Samsara & Dreams the Ragman: Novella Double-Shot #4

SAMSARAA mortally wounded soldier, amidst the bloody chaos and brutal mayhem of combat, slowly dies on the battlefield, his final thoughts centered on his beloved wife back home, the wonderful life they shared together, and a terrible mistake he can never forgive himself for.In an eerie desert town, a new sheriff arrives, struggling to understand how and why he has come to this strange place. Charged with finding a young boy who has gone missing, he is unaware that the answers he seeks are hidden beneath the hot sands and in the twisted mind of a hideous desert witch, answers that will reveal the truth behind the town's inhabitants, the missing boy, and ultimately, the sheriff himself.Set in the 1940s, at the height of World War II, SAMSARA is the story of a small town cop that makes a fatal error on the job and runs off to war because of it.
Leaving behind the woman who makes his life worth living in the first place, it follows his time in this world, the next, and the ominous, haunted town of lost souls that bridge the two.DREAMS THE RAGMANAs a young boy Derrick listened to his grandfather's spooky tales of "The Ragman, " an old junk dealer and boogieman of sorts to the children in the neighborhood who he claimed had followed him throughout his entire life and stalked him from the depths of his own worst nightmares.
But as an alcoholic ravaged with senility, his grandfather's stories were dismissed as delusions. When years later, murder comes to Derrick's small hometown, he and his best friend Caleb-both teenage outcasts-discover that the killer is a hobo dressed in rags who rides the rails in and out of town when committing his crimes. They dub him "The Ragman" unaware of just how accurate that nickname may be, but the murders are never solved.
As time passes, Derrick weds and settles into a troubled marriage while Caleb moves to New York City and spirals into drug addiction and madness. Thirty years later, in a dying seaside resort town, the killings have begun again. Has The Ragman returned, or is something even more sinister taking place? As Derrick and Caleb meet at the scene of the latest grisly murders, they soon find themselves confronted with an unsolved mystery that has haunted them for decades and an eternal evil they may never be able to escape.
The rain falls, darkness descends, a train's whistle blows, and the Ragman begins to dream.