Hell On Wheels – DJ Butler David J West

He opened the door. “So let’s go look.” He moved slowly across the tall grass and into the screen of dogwood and hickory that hid the river from view. Stacy followed, the gun in her hand but pointed at the ground. “There’s some kind of building over there to the right,” Stacy said. “Don’t be nervous,” he told her. “I’m pretty sure it’s a prison.” “You know this place?”

“There aren’t that many bridges over the Mississippi. It pays to be aware of them all.” “Let me guess, the prison guards are all orcs. No, trolls. Wait, leprechauns.” “Leprechauns aren’t real.” “Really?” “Got you.” Silas chuckled. “No, they’re real.” “So, the guards are trolls, then?” “As far as I know, the prison guards are human.”

They reached the heart of the stand of trees and Silas stopped. They stood on a bluff, overlooking a shelf of land along the river. He saw the lamps of the correctional facility to the right and below the bluff, and the lights of a truck driving past, toward the prison. He saw the bridge bypass road, a rural, two-lane highway like any other, cutting through the woods across the bluff and then becoming the bridge, stretching out over the shelf below and then over the flat, dark, iron path of the water.

He saw the arches and suspenders of the bridge and the railroad track running along the river’s edge, below the bridge. From the south, a train approached, a creeping cyclops dragging a dark chain. “All clear,” Stacy said. “Not a cop car or a prison guard in sight.” “Wait.” Silas pointed at a thin, black, irregular line that meandered across the asphalt. “What’s that?” Stacy strained to look. “A seam in the asphalt? A line of tar?”

“I just saw it move,” Silas told her. “Let’s watch.” They stood still as time ticked by with excruciating languor. The night was cool but humid, and the humidity seemed to pool under Silas’s shirt as sweat. He forced himself to stay focused on the line, and at the same time to keep his ears open. What time was it? Perhaps twenty minutes passed. Silas heard the meaty grind of a truck engine, and at the same time, a long, hooting call.

“What kind of bird is that?” Stacy murmured. “Shh.” The black line moved.

Silas Danger can’t stop running. The year is 1975. Silas drives a red Pontiac GTO. Trapped in the back of his muscle car are the ghost of his sister Betty and half of the demon that killed her. He doesn’t know how she died, and he hasn’t figured out how to save her yet, but he knows that if he spends three days in any one place, the other half of the demon will catch up, kill him, and drag Betty down to hell.

Silas works as a scout, messenger, courier, herald, and sometimes spy across the weird, fragmented, magical world of Other America. Dodging bridge trolls as well as alien grays, lamiae along with snallygasters, undead blues singers and also bison-headed giants, he runs errands in exchange for information that will help him save his sister. This time, he’s hired to run a deck of Tarot cards from New York to San Francisco on a tight schedule. The first complication comes when the dame with the card deck won’t just hand them over, she insists on coming along.

The second is that everyone else in Other America seems to know that Silas has the cards, and everyone seems willing to kill to get them. OceanofPDF.com BAEN BOOKS by D.J. BUTLER and DAVID J. WEST Hell on Wheels BAEN BOOKS by D.J. BUTLER THE CUNNING MAN (with Aaron Michael Ritchey) The Cunning Man The Jupiter Knife The Familiar Spirit THE WITCHY WAR SERIES Witchy Eye Witchy Winter Witchy Kingdom Serpent Daughter INDRAJIT AND FIX In the Palace of Shadow and Joy Between Princesses and Other Jobs Indrajit & Fix Among the Gray Lords TIME TRIALS with M.A.

Rothman Time Trials Ice Trials Abbot in Darkness OceanofPDF.com Hell on Wheels This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. Copyright © 2026 by D.J. Butler and David J. West All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. A Baen Books Original Baen Publishing Enterprises P.O. Box 1403 Riverdale, NY 10471 www.baen.com ISBN: 978-1-6680-7329-2 eISBN: 978-1-964856-66-7 Cover art by Kurt Miller First printing, June 2026 Distributed by Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Butler, D.

J. (David John), 1973- author | West, David J., 1973- author Title: Hell on wheels : a Silas Danger thrillride / D.J. Butler and David J. West. Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen Publishing Enterprises, 2026.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 31cf2085b2f195f7
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 2,520,179 bytes (2.403 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9781668073292, 9781964856667
• Pages: 342
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 553.6 minutes
• Total Words: 110,720
• Total Characters: 613,754
• Average Words per Page: 323.74
• Average Characters per Page: 1794.6

Most Frequent Words

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