Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on.  Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas.  Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #4 — WESTERN
(× Disappearance or Fire or Skeletons and Bones)

TITLE:  The Smokers

PREMISE:  Surprise Prequel to Fire Red, set in 1947.  Desert Rose, New Mexico is next to a reservation that is at risk of being seized by the feds because the tribe that it was reserved for is going extinct (Disappearance).  There are eight people left in the tribe, in the wake of a few diseases and disasters, and none remember the language, none remember the gods.  But a god of fire (Fire) remembers them, and stirs from his slumber like a cranky old man to spit curses indiscriminately.

Stars fall in the night as a posse of pinkertons comes to remove the last of the tribe from their homes.  The stars make all the fire on the land sick, and anyone who imbibes the fire becomes infected.  Just about everybody smokes, but the tribe was out of cigarettes at the time, so the natives are mercifully unaffected.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The infected become fiery freaks, immoral and violent and burning up from the inside.  Dina McMurtry, a spinster in her 30s, is the tribe’s warrior – technically a sheriff, in practice a social worker, and mean as hell.  She helps rally the tribe to defend themselves as the smokers close in, all while the adults in the tribe are jonesing for cigs.  Why are the pinkertons blowing up when they get shot?  Why are they crumbling to flaming skeletons (Skeletons) and bouncing around in the night uncanny like cinders lofting from a bonfire?  A few natives survive, but they didn’t know about the cigarettes, and become infected.  Dina keeps her cool just long enough to send the children away in a truck, before the tribe officially ends in a burning skelly pile.

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