Staked out under the baking heat of the desert sun by Frank Chapel's riders from hell is no way for any man to die.

Only someone as resilent as Matt Travis had the courage to endure the heat and the vultures and survive. When finally he manages to escape a gruesome death only one thing is on his mind — revenge.

But his memory has been blasted to oblivion and he is even unsure of his own name. All he knows is that everyone wants him dead!

Justice must be done and Matt will be judge, jury and hangman. First, though, he must face up to the truth of his past and, that accomplished, lead begins to fly.

The vultures were closer now.

In an unending barrage, the sun beat down its merciless heat on to the rocky Utah desert.

Beneath the inferno, a man lay spread-eagled, facing upward. Thick bonds tied his hands and feet to heavy stakes driven deep into the unforgiving desert. Each stake was set far enough apart to hold and stretch him without hope of escaping.

With his head turned as far as possible from the blinding rays of the sun, the man's cheeks and neck still fried. He couldn't shield his face as the sun burned him to death in the slowest way possible.

Yet again, the man tried to drag his arms upward. His arms stayed down.

How long he had been here, the man didn't know. He was aware of a yesterday and perhaps a day before that. Before then, his thoughts refused to travel. The sun had fried his mind and he couldn't remember anything more.

What had he done to deserve suffering his slow death? Who had staked him here?

The answers were beyond remembering.

Worst, the man didn't know his own name.

With the sun rising in the sky, he knew these worries wouldn't last much longer. Before long, the sun would blind him and then bake him. By sunset, his last duty would be to feed the vultures that circled ever closer.

Without much hope, the man flexed his arms, but he was too weak to know if he moved them.

While the man kept his eyes closed to preserve his eyesight, the great birds flapped around him. The man believed dead meat attracted them, so they wouldn't attack him while he lived. Then again, they wouldn't need to wait much longer.

Amid the cawing of the squabbling birds, flies buzzed. They crawled over his exposed skin as they staked their claim for this piece of fresh meat before the vultures took their share.

Wings flapped. A shadow covered the man's face. With this momentary respite from the sun, he opened his eyes.

A vulture hulked over him. Its beak was open wide in anticipation.

The reek of death surrounded him.

Despite his baked throat, a cry loosened itself from the man's chest.

In surprise, the vulture squawked away from him. Then with a crash, which shook the man's body, it flew into the stake pinning his right arm.

For terrible seconds, the man's body racked apart. The pressure almost wrenched his arm from the socket. Then the pressure yielded.

The man sighed gratingly. He only had hours left but the vultures wouldn't take him while he lived. He flexed his arm. It was less constrained than before.

Supposing the vulture had done more damage than he had previously thought, the man looked to his right. The stake holding his right arm was at a sharp angle to the rocky ground. The huge bird in crashing into the stake, had partially dragged it from the ground.

Gulping in his dry throat against the hope that hit him, the man flexed his arm, testing whether the stake was loose enough to move. His bones creaked as he moved them for the first time in days.

The stake moved six inches.

The man reached the extent of his movement to the right, paused, and then moved his arm in the opposite direction. His arm moved six inches in that direction too. Better, the stake creaked as much as his arms did.

Wasting no time on wondering if he could escape, the man thrust his arm upward. In a pebble-filled shower, the stake surged from the ground and his arm thrust into the air above his head.

The man grinned, but with the first possibility that he might live, his heart raced in panic. When staked in the desert, he'd die. Now with a hint of hope, he must grab the chance.

He forced his shoulder upward and at the extent of his reach, he closed his free hand over the stake holding his left arm. Then he fell back; in another creaking shower of pebbles, the stake slipped from the desert ground.

The man pushed himself to a sitting position. He stretched his sore back as far as possible and grabbed the stake holding his left leg. He tugged backward. When the stake failed to move, he lurched to his right and with a firm grip, pulled the right stake free.

Now that he was almost free, he shuffled towards the final stake, wrapped both arms around it and pulled it free. Then he pushed to his feet and stood, swaying back and forth.

With the stakes still attached to his ankles and wrists, he staggered to the nearest boulder and fell into a rare piece of shade. Despite the oppressive heat, here was a small pool of coolness. With his legs drawn to his chest, he wondered what he could do.

The man had no idea as to his current location, or the direction of safety. If he were near to a town or a commonly used trail, someone would have found him, so he must be many miles from help.

Despite his poor memory, he knew that travelling at night was the safest way of walking through a desert, but in his present weak state, he doubted he'd be alive by sunset.

Without a choice, he dragged the stakes from his limbs, staggered to his feet, and stumbled into the raging heat.

The flies buzzed again, dense and insistent.

As the man rounded the boulder, he smelt the rank odour and knew what he'd see before he reached the other side.

Staked on the ground ten yards before him were three fly-blown bodies.

Vultures squabbled over the bodies. The birds turned their vast heads to the man and shuffled back a few feet to wait for the interruption to end.

The man staggered forward to stand over the bodies.

The first person had died from repeated, frenzied stab wounds. A dagger still protruded from the body's chest.

Stakes secured the second person's body across the chest and thighs. With a grimace, the man noticed the victim's hands and feet lay in a pile a few yards away.

The third person appeared to lack skin.

Each of these people had died an increasingly painful death. The man gulped drily. He wondered if an interruption had stopped their torturers before they perpetrated whatever painful end they'd intended for him. If the third person's fate were a guide, the death they'd planned for him was horrendous.

The man sighed. The death they'd planned for him was the worst of all. They'd let him live to die the slowest of deaths.

The man turned from the corrupted bodies. He shielded his eyes as he examined the barren, white-glowing desert. He discovered that he was on a small plateau, facing a gully, which nestled between two steep-sided hills. Beyond, the landscape was empty of features.

He turned around. In all directions, the rock-strewn surface was unrelenting and free of any vegetation or sign of civilization. The only movement came from the vultures that circled over the gully.

With no clue as to how he might escape, he pondered. All directions appeared to lead to death. In which direction he wanted to meet that death was his only choice.

For long minutes, the man found nothing to guide him. Then his gaze became accustomed to the harsh terrain.

Trails coated the ground a few yards from him. Having identified the scuffed markings, he found hoof prints lying around the staked men. They led beyond another rock pile and down into the gully.

With his direction resolved, the man let the vultures return to their interrupted feast and staggered down this trail and into the gully. Towering rocks loomed over him as he stumbled and slid down the gully side.

At the bottom, bodies lay everywhere. They sprawled over the remnants of a short wagon train.

The six half-burnt wagons were in a defensive circle. The swathe of death around them showed that the defenders had failed.

With flies filling the air, the man staggered forward. He wandered from body to body searching for someone who might still be alive. Everywhere he looked, the ravaged bodies had been dead for days.

He counted twelve bodies, including women who had died beside their men. Too much time had passed to suggest who these people were when alive. As gunshot burns holed their clothing, the cause of their deaths was clearer.

The man looked in each wagon. Within the third, three children huddled in the corners. They were dead too.

'They didn't need to do that,' the man mumbled, and with these croaked words, he remembered how dire his situation was.

He searched for food and water. Beside a wagon he found a barrel with a gunshot hole half-way down one side. He threw the barrel top to the ground. His own dishevelled and sunburned reflection stared back. With a grating whoop of joy, the man thrust his head into the barrel and gulped down water until he choked. Then with the barest pause for breath he plunged his head back in to gulp again.

With his imminent survival assured, the man planned how to prolong his luck. Further investigation yielded no help. His riffling through clothing and the wagon remnants failed to reveal a map. The two remaining horses were dead and food was only noticeable by its absence.

When the sun edged close to the horizon, the man decided.

He gulped as much water as he could stomach and filled the two canteens he'd found. Then he upended the water barrel over his head. Without a backward glance, he marched down the wheel-rutted trail the wagon train had taken to reach this terrible place. The wagons had come from somewhere. His only hope was to retrace their journey and hope he'd find safety before his water ran out.

The man walked from the gully. He passed a formation of rocks shaped like a lizard and then faced the flat desert terrain. The setting sun threw his long shadow before him. Ahead, the wagon trail stretched. To the north were low hills. To the south was endless light sand.

When the sun set his clothes were already dry and returned to their previous gritty state. Afterwards, the temperature plummeted. With the coolness and water in his belly, the man was happier with his predicament.

Maintaining his eastward direction, he walked through the night. For company, he had the wheel markings running across the sand below him, and above him, the harshly bright stars. Every hour he stopped to empty his boots of sand, but as the sky lightened he no longer bothered.

An hour after sunrise he sheltered next to a large rock outcrop. Huddled in the coolness, he slept while the sun did its worst.

At sunset he walked again, although the trail was hard to follow. The slight breeze blowing in his face shifted the sand over the wheel markings.

Even with rationing, his first canteen ran out during the second morning of his journey. The second canteen yielded its last precious drop of water on the third afternoon.

Then all the man had left was his willpower.

He maintained his general eastward direction, receiving no encouragement from the stars shining down on him.

He walked throughout the fourth night, without sign of civilization or water. In the morning, he searched for shelter and then stopped. Without water for two days and food for over a week, he was beyond weakness. Only his legs refusal to stop moving kept him walking.

If he stopped, he'd never start again.

He knew deserts often trapped their few visitors with mirages. As the morning heat built to the unforgiving inferno of midday, he experienced them.

The outline of buildings shimmered in the distance. Seemingly, he'd been walking by them for years.

The wheel trails beneath his feet were no longer there. They hadn't been for a long time.

The man stumbled to his knees and tottered back and forth. He was torn between accepting that the buildings existed and so walking to them, and believing them a mirage and so falling on to the sand and dying.

If they were a mirage, he was only wasting his time in living for a few more minutes.

The man decided to waste that time.

He staggered to his feet and aimed for the buildings, shuffling forward painfully. Each step he dragged from his faltering legs didn't bring the buildings closer. Just as he decided they were a figment of his sun-blasted imagination, a fence appeared before him.

With a tentative hand, the man closed his fingers on the rough lumber. He ran his hand along the fence. The wood grated his fingertips. This was the first object that he'd felt for a while that wasn't sand or rock. Now knowing that the town wasn't a mirage, he ducked through the fence posts and staggered to the buildings.

A few yards on, he reached a sign.

'Hell's End. Population 47,' the sign proclaimed.

'Wrong, forty-eight,' the man mumbled and pushed on to the buildings.

A few rough adobe buildings were on either side of the only road. Some buildings had signs above their doors offering such delights as a saloon and stores. The man staggered to the nearest building, the saloon. He stumbled on to the short porch, through the swing doors, and into the coolness beyond.

While the flies buzzed, he swayed in the entrance. His eyes refused to focus on the gloom inside. Then he saw people. In relief, he fell to his knees.

On the sandy floor, he forced his head up.

Three men lined the back wall, leaning back in their chairs with hats pulled low over their faces. A bearded man loomed over him.

'Please,' the man said in a croaking whisper with a hand over his brow. 'Help me. I need water.'

The bearded man smiled. He pulled a gun from its holster and pointed it at the man.

'I had a feeling you'd return,' he muttered. 'You should have stayed where you were.'

This novel started with the image of a man lying staked out in the desert.

I had no idea who he was, so he was just that — the man. The man escaped from his terrible fated death, but finds he is the sole survivor of an atrocity.

He staggers back to civilization, but nobody believes his tale, thinking him the commiter of the atrocity, not a victim.

He is allocated a name — Matt Travis (which has no connection to Scotland's most tuneful band) and he begins to piece together a version of the events leading up to the atrocity.

Later, Cassidy Yates from The Outlawed Deputy arrives to help him, but before Matt can approach the truth, further disaster strikes when he accidently kills the one person who seems to know everything about his past.

From then on, his life complicates and Matt's quest for the truth and justice is a troubled one.

And just like Matt, I didn't find out why he was lying in the middle of the Utah desert until I reached the final sentence, but by then, it was too late to let Matt know.