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twisted tableau, was somehow keenly different: all about him was the agonizing helplessness embedded in the thick smoke of charred flesh and bone. Though as he himself became helplessly paralyzed with panic—his mind exploding to find his own escape from this flaming incarceration—he spun to find the face of a man whose grinning mouth stretched below blackened eyes, reminiscent of a abysmal well.
    “Yes, Brother Thomas,” this grin laughed at him. “Please do something!” The bellow coming from this mouth chilled the Stranger to the bone while the flames rose all around them to consume them back into the earth.
    As the sun broke through the bars of the cell and fell upon his face, the Stranger stirred, then awoke.
    Damnit , he thought. It was morning and he began cursing himself for his lost night—what he figured would be his last. Any moment he expected Overton and that rat-faced sidekick deputy, Kentuck, to come in, cuff his hands, and lead him to the gallows. The Stranger sat with his feet planted firmly on the floor and his eyes shut as he tried to remember any kind of prayer from his past. When they came for him, he would neither beg nor cry; he would take every last step with whatever dignity he had left.
    Minutes passed, then what seemed like hours. His stomach grumbled from hunger. Finally the Stranger got to his feet and peered out the window of his cell. The gallows were still in plain view, a brand new ten-strand hemp noose awaiting his neck.
    But there was nobody there.
    No men. No women and children perched upon buckboards awaiting the spectacle of his slow execution.
    And that’s when he noticed it:
    The door to his cell was unlocked and slightly ajar.
     
     
    *****

CHAPTER 2
     
    E ternity passing through his mind, the Stranger stared at the pathway to his seemingly obvious freedom before finally accepting it. What had appeared before his eyes was no illusion, for, while he’d been sleeping, someone had unlocked his cell.
    He rose from his bunk, ebbing fear still in his subconscious from some forgotten dream—though whatever it was had left behind a dark and sticky residue of uneasiness in his mind. His feet brought him closer, shuffling across the wooden planks, when it hit him: a flash of white tearing through his mind like lightning.
    The flash had taken him back—the sharp crack of rifle fire, its cordite fresh in his nostrils. In the wavering heat of midday, he sees a marching infantry advancing toward them across the plain, bayonet at the ready. Behind him, the rapid cannonade of artillery roars defiantly, lessening the enemy front line, hurtling shattered bodies into the air.
    He turns to the soldier next to him—another face from his past; another ghost from a time buried in his mind—a green recruit picked up just three weeks prior while his regiment had been on the march. The rookie’s face was pale, stricken with fear, unlike the face of the other soldier he’d seen the day before, which had the look of a predator eyeing its prey.
    The Stranger remembered both men quite well, being diametric contradictions of one another. The recruit, with his shock of red hair and crooked mouth, had expelled a certain sense of panic from the first second the Stranger had laid eyes on him. This moment in time, now exhumed from the shifting sands of his memory, was no different.
    From the recruit’s throat come the breathlessly spilled words of the 23rd Psalm.
    “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want; He maketh me lay down in green pastures—”
    His neck stretched so far, the muscles coiled so tightly, that each vein was clearly visible through the skin—which is exactly where the lead ball fired from a Mexican rifle struck him. His young body hit the ground, bringing with it another flash in the Stranger’s mind—one that returned him to his place in his cell, standing halfway between the bunk and the door.
    Just a random visitation to one of the many horrors stored inside the crumbling