"The hell with you," Caleb said. His face disappeared from the window.
Matt hesitated, then ran to the door, threw back the plank, and opened it.
Caleb had his back to him, a revolver in each fist. He bobbed his head to look at Matt, stepped inside. They closed the door and threw the plank in place. "You asshole," Caleb said. Matt didn't answer. "I fought my way clear across town—they're eating people, Matt. And the dead get up and walk."
"I know," Matt said.
Without warning, Matt leaped toward Caleb, grabbed him by the shirt front, flung him over the desk—against the wall. He jerked Caleb to his feet and yelled in his face. "This is your fault, you bastard. You're the one that got the Indian hung. You're the one really done it. You're...."
One of Caleb's revolvers came up through Matt's arms and the barrel touched Matt's top lip.
"Let go. What say?" Caleb said.
Trembling, Matt let go.
And then he caught something out of the corner of his eye. A dead face at the window.
And another.
Then something worse.
Between the two at the window he saw someone crossing the street carrying a large crate.
The Indian.
"Holy Mother of God," Matt said.
Caleb looked.
"Jesus Christ with a wooden dick and shit and fall back, that's the big bastard himself. He looks mighty spry for a hung and lightning-struck fella."
Caleb put one of his revolvers on the desk, opened the other, and began to reload from his gunbelt. "Let's see that bastard eat lead. Now unlimber some of them Winchesters over there or we're dead meat— walking dead meat." Caleb lit the lamp on the desk to provide shooting light.
The Indian had moved to the window. He bent down and looked in. His face was the worse for wear. It looked to be slowly rotting. He set the crate down before the window, and pulled off the lid, leaned it forward.
The woman inside did not look like a woman. She did not look human. Caleb and his mob had hacked away her features and skinned her, so there was nothing left of her former beauty. Membranes covering her stomach had broken open, and a strand of intestine poked out like a shy snake.
Matt, who was loading a Winchester, found his eyes locked on the creature in the box, and he knew immediately who it was, though he had not witnessed her torture.
He looked at Caleb. "You bastard!"
"That's what my old Ma called me too," Caleb said.
The Indian went away from the window.
There was a loud thump at the door.
The wooden bar cracked.
The thump turned to a boom and it was repeated.
One of the Indian's big fists broke through the wood, grappled for the doorbrace.
Caleb leveled his revolver and fired three times into the arm. The bullets struck, went through, plopped into the thick wooden door. The arm still weaved about like a tentacle.
"Toss me that Winchester!" Caleb yelled.
Matt, almost in a daze, did so.
Caleb stuck the revolver in his belt, caught the rifle, cocked it, and fired three quick shots through the door.
The arm stopped.
Momentarily. Now it clasped its palm against the door and pulled. The hinges creaked, groaned, screamed.
The door came off and the Indian tossed it into the street. For a moment he stood framed in the doorway, his dead servants crowding around him for a peek.
Matt loaded a shotgun (after spilling half the box of shells on the floor) and he began to back up toward the open cell.
Caleb had not moved. He fired the Winchester three times. All three shots dusted harmlessly against the Indian's chest.
The Indian smiled.
Caleb fired again. The shot hit the Indian in the left cheek and made a small neat hole but had no effect.
"You shiteater," Caleb said. "Come and get me." Caleb grabbed the barrel of the rifle, swung it over his shoulder, and the Indian—fast as a bullet—moved.
The Winchester came around, and the Indian's big hand grabbed it by the stock and jerked it free of Caleb's grasp. With a wrench of both hands, the Indian twisted the rifle in two.
Caleb went for his revolver.
The Indian caught his hand.
"Not nice" the Indian said." Not nice at all." The Indian squeezed.
Caleb screamed as his hand and the butt of the revolver became one, human flesh and bone welding with iron and ivory.
With a backhand slap, the Indian knocked Caleb down.
Dazed, Caleb looked up. The Indian reached down, took hold of the strand with the ears on it, snapped it free of Caleb's neck.
Turning his head, the Indian looked at his servants waiting impatiently in the doorway.
He smiled. "Feed," he said, and the dead rushed in.
Caleb screamed as they descended on him. Teeth snapping at his clothes, throat, and stomach.
He tried to back crawl, but they held him down. He bellowed as an old man's jagged handful of teeth snapped into his arm.
A woman's head struck at the soft part of his stomach, ripped through his shirt, and tore his flesh—deep. An intestine jumped out of the wound in a short gray coil, and then it was in the woman's teeth, and she rose, stretching it, trying to rip it free. Another woman dove at the extended gut, and it snapped in half—the two of them tumbling over the desk in their frenzy to pull it from one another—like two ravenous blue jays squawking over a large, juicy worm.
Hands dipped into the wound, more guts were uncoiled, faces met Caleb's face, and chunks came out of his face and neck. After a moment, bathed in gore, his innards stretched all over the sheriffs office, Caleb finally ceased to scream.
Frozen with fear, Matt had backed into the cell and pulled the door shut. The Indian tied the strand with the ears on it around his neck, walked over, and put his face against the bars.
Matt let go with both barrels of the shotgun. The Indian's head jerked back a foot, then returned to stare through the bars. The shotgun pellets hit him just beneath the nose and down his chest. The little balls of lead dripped out of his flesh and rang on the floor. The Indian's laugh wasn't quite as loud as the slurping and sucking and chewing that was going on behind him.
The Indian took hold of the bars, and slowly, with a smile on his face, he began to bend the bars apart. He put his head through the space he had made and grinned at Matt.
Matt dropped the shotgun, pulled his revolver, and put the gun to his own head. He cocked back the hammer. Closed his eyes. And hesitated.
But just for a moment, then he pulled the trigger.
Matt's hand was snatched away, and the bullet slammed harmlessly into the back wall of the cell, and Matt, his eyes wide open, saw that the Indian was in the cell—holding the revolver's barrel—smiling at him.
The Indian snatched the revolver away. It clattered across the floor. The Indian opened his mouth. His teeth winked silver-white in the dim light made by the moon's beams struggling against the clouds and the rain, and the flickering lamp light.
The Indian's jaws opened wider, and wider. There was a snapping sound as they came unhinged like a snake's. A loud hissing sound came up from the Indian's throat, and the head snapped forward, engulfing Matt from chin to nose.
Matt screamed, and inside the great mouth it made the faintest of echoes as it rushed down the Indian's throat. There was a nauseating crunch as gouts of blood sprayed from either side of Matt's face.
The Indian, who had been leaning slightly forward, straightened his head, and as he did, he lifted Matt— kicking—off the floor. The Indian shook his head like a dog worrying a bone, and Matt flopped like a wet rag.
A last shake of the Indian's head, and Matt's face came off, and Matt splattered to the floor and slid until his head hit the far wall He was lying face up, and there was no face.