Fuming smoke brought Colby Settler back to the hellish reality of what his life had become.

"Calm down, son! Calm--! Hold him down so's I can administer to the--!" Doctor Parrish Severus got worked up, his seventy-year-old blood cooked to boil just like this boy's skin.

Three cowboys in the room tried to corral Colby. He fought like a cornered puma.

"Too hot!" one cried out.

A second got the flesh burned off the left hand as something like a black geyser gushed out of Colby's pores.

Doc Severus, holding the brace, leaned back and forth, waiting for the chance to jump in. The room this calamity occurred in, with its wooden walls and furniture, seemed all too willing to burst.

"Bed's on fire!"

"Well, put it out!" Doc screeched. "Water barrel outside! Don't just stand there sizzling! Go!"

Cowboy with the burnt hand ran out to play fetch.

"What's...what's happenin'?" Colby had the shakes. Shakes spread the black smoke around, but it finally gave him reason to stop with the shrieks and running around. He had been awake all of three minutes, the first time since God knows when. Burning alive is a hard thing to wake into.

Doc pounced. He slammed the steel brace over the boy's chest and attached the thick rubber straps and buckles. Tight enclosure. Mindful of the ashen smoke he held his breath for this formidable act. Another cowboy shoved a heavy gauntlet onto Colby's right forearm, a curious bit of paraphernalia hosting brass fittings, along with a large cylinder in the center not unlike that on a syringe. Colby winced.

"It's bitin' into me, Doc!"

"Calm down, Mister Settler!"

But the syringe got to bubbling as black matter started to rise inside of it. In its metal casing, Colby saw his reflection, the strangeness of a dirty blond beard, except for where the two scars were along the chin. A face devoid of flesh tone.

A second gauntlet went over the left forearm. Colby found himself strapped up, around and down until he was just about entrapped by this, this...

"Fetters? What? I'm, I'm under arrest or somethin'?" He was considering bucking again, but the bed fire prompted him to jump away for safety reasons instead.

"No! You don't see any law here, do you?" Doc Severus adjusted his spectacles.

The injured cowboy returned with two pails of water and dumped them without haste onto the bed. The hiss and steam and ash were too much. Cowboys opened windows as they coughed.

Doc led a startled Colby outside, into the manic, wagon tarnished streets of the Railroad City. Sun blighted Colby on the way out as he adjusted to the day, the noise of horses heaving and wheels grinding dirt. A trail of smoke followed him.

"Hot dang, boy, you reek like a cooking fire! But, I'm afraid it can't be helped now."

Colby caught his breath. Bent over, he wanted the city to stop spinning. The gauntlets were tight. Too tight. Black liquid in the cylinders.

"S'that...is that my blood?" The stomach churned. Abdomen tightened.

"Relax, boy. You got to relax or things'll blow all over again. You hearing me?"

Colby nodded as his head sank closer to bent knees. He felt the heat from the gauntlets. They were shiny and newer than anything he'd seen since the grandfather clock at Francois Department Store right when they got into...

"Railroad City." Long breaths. "This is Railroad City, ain't it? We ran...fifty head in here, yesterday?"

Doc pulled out a gold pocket watch from his plaid waistcoat. He timed the eruptions from the boy, as he had been. "More like sixteen days, son. You been down since the Silence struck you."

Colby straightened up. "What? Sixteen! I ain't been down fer..okay. Now that you said it, I feel like I laid in bed ferever." He put the hands to his lower back and cracked the spine for relief before reattaching a clip from black suspenders to his pants. "Silence, you said? And, what's all this?!"

The hands, outstretched, placed the gauntlets and their hot ebony fluid squarely in Doc's weathered face.

Doc took him by the shoulders, quietly noting they were sweaty and very hot. "Son, listen to me real good and try not to miss a word of it. Sixteen days back, when you and your fellows rode into the Rail with your fifty head of cattle, there was an eruption. Now, everybody's got a theory, rumors are wild, but best we can tell, a blue light covered the city and, well, changed a few things.

Arms still held out, Colby saw them and not the doctor. The skin had mottled, gray dots of varying size all over, getting more gray at the fingers until they terminated at around the fingernails, all of which were a dull black, like coal. He thought, as the doctor spoke words he couldn't fathom, that he had been burned alive in this Silence and that he might have preferred death if he had had any say-so at the time.

"...Blue Silence is the name the papers gave it. Any living thing hit by the Blue done up and did a sudden biological split straight out of Darwin. Birds, people, dogs, dang blades of grass even. A man who was at the scene, Stockwell's the name, seems to have it all figured out. He was hit by it as well, even made the braces for you. Says you got to keep them on and drain the ash at least once every three days."

"Ash? You mean I'm still on fire?" Colby jumped back, terrified, hopping all about the breadth of dusty, manure tainted Gardenia Street. He patted down his body, trying to put out a fire that wasn't there.

Cowboys came running, ready to hold the boy down or shoot him, depending on how twitchy their fingers got.

Doc calmed both sides with a simple gesture of open palms. "Colby, you got to calm down. Some of these folk are just getting the spine to come outside again. I know things are frightening right now, but you ain't in on what all's been going on, not the fullness of it. Now, you're gonna be okay, son, you hear me? You're gonna be fine. But things are different, very different, and you, like the rest of us, is gonna have to adjust."

Colby watched the moving back and forth of the people of the Rail. Families in a wagon running at a fast pace, no doubt to avoid him in his contraption. Cowboys leaning on the fence at Calico X Fields and Stockyard, watching with the bland indifference of men who had seen it all. A woman, pulling her young daughter across the street, a daughter observing Colby with intense interest under her plain white bonnet. A girl with radiant copper eyes and blue lips who soon buried her face in Mother's day dress.

The cowboy snapped to.

"Doc, I...I'm okay. I'm, gonna get me a drink and..." he rubbed his face and felt his own incredible body heat. Perspiration smelled like the furnace of a locomotive and made his nose wrinkle. "Where's um, where's Fear, Val and the rest? They made it, didn't they? You gotta swear to me they made it or I'll lose it again."

"They did, son. All except for Palecki. I'm, sorry about him. We did all we could. The Blue, well, it's random as hell. Some it altered, most it left untouched, but a few it, killed. Can't explain it, to be perfectly honest."

"Johnny Palecki's dead?" Colby almost fainted, but caught himself on the fence by Calico X. Cowboys rushed to sit him down, put a ladle of water in his hand to drink. He did, but they all heard the sound, hissing, as water touched Colby's tongue. Whispers ran down the line of dusty men. "He was, like my brother. I mean, he rubbed Val and the rest the wrong way, but--"

"We had to take you outta Meadowlark Hospital, on account of the ash," said Doc. "That's what we call it, anyway. Mister Stockwell says your body is constantly generating ah, 'concentrations of agitated carbon, not unlike that found in volcanic eruptions'. Starts fires if you get emotional, even when you ain't conscious. That's why you gotta stay calm, so you can live your life, and so we can take you back over there to see your fellows."

"Ash. Volcano." Colby muttered words that had no personal meaning for him. He was a trail boss, thirty-nine years of age yet unknowing about much of the world. What little he had awareness of came in the form of horses, a proper saddle, decent boots that didn't pinch and grades of cattle. The range had been his sole educator for the last seventeen years, the cratered back alleys of Cincinnati before then.

Trail boss meant having cowhands under his sway, in his care. Colby was blessed. He had some of the best. For the most part, that is. Clouds above headed east. A flock of birds travelled northwest. Cattle were mooing. Everything did as it was supposed to. Natural. Except Colby Settler.

He groaned a little, looked down the line of hardened faces, men who worked the range, the beasts, and the bottle. They all watched him as if his next move would determine all their fates.

"I gotta seem 'em, Doc. I'm calm. And I'll get calmer along the way. Show me to 'em. I need to know they're okay."

"Then follow me, son. You'll see them. They can speak, and they can tell you about what happened, and what all fell off within your group afterward."

They started walking. Colby began to wonder but didn't ask, exactly what Doc Severus' last remark might mean. Then, he stopped.

"Get me a pair of gloves from one of those men over there, would you, Doc? I need my people to see the man, not...just get me a pair so we can get."

[Author's Note: More to come! If you never read my Rail Tales, check out more here on Wattpad. All of them under my name are in this, the Legacy Universe as I call it (LU), except for Down Jersey Driveshaft. I have several LU stories taking place after 1877 and far into the future. Enjoy!]