gone too, and…”

“Don’t…you…dare…”  I held up a finger.  “Don’t you dare drag Stewart into this.”

“I’m just saying maybe it’s finally time for us to walk away from all this, try and have a normal life.”

“And what makes now any different from last year?  You didn’t even want to talk about it back then.”  I stood up, knocking dust off my denim trousers.  “Matter of fact, you called me a damn fool for bringing it up.  Now you’re the fool.”

Reeves stood up as well, saying, “Hey, hold on, that was different.”

“No, it wasn’t.  I told you that I’d had enough, but you wouldn’t let me leave, not even after…after we lost Stewart.”  My face felt hot, and I turned away from him.  “I finally got the message then: we’re stuck in this business until the day we die.”

“That’ll be a lot sooner than later, the way you’re going at it.  Y’know, for somebody who just admitted that he’s afraid to die, you sure are doing your damnedest lately to get planted in the ground.”

“So maybe I am crazy, then,” I muttered.  “Maybe the only way to make sure I stay alive is for you to stick around.”

“Richard, I’m serious.”

“So am I.”  I turned back around enough to look at him, then waved a hand at the endless expanse surrounding us.  “I don’t know where you plan on running off to, anyhow.  You know as well as I do that it doesn’t matter where we go, we’re still criminals.  It’ll catch up with us eventually, so why even bother tryin’ to get away from it?”

He tried to stare me down, but he slowly began to see the truth in what I said.  And why not?  He’d told me nearly the same thing a year ago.  “All right,” he said with a sigh, “I’ll stay.”

I bent over and picked up the pint.  “That’s good to know,” I said, then took a drink.

“You gotta do me a favor, though.”

“Sure thing.  What is it?”

“Number one: Stop drinking.”  He plucked the bottle out of my hand.  “Number two: We keep going south, strange dreams or not.”

“What the Hell for?”

“Because you need to see a damn doctor, that’s what for.”  He jerked a thumb southward.  “I remember somebody in Barrelhead saying there’s another town a few hours away.  I know it’s a risk and all, but you look like Hell, partner.  You need some rest, I need some rest…maybe we’ll get lucky and somebody’ll be willing to hide us for a couple days.”

I scoffed, but he had a point: alcohol would keep the ache in my head and ribs at bay for only so long.  Still, I couldn’t shake the fear that dream had put in me.  It’s nothing, I told myself, you just had a nightmare, same as you have damn-near every night.  This one was just a mite scarier than usual, that’s all.  You can’t keep hesitating like this.  “Damn it all to Hell,” I muttered, and rubbed my eyes.

“Come on, Corrigan,” Reeves said, “the only way you’re gonna get over this whole thing is by facing your fear.”

I grunted, then said, “Fine, let’s get moving.  Daylight will be here before we know it.”

We saddled up again, same as before, and continued heading south.  I shaded my eyes from the growing dawn from time to time, peering first behind us to check for any signs of a posse, then ahead to where this town was supposed to be.  For the first fifteen minutes, I saw nothing but desert and scrub brush in either direction, then I began to make out a few squareish shapes to the south.  I thought I saw a gleam that might have been sunlight bouncing off glass or metal, but it was too indistinct at that distance.  I did point it out to Reeves, however, and he urged the horse to move a little faster.

As we got closer to the town, I could feel that knot in my stomach return with a vengeance.  Neither one of us saw anything moving, nor could we hear anything besides the soft jingle of our gear and the horse’s hoofbeats on the hard New Mexico plain.  Not very encouraging, to say the least.  About a hundred feet or so from the first building, we stopped at a billboard covered in signs and adverts for the various goods, services, and nostrums this particular town could provide you with.  Barely visible beneath all this nonsense was a wooden placard declaring:

Welcome to

HADLEY

God Bless You All!

At least that’s what it must have originally said -- someone had taken some red paint and written “SAVE” in huge letters over the word “Bless”.  Religious nut, probably.  I looked past the sign at the town itself.  The buildings seemed well cared for, but there appeared to be no life in or around them -- not so much as a fly buzzing a manure pile, even.  “You sure those folks in Barrelhead weren’t talking about a ghost town?” I asked Reeves.

“Pretty sure,” he answered, but I could hear the doubt in his voice.  “Maybe this is an ambush, you know?  Maybe that posse chasin’ after me last night headed up thisaway.”

“If that’s so, they sure are bad at being nonchalant about it.”  I pulled my gun and told him to go forward.

The horse, unfortunately, had other ideas.  When Reeves tapped it in the side with his spurs, it refused to move.  He gave the reins a tug and tried again, but the dumb thing just shook its head and whinnied.  “What is this, you on a lunch break or something?” Reeves said.  “Get moving!”  He dug his spurs in, and the horse got moving all right: it reared up, screaming and kicking its front hooves in the air.  Not sitting in the saddle proper to begin with, I flew right off and hit the ground butt-first.  I scrambled away on my hands and knees, trying to get as much distance as I could between me and the horse, while Reeves hung on for dear life and struggled to get it under control.  The two of them danced around for a minute like some crazy rodeo act before Reeves gave up and jumped off the horse.  The moment he left the saddle, the horse broke north, back the way we came, foam flying off its muzzle.  We just sat there and watched it go, helpless to do anything but choke on trail dust.

After a minute or so, I got up, walked over to where my hat landed when I fell, and picked it up.  I whacked it against my leg a couple times to knock off the dirt before putting it back on, saying, “Well, at least now we know there ain’t no ambush, ‘cause if there is, they missed a perfectly good opportunity to blow us both to Hell.”

“I don’t know what happened,” Reeves said, gesturing in the direction our ride went -- he was still sprawled out on the ground.  “I’ve never seen a horse go crazy like that for no reason.”

“Maybe it just got sick of us riding double.”  I looked down the main street of Hadley.  “There’d better be somebody here,” I said, “or else we are in serious trouble.”  I began to walk into the town proper, revolver out and cocked.  Reeves followed a moment later, pausing only to collect his Winchester which, thankfully, had fallen out of the saddle holster before our mount took off.  The town was small, but it appeared to be prosperous, despite being in the middle of nowhere.  I noticed that many of the doors and windows were boarded up (from the inside, no less) and drifts of sand forming on parts of the boardwalk, but otherwise, it looked inhabited.

There were just no people.

Reeves stepped up onto the boardwalk and poked his head into one of the few open storefronts: a tailor and dressmaker’s shop, according to the sign above the eave.  “Hello?” he called out.  “Anybody in here?”  No one responded, but he went inside anyways.  I continued on down the street, searching for any clue as to why this place was deserted.  As I approached the first cross-street, Reeves shouted my name, so I turned around and ran back to the shop.  He was leaning against the doorway, his eyes wide and face pale.

“What is it?  You find somebody?” I asked as I hopped up onto the boardwalk.

“Sort of.  You’ll see.”  He nodded towards the shop, then pulled the bandana hanging around his neck up over his mouth and nose before heading back inside.  I followed a few paces behind him, taking in the scene: the whole store was in disarray, with everything that wasn’t nailed down tossed about.  Bolts of cloth and pieces of garments were strewn across the floor, and a dressing dummy had been knocked over in one corner, the fabric-covered chest shredded open.  “What the Hell happened in here?” I wondered aloud.  “Indian trouble, you think?”

“This is nothing,” Reeves said, a slight tremble in his voice, “you gotta see the upstairs.”  He led me to a stairway at the back of the shop, then turned to me and tugged slightly at his bandana.  “You might want to do the same.”

I didn’t get what he meant, then I noticed the smell: a gut-twisting, rancid stench, like a carcass left out in the sun for a few days.  I had an inkling of what Reeves found and pulled up my own bandana to stifle the smell.  He led the way up the stairs, and I followed with absolutely no desire to see what the source of the smell was.  At the top was an open door, cracks in the wood near the handle and hinges from Reeves forcing it open, and bloody scratches all over the surface from someone -- or something -- that tried to do the same before him and failed.  Beyond the door, the second floor opened up into one huge room -- it must have served as the home for the shopkeeper’s family.  There were a couple beds along one wall, a table and chairs along another…and about ten dead bodies.  They were scattered all about the place, some laying on beds, others sprawled out on the floor, but they all looked the same: skin shriveled and turning black, eyes bulging from bloody sockets, and expressions of pure terror carved into every face.  I staggered back slightly, fighting the urge to throw up.  “Sweet Jesus,” I whispered, “what did this?”

“I was hoping you might know,” Reeves answered.  “The door was blocked from the inside, but it gave way after a couple shoves.  There’s no wounds that I can see, no signs of a fight.”  He threw his hands up in exasperation.  “These people barricaded themselves in here and just died.”

I took off my hat and waved it in front of my face to disperse the stench a bit.  “Maybe there was an epidemic, like typhoid or cholera…they could’ve been quarantined up here.”

“Then why was the barricade on the inside of the room?  It’s like they were hiding from something.”

“Yeah, but what?  And for how long?”

Reeves shrugged.  “Got me.  These people could’ve died yesterday or a month ago for all I can tell.”  He walked over to one of the bodies laid out on a bed: a man, judging by the clothes, but that was the only distinguishing feature left of the original person.  The skin on the face had stretched tight in the dry heat, giving it a leering, skull-like appearance.  Its milky-white eyes stared up at the ceiling, and a few wisps of hair still clung stubbornly to the peeling head.  Reeves leaned over for a closer look, muttering, “Hell, could’ve been a year ago…”

Suddenly, the corpse reached up and grabbed Reeves by the arm, then sat up straight.  “Warm…” the thing hissed out from between its cracked lips.  “You’re warm…so cold down here…”

Reeves screamed hysterically and tried to push it off, but it wouldn’t let go.  I just stood there watching the whole thing, too much in shock to scream myself.  The thing managed to get to its feet, then yanked off Reeves’ bandana and wrapped its bony arms around his waist -- it looked like it wanted to kiss him.  “Shoot it!” he ordered as he forced the thing’s putrid face away from his own.

“I can’t!  I might hit you!”

“Do you really think I care about that right now?  Shoot the damn thing!”

Without thinking twice about it, I brought my gun up and fired.  The bullet neatly pierced the corpse’s skull, then embedded itself in the wall behind them.  The corpse stiffened for a moment before slumping to the floor, lifeless again.  Once it was down, Reeves began to stomp on its head until it split open.  The blackish ooze that splattered all over his boot was like nothing I’d ever seen before, especially not coming out of some guy’s head.  Reeves barely took notice of it, he just kept kicking and stomping on the corpse, snapping brittle bones and ripping open dead flesh.  Throughout it all, Reeves’s face was locked in a tight grimace, his breath whistling in and out from between his gritted teeth.

“Reeves, it’s dead, stop it already,” I told him, grabbing his arm.  He just shook me off and kept on kicking.  “Reeves…Kyle, stop it!” I shouted, this time taking him by the shoulders and pulling him away from the body.  He stared right through me for a moment, the expression on his face probably quite similar to the one I’d had when he broke me out of jail the night before.  My distress, however, had been brought on by nothing more than bad dreams, while what he’d just experienced was much more horrifying than anything I’d gone through in that cell.

“Corrigan?” he said after a time.

“Yeah?”

“You can let go now.”

“Huh?  Oh, sure.”  I took my hands off his shoulders, and he stepped away from me, his hands trembling slightly.  I couldn’t blame him.  “C’mon,” I said, hitching a thumb towards the door, “let’s get the Hell out of here.”

“No!”  He shouted so loudly that I jumped back a little.  He then slipped his rifle off his shoulder.  “We’ve got to get the rest of them!”

“Rest of…Reeves, they’re dead already, remember?  You checked them yourself.”

“I checked that thing too,” he answered, pointing at the mangled corpse that attacked him, “but it wasn’t dead.  Leastways, not all the way dead.”  He cocked the rifle.  “I’m not taking any chances with the rest of ‘em.”

“Christ, Reeves,” I muttered, then reached out and tried to pull him towards the door.  As my hand came towards him, though, he pointed the rifle straight at me.  He said nothing aloud, but I could read the look in his eyes well enough: if I tried to stop him, I’d get a bullet in my own head for my trouble.  I’d never seen him act so crazy before.  Yeah, I told myself, like you’ve been a perfect example of sanity lately.  I swallowed hard, then said quietly, “I’m going downstairs.  You’ve got five minutes to do whatever you want up here, then we light out of this place.  Okay?”

“Okay,” he replied, but he didn’t lower the rifle.  I stepped backwards through the doorway, then turned and went down the stairwell, half-expecting Reeves to take a potshot at me behind my back.

The first shot went off as I reached the ground floor -- I flinched at the sudden roar that shattered the dead quiet.  “Just save some bullets for the posse, Reeves,” I mumbled as I pulled down my bandana and took in a lungful of fresh air.  It tasted good, and I leaned against the shop’s counter to drink it in.  My head was beginning to pound again -- coupled with that stink upstairs, it made me feel like I might puke for sure.  God, I needed some sleep.  That, and some real food and some decent doctorin’, and I’d be tip-top again.  But with a posse potentially on our asses, no horse, and Reeves trying to kill dead people, it didn’t look like I’d be getting any of that anytime soon.

As I stood there listening to Reeves’ intermittent rifle shots, I spied a notebook of some sort laying on the floor.  Needing a distraction, I picked it up and began to flip through it.  It contained nothing terribly interesting at first -- records of payment, measurements, idle sketches -- but the last entry definitely caught my eye: “Aug. 24-74: blue Gingham dress, Mrs. D. Foley - $2.00”.  It wasn’t the merchandise so much as the date that held my attention.  Unless I had my days mixed up, it was already September 2nd, which meant this entire town had quietly dropped dead within nine days.  That didn’t seem possible, especially with Barrelhead being only six hours away at most.  The whole time we’d been casing out the town for our bank job, none of us had heard about an epidemic or Indian attack or anything happening right down the road.  We sure as Hell didn’t hear about any walking corpses, either.

I walked out of the shop and back into the street, anxious to find some more clues to clear up this mystery.  It wasn’t as easy a job as I hoped, for I soon discovered that most of the other buildings were boarded up pretty tight.  When I could get into a place, I found nothing other than more dead bodies -- luckily, none of them moved.  I was about to give up and head back to Reeves when I spied some piles of dirt and lumber near the edge of town.  Probably some sort of mass grave, I figured, but I decided to check it out anyway.  As I got closer, I could see that it was some sort of shallow pit, no more than two feet deep, and I realized that it was the beginnings of a cellar -- someone had started work on a new building before the whole town kicked off.  No big mystery about that.

Then I saw the black object from my dream laying right in the middle of the cellar pit.

My blood turned to ice as I stood there, rubbing my eyes and hoping it would disappear.  It looked just like I remembered it: a pitch-black stone, about eight feet across and eight-sided, and every inch of its surface covered in strange symbols.  Oh, God, this can’t be real, I thought, and tried to shout for Reeves, but my voice was gone, just like in my dream.  Before I even realized what I was doing, I stepped down in to the pit and approached the thing slowly, stopping a few feet away from it, a sickening feeling of dread filling my gut.  The stone stuck up out of the earth about two inches, and it appeared that someone had attempted to pry it out even further with a couple of crowbars, which were wedged beneath one end of the massive slab.  In the center was a fist-sized hole, the same shape as the stone itself.  That hole seemed important, but I couldn’t remember if I’d seen anything in there in my dream.  But it was only a dream, I thought, how in the world can this be possible?  Then again, I’d also just seen a corpse get up and attack my friend -- up until we got to this place, I wouldn’t have thought that was possible either.  Were the two things related somehow?  Hell, I was just a bank robber, what did I know about crazy things like this?

My ruminations were cut short by a quick, sharp crack of thunder.  I looked up and saw ugly black storm clouds rolling in from the west, which was puzzling, as the sky had been mostly clear when we’d arrived.  I dug out my pocket watch to check the time, and realized that I’d been so focused on checking out the town that I’d lost a half-hour.  I cursed myself for not paying closer attention.  In our situation, rain was a mixed blessing: it’d cover our tracks if we hightailed it across the desert, but we’d also get soaked to the bone.  I decided to go find Reeves and weigh our options, not that we had many.  As I walked back to the edge of the pit, I caught a sparkle of something out of the corner of my eye.  Curious, I bent down and pulled out of the dirt a bluish-green shard of quartz crystal, about three inches long and as thick as my thumb.  The colors within appeared to swirl and pulse with warmth in time with my heartbeat as it sat in my palm, which I thought was rather strange.  Even stranger still, the feeling of dread inside of me seemed to pass the longer I held onto it.  I ran the pad of my thumb along the shard, and as I did so, I noticed the edges of it were jagged, like it had broken off of a larger object.  I glanced back at the black slab, thinking perhaps that this was what went in the hole, but if that was so, then where was the rest of it?

Thunder rumbled overhead again, bringing my attention back to the more pressing problem.  I tucked the crystal into my shirt pocket, figuring on giving it a closer look later, and continued on my way back to the shop where I’d last seen Reeves.  I was halfway there when I felt the first droplet hit my cheek, then another as the clouds ripped open over the wide New Mexico plain.  The main street quickly began to turn into a muddy mush that sucked at my boots with every step, and the rain rolled off the brim of my battered hat like a waterfall.  Slogging across the plain in this mess isn’t going to be much fun, I thought.

I found Reeves outside the shop, sitting on the edge of the boardwalk with his head hanging low.  His Winchester was laying beside him, inches away from being soaked by the downpour.  He didn’t even look up when I hopped up onto the boardwalk and approached him.  “Reeves?  You okay?” I asked, but I got no response.  I knelt down beside him and went to touch him on the shoulder, then stopped when I saw that his entire body was trembling.  “Reeves...hey, c’mon, you’re scaring me.”

“I g-g-got ‘em,” he finally stammered.  “They’re all dead now, th-that’s for sure.”  He then looked up at me, and I could see that his face was slick with sweat, coupled with a pale, feverish complexion.

“That’s good to know,” I answered, but inside I was panicking.  Reeves was in no shape to travel, and I had a horrible feeling about what the cause might be.  “You feel all right, partner?”

“S-sure!” he said, suddenly perking up.  “Just a little tired, that’s all...just need to r-r-rest a bit...”  His voice trailed off as his head dropped low again.

Oh God.  “Kyle, listen to me: that stone in my dream that I told you about, it’s here, no bullshit.  I don’t know what that means, but I doubt it’s good.  You understand me?  We can’t stay here.”  He nodded, and I breathed a sigh of relief.  “Good, then let’s get moving before this storm gets any worse.”  I slipped a hand under his armpit and tried to pull him to his feet, but he was nothing but dead weight.  “Come on, dammit!” I yelled, but once again, he didn’t respond.  I managed to drag him away from the edge of the boardwalk, but when I let go, he merely laid there on the planks, breathing shallowly and moaning, “I’m c-cold,” an eerie echo of the corpse-thing’s ramblings.

This wasn’t right.  Hell, this whole damn town wasn’t right.  Berserk horses, dead people who didn’t stay dead, a disease that crippled you within an hour of catching it, things seen in dreams becoming real...what in the world had I walked into?  I gazed out over the dead town, watching the sky light up in jagged patches from lightning, then shake from the deafening crack of thunder.  One thunderclap seemed to go on forever, then I recognized it as the sound of horsehooves slapping the ground.  I jumped off the boardwalk and into the street, staring towards the north through a sheet of rain.  I couldn’t tell how many were riding our way, but they were coming in way too fast to be casual visitors.  “Reeves, get up!  We’ve got company!”  I scrambled back to where he lay and tried to pick him up again, this time succeeding in getting him to his feet.  He mumbled something, but I couldn’t make it out.  “Look alive, pal.  It’s time to show that damned sheriff why we’re worth two hundred apiece.”  I slapped his face a couple times in an effort to rouse him some more, but all he did was loll his head back.

The posse was nearly close enough to see us by now, so out of desperation, I hauled him into the shop and dumped him behind the counter.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to go pick up his rifle before the newcomers rode up the main street, their mounts bucking just as wildly as our own had done.  I managed to shut the door before they passed in front of the shop, but between Reeves’s rifle and my muddy footprints, it wouldn’t be long before they figured out where we’d holed up.  “Search every damn building!” I could hear the sheriff shout over the horses’ strangled cries.  “Shoot those bastards on sight!”  I hunkered down behind the counter, my pistol in hand as I stared hard at the door.  The first one of ‘em that dared open it would get a bullet for his troubles.

“We’re gonna die, aren’t we?”  I turned and saw Reeves attempting to sit up.  His eyes were glassy, but he seemed coherent again.

“Nonsense,” I replied, “we’ll be fine.  This is just like Saundersville.”

He coughed, making a thick, phlegmy sound.  “Carson died in Saundersville.”

“Yeah, but we didn’t,” I answered sharply, then asked, “Did you see a back door in this place?”  He shook his head.  “Damn, that means we’ll have to run out the front.  You up for some runnin’?”

“I...I don’t think I can do it, Richard.  I keep...I’m not sure what it is.”  He stared down at his shaking hands, saying, “It’s like I black out or something.”  Someone outside started yelling -- I think they’d found some of those dead bodies -- and Reeves tried to stifle another cough.  “Forget about me, get your own ass out of here,” he told me once he had it under control.  He couldn’t do anything about the look of fear in his eyes, though.

“No way.  You didn’t leave me to die in Barrelhead, so what makes you think I’d abandon you here?”

“I’ll slow you down.”  We could hear more yelling, then a gunshot.  “Besides, it’ll be easier if we split up.  We can meet up somewheres later when it’s safe.”

I thought about it for a moment, then said, “You remember that old hidey-hole in Texas?  By the river?”

“Of course.”

“All right then, let’s both head there.  If one of us doesn’t hear from the other in a month...”  I let the thought trail off.

Reeves smiled.  “You’ll make it, partner.”

“And so will you.”  I stood up, saying, “Stay low for a little longer.  Maybe I can take a few out before you go.”  I made ready to run, opening up the door a crack to peer outside.

“Corrigan?”

“Yeah, Reeves?”

“You...you weren’t kidding about that stone, were you?  Finding it here, I mean?”

I looked over at him crouched behind the counter.  “No, I wasn’t kidding,” I replied.  The expression on his face went from fear to utter disbelief.  He opened his mouth, as if he had one more thing to tell me, but I didn’t bother to listen: I’d seen a chance to run and jumped out the door.

TO BE CONTINUED!