Faux DC! - Vertigo Titles

He was the most godawful ugly hombre I'd seen in my life. Or ever wanted to see, for that matter.

It looked as if someone had carved on him with a rusty butcher knife. Chapped lips peeled away into a sutured wound, exposing decayed gums and gritted teeth hiding behind tendrils of spidery skin dripping from cheek to jaw. His dry and puckered flesh, screaming with ages of torture, slid down the right side of his skull. One of his eyes---bloody and bulged and festering like an open sore---stared into the pits of Hell.

I saw him stride through the batwing doors as cool as a vulture's shadow in the valley of death. He didn't look this way or that, or mutter a word to the whores who showed a bit too much naked flesh and looked pouty in their rouge and mascara, or order a mug of suds from George the bartender. He just glided across the rotted wormhole planks lain across the saloon's floor, sportin' Confederate army duds like the South had won the damned war, and seated his back to the wall.

His name was Jonah Hex, and he was a bounty hunter.

I rolled myself a cigarette, powdering the paper with tobacco grounds sprinkled from shaky fingers. My tongue was drier than a bone as I licked the smoke and stuck it into my mouth. The sound of my match striking to life caught the bounty hunter's attention, and I felt that mutilated eye of his settle on my sweating face.

Almost everyone in the saloon knew why the stranger was in town. He was here to kill and collect the $500 bounty on Lonnie Mack's alive-or-dead body. The only person who didn't seem to know it was the feller playing poker with Archie Meadow near the bar. And the funny thing, if one could call it that, was that this feller was Lonnie Mack.

"Doc says I'm a strange critter," Lonnie said. "Says the desert oughta be drying my sinuses, not making them worse."

He folded a fist of cards and blew a snoot full of snot into his palm. And then he stuck it out for Archie, who looked away in disgust, to see.

Except the only thing that Archie saw was Jonah Hex looking right back at him.

"Deal me out," Archie said. He swallowed the last of his beer, wiping a greasy hand across his mouth. His chair squawked loudly across the floor as he pushed himself away from the table, standing up.

"What the hell for?"

"I just remembered the wife wants me to pick her up some stuff from the mercantile. Flour, beans, pantaloons---"

"Pantaloons?"

"I gotta go," Archie stammered. And as he pushed open the batwing doors, Lonnie shot him in the back. A flower of blood blossomed beneath Archie's corpse as he crumpled to the saloon floor.

Behind the bar, George blinked away the sweat coursing into his eyes. I could see him shaking, desperate for a stiff drink to calm his nerves. But as Lonnie Mack approached him, scattering the whores like Moses at the Dead Sea, the poor bastard was just too darned scared to move.

"Archie's wife had him more whooped than the Confederate army," Lonnie snarled. Everyone in the saloon knew he was taking a potshot at Jonah Hex, but we all valued our lives more than to laugh.

I spied Yancy Tucker, the town's gangly undertaker who prided himself on being the spitting-image of Abraham Lincoln, lick his lips in anxious anticipation of planting Archie Meadow's carcass in the cemetery.

"Somebody oughta skin you alive for selling this cat piss," Lonnie said. He jerked a whisky bottle from the bar and began to pour it down his throat, ignoring the alcohol that escaped his mouth and ran in streams off his chin.

When he was done, he tossed the bottle into the air and shot it, sending shards of glass and watered-down whisky spraying the saloon.

"What say, George," Lonnie grinned. "You fancy a game of poker?"

George shook his head. He opened his mouth to speak, but what came out was a gurgle no louder than a mouse fart.

"I'll play," said a scratched voice, and all eyes turned to the stranger standing over Archie's corpse in the batwings.

Lonnie wiped his snotty nose on the back of a sleeve. He sauntered back to the poker table, sitting down as calmly as a feller who hadn't just gunned someone down in cold blood. He started to shuffle the cards, making them sound like a string of firecrackers exploding in his calloused hands.

"Well?"

The stranger's eyes studied Lonnie Mack over the flame of a match as he lighted the cheroot stuck between his lips.

"Well what?"

"Are you going to play poker or just keep standing there like the wooden injun outside the cigar store?"

The stranger winked at the whores who showed a bit too much naked flesh and looked pouty in their rouge and mascara as spurs announced his easy gait towards Lonnie's table.

I knew the feller was a bounty hunter, just like Hex, before he even ordered his first beer. I could see the guns peeking out from beneath his poncho, riding in his holsters like two old ladies on their way to a Sunday-Come-To-Meeting church social.

Now, it weren't no big deal for cowpokes to be wearing iron these days. Hell, I even had a peacemaker hugging my leg. But the guns this stranger was babysitting were Frontier Colts with slight notches knifed into the grips. And these guns weren't for scaring coyotes away from your livestock or for shooting the night sky after the 4th of July celebration. No sir. These guns were for killing time.

"Cut'em."

As Lonnie tossed the cards onto the stack of money spread in the middle of the table, I blew the dust off my beer and started to ponder the situation.

One night, Lonnie Mack split his momma's skull open with an ax because he was tired of hearing her preach at him from the good book. And Yancy Tucker hadn't no more buried her in the boneyard before word got back that Lonnie was riding with Black Morgan's raiders. There weren't no telling how many innocent folks he had robbed, raped and killed before making his way back to the saloon for a game of poker. No, the only ones beside his momma that we knew about had lived in Eternity.

The story had it that Lonnie had ridden into Eternity after a bank job with Black Morgan, stopping for a swill of raisin' hell. After he had grown tired of spending some of that stolen money, Lonnie disappeared to the home of a well-to-do rancher living outside the town. While in their captive company, he not only blew out the rancher's brains with his own rifle, but raped his pregnant wife to death with the smoking barrel of that gun still dripping with the feller's brains. And just for good measure, Lonnie cut out their ten-year-old son's tongue with a sawed-tooth buck knife to stop him from screaming.

The best Eternity could do, seeing as how the town's posse was more yellow than skunk piss, was offer $500 blood money for Lonnie Mack's life.

But before I get too far off the beaten path, it wasn't Lonnie Mack's no-good-for-nuthin' murderous ways that I was pondering. No sir. I was just trying to figure out how such a devil could not only be as mean as a rattlesnake, but as plain-ass dumb as a rock. Because here he was, stuck between two bounty hunters, and splitting his face open with a shit-eating grin.

"I'm about ready to clean your plow, stranger," Lonnie said, raking in another pot of crumpled dollar bills and jingling coins.

The stranger's dirt smeared face cracked with a grin, and I'd swear I caught a vicious gleam sparkle in the depths of his black as a dead baby eyes.

"You may be right," the stranger agreed. "But, let's play one more. Just a chance for me to even the stakes."

"It's your funeral," Lonnie said, and I nearly choked on my last swallow of beer at the grave remark. Lonnie shot me a 'keep quiet or I'll shut you up for good' stare as he dealt a new hand of cards.

I wiped beer spittle from my beard and looked towards Jonah Hex. He was still seated in the corner, stiff as a corpse stretched out in its coffin.

And then a fly zipped through the stagnant air and landed on the table in front of him.

With a quick action that barely stirred the cowshit scented breeze blowing in through the batwings, Hex slapped a hand down on the fly. He crushed it beneath his palm, calmly as you please flicking it onto the floor. For good measure, he ground the fly into black jelly beneath his boot heel.

The spider and the fly, I thought. How damned appropriate.

"I done beat you," Lonnie interrupted. He put a hand out to grope the money draping the table, and gestured at the cards fanned in front of him. "What do you think about that?"

The stranger cocked an eyebrow, smiling. For a moment, he drank in the sight of the whores who showed a bit too much naked flesh and looked pouty in their rouge and mascara, before returning his attention to Lonnie Mack.

"I think you need to get back on your fleabag mule, stranger," Lonnie said, laughing.

"My mule wouldn't like you laughin' at him," the stranger replied. "Maybe if you apologize, I can convince him not to kick your ass."

You could see meanness and stinking sweat seep through Lonnie's pores as he bared his green teeth and snarled:

"I'll kill you, you puss---"

"Eeee!"

The whores screamed and disappeared up the stairs into their den of sin as the stranger's pistol sounded off like a cannon in the quiet of the saloon. Its bullet tore up from beneath the table where he had been cradling it in his crotch and smashed into Lonnie Mack's face. It ripped death through his jaw, pulping his brain into day-old oatmeal before smashing out the back of his skull.

Lonnie Mack was dead before his corpse toppled to the warped plywood floor, acrid smoke and the copper scent of blood drifting from his wounds.

The stranger pulled the money from Lonnie's lifeless hand and began to thumb through the gore-stained bills.

"Aces and eights," the stranger said, glancing at the playing cards. He tossed his cheroot into the bullet wound in Lonnie's head. It sizzled like frying bacon as the hot blood extinguished it. "Dead man's hand."

"Do you know who you just killed?" George came around from the bar and I saw that he had wet his pants. "That was Lonnie Mack, mister! Meanest damn bastard I've ever seen."

The stranger glanced down at George's stained crotch and grunted. He stuck another cheroot between his lips and started to gnaw on it.

"He's worth $500 over to Eternity," George told him.

"That's about the good, the bad," the stranger squinted at Jonah Hex, "and the ugly of it."

"A thing like this must make a man thirsty," George said, eyeing the money in the stranger's hand. "Fix you a drink right quick, if you'd like. Or for a few dollars more, rent you a room upstairs to keep company with one of those pretty gals. What do you say?"

But the stranger didn't get a chance to say another word before Hex erupted from his table. In his fist, a Navy Colt .44 Dragoon pistol, belching flame and smoke, appeared with chain lightning speed.

The stranger's left eyeball burst like a fresh grape. And as he opened his mouth to scream, Hex punched him with another bullet that sent smashed teeth adrift on a geyser of blood.

I slowly stood up as Hex moved to inspect the corpses. He kicked Lonnie's head as if it were no more than a ripe watermelon, and then knelt down beside the stranger.

"Sure was a hell of a way to die," I said, taking a step back as Hex glared at me through the drifting gunsmoke. My throat felt as tight as if I was standing in a hangman's noose, and my skin crawled watching the flies feast on the congealed blood.

"Damn straight," Hex agreed. The wind from outside the saloon gusted through the batwings, blowing the bloody poker money around Hex's boots. "Poor sumbitch died for a fistful of dollars."

"I'm going to have to bury that poor bastard," Yancy Tucker said. "You wouldn't know him, would you? I don't have a name to put on the tombstone."

"I don't give a damn what you call him," Hex replied. "For all I care, you can bury him as the man with no name."

Next Issue:

Bloody memories of the Civil War chase Jonah Hex through a ride into the past. Haunted by the corpse of a man who once saved his life, will Jonah receive help from beyond the grave as he confronts the ghosts of the Ku Klux Klan?