Before we get on with the next chapter, I want to congratulate Markmark261 for being the first to notice that I named the warehouse complex for T.M. Maple. For you young'uns out there, "The Mad Maple" was a common sight in the old DC lettercolumns, seeming to be a reader of everything out there, including Jonah Hex (he even got the last word in the final issue of HEX, writing a letter that bordered on eulogy for the character). As I was starting this fic, I heard that Maple had passed away a few years ago, so I named the place in his honor. Good work, Markmark, your No-Prize is in the mail!

6: THE COWBOY AND THE HERO GO TO TOWN

Sobriety, in Jonah's opinion, was highly overrated. He saw nothing wrong with taking a nip or two every so often, but after his little sit-down with Hal, even he had to admit that perhaps he'd slipped too deeply into his cups. He promised to cut back, but both Stiletta and Green Lantern told him that wasn't good enough, it was either all or nothing. Jonah felt they were being rather extreme. "Y'all sound like this temperance woman whut got a hold of me once," he told them. "If'n yuh start thumpin' a Bible at me, Ah'm leavin'." They informed him that wasn't an option, either.

During his first day on the wagon, the gunfighter was watched closer than a fox circling a henhouse. The only time they let him be alone was when he answered the call of nature, and even then somebody stood outside the bathroom door. By the end of the day, he was ready to kill for both some privacy and a stiff drink, and the fact that he was beginning to feel sick as a dog didn't help his mood. Hal noticed Jonah's discomfort, and told him it was from something called "the dee-tees". "I went through the same thing when I dried up," Hal said as the two of them sat in the Hub, each of them nursing a cup of weak coffee. "Figure it's your body's way of getting even for trying to kill your liver."

Though he was suffering, Jonah found the man's frankness a comfort. It made Hal more human to him, not just some strange relic from a past that he hadn't even experienced yet. "Yuh don't strike me as the sort of fella thet would drink."

"The best alcoholics don't look the part. That's how they get away with it. I wasn't a slobbering, fall-down drunk, but I did enough to land up in jail on a drunk-driving charge." He stared down at his cup. "Crippled one of my friends, nearly killed my brother...and yet I still managed to get this." Hal brought up his ring hand. "God has a strange sense of humor."

"Ah've noticed thet," Jonah said, then gestured about them. "Seems the best way tuh explain all this."

"This wasn't God, just men...very stupid, short-sighted men. I thought we'd finally gotten out of the shadow of nuclear war in my time, but it certainly doesn't look that way. I just wonder what happened to all of us that we couldn't stop it."

"Hell, son, Ah wasn't even here fer thet."

"No, I didn't mean you and me, I meant the other heroes." Hal had explained earlier about all the other masked men that used to exist back at the turn of the millennium. To Jonah it all sounded like hogwash. Sure, he'd seen a few odd things himself since coming to this time, but the sort of people Green Lantern claimed to know didn't even sound like real folks. He reasoned it away as he did most of the strangeness he'd encountered in "modern" society: somewhere between 1875 and 2050, everyone had gone completely insane. "There's no way they would have all sat back and let this happen," Hal continued, "not to mention that apparently no one has shown their face since then."

"There was thet Bat-fella," Jonah said, "but Ah think he's dead."

"Okay, one guy out of thousands. What about the rest?"

"They're yer friends, why do yuh keep askin' me?"

"Well, isn't this your field of expertise? Finding people?"

Jonah looked at the man for a moment, then turned away. "Thet ain't whut Ah do no more. Back home, Ah'd do yuh fine, but here...yuh don't want some broken-down old man helpin' yuh. Ah wouldn't do yuh one lick of good."

"Why not? You've been here for quite a while, you know how things work. I don't even know the name of the nearest town."

"Breyersville...but there ain't nobody there worth talkin' tuh." Hex thought for a moment, then said, "Best place tuh start is the Crystal Palace, if'n yuh got money tuh spare...cost yuh twenty Soames just tuh set foot in the place. Then there's Freepoint a few miles past thet, an' River's End...lots of folks go through there all the time. An' if'n yuh don't mind hoofin' it fer a couple days, yuh kin..." He stopped. "Whut's so damn funny?"

"Nothing," Hal replied, a sly grin on his face.

"Yuh ain't gonna get nowheres if'n yuh don't take this serious. Don't yuh know there's folks'll kill yuh soon's they look at yuh 'round these parts? Thet hole in yer leg is proof of thet. They don't give a damn 'bout yer name or yer fancy ring, all's they see is easy pickin's." He took a sip of coffee, then said, "Ah'd best come along an' watch yer back when yuh go lookin' fer these friends of yers, otherwise yuh'll be buzzard chow in no time flat."

Still smiling, Hal said, "That's very generous of you, Hex."

"An' yuh'd best appreciate thet generosity, 'cause yo're gonna have tuh depend on it awful heavy." Jonah pointed a finger at him. "Yuh ain't got a gun, a ride, or one red cent tuh yer name, so muh sense of Christian charity is all yuh got goin' fer yuh at the moment."

"So, do you want to start tomorrow morning?"

"If'n Ah ain't sickin' up muh guts, sure thing."

True to his word, the Green Lantern found Jonah in the Hub the next morning, ready to hit the road. He looked a bit rough around the edges, but he was sober, and that was the important thing. Right after Hal managed to put some breakfast in his belly, the gunfighter came up and shoved a bundle into his hands. "Put this on," Jonah said, "so's yuh don't look like a fool in his underwear while we're out there." Hal unfolded it and saw it was a long black coat, made out of the same leather-like material as Jonah's. There was also some cold-weather headgear and goggles. "Ah managed tuh borrow this fer yuh, too," he added, and pulled out a .45 automatic pistol. "Red told me this is from 'bout the same time as yuh are, so yuh should know it well enough."

"Thanks," Hal said as he slipped the coat on, "but you can keep the gun. That's not my style."

"This ain't 'bout style, it's fer protection."

"I don't use guns...and I don't kill."

"Any owlhoots we run into out on the trail ain't gonna know thet." He grabbed Hal's hand and slapped the pistol into it. "If'n there's trouble, just take the damn thing out an' shoot over their heads. Yuh do know how tuh fire a gun, don't yuh?"

Reluctantly, Hal put the gun in his coat pocket. He had no intention of using it, but Jonah did have a point: just showing that he was armed might be enough to deter trouble.

The next stop was the motor pool, just off to the left of the main entrance. As they stepped into the makeshift garage, their ears were assaulted with the sound of the Rolling Stones blaring full-blast from a stereo on one of the workbenches. Jonah rolled his eyes as Mick Jagger declared that, after nearly a century, he still couldn't get any satisfaction. Hal saw the gunfighter's sour look out of the corner of his eye and asked, "Not that crazy about the Stones?"

"Ah'd stone the jaspers muhself if'n Ah could," he answered. "Sounds like a bull moose 'bout tuh rupture itself." They headed over to a row of cycles standing at the other end of the garage, the one Hal had ridden to the complex among them. "Looks like yuh picked a good one," Jonah said as he checked it out, "ain't nowhere near as beat-up as muh own."

"I can't picture you tooling around on a motorcycle."

"Ain't by choice...the future seems tuh be a mite short on horses." He toggled some switches, and the machine fired up.

"Hey, hands off!" Lewis slid out from under a hulking armored vehicle not far away. "I'm stripping that thing for parts."

"Well, muh eyesight must be gettin' poor in muh old age," Jonah replied, "'cause it looks tuh me like yo're a-crawlin' 'round under thet metal armadillo."

"Don't play stupid, you know what I meant." The mechanic walked over just as the Stones began telling whomever cared that Jumping Jack Flash was a gas gas gas. "I'm gonna take the power cells out of this and slap them in the crawler," he told them, killing the ignition on the bike, "the old ones are almost burned out."

"Do you have another bike to spare, then?" Hal asked.

"What for? You two gonna run off and play Butch and Sundance?"

"You got it. I'm Newman, he's Redford." He nodded towards Hex. "If you really must know, we're going to check with the locals about where my colleagues might be."

"Oh, my mistake," Lewis said, "today's Superhero Day."

"Thet's right," Jonah told him, "an' if'n we find any of 'em today, we're gonna bring 'em back here so's they kin thank yuh personally fer givin' us such a damn hard time." He flashed a grin at the mechanic that would make the Devil cringe. "Ah hear tell some of 'em kin rip through steel like it's tissue paper...wonder whut they could do tuh yer dirty hide."

While he may not have believed that the Green Lantern was truly a superhero, he did find Hex's smile disturbing enough to sputter out, "The red one over there's available."

"Thank yuh kindly," Jonah said, and tipped a nonexistent hat in Lewis's direction. The two men grabbed their rides for the day and wheeled them out of the warehouse. The snow had quit for the time being, but the sky still had a dead gray look to it. "Reckon we kin hold off on the headgear fer awhile," the gunfighter told Hal, and stashed his own on the cycle. "The minute yuh feel it stingin', though, put it on. Don't want tuh spoil yer pretty-boy looks." He hopped on board and revved the engine, a different sort of grin on his face now. While he may have said he preferred horses, it was obvious that Jonah got a kick out of riding something faster than the locomotives in his day.

Hal started up his bike and revved it as well. "You ready to roll, Sundance?" he yelled over the noise of the engines.

Jonah looked over at Hal, puzzled. "Ah thought Ah was Redford!" he yelled back.

"It's the same...never mind!" He waved a hand in a gesture of dismissal, and the two of them sped off, snow spraying off their back tires.

They reached the first settlement that Jonah deemed worth their trouble by eleven in the morning. Freepoint wasn't pretty by any stretch of the imagination, but the ramshackle buildings and rows of converted trailers did well enough for the residents, and unlike Crystal Palace, they wouldn't charge for the privilege of walking through their streets. The two men drew their fair share of looks as they made the rounds, asking questions of anyone that seemed willing to talk to a clean-cut gentleman in a mask and a rough-looking man with a face only a mother could love. Unfortunately, most of the answers they received were the same as the ones Hal got from Stiletta and her friends: no one had seen a meta since the war, few to none were known before the war, and the names Green Lantern rattled off, including his own, jogged no memories.

After two hours with no luck, they declared the place a loss and headed to the next town five miles away, a hole in the wall laughingly called New Eden. Prospects didn't improve any there, though Hal did spot some people clustered around a burning oil drum that gave off the same reddish-pink smoke he'd seen in the parking garage. When he asked Jonah about it, the gunfighter made a face and muttered, "Lotus-eaters."

Hal smirked, saying, "I didn't know you read Greek mythology."

"Whut do Greeks got tuh do with anything?" He waved a hand at the small crowd. "They burn little bricks of the stuff an' suck up the smoke. Makes 'em act all moony, like opium, only they don't even got the sense tuh do it in a den, they just drag it out into the open." Jonah lit a cigarette and blew smoke their way, as if to counteract the strange drug's effects. "Cain't get drunk like civilized folk do."

The more hours that passed, the more Hal's discouragement grew. They had traveled countless miles and had nothing to show for it but sore backs from all that riding. As they headed back to their cycles after hitting yet another dead end in another shantytown, Hal expressed his concerns to Jonah. "Maybe we're going about this wrong, or just asking the wrong questions. We should have found out something by now."

"We're followin' a cold trail, Jordan. Thet's the worst sort tuh follow. All's we kin do right now is keep siftin' through all the worthless information 'til we find a good solid lead, then we kin jump on thet an' hope it pans out."

Hal sat down on his bike, saying, "Yeah, I know, but this is frustrating. I'm about ready to call it quits for the day."

"C'mon, one more stop, then we'll head back tuh Maple."

"Are you really that eager to get rid of me?"

"Yes."

Jordan was knocked speechless for a moment. "I thought we'd settled all this."

"Ah've decided tuh tolerate yuh, Ah never said we was best buddies now. The sooner Ah kin foist yuh off on some of yer fellow masked men, the happier Ah'll be." He closed his eyes and rubbed them with his fingers. "Yuh have no idea how much it troubles me just tuh look at yuh sometimes. Ah don't care thet yuh've got this idea in yer head thet we're pals...maybe when we meet the other time we will be, but right now yo're just a bad dream Ah cain't shake."

"I'm sorry you feel that way, Hex. I hope you'll change your mind when we do find my colleagues, because if they can help me get back to my proper time, then they might be able to..."

"Don't start."

"Start what?"

"Makin' promises. Ah don't want tuh hear 'em, 'specially 'bout thet." Jonah leveled his gaze at him and said, "Ah've missed muh chance tuh go home twice now. Both times Ah got muh hopes up only tuh have 'em crash down like one of them newfangled flyin' machines. So don't go an' build 'em up again, Ah don't think muh heart kin take the strain a third time."

Green Lantern fell silent for a while, looking out over the sprawling, snow-covered expanse that lay before them, then said, "Okay, I won't bring it up anymore."

"Fine by me." Jonah straddled his own bike. "So, one more stop? River's End is only 'bout three or four miles thetaway." He waved a hand to the east.

"Sure." They fired up their rides, and Jonah led the way to River's End. As they neared the building, Hal let out a quick laugh. The gunfighter had told him that lots of people came to the place, and once he saw it, he realized why...or at least why they would still associate it as a fine source for goods and services. The world comes to an end, Hal thought, and people still go to the freaking mall.

Most of the structure was intact, but parts of the exterior had been built upon, extending out to the mall's crumbling parking lot. That area had the air of a Turkish bazaar about it, with people standing out in the cold haggling over the price of whatever junk lay before them. Jonah skimmed the booths with a practiced eye, picking out the truly useful vendors from the crazies that would make up tales just to part the two men from what little money they had. But even the bounty hunter's experience couldn't produce information where there simply wasn't any, and they slowly worked their way inward to the mall proper. The interior shops looked much better than their outside counterparts, as did the people running them, but the higher quality didn't improve their prospects. "Looks like we've gone bust again," Jonah muttered as they neared the back end of the mall. "Yuh sure we're lookin' fer real people, Jordan?"

"Very funny." Hal surveyed the area, hands on hips. Some of the storefronts on that end had been converted into living quarters, with all sorts of people and their possessions crammed within. "Let's check with some of the folks down here before we take off," he said...then realized he was talking to himself. Jonah had disappeared. Oh damn, he thought as he turned around in a circle. Did he decide to ditch me here? After a moment, he saw the gunfighter across the way, walking into one of the stores. In the display window was a hand-lettered sign:

GUNS + AMMO BUY SELL TRADE

"Like a kid spotting a toy store," he mused, then followed after him. Hal found him already engaged in conversation with the owner behind the counter, handing the man a bullet.

"Yuh got anything like thet?" Jonah asked.

"What sort of gun is this for?" The man held it up for a closer look. The brass casing was blackened with age.

"Colt .44 Dragoon...converted, of course."

"Are you high? I sell guns, not antiques." He tossed the bullet back at Hex, who snatched it out of the air. "Lay off the Lotus and come back when you've really got business for me," he said, and began to turn away.

Jonah reached over the counter, grabbed the man by his shirt, and pulled him back. "Ah ain't in the mood fer sass. Show me whut yuh got, an' Ah'll tell yuh if'n we've got business."

"All right, all right! Jesus..." He shook loose, then rummaged under the counter for a moment. "I've got a box of odds and ends, maybe what you need is in there." He placed a metal box half-full of bullets in front of Jonah.

"I didn't know we were doing any shopping today," Hal said as Jonah began looking through the box.

"Place was here, figured Ah'd try."

"Good idea...think I'll do the same." He then said to the owner, "Mind answering a few questions for me?"

"Let me guess: you want musket balls."

Hal ignored the comment. "I'm looking for some people...the sort that would really stand out if you saw them. They used to call them metas: stronger than average, faster, some have extranormal powers. There were quite a few back around the turn of the millennium. I'm trying to locate some, find out if any survived the war."

"People like that don't exist around here," the man said, shaking his head. "You've seen too many movies."

"What about before the war? Did you ever hear about any of the old heroes?" Hal felt strange referring to himself and those like him as "old", but at this point in time, it was the proper context. "You should know Superman, at least."

He laughed. "Superman? That's a fairy tale. You may as well be looking for Rumpelstiltskin."

"He's not a fairy tale, he's a real person."

"If you say so, buddy...personally, I think you both need to cut down on the briqs." The man turned to Hex and said, "So are you buying or just wasting my time?"

Hal expected Jonah to punch the owner, but instead he held up five bullets, all roughly the same size as the one he'd showed the man earlier. "How much?"

"Two-and-a-half Soames."

Reaching into his coat, the gunfighter produced a small plastic container and shook out what looked to Hal like Alka-Seltzer tablets. Stiletta had told the Green Lantern before about the importance of Soames in current society. In a world where almost every water source was poison, the purifying tablets were worth more than gold, and had become the de facto currency. Jonah snapped one of them in half, then handed over the proper amount.

"Pleasure doing business with you...now scram." The owner jerked a thumb towards the door.

"Cain't imagine why folks ain't linin' up tuh come into this place," Jonah muttered as they left the shop. He gave the bullets in his hand one more look before tucking them in his pocket.

"I'm surprised you're still using your old guns," Hal said. He'd seen the Dragoons laying on the table in Jonah's room and recognized them immediately. "It's obviously not easy to find ammunition for them, so why do you keep bothering?"

"This is the first time Ah've gone lookin', actually. Didn't get them back 'til a month ago."

"You mean they were..."

"Yeah, they were," Jonah said, cutting him off before Hal could mention the corpse. "Funny thing is, they should be at the bottom of a lake 'bout two hunnert years back."

"A lake? What happened?"

"Ah was drunk." Jonah stopped walking and shoved his hands in his pockets, obviously embarrassed to admit what he'd done. "Drunk an' fed up with the world. Ah thought muh guns was the cause of all muh troubles, so Ah tossed 'em in a lake an' said good riddance. When Ah sobered up a week later, Ah thought 'bout tryin' tuh fish 'em out, but Ah wasn't 'bout tuh up an' drown muhself fer 'em, even if they was the nicest pair of guns Ah ever owned." Hal could see the confusion brewing in the gunfighter's eyes once again. "They should be nothin' but hunks o' rust by now, but there they were, right in muh hands."

"Maybe you had copies made after you...I mean..."

"Ah know whut yuh mean, an' Ah thought of thet, but Ah know thet it ain't so. When yuh trust yer life tuh something fer so long, yuh get tuh know every quirk 'bout it." He pointed at Hal's ring. "If'n yuh dropped thet in a pile of rings made tuh look just like it, wouldn't yuh be able tuh pick it out? Yuh kin spot it an' just know thet it's yorn. Ah had them Dragoons fer years, Ah know every inch of 'em. Even the damn serial numbers is the same."

"Then you must have retrieved them somehow, I don't know. For sure, you had guns just like that when we met in..." He stopped, hearing a commotion coming from down the hall. Two men in biker leather ran out of one of the converted storefronts. With them was a two-year-old girl, beating at the man carrying her and screaming bloody murder. The bikers shoved away what little resistance they met and headed towards the nearest exit. Hal didn't know what was going on, but years of experience told him it couldn't be good. "Come on, we've got to try and head them off!" he shouted at Jonah, and began to run after them.

"Whut's this 'we' nonsense, Lantern? Yo're the damn hero." But after standing there a few seconds, he cursed under his breath and followed, easily overtaking the still-injured Jordan. The bikers were too far away for him to block their escape route, though, so Hex decided to improvise: he drew one of his guns and fired a shot at the pushbar on the door to the outside just as the unencumbered biker was reaching for it. The ricochet was more than enough to make the guy change his mind. Seeing the bounty hunter and the Green Lantern bearing down on them, the second biker turned tail and ran off in another direction. "Ah'll fetch the one with the girl," Jonah told Hal, "y'all kin have the other fella."

"Much obliged." Hal had discovered that when you spent a good deal of time around Jonah Hex, his speech pattern tended to rub off on you.

The first biker had only been momentarily stunned by the sudden gunshot, and was now pulling out his own weapon. Time to even the odds, Hal thought. He whipped off his coat, threw it in the biker's face, and forced him against the wall. He then grabbed the man's hand and twisted until the gun dropped to the ground. "Why do I doubt either of you is that girl's father?" Jordan said to him.

"Fuggoff, man," the biker spat back, tossing his head to push aside the coat. "What business is it of yours?"

"I'm the new mall security." He gave the biker's head a quick rap against the wall, hard enough to knock him out, then turned to a man standing nearby. "Watch this guy," Hal said, handing him the gun before heading off the way Jonah and the second biker had gone. He found them not far away, the would-be kidnapper sprawled out on the tiles with a bloody nose and the gunfighter kneeling down to gather up the sobbing child.

"M-Mama, hur' my Mama," the girl stuttered out as she buried her face in the folds of Jonah's coat. She was dressed in a ragged sweater three sizes too large and mismatched shoes.

Jonah smoothed down her hair with a surprisingly gentle touch. "Hush there, youngster, it's alright now." Balancing the girl in the crook of his arm, he stood up and said to Hal, "Yuh lost yer coat."

"The other guy looked like he needed it more." He gestured at the girl, saying, "I didn't know you had it in you."

"Ah have muh moments." Jonah looked down at her tear-streaked face. "Got a boy back home...ain't seen him since he was a month old, but Ah reckon he was 'bout her age when Ah came here."

"I'll bet he's a hellion on the playground." He reached out with a gloved hand and wiped away some of her tears.

The girl sniffled and lifted her head away from Jonah's chest to look at Hal. After a moment, her expression went from sadness to the sort of joy you only see on a child's face. "Lannern!" she cried out.

The two men stared at each other. "Did she just say..." Hal began, then stopped as the kid began to pull at the chest-symbol on his uniform.

"Geen Lannern!" she said the best her two-year-old vocabulary would allow.

"Out of the mouths of babes," Hex wondered aloud. The child began to wiggle in his arms, so he handed her off to Jordan. "Looks like yuh got yerself a new sweetheart."

"I guess so." He gagged as the girl locked her arms around his neck in a toddler death-grip, giggling and saying his name over and over. "Time to go find Mama," he said, and the three of them retraced their steps back to the storefront Hal had seen the bikers come out of. As they neared, a woman dressed just as haphazardly as the little girl ran up to them, her face bloodied and a bruise forming on her cheek.

"Oh my God, Merrissa," the woman said, pulling the girl from Hal's arms, "oh, my baby girl." She ignored the men as she rocked the child in her arms, the relief plain to see on her face.

"Are you all right, ma'am?" Hal asked.

She nodded, saying, "I'll be better if you tell me you killed those bastards. God knows what they were planning to do with her."

Paying no mind to her mother's thoughts of homicide, the girl pointed and said, "Mama, iss Geen Lannern!"

"No, sweetie, I told you, they're gone, all gone." Then she gave Hal a long look. "He does look a lot like the pictures, though."

"Pictures?" Jordan laid a hand on the woman's arm. "Ma'am, what are you talking about?"

"It's nothing, just some old magazine Merrissa found. She asked me who was in the pictures, so I read her the names and made up stories to go with them."

"Can I see it?"

"Sure, I guess," she said, and led them into the converted store. They walked past piles of junk and old furniture to a small area where the mother and daughter lived. They had little more than a mattress and a few bags of belongings.

The girl fought her way out of her mother's arms, saying, "I wanna show 'im!" She ran over to the mattress and pulled out the magazine tucked beneath it, then held it up for Hal to see. "Don' like the ou'side pages, jus' the inside. Ou'side's all blucky."

Hal didn't know what "blucky" meant, but he figured it referred to the smears of dirt ingrained into the magazine cover. The image was still clear enough for him to recognize the Newstime logo, and beneath that..."Oh Jesus," he breathed, then took it from her and began to flip through it.

"Whut is it?" Jonah asked, leaning over Hal's shoulder for a better view.

The Green Lantern didn't answer, just kept flipping the pages and skimming paragraphs. After a couple minutes, he said to Hex, "How many Soames do you have left?"

"Ah don't know, maybe..."

"Whatever it is, give them half."

"Whut? Yuh lost yer mind, boy?"

"Give them half," he repeated, then knelt down in front of the girl. "I'm sorry, honey, I'm going to have to keep this. It's important."

The girl pulled at the magazine. "No, iss mine, I wanna keep it," she said.

"If I give you one of the pictures, can I have it?" he asked. "I'll try to have one of my friends bring it back when I'm done, I promise."

She thought about it, lower lip pouting out, then said quietly, "Okay."

Hal opened the magazine to a picture of himself, making sure the back of the page contained nothing more than an advertisement, then carefully tore it out. He handed it to her and gave her a kiss on her forehead. "Thank you, Merrissa," he said, then stood up and looked at the mother. "And thank you, ma'am. You've just helped me more than you'll ever realize."

The woman was stuffing the Soames into her pocket. "No problem...come by next week and I'll have even more magazines for you."

"This one will do fine," he told her, then turned to walk back out into the mall, the gunfighter right behind.

"Yuh mind tellin' me why Ah gave thet gal eighteen Soames fer an old periodical?" Jonah asked once they were out of earshot.

Still walking, Hal said, "Have you ever heard of a place called Coast City?"

"Cain't say thet Ah have."

"It's in California. I spent most of my life there. A few years ago...to me, it was a few years ago...an alien warlord named Mongul came to Earth and wiped out the entire city, killed millions of people in a bid to take over the planet. I wasn't there to stop him from destroying Coast City, but I was able to take him out before he could finish with his plan. Broke my arm, tore up my knee, but I didn't let up until I was sure he couldn't hurt anyone else."

"Whut's all thet got tuh do with anything?"

He stopped now and handed the magazine at Jonah. Beneath decades of grime, the gunfighter saw the Newstime banner running across the top, and the phrase "One Year Later" at the bottom of the cover. Between the two was a picture of a slender tower with a memorial flame burning near its tip, and five statues ringing its base. The faces on four of the statues were unfamiliar, but Jonah had come to know the fifth one very well the past few days.

"According to this," Green Lantern said, "Mongul killed me as well."