Jonah Hex: Shades of Gray #5

[arcalian]

Jonah Hex: Shades of Gray
Issue #5: "Out of the Frying Pan..."
Written by: Susan Hillwig
Cover by: Eli Cadavona
Edited by: Jay McIntyre

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[arcalian]

“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.”

[arcalian]

All those hours of walking had worked up his appetite again, so Jonah scavenged around one of the incomplete buildings until he’d found a good amount of electrical wire.  He hadn’t done a lick of hunting in over a hundred years, but he soon managed to fashion a snare and hang it above a well-worn rabbit trail he’d located in the woods.  Knowing that it could be a while ‘til suppertime, he decided to go exploring, and it wasn’t long before he discovered that he wasn’t the only one to ever hunker down in Vista Verde.  Scattered all throughout the houses were bits of clothing, empty food packages, some abandoned periodicals, even a beat-up, dirty mattress, not to mention numerous spray cans laying beneath wall after wall of indecipherable graffiti.  There was no sign that the owners of said items would be back any time soon, so Jonah laid claim to anything that looked useful, especially the mattress.  Luckily, it was located in probably the most intact house on the entire lot, so there was no need to move it to a more secure location.  Best of all, that house came with a wood fireplace, which appeared to have already been used, so Jonah got a fire burning before heading out again to check his snare.
 
The sun was nearly down by then, but his altered vision could pick out objects in the woods just as easily as if it were daylight, so he found the snare in no time, as well as the rabbit that had become entangled in it.  “Sorry, fella,” Jonah whispered as he unwrapped the wire from around the dead animal’s neck, “but a man’s gotta eat.”  He laid the carcass out on the ground belly-up so he could skin it...then paused and slapped the heel of his hand against his forehead.  “Yuh cussed idiot, yuh ain’t got no knife!” he growled.  “All the damn things Maggie offered tuh pack in thet bag, an’ yuh didn’t think tuh ask if’n she had a spare knife!  Idiot!”  Hoping that he could find a suitable sharp object back at the house, he picked up the rabbit and began to stand, then fell back to his knees when he felt a sharp pain in his chest.  He cried out as it quickly moved from his chest to his left shoulder, then down his arm.  Heart attack, he thought.  Don’t they say thet yer left arm hurts when yo’re havin’ a heart attack?  But he wasn’t old enough to be having a heart attack...or he used to be, but he wasn’t anymore.  Before he could figure out the logistics of it all, the pain coalesced somewhere between his wrist and the palm of his hand.  He dropped the rabbit and clutched at the area with his other hand -- he could swear that he felt a strange bulge growing beneath the skin -- then a cluster of slim black tendrils began to push their way out of his palm, weaving about each other until they formed a solid object that fell to the ground right next to the rabbit.  The pain disappeared after that, but Jonah cradled his arm to his chest nonetheless as he stared at what had just been expelled from inside him.
 
It was a knife, about ten inches long including the handle, which was made from a carved piece of deer horn.  Jonah knew this on first glance because it was identical to a knife that his father owned when Jonah was a boy.  He remembered admiring it many times, but he’d never been allowed to touch it, and now, inexplicably, it was laying right in front of him.  No, thet ain’t it, he told himself.  Thet’s just a copy, an imitation of whut y’all remember.  It’s made outta the same black stuff thet cussed ring spews out, the same stuff thet it keeps puttin’ yuh back together with when yo’re injured.  It knew yuh needed a knife, so it spat one out the only way it could manage.  The ring ain’t just messin’ with yer body, it’s rootin’ around in yer brain...
 
That last thought was a bit too much for Jonah.  His throat suddenly filled with bile, and he managed to scramble far enough away from the dead rabbit before he vomited.  The remains of his lunch were soon laying in a puddle at the base of a tree, against which Jonah leaned heavily as he waited for the sick feeling to pass.  “God, help me,” he rasped, “Ah don’t want this thing inside of me no more.  It just ain’t natural tuh be like this...it ain’t right.  Ah want tuh be normal again.  Ah want tuh be human.  Ah want...”  His voice caught in his throat as he tried to get the words out.  “Ah want tuh be at peace.”
 
Oh, what a joke that notion was.  Jonah Hex finding peace?  How many times in the past had he thought he’d found it, only to have it ripped from his grasp?  How many ruined lives?  How many dead lovers?  It wasn’t something he was meant to have, yet a part of him kept hoping to achieve it.  Even after he’d died, his anguished mind had clung to that feeble dream of peace for over one hundred long and lonely years.  Perhaps that was why his soul had never moved on: he couldn’t let go and accept that peace was impossible for a man bound for Hell.
 
He spat bitter-tasting saliva onto the ground, then wiped his mouth and chin with his shirtsleeve before going back over to where the rabbit lay.  The knife was still there, and Jonah was hesitant to pick it up, but he eventually did.  He tried not to notice how well-balanced it felt in his hand, or how sharp the blade was as it sliced through the rabbit’s pelt, separating it from the meat.  He refused to admit how convenient it was for the black ring to have produced it for him, even as he wiped the blade clean in the grass before tucking it inside his boot.  Jonah Hex wasn’t the sort of man to cast aside a useful weapon or tool, and that was what he forced himself to think of the thing as: only a tool, something he happened to luck into while scavenging, because thinking of how it had really come to exist made him want to throw up again.
 
By the time the rabbit was done cooking on the makeshift spit he’d set up in the fireplace, some of Jonah’s appetite had returned.  He ate in an almost mechanical fashion, chewing and swallowing the meat without really tasting it, and occasionally taking a swig from the container of water sitting next to him -- during his earlier exploration, he’d found a working spigot, and used it to wash out and refill a few plastic bottles that he’d come across.  All the while, he stared into the fire, his altered eyes perceiving it as nothing more than an undulating white light, and tried to ignore the possibility that he may never be able to see things normally again.  As loath as he was to admit it, the incident with the knife had cast a pall over everything.  It made Jonah even more desperate to find the Green Lantern, and he began to reconsider his decision to spend the night in Vista Verde.  Once he’d had his fill of rabbit meat, Jonah stretched out on the mattress with the intention of resting for only a few hours, then striking out through the woods to the west again.  Unfortunately, his full belly and exhausted body conspired against him, and Jonah quickly slipped into a deep sleep.
 
Even in his dreams, the world was monochrome, though instead of seeing nothing but gray, Jonah’s environment took on the color of whatever emotion he happened to be feeling.  As this particular dream unfolded in sleeping mind, he found himself walking through the empty streets of Vista Verde, which had become just as green as its name.  Every possible shade was on display, from the deepest emerald to the palest sea-foam.  The place was also a mishmash of both old and new -- a livery next to a video-rental store, a run-down saloon where a band played modern rock music -- the oddity of all this seemed lost on Jonah as he made his way to a Kelly-green house standing alone on the corner.  When he stepped through the door, he suddenly found himself in a lavish bedroom draped in silks, and the world came into violet bloom as he saw the woman reclining on the four-poster bed.  “Maggie,” he whispered, and she looked at him and held her arms out, inviting him into her embrace.  She was clothed in a gauzy lavender gown, which Jonah tore at with such abandon that he saw a brief flare of orange, but soon all was violet again.  Maggie’s hair, her eyes, her smooth skin...everything about her was purple majesty, and Jonah drunk it in like sweet wine.  “Ah love yuh, Maggie,” he breathed into her ear, for in this place, he knew it was safe to admit.  Out in the world, Jonah knew that loving someone could be death sentence, but not here, not while they were wrapped in soft violet light.  But as he held Maggie tight, he noticed that her body began to feel thinner, her skin more coarse.  Confused, Jonah pulled back, and everything became a lurid shade of yellow as Maggie shriveled up into a corpse before his eyes.
 
He screamed and tried to let go of her, but her jaundiced, clawed hands dug into his face, ripping open old scars, and Jonah could suddenly feel his body growing stiff and cold as other corpses appeared out of nowhere.  They held him down and tore his clothes off, revealing an ugly rodeo-rider’s outfit, bedecked with embroidery and fringe and rhinestones.  He tried to scream again, but he couldn’t make a sound as they dragged him over to a platform and nailed his feet to it, forcing him to stand in front of a crowd of dead faces that laughed and threw stale popcorn at him.  A urine-colored light shone down upon an undead carnival barker that walked up to Jonah’s side, and he saw that it was Lew Farnham, who turned to the crowd and said, “Take a good look, ladies and gentleman, at the greatest oddity of our times.  Jonah Hex, the only dead man in the world that thinks he’s still alive!  He walks amongst the living, pretending to be just like them, but we all know better, don’t we, folks?”  They jeered at him, and Jonah struggled to move, to yell back at them, to do anything, but it was impossible.  “Such a tragedy,” Farnham continued.  “Even now, he can’t face up to the truth.  He’s nothing but a stubborn old mule that refuses to budge.  What say we help him get to where he belongs?”  With that, the crowd began to surge forward, grabbing hold of Jonah as he silently screamed inside his corpse.  They pulled him down into a thick yellow fog that obscured his vision, but soon Jonah could smell smoke and feel the heat of the flames, and he knew he was in Hell, they’d finally dragged his stinking carcass down into Hell, and there would be no reprieve for him, no redemption, just endless punishment for all the deaths he’d caused in his old life.  He tried to draw a breath so as to beg for mercy, but the air around him had turned rancid, and he clawed at his own throat in desperation...gasping...choking...
 
The pain of his fingernails digging into his flesh managed to wake Jonah up, and his eyes flew open to see that it wasn’t all a dream: the room he was laying in was filled with smoke, not to mention an oppressive heat.  His first thought was that the embers in the fireplace had spilled out onto the floor and started a blaze, but a quick glance showed that wasn’t the case, as the smoke appeared to be pouring in through a nearby broken window.  Pressing a corner of his blanket to his mouth in order to filter out some of the smoke, Jonah stumbled over to see that the world outside had become nothing but flames.  Dear God, Ah really am in Hell, he thought, then regained enough of his senses to move back to the mattress and round up his gear.  Whatever was happening, it didn’t seem like a good idea to stay where he was.  He took a moment to tear off a strip of blanket, soak it with water, then tie it over his mouth and nose before daring to leave the room he was in.  Once he got near the foyer, he realized how bad his predicament was: the entire front of the house was on fire, with parts of the structure already beginning to collapse.  Ain’t gettin’ out this way, he thought, and turned back the way he’d come to search for an alternate exit.  The best he found was a window that didn’t show him a view of flames, so he counted his blessings and busted through it.
 
Thoughts of being in Hell only increased as he saw what had become of Vista Verde.  All the houses flanking the one Jonah had picked out were ablaze, with at least one already having fallen in upon itself, spewing more sparks into the ash-laden air, and the weedy lawns had become fields of fire.  Beyond that, it was impossible to tell, for Jonah’s light-sensitive eyes were overwhelmed by the glare of the flames.  Head fer the dark spots, he told himself, then began to do just that, running down the street towards what he hoped was safety.  It soon became evident that “safe” was a relative term: the fire had engulfed the entire area, apparently eating up the woods first before it started in on the houses, not to mention the fact that the streets themselves were beginning to turn into a tarry goo from all the heat.  “Gotta get out...there’s gotta be a way...” Jonah gasped as he stood in the middle of Vista Verde, one hand clutching the duffel bag and the other holding his hat onto his head.  Then the answer came to him, and it wasn’t a pleasant one.  “Okay, yuh stupid ring,” he said aloud, “if’n yuh really know whut Ah’m thinkin’, then yuh know thet Ah sure as Hell don’t want tuh trust muh life tuh y’all...but Ah ain’t got any choice in the matter.  So if’n y’all take good care of me an’ get me through this here mess, then Ah’ll put in a good word fer yuh once we go our separate ways.  We got a deal?”
 
There was no indication that the ring heard Jonah’s plea, much less understood it, but the bounty hunter rushed forward into the fire as if he’d received a confirmation anyhow.  Aside from the flames, the path ahead of him was clear of obstacles, so all he had to do was keep an eye out for falling debris.  It wasn’t long before the fire was licking its way across his clothes, then slipping beneath to singe his skin.  His throat already raw from inhaling all the smoke, Jonah bit down on the screams that wanted to erupt from his mouth, and when he felt parts of his body go numb as the ring began to perform its ministrations, he refused to acknowledge it.  None of that was his concern, all he needed to worry about was running as far and as fast as he could until he finally escaped this blaze.  But as he dashed through what was left of the woods, other forces seemed to conspire against him, and one of the charred trees nearby suddenly collapsed, starting a chain reaction that Jonah simply couldn’t get clear of in time -- one moment he was running, and the next he was pinned to the ground under flaming timbers.
 
Now he let the screams come, howling like mad as he tried to drag himself out from beneath this deathtrap, but his fingers only dug at the ground in futility.  Then the flames caught his hair alight, quickly spreading across his face and boiling his brain inside his skull, yet still the ring scrambled to put him back together, new flesh burning away moments after restoration.  Throughout it all, a single order echoed in Jonah’s tortured mind, unheeded by the black ring:
 
Stop...please...this hurts too damn much...just stop and let me die...
 

[arcalian]

God, what a mess, Harker thought as he took in the view framed by the visor of the protective helmet he wore.  Even after eight years as smoke-jumper, he could still be awe-struck at the damage wrought by wildfires.  And California had more than its fair share of them: a bad combination of too little precipitation, too much dry foliage, and a ton of careless humans, all in one very large state.  The only good thing about it was that Harker and the other people on his team were never short of work.  In fact, they’d been laboring for almost twenty-four hours in an effort to get this latest blaze under control.  It appeared to have finally burned itself out, but they still took the precaution of walking through the affected areas in search of hot spots.  Piles of ash were probed for live embers and fire-breaks maintained to make sure that the nightmare didn’t start up again when they least expected it.  At the moment, the team was inspecting a plot of land designated as “Vista Verde” on the map.  It was supposed to have been a new housing development, but the investors went bust before it was completed, and Harker was glad of that.  One of the problems they always faced when dealing with wildfires was making sure no civilians were caught in its path -- it was easy to set up roadblocks and divert traffic away from an affected area, but getting people to voluntarily leave their homes was a whole other matter -- so it was a stroke of luck that no one was living in Vista Verde when the fire swept through.  The only victims here were row after row of empty buildings.
 
At least, that’s what Harker believed until he heard one of the guys say over the radio, “I’ve got a body over here!”  It was Vanzetti, who was further ahead in what was once thick woodland.  Harker and some of the others made their way over there as fast as they could, their fire-retardant suits impeding their movement somewhat.  When they got to Vanzetti’s location, they found him trying to move a fallen tree trunk.  “Almost didn’t spot it,” he told Harker and the others, static from the radio mike in his helmet making his voice crackle.  “Poor bastard must’ve been fleeing the area and got pinned.”
 
Another man grabbed the other end of the trunk, and together they heaved it aside, revealing a blackened skeleton laying on its belly.  “We’ll have to call in a chopper so they can properly move the body,” Harker said over his own mike.  “I’ll stay on site until they arrive.  The rest of you keep combing the area and hope this person was alone.”  The others departed, and Harker knelt down next to the body to examine it closer.  Nearly all the flesh had burned away, not to mention the clothes, so there was no way to determine the sex at first glance.  All of its teeth appeared to be intact, so at least there was the hope that dental records might be used to identify who the victim was.  Then Harker spotted what looked like a luggage strap poking out from beneath the body.  It was badly burned as well, but perhaps whatever it was attached to had been somewhat protected by the flames, and therefore might provide some clue as to the body’s identity.  Gently, he slipped a hand under the skeleton and lifted it so as to get a better look, only to get a shock as the skeleton suddenly laid a hand upon him!
 
Harker cried out and scrambled away from the body, which was struggling to push itself upright.  With a trembling hand, Harker activated his radio, but he couldn’t find his voice as he watched the skeleton get to its feet, the empty eye-sockets of its skull appearing to study him just as intently as Harker had been studying it moments ago.  Then it picked up the charred bag that had been laying beneath it and hugged it tightly against its ribcage.  Before it did so, Harker caught a glimpse of something even more bizarre just behind those ribs: a fist-sized lump of muscular tissue that was flexing slowly, very slowly.  Harker soon realized it was a human heart...but what were those slim black tendrils branching out from it?
 
The thing’s jaw began to move, and a rasping sound came out of its mouth, though there were no lungs to draw breath.  “S-s-s-suh...stuuuh...st-stay...away....from me...” it finally managed to get out, then turned and began to stumble across the ashen landscape, towards a part of the woods that had withstood most of the fire.
 
When the chopper arrived, it found Harker sitting alone, having not moved an inch the entire time.
 
TO BE CONTINUED!

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