The Long Road Home #4

"Alright, Jordan, explain all this nonsense tuh me, and make sure yuh chew it fine so's Ah kin understand it."

After retrieving Hal's coat from the still-unconscious biker, the two men found what passed for a food court near the center of the mall and grabbed a secluded table where they could hash things out. They received a few dirty looks from some of the vendors for taking up space without buying anything, but the look Hex gave them back was dirtier, and they were soon left in peace. They sat across from each other at the small table, the magazine laying between them. "You remember the year I told you I came from?" Hal said, then tapped the cover’s upper corner, where the date was printed. "This was published on the one-year anniversary of Coast City's destruction. That event happened three years before I came here...it's a time I've already lived through."

"Ah got thet much straight. Whut Ah don't understand is why whut yuh said happened back then don't match up with whut this says." He tapped the cover himself now. "Is this one of them paradox things yuh was talkin' 'bout?"

"Sort of. What I was referring to before has to do with changing what happened in the past in a catastrophic way, one that makes the timeline unravel. But this...the flow of time is very strange, Jonah. In addition to what we think of as 'normal' reality, there's all these 'possible' realities lying just beneath the surface...the way things might have been if events happened in a different order, or not at all in some cases."

"Yuh lost me...sounds like yo're sayin' things happen more'n once." He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and shook one out.

"The simplest way to explain it is that, for every decision you make in life, you make the opposite one in another reality. Let's say you come to a fork in the road: in one reality you go left, in the other you go right. Everything after that is different in both realities, because different things will happen to you depending on the direction you go." Jordan held up a hand. "Not every decision you make is that reality-altering, of course, but some little things do effect the universe in ways you can't imagine. It's like a snowball effect."

Jonah had been in the process of snapping off the cigarette filter when Hal said that. The gunfighter now sat there, looking at the two halves. He was far from stupid, but he did have difficulty with concepts that weren't tangible. It had taken him a day or two to get his head around time travel, and the incident with the corpse...well, he was still wrestling with that one. Now he had to deal with the notion of reality being multiple-choice. He placed the halves next to each other on the table so they looked like a whole cigarette again. "Everything starts off normal," he said aloud, more to himself than to Hal, "then something happens thet could go two ways...maybe three or four ways...so it splits off." He pushed the two halves around so they now lay side-by-side. "Everything keeps goin' on like afore, only now there's two of everything...an' nobody notices?" The last part he directed at the Green Lantern.

"Most normal people don't, no...which is good. It helps them stay sane."

"So have things always been screwed up like this? Is there someplace where the South won the War?"

"Yeah, probably." Hal did his best to not laugh when Jonah's eyes almost bugged out of his head. "There's probably also a world where the Civil War never happened, or where America as we know it never even existed...just about everything that could happen has happened in another reality. And this," he said, picking up the magazine, "is one of those other realities."

"By which yuh mean it ain't yorn." Hex lit his cigarette-cum-visual aid. "How the Hell did yuh end up here, then? Ah thought yuh just got tossed forward in time like me."

"So did I, but the blast that knocked me here was mainly made up of a cosmic energy source, one that Dr. Steveling said existed everywhere. I'll bet it passes straight through all the alternate realities, too. I just slipped right through and didn't notice...and if we hadn't found this, I probably would have never noticed since I ended up a few decades ahead of where I started."

"Lucky you. So how's this place different from where y'all came from...other than the fact thet yo're dead, of course."

"I wish that was all. Like I told you before, Mongul was trying to take over Earth...him and a cyborg that was impersonating Superman. They'd built a massive engine on the ruins of the city, and Mongul was about to turn it on and knock the planet out of orbit when I intervened. The real Superman and the others were working on taking down the cyborg and disabling the engine, so it was just the two of us duking it out. That monster almost had me at one point: I was flat-out on a catwalk, just totally spent. He raised his fist for a killing blow, but I managed to roll out of the way at the last moment, bought myself enough time to get my second wind so I could get up again and cream him." He looked down at the cover and the picture of the memorial. "It was just a fleeting moment. If I'd moved one second later, Mongul probably would have crushed my skull into powder...and I almost let him, he'd knocked me so low."

"Yuh didn't, though, yuh got up an' finished the job. But this other Hal Jordan..."

"One damn second, that's all it would have took. With me out of the way, Mongul would have gone on with activating the engine. By that time, the others had probably rendered it inoperable, but the power source would still be intact: pure kryptonite. Maybe he saw that he couldn't win, so he detonated the engine core just so he'd have the satisfaction of wiping out those who had ruined his plan." Hal traced a finger over the statue faces, naming them in turn. "Supergirl, Steel, Superboy...they were standing right outside the core chamber when I found them after the fight, so they were probably there when it went off, and Superman...he was in the heart of the thing, along with the cyborg and Eradicator. I'm just speculating, of course: according to this, no one survived the final blast that wiped out the last of Mongul's complex, so nobody knows what exactly happened. They couldn't even do a full investigation of the wreckage, the whole area was so hot from radiation."

"Superman's one of the fellas yuh've been askin' around fer," Jonah said. "Yuh called him one of the 'big guns'."

"The biggest. I figured if any of the heroes could last through a nuclear war, Superman would make it for sure," Hal said, "or at the very least, people would remember his name. He went everywhere, from one end of the globe to the other." He opened the magazine to a random page. It showed a dark-haired, muscled man in a red and blue outfit soaring across the sky just as easy as you please, a red cape spread out behind him like wings.

Hex recalled seeing something quite like that a few months back, but he'd written it off as a hallucination caused by too much rotgut. 'Sides, it was here an' gone afore Ah knew it, he thought. Maybe it was just some odd little hiccup in time like whut brought Lantern here, no point in gettin' the fella's hopes up fer nothin'. "The boy an' girl...they his kids or something?" he asked.

"No, just heroes that looked up to him, so they wore his symbol as a kind of tribute. Same with Steel. I suppose we all wanted to emulate him."

"Sounds like wantin' tuh be like him weren't enough tuh carry 'em through, though. Ah take it in yer time, they all made it out safe an' sound?"

He nodded. "We were all banged up to some degree or another, but yeah, everybody walked away intact. Hooray for the good guys. But in this timeline...remember I said that someone had been impersonating Superman? That same man had talked the government into staying away from the ruins of Coast City, then sent the Justice League on a wild goose chase across the solar system, all to make sure they wouldn't interfere with Mongul's plan. As far as they all knew, he was Superman, so why wouldn't they believe him? By the time people realized they'd been duped, it was too late, we were all dead, and they didn't have a clue as to why. According to one of articles in here, the public thinks Eradicator was one of the bad guys...and some people still think the cyborg was the real Superman." Hal flipped ahead a few pages, saying, "All this confusion didn't help the League's reputation, either. There's another piece in here mentioning that the government forced the League to disband a couple of months earlier due to 'lack of trust', probably because the heroes fell for the ruse just like everyone else."

"An' without yer 'big gun' tuh back 'em up, they didn't have a leg tuh stand on.” He thought of all his fellow Confederates that were so quick to brand him a traitor after the Fort Charlotte Massacre, then said, "All them regular folks wanted somebody tuh pay fer whut happened, an' all yuh masked men was just convenient scapegoats, seein' as how the real skunks thet did all the damage was already dead."

"That's sounds about right, unfortunately. There was a similar uproar during the 1950s, I think, due to the Red Scare. The government called the members of the Justice Society Communist sympathizers and wanted them to publicly reveal their identities. They all retired or went into hiding rather than comply, and there were no superheroes operating in the public eye for decades until...well, until Superman. If the pattern repeated again in the modern era, and all the heroes of my time went underground...my God, do you know how much chaos that would bring? In just the past three years, there's been so many global threats that only...” Hal let the sentence trail off, his face becoming pale.

"Whut's wrong?" Jonah asked. The look on the Green Lantern's face was disturbing, like the man had seen the Devil himself. "Yuh still with me, son?"

His voice barely audible, Hal managed to form one word: "Parallax."

"Come again?"

Jordan's eyes seemed to focus elsewhere as he spoke. "For years, I've been beating myself up for the loss of Coast City, wondering what I could have done differently, how my life would have turned out if I hadn't..." He stopped, pain flickering across his features for a moment. "I never thought things could turn out worse."

"This has tuh do with whut y'all was tellin' me the other night, don't it? The bad decisions." Hex tossed away the cigarette and leaned forward, elbows on the table. "Them gloves yuh wear ain't as white as they look, are they? All them folks died, an' yuh couldn't take it, so yuh went crazy...just like me."

Hal opened his mouth, but nothing came out at first. Then, slowly, he told the gunfighter, "It wasn't the same, I...something was...influencing me. I wasn't in control all the time. It let me think I was, but..." He drew in a shuddering breath. "I was afraid, and I didn't want anyone else to die, so I amassed this staggering amount of power to the point where I could affect Time itself, and I tried to...restart everything. Just erase all the bad things that ever happened. I almost did, but my friends stopped me. For a moment, though, I touched the very fabric of the universe...who knows what sort of imprint I left on it once they made me let go?"

Jonah leaned back in his chair, thinking, He's lyin', whut he's talkin' 'bout ain't possible. Then again, if someone had come to him before he'd been dragged into the future and told him about a tenth of the things he'd seen here, or about moving through time in and of itself, he would have laughed it all off. If'n it's true, though, then thet means... "This is all yer fault: the world got blown tuh Hell an' gone in this time 'cause yuh weren't there tuh leave yer mark."

"I think so." Hal looked around at the people sitting nearby, oblivious to the two of them discussing matters of time and space. "In one reality I live and almost wipe out the universe in an attempt to save lives, and in another I die and unintentionally destroy civilization by my absence. Which is worse?"

"Apples an' oranges," Hex muttered. "Both of 'em are bad, just dif'rent types of it."

"I'm surprised you're so glib about this."

"Yuh want me tuh browbeat yuh over this or something? Ain't no point in it, the deed's done...both of 'em. Ah gather from the way y'all was talkin' the other night thet yuh've done yer penance fer the damage yuh caused back in yer own time, anyhow."

"'Penance' is the perfect word for it."

Jonah nodded. "Fair enough. Ah ain't one tuh hound a man once justice has been served, so yo're off the hook with me. As far as whut happened in this time goes, yuh died. How the Hell kin yuh punish a man fer dyin'? Kill him again?"

"I suppose you're right. It's just hard to think that what I did as Parallax was a good thing in the long run."

"Like yuh said afore, God has a strange sense of humor." Jonah lit another cigarette and watched the Green Lantern through a haze of smoke. He saw the man in a different light now: not as high-and-mighty as he seemed at first glance, for sure. “So whut do we do now, Jordan? If’n all them long-underwear folk is gone, how we supposed tuh get yer green butt home?”

“All the heroes on Earth are gone...but there are others that weren’t based on Earth,” Hal told him, then pointed upwards.

Like a rube, Hex looked up and saw nothing but the mall’s ceiling, then the meaning of what Hal said sunk in. “Oh, Ah’ve gotta see how yuh plan on pullin’ this one off.”

The snow came back in full force the next day, the wind howling and shaking the walls of the warehouse. Despite that, the four of them agreed to head out into it, albeit with a different sort of transportation: the crawler was the biggest vehicle in the motor pool, and had been built to withstand all sorts of abuses, both physical and environmental. The four tank-like treads that propelled it could eat up the roughest terrain, and the armor plating was thick enough to deflect most weaponry. Lewis threw a fit when they came to borrow it, but somehow they managed to pry the vehicle out of his hands. Due to Hal's inexperience with the technology and Jonah's track record of crashing just about every big vehicle he'd ever attempted to pilot, Cutter and Stiletta strapped themselves into the front cabin to drive the monster. Not long after they’d gotten underway, Hal left his seat in the small passenger compartment and braced himself in the connecting doorway, both to get an idea of how the vehicle worked and to observe the lay of the land through the windshield.

Jonah had laid out directions on an old map of the area, one that had been modified to reflect the changes the nuclear war had wrought. That left him little to do but sit back and enjoy the ride, so he began to double-check the munitions he'd brought along, popping the clips on the guns to verify they were loaded. Once he was done, he started over again from the beginning. It was unnecessary, of course, but it kept him distracted from how much he wanted a drink at that moment. The thought of it had kept him up most of the night: just sneak down to the pantry, take one little nip, and sneak back. No one would know if he kept it small. Besides, it would help quiet the voices that always seemed to whisper in his ear as he tried to sleep.

But he'd made a promise to Stiletta: no booze, not one drop. He didn't want her to think of him as weak, so he did his best to ignore the dryness of his throat and concentrate on the task in front of him, methodically pulling the weapons one at a time out of the duffel bag between his feet and looking them over. When Hal came over and sat next to him, he didn't even lift his head.

"I don't think any of the guns have run off yet,” Hal said, nudging the duffel with his boot.

Jonah grunted, put the pistol in his hand back with the others, then picked up a new one.

"Speaking of guns, I've been mulling over what you told me yesterday about your Dragoons," he continued, "and how you'd gotten rid of them back in your time."

"Rather not talk 'bout thet right now."

"You don't need to talk, just listen. I actually feel kind of stupid about this, it didn't occur to me until this morning," Jordan said, shaking his head. "You said they were with your corpse in the warehouse, and that you're positive they're the same guns you'd ditched."

"Yuh callin' me a liar, boy?" Jonah growled, obviously annoyed.

"No, I didn't mean that at all. It's just that, in light of what we found out yesterday...well, I don't think that corpse you found is really you."

He dropped the gun back into the bag, then slowly turned to look at the Green Lantern. "Ah beg yer goddam pardon?"

"Hear me out, this is a bit complicated. Stiletta told me that her father pulled hundreds of people out of their respective timeframes and brought them here, including yourself. She also said that most of them died fighting these mockup battles he arranged for." Hal leaned closer. "Do you know how much damage to the timestream that would cause, so many people being yanked out of where they should be and never returning? One or two might not have too big an impact, but hundreds..."

Jonah remembered something he'd seen when escaping Borsten's complex not long after he'd arrived. "He'd snatched up a mess of Yankees and stuck 'em in glass cages...reckon enough fer a whole battalion...an' he had a lot of other fellas in uniform, too," he said. "Thet many soldiers go missin', figure whatever war they're fightin' might turn out dif'rent without 'em."

"Exactly, which means by changing the past, you've just changed your own future. So how could you disrupt past events that much and have it not effect you?"

After a moment, Hex answered, "Take 'em from somebody else's past...thet crafty sonovabitch, he wasn't just reaching backwards in time, he was veerin' off tuh the left, too!" He slammed his fist onto the seat. "Thet no-good, heartless...dammit, Ah'm glad we killed him!"

"Whoa, hey, calm down! He may of not even known he was crossing realities: sometimes despite our best efforts to screw things up, the universe manages to find a way to smooth out the anomalies. Maybe some sort of cosmic fail-safe kicked in and tried to disperse the damage he was causing. He's gone, and so's the equipment he used, so we'll never know for sure. No matter whether it was intentional or not, it means that this reality isn't yours anymore than it's mine. We're both visitors here."

"How kin yuh be so sure 'bout thet?"

"It's the Dragoons. Think about it: the Jonah Hex for this reality never threw them in a lake. Maybe he never even got drunk like you did, and he probably never got pulled into the future as well. He kept those guns until he was an old man, died somehow, and the body got stuffed and mounted by someone who then displayed the Dragoons with the body. That's why they look like the same guns to you: until that split in reality, they were the same guns."

An' nobody notices, Jonah thought, not even me. He turned away from Hal and stared straight ahead -- the implications of what the man was telling him were still sinking in. For over a month, he'd been struggling with the knowledge that he would someday become nothing more than a carnival attraction, robbed of any sort of dignity or respect, and that there was no way to stop it since it had already happened. But if'n this ain‘t the same world Ah come from, then maybe it won‘t happen tuh me. It might, but it might not...fifty-fifty odds, same as everybody else. Suddenly, Jonah felt like a weight had been cut away from his heart. "Ah ain't dead," he gasped under his breath. When he'd said that on other occasions, it was to calm himself down, to reassure himself that what he'd seen in that dusty storeroom hadn't come true yet. Now he said it with a conviction he could never muster before. "Ah ain't dead!" he shouted, pumping his fists into the air and laughing. "Ah beat it, yuh ugly bastard! Ah ain't gonna end up like yuh! Ha ha!"

From the co-pilot seat up front, Stiletta poked her head into the passenger compartment. "What are you guys doing back there?"

"We're havin' a wake," the gunfighter answered, a huge grin on his face. "Some jasper named Jonah Hex up an’ died, but not this one!“

“What are you talking about?”

“Lantern thinks Ah got bounced up an’ over here like he did.” Hex got up from his seat and went over to hers. “If’n it’s true, thet means Ah ain’t gonna end up some corpse in a godawful costume! Thet’s just a maybe!” he said, laughing again. “Ah could die tomorrow, or not ‘til Ah’m a hunnert...but Ah'm gonna do muh damnedest tuh outlive Methuselah!”

“Oh my God, are you serious?” She looked from him to the Green Lantern and back again. “Oh my God,” she repeated, then threw her arms around Jonah, laughing herself now. He returned the gesture in kind, almost lifting her out of her seat. Cutter complained that it was hard to drive with both of them carrying on like that right next to him, but neither of them listened.

The four of them walked back to the surface like they'd been condemned, no one speaking. When they entered the long dark spot in the corridor where they'd found the body, Cutter tried to break the bleak mood. "It'll be nice to have you around for Christmas," he told Hal. "Marya says she got two hams for the big dinner tomorrow night."

"That's great, Cutter."

"It's not so bad living at Maple, you'll see. Better than some other places." He dropped back a little so that fell in step beside Hal, the beams from their flashlights bouncing in rhythm.

"You seem like good people." The young man couldn't see the Lantern's face very well in the dark, but his voice came out flat.

Cutter began to say something else, but Jonah shushed him and made them all stop. "Ah think Ah heard something," the gunfighter whispered. He panned his light in a circle from left to right, letting it crawl over the walls and pour down a nearby hallway. Nothing out of the ordinary could be seen. "Thought fer damn sure Ah heard something," he muttered, and started to step forward.

That was when they all heard a soft whirr and a scraping of metal, but not from their level. Hal caught sight of it first: a large hole in the ceiling, opening up to the level above them. They'd passed the rubble in the corridor earlier with barely a second glance, there were so many areas like it. Now Hal looked up and saw red eyes watching Jonah as the gunfighter walked right beneath the hole.

"Hex, get down!" Jordan pushed Cutter behind him, then brought up his borrowed gun and fired at the mechanical dog just as it jumped down from its perch. One of the bullets struck home, but it wasn't enough to stop the machine.

Jonah saw it coming and hit the floor, dropping his light as he slid out of the way and drew his own guns. When he came up into a kneeling stance to take aim, however, he stopped cold. In the spinning beam of his abandoned flashlight was Stiletta, flat on her back with the machine-hound straddling her, the stock of her rifle wedged in its jaws.

The first time Jonah had gone up against these iron hounds, it had been in one of the aboveground hangers, with a good distance between him and them to work with before they could sink their teeth into him. It had been close, but in the end, they'd never laid a paw on him. This time, however, the odds were stacked against him: he was trapped in a dark, narrow corridor, barely five feet away from the thing, and it had Stiletta pinned to the floor, to boot. The explosive charges he'd brought along would just rip them all apart at this range, and if he risked a shot with it thrashing around on top of Stiletta, a stray bullet might kill her. He had to make a decision, though, and quickly: the splintering rifle stock in the woman’s hands wouldn't hold the huge metal beast at bay much longer.

"Everybody out of the way!" Hex yelled, then charged straight at the dog, turning his shoulder towards the bulk of it and knocking it off Stiletta. Hal and Cutter both dove for cover on opposite sides of the corridor as Jonah and the machine-hound tumbled past. The gunfighter came to rest about twelve feet from where he'd started, fighting to right himself before the dog could recover. Unfortunately for him, the machine was built to take heavy impacts, and it soon regained its footing and lunged after him. Hex rolled out of the way, but one of its front paws raked across his back, metal claws easily ripping through the layers of protective clothing and drawing blood. Cutter grabbed hold of Hex and pulled him into a hallway branching off from the main corridor.

Holding his flashlight along the length of the gunbarrel to illuminate his target, Hal fired at the machine-hound's own back as it ran past, the armor-piercing rounds punching holes in its hide. He didn't stop it, but he definitely got the machine's attention. It skidded to a stop and whirled on the Green Lantern, exposing itself to another barrage of gunfire from behind, this time from Stiletta at the head of the corridor -- her rifle was useless, so she was blasting away with the handgun she'd been carrying for a backup. "Get moving!" Hal told her. "Head for the crawler, we'll be right behind you!"

"No way, you need all the help you can get!" she answered, never letting up on the dog.

"Well, somebody better get a move-on," Jonah said as he and Cutter began to open fire from their position at the back, "'cause these bullets ain't gonna last forever!"

One of their shots took out part of the dog's cranial housing, exposing wiring and sensors, but that only succeeded in making it more berserk. Sparks and shrapnel flew everywhere as it howled, metal teeth champing at the air. The photoelectric eyes of the beast stuttered for a moment, blinking on and off like twin traffic signals, but it still thrashed around. "I think we knocked out its vision," Hal said. Reaching down, he undid the Velcro straps on his leg brace and ripped it off. "If we're gonna make a run for it, now would be a good time!"

"Yuh heard him, son," Jonah said, and gave Cutter a push to get him moving. The young man's eyes were fixed on the dog as they ran past. It looked straight at them for a moment, but it didn't appear to notice them. "Never mind it, Ah've got us covered," Jonah told him, giving him another push, "yuh just look where yo're goin'!"

Flashlight beams swung back and forth as they retreated, alternating from the floor to check for obstacles, to the walls as they searched for the markers that would lead them back to the surface. Stiletta was far in front, with Hal gaining, and Hex at the tail end with a hand clamped on Cutter's arm to make him keep pace. In the darkness behind them, the sound of the machine-hound careening into walls echoed up the corridor. "It's still coming," Cutter gasped, craning his neck around to stare into the black. "Fugging thing's blind, and it's still coming..."

"May be blind," Jonah said, "but it ain't deaf, so put a cork in it!" He knew it wouldn't help, though, their footsteps alone made enough noise for the dog to follow. Their only hope was to stay as far ahead of it as possible.

Suddenly, Hal went down, his flashlight dipping as he cursed and hit the floor. Cutter and Hex paused to help the Green Lantern, who was holding on to his injured leg. "Figured I could run faster without the brace," he said through gritted teeth, "but my stupid knee gave out."

Stiletta turned around and shined her light back at them. "What happened? Are you all right?"

"Perfect," Jonah answered, and put a hand under Hal's arm to yank him to his feet. "Lantern decided we don't have enough problems, so..." He stopped when Stiletta began shouting, the beam of her light darting to the right of the corridor. He then heard the whine of the machine-hound's gears directly behind them. With barely a thought, he threw himself to the left, pulling Hal along with him and getting off two shots with his Magnum. Unfortunately, Cutter was not so quick, and the hound jumped on top of him, knocking him to the ground. Front paws planted on his chest, it sank its teeth into his shoulder, the powerful jaws clamping down hard enough to snap his collarbone. Deciding that the danger of accidentally shooting Cutter was of little consequence now, Hex took aim for another shot...and hit an empty cylinder. In their rush to get away, he'd never reloaded. "Sonovabitch!" he shouted, then ran forward and smashed his gun over the dog's muzzle until it let go, giving Hal the opportunity to grab Cutter. It snapped at Hex blindly for a moment, then jumped on the young man again, latching onto his calf before Hal could pull him completely away from the dog. The Green Lantern fell to the ground as well, but he kept his arms wrapped around Cutter's chest and held on as the dog tried to drag them both further down the corridor. "Hold on tuh him, Ah'll be right back!" Jonah said, then ran off into the darkness.

Stiletta soon joined Hal, adding her weight to the human chain as the dog jerked Cutter's leg in a perverse game of tug-of-war, the young man screaming the whole time. "Where the Hell did Hex go?" Hal asked her, then turned his head in the direction he saw the gunfighter run, yelling, "Come back here, you bastard! I swear to God, if you don't..."

He stopped when he heard something banging down the hallway, and Jonah's voice echoing off the walls: "C'mon, doggie! Yuh want a fight, Ah'll give yuh a good one!" Though Hal couldn't see very well in the dim corridor, he could hear the sound of bootheels slapping the ground, and it was coming closer. "Over here, yuh stupid clockwork mutt! Yuh couldn't take me out last time, so here's yer chance fer a rematch!" Jonah yelled, then Hal saw a human shape fly out of the darkness and land on the machine-hound. The dog reared up with a growl, letting go of Cutter and turning its attention on its new opponent, who offered no resistance.

"Jonah, no!" Stiletta screamed, and began to reach out to try and pull the dog away, but another hand came from behind her and latched onto her wrist. She turned to yell at Green Lantern, then saw that it was Jonah. "How the Hell..."

"Never mind," he said, "we've got maybe ten seconds 'til the charges go off." He then scooped Cutter up into his arms, and the three of them ran as fast as they could away from the dog, Stiletta supporting Hal on his bad leg. Seconds later, an explosion lit up the corridor, shards of metal and concrete flying everywhere as they hit the deck. More of the ceiling caved in behind them, entombing the remains of the machine-hound. Coughing a bit from the smoke, the gunfighter muttered, "The timers on them things is a shade off."

Hal groped for Jonah in the darkness. “How’s Cutter? You still got him?” He ran a hand over Cutter's neck to check for a pulse as Jonah set him down on the floor. “I need a light...who’s still got a flashlight?”

“Shit, I dropped mine back there somewhere. Jonah, do you...” Stiletta began to say, then stopped when she saw a spark.

“Sometimes, yuh got tuh do things the old-fashioned way,” Jonah said, holding up the wooden match so Hal could see what he was doing. The light was poor, but it was enough to tell that Cutter was in awful shape. His coat was soaked with blood at the shoulder, and the dog had nearly torn his leg off, dislocating it from the hip socket in the struggle. More blood was pumping out of the shredded muscle that used to be his calf. He wasn’t screaming anymore, just laying there with his eyes rolled up to the whites and breathing shallowly.

“We’ve got to stop the bleeding.” Hal undid Cutter’s belt and cinched it tightly around the young man’s thigh. "I need something for bandages."

Stiletta removed her coat and tore the sleeves off, handing them to Jordan. She then ripped a few more strips off of what was left and wrapped it around a long piece of metal laying nearby. "You want to explain your little magic trick back there?" she asked Hex as she lit the impromptu torch with his match.

"Figured since the dog was blind, it wouldn't know the dif'rence 'tween a live body an' a dead one right off," he said, "so Ah ran up the hall 'til Ah found thet fella we stumbled across, shoved a couple of charges in his pockets, then ran back here howlin' like the Devil so's the dog would think Ah was the one a-jumpin' on it."

"That's an absolutely insane idea."

"Worked, didn't it?"

Hal waved a hand at Stiletta, saying, "Bring the light closer." He'd bandaged the shoulder, and was now working on tying a splint to Cutter's leg, using two more pieces of the metal shrapnel that used to be part of the corridor. "This should keep it immobile enough to move him," he said. "We've got to get him back to the warehouse, and fast."

Careful not to jostle him too roughly, Hal and Jonah carried the unconscious young man out of the complex, Stiletta leading the way with the torch. Once they'd returned to the vehicle, they laid Cutter across the bench-like seats in the passenger compartment, wrapping him in a blanket stowed onboard and strapping him down as best they could so he wouldn't bounce around. The gunfighter collapsed on the floor next to the seats as Hal and Stiletta readied the crawler to head out. Hal poked his head out of the driver's cabin to check on the two of them once they were moving, but Jonah waved him off. "Y'all worry 'bout steerin' this monster, Ah'll keep an eye on the kid," he said.

"Who's going to keep an eye on you?" Though Hal had treated Cutter's wounds, no one had even taken a look at the gouges in Jonah's back.

"Ah've had worse," he answered, and leaned back against the crawler's hull. Despite his bravado, Jonah was in quite a bit of agony. The engine seemed to thrum in time with the throbbing pain in his back as they drove across the frozen wasteland, but he ignored it for now and focused his attention on Cutter, watching the kid for any sign of trouble.

After an hour or so, the gunfighter's eyes began to slip closed from exhaustion, but he soon snapped to attention when he thought he heard Cutter speak, followed by a cough. Jonah sat up and felt the young man's pulse near his throat, saying, "Kin yuh hear me, son?"

"Dad?" he gasped, trying to lift his head.

"Yer dad's not here," Jonah said, "lie still."

"It hurts, Dad...make it stop, please..." His voice was so weak, he sounded like he was eight instead of eighteen.

Jonah placed a hand against Cutter's pale, clammy cheek as the young man stared through him with unfocused eyes. "Ah wish Ah could," he said, and he meant it. He'd seen things like this when he'd fought in the Civil War: badly wounded men laying in battlefront hospitals or out in the field, begging for the comfort of friends and loved ones. A few were so far gone, they became incoherent. He remembered one long night hunkered down in a ditch, listening to some poor soul out in the dark screaming for fried chicken and ice cream. After a couple of hours, someone managed to put a bullet into the screaming man and end his misery. "Yuh did real good today, Cutter," he told him.

If he heard the words, he made no sign. "I'm tired..."

"Ah know. Yuh rest easy now, boy...yer dad will be here when yuh wake up."

Cutter said nothing else after that, the only sound coming from him being the unsteady wheeze of his breathing. A few minutes later, that faded away as well. Jonah moved his hand over the young man's eyes to close them, then got up and walked over to the front cabin. Hal immediately began to get up from the co-pilot's chair, but the gunfighter put a hand on his shoulder to hold him in his seat. He then leaned over to Stiletta and told her to slow down.

She looked up at Jonah and was about to chew him out for suggesting such a thing, then she saw the expression on his face. "No...no, you're wrong," she said, tears already forming in her eyes. "You go check, GL. He's wrong, he's got to be..." Even as she said the words, she was cutting the acceleration on the crawler. By the time the machine came to a full halt, she had crumpled up over the steering wheel, still telling Hex he had made a mistake in between sobs.

December twenty-fourth: even in a world torn to pieces by nuclear holocaust, that day still meant Christmas Eve to many people, including those residing at Maple. That particular date, however, would also be remembered as the day they laid Cutter to rest in the tiny cemetery outside the complex's perimeter. The grave lay next to his father's, though not as deep due to the hardness of the winter earth. Stiletta began to cry as one of the residents read a few passages from a ragged Bible, and even Hal felt some tears slip free when they lowered the body in, swaddled in a plastic tarp. Only Jonah seemed unmoved by the whole proceedings. In fact, he didn't show up for the funeral until halfway through, choosing to stand at the edge of the group around the grave, his face lacking any expression. He hadn't talked to anyone since thrashing Lewis the night before, and when Stiletta tried to approach him after the funeral, Jonah simply walked away before she even got close to him. "You don't think he's starting to slip again, do you?" she asked Hal.

"After what he did yesterday, I don't know," he answered. That didn't make her feel any better.

As the day went on, the children began to get wound up in anticipation for the big Christmas Eve dinner, and the presents to follow. They didn't understand why most of the grown-ups seemed sad, or why they changed the subject when one of the kids asked why Cutter wasn't there to fix the lights on the artificial tree they'd set up in the Hub. Despite the hellish environment they had spent most of their lives in, many of the children still had no comprehension of death. In the days to follow, their parents would do their best to explain it to them, but for now, the words would go unsaid.

Hal volunteered to play watchdog while the others gathered for the feast. He thought it only fair, seeing as he was sort of the odd man out. Stiletta tried to talk him out of it, but the Green Lantern had made up his mind. "If I'm staying here, I'll have to start pulling my own weight sometime, right?" he said, giving her a small smile. "Consider this my Christmas present to everybody." He then left the Hub, wishing a happy holiday to folks as he walked past them. Once he was gone, Stiletta’s thoughts lingered on him. Though he seemed fine, she worried that the current setback might cause Hal to become like Jonah: a stranger out of time, isolating himself from a world that he felt he had no place in.

No, Lantern said he's been through this sort of thing before, she thought, he'll be all right. Jonah, on the other hand... Stiletta realized then that the gunfighter hadn't shown up for the dinner hour. She'd hoped that he wouldn't try and skip out as well, but it appeared that was exactly what he was going to do. As the other residents began sitting down at the tables laid out around the room, Stiletta left the Hub and headed down the hall to Hex's quarters. Not surprisingly, the door was shut, and she gave a light rap on the metal plating, saying, "Jonah? Are you all right in there?" There was no answer at first, then she heard movement behind the door. He opened it just enough to look out at her, the poker face still in place. "I was just...do you want to come down for dinner?" she asked, his stony gaze making her nervous.

"Not hungry," was all he said.

"Well, maybe you could come down anyways, just to hang out. It's Christmas Eve, you shouldn't be cooped up all by yourself."

"Wouldn't be the first one Ah spent by muh lonesome." A small flicker of emotion in his eyes, gone before it could fully manifest. "'Sides, them folks don't want me 'round tuh spoil their fun."

"That's not true. If you think they hate you for what you did to Lewis, forget it. Everyone here has wanted to bust him in the chops at one time or another." She'd hoped to get a smile out of him, but the poker face remained. "If you're not coming out, can I come in, then? I feel silly talking to you through a crack in the door."

He hesitated, then opened it a little wider, stepping aside to let her in the room. The dim lamplight made her shadow dance on the wall as she passed it. "Why ain't yuh down there yerself?" he asked, closing the door.

"I wanted to see if you were okay."

"Ah ain't been drinkin'."

"That's not what I said." She stood in the middle of the room, hugging her elbows. "I'm worried about you, Jonah. I don't want you to start hiding again."

"Ah won't, promise. Ah just don't feel like bein' 'round nobody right now."

"Do you want me to leave?"

"No...no, yo're fine," Jonah said, then looked down at the floor. "Ah'm kind of glad yuh came by, actually. Been wantin' tuh talk, but..." He ran a hand through his hair. "Ah ain't sure whut tuh say."

"What is it? You can tell me." She took a step forward, closing the distance between them. He looked nervous, and she had a feeling about what was on his mind. "Did you want to talk about Cutter?"

He shook his head. "Ain't thet exactly. Close, but..." He took a deep breath, then said, "When we was down in them tunnels, an' thet dog came out an'...when it pinned yuh, Ah got scared."

Stiletta smiled and said, "Is that it? You dope, we were all scared, that's nothing to be ashamed of."

"Thet ain't whut Ah meant. Ah got scared 'cause Ah thought...Ah thought it was gonna kill yuh, an' Ah couldn't bear the thought of thet." He mussed his hair again, stalling. "The whole time Ah've been stuck in this godawful place, yo're the only thing thet's kept me goin'. Hell, Ah'd be dead ten times over if'n yuh hadn't been there tuh tell me whut's whut these days. Ah need yuh."

"Maybe in the beginning, but you do all right for yourself now. What about those couple of times when we got separated? You did fine then."

"Chalk thet up tuh dumb luck, 'cause thet's all thet was." Gently, he placed his hands on her shoulders. "Even then, the only thing Ah could think of was findin' yuh again. Yo're important tuh me, Ah..." He lowered his head for a moment, and when he brought it back up, he looked directly into her eyes. "Ah love yuh, Stiletta."

She didn't speak, couldn't speak. She'd always suspected, but to hear him say it was something else entirely. For him to lay himself bare like that, after months of dancing around how he felt, took courage. "Jonah..." she finally managed to say, but he cut her off.

"If'n yuh don't feel the same, thet's fine. Ah think Ah kin live with thet, but after everything thet's happened lately...Ah didn't want tuh lose yuh without yuh knowin' thet."

"I think I already did," she said, then reached out and touched his chest, her hands sliding over the black, synthetic material of his shirt, "but I don't know how I feel."

"Like Ah said, thet's fine...but Ah do hope thet yuh feel the same. Ah know Ah ain't the handsomest fella 'round these parts, but Ah like tuh think thet Ah'm long on charm."

"Oh, you are," she answered, laughing. Jonah laughed a little himself, then moved his hands from her shoulders up to her face, cupping it in his callused palms. He then gave her a kiss, lingering for just a moment before pulling away. Stiletta had kissed him before, just hours after they’d met. Not out of affection, though, merely a thank-you for saving her life. The look of surprise on his face at the time had been priceless. The look he gave her now was one she'd never seen from him before: soft and full of warmth, overshadowing the twisted scars until they seemed to not exist at all.

"Sorry, had tuh do it," he said, "even if it's just the once."

"It's okay." She then surprised herself by saying, "You can do it again, if you want."

He did, taking his full measure of time as he embraced her, hands caressing her long blonde hair. Jonah's fingers brushed against the clasp of her bodysuit at the base of her neck and stopped there. After a minute of fumbling with it, he pulled back from kissing her and grumbled, "Have Ah ever told yuh how much Ah hate this damn zone suit yuh wear?"

With a smile, she reached behind her neck, brushed his hands aside, and undid the clasp.

Nestled under blankets, Jonah lay perfectly still, trying to not disturb Stiletta as she drowsed in his arms. The bed was only made to fit one person, leaving little room to stretch out. Don't bother me none, he thought, and gently traced the contour of her face with his finger. Ah could spend the rest of muh life right here.

She shifted closer, her breath tickling his neck, then kissed him along his jawline. "This is nice," she said softly.

"Ah was just thinkin' the same."

"So...what do we do now?"

"If'n yo're suggestin' we have another go already..."

"No, I meant us." Stiletta moved a little so she could look Jonah in the eye. "Is this a one-time thing or what?"

"Ah'd rather it not be," he said, touching her face again. "Ah thought Ah'd made thet clear."

"You did, but I was just thinking, with you and the Lantern trying to find a way back home..."

"He's tryin' tuh get home, not me. Far as Ah'm concerned, this is muh home from now on."

She looked at him quietly for a moment, then said, "You're serious."

"Why wouldn't Ah be? Been doin' a little thinkin' of muh own: if'n Ah ain't the Jonah Hex we found in the warehouse, then maybe Ah ain't the Jonah Hex thet Lantern met, neither. Maybe he met the one thet got his dumb ass stuffed."

"But what if you are the one that helped him out? Do you want to take that risk?"

"We ain't goin' nowheres, so there ain't no risk. Fer all Ah know, this is where Ah'm supposed tuh be...an' if'n thet's the case, then Ah want y'all tuh be here with me." He cocked an eyebrow. "Assumin' yuh'll have me, of course."

Stiletta kissed him in response, letting her hand drift up to his face. She had been hesitant about touching his scars while they made love, unsure of both his reaction and her own if she'd done so. Now she did it without fear, her fingertips lightly brushing the skin . "You've never told me how this happened," she said.

He laid his hand over hers, so that her palm covered most of the ruin on the right side of his face. "Does it matter?" he asked.

"No, it doesn't." She went to kiss him again, but stopped when someone began pounding on the door and calling Hex's name. It sounded like Mookie.

"Whutever yo're sellin', we ain't buyin'!" Jonah yelled at the door.

Mookie wasn't so easily deterred. "C'mon, Hex, we've got a situation out front!"

That made both of them sit up in bed. Jonah already had his pants on before Stiletta could even put her feet on the floor. "Whut's goin' on?" he asked as he buckled on his gunbelts.

"I'm not sure," Mookie told him through the door, "but I think some of GL's friends decided to drop in for Christmas dinner."

Hex and Stiletta froze, staring at each other. "Tell him we're a-comin' on the double!" he called out, throwing on the rest of his clothes. Jonah ran out into the hall seconds later and bolted to the front entrance, dodging people who were collecting by the open warehouse door in an effort to discover what the commotion was about. When he made it outside, he could see Hal standing in the middle of the cul-de-sac, looking up at a trio of green, human-shaped streaks in the sky that were closing in fast. As they neared the ground, Jonah saw that only one of them could actually pass for human. The other two were almost beyond the gunfighter's comprehension in appearance, though they all wore uniforms very similar to Hal's.

Jonah barely noticed when Stiletta caught up with him, laying a hand on his shoulder -- she was struck dumb the same as him. After a few minutes of watching Jordan talk with the new arrivals, Hex finally managed to recover his voice long enough to croak out the standard saying he used when words just plain failed him:

"Holy Hannah..."