It came from the east and went into the west with a rustle of the prairie grass and a cry of the rails that lasted on the wind long after it was gone. Jonas Arthur stood on the platform and watched it go, watched the smoke rising from its single stack against the deepening horizon. He'd been waiting for the Drenditch Express, intent on robbing it, but it hadn't come. Instead another train passed the station and disappeared into the desert, and Jonas knew what it was that was riding the rails west: a demon-train.

Hell-bent on catching the mysterious coach, Jonas begins the pursuit. The train runs west, its whistle drawing him beyond the edge of the Frontier, beyond the edge of the world as he knows it. Against all reason and common sense the hunt will take him into a world stranger than anything he's ever imagined. If the inhabitants of the wasteland don't finish him off the weather might. But Jonas cannot be sated. With no idea why he does it, he presses on in the path of the train, following its pull as it leads him out beyond the wasteland.