To catch up with our story so far, begin here.

It felt like a life time since he’d last looked up into the night-time and viewed the dazzle of stars above him. Brady lay on his bed roll, saddle for a pillow, in the cradle of some boulders and rocks as the fire burned down to embers.

For days it had been hard to clear his mind of Rosa, of Keene and the town that bore his name. He was happy to be done with it – save for Rosa. Brady slowly drifted into a restless sleep.

“Hallo, the camp,” called a voice.

The call jarred Brady from the first peaceful sleep he’d had in ages. He slipped his revolver from it’s holster and waited for the voice to call again.

“Hallo, the camp,” the voice sang out.

Sitting up Brady returned, “Come into the light and be recognized!”

Not far off came the sound of hooves trudging through the hardened sand and clicking against errant pebbles. Soon Brady could see a figure, behind it two mules and nothing else.

He tossed a couple of sticks on the embers and the camp’s fire jumped to life. The figure moved closer until Brady could see his face.

“John!” Brady nearly shouted as he scrambled to his feet.

The two men shook hands, “Good to see you, too,” John replied.

Adding even more wood to the fire, Brady set the coffee to heating and then dug around for a couple of biscuits to offer his foot-weary guest. “I was wondering how you made out,” he said as he poured some coffee into John’s tin.

“I knew there was gonna be hell to pay,” John explained, “if I stuck around after you escaped.”

He continued to tell how earlier in the same evening when Brady slipped out of the dungeon, he had already made his get away. “I lit a-shuck south, then west and finally north to avoid anyone who might be lookin’ for me.”

John also explained how Rosa came to be captive of George Keene, and it came as a surprise, “She was married to him. By the time she figgered out who and what Keene was all about it was too late, she’d been cut off from her family and had no way to let’em know she was unhappy.”

Brady sat their absorbing the information. He realized he’d made he out to be more than human, nearly angelic in his mind, and that she had escaped a bad marriage and he had butted in where he shouldn’t have been.

“Saw what happened to the town,” John added. “Alcala and his men pretty much razed it. Kinda reminded me of Charleston back in the war betwixt the states. I was only a youth then, but it’s something I never forgot. Been workin’ my way west ever-since.”

Before the pair knew it, the sun was pushing it’s way up over the eastern-edge of the distant mountains. With no sleep the two ate a quick breakfast of fried potatoes and more coffee, before striking camp and starting north.

“Still can’t figure how come she picked me to help her,” Brady stated.

John smiled and laughed slightly, “She asked every stranger that rode into Keene. She was desperate.”

“But, why not simply ride off on her own?” Brady asked, not expecting an answer and none was coming.

In a land that grows the best apples in the world, one has to be more than simply impressive to better the best. Grimhilde de Queen was exactly that person, proving it when she brought home the coveted Pomological Society Award to her hillside burg.

The treasure to her prize: the Red Delicious Apple. “So fair an apple, it should be in pictures,” proclaimed the Daily Mirror.

And indeed it was ‘rotoscoped,’ as she gave one to Walt. Sadly, her fame ended there, as the apple poisoned a fairy-taled princess, beginning Grimhilde’s fall into the burning pit of rock-and-roll fame.

Wandering the desert, it’s reddish sands, climbing one hill, stumbling down another. Desolation Wilderness; perfectly named, perfectly hostile.

He’s searching for that place, one he knew well in childhood, a dimming memory each day. Sun baking his skin, wind drying his tongue, continuing to call out her name, always that singular thought: her.

Finally. Bathed in her lengthy shadow, struggling to stay standing in her presence, her gnarled, twisted, withered limbs enveloping him.

Singing his song of death, he’s following the ancient way of his Fathers. Dying, casting up Spirit, entwining with hers, growing as straightened as Methuselah’s standing braided.

In her youth, Lydia went on a tour of Africa, where she found a female lion cub, limping and alone. She coaxed the cub into the Land Rover with food, checked it’s paw, removing a large stick from between its toes pads.

A few years later Lydia, visiting a wild game park in California, saw a lioness she believed recognized her. The lioness stood by her Prius, raising it’s formerly injured paw.

Knowing it was the same animal she’d helped, she got out and approached it. Subsequently, the lioness mauled her to death.

The moral: don’t be stupid like Lydia.

“Come out to the desert,” they said.

“We’ll play some paintball and do some exploring,” they said.

“It’ll be fun,” they said.

“My dog and I showed up — and the fuckers ditched us,” I said.

Looking down at Rover, he woofs, “Let’s go and make those assholes pay.”

He knows that I speak fluent ‘canine,’ and I do so without the slightest hint of an accent. For his part, Rover thinks in ‘human.’

“Let’s,” I smile.

“When finished,” Rover gruff-gruffs, “Can I roll in them?”

While I’m not prone to fits of laughter, I emit a slight chuckle, “Sure, pal.”

While downtown at an annual event playing out along the river, I watched a four-year-old boy terrorizing both animals and other children. He chased after and tossed rocks at birds, purposely stomped on one girl’s toes and had to be warned not to tease a German Shepherd, who remained calm during the ear-pulling and tail-tugging.

“What a little monster,” I thought, reflecting on how well-behaved my son had been at that age.

Then the child’s dad called to him: “Come on Vlad, we’re leaving!”

“You don’t suppose…naah…couldn’t be,” I thought adding, “It does, however, seem to explain an awful lot.”

Chet had locked himself out of the house yet again. He thought about calling his wife, but she was in another state visiting her mother for one more day, so he figured he could wait it out in the tool shed.

He unrolled the three sleeping bags and laid them one atop the other, cushioning him from the cold and hard cement floor. As Chet laid there he let his mind drift until he fell asleep.

It was sometime later that Chet heard strange noises. He had an old kerosene camp lantern, so he decided to light it and have a brief look around.

No sooner did he light the lantern, than the noises stopped. “Must have been dreaming.”

Chet doused the lamp, laid back down and returned to sleep in short order. Then it happened again – strange noises.

He laid still, listening and wondering what they were and where they were coming from. Chet was certain that the sounds came from somewhere inside the shed.

That’s when Chet remembered that his wife had hung a house key on a chain with a cartoonish metal monkey on it inside the shed to the left of the door. He got up, quickly retrieved it and rushed across the back yard and into the house.

While the sounds spooked him initially, Chet promptly forgot about them the moment he locked the door behind himself. His mind then focused on bed and sleep.

Soon several beings moved from the shadows, each made from nuts, bolts, washers and other odds and ends of building materials. They waited patiently for their leader, who had found a way to get inside the human’s house; their first step in world domination complete.

More than 20 years after their disappearance, the remains of two missing Sparks teens were positively identified in March 2000. The skeletal remains of Brenda Lynne Judd, 14, and Sandra Kaye Colley, 13, were discovered in November 1999, when a Hallelujah Junction property owner in Lassen County, just off of U.S. 395, accidentally dug them up with his tractor while getting some fill dirt.

The pair disappeared in Reno during an evening out at the Nevada State Fair in June 1979, victims of convicted sex-slave killer Gerald Gallego, who faced execution in both Nevada and California for four other killings. Gallego was implicated in the girls’ deaths by his wife, Charlene Williams, who told investigators he sexually assaulted the girls, bludgeoned them to death and buried them in a shallow grave.

In a July 7, 1979,  story from the Reno Evening Gazette, Jewel Stelling, the mother of Sandra, said the girls were last seen about 8:30 pm, June 24. When they were discovered missing, she and Brenda’s parents searched the fairgrounds.

“It is like they vanished,” Stelling said in the 1979 story. “Both have very good home lives. They only have a very little bit of money,” she added.

The girls were described as the best of friends. They “used to giggle and say they were going to grow up to be famous singers and movie stars,” according to Brenda’s mother, Lela Duncan.

“[Brenda] was a very caring young lady,” Duncan said “She never hurt nobody in her whole life.”

When girls disappeared, they were initially listed as runaways by the Reno Police Department because there was no sign of foul play. But the circumstances not only led family members to believe otherwise but also two teachers and a private investigator.

“When they said runaway, I didn’t quite believe it,” said Mary Mingo, a Sparks High School math teacher who remembers having Brenda in a ninth-grade class the school year before her disappearance told the Reno Evening Gazette.

“It didn’t mesh with what I had seen. She didn’t seem irresponsible or belligerent like the conceived notions we have of runaways.” Mingo described the 14-year-old as “very quiet.” She said she was a B student in math, but “a very good worker. It was a self-paced program, and she was always ahead of everyone else. She did several assignments a day. There was no discipline problem.”

Mingo also indicated Brenda was somewhat of a loner. “She didn’t have many close friends in that class, but it was a small class,” Mingo said.

Barbara Olson, a Sparks High English teacher, told the Reno Evening Gazette that she vaguely remembered having Brenda in a fourth-period class. “It seems to me she was very naive, as most ninth graders basically are. She was a very friendly, open girl. Very sweet.”

Brenda also worked part-time in the maintenance department at the airport.

“She had a paycheck waiting for her which she never picked up,” said Rob Wheeler, a private investigator, hired after the girls’ disappearance. “That doesn’t sound like a runaway.”

Wheeler added that the day before their disappearance, Sandra, who attended Sparks Middle School, competed in a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints beauty pageant at Idlewild Park’s, California Building. “[T]heir psychological profile doesn’t point to them being runaways,” he concluded.

After capture, Williams told investigators that at her husbands urging, she’d lured victims to their vehicle with the promise of job. Then they’d abduct the victims and Gallego would sexually assault them as Williams drove to a remote site, where Gallego would kill the victims, often times with a hammer.

Both Sparks girls died from “blunt force trauma,” to their heads.

Around the same time the two girls bodies were found, Gallego was formally sentenced for a second time in Pershing County, Nevada. This time for the 1980 kidnap-murder of 17-year-old Sacramento girls, Karen Chipman Twiggs and Stacey Ann Redican, who were abducted from a shopping mall and later found in a canyon near Lovelock, Nevada.

Williams pleaded guilty to her role in the Nevada killings and testified against Gallego at trial. She served nearly 17 years in the Nevada State Prison for her part in the killings of Stacey and Karen, before being paroled in 1998.

She now lives in the Sacramento area, working for a charity involving wounded soldiers and their families.

Williams claimed she and Gallego prowled mostly shopping centers for victims. However while at the state fair, they founding advertising fliers on parked vehicles, removing a number of them and forming a small stack. They then concocted a plan to invite a girl to their van on the pretext of offering her money to put them under windshields.

They eventually found a girl to Gallego’s ‘liking’ and while she agreed to distribute the fliers, she said she’d first have to check with her father. After she left to do that, the Gallegos decided it would be too risky to take her and when the girl returned, the Gallegos told her they had found someone else.

Next, the two enticed Sandra and Brenda to their van and though it was still daylight, Gallego forced them into the vehicle at gunpoint.

A witness reported seeing the couple in a van and later determined it was registered to Williams. Reno police then located the vehicle parked at Circus-Circus. They also learned that Gallego, using the name of a distant cousin, Stephen R. Feil, and Charlene A. Williams, were married in a Reno wedding chapel on May 31, 1980.

Meanwhile, former coworkers in Reno remembered Gallego, known to them as Steve Feil, as a quiet man with few friends. Gallego worked at the Pepsi Cola Bottling Company from July to September 1979.

“He was a very quiet guy,” recalled Cheryl Langford, office manager of the Reno plant. “He never seemed to say much. “He was quite good-looking, [and] he was friendly when I you spoke to him,” she told the Reno Evening Gazette.

Surprised when several police came to the plant several times to ask about Feil, Lanford said, “I couldn’t believe I actually worked with the guy,” adding that he only was in the office area of the plant about one-half hour each day. A route salesman who delivered Pepsi to local stores, Gallego spent a short time in the office each day before he left on his rounds, she said.

“He just went from store to store and sold pop. We never had any problem with him,” she added.

However after working for the plant a few months, Gallego got into a fist fight with a grocery worker behind a local Warehouse Market, said Dave Ziegler, a supervisor for the bottling company. Ziegler said he did not know what the fight was about and there were no injuries.

“I just told him that he would have to watch his temper,” Ziegler said, adding Feil was then placed on probation. “I interviewed the people at the store and got his side of the story. Seems that both were at fault for getting into it,” he said.

Gallego then worked for a few more months, Ziegler said. “He wasn’t a bad worker. He was always on time and stuff. He sold quite a bit and always made his quota and his commission. He was very conscientious about his job,” he said.

FBI agents arrested the Gallegos in November 1980 in Omaha, Nebraska on charges of murdering Craig Miller and Mary Elizabeth Sowers. The couple was forced into the Gallego’s car at gunpoint, while leaving a fraternity party November 1, 1980.

Craig was ordered from the car and shot; his body was found near Bass Lake, California. They killers then returned to their apartment with Mary, where he sexually abused her before taking her to a field in Placer County where he then executed her.

In 2002, Gallego died of cancer in a Nevada prison medical center while awaiting execution for murder’s of Karen and Stacey.

The pair of killers were also suspected of the murder of Rulan Waite McGill, who was last seen shopping at Meadowood Mall in Reno following dental appointment when she disappeared. The 32-year-old Winnemucca teacher was found submerged in an irrigation ditch behind a warehouse at Greg Street and Industrial Way, in Sparks, having been robbed, sexually assaulted and stabbed to death.

Two days after she left home, her vehicle was found abandoned behind the warehouse. The following morning, Rulan’s stepfather, James Porteous and his brother-in-law, Harold Barnett of Emmett, Idaho discovered her body.

In November 1997, Terry Childs, convicted in 1987 of murdering 17-year-old Lois Sigala in Scotts Valley, California and serving a 41-year sentence told Santa Cruz prosecutors that he was responsible for 11 other murders including Rulan, in the late 1970s. Childs confessed to the crimes to avoid being transferred to Pelican Bay State Prison, near Crescent City, California, known as one of the toughest in the state after stabbing another inmate at Corcoran State Prison in an apparent murder attempt.

He’s currently housed at Salinas Valley State Prison.

The moment he saw her, he had an erection and it stayed with him throughout the night. Ruby was her name and a redheaded firebrand to boot.

Only 12 at the time, Nick had seen her on the neighbor’s television as she gyrated in motion to the beat. He couldn’t get over how much she sounded like Janis Joplin, but was so much sexier.

It had been years since Nick thought of her. But that suddenly changed as he drove by the Stardust along the Vegas strip, where he saw her name on the flashing marquee.

He quickly parked and went in. Nick had to see Ruby perform and his stomach felt topsy-turvy as he sat down in the Starlight Lounge to watch.

Ruby was still that and more as Nick sat there recalling how he had masturbated to her image in his mind. He felt that same swell of flesh as he focused on the movement of her hips and listened as she half-crooned and half-screamed over the band playing behind her.

Soon it was two in the morning as Ruby slipped off stage behind the curtain, only to reappear seconds later at the bar in front of Nick. He paused for a moment to study her figure from behind.

“Now’s my chance to meet her.”

Trying to stay calm and look cool, Nick walked to the bar and stood beside her. Ruby smiled at him, lit a cigarette and asked, “Wanna autograph?”

Nick choked for an instant before answering, “Sure.”

“Sorry, I forgot, I’m fresh out,” Ruby sighed. As she batted her eyes at him, she added, “I guess we could go back to my dressing room and fuck.”

It was so nonchalant and disarming that Nick had to fight back cumming in his pants. She reached down and softly caressed his jean-swelling pecker with the manicured nail of her pointer finger, “I’ll take that as a yes.”

Without a word Nick followed the petite redhead singer to her dressing room. He was barely in the door when she started undressing him.

His dick sprung out of its confinement like a sprint-loaded spike and Ruby was on it like a kitten on a ball of yard. Her mouth and lips pleasing, her finger nails on his balls, inviting pain-driven groans.

Soon the two were a tangled mass of undulating bodies, fucking like this, sucking here, fucking like that and licking there. Ruby shuttered beneath Nick as he battled not to unload in her for a while longer.

But soon Nick’s stiffened cock betrayed him and he painted Ruby’s insides with a load of hot jism. After, they lay together, heavy petting and passionately making out, their bodies struggling to recover.

“What brings you into the casino tonight?” she asked.

“You. I saw you were playing here tonight and I couldn’t pass up the chance to hear you sing in person,” Nick answered.

“In person, huh?”

“Yeah, I saw you on TV once.”

“Crissakes, that’s been few years ago.”

“I jerked off thinking of you mashing your hips into me back then.”

“No fucking shit…”

“Yeah, but this beats the fuck outta that.”

“Then once more for the road, mi amigo, then I gotta get home to my old man. He’s probably already wondering where the hell I am.”

Nick was far ahead of her as he slipped his hardened dick in to her juice-laden pussy as deeply as he could. She smiled as Nick kissed the flower tattoo above her swollen right nipple, before he gently began suckling it all the while cupping the breast in his left hand.

Ruby was three hours late getting home. And Nick was certain that Charles Bukowski, had he known, would be jealous.

Fitch had grown tired of that damned cherub of love, Cupid, using him for target practice. So he decided that the next opportunity he had, he’d put a stop to the weaponized-child’s rein of hurt on his heart.

“Tell you what Cupid,” Fitch offered, “let’s have an archery contest. If you win, I’ll fall in love with the first woman I see. If I win, you leave me alone.”

“Sure,” Cupid said with a smile, knowing he’d win.

On the day of the big contest, the two lined up side-by-side, bows in hand. Cupid shot first and Fitch shot Cupid.