Shadow Falls: Badlands by Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff

behind in Sagebrush will be nothing if you choose to disobey fate’s warning,” she hissed. “If you do not take the path that has been laid out for you, death will follow in your wake, taking with it the innocent.”
    “And what, exactly, is waiting for me at the end of this path?”
    “If you wonder if you will be saved then you labor to ask the wrong question.”
    “Will I be damned, then?”
    “You are already damned, Galen Altos—but tonight there is reason to believe your fate has not been completely written.”
    She turned her face away and, with a puff of breath, the dead girl from Veracruz blew out the lamp and plunged the both of them into total darkness.
     
     
    *****

PART II
     
    Alone by Edgar Allan Poe
     
    From childhood’s hour I have not been
    As others were—I have not seen
    As others saw—I could not bring
    My passions from a common spring.
    From the same source I have not taken
    My sorrow; I could not awaken
    My heart to joy at the same tone;
    And all I’d lov’d, I loved alone.
    Then—in my childhood, in the dawn
    Of a most stormy life—was drawn
    From every depth of good and ill
    The mystery which binds me still:
    From the torrent, or the fountain,
    From the red cliff of the mountain,
    From the sun that round me rolled
    In its autumn tint of gold,
    From the lightning in the sky
    As it pass’d me flying by,
    From the thunder and the storm—
    And the cloud that took the form
    (When the rest of Heaven was blue)
    Of a demon in my view.
     
     

 
    CHAPTER 8
     
    T hat orange ball of fire hung in the sky, having just risen only hours earlier. Galen scratched his beard; the growth on his face itched like mad. He'd let the beard sprout over the last two months for no other reason than he'd come to consider himself a different person. Truth was, though, that he had begun the exile from himself a long time ago.
    While he had sat in a cramped and fetid cell in a small town whose name he could now no longer remember, he recalled being repeatedly referred to as the “Stranger.” It was a moniker that had stuck, even though at the time of his arrest he gave his name as something even different than his previous—then current—alias of “Tom Holt”. That false name eventually escaped him as the townsfolk came by to gawk at the condemned man, referring to him by his nickname. His true name and identity would die on the gallows, he reckoned, as he now assumed the “Stranger.”
    Blue followed closely behind as Blue tended to do, wandering no further than a half dozen paces back, often bumping his wet nose disgustingly against Galen's left hand.
    Galen had come to accept this somewhat bothersome behavior, figuring it to be the only way the burro knew to get around; its failing eyes were going the way of its failed ears.
    “Time has not been kind to either of us,” Galen said out loud to the burro.
    Galen had not seen another human being for nearly a month, the last being a group of families headed west along this trail to satiate their lust for gold. His contact with them was brief, lasting only a few hours while they swapped traveling conditions. Galen had little to tell, since he himself had only been on this particular trail since leaving Texas. The traveling group's leader, a stout man named Lindstrom, had inquired about conditions west of the Rockies and the land’s passability come later months. Galen responded that he did not know—and wondered moments later why he had lied.
    They shared a meal together before going their respective ways and, as the Lindstrom party departed, Galen watched the sullen and haggard faces on some of the women and children, knowing they had no idea how much more trying their journey would become.
    The story Galen had not shared with the Lindstroms was that of the Donner party. The Donners, another family stricken with the “westering fever” of the last decade, became snowbound in the Sierra Nevadas and, to stay alive, resorted to cannibalism. Galen had