A deluge of thoughts and fears cascaded through Red's mind as his captors pushed him towards the edge of the glade, where the darkness sat mobilized and impossibly thick, as if testing the boundaries of the bonfire's luminescence. At the point where the glade ended, the ground descended into a steep slope, a slippery, wet terrain covered in leaves and underbrush. From Red's standpoint, it's symbolism was offensively obvious. It was the abyss. Eternity. Death.

He turned and faced his captors, their figures swayed before the great fires like religious supplicants. Featureless monoliths, filled with spite and violence. In the dim light he saw the pistol raised and pointed his direction. Instinctually, he surged forward, burying his shoulder into the nearest body. The soldier emitted a low mixture of a growl and a groan and buckled neatly in half, collapsing to the ground.

Red turned to the pistoleer just in time to see the muzzle flash and feel the impact. The jolt was deadening and all-encompassing. His body, free of his control, tumbled backwards into the darkness. The old man's mind detatched from the physical plain and he was only vaguely aware of his body, turning and twisting as it careened through the night down the face of the hill.

Within a few elongated moments, Red himself joined the darkness and then felt nothing at all.

Only a vague perception of existance encased in darkness. His heavy eyelids parted ever so slightly and the sunlight and the realization of life flooded his senses.

Red laid there on there for some time, his back on the forest floor, eyes peering up through the branches of the hickory trees at the grey expanse beyond. Eventually, the feeling returned to his body and he attempted to sit upright but was instantaneously halted by waves of undulating pain coarsing throughout his being with such intensity that the old man was unable to identify their point of origin.

He doubled over neatly as a jack rabbit and collapsed to his side, gasping in pain. Ripping the air into his lungs only increased his agony, and Red placed his hand to his neck. His probing fingers ran over the jagged bullet wound just to the left of his larynx. His fingers found their way to the back of his neck, where he found a neatly formed exit wound.

The horror of his injuries banished any remaining fog from his mind and Red struggled not to let panic's grip overtake him. Wounded and alone, panic was a quick transport to death. Still prone on his side, Red reached up and felt along the seam of his shirt sleeve. Finding a torn stitch, he wedged his fingers between the two pieces of fabric and tore the entirity of his sleeve free.

He painstakingly wrapped the makeshift bandage around his shattered neck and secured it in a knot. He lurched to all fours and crawled towards a nearby birch tree. Taking hold of it's bone-white bark, he slowly hauled himself to his feet and then stood grasping it for sometime until he felt steady enough to continue.

He peered up to the precipice from which he had fallen. The steep hill between he and the glade was several hundred feet long and dotted with trees. It seemed amazing to Red that he had not collided with one of his way down, or if he had nothing seemed broken.

He saw no smoke rising from the glade, and the air was pregnant with silence, but unarmed and injured, the old man shuffled away in the opposite direction, one bloodied hand gripped tightly around the front of his neck.

***********************************************

Even in his weakened state, the old man's familiarity with the land and sense of direction served him well. He watched with dread the great unfurling plumes of brakish smoke that rose above the treetops. By the time he reached town, his eyes confirmed what his heart already knew.

The town was a graveyard.

He stumbled along mainstreet, gazing numbly at the burning frameworks of buildings that stood like the skeletal remains of some monolithic creature. Through some of the glasses windowpanes, Red felt he could make out the charred remains of humans, but he could not be certain, nor did he wish to be certain. In the streets, corpses lay in various states. Some burnt to unrecognizable husks, while others were simply shot, stabbed or worse.

The old man walked on, his eyes glistening in the heat of the fires. Peterman's general store was pock-marked with bullet holes, but remained unburned. Red entered the store and immediately felt his stomach turn.

Shum Peterman, local businessman and part-time alcoholic, lay in the center of the room between two rows of his own dry goods. In a cruel mockery of the Christ, he lay with arms outstretched, nails through each palm adhering them to the floor. Only his familiar old leather apron revealed his identity as his facial features had been bashed away with some blunt object. A rifle butt most likely.

The old storekeep had lost control of his bowels upon death, making his humiliation in the world of men complete.

Red rested his weight on the doorframe and peered at his old friend. Somewhere deep beyond his concious mind, he prayed to a god he had long since given up on, and then stepped into the store to find supplies to treat his wound with.

A hurried wind carrying the promise of a blistering summer heat accompanied the lone rider down the road towards Louisville. The hunched and haggard frame in the saddle bore little resemblance to the man that had once called himself sheriff in the small mining town of Akeley's Hollow. Five weeks of feverish, demonic visions on the floor of a burnt out general store had left him gaunt and skeletal. His face, drawn and darkened, was buried beneath a thick mask of whiskers and painted by the dust of the road.

His cool blue eyes appeared hollow and empty, a look attained through days of weeping over the desecrated remains of his dead wife and child. The two memories of his old life had been cruelly torn from the their graves and their bodies scattered throughout the yard. Red, weak and ill from his wounds, had crawled through the yard fruitlessly attempting to piece their memories back together before remorsefully settling on a joint burial for them.

The old black nag he had found in the back of the livery, wild eyed and lathered, now carried him dutifully down the old dirt trail that snaked through Kentucky's coal country and would eventually fuse with one of the great traderoads like fingers to a hand. He would ride that traderoad to Louisville, the nearest of the great cities, where he report the tragedy of Akeley's Hollow to the authorities and then set off in search of the dark officer.

The serpentine roadway dipped through a small thicket of trees, where blackened branches reached towards him like lepers. Red drew his shoulders up and placed his hand over his throat where a thick woolen rider's scarf was wrapped tightly. The wound had become infected on the third day and the old man had spent the next two weeks on an old tarp in the back of Peterman's store, hovering in a dillusional limbo between life and the hereafter. When he was well enough to walk, he found speech difficult and food nearly impossible to consume.

The tortuous images of his family and the slaughtered townsfolk that had haunted his fever-induced nightmares had led to a revelation. Since the death of his family, Red had drifted through the world of man as though waiting for death. Without purpose and without passion, the old man had merely existed. But the officer's ivory smile had provided him that purpose. He was far from religious or superstitous. Anything but sentimental or altruistic. But Red felt a certainty down to his marrow that the officer named Gideon was a melevolent force of evil, visiting upon a shattered and fearful world. The old man knew that if he wasn't put upon earth to eradicate that evil, that he was put there to die in the process of trying.

As the ancient gunfighter emerged from the thicket and into the heat of the day, and the traderoad to Louisville stretched in the distance like a great river of dust and stone, each hoofbeat brought a rhythmic thump of the polished steel of weaponry against his wirey frame. Each jolt was a welcome reminder of his newfound purpose.