The wind had picked up by the time the sun started to fall behind the ruined buildings.
Arthur found a small patch of safety — the hollowed-out shell of what once might've been a repair garage. The doors were long gone, the roof half-caved in, but the walls still stood. Good enough for the night.
He laid out an old tarp he found rolled under a desk, kicked aside some debris, and made camp by the dim glow of a half-working lantern he'd scrounged off a dead man's pack earlier that day.
"Ain't much of a home, but I've slept worse," he muttered, settling down against a broken tool bench.
He unstrapped the old leather satchel from his shoulder — the very same one he'd handed to John back on that mountain. But now… here it was. Like the world had folded in on itself.
Arthur laid it in his lap and opened the flap slowly.
Inside, his fingers passed over familiar textures — the smooth wood of a carved pipe, the worn leather of an old sketchbook, tins of beans, wrapped jerky, a bottle of bourbon (half full), and a few boxes of ammo for weapons he never thought he'd hold again.
He pulled out a small tin of beans, twisted it open, and ate slowly. No fire. Too risky. Just cold beans and the sound of wind slipping through cracked concrete.
Then his hand brushed against the journal.
His journal.
The cover was weathered, the spine cracked, but it still held tight. He opened it with care, staring down at his last words — written somewhere in 1899.
There was a line about John… about dying free.
Arthur exhaled, breath catching just a little in his chest.
He flipped to the next empty page.
Then he pulled a pencil from the side pouch and began to write, the way he always did — neat, steady, full of thought:
June something… I don't rightly know anymoreI ought to be dead. Thought I was. Died up on a mountain watchin' the sunrise, ready to meet whoever's waitin' for an old outlaw like me.
But now I'm here. And I don't know where here is.
Whole world's different. Metal wagons left to rust in the streets. Tall towers half-fallen. Roads paved in black stone. People talkin' strange, scared, hungry. Said it's the year 2038. That's near one hundred forty years past the day I should've drawn my last breath.
Some kind of sickness ended the world. Fungi. Like the kind that grows on dead trees… only now it grows on people.
Saw one of 'em today — not a man no more. Thing had mushrooms sproutin' from its head. Ran at me like a rabid wolf. I shot it dead, but I don't think that's the worst of it.
I think I'm the only one of me here. No Dutch. No John. No Sadie. Nothin' left of the life I knew.
Just me, my guns, and whatever this world's become.
But I ain't layin' down. Not yet.
Arthur stopped writing, staring at the page a moment longer before closing the book.
He leaned his head back against the wall, watching the orange skyline outside fade into night. Sirens wailed in the distance. Or maybe it was a scream. Hard to tell in a place like this.
He placed the journal back in the satchel, then reached for the Cattleman revolver and placed it by his side.
Sleep came slow. Restless. But Arthur Morgan survived another night — in a world that should've never had him.