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wasn’t them.
    But Grey knew them just the same.
    Yes, he did.
    Not five hours ago he had seen one of these men try to climb a tumble of rocks and do it badly, holding a gun in one hand and reaching for handholds with the other. And he’d seen the other man stand at the bottom of that rock pile and yell curses and taunts up at his friends.
    Their names floated through shock and horror to his mind.
    The man who held his left arm was Big Curley.
    The man who held his right was Riley Jones.
    They stared at him with empty eyes.
    The eyes of men who could not be doing this. The eyes of men who should be nothing more than buzzard meat. Feasts for the worms.
    But they held him and they bent toward him, their mouths filled with broken teeth.
    Open mouths.
    Hungry mouths.
    Dead mouths in dead faces.
    Bending down toward him.

 
    Chapter Eight
    Something snapped in Grey Torrance’s mind.
    It was like the chain between handcuffs yielding to inexorable force. It was like a worn piece of rope breaking when a bull jerks his head with absolute defiance.
    Like that.
    Big.
    Sudden.
    And all at once Grey felt his muscles release from the frigid rigidity of terror and become loose, become his own again. As the biting mouths of the two dead men dipped down toward his face and throat, Grey moved.
    With a howl of fury he rolled onto his shoulders, bending his knees, bringing his feet up, forcing them between those cold hands and his own flesh. Then with a savage grunt he kicked up with all his force. His boot heels smashed into the face of Riley Jones and burst it apart. Shoe leather and hobnailed heels obliterated the chin and sent the remaining teeth flying. The steel spurs ripped bloodless flesh from the raw gray muscle. One eye popped like a grape.
    The thing that had been Riley Jones merely staggered back, his neck tilted backward at a curious ankle.
    The other one kept coming, though.
    Grey bashed aside Big Curley’s hands, fell over onto his hip, and hammered at the man’s knees and calves with a brutal one-two-one-two. Bone cracked like gunshots and the big deputy canted sideways on a leg that looked like it now had two knees, both of which were bent the wrong way. His big body fell hard, and Grey had to roll sideways to keep from having it land on him.
    But even as Big Curley crashed to the ground, his hands kept snatching and trying to grab. So did Riley, despite his smashed face. As if pain meant nothing at all.
    Nothing.
    Grey kicked himself backward, got to heels and palms and scuttled away from the two men.
    If “ men ” was even the right word.
    Over the course of a hard life Grey Torrance had been shot, stabbed, slashed, kicked by a horse, and thrown from a moving wagon. He’d broken bones and torn his flesh, and though he was a tough and stoic man, he knew for certain that he could not have endured this kind of damage and not reacted to it.
    No one could.
    No man could.
    The two things crept and thrashed along the ground toward him.
    Grey dug frantically into his pocket and came out with the two-shot derringer. He thumbed the hammer back and as Big Curley lunged at him Grey fired. The bullet caught the dead man dead center in the chest.
    Big Curley twitched.
    That was it.
    As the bullet punched through his sternum and into his heart, the man merely twitched and grunted.
    And kept coming.
    Now the world seemed to be completely falling off its hinges. Grey had one round left and he jammed the barrel into the big man’s eye socket.
    â€œDie, you son of a bitch!”
    He fired.
    The close contact muffled the sound of the shot, rendering it soft and wet. The gun was low-caliber and the bullet did not have enough force to crack its way out of the back of Big Curley’s skull. Instead it bounced around inside the vault of hard bone, plowing trenches and tunnels through the man’s brain.
    All at once the hungry mouth fell into slackness, the body instantly flopped down. There was no