A bit of forewarning: some of the ideas I suggest in this chapter may tick off some people. Or they may not. Maybe I'm being paranoid. Either way, let me finish telling you the whole story before you pass final judgment and send me angry e-mails. I swear, it all works.

7: A MOMENT OF CLARITY

"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 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: no one survived the final blast that wiped out the last of Mongul's complex according to this, 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 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 power to the point where I could effect 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."

Truth be told, Hal didn't have much of a plan, just a sketchy idea. For a real, concrete plan, he was going to need some more help. Once they returned to the warehouse, him and Jonah located Stiletta, then went off to her quarters for privacy so they could fill her in on what the two of them had discovered. Wisely, Hal skipped the part about Parallax and the theory that he was the cause of the current state of the world ("Yuh start tellin' folks thet, they might decide tuh stretch yer neck fer yuh," Jonah reasoned). Like Hex, Stiletta was curious to find out how the Green Lantern was going to turn this situation into something useful. "That's great that some of your friends might be alive on Mars or wherever," she said, "but you're stuck on Earth. There's no way to reach them."

"Physically, no, and I figured as much, but I still might be able to contact them," Hal replied. "Back in my reality, the Green Lantern Corps had only recently reformed. There's only five of us, and we're starting almost from scratch. However, in this reality, I never...I mean, the incident that disbanded the Corps never happened. I could be wrong, but unless something disastrous occurred in the past half-century, the old Corps should still be operating out there. That's 3,600 different beings that can potentially respond to a distress call."

Jonah had commandeered the only chair in the room, and was sitting on it backwards, his arms folded over the backrest. "Whut do yuh plan on doin'? Gonna stick yer head out the window an' holler fer 'em?" he said.

"Close. There's an emergency frequency that the Corps set up for planets under our protection. If I can zero in on that, I can send a message through the relay network, and hopefully it'll get picked up by a Lantern in this sector. But for this to work, I need to find a long-range transmitter, something that can bounce a signal off a satellite and into space."

"Oh, I'm sure there's one in the storeroom," Stiletta joked, then turned dead serious. "Are you crazy? Where do you expect to find something like that?"

"Best bet is a military installation, but I doubt any survived the war."

"I think a few did, but they've more than likely been taken over by the Conglomerate or some other strong-arm group. I doubt they'd let us in to make a long-distance call."

"Yuh think any ol' military place would have one of these transmitters?" Jonah asked. "'Cause Ah know of one 'bout a hunnert miles south of here. It's in bad shape, but Ah don't think anybody's set up housekeepin' there yet."

"Hate to burst your bubble, cowboy," Stiletta answered, "but you're mistaken. There's no bases out that way."

"Yuh don't think Ah know whut Ah'm talkin' 'bout?" He turned towards her. "Remember me tellin' yuh 'bout how Ah ran into Harris? Him an' them other soldiers from Viet-whutever, we all stopped by this run-down compound set up by the Army fer research. Weren't on no maps, but one of the fellas said his Pa used tuh work there in his time."

"Vietnam? Is that what you mean?" Hal asked, thinking to himself, He sure does get around, doesn't he?

"Reckon thet is, but it ain't important. Point is, the place is there, an' it might have whut yuh need. 'Course, it weren't exactly the friendliest of places when we stopped by. There was these machines whut looked like big dogs a-runnin' 'round, almost took a few good nips outta muh hide. Ah think we wrecked 'em all, but if'n we're goin' there, Ah'd come loaded fer bear just in case."

"Sounds like a good idea. I'll leave that up to you, Hex: you scrounge up whatever ordnance you think will help," he said, then turned to Stiletta. "I'm not asking you to come along, but an extra set of hands might be useful."

"If you'd told me not to come, I would have made Hex shoot you until you changed your mind."

"Thank God you didn't have to resort to that. I want to leave early tomorrow morning, if possible. That should give us enough time to get supplies and equipment together." Hal rubbed a hand over his face. "Now all we have to worry about is whether or not the transmitter still works...if it's even there."

"Cutter should be able to help on that end, assuming you don't mind making this trio a quartet," Stiletta offered.

"Do you think he'll be up for it?"

She laughed. "It's a secret military base full of high-tech gizmos...we'll have to watch him all night to make sure he doesn't try and beat us there on foot."

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 lair, 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 Bornsten'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'd 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 an 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.

About a half-hour later, the crawler passed the remains of a fence that marked the perimeter of the base. Not much was left standing aside from a couple of sagging hangers and a nondescript two-story building. "It may not look like much," Jonah remarked, "but some of the corridors seemed tuh go down awful deep. Them critters Ah told yuh 'bout didn't make us feel real welcome, though, so we didn't poke 'round here too long."

They drove the vehicle into one of the hangers, then disembarked, guns at the ready. "Okay, let's assume for now that there still might be some of those dogs roaming the grounds, or even some other defense measure," Hal said. "It'll slow us down, but I think we should all stay together, just in case."

"Fine by me," Cutter answered, slinging a bag of electronics gear onto his shoulder. "I don't relish the idea of being robo-kibble."

A sweep of the above-ground levels revealed nothing of use, though it appeared that some scavengers had been there in the months since Jonah's visit. They took it as a good sign: if people had been on the grounds, then perhaps all the defenses had been eliminated. Despite that, they were taking no chances: each of them carried a weapon loaded with armor-piercing rounds along with a few timed explosive charges, the only things the gunfighter thought were capable of stopping one of those machine-hounds. Picking a building at random, the group began to head into the bowels of the facility. Jonah took the lead, with Cutter and Stiletta following, and Hal taking up the rear. The Green Lantern carried a can of reflective spraypaint in addition to a gun, and marked the wall every ten feet or so with an arrow pointing the way they'd come.

They soon found that a few areas were completely impassible, as parts of the structure appeared to have caved in, or the sliding metal doors refused to open no matter how much force was applied. The deeper they went, the more the place felt like a tomb. The echoes of footsteps off the walls and the lack of power in some areas didn't help. During one long stretch of darkness, the otherwise stale air in the corridor began to sour, like raw meat that had been left out too long. Jonah stopped short, waving his hand into the beam of one of the flashlights behind him to call for a halt.

"What's wrong? You find something?" Stiletta asked, raising her light towards his face.

He grabbed hold of it and pushed it back down. "Don't know yet. Stay still." He left the group and moved forward, his own light trained on the ground. It soon fell on a dark mass laying on the floor, vaguely human-shaped. Putting down his flashlight, he knelt beside it for a moment, then called the rest of them over. The added light soon revealed a man in a heavy coat that had been shredded in multiple places, along with the flesh beneath. The face was a mask of dried blood and splintered bone, and the person's right arm was missing below the elbow. Jonah looked up at them and said what they were all thinking: "There's at least one left."

"How long ago?" Hal asked, his nose wrinkling up at the smell.

"'Bout a week. Scav, most likely. Got adventurous an' decided tuh go explorin'. Ain't much of a blood trail, so he must've gotten hit pretty quick. Put up a fight, though." He picked up his flashlight and pointed it to the other side of the corridor. The rest of the arm was over there, a pistol still in hand. "Knocked him down, ripped it off, then crushed his skull."

Cutter made an unpleasant noise and put a hand over his mouth. "You all right?" Stiletta asked him, and he nodded.

"Last time Ah was here, three of 'em tried tuh jump us. We blowed up two, and the third fell through a rotted spot in the floor. Made a lot of noise on the way down, an' Ah figured thet was the end of it." Jonah stood up. "Reckon Ah underestimated it."

"If any of you want to go back, I won't hold it against you," Hal said, looking at each of them in turn. "It's my risk, not yours."

Jonah shrugged. "Ain't changed much fer me. Now Ah know fer sure there's something down here 'stead of just guessin' 'bout it. 'Sides, maybe it won't know we're here if'n we keep this quick an' quiet."

Stiletta and Cutter agreed, but the young man seemed a bit pale. Don't blame him, Jonah thought, muh own stomach's startin' tuh flutter a touch. He did his best to push such thoughts aside as they continued down the corridor, all of them keeping a closer eye on their surroundings.

The tension in the group went down a bit when they reached a lit section once again, and not long after that, they came upon a door marked simply CONTROL. "This might be it," Hal said, and worked his fingers into the slim opening to pry it the doors apart. With a squeal, the frozen mechanism finally gave way and revealed a room lined with computer terminals and monitoring equipment. Some were even operating, though they currently showed nothing more than static. "All right, let's see what we can do with this," he said to Cutter, and the two of them began walking up and down the rows of electronics, toggling switches to see what did and didn't respond.

Stiletta followed after them, but stopped when she noticed Jonah still standing in the doorway. "Feeling a little lost, cowboy?" she asked, gesturing to the terminals.

"Somebody's gotta stand guard," he replied, then turned to face the corridor.

She came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. "Come on, where's that smile I saw earlier?"

"No smilin' when Ah'm on the job...bad fer muh reputation." He cocked his head towards the others. "Go on, girl. If'n Ah need help, Ah'll holler."

She lingered for a moment, then gave his shoulder a squeeze and walked away, rejoining the guys as they fiddled around under one of the consoles. To be honest, he did feel lost in this place, but it was a feeling he was learning to live with. Maybe Ah won't need tuh much longer, though, Hex thought. No matter what he told the Green Lantern, he had been wondering if the masked men they were trying to reach really could help him get home. And after Hal mentioned that the gunfighter's future may not be one that ends in a dusty warehouse, his desire to get back had grown. Yo're settin' yerself up fer another fall, Jonah boy, he told himself. Wish in one hand an' spit in the other, see which one'll do yuh the most good.

As the other three worked on making the long-neglected equipment functional again, Jonah paced up and down the corridor, smoking too many cigarettes and keeping his eyes and ears wide open. There appeared to be no trace of the four-legged defense system nearby, but he wasn't about to drop his guard. He stopped at the head of every hallway that branched off of the one near the control room, listening for the whine of servomotors or the throaty metallic growl he remembered the machine-hound made. He heard nothing but the thump of the ventilation system. If'n it was a real animal, Ah could check fer droppings, he thought. 'Course, this thing could shit out scrap metal fer all Ah know. Whenever his path took him past the control room, he'd poke his head in to see how they were making out. Unfortunately, the gibberish they spoke to each other about frequencies and signal-bouncing and words that he wasn't even sure were English just made him shake his head and continue on down the corridor.

After a few hours, he began to wonder how long they'd go at it before they finally declared it a loss. The gunfighter was thinking of interrupting them to ask if they were spending the night when Stiletta came out of the room and waved to him. "It worked! I can't believe it, we got a hold of somebody!" she said as he came down the hall.

"Keep yer voice down, sugar," he replied, "we're trespassin', remember?" Inside, though, he felt like shouting as well. "Is it the right somebody?"

"GL says so. He called the guy 'Owen', I think."

"Well, if'n he's on a first-name basis with the fella, then Ah reckon we're in business." The two of them headed into the control room. Hal and Cutter sat at one of the terminals, each wearing a slim headset with a microphone attached to the earpiece. Stiletta handed one like it to Jonah, who held it up to his ear. The voice he heard was partly obscured by pops of static, but he could make it out well enough.

"...ask you to cease transmission. Communication over this frequency is reserved for emergency signals only. You are in violation of..."

"I don't care if I'm in violation. Matter of fact, I encourage you to come arrest me personally," Hal answered. "This is not a joke, this is a genuine distress call from Earth, Sector 2814. My name is Hal Jordan, I was Green Lantern for this sec..."

"Hal Jordan is dead," the voice interrupted, "and Earth is no longer under the protection of the Corps. I must ask you to cease transmission. Communication over this frequency..."

"Don't start that again, dammit! I'm not in the mood for typical Oan bullheadedness! If you don't believe I am who I say, then dig up my old security codes and I'll rattle them off to you. Better yet, get someone that knew me. We'll have this cleared up in five minutes."

"No matter your true identity, I cannot comply. A quarantine has been placed on Earth, outlawing contact with the planet in any form...including this communication."

"Why?" Jonah spoke into the headset mike. Everyone looked at him like he'd fired a shot in the room. Hal repeatedly drew a hand across his throat and mouthed Shut up!

Without missing a beat, the voice from Oa replied, "The planet's inhabitants have been declared too unstable to maintain meaningful relations with. They have a history of self-destructive behavior, as well as xenophobic tendencies. While the actions of Green Lantern Hal Jordan and a few others from his planet have shown that some can rise above their society's limitations, on a whole Earth is still far too barbaric. Until evidence is presented to the contrary, the Guardians will not allow the planet's negative influence to spread beyond its system."

"Give me a chance to plead my case to the Guardians," Hal said. "I'll convince them to lift the quarantine, just for a while."

"Request denied. This communication will be forcibly terminated in five seconds, and all further transmissions from your coordinates will be ignored." After a pause, the voice said, "I am sorry," followed by a brief electronic tone, then silence.

Hal slowly sat back in his chair, then took off the headset, tossed it onto the keyboard in front of him, and let his hands drop to his lap. One by one, the others did the same. After a minute, Cutter began to turn off the equipment, his hand lingering for a moment above every switch, as if waiting for a last-second reprieve.

It was Jonah that finally broke the silence. "Thet 'Owen' fella always talk like a big-city lawyer?" he asked.

"I think the Oans have perfected that sort of talk," the Green Lantern answered, standing up. "Let's get the Hell out of here."

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.