Shadow Falls: Badlands Read Online Free PDF Page A

pounded on the locked doors of the church that was to become their tomb. Even on the rare morrow that he would awake not drowning in night sweats, he could still feel the presence of the horrific vision in his mind, seared into his brain as if branded with a red-hot iron.
    The sun had barely risen, though the Texas heat was already unbearable. At least inside his cell, the Stranger was directly in the shadow of the gallows being erected for his hanging the following day. Truth was the Stranger wasn’t sleeping, but had taken to closing his eyes and pretending he was. During the moments he was noticed to be awake, he was subjected to non-stop barrages of verbal and physical harassment by the jail’s proprietor, who used the Stanger’s sentencing to justify his cruelty—insisting that the prisoner deserved no better. After all, he was to be the town’s guest of honor in what would serve to be the only real entertainment in weeks.
    To a certain extent, the Stranger didn’t believe he deserved any better than the promised hanging, either. His had been a life of unrepentant sin fueled by anger, jealousy, greed, and every extreme of emotion felt by a man with no direction or boundaries. He had stolen, murdered, robbed, raped, and taken the Lord’s name in vain—sometimes all while even in service of his own country. He often used spirits to self-medicate and flee the world around him—although this liquid escape only lubricated the wheels that perpetuated his path of destruction.
    His past—what he could slowly remember of it—had been soaked in the blood of the innocent and not-so innocent alike. After two sobering weeks in a stifling cell, barred from whiskey as the heat soaked up the remaining drops left in him, his past quickly filled up with regret.
    Regret of a life wasted; of loves never found; of promises left unfulfilled.
    But even the regret, he reckoned, would be temporary, given his date with the gallows in less than twenty-four hours.
    With a creak, the Stranger could hear the front door of the sheriff’s office open. Someone was coming in. He kept his eyes shut and his back to the cell door, hoping that continuing to feign sleep would keep whomever it was from bothering him during what few hours he had left. Along with the sound of boots on the rotted wooden floor came misplaced giggles, which were unmistakably female.
    “Thar h’is,” spoke the bug-eyed, rail-thin deputy, the one who the Stranger discovered everyone called “Kentuck” for no better reason than that’s where he’d claimed his kin had migrated from. Along with Kentuck was a nearly toothless whore who, though only in her twenties, looked two decades older from the years on her back and a five year habit involving laudanum.
    “Git up!” Kentuck yelled through the bars. When the Stranger didn’t move, Kentuck sucked a wad of tobacco-stained saliva into his cheek and spit onto the Stranger’s vulnerable back. “I says, ‘Git up!’” he repeated.
    His incarceration here in Sagebrush, Texas, this small border town just north of the Rio Grande, had been marked with similar and regular abuse. The night he had been arrested, Kentuck and the sheriff, a stocky and cantankerous man named Overton, beat the Stranger into unconsciousness in this very cell while the Stranger’s hands were still cuffed behind his back. The charge had been stealing a horse—of which he was definitely guilty—and killing the man who owned the now stolen horse. The latter was a debatable charge at best, since the Stranger claimed he’d just been firing a warning shot, and the “hapless geezer in question had impeded the passage of said bullet with his foolhardy head.”
    After the Stranger had been caught, instead of calling in a marshal or a judge, Sheriff Overton deemed the situation one that was to be handled without the “meddlin’ of outsiders,” as he liked to put it. Besides, he reckoned, given the chance, a proper hanging would be a spectacle that