When the dead pour off the evening train into an 1880s frontier town, the Chinese cowhand the town has shunned for years becomes the only man who can lead the survivors through the night, and the night starts taking people faster than they can decide who is worth saving.

SYNOPSIS:

Dry Fork, 1888. Kai has ridden four years for Hollis Calder at the Bar H, the best hand on the place and the only Chinese man in the county. He has been saving toward Montana, and the poker game at Doyle's saloon tonight finally puts him over his figure. One more night, then he draws his pay and goes north. Jo pours the drinks and has a tin of coins of her own and the same plan.

The evening train comes down from Cordell with a sick man aboard. He dies in his seat and gets back up. By the time the engine reaches Dry Fork the cars are full of the dead, and they come off onto the platform and take the people waiting there. A stowaway named Wes is the only one to get out of the freight car alive, and the dead follow him down the road toward town. Part of the wave peels off at the Bar H, where Calder loses his wife, his son, and every hand on the place, and rides in alone with their blood on him.

The town has no answer for what is coming. Bullets do nothing. Kai starts giving orders because no one else does, and the room follows him because he is the only one moving. They board the saloon, pile the piano against the doors, and sharpen chair legs when the ammunition runs short. It takes them most of the night to learn that the head is the only thing that stops one.

Garrett Vance holds paper on half the street and wants Kai and Wes put out the door to draw the dead off. He keeps saying it, and the room keeps getting smaller, and every hour a few more men listen. Doyle takes a bite at the first window and hides it behind a buttoned cuff. Burl takes one on the mercantile run and turns on a crate the room has left a wide space around. A working woman swears the bite missed her. Elsewhere in town Marshal Coe dies in the street, and his wife Ellen makes her way out alone, learning as she goes to swing a wagon singletree and to keep her hand down on a latch when a man is on the other side of the gate.

The telegraph wire is cut. The horses are gone. The saloon burns and they run the street to the stone church, losing people off the edges of the knot the whole way. Vance makes one last grab at throwing Wes out and the window he opens takes only himself. Calder, with nothing left to ride home to, hauls on the bell rope to pull the dead off the doors, and it costs him what he means it to.

At dawn three ride out bareback: Kai, Wes, and Jo. Ellen rides out a second direction along the rail line. Delaney walks his daughter out a third. Behind all of them the dead come out of the town onto the open road, and they do not stop.