LITMIR.BIZ

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new man’s real thirsty. Drank up two pints of whiskey already. Sal don’t think he’ll make much sense if you don’t talk to him soon.”

      I slid on my trousers and grabbed my cane. The dozen or so cots on the top floor of the rooming house were only half filled with soiled men, but the whole building stank to high hell of whiskey and decade-old boot sweat. It was enough to drive a man to drink ten minutes after he woke—and most did. Some nights I slept on the floor in the back of the general store just to avoid the mingling of so many bad odors under one roof.

      “One of you bastards got gangrene?” I called out.

      “Red probably yanked his pecker off in the night,” Fat Wally cracked. “Left it rottin’ beneath the sheets.”

      Covering my mouth with a handkerchief, I hobbled to the door. Stumpy shadowed me down the steps one at a time, knowing Sal’d scold him if he came back alone.

      “If I’d a known it was gonna come to this…” I grumbled. “Racing to interview some dead man before he drinks too much and gets himself sent to hell… Well, shit! I’d a stayed alive!”

      “Really?” Stumpy said in his childlike way, as if it was just a simple matter of choice. “But then who’d write the paper?” he asked.

      Even with a limp, it was barely a two-minute walk from the rooming house to the Foggy Dew. Damnation consisted of two long roads bisected by three short roads, making twelve blocks of rickety wood buildings. You could see the whole town from end to end in the time it took to smoke a pipe. Each structure was more lopsided and rotted out than the last. The roofs were shedding shingles like a lamb’s coat in the springtime. A narrow boardwalk lined the storefronts, but it was more of a hazard than a convenience. With all the missing and broken planks, you had a better chance of tripping and getting a splinter in your face than reaching your destination unharmed. The only use for it would be keeping folks out of the mud, and there wasn’t any rain to make mud. Nobody remained from the time of Damnation’s construction to tell why it was even there. The builders must’ve been a peculiar lot. Some reckoned they had special powers, for they somehow managed to construct the entire town without a single level surface. Every windowsill, doorjamb, and floorboard was as crooked as a dog’s hind leg.

      Across from the Foggy Dew, the vampire was sitting on a rocking chair up on his balcony, looking bored as usual. He had the whole third story of the hotel to himself. It was the tallest structure in town, but didn’t offer much of a view on account of the brown dust cloud around the perimeter of Damnation. Dead men and animals came in on a single road that vanished into the dust. If you tried walking out, you just came back again from the other direction.

      Most days, he sat looking down in quiet disgust. Could’ve wiped the lot of us out any time he wanted, but then it’d be just him and the wolves and the dust. The men often brought their arguments out in the road and that offered a little entertainment. There wasn’t much to do except drink, play cards, and watch the occasional gunfight. The vampire hawkeyed me, probably wondering how a cripple managed to last so long. Truth was I had a better chance than most of making it a year without getting caught up in a gunfight. I didn’t have many personal ties that’d draw me into conflict. It was my nature to watch from the sidelines and listen. And sooner or later, every sorry bastard wanted someone to tell their stories to.

      Stumpy noticed the vampire glaring at me. “Don’t mind him, Mr. Thomas. He’s just jealous. Knows he could never last as long as you without tearing someone up.”

      “Some folks got a taste for killing that never goes away,” I said. “No matter what’s at stake.”

      “How long’s it been now?” Stumpy asked.

      “About two and a half months. Kinda feel like I got a target on my back these days.”

      “Ah, nobody’d shoot you, Mr. Thomas. If they did, wouldn’t be nothin’ for them to read,” he said simply. Of course, the wolves weren’t fans of my writing, but there had been a relative peace between us and them—so far.

      In the Foggy Dew, the new fella was sitting at the bar drinking whiskey with a tequila chaser. Had a mess of dark curly hair like a buffalo hide and the sallow skin of a longtime drinker. A round table muscle sagged over his belt. His eyes were just bloodshot slivers between swollen lids. Most of his scarred cheeks were covered by a patchy beard, except a trail of pockmarks that crept toward his temples.

      “Came through the dust an hour ago, and he’s already stinking drunk,” Sal complained. “Figured you’d wanna make a record of him before Jack shoots him. Claims to be kinda famous.”

      “Kinda?”

      “You’ll see.”

      Rope marks wrapped the fella’s neck, and he was gasbagging about how he’d been hanged for robbing a stagecoach then killing a posse of men. Got caught near the Mexican border coming out of an outhouse. I dipped my pen in ink and started scribbling a few notes. Some folks got shot before they said anything of much interest. Left me trying to recall their name and where they came from. Others kept repeating the same nonsense over and over, so I didn’t write anything down, thinking they’d never shut up. When they got sent to hell, I forgot what they were going on about. So I found it best to collect whatever facts I could up front, then clean it up later. I ordered a beer and restricted myself to one sip for each sentence I wrote, which proved a fair incentive.

      “If I didn’t have the backdoor trots from eatin’ so many dang Mexican strawberries, they never woulda got me,” the newbie chuckled loudly. He might’ve been uglier than a new-sheared sheep, but it didn’t bother him none. He was a jolly killer. “They gave me a proper Texas catwalk,” he continued. “I tell you this. The best thing about being hung is I ain’t never gotta go back to Fort Worth!” He broke into a fit of knee-slapping laughter.

      “Hey, ain’t you Buddy Baker?” one of the newer boys asked him. “I hearda you. You shot Jared Nichols in Kansas City—he was fast.”

      “Not fast enough.” Buddy scoffed. “I bet you didn’t know I shot more men than William Bonney. And that’s a fact!”

      “I ain’t never heard that.”

      “That’s ’cause there weren’t no witnesses to a mess of ’em. Damn journalist got in the way, so nobody recorded it. Ain’t my fault a man can’t hold a pistol and a pencil at the same time.”

      “You boys hear that?” Stumpy said. “Buddy here shot more men than Billy the Kid!”

      “Lemme get some more of that pork belly and a splash of that there bug juice,” Buddy said to Sal. “You say I don’t have to eat no more now that I’m dead?”

      “Ain’t gonna die of starvation.” Sal raked his fingers over the ends of his handlebar mustache and filled Buddy’s glass. The lamplight glimmered eerily on his bald head. Sal looked more like a mortician than a bartender. “You’ll still get hungry something awful. More outta habit, I ’spose.”

      “Ain’t you got nothin’ ’sides pork?” Buddy asked.

      The dead animals appeared from the dust with blackened eyes and ice-cold blood in their veins. Sal cooked up the pigs for us. Indians got the chickens since they had the fewest to feed. Werewolves took the cows on account they had the biggest appetites. The vampire could eat whatever he wanted, but he wasn’t hungry for anything in Damnation—that we knew of.

      The divvying up of the animals had been decided long ago by the werewolf pack leader, Argus. In wolf form, he stood as tall as a Shetland pony and was quick as a jackrabbit. Could tell him from the others by his white coat with specks of gray. Argus reckoned it was better to give us the smaller animals than to worry about us picking off any of his pack. He told Sal and the chief so. The chief was the oldest dead Indian. Kind of a grumpy fella. He wasn’t too happy about getting stuck with the chickens, but he was used to not getting his way. Some joked that the chief was at the very first Thanksgiving in Plymouth and didn’t get nothing but the gizzard. Others said he was the one who traded

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