Mysterious gunslinger Harlan McCready has just arrived in the town of Sanction. Fresh off a long stint working for the railroad, all he seeks is a cold beer and a warm body. But solace is in short supply tonight because Harlan is about to unknowingly become a pawn in a long-standing feud between a dangerous sheriff and his frustrated and spiteful wife.
Driven to desperation by her cruel and impotent husband, Mrs. Manning, masked as a prostitute in the local brothel, seeks revenge by way of random impregnation by stranger. Yes, Harlan’s picked the wrong night… the wrong whore house… and most importantly, the wrong whore!
With his boots barely back on, Harlan is told of his mistake by the panicked saloon owner and must flee town. Meanwhile, a defiant and satisfied Mrs. Manning waits for her belly to grow, willing to accept any punishment her husband will choose to inflict once the jig is up.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Manning over-estimated her husband’s mental stability. For five months later, he stands over her corpse, having strangled her to death just before cutting out the fetus of her unborn son with a hunting knife. Talk about crossing the line. Dwight just crossed about five of them!
The die is cast, as they say… so Manning devises a dark plot in his evil mind: He and his deputies will pin the murder on Harlan McCready… the suspicious drifter who “raped” and impregnated the innocent Mrs. Manning five months earlier.
With a suitable scapegoat in place, Manning and his deputies storm off after Harlan, looking for some form of twisted justice. But corruption blurs the lines between retribution and the law, so it’s no surprise that Manning’s version of “justice” involves murdering Harlan’s mother, burning his house to the ground and shotgunning him in the gut…all before dragging him from the back of a moving train. Gross over-reaction on Manning’s part… or self-therapy for a madman?
With Harlan scratching at death’s door, the deputies hang him from a gnarled tree overlooking a dark mountain pass. But fate decides to break in McCready’s favor and, before the noose can do its deed, he lashes out, impaling Dwight’s right eye with his boot spur. A desperate escape follows. One that will nearly cost Harlan his life. Tumbling dangerously down the mountainside into the ghost town of Potter’s Pass, he avoids the bloody gavel of Sheriff Manning’s wrath. For now…
As the landscape dies and the winter stirs, Manning slips further and further into the decay of his rotting soul. Harlan may be presumed dead, but Dwight has begun to store skeletons in his closet faster than he can load shells into his shotgun. Nights pass by with the ghost of his murdered wife wandering the downstairs halls. A baby cries in the shadows of a room and the preserved fetus of his unborn son seems to watch him from its glass jar. More therapy? Or maybe the sheriff is just losing his precious grip on sanity.
So is it reality or just his haunted mind when Manning catches wind of townsfolk telling stories of a dreadful rider on a dark horse, charging out of the burnt-out ghost town of Potters Pass? The same place Harlan McCready supposedly tumbled to his death. The same place Manning himself, hides a dark secret of a violent past.
Ghost stories or not, when his deputies start turning up dead, Manning knows the Reaper is close to his door. Something is coming for him. Be it a wraith on a black steed or simply a wronged man hell-bent on revenge… a showdown is inevitable. Blood is on the wind. And Dwight is about to meet his match.
With the stage set for grisly retribution, …And Hell Came With Him explodes into a day of judgment the likes of which the Wild West has never seen.