Bill raised his eyebrows as the sheriff blew through the office like a hurricane. The lawman was obviously having a stressful day, but this talk of men who wouldn't stay dead? That was confusing. Clearly, the bounty hunter's killing shots hadn't been quite as lethal as they all would have liked. Would have taken a real clever man to play opossum and fool so many people, though, and Bill found himself wondering just what kind of town the sheriff was running here.

Well, nothing for it but to talk to this Ang person, whoever that was. This whole business was crazy, but he had nothing else to go on, and he'd be damned if he'd give up his hunt now after coming so close. The marshal stepped into the back room to find it empty.

"...Huh." Whoever Ang was, they seemed to have left through the back door, seeing as how it was open into the night. What was more, there was a sound coming from that direction - a queer sort of whistling. Something about that noise sent a chill down the old man's spine, and a thought pushed its way to the front of his mind: [i]That ain't natural.[/i] He pushed it back down just as fast, took his rifle from his back, and stepped through into the moonlit night to follow the noise.

Bill had seen a lot of things in his long life: a lot of death, pain, and misery. He'd had a lot of long chases, a lot of bad scraps, and a lot of hungry nights. He'd heard wolves bay for his blood and stared down the barrel of Confederate rifles. But something about that night, how big the moon was in the sky, how twisted all the silhouettes of the buildings seemed, how shrill that godawful whistling was... it spooked him.

He wasn't following long before he arrived on a disturbing scene. A small group of people were facing down a solitary figure - one of them, the woman he'd seen earlier, was pointing a rifle at him. At the figure's feet there was a man, unconscious, his shirt torn away. Whatever the strange man had in mind for that poor soul, Bill was prepared to guess that it wasn't wholesome. The whistling was coming from nearby, though nobody seemed to be making it - more like it was just emanating from around them.

All these things were more minor details, however, compared to the two things that grabbed the Marshal's attention. One, the figure's face was unmistakably Westbrook, and two, he was armed in a way Bill had never seen before. There was something on his fingertips, long, sharp, like claws. The old lawman didn't much want to see what the killer could do to a person with those.

Bill took aim at Westbrook's center of mass, steadied his rifle, and announced his presence with a shot. What happened next, nothing on this earth could explain - Westbrook swerved away from the bullet, faster than any person should be able to move. Cursing, Bill loaded another shot and yanked the bolt back on his rifle, taking aim once again. Something queer was going on here, and Bill would find out what it was just as soon as this murdering sonofabitch was dead - not one second sooner.