Jonah Hex: Shades of Gray #5

“So, how was everything today?”
 
“Perfect.”  Jonah smiled at the waitress standing behind the lunch counter.  “Best chili Ah’ve had in a hunnert years.”
 
“Wow!  That’s quite a compliment.  Did you save any room for dessert?”
 
“Gonna have tuh pass, darlin’,” he replied, though in truth he’d been gazing longingly at the display of pies at the end of the counter most of the time he’d been sitting there.  Sadly, he knew that he barely had enough money to pay for lunch, so gazing was all he could afford to do.
 
“Well, if you change your mind, just flag me down.”  She set Jonah’s bill next to his nearly-empty bowl of chili.  “Have a great day, sir.”
 
If’n Ah reach muh destination today, Ah certainly will.  Five days had passed since Jonah’s resurrection, and if he understood the map correctly, he was finally near the borders of Coast City.  There was still a little bit of traveling left to do, but even if he didn’t manage to hitch a ride, he was sure he’d be there by sundown.  Once there, he could track down Green Lantern, and then it would only be a matter of time until that cussed black ring was yanked out of Jonah so he could get on with his new life in the 21st Century.  What exactly he was going to do with that life, he wasn’t sure, but he knew he didn’t want to spend it with one foot still in the grave.
 
He polished off the last of his meal, then glanced at the bill and winced.  $3.50 for the chili, ninety-five cents for the coffee...Good Lord, he’d seen cheaper fare in boomtowns!  Jonah still couldn’t believe how expensive things were these days.  He recalled how his jaw had dropped when Maggie handed him a twenty-dollar bill as “pocket money”, then proceeded to explain to Jonah about the horrors of inflation.  Best he could figure was that a nickel now equaled a dollar, more or less, but that didn’t make it any easier for him to stomach as he laid the proper amount on the counter.  Good thing Ah’m almost tuh Coast City, ‘cause now Ah’m as broke as a dead-dick dog, he thought, then got off the stool and grabbed the duffel bag sitting by his feet.  Wonder how folks these days kin even afford tuh make ends meet with prices like this?
 
The hot, dry afternoon air smacked Jonah in the face as he left the restaurant.  He was unaware of the technical aspects of air-conditioning, but he’d grown to appreciate it over the last five days, especially whenever he managed to hitch a ride with someone whose vehicle was equipped with it.  The young couple who’d dropped him off in this town a few hours ago had the air in their automobile set so cold, Jonah wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d seen snow blowing out of the vents, yet the girl grumbled about being hot.  To her, such a luxury still wasn’t good enough.  It just boggled Jonah’s mind how someone could be so ungrateful for push-button, instant coldness on a hot day.  Thet’s because none of these folks have ever had it rough, Jonah thought as he walked out of town and towards the hilly landscape that lay to the north.  This ain’t like when yuh got stuck in thet other future.  Those folks livin’ there knew whut they’d lost, an’ they became grateful right quick fer whatever they could scrounge up.

While Jonah’s boots may have been treading the gravel alongside the road, his mind wandered a path much further away, all the way back to when he was a much younger man with an older face.  For a brief period of his life, Jonah Hex had been trapped against his will in the year 2050, thanks to a time-manipulating despot named Reinhold Borsten.  During that period, he’d seen and experienced things that would haunt him all the way up to his death and beyond: irradiated wastelands pelted by flesh-melting rain, people and creatures that seemed to have been birthed out of nightmares, infernal machines and things indescribable.  Every day Jonah spent there was a test of his very sanity, but what had almost irrevocably shattered it was the discovery of his own corpse on display in a dusty warehouse.  It was only due to the unwavering support of two people that Jonah managed to pull himself back together.  The first was Stiletta, a young woman who, like Maggie, befriended Jonah as he struggled to find his footing in this strange new place.  After a while, they became more than friends, though like with Maggie, that affair was all too brief.  Then there was Green Lantern, who at the time was just as lost as Jonah.  Hal claimed to have met the bounty hunter before, though because of some fluke of time travel, the two events were occurring out of order, and their “first” meeting wouldn’t happen until three years after Hal helped Jonah get back to his proper time.  Once that was out of the way, Jonah spent the rest of his life trying to wipe every last remnant of that horrible period from his mind, and he’d nearly succeeded...until Lew Farnham showed up toting the same clownish outfit that Jonah had seen his corpse dressed in.  Then Jonah died, and he spent the next century knowing he’d eventually end up in a dusty warehouse, staring down upon his younger, living self.
 
But that wouldn’t happen now, would it?  The Green Lantern had told him long ago that the future he’d seen was only one of many possibilities, and Hal seemed certain that the hellish world Jonah experienced would never come to be, at least not in the timeline he was a part of.  That hadn’t stopped Jonah from cursing Hal’s name along with Farnham’s after his corpse had been stuffed and mounted, but now that his formerly-dead flesh was young and vital again, it seemed Hal was correct all along.  This timeline, the one Jonah existed in, wouldn’t be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust within the next 40 years, and Jonah’s body wouldn’t be desecrated for all eternity.  That knowledge alone was a relief, but even better was that his previous experience with the nightmare world of 2050 was actually proving useful as he navigated his way through this new world of 2010.  Whereas his younger self had to cope with the existence of things that were just plain impossible in the 19th Century, his older and wiser self was already insulated against many of those shocks, or at least they were less earth-shattering.  They still weren’t exactly a pleasure to deal with, but as Jonah made his way across the great state of California, he’d developed a tendency to compare these two disparate worlds, if only to pass the time.
 
After an hour or so of walking, the town was long behind him, and Jonah noticed that the traffic was incredibly light on this stretch of road winding through the hills.  The occasional vehicle would zoom past, but none of them seemed interested in giving him a ride.  Knowing how close he was to Coast City even on foot, Jonah shrugged it off and kept walking.  Then he realized that some of the cars that passed him on the northbound side were coming back on the southbound as well.  It was hard to verify at first, since the black ring inside him had essentially rendered him colorblind, but after watching a big truck with “Mayflower” printed on its sides lumber up the road, then seeing an identical truck return from the same direction not long after, Jonah figured that it couldn’t be a coincidence.  About five miles after he made that observation, he saw the reason why: a long line of vehicles, all pointing north, but stopped dead on the road.  Damned peculiar, Jonah thought as he watched one of the cars pull out of line and turn about in the middle of the road so they could drive south instead -- those who stayed behind inched up into the clear spot the departing vehicle made.  Still walking on the gravel shoulder, Jonah craned his neck in an effort to figure out what the fuss was about, but the sun dazzled his eyes too much for him to make anything out.  Cain’t hurt tuh ask somebody, he reasoned, then sidled over to one of the stopped cars, which had its front passenger-side window rolled halfway down.  A man and a woman were sitting up front, and three rowdy boys were bouncing around in the back.  “Pardon me,” Jonah said, “but do y’all have any idea whut’s goin’ on up there?”
 
“How the Hell should we know?” then man snapped, his aura blood-red as his hands held the steering wheel in a death grip.  “We’re all the way back here!”
 
“Ed, the man was just asking a question,” the woman said, her own aura a mild yellow.
 
“And it’s a stupid question!”
 
“Mom!  Mom!” one of the boys shouted.  “Can we get outta the car like him?”  He pointed at Jonah.
 
“Yeah, it’s hot in here!” another chimed in.
 
“I gotta pee!” the youngest added.
 
“Will you kids shut up, for God’s sake!”  The man turned around and started smacking the boys with his open palm.  “I can’t take it anymore!”  Then the man heard a metallic click, followed by his wife screaming, and he turned back to see that Jonah had stuck one of his Dragoons through the window and pointed it at the man’s head.
 
“Ain’t no reason tuh be hittin’ them boys,” Jonah said firmly.  “Y’all obviously ain’t goin’ nowheres, so let ‘em out so’s they kin stretch their legs.”  Jonah then nodded towards the woman, whose screams had died down to a trembling sob.  “An’ be a little more civil tuh her while yo’re at it.”
 
The man gaped at Jonah for a few seconds before carefully reaching over and hitting a button on the driver’s-side door.  There was a loud thunk as the locks disengaged, and the three boys threw the back doors open and scrambled out, the youngest one immediately running for some bushes alongside the road.  “Don’t go too far,” Jonah told them as they whooped and ran all around the stopped vehicles.  “This here’s just a temporary furlough.”  Looking back inside the car, he said to their parents, “Give ‘em five minutes, then round ‘em up.”
 
The adults nodded dumbly at Jonah, who put his gun away as he continued on down the road.  If there was one thing the bounty hunter couldn’t stand, it was folks that abused their kids.
 
The road made a sharp turn to the right around the base of a hill, and as Jonah rounded the corner, he finally saw what the holdup was: two police cars blocking the road north.  One officer stood in the middle of the road and waved any southbound cars through, while two others walked down the line and spoke with the drivers of each of the northbound vehicles in turn.  Jonah was too far away from all this to make out what was being said, but after his previous encounters with the law in this century, he thought it best to avoid these fellas.  Glancing across the road, he saw that the land beyond the guardrail sloped down into a wooded area.  Time tuh blaze a new trail, Jonah thought, and began to weave through the stopped cars, keeping his head low in the hopes that the police hadn’t noticed him yet.  When he reached the center line, he darted across the empty southbound lane and, after a quick glance over the side to see what he was getting himself into, jumped the guardrail.  The slope was a bit steep, but Jonah just dug his bootheels into the loose scree and slid down into the cover of the woods.  Once there, he paused and looked back up the slope, but he didn’t see anyone peering over the guardrail or hear any voices yelling for him to halt.  Got away scot-free, he thought with a grin, then headed deeper into the woods, still keeping on a northward course.
 
A brief consultation with the map told Jonah that there were no major roads nearby, save for the one he’d just deserted.  That didn’t trouble him much: north was north, whether you were on a road or in the woods, and he soon found traveling through the latter a pleasure.  The dappled sunlight coming through the trees was less harsh on his eyes, and getting away from the steady drone of automobiles (not to mention the choking smell of them) was pure joy.  Had it not been for the nylon duffel bag slung over his shoulder, he could have very easily believed that he was back in the 19th Century again, traveling through the wilderness.  He could swear that he even smelled a waft of smoke on the wind, like from the chimney of some homestead nestled in the woods.  No such place ever came into view, however, so he dismissed it as wishful thinking.
 
Hours and miles went by, with no sign of civilization to be found, and Jonah began to find himself missing it.  Back in his old life, he couldn’t have cared less about not seeing another living soul for days, as he was never the sociable type, but after being isolated for over a century, he suddenly realized that he liked having other people around him, even if he wasn’t interacting directly with them all the time.  Just knowing that he could approach someone and talk to them if he so wished, or that they could see and acknowledge him as another human being and not an inanimate object...it gave him a sense of dignity and belonging that he’d been denied for so long.  Being alone now, even in such tranquil surroundings, made him feel somewhat incomplete.  It was a strange feeling, and Jonah wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, so he did what he always did whenever he felt an emotion that was currently inconvenient: he shoved it down into the deepest recesses of his gut and ignored it.
 
As the sun was just beginning to approach the horizon, Jonah came across a paved road cutting through the woods in an east-west direction.  He glanced at the map to get his bearings, but this particular road didn’t appear to be marked upon it.  Must be new, he thought, walking out to stand in the center of the road.  It fairly narrow compared to most he’d been traveling on the last few days, and as far as he could discern from what few marks were on its surface, it hadn’t been used much yet.  Reckon Ah could break it in a bit muhself.  Assuming that his bearings were correct, Coast City was roughly 10 miles west of his current position, so he started walking in that direction -- if he was lucky, this road would take him all the way there.  After a half-hour, though, it became evident that it wouldn’t be that easy, as the road dead-ended in front of a place that reminded Jonah of a ghost town.  It was a series of empty streets, all as new and untouched as the road he’d been walking on, and each one lined with scores of fancy two-story houses, many of which were only partially built.  A large wooden sign was posted next the main road, declaring this place to be Vista Verde, “The Perfect Place to Raise Your Family -- Ask About Our Early Move-In Specials!”  There were more accolades on the sign, but Jonah couldn’t read them because of the huge FORECLOSED banner pasted over it.
 
“How in blazes do yuh foreclose on a town?” he wondered aloud, but upon closer examination, he saw this wasn’t a real town: it had no businesses or restaurants or churches or anything else that Jonah had seen in modern towns over the past five days, let alone what he’d expect to see in a town from his own time.  “Y’all built a bunch of houses too close together in the middle of nowhere, an’ yuh expected folks tuh just show up an’ be happy with it?  No wonder the bank foreclosed on yuh!”  His harsh laughter echoed off the buildings, though in his mind, he was debating what his next move should be.  It would be dark soon, and while he could see at night easily enough, it looked like his original estimate of reaching Coast City by sundown was way off, so he had to make a choice between pushing on through the dark, unknown woods or taking shelter in this joke of a town until daybreak.  “Tuh Hell with it,” he finally said.  “Tonight, Ah’m the mayor of Vista Verde, population: one.”