The Stranger rose, groaning, and he went and untied Clem. The man could not stop shaking. There were meat hooks on the walls and a sort of leather harness, and there was a smell in that cavern that was hard to describe, an old, sweet, awful smell of decay, of butterscotch and rot. Clem licked his lips and then he was sick all over the floor and over his pants and boots.

“Can you walk?” the Stranger said.

Clem wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “I’ll manage,” he said.

“Here,” the Stranger said, and he passed him one of his guns. Together, they followed into the tunnels.

Blood and snot and detached pieces of entrails led them and soon they could hear Pogo’s laboured breathing and that mutter again, never ceasing, a mumble of syllables that repeated without rhyme or reason, and the Stranger held tighter to his gun, and wished that it would be enough. The tunnel sloped upwards here and as they burst through into the next cave they saw that it was another shaft, and an old ladder led back up to the surface. Overhead, he heard gunshots, and as he emerged up into the moonlight he saw the Kid coming through with guns blaring. The gibbering thing that was Pogo ran at him and knocked him down, and began pawing at him and trying to bite the Kid’s face. It was then that the Stranger saw the lights.

The Kid rolled and he tried to strangle Pogo, his hand round the creature’s neck, but Pogo kicked him off and he scampered again. The lights seemed to confuse him. He stood between them and the two men, unsure which way to run. The Stranger felt rather than saw Clem emerge from the shaft and stand beside them.

And now they were three. He cocked his gun.

“Fire.”

The hail of bullets decided it, and the half-blind, insane thing turned tail and ran at the oncoming lights of the train. They could hear it now, the slow, unstoppable chug-a-chug of the pistons and the belch of the engine, and for one moment, the man who had called himself Pogo was perfectly framed in the twin headlights, caught like an animal, before the train rushed along the tracks and hit him.

Even then, Pogo didn’t quite die.

Somehow, he was still alive, and he glared at them out of one remaining eye, offering crazed hatred to his hunters. On seeing him, Clem was sick again, and the Kid sagged down to the ground, holding the wound in his side.

“Enough,” the Stranger said, tiredly. Then he pulled out his gun and shot Pogo in the back of the head.