Master Bruce
PrinceAlexus
Pilatus
Half Pint
Chronic
MST3K 4ever
Infinite Cosmos
QJT
Sep
Fading Memory
Calvert, Oklahoma
February 3rd, 1864
The wind that howled across the open plains was a bitter cold, the kind that blew right through their dusters and chilled to the bone. The dark of midnight bore down on Jonah heavily as he stood closer than he'd like to the fire, the only source of heat and light for miles. The smoke stung his eyes and choked his lungs, but he couldn't step back from the blaze. Part of him, small at first but larger and stronger the longer he stared, wanted to step into the flames himself.
An hour ago, these burning timbers were a church-house. An hour ago, the flecks of ash that rose from the center of the blaze were people. An hour ago, the air that now only carried the crackling of flaming wood was filled with gunfire and screams.
A few steps closer, and Jonah wouldn't see those faces anymore, wouldn't hear all those voices crying for mercy. It’d be justice.
No. Not justice.
Vengeance…
"Fuckin' hell, Jonah," Jeb Turnbull slurred, whiskey on his breath as he stumbled into his friend, "I reckon we went too far on this one."
Jonah blinked a few times with his good eye, his reverie broken by Turnbull barging in on it. He glared at Jeb for a moment, then turned away. "It's what yer paw wanted, ain't it?"
"Ah guess," Jeb said, his head lowered, "Still, I can't hardly figure what good it's doin."
"An' what makes you think we're here ta do good, baby-boy?" Eddie Cantwell jeered at Jeb. "Our outfit ain't called Satan's Servants for nothin!'"
Jonah snorted at that. He had hated the name “Satan’s Servants” ever since Jeb’s father had dubbed them when he hired them for this enterprise. It wasn’t that it offended Jonah’s sensibilities; he hadn’t been raised Christian, and very few things in their Good Book lined up with his experience of the world. He just hated the name because it was so damned corny.
Eddie Cantwell. John “Blackjack” Burgis. Tobias Manning. Lucas “Mad Dog” McGill. Their ringleader, Victor “Starman” Sono. And Jonah himself. The six of them had all been facing the gallows just a few months earlier, before they were granted a special “pardon,” dragged from the various holes they’d been stuffed into while waiting to die, and shipped to a massive plantation in Virginia. That’s where they’d met their employer, Quentin Turnbull.
Turnbull was the richest landowner in the Confederacy, and had considerable political influence; in the few times he’d been in the company of Southern high society, Jonah had heard rumors he was planning to give President Davis the boot as soon as the war was over, and was only propping him up to take the fall if they lost. And he’d gathered a half-dozen of the most vicious killers in the South–which, given the state of the war, was quite the statement.
”I love my home,” Quentin Turnbull had told them that night, having offered them warm meals, good whisky, a comfortable place to kick up their feet, and the first taste of ‘the good life’ that many of them had ever experienced. ”but my beloved Virginia, and indeed all of your homes, face an existential threat the likes of which we have not seen since the tyranny of King George. While I am confident that our boys will succeed in the noble cause of driving back the Northern aggressor, I do believe that in order to secure our victory, we may find ourselves forced to take what some might call….unsavory measures…”
Quentin’s plan was simple. Gather up a gang of the most evil bastards he could find, and set them loose along the western front. The idea, Turnbull stated, was that they would ”raise unholy hell itself, committing every sin the mind could imagine,” along Union-friendly towns and forts, so that the Blue-coats would have to devote more of their troops and weapons towards chasing them down, a diversion so the Gray-coats could strike more valuable targets. In return, he’d offer them a full pardon.
Jonah had known the promise was bullshit. Oh, sure, Quentin might have pulled strings to get them cut loose if any of them came back alive. But that was never going to happen; this ride was just as much a death sentence as if he’d stayed in his cell and let them hang him. But he took the offer anyway, preferring to die in his saddle than on the terms of some crooked lawman, stringing him up for killing someone even more crooked.
”Think of it as me giving you a last chance to do what comes natural to you,” Quentin Turnbull had told them. ”I believe each of you has been touched by the Devil in one way or another. And now you have my blessing to go and do the Devil’s work…”
So here they were, in the smoldering soot and blood-soaked dirt that used to be the town of Calvert. This was the twelfth town they’d hit, and each time Satan’s Servants had ridden into down, they had lived up to their name more and more.
Jonah had gone on raids with the Apache when he was young, and he knew the kind of things they’d do to unwary settlers. He’d seen the remains of towns that had been hit by Comanche, by banditos from south of the Rio, by Yankees and Rebs trying to demoralize the other side. He knew the kind of savagery men could visit on the weak and the innocent. Hell, he’d participated in it himself on more than one occasion. But even as stone-hearted as he’d become, what they were doing on this ride, it didn’t sit right with him.
And what they’d just done in Calvert had topped them all.
”Hooo, God damn, that one had some spirit in him!” Victor Sono called out as he strode from the ruined jailhouse, fixing yet another star-shaped badge to his vest. ”Fella kept his poker-face longer’n any lawman I’ve ever had the pleasure of cuttin’ on yet, thinkin’ he weren’t gonna give me a scream, not gonna give me the satisfaction.”
The front of his vest was almost blinding with the gleam of the fire-light from all the polished badges he’d collected. ”Oh, but I got my scream by the end of it, believe you me.”
”What is it with you an’ lawmen, anyhow?” Tobias asked between scrapes of his knife against the skull of the schoolteacher, her eyes still open in shock. He’d taken to collecting scalps, and developed a preference for blondes.
”Never did like folks who thought they could tell me what I could and couldn’t do,” Sono shrugged. ”I like to show ‘em that their tin stars don’t make ‘em special.”
”God damn right!” Cantwell said. ”Ain’t no man livin’ that can stop us!”
”That ain’t what he means,” sneered Mad Dog McGill as he cut another long strip from a bloody shank of meat. Jonah chose not to wonder where the meat had come from. ”We ain’t any more special than these sorry sonsabitches. There ain’t nobody who’s special. We’re just dead meat in the end.”
Jeb scowled at the three outlaws as they celebrated. ”Ffffuck, but you’re a real piece a work,” he slurred. Jeb had been sent along with the other six on his father’s orders, and he’d been the only one to voice any kind of objections to their actions. And while his protests had grown quieter and quieter, he was the only one in the company who hadn’t so much as drawn his gun on this ride. McGill and Manning had planned to skin him and leave him in a ditch before they’d even crossed the Mississippi, but Hex had stopped them. Jeb was the only one of the gang that Jonah could stand; he was the only one who still had any shred of a soul left in him.
”It’s done,” said Blackjack Borgin, an enormous black man with a pickaxe slung over his shoulder, and dark red stains splashed up and down his front. Borgin hadn’t spoken a word since the raid began. Hell, he’d barely said more than ten words to any of them since they’d set out from Virginia. Usually, he had just let his pickaxe do the talking.
Borgin pulled something from the pocket of his overalls– an old, yellowed scrap of what looked like parchment paper– and handed it to Jeb. The Turnbull boy looked around nervously, the sight of that scrap sobering him up quick, then stuffed the scrap in his coat.
”N-no witnesses, yeah?” he asked. ”Like my Pa ordered?”
Borgin just nodded. The mayor of Calvert had a large family, a frail old mother, a pretty young wife, and five children who couldn’t have been older than ten.
”Jeezus, yer one cold-hearted fuck,” Cantwell said. ”I ain’t never had a problem cuttin’ up men, even women-folk if they get too lippy. But little old ladies and youngins?”
Borgin shrugged. ”Fuck ‘em,” is the only answer he gave.
Jonah had pulled the trigger on a hell of a lot of people on this ride, none of whom had it coming. His work was always quick, one through the heart or the brain-pan, painless as he could manage. He knew he was a monster, but the other riders of Satan’s Servants, they loved being monsters.
While the other outlaws laughed, and Jeb stumbled off to their wagon, Jonah Hex looked at the flames again. He heard the people of Calvert screaming again. He heard their voices form around a single word.
Vengeance
”All right, boys, we’re done here!” Victor called out to the gang. ”And as much as it might pain me to say it, our revels are very nearly at an end. We’ve hit twelve of the thirteen targets that our dear benefactor, the esteemed Mister Turnbull, has set for us. Which means we’ll soon be moving on to our final target….”
Fort Charlotte, Texas
February 19th, 1864
”J…*ghkk!*...Jonah…” Jeb gurgled, blood bubbling up in his throat and leaking out of another half-dozen holes up and down his body. ”Ah think….think’m….dyin’.”
The air was thick with the smell of smoke, spent gunpowder, burning grass, and fresh blood. Three paces to his left, Blackjack’s legs twitched violently. Four more paces from them, the rest of Blackjack was still. Behind them, steam rose from the mass of pulverized meat that used to be Mad Dog McGill. To their right, Victor Sono’s hands were frozen in place, forever clutching at the red mess where his face used to be.
A hundred paces in front of them, the guns of Fort Charlotte still smoked, jeers of triumph rising from inside the high timber walls. He’d never know how the Yankees had known they were coming, but their midnight raid was over before it even began, Satan’s Servants cut to pieces by grape-shot and Gatling guns before they could even get off a shot.
Jonah Hex crawled on his belly through the mud, white-hot agony searing him as filth seeped into his own bleeding wounds, but nonetheless he pulled himself over to his friend. Dying was too good for Jonah and the other riders, but Jeb didn’t deserve to be here with them in the mud.
”Ah’m here, Jeb,” Jonah grunted through gritted teeth. ”You shouldn’t a been here.”
Jeb tried to laugh, began to choke. ”Naw, I’m…I’m no saint. Never tried…to stop this…”
”Ain’t the same as doin’ it yerself,” Hex tried in vain to comfort the dying man.
”We…had this comin’,” Jeb wheezed. ”All of us. Me…most of all.”
Jonah caught a flicker of light from the corner of his bad eye, a flame from a burst cannon shell. Again, as the fire flickered, he heard the voices of the dead.
Vengeance
”Th-..*hkk!*...the pages…Jonah…” Jeb fumbled frantically inside his jacket, his hands shaking as he produced a handful of yellowed parchment scraps. ”G…git these…t-*kghk!*-to…my pa…”
Jeb shuddered violently for a moment, then lay still, his eyes wide open, staring forever into the night sky.
Jonah tried to crawl closer to him, tried to reach the papers in his lifeless hands, but his strength gave out. With the last bit of energy he had left, Jonah rolled onto his back, staring into the same blackness as his departed friend.
Vengeance
”It’s…it’s all wrong…” he muttered to no one. Jonah had never been the type for praying; if there was any kind of almighty power who planned out his life, then he had nothing to say to that sonofabitch. But now that there was no one to hear what he had to say, he might as well say it. ”since…the day ah was born, it’s always been wrong. Mah life…the lives ‘round me…the whole God damned world…it’s all wrong. Ah’d…ah’d give…”
He took one more deep breath. The last he would ever take.
”Ah’d give up anything to set it right.”
As Jonah Hex let out his last, his voice carried up into the dark night sky.
His body went cold. Time stretched out. Every second became an hour…a day….a year….an eternity.
Jonah closed his good eye, expecting it all to go dark.
Instead, out of his bad eye, he saw a figure step over him. A thin, well-groomed man in a fine red suit.
”Mercy me,” the man said, ”Jonah Hex himself. I must admit, I have been eagerly anticipating the chance to properly make your acquaintance for some time indeed. I do have to admit, however, it is a trifle disappointing to finally meet you face-to-face, only to find you in such a lamentable and profoundly fuckin’ sorry state.”
Jonah stared up at the stranger, and suddenly, he was no longer cold. His skin now stung from burning heat, as if he were back in Calvert, standing just a few feet from that burning church house again.
”Who…the hell…are you?”
The stranger grinned. ”Who the hell, indeed. I’m someone who’s interested in enacting a great deal of change in this wicked world, but regrettably somewhat lacking in the ability to do so without a willing agent.”
Jonah stared up at the man in confusion. The stranger sighed.
”Did I just not hear you say that you would give up anything to set this world right?” the man asked.
”Ah…ah guess,” Jonah shrugged.
”Then I have a proposition for you,” the man said with a smile.
Around them both, the world fell away. And in its place was fire, a fire that roared from all sides.
VENGEANCE
”Ah’ll ask again,” Jonah said, propping himself up on a ground that no longer existed. ”Who the hell are you?”
The man smiled wide, a broad toothy grin that never touched his eyes. He offered a hand to Jonah. ”You, my friend, can call me–”
”--Mister Church,” said Kate Marston, a doughy middle-aged woman in a sweater with kittens on it. ”That was the man who told us how to meet you.”
”He said you might be able to help,” said her husband Tim Marston, a thin balding man wearing a t-shirt with “Jesus Loves You” printed on the front.
6 miles south of El Paso, Texas
Present Day
The couple stood nervously at the hideous man on horseback who stared them down. The husband held a sheet of paper, a printed out email, that simply stated the coordinates and time to meet ‘your contact.’
The last slivers of sunlight were fading over the horizon, their bright green hatchback the only car in sight on either of the two long country back-roads that intersected where they stood.
Jonah Hex chuckled without a trace of mirth. He supposed they might have balked if ‘Mister Church’ had told them to stand at a crossroads at sundown, but give them the specific time and place and it didn’t sound so unusual.
”Depends on whatcha mean by ‘help,’” he told them.
”Our little girl, Izzy,” Kate started, ”She’d just turned nine. We’d read an article about this….this summer camp….Camp Mackie. She could…she could make new friends, have fun in the woods….we…we thought…”
As she choked back sobs, Tim stepped in. ”Izzy never came back,” he said. ”We drove up there to pick her up, but when we got there, the camp was abandoned. We called the police, of course, but they weren’t any help.”
”We’d been putting money aside,” Kate said, ”You know, for Izzy’s college? We had to spend it all, hiring a private investigator. He looked all over, but he never…the only thing he was able to find was a scrap of her pajamas.”
”We thought that was it,” Tim added. ”We thought it’d just be a mystery we’d never have an answer to. Then a few nights ago, we get contacted by this ‘Mister Church’ person.”
Jonah’s stomach churned. He knew where this was going.
”He…he sent us a link on the internet…a place on the…the dark web…” said Kate. Those words didn’t mean much to Jonah– that world wasn’t one he wanted anything to do with. But he’d seen and heard enough to get the gist of it.
”It was…it was a video,” Tim stammered, his skin turning green with sickness. ”It was just called ‘Izzy Does It.’ And…and it was her…and there were these men…and they…they…oh God…”
The father turned away and retched into the dirt. The mother looked up at Jonah with pleading eyes.
”He said you could help us!” she begged. ”Please, just…”
”Ah’m sorry,” Jonath said, ”but if yer hopin’ to get yer little girl back….Ah cain’t do that. If ah’m here at all…that means she’s already dead.”
Jonah watched their desperation turn to despair, watched this mother and father, their little world they had built for themselves, all crumble. The Marston family was broken, forever He hated himself for telling it to them, but it was better that they didn’t have any illusions about what comes next.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
”But there’s somethin’ ah can help you with,” he continued. ”Ah can find those men. An’ ah can make ‘em pay for what they did.”
The Marston parents looked gravely at each other, then back to Jonah. ”Yes.”
Jonah held up a hand. ”’fore we do this, ah want to make it clear. You agree to this…there ain’t no takin’ it back. You can walk away from this, right now. Those men go free, but you get to see yer little girl again, in the Hereafter. Ah go after those men, though, an’ Ah drag their sorry souls to Hell….an’ when the time comes, you follow on after. What Ah’m offerin’...it ain’t justice.”
As Jonah spoke, the air smelled of brimstone, and his face began to bubble and peel away. As the Marstons watched, Jonah’s face became a bare, bleached skull. Flames erupted from within him.
”Those men need to suffer,” Kate spat, ”I don’t care what happens to me.”
”You find them,” Tim nodded, ”You make them pay for what they did to our Izzy. To hell with everything else.”
Jonah Hex extended his hand to seal the pact. The Marstons took his hand, and the flames roared.
Vengeance
February 3rd, 1864
The wind that howled across the open plains was a bitter cold, the kind that blew right through their dusters and chilled to the bone. The dark of midnight bore down on Jonah heavily as he stood closer than he'd like to the fire, the only source of heat and light for miles. The smoke stung his eyes and choked his lungs, but he couldn't step back from the blaze. Part of him, small at first but larger and stronger the longer he stared, wanted to step into the flames himself.
An hour ago, these burning timbers were a church-house. An hour ago, the flecks of ash that rose from the center of the blaze were people. An hour ago, the air that now only carried the crackling of flaming wood was filled with gunfire and screams.
A few steps closer, and Jonah wouldn't see those faces anymore, wouldn't hear all those voices crying for mercy. It’d be justice.
No. Not justice.
Vengeance…
"Fuckin' hell, Jonah," Jeb Turnbull slurred, whiskey on his breath as he stumbled into his friend, "I reckon we went too far on this one."
Jonah blinked a few times with his good eye, his reverie broken by Turnbull barging in on it. He glared at Jeb for a moment, then turned away. "It's what yer paw wanted, ain't it?"
"Ah guess," Jeb said, his head lowered, "Still, I can't hardly figure what good it's doin."
"An' what makes you think we're here ta do good, baby-boy?" Eddie Cantwell jeered at Jeb. "Our outfit ain't called Satan's Servants for nothin!'"
Jonah snorted at that. He had hated the name “Satan’s Servants” ever since Jeb’s father had dubbed them when he hired them for this enterprise. It wasn’t that it offended Jonah’s sensibilities; he hadn’t been raised Christian, and very few things in their Good Book lined up with his experience of the world. He just hated the name because it was so damned corny.
Eddie Cantwell. John “Blackjack” Burgis. Tobias Manning. Lucas “Mad Dog” McGill. Their ringleader, Victor “Starman” Sono. And Jonah himself. The six of them had all been facing the gallows just a few months earlier, before they were granted a special “pardon,” dragged from the various holes they’d been stuffed into while waiting to die, and shipped to a massive plantation in Virginia. That’s where they’d met their employer, Quentin Turnbull.
Turnbull was the richest landowner in the Confederacy, and had considerable political influence; in the few times he’d been in the company of Southern high society, Jonah had heard rumors he was planning to give President Davis the boot as soon as the war was over, and was only propping him up to take the fall if they lost. And he’d gathered a half-dozen of the most vicious killers in the South–which, given the state of the war, was quite the statement.
”I love my home,” Quentin Turnbull had told them that night, having offered them warm meals, good whisky, a comfortable place to kick up their feet, and the first taste of ‘the good life’ that many of them had ever experienced. ”but my beloved Virginia, and indeed all of your homes, face an existential threat the likes of which we have not seen since the tyranny of King George. While I am confident that our boys will succeed in the noble cause of driving back the Northern aggressor, I do believe that in order to secure our victory, we may find ourselves forced to take what some might call….unsavory measures…”
Quentin’s plan was simple. Gather up a gang of the most evil bastards he could find, and set them loose along the western front. The idea, Turnbull stated, was that they would ”raise unholy hell itself, committing every sin the mind could imagine,” along Union-friendly towns and forts, so that the Blue-coats would have to devote more of their troops and weapons towards chasing them down, a diversion so the Gray-coats could strike more valuable targets. In return, he’d offer them a full pardon.
Jonah had known the promise was bullshit. Oh, sure, Quentin might have pulled strings to get them cut loose if any of them came back alive. But that was never going to happen; this ride was just as much a death sentence as if he’d stayed in his cell and let them hang him. But he took the offer anyway, preferring to die in his saddle than on the terms of some crooked lawman, stringing him up for killing someone even more crooked.
”Think of it as me giving you a last chance to do what comes natural to you,” Quentin Turnbull had told them. ”I believe each of you has been touched by the Devil in one way or another. And now you have my blessing to go and do the Devil’s work…”
So here they were, in the smoldering soot and blood-soaked dirt that used to be the town of Calvert. This was the twelfth town they’d hit, and each time Satan’s Servants had ridden into down, they had lived up to their name more and more.
Jonah had gone on raids with the Apache when he was young, and he knew the kind of things they’d do to unwary settlers. He’d seen the remains of towns that had been hit by Comanche, by banditos from south of the Rio, by Yankees and Rebs trying to demoralize the other side. He knew the kind of savagery men could visit on the weak and the innocent. Hell, he’d participated in it himself on more than one occasion. But even as stone-hearted as he’d become, what they were doing on this ride, it didn’t sit right with him.
And what they’d just done in Calvert had topped them all.
”Hooo, God damn, that one had some spirit in him!” Victor Sono called out as he strode from the ruined jailhouse, fixing yet another star-shaped badge to his vest. ”Fella kept his poker-face longer’n any lawman I’ve ever had the pleasure of cuttin’ on yet, thinkin’ he weren’t gonna give me a scream, not gonna give me the satisfaction.”
The front of his vest was almost blinding with the gleam of the fire-light from all the polished badges he’d collected. ”Oh, but I got my scream by the end of it, believe you me.”
”What is it with you an’ lawmen, anyhow?” Tobias asked between scrapes of his knife against the skull of the schoolteacher, her eyes still open in shock. He’d taken to collecting scalps, and developed a preference for blondes.
”Never did like folks who thought they could tell me what I could and couldn’t do,” Sono shrugged. ”I like to show ‘em that their tin stars don’t make ‘em special.”
”God damn right!” Cantwell said. ”Ain’t no man livin’ that can stop us!”
”That ain’t what he means,” sneered Mad Dog McGill as he cut another long strip from a bloody shank of meat. Jonah chose not to wonder where the meat had come from. ”We ain’t any more special than these sorry sonsabitches. There ain’t nobody who’s special. We’re just dead meat in the end.”
Jeb scowled at the three outlaws as they celebrated. ”Ffffuck, but you’re a real piece a work,” he slurred. Jeb had been sent along with the other six on his father’s orders, and he’d been the only one to voice any kind of objections to their actions. And while his protests had grown quieter and quieter, he was the only one in the company who hadn’t so much as drawn his gun on this ride. McGill and Manning had planned to skin him and leave him in a ditch before they’d even crossed the Mississippi, but Hex had stopped them. Jeb was the only one of the gang that Jonah could stand; he was the only one who still had any shred of a soul left in him.
”It’s done,” said Blackjack Borgin, an enormous black man with a pickaxe slung over his shoulder, and dark red stains splashed up and down his front. Borgin hadn’t spoken a word since the raid began. Hell, he’d barely said more than ten words to any of them since they’d set out from Virginia. Usually, he had just let his pickaxe do the talking.
Borgin pulled something from the pocket of his overalls– an old, yellowed scrap of what looked like parchment paper– and handed it to Jeb. The Turnbull boy looked around nervously, the sight of that scrap sobering him up quick, then stuffed the scrap in his coat.
”N-no witnesses, yeah?” he asked. ”Like my Pa ordered?”
Borgin just nodded. The mayor of Calvert had a large family, a frail old mother, a pretty young wife, and five children who couldn’t have been older than ten.
”Jeezus, yer one cold-hearted fuck,” Cantwell said. ”I ain’t never had a problem cuttin’ up men, even women-folk if they get too lippy. But little old ladies and youngins?”
Borgin shrugged. ”Fuck ‘em,” is the only answer he gave.
Jonah had pulled the trigger on a hell of a lot of people on this ride, none of whom had it coming. His work was always quick, one through the heart or the brain-pan, painless as he could manage. He knew he was a monster, but the other riders of Satan’s Servants, they loved being monsters.
While the other outlaws laughed, and Jeb stumbled off to their wagon, Jonah Hex looked at the flames again. He heard the people of Calvert screaming again. He heard their voices form around a single word.
Vengeance
”All right, boys, we’re done here!” Victor called out to the gang. ”And as much as it might pain me to say it, our revels are very nearly at an end. We’ve hit twelve of the thirteen targets that our dear benefactor, the esteemed Mister Turnbull, has set for us. Which means we’ll soon be moving on to our final target….”
Fort Charlotte, Texas
February 19th, 1864
”J…*ghkk!*...Jonah…” Jeb gurgled, blood bubbling up in his throat and leaking out of another half-dozen holes up and down his body. ”Ah think….think’m….dyin’.”
The air was thick with the smell of smoke, spent gunpowder, burning grass, and fresh blood. Three paces to his left, Blackjack’s legs twitched violently. Four more paces from them, the rest of Blackjack was still. Behind them, steam rose from the mass of pulverized meat that used to be Mad Dog McGill. To their right, Victor Sono’s hands were frozen in place, forever clutching at the red mess where his face used to be.
A hundred paces in front of them, the guns of Fort Charlotte still smoked, jeers of triumph rising from inside the high timber walls. He’d never know how the Yankees had known they were coming, but their midnight raid was over before it even began, Satan’s Servants cut to pieces by grape-shot and Gatling guns before they could even get off a shot.
Jonah Hex crawled on his belly through the mud, white-hot agony searing him as filth seeped into his own bleeding wounds, but nonetheless he pulled himself over to his friend. Dying was too good for Jonah and the other riders, but Jeb didn’t deserve to be here with them in the mud.
”Ah’m here, Jeb,” Jonah grunted through gritted teeth. ”You shouldn’t a been here.”
Jeb tried to laugh, began to choke. ”Naw, I’m…I’m no saint. Never tried…to stop this…”
”Ain’t the same as doin’ it yerself,” Hex tried in vain to comfort the dying man.
”We…had this comin’,” Jeb wheezed. ”All of us. Me…most of all.”
Jonah caught a flicker of light from the corner of his bad eye, a flame from a burst cannon shell. Again, as the fire flickered, he heard the voices of the dead.
Vengeance
”Th-..*hkk!*...the pages…Jonah…” Jeb fumbled frantically inside his jacket, his hands shaking as he produced a handful of yellowed parchment scraps. ”G…git these…t-*kghk!*-to…my pa…”
Jeb shuddered violently for a moment, then lay still, his eyes wide open, staring forever into the night sky.
Jonah tried to crawl closer to him, tried to reach the papers in his lifeless hands, but his strength gave out. With the last bit of energy he had left, Jonah rolled onto his back, staring into the same blackness as his departed friend.
Vengeance
”It’s…it’s all wrong…” he muttered to no one. Jonah had never been the type for praying; if there was any kind of almighty power who planned out his life, then he had nothing to say to that sonofabitch. But now that there was no one to hear what he had to say, he might as well say it. ”since…the day ah was born, it’s always been wrong. Mah life…the lives ‘round me…the whole God damned world…it’s all wrong. Ah’d…ah’d give…”
He took one more deep breath. The last he would ever take.
”Ah’d give up anything to set it right.”
As Jonah Hex let out his last, his voice carried up into the dark night sky.
His body went cold. Time stretched out. Every second became an hour…a day….a year….an eternity.
Jonah closed his good eye, expecting it all to go dark.
Instead, out of his bad eye, he saw a figure step over him. A thin, well-groomed man in a fine red suit.
”Mercy me,” the man said, ”Jonah Hex himself. I must admit, I have been eagerly anticipating the chance to properly make your acquaintance for some time indeed. I do have to admit, however, it is a trifle disappointing to finally meet you face-to-face, only to find you in such a lamentable and profoundly fuckin’ sorry state.”
Jonah stared up at the stranger, and suddenly, he was no longer cold. His skin now stung from burning heat, as if he were back in Calvert, standing just a few feet from that burning church house again.
”Who…the hell…are you?”
The stranger grinned. ”Who the hell, indeed. I’m someone who’s interested in enacting a great deal of change in this wicked world, but regrettably somewhat lacking in the ability to do so without a willing agent.”
Jonah stared up at the man in confusion. The stranger sighed.
”Did I just not hear you say that you would give up anything to set this world right?” the man asked.
”Ah…ah guess,” Jonah shrugged.
”Then I have a proposition for you,” the man said with a smile.
Around them both, the world fell away. And in its place was fire, a fire that roared from all sides.
VENGEANCE
”Ah’ll ask again,” Jonah said, propping himself up on a ground that no longer existed. ”Who the hell are you?”
The man smiled wide, a broad toothy grin that never touched his eyes. He offered a hand to Jonah. ”You, my friend, can call me–”
”--Mister Church,” said Kate Marston, a doughy middle-aged woman in a sweater with kittens on it. ”That was the man who told us how to meet you.”
”He said you might be able to help,” said her husband Tim Marston, a thin balding man wearing a t-shirt with “Jesus Loves You” printed on the front.
6 miles south of El Paso, Texas
Present Day
The couple stood nervously at the hideous man on horseback who stared them down. The husband held a sheet of paper, a printed out email, that simply stated the coordinates and time to meet ‘your contact.’
The last slivers of sunlight were fading over the horizon, their bright green hatchback the only car in sight on either of the two long country back-roads that intersected where they stood.
Jonah Hex chuckled without a trace of mirth. He supposed they might have balked if ‘Mister Church’ had told them to stand at a crossroads at sundown, but give them the specific time and place and it didn’t sound so unusual.
”Depends on whatcha mean by ‘help,’” he told them.
”Our little girl, Izzy,” Kate started, ”She’d just turned nine. We’d read an article about this….this summer camp….Camp Mackie. She could…she could make new friends, have fun in the woods….we…we thought…”
As she choked back sobs, Tim stepped in. ”Izzy never came back,” he said. ”We drove up there to pick her up, but when we got there, the camp was abandoned. We called the police, of course, but they weren’t any help.”
”We’d been putting money aside,” Kate said, ”You know, for Izzy’s college? We had to spend it all, hiring a private investigator. He looked all over, but he never…the only thing he was able to find was a scrap of her pajamas.”
”We thought that was it,” Tim added. ”We thought it’d just be a mystery we’d never have an answer to. Then a few nights ago, we get contacted by this ‘Mister Church’ person.”
Jonah’s stomach churned. He knew where this was going.
”He…he sent us a link on the internet…a place on the…the dark web…” said Kate. Those words didn’t mean much to Jonah– that world wasn’t one he wanted anything to do with. But he’d seen and heard enough to get the gist of it.
”It was…it was a video,” Tim stammered, his skin turning green with sickness. ”It was just called ‘Izzy Does It.’ And…and it was her…and there were these men…and they…they…oh God…”
The father turned away and retched into the dirt. The mother looked up at Jonah with pleading eyes.
”He said you could help us!” she begged. ”Please, just…”
”Ah’m sorry,” Jonath said, ”but if yer hopin’ to get yer little girl back….Ah cain’t do that. If ah’m here at all…that means she’s already dead.”
Jonah watched their desperation turn to despair, watched this mother and father, their little world they had built for themselves, all crumble. The Marston family was broken, forever He hated himself for telling it to them, but it was better that they didn’t have any illusions about what comes next.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
”But there’s somethin’ ah can help you with,” he continued. ”Ah can find those men. An’ ah can make ‘em pay for what they did.”
The Marston parents looked gravely at each other, then back to Jonah. ”Yes.”
Jonah held up a hand. ”’fore we do this, ah want to make it clear. You agree to this…there ain’t no takin’ it back. You can walk away from this, right now. Those men go free, but you get to see yer little girl again, in the Hereafter. Ah go after those men, though, an’ Ah drag their sorry souls to Hell….an’ when the time comes, you follow on after. What Ah’m offerin’...it ain’t justice.”
As Jonah spoke, the air smelled of brimstone, and his face began to bubble and peel away. As the Marstons watched, Jonah’s face became a bare, bleached skull. Flames erupted from within him.
”Those men need to suffer,” Kate spat, ”I don’t care what happens to me.”
”You find them,” Tim nodded, ”You make them pay for what they did to our Izzy. To hell with everything else.”
Jonah Hex extended his hand to seal the pact. The Marstons took his hand, and the flames roared.
Vengeance
