Hanged Man’s Road Chapter 16: Paul wakes from a nightmare he can’t shake to find Lenny fevered, wounded, and still a danger he can’t quite name. As he and Alan break camp, the question of whether Lenny’s story is true matters less than the kind of men they choose to be. Compassion wrestles with fear, duty with survival, and the decision to take Lenny with them reveals a shift in Alan.
Hanged Man’s Road Chapter 15! As twilight settles over the ranch, music, firelight, and drink wash away the last two days of fear. Surrounded by the fragile comfort of new allies, Lenny lets himself drift into the rhythm of celebration. Sybil smiles, Teddy eats his fill, and for a brief, golden moment, the world feels generous again. Between yesterday’s terror and tomorrow’s unknowns, Lenny finds something he hasn’t felt in a long time: hope — tentative, flickering, and dangerously easy to believe in.
In the aftermath of the standoff, Lenny sees the ranch with new eyes. Hayes’s mastery of the remuda, Jerk’s quiet loyalty, and Dusty’s unexpected generosity all blur the line between refuge and obligation. As the ranch reshuffles itself to hide him from prying eyes, Lenny accepts a simple truth: survival depends less on fear and more on the uneasy bonds forming around him. And for the first time since his world collapsed, a future—however fragile—begins to take shape.
The bill’s come due. Riders arrive at the ranch hunting for Lenny, and whatever illusion of safety he clung to collapses. Hayes’s cruelty, Gopher’s blind loyalty, and Jerk’s uncertain promises blur into a single truth: he’s alone, cornered, and out of options. Forced into hiding with nothing but a useless knife and his own spiraling fear, Lenny braces for the moment his past finally catches up to him — when a bag of silver may be all that stands between hope and a hangman’s noose.
Hayes’s brutality leaves Lenny battered, but it’s Sybil’s raw honesty that cuts the deeper wound. Her anger and grief expose the weight she’s been carrying alone, stripping him of every excuse. In the darkness of the stables, love becomes the judge he can’t escape, and guilt delivers the sentence.
Lenny’s first night on the ranch shatters any illusion of mercy. Stripped of comfort and thrown into a stall like an animal, he discovers that survival under Dawson’s protection comes with its own brand of cruelty. As rumors of Silas’s fate tighten around him and a vicious new boss tests his limits, Lenny learns that the road to redemption begins at the bottom—and someone is always waiting to grind him further down.
Hanged Man’s Road Chapter 10 is live! Lenny is reunited with his family, but the danger he escaped leaves a quieter wound. In the borrowed stillness of the foreman’s cabin, he begins to see how his violence has reshaped the people he loves—most painfully in the strength his wife shows without accusation. With protection secured and his future decided by others, Lenny learns that some consequences don’t punish—they endure.
This is why "professional beta-readers" like @superbwebspecter are a bunch of self-serving grifters and scam artists. They can't articulate a proper sentence, much less help you with your writing. Every time you see one of these clowns pop in your threads, please tell them to fuck off.
After nearly killing the man who ruined him, Lenny learns that survival isn’t about justice—it’s about leverage. As Silas’s shadow stretches toward his wife and child, Lenny accepts protection from a harder, colder power, trading his freedom for their safety. The deal keeps his family alive—but can he pay what is asked?
I finished the first draft of the final chapter of my next book. There are still rewrites, but this is huge. I need a few days to decompress and live with the ending that I wrote.
They helped Lenny to a pallet of blankets near the fire. He rested uncomfortably, drifting in and out of consciousness. For most of the afternoon, he moaned, wept, and whimpered through his sleep. Sometimes Paul caught him mumbling indecipherable words punctuated by errant twitching and hushed cries.
On the few occasions when he was awake, he’s sit up, sip lightly at some water, and ask small, insipid questions. Paul doubted the man’s sincerity. He seemed to be filling an expectation, offering an disingenuous attempt at friendship, a masquerade used to gain their sympathy and trust. The effort was transparent and galling. It irritated Paul—empty social transactions that wasted time, purchasing only delays.
And so, the day lingered pointlessly. Their time was unrecoverable. Breaking camp that afternoon would earn them nothing, and staying in place would be no better.
To mitigate their losses, Paul and Alan spent the remaining daylight hours doing camp chores, caring for the animals, and making preparations to resume their journey in the morning. They worked quietly, moving through the camp with practiced familiarity. But the work brought empty comfort.
While they killed time, Lenny slept. Paul’s frustrations grew as the hours leaked away. He almost wished he had left him in the field among the dead.
With his work completed, Paul went to the sleeping man. Lenny snored in his bedroll, a thin blanket half covering him. Paul knelt beside him and peeled back the bandages wrapped around the wounded arm. The cloth clung to the skin, bound by drying pus that stank sourly. The flesh was red, swollen, and felt dangerously warm. Paul let go of the wrappings and slumped back. Lenny didn’t even stir.
Alan stoked the fire, watching Paul from the corner of his eye. The air was still, dry, and warm. The fire made things more uncomfortable. But they needed to boil water for clean bandages. Yet another concession to be endured.
“Well?” the kid asked.
“Infected,” Paul said dryly.
Alan dropped some strips of cloth into a kettle, setting it over the fire on an iron tripod. “Bandage soup coming right up.”
Paul closed his eyes, ignoring Alan, stealing a moment for himself—a few seconds of self-imposed solitude. Then, he pushed his exhaustion aside. He sat up, dug into his vest pocket, and pulled a roughly folded map free.
It was a crude, hand-drawn thing, purchased for almost nothing from a nomadic peddler. Drawn from an old man’s memory, with no attention given to detail or scale. Paul spread it across the asphalt in front of him and laid small stones on the corners to keep it from rolling up. Alan sat next to him.
“Best I can figure, we are about here.” Paul dropped a pebble on the map. He jabbed a finger at a circle with a wavy line in it. “That’s the pond at the clearing where we found our friend.” He placed another stone on the map next to a triangle. “And that is where we need to go.”
“That don’t seem too far,” Alan said hopefully.
Paul shrugged. “Maybe. But this map ain’t to scale. Could be a few weeks away.”
Alan thought about it for a moment. “What about our people? We could take him with us.”
Paul shook his head. “They’re too far. His fever, that infection. Also, some of the stock in the wagon won’t survive the trip. I think we might need to trade some out for other foods. Probably best we continue on to the trading post.”
“Trading post?” Lenny said groggily. He yawned and stretched out his good arm. Though barely awake, he looked interested—almost eager. “Are you talking about Fort Kessler?”
The noon sun cooked the road. The trees along the highway’s edge offered some shade, but they couldn’t stop the heat from radiating off the asphalt. It was the worst time of day to attempt waking the stranger, but Paul couldn’t put it off any longer. He wanted answers. He needed to know they wouldn’t be attacked again.
He stood at the rear of the wagon. Alan lowered the gate, climbed in, and made his way toward the front. Paul wiped the sweat dripping from his brow with the sleeves of his shirt. He rolled them up and unfastened a few buttons near his collar, hoping it would help keep him just a little bit cooler. His eyes never left the survivor.
The wagon rocked slightly as Alan climbed over the furthest sacks and boxes of supplies and settled in. The sleeping man didn’t move. He only breathed—a slow and rhythmic passing of air. It was the only sound Paul heard from the man—the only sound he wanted to hear.
Alan took the poles of the stretcher near the stranger’s head and waited for Paul’s signal. Paul took a deep breath, held it, and lifted the stretcher at his end before nodding to Alan to do the same. They held the man lifted off the wagon a few inches for several seconds. Paul watched the survivor, waiting for a change. None came. Finally, he let out the breath he was holding and nodded again.
Slowly, Paul backed up as Alan stepped forward. With great care, they proceeded until the head of the stretcher was at the gate of the wagon. Paul stopped and nodded again, the silent signal that stood for each command: Raise. Lower. Proceed. Stop.
Alan lowered his end of the stretcher and gently rested it on the edge of the gate. He climbed down carefully. Paul held his end of the stretcher while Alan removed some of the bedding from the wagon and set it in the middle of the road, just as Paul had instructed him earlier.
The man shifted. The steady breathing stopped for a moment. Both men watched him, frozen. Alan’s hand moved toward the gun at his hip, but he did not draw. Then there came a release of air before the slow breathing of deep and relaxed sleep returned.
I am about to be very unkind to the solicitations for paid “beta readers.” At what point did writers start falling into traps where we pay people to read our work? It’s supposed to work the other way around.
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