We were in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, held up in a small saloon called The Gold Rush in what was once the bustling miner’s town of Cripple Creek. Fiends, ghastly rotting corpses filled with murderous hunger, were flailing at our barricades on the ground level. They would be inside soon and soon after that we would be part of their ilk.

I had come West on the railroad to see to an illness that was befalling the miners. Illness is an inappropriate term. These men had unearthed something in those shafts that had killed them. They didn’t stay dead. Instead, they got up out of their shallow graves on the gravely slopes of the nearby hills and began killing. Murdering and eating the victims. Those that they the killed joined them. By the time I deduced how awful the situation was, it was too late.

Now, I’m standing on the whiskey warped floorboards of this saloon, holding an empty pistol in my hand while I watch an ignorant miner throw a lit stick of dynamite.

“Don’t, you heathen fool!” I yell, to no effect.