answers are for wusses.

“So that’s it? Just a bunch of guys that don’t like living here?” Rex Logan was having trouble reconciling the dead man’s fear with the source described by the bartender. “Why don’t they just leave?”
“It’s not that they don’t like living here,” the old man clarified, “it’s that they don’t like it being called New Mexico.”
“They think it should be called something else?”
“Anything else. I’m not saying it’s not a stupid thing to get so riled up about, but I can kind of see their point. I mean, you tell somebody you’re from Kip’s Rock or Tengen Prime, it means something; tell ‘em you’re from New Mexico and they ask which one.”
“No kidding, you know I don’t even know which one I’m on?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Crap. I really am in the middle of nowhere,” Rex exclaimed. “No wonder it seems so empty.”
“Yeah, whole planet’s only a couple million people. I remember when it wasn’t even half that. That was before I opened this place, and-”
“Let’s get back on track,” Logan interrupted. “The key’s got something to do with this group, and for some reason I can’t comprehend, that guy was terrified of them,” Rex said, indicating the heap at the base of the bar’s entrance shaft.
“Well, probably not all of them. Some seem to be a lot more intense than others.”
“Radicals?”
“Something like that. A couple of the guys I’ve seen Bruce with scare the hell out of me.”
“And Bruce is?”
The bartender nodded in the direction of the dead body.
“Right. Which would make the guys that are out there looking for me…?”
“Some of his more radical friends, yeah. Look, I don’t really know any more than that. Can you let me go now?”
“What about the key?”
The bartender glanced nervously down at the revolver where it lay across Rex Logan’s lap, held loosely in his right hand. “I really wish I had something more I could tell you; all I know is these guys showed up early this morning, and they were right pissed about something you did last night. At the time I figured it was related to you winning so many hands of Shanghai rummy, but now I’m thinking maybe that wasn’t it.”
“Sounds like I had a busy night last night. You figure they’re likely to…?” Rex trailed off.
“Likely to what?”
“Shh… I think I heard something.” Listening intently, Rex heard a few muffled voices, followed by the sound of boots on the metal rungs of the Hole’s entry shaft. Thumbing the hammer back, he readied the revolver, turning some of his attention towards the body still lying at the base of the shaft. The bootsounds stopped, and he heard the tone of the voices shift. Without taking his eyes off the empty space from which those boots were bound to emerge, he spoke to the bartender in low tones. “Look, I’m not sure exactly how this is going to go down, but if these are the associates of our rather dead mutual acquaintance over there, I’m laying heavy odds on some serious violence.” A grin began to spread across Rex’s face. “I said I wasn’t looking to kill you tonight, barkeep, and I don’t see any reason why I should let them do it either; you have a back way out of this place?”
The old bartender was trembling. “No, there’s just the one entrance.”
“And the drinks? Where do you keep the drinks?” The boots were sounding off in the opposite direction now, working back up the rungs. For a brief moment Rex wished he’d chosen a less obvious place for his earlier interrogation of Bruce.
“There’s a cooler built into the floor at the other end of the bar.”
“It’ll have to do; let’s go.” As he stood, a couple of small cylinders dropped out of the space Rex Logan had been watching. He grabbed the bartender with his free hand and threw him over the bar as the canisters bounced off the floor. Dropping the revolver, Rex grabbed one of the heavy wooden tables and began to haul himself over the bar in turn, holding the table between himself and the entryway as the cylinders bounced a second time. The grenades exploded with dreadful force before Rex had cleared the bar. The heavy planks that made up the table splintered and gave way even as they succeeded in shielding Rex from the shrapnel that tore thoughout the room, the blast throwing him back into the wall behind the bar. The bottles lining the wall shattered as he slammed into them, and he fell to the ground dripping with alcohol. He landed on all fours, and shook his head in an effort to drive the liquor from his eyes. He could feel dozens of tiny cuts burning under the influence of the alcohol as he looked up to see the bartender looking back at him.
“Your gun!” The bartender cried out frantically.
“Don’t worry about it. I only had a couple shots left in that thing anyway.” Rex’s eyes scanned the underside of the bar. “Now which of these cupboards were you going for when I first got here?”
It took a moment for the old man to realise what he was being asked. “Right. Third from the left, under the register.”
“Thanks,” Rex said, sliding the metal door aside, “Now get yourself into that cooler and don’t come out until I come for you.” Reaching into the cupboard, he wrapped his fingers around a thick wooden stock and drew out the weapon within. He smiled. A 40mm grenade launcher… nice.
“Be careful. These guys aren’t drunk any more; they’re not the same guys you brawled with last night.”
“Well, I’m not drunk anymore either, and I don’t even remember last night.” With a flick of his wrist, Rex cracked open the grenade launcher and smiled. Reaching into the cupboard, he found a large cardboard box and dragged it out. “Are these…?”
“Flak rounds.” It was the bartender’s turn to smile, as he clambered into the cooler among clanking bottles. “I had a friend of mine put those together. Sorta like a shotgun shell-”
“But it kicks like a mule, right?” Rex interrupted as he examined the shell that already rested within the launcher.
“Something like that.” There was a series of muffled thumps as their assailants dropped down the shaft into what was left of the bar. The bartender shuddered, “You’re sure you’ll be okay?”
“Okay?” A smile was spreading across Rex Logan’s face as he snapped the weapon closed. “I’m gonna be fucking fantastic.”

questions.

Rex logan was no stranger to danger, and as he descended the rungs he began to feel at home for the first time since waking up. Looking down between his feet, he could see the floor below, his barely conscious attacker sprawled to one side. It looked like he had bounced a little, and Rex grinned as he stopped briefly to listen. He heard a hint of movement vaguely to the left of the rungs, but no other sounds, so he decided to play his hand in that direction. Letting go of the rungs, he dropped the last ten feet, landing in a crouch and snapping the large revolver up in the direction of the movement he’d placed just moments ago.
“Don’t even think it,” Rex growled at the old man standing behind the bar. “I know what you’re reaching for there, and it’s a whole heap of trouble you don’t want. Put your hands where I can see them and step out from behind that counter.” Rex motioned with the pistol, “I’d suggest settling yourself into that chair there.”
The bartender did as he was told. The heap on the floor hadn’t been lying. The Hole was empty of patrons. A lesser man might have found it unsettling to know that those patrons were all out hunting him, but Rex Logan simply focused his energy on the task at hand. “You gonna kill me, Sir?” The bartender’s voice was wavering a little; he didn’t look like a man that was too happy with his prospects.
“You stay as you are, no. I’m not looking to finish you today.” Rex smiled menacingly before clarifying, “but I most certainly will if you give me cause.”
Once the bartender was sitting alone in the open, away from anything dangerous, Rex turned much of his attention to the body on the floor. It had begun to groan and shift. Rex grabbed the front of the man’s shirt and dragged him into a rough sitting position against the wall before crouching in front of him. Shifting the gun to his left hand, Rex slapped the man’s face with his right. The eyes snapped open. The stunned noise that burst from the man’s lips could have been described as “Huh?”, but it would have been a stretch.
“G’day, my would-be highwayman. I’ve decided it’s my turn to ask some questions.”
The heap snarled, “I don’t have to tell you a thing.”
Rex responded calmly, “No, you most certainly don’t. But then, I don’t have to shoot you in a series of progressively more lethal places,” Rex smiled politely, “it’s just one of a few options.”
“You don’t scare me, I got the drop on you once; I’ll do it again.”
“Wow, yes, you’re right. You did indeed manage to get the drop on me when you appeared out of nowhere while I was unarmed. Somehow I don’t see you doing it when I’m the one with the gun.” Noting a twitch of movement to his left Rex brought the gun to bear on the bartender without taking his eyes off the man he was interrogating. “I don’t see you managing it either, barkeep. In case it wasn’t clear, I consider movement on your part cause for your removal. You will not be warned a second time.”
The man slouched against the wall in front of Rex glared at him, “You’re finished, Logan. I’m gonna take you apart.”
“I don’t get it. Did this thing only have the one shot in it? Is that why you’re not scared?” Rex used the revolver to pin the man’s hand against the wall and pulled the trigger.
The blast was deafening in the small cavern, and the man screamed, pulling what was left of his hand towards his chest and cradling it in his other arm. He caught his lower lip with his teeth and continued to glare, trying in vain to hide his agony. “You son of a…”
Rex interrupted, “So I’m a bastard and the gun is loaded. Those were assumptions I was running with from the start, but hopefully you’re on the same page at this point. I mean, really, we haven’t even gotten to the questions yet.”
The man was trying to wrap his shattered hand with a piece of his shirt, and looked up ruefully, “Like what?”
“Like your name, for one. You seem to know who I am, but you’re nobody to me. How about it?”
The man continued to glare silently.
“And the key? You want to tell me what was so important about that key?”
The man said nothing, so Rex drew the hammer back once more. Eyes widening, the man cried out, “You don’t get it. I can’t say anything; they’ll kill me!”
“Right,” Logan pressed the gun into the man’s shoulder, “and I’m knitting you a scarf here.” He pulled the trigger again, painting the wall the same colour as the floor. “Maybe you should be worrying about me. The key! What’s the deal?”
“You can go ahead and kill me! It’s no worse than what they’ll do to me.”
Rex cocked the gun once more. “Who? What who will do to you?”
The man’s eyes flickered ever so slightly to the side before looking directly into Rex’s own. “You’ll just have to shoot me.”
Rex Logan stood up, shifting the gun back to his right hand as he turned towards the bartender in the corner. “Sure,” he said, firing one last shot into the man as he lay bleeding against the wall. He began walking towards the bartender that had caught the dying man’s gaze for that brief moment. Drawing a chair, Rex sat in it backwards, straddling it’s high back and resting his arms on it as he stared down the grizzled old man. “It looks like maybe you and I have something to talk about, barkeep.”

just a friendly conversation

The road gave new meaning to the word dusty. The horizon was largely bare, and withered trees were few and far between, stretched thin across the landscape. Wildlife was non-existent, and the only movement Rex had seen in the last half-hour was an unfamiliar variety of tumbleweed. No settlement, no buildings, not even a lone shack by the side of the road “Two klicks, my ass. There’s nothing out here.”
“Oh, I dunno about that,” said a voice behind him. The statement was punctuated by the distinct click of a hammer being pulled back.
Rex stopped walking, but left his hands at his sides. “A revolver? Seriously? What kind of backwater planet is this?”
“Never mind that; just hand over the key! I’m pretty surprised to see you back this way. Everybody else lit out looking for you.” It sounded like the man was chewing on gravel.
Rex started to glance over his right shoulder, but he stopped when he felt the cold steel of a gun barrel nudge at his cheek. He settled for a peripheral view of the area around him. He couldn’t see directly behind him, but at least he had some idea of where things weren’t. “You know me? Because you don’t sound familiar.” Rex paused for a brief moment as a thought occurred to him. “And where the hell did you come from anyway?”
“I said give me the key, you dumb son of a…”
“Yeah,” Rex interrupted, “I heard you the first time, but I don’t have any key. Look, if we’ve already met, why can’t I turn around? And I still don’t get where you came from.”
“The Hole, Logan. Don’t try to tell me you’ve already forgotten it; you were just there last night.”
Rex chuckled to himself. “You kidding me? I don’t even know what planet I’m on, never mind what I did last night.” Rex started to turn again, to the left this time, only to run into the revolver again. Once more, he settled for getting some idea of the vast nothingness that lay to that side of him, before turning his gaze forward again. “You want a key, right? I woke up with one in my pocket this morning; traded it for this hat here.” Rex Logan dipped the brim slightly as he tapped it with a couple of fingers.
The gravel’s pitch raised an octave or two. “You traded it? For a hat!? Are you out of your mind?”
“I don’t know about that. It looked like a pretty old key, and this is a pretty sweet hat.” Smiling quietly to himself, Rex continued, “I didn’t even know what it was for, so it wasn’t doing me any good.”
“Who has it now?”
“Same guy that gave me directions to the Hole, although they clearly didn’t help me find the place. It’s literally a hole, isn’t it, and I walked right by it?”
“Sure did; we’re not ten feet from it right now, dumbass!”
“Yeah,” Rex Logan sighed sarcastically, “*I’m* the dumbass here.” Spinning quickly to his right, Rex Logan used his arm to sweep the gun off target, wrapping his hand around the barrel as he drew his leg up towards his core. Driving his foot quickly up and out, he felt his foot connect with the man’s chest in the same instant that the gun bucked in his hand, firing harmlessly into the air near his head. Rex’s assailant was lifted off the ground, losing his grip on the large handgun as Rex maintained his own. Rex Logan watched the man sail through the air and slam into a raised trap door like a sackitball off a backboard, before dropping into a now evident hole in the ground. About two feet square, it coughed a fresh cloud of dust into the air as the man landed below with a loud crash. Rex approached the hole, pulling the hammer back before descending via a series of metal rungs mounted into the side of the shaft.

rude awakening…

Rex awoke to a sharp pain in his ribs. Two sharp pains, actually; one following close on the heels of the other. As his hands moved to defend his body from his unseen assailant, he heard the sound of as-yet uncracked voices.
“Told’ja, Billy… ‘e’s still alive.”
“I dunno. ‘Member those critters last summer? Them twitched when we poked at ‘em, an’ they’s dead all right. Just reflexes, y’know?” Billy’s query was punctuated by another sharp jab.
Rex opened his eyes only to be blinded by the glare of twin suns, and he raised one hand to shield his eyes while the other grabbed the object that kept poking him. ‘A stick?’, he thought as he wrenched it from poor Billy’s hands, ‘what kind of backwards fucking planet would still have sticks?’ As his eyes adjusted to the blazing light above him, the two children came into focus. The smaller one was hiding behind the larger, who was in turn hiding under a ratty old outback hat that was clearly too big for him. “Where am I?” he asked the taller of the two.
“Pa’s ditch, mister!” Billy apparently wasn’t the brightest laser in the arsenal.
“I mean, what planet is this?” Looking around, Rex noticed a couple of scraggly trees poking up through the wasteland before realising his hat was missing. He clearly wasn’t anywhere near the Core. Rifling through his pockets turned up very little – a matchbox, a few spesos, and an old-style key.
“New Mexico.”
“Which New Mexico?”
Silence; Billy looked all out of answers at this point. Rex found a crushed pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket and drew one out, touching the matchbox to its end and breathing deeply. Guess this planet couldn’t be all bad. He glanced at the image emblazoned on the crumpled packaging.
“You kids know where I can find a place called ‘the hole’?”
“Sure mister, ’bout two klicks up the road… You okay?”
“Can’t say I’m entirely sure yet, Billy, but I’m gonna find out.” Rising roughly to his feet, Rex brushed the dust from his clothes and started to put the matchbox away when he noticed the older boy’s eyes following it. “You like this? I’ll trade you for that hat of yours.”
“Sure, mister. ‘S’too big fer me anyway, and there ain’t no point being a cowboy ’round here anyway.” The boy held the hat out, and Rex held out the matchbox in return.
“Well, Billy, this isn’t exactly a cowboy hat.” Rex adjusted the crown before setting it atop his head. “This one’s an aussie hat.”
“Like that guy the Church of Metal always goes on about?”
“No, not Ozzy. Aussie. You pretty much just find these on Old Earth and on the Edge.” He reached up and gave the brim a sharp tug. “This New Mexico near the Edge?”
Billy looked lost again, and Rex took his leave.
After walking for a while, he looked back to see the boys fiddling with the matchbox, touching it to various items they found in the dust. Maybe not the best thing to leave in the hands of children, but Rex Logan wasn’t the kind of man who walked bareheaded through the desert. That was Corps crap. Anyway, the kids would probably be fine. What struck Rex as more disturbing was that he’d once again woken up on a strange planet, which made three interplanetary benders in only a couple months standard time. It was time to find some new drinking buddies. Rex merely muttered to himself, “Damned Canadians.”

enter rex.

welcome to the future home of the future hero rex logan. go go outback danger!