I go into the saloon alone.
The Ledger's notice hits me at the door, SHERIFF CALLOWAY, DEEP-TRENCH PARASITIC SYMBIOSIS, 72 HOURS AND TEN THOUSAND BLOOD-IRON, and I push through the swinging doors before I can think too much about it.
The smell hits first. Something wet and low and very old, like standing water in a room that's been sealed shut for years. My boots find the floor and the boards groan loud enough that it's embarrassing.
"You walk heavy," a voice says from the dark behind the bar. "Heavier than you should."
"Get that a lot," I say.
Calloway stands up.
He's wrong in ways that take a second to fully catalog. Bloated. Purple. Barnacled flesh stretching over a body three sizes too large. His jaw is gone, replaced with thick rusted brass pipes grafted into his throat and trailing down through a hole in the floor into the black water below. He breathes the sludge. A silver star is pinned directly through the skin of his chest.
He looks at me with eyes that are still human somehow, still present, still horrified at themselves.
That almost stops me.
"You killed this town," I say.
The pipes rattle. His voice comes out wet and distorted. "I gave them to the water. The water provides. The water protects."
"The water drowned them."
"They chose to stay." Something cracks in his voice under the wet metal sound. "I warned them. I told them what was coming and they stayed."
"And you stayed with them," I say. "You stayed because you couldn't leave."
He swings the anchor.
Two hundred pounds on a chain, swung with the full strength of a parasite-enhanced body. It hits me in the ribs and the force throws me through the bar in an explosion of wood.
I land in the wreckage and the boards below crack and I can see the black water eight inches under them.
I get up.
Calloway stares. Both of us breathing.
"What are you," he says.
"Complicated," I say, and raise the LeMat.
Two bismuth rounds into the brass pipes at his throat. The barium tips flare and the pipes melt in one second and the connection to the water severs and the thing inside him begins to die immediately, thrashing under his skin, looking for what it can't find.
Calloway falls.
He hits the boards and they crack under him and his hand slides through into the water below and goes still.
I stand in the wreckage of the bar and breathe.
The spectal coins dissolve through my sleeve.
BOUNTY CLAIMED: Sheriff Calloway. | REWARD: +72 Hours Stability. 10,000 Blood-Iron. | LEDGER BALANCE: 87 Hours, 44 Minutes.
I go to the back office and find the map.
Blood on leather. Towns crossed out. One black stain in the center of everything with one word scratched underneath it.
I bring it back to the door and call out: "Hey. You two want to see where we're going?"