* * * Don't Know Much About History * * *
Hal lay on his back, jaw clenched tight and eyes fixed on the ceiling. He wanted to tear off his gloves and scratch at the itchy spots on his face with his bare nails, but he'd been told that was a bad idea. "It just makes it worse," the young man they'd called Cutter said. "Soon as Vance takes care of your leg, he'll help you with that problem."
Not soon enough, Hal said to himself, and tried not to think about how badly he wanted to scratch, or about the numerous bloodstains that were permanently embedded in the infirmary's concrete floor, or that the strongest thing they had as far as painkillers went was a local anesthetic.
"I've almost got it," Vance said, holding down Hal's leg with one dark hand and using a medical clamp like a pair of tweezers with the other. "Little bastard's worked its way in deep. Lucky for you, it missed the femoral artery."
Hal grunted in response.
"Hang tight a bit longer, and the doctor will give you a sucker when he's done...okay, got it, flush it out." Vance moved his stocky frame out of the way so Cutter could bathe the wound with antiseptic. Both of them could clearly hear Hal grind his teeth. "You've been a real trooper, buddy," Vance said, and patted the Green Lantern on the shoulder. "Another couple minutes and you'll be all stitched up."
"Great," Hal groaned. "Where's my sucker?"
"I lied. We're all out." He held up the clamp, showing his patient the bloody slug. "You can keep this for a souvenir, if you want."
"Consider it your fee."
Vance chuckled, and Jordan heard a metallic clatter as the man put the clamp down on an instrument tray. Despite the surroundings, the medical equipment these people had surprised Hal: he was lying on an actual gurney, and he saw scattered about the room an array of items that looked like they could have come straight from any hospital, including what appeared to be a motorized wheelchair, though the wires hanging out of an open panel on its side told him that it wasn't available at the moment.
"So, are you really a doctor?" Hal asked. He could occasionally feel a prick and tug as Vance put in the stitches.
"First-year intern," he said, "but I've gotten a lot of on-the-job experience."
"You should have seen what he had to do to Hex last month," Cutter added. "Dude was digging all around his guts for hours."
"Um, Cutter, I don't think he wants to hear about that right now."
"What? It obviously turned out good."
"Actually, I do...
nngh...I want to hear about it." Hal gestured for Cutter to step closer. "What happened?"
"Same as you: scavs. Different guys, though, going by their clothes. Him and Stiletta were coming here for our little Thanksgiving shindig, and the fuggers gutshot him while they were still a few miles away. She got away and made it here, and we rode in like the cavalry."
"Not that it really mattered," Vance said. "Hex had taken out most of them by the time we arrived."
"Yeah, that's the best part: we find him, and he's half-past dead, but he's still got his guns up!" The young man made like he was drawing sixguns. "He's a fugging Terminator, you can't stop him!"
Despite the pain, Hal had to smile. That sounded like the Jonah Hex he knew: totally unflappable, no matter what the situation. Then something else struck him. "You said this happened a month ago, around Thanksgiving."
"Yeah, like a day or two before. Why?"
Hal looked Cutter in the eye. "I'm going to ask you a very stupid question, but I want you to answer it as best you can: What's today's date? Not just the day, I want the year, too."
"It's December twentieth, 2050," a voice said from the doorway. Hal lifted his head as best he could to see the blond-haired woman standing there. With the coat gone, he saw that she was dressed in what looked like a very skimpy unitard with thigh-high boots. As she entered the room proper, though, the lights reflected off the near-transparent bodysuit that clung to her skin, giving the appearance of bare flesh while covering her from the neck down.
"Hey, Stiletta. You tranq your boyfriend?" Cutter asked.
"Oh yeah, he's peachy." She walked over to the gurney and stood on the side opposite Vance and Cutter. "Well, how far away from home are you?" she asked Hal.
"Excuse me?" The woman's abruptness was throwing him seriously off-rhythm.
"You asked what the date was. I assume that's so you can get your bearings. Figure you can't be from as far back as Jonah, 'cause you two don't have the same taste in clothes."
"Not even close. I'm about a half-century ahead of where I should be, and he's...I don't know, way the Hell off."
"Wait a minute," Cutter interrupted, "
this guy's from the past, too?" He looked at Hal. "So does that mean you really know Hex, or was all that bullshit earlier?"
"Little bit of both," Stiletta said before Jordan had a chance. He glared at her, but she simply told him, "Never mind, I'll explain later."
"Can we stop playing Twenty Questions for a minute?" Vance asked as he finished strapping down the bandage on Hal's wound. He'd cut open part of the leg on the Green Lantern's uniform to accommodate the gauze, and the black fabric hung over it in ragged flaps. "Let me finish checking him over, then you can chat all you like." He reached beneath the gurney and pulled a lever so he could ratchet the head of it up and let Hal sit at a 45-degree angle. "That mask made out of the same stuff as the suit?" he asked Hal.
"Far as I know."
"Your vision's not blurry or anything?" Vance gently placed his hand beneath Hal's chin so he could move his head. "Do you feel queasy at all? Having trouble swallowing?"
"I feel kind of light-headed, but that's probably from the blood loss."
"I'd say so." Vance pulled at the neck of the uniform for a moment, then let it fall back into place. "Okay, it looks like you've got just a minor case of acid burn from the snow. Your face will be a little red for a few days, like a sunburn, but you shouldn't scar or blister. Have to keep an eye on the burns around the gunshot wound, though, make sure it doesn't get infected." He picked up the bottle of antiseptic off the instrument tray and poured some on a gauze pad. "Here, dab this on wherever it itches."
"Thanks." Hal pressed the gauze against his forehead and cheeks in turn. "You said this is from being out in the snow?"
"It's mildly radioactive," Stiletta told him. "All the water sources are, to some degree or another. Just be glad it isn't raining, that'll strip flesh right off the bone if you're not protected." She plucked at the transparent sleeve of her bodysuit.
Hal leaned back, still holding the gauze to his face. Seattle was in ruins, and the water table was hotter than Chernobyl. He could only think of one thing that could cause that. "Who dropped the bomb first?" he asked them.
"Nobody knows," Cutter said. "Most people say Russia or China. My dad used to say somebody at NORAD probably spilled their coffee on a keyboard and made the whole system short out."
"How long ago?" Hal asked, not really wanting to know the answer.
"Five years."
"Dammit." Hal closed his eyes, then slammed his fist onto the gurney and swore again, louder this time. He couldn't believe it: all the crises they'd overcome, all the near-misses, and it still came down to one idiot pressing a button. He took a few deep breaths, doing his best to calm down before asking his next big question: "Is any of the League left?" When no one answered, he opened his eyes and saw the three of them were looking at each other. "The Justice League...JLA. You know: Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman...any of that ring a bell?" he asked.
Still no reaction.
"What about the Justice Society, the JSA? Or the Titans...any metas at all?" Hal sat up straight, staring at them. "
Nobody survived?"
"I think Jonah said he ran into some weirdo in New York called Batman," Stiletta said, "but the rest of that..." She shrugged.
"Metas...you're talking about metahumans," Vance said. "Like those guys with the capes and the long underwear that used to fly around and beat the crap out of each other." His eyes widened, as if seeing Hal for the first time. "You mean you're one of those old guys?"
"I'm not
that old, but yeah."
"My grandpa used to tell me about you folks. Which one are you?"
"Green Lantern."
"No foolin'?" Vance frowned. "No offense, but Gramps said you were a brother."
Hal was struck dumb for a moment, then let out a short laugh. "None taken. There’ve been four men on Earth that have gone by that name...no, five." He'd almost forgotten about Alan Scott -- he wasn't Corps, but he'd come first. "Your grandfather must have been talking about one of my associates. He'd sub for me when I wasn't available."
"Well, he must have the slot permanently if you're here," Vance said. "Speaking of which, how the Hell
did you get here?"
Hal gave them a brief rundown of the incident. "From what I was told about this Casimir engine," he said when he'd finished, "I'd say that the energy from the quantum vacuum, combined with what was siphoned off my ring, was powerful enough to rip a hole in space-time briefly and blast me and the engine through it."
"Could it send you back?" Stiletta asked.
"I don't know. Maybe if it was powered back up, but my ring's dead, so if that contributed, then it's no good. Besides, the engine's not designed for time travel, it's just a side effect. Another blast could knock me further ahead, or even further backwards...assuming it didn't kill me."
Stiletta cursed under her breath, which puzzled him: why was
she upset when
he was the one out of time?
"It doesn't matter anyways," Cutter said, throwing up his hands, "the thing's in the hands of the Slabberz now. May as well be on the moon."
"The kid's right. If it's as big as you say, there's no way you could get in and out of their territory with it," Vance added, "and you sure as Hell can't reason with them."
"Then I'll find another way to get it from them, or I'll find another way back to my time," Hal told them. "This isn't my first trip through the timestream. I've gotten back before, I can do it again."
Stiletta looked over at Vance and Cutter, saying, "Is there any way you guys can clear out for a while? Me and the new guy have to talk."
"About what?" Cutter asked.
"About what a nosy little shit you can be," she answered. "Come on, guys, this is important."
Vance regarded her for a moment, then said, "Okay, will twenty minutes do? I still need to clean up around here."
"Perfect."
The two of them filed out, Vance pulling the curtain over the doorway shut behind them. Stiletta grabbed a high stool from a corner of the infirmary and brought it over beside the gurney. "I'm not sure where to start," she said as she sat down.
"Then let me," Hal said. "Do you know who Jonah Hex is? I mean who he
really is?"
She nodded. "He's a cowboy. Well, he says 'bounty hunter', but he's from the Old West, so it's all cowboys to me."
"Do you know how he got here?"
"It's a long story."
"I'm not going anywhere right now."
Her mouth twisted, then she said, "My father brought him here. About eight years ago, before the war, he'd been doing research work for the National Security Agency. Time travel research." She held up a hand. "Before you get excited, forget it, the equipment and the complex it was in got destroyed months ago. Nothing's left. Anyways, while my father was working on the project, he found out about the war, or at least when it would happen, so he rounded up as much tech and raw data as he could, and used the time machine to bypass the war." Stiletta's eyes wandered down to the floor. "My mom and I didn't know this, of course. He just disappeared. We'd heard about an explosion at the building he worked at, and we thought maybe he'd died, but nobody would tell us anything. Then all these people kept calling the house, and I'd see cars I didn't know parked down the street and following me to school..."
"The government thought you and your mother knew something."
"He didn't say a damn thing! He just left us to die..." A tear trickled down her cheek, and she brushed it away roughly, saying, "My mom sent me to live with her parents out on their farm in the country, just 'til the Feds laid off us. That's how I survived when the bombs hit: I was in the middle of nowhere. When I found out a couple of years later that my father was alive and living like a king off the tech he stole, I swore I'd kill him." She brought her head back up. "And I did, too. Me and Hex blew that whole damn fortress to kingdom come."
Hal didn't like how calm she sounded about the deed, but he was in no position to judge. "That doesn't really explain to me how somebody like Hex got mixed up in all of this, though," he said.
"It was one of my father's side-ventures. When he arrived here, he built another time machine and used it to steal more tech from the past, and later to stage reenactments."
"'Reenactments'?" Hal echoed.
"He'd grab people out of various time periods," Stiletta explained, "soldiers mostly, and set them up in artificial environments to have them fight battles. He'd keep them drugged up so they wouldn't know where they really were, and stick 'em in stasis tubes in between battles...if they lived. He did it to hundreds, maybe thousands of people, and him and his guests would sit back and watch as they killed each other, like it was a movie or something."
"So one day he decides to grab Jonah Hex..."
She nodded. "Jonah said he was in the middle of a bar when it happened. One minute he's facing down some scumbag, and the next..." She snapped her fingers. "They'd stuck him in a facsimile of the bar, but he figured it out pretty quick and busted out of there. He ran into me not long after that out in the wasteland, and we've been friends ever since."
"Just friends? I thought Cutter said..."
"He's just bullshitting. Everybody teases me because Jonah's always calling me 'darlin'' and 'sugar' and stuff. It's just the way he talks." She paused, then said, "I think sometimes it's not just talk for him, though. He'll give me a look or say something, and I think he's trying to say something else, you know? But it's too weird."
"Because of where he's from?"
"No, because I'm only twenty-three and he's pushing forty. I never went for older men." She waved a hand at the Green Lantern. "So, what about you? You said you're from the turn of the millennium, so how'd
you run into Hex?"
"Like I said before, this isn't my first experience with time travel. It happened roughly seven years ago, while I was on a mission with the JLA. We were checking out a strange power surge near the Grand Canyon. Turned out to be a trap set by a man that called himself the Lord of Time."
"Not
too full of himself, was he?" Stiletta joked.
Hal smiled. "Some of us heroes aren't much better. Pompous name or not, he had the goods to back it up: he knocked me and my friends all the way back to 1878, and erased our memories somehow, to boot. I woke up alone in the middle of the desert, my brain half-baked from laying out in the sun, and who should happen to come riding along at that moment?"
"Jonah Hex, king of the last-minute rescues."
"Make fun all you want, that man saved my life. Unlike now, my ring was working back then, but I couldn't remember how to use it, or even what it was. Only time I could make the damn thing work was by
not thinking about it, it seemed, like a reflex action. Hex kept me in one piece the whole time, helped me puzzle things out, even got me back together with my friends." He shook his head. "For the life of me, though, I can't think of what I might have done back then to tick him off so bad."
"You didn't do anything to him, and that's the problem."
"What do you mean?"
She sighed. "You said you met him in 1878...you're
sure that was the year?"
"Yeah, Jonah told me so himself."
"No, he didn't ...not yet. You see, Jonah told me when he got yanked out of the Old West, it was
1875...which means
that Jonah Hex out there hasn't met you yet." She pointed towards the doorway.
Green Lantern gaped at her as the information settled in. "That's impossible. I mean, it's possible, but...if he's here in the future right now, how did he get back?”
"It gets worse. You get a look at that amusement park stuff on your way down here?"
"I saw the horses, and that sign near the front entrance: 'This Is A Dark Ride'...that's what they used to hang up over rides like the Tunnel of Love at the carnival."
"Marya...that's Vance's wife...she collects that stuff. When they moved into these warehouses three years back, they found one full of things like that, so she started to use them for decoration." Stiletta shrugged. "Everybody needs a hobby, I guess, something to take your mind off what life's like these days." She waved a hand vaguely towards one of the infirmary walls, saying, "There's an area off thataway where she keeps the unused pieces. She's got so much junk back there, she doesn't remember where it all came from. That's where we found it."
"Found what?"
"Cutter told you about Jonah getting shot, right?" Hal nodded, and she went on. "Well, with him all busted up and winter starting to set in, we decided to stick around awhile. So Jonah's off one day wandering around the place, and in one of the storage rooms he finds this statue...or at least it looked like a statue." She stopped for a moment, rubbing her hand over her mouth in a nervous gesture. "God, it almost made me sick when I realized what it was, especially with Jonah just sitting there in front of it. Someone...at some time in the past, someone killed Jonah Hex and had his body stuffed like a hunting trophy."
"Are you saying Jonah found
his own corpse? Here?”
Stiletta nodded. "He looked...I mean, the
body looked pretty old. The hair was all white, and the costume was pretty moth-eaten. That was the other crazy thing: it was dressed in this silly white cowboy outfit, with all this fringe and floral embroidery. You wanted to laugh when you saw it, but you couldn't, not when you knew what it really was. For God's sake, there were rhinestones on the back spelling out his
name! It was ridiculous!"
"Jesus Christ," Hal whispered, and looked towards the doorway, thinking of what Jonah had said to him earlier. "No wonder he reacted the way he did." He then turned back to Stiletta. "How did he take it? The same way?"
"No, he was actually kind of happy at first. 'Guess it means I'll be goin' back home one day,' he told me. Of course, everybody else found out about the thing, and we had to do some explaining...I don't think any of us thought about how this might affect Jonah in the long run. I mean, on the surface, it looked like good news, finding out he wouldn't be stuck in the future forever. But to find out you're going to end up like that, and you don't even know how...it was like somebody handed him a book about his life, but they'd ripped out a bunch of chapters and left the last page: 'So they tossed Hex's stuffed corpse into a warehouse and forgot all about him. The End.' We don't even know
when it happened, just that he's dead in the
past but alive
here. It didn't take long for that to start playing with his mind." She shook her head. "Nobody really noticed at first...well, we
noticed, but he was still recovering from that gutshot, so we all thought that was why he seemed so shaky and pale some mornings. Vance started to slip him a few more painkillers, figuring that's why he wasn't sleeping, but it didn't seem to help."
"He never said anything, not even to you?"
"I honestly think Hex would rather shoot himself in the head than admit he has a problem with
anything. That's the sort of guy he is: too macho for his own good. So a couple of weeks go by, and he still looks like shit, and now he's starting to smell a little boozy in the morning. Now we know something serious is going on, but he won't talk, won't even admit he's been drinking. Then one night, he wakes up the whole complex by screaming at the top of his lungs. He's not in his room, and we figure out it's coming from the storage area, so we head down there and Jonah...he'd ripped the statue off its base and was tearing it apart with his bare hands. God, it was awful. Whoever had stuffed the body had wired the skeleton together too and used it like an armature, so there were these splintered bits of bone sticking out. They'd cut up Jonah's hands and he's bleeding like crazy, but he wouldn't stop, he just kept yelling at the thing that he wasn't dead, and the look on his face...the whole time I've known him, I've never seen him look scared. Confused, yeah, and pissed off more times than I can count, but that night...I swear to God, I've never seen anyone so terrified in my entire life."
She hung her head down. "After all the weirdness he's had to put up with since he came to this time, finding that thing finally drove him to the breaking point. He still has his good days, but they're few and far between. If you put a gun in his hand, he's the same old Jonah Hex like you saw earlier, but beyond that, all he does is drink and sleep...or at least try to sleep. The thought of what’s going to happen to him is eating him alive, but he still refuses to admit he has a problem." She looked up at Green Lantern again, saying, "If you really do know him, even though he doesn't know you yet, you've got to help me put him back together."
"How? It sounds like I'm part of the problem."
"That's true. Matter of fact, he wants me to throw you out. But I want you to stay and talk to him. Maybe if he hears something
good about his future, it won't look so bleak to him," Stiletta said. "Better yet, if you find a way back to your time, maybe you could take him along, get him away from all this."
"I don't think that would help at all. His home is the Old West, not now or a half-century ago. It would probably just set him more on edge." Hal sighed and leaned back, pressing the gauze to his forehead again. "And as far as telling him anything, I can't do that without possibly effecting the timestream. Remember,
his future is in
my past. If I say or do the wrong thing to him now, it could change what happened back then."
"And what would happen to your past if you do nothing, Jonah goes crazy, and he
never gets back home?" Stiletta leaned forward on the stool. "Face it, hero: if you want to make sure Jonah Hex is ever going to save your life, you're going to have to save his first."
