He shook his head, momentarily attempting to dislodge the hunger that burned in him like a fever dream. He clawed out for the intelligence to communicate, but it was denied him. Eat, his brain said, kill.

His huge misshapen skull was an architecture of bone knitted with poorly-fitting gray and pink skin, rubbed raw and infested with beetles and worms. He flinched each time one of these parasites worked at a strand of nerve.

Ryan moved then, as Skullhead knew he would. He brought up his weapon and pointed the long barrel at Skullhead's huge plated chest. Blinking his eyes, he pulled the trigger. The chamber explosion was deafening, noise beyond noise, but Skullhead had little time to be angered at this as a. 50 caliber slug ripped through his chest and exploded out his back. Skullhead was thrown from the rocks, an agony that was at once sweet and numbing threading through his chest.

But more than pain, there was rage.

Skullhead scrambled back up the rocks with impossible speed. Ryan brought up his weapon and the beast knocked it from his hands with a single lethal blow. Ryan cowered: crying, whimpering.

Skullhead stood over him. Black blood and bile ran from the hole in his breast. His face was twisted up in a ragged sneer, yellow teeth protruding from the gums like knife blades. He was larger than any man, a giant, his arms longer, his skeletal fingers sharpened stakes. He pressed his face in that of Ryan, enjoying the terror that it produced in the man-making his bladder and bowels void, his eyes roll madly in their sockets. Skullhead licked his cowering face with a spiny tongue, the taste of fear making his loins ache. He drew back his great, bobbing head, lips peeling back inches from slavering jaws that jutted like a steel bear trap.

One fleshless hand gripped Ryan, pulling him up. Skullhead towered over him by more than two feet. With a flick of his wrist, he sent Ryan tumbling through the air. No hurry in eating, a bit of play first.

4

Ryan was dazed when he pulled himself up, his right wrist bent in agony. Skullhead stood before him, bathing him in the acrid heat of his shadow. Ryan made to run and the beast snared him by the head with one immense hand, the fingers of which covered his face. Skullhead drew the spindly, rawboned fingers back, taking Ryan's scalp with them.

Ryan fell to his knees, his scalp hanging by a thread of meat, great furrows dug in his skull. Blood washed down into his eyes and he pushed it angrily away with shaking fingers. He knew he was going to die. There was no question of this; it was only a matter of when. His stomach convulsed at the commingled hot grave odor of the beast and his own rich, flowing blood. He tried to stand, bile squirting into his mouth, and the beast pulled him forward, so he could stare into the merciless face of death one more time.

Skullhead knew it had to be this way. Kill, but take time to savor the fear, to sip it like wine.

Skullhead's face was huge in the grainy moonlight, the color of fresh cream, a tapestry of abraided flesh pitted with sores. And the eyes…crimson, slitted orbs sunk in bony, angular depressions.

Ryan studied this nightmare in detail. It gave him something other to think about than pain or death. He viewed the face like a map. Here were craters, there valleys, and there occasional matted growths of fur that grew in and out of the skin. The snout was pressed in, only vaguely vulpine, the nostrils flattened and wet, the teeth hooked like sickles.

Skullhead growled with a blast of hot, fetid breath and pulled Ryan's arms free with wet, rending snaps. He dropped the limbs and studied the horror on the man's face. It wasn't enough. He buried his claws in Ryan's groin and slit him up to the throat, marveling at the bounty of glistening jewels that bulged out. Ryan slumped and Skullhead caught him. He chewed his face free from the muscled housing of his skull and broke the dying man on the rocks, slamming him against them with titan force until Ryan came apart like a drenched and running rag doll.

Then and only then, did he dine.

5

Longtree lit a cigarette and exhaled in the wind. "Did he say what he wanted?"

"No, sir," Cal Shannon told him, "he just said how he wanted to see you right away. That it was important."

"I see."

"If you ask me, Marshal, something strange is going on up there. Mr. Ryan's got men walking guard, twice the number of riders with the herds…peculiar, if you ask me. Don't tell him how I said so, though."

"Course not."

"His race horses got slaughtered last night. Boys are saying how maybe it's that beast folks are talking about."

"Could be."

Shannon shrugged. "Anyway, he said to ride up there right away."

Longtree nodded. "I will. Thanks, Shannon."