Their first stop was at an electronics store. He was after a couple of ruggedized tablets. Something he could recharge from a USB port. One primary and a backup. The weight of the backup would be painful as hell to justify, but a huge portion of his plan relied on access to information a broken tablet wouldn’t afford him. A handful of micro SD cards joined the tablets on the counter. They weighed almost nothing, and would hold a ton of data.
Several packages of rechargeable batteries followed, ranging from triple-As to fourteen-five hundreds and CR123As. Half a dozen small Cree emitter flashlights with high/low and strobe features. Colored plastic lens gels ostensibly for spotlight lenses. Even a couple of those flashlights that could be recharged by shaking them up and down. He might end up leaving those behind if the overall weight got to be too much, but they’d come in handy if he could lug them.
By the time he added a few programs and other odds and ends, he was five thousand dollars lighter in the wallet. The debit card that the clerk slid back across the counter at him seemed to weigh noticeably less.
“Back to the hotel for now,” he ordered as soon as Bob took his seat behind the wheel.
He’d already torn the first tablet out of the packaging and was busily configuring it.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got a phone with internet access, do you?” he asked at one point.
“Not one that you’d be allowed to use, I’m afraid,” Bob answered. “Shall we make a detour?
“Have to, I think,” Sam grudged. “I’m not trusting hotel internet security with my life.”
By the time they’d arrived back at the hotel, Sam had already placed several orders.
“If I give you a list,” he asked Bob as they reentered the room, “could you do some of this ordering for me?”
“Of course,” Bob smiled. “Happily. Just let me get the transfer of your personal goods underway.”
Sam nodded without looking up. That was still a point of irritation for him. He’d spent more than half his life amassing a full set of just the sort of things he’d be needing, and he wasn’t going to be allowed to use any of it. How frustrating was that?
Meanwhile, he was going down the list of things he could remember without having to look them up. Let Bob hunt them down. Tomorrow or the next day when his laptop got here it would go quicker, since he’d have an actual list to work from.
Done with the rough list, he slid it across the table and brought up one of the writing forums he’d been frequenting over the past several or a dozen years. He logged in and navigated to one of the ‘looking for experts’ subforums. Leaning back for a moment or two, he thought about how he was going to phrase this as well as the private message he’d have to send to get the mods to okay it.
Seeking experts in primitive survival and civilization-building, he titled the thread. Cash prize
In order to promote solid world-building practices, and story consistency, a prize in the sum of one thousand dollars will be awarded to the submitter who presents the most thorough and applicable collection of videos, documents, maps, and instructional material to support a storyline wherein the protagonist travels the breadth of a continent (any continent will do, but the OP prefers North America, as judging will be easier due to familiarity).
The premise requires that no existing civilizations more advanced than paleolithic peoples be in place. No system of roads will yet exist.
Up to three hundred pounds of modern equipment may be included, although this equipment should be limited to current technology. Space opera tech will result in rejection of the collection.
All entries must be submitted by midnight central time, February twentieth. Judging will take place over the next three months, and prizes will be awarded May thirtieth.
Sam sat back and looked the post over. There were holes, and he’d end up with a lot of useless crap from the European members and those who wouldn’t bother to read the entire post or its rules. Still, it would do. He’d pick up pre-paid gift cards for the prizes to satisfy the rules lawyers, and worry about how to get the winners paid off if he made it back.
He added contact info and his brand new email address for the files to be sent to. He emailed the system mod to let her know what he was doing and to make sure it was okay. He’d been a member there for years, so he figured he was safe.
Once he was done, he logged out and logged into another forum, pasting the whole mess into a new thread there. Then off to a trekking site and the big gun forum, listing his new address in each of them. He’d chosen theroadwest@ deliberately. Many of those he’d exchanged messages with in the writing forums over the years knew he’d written the Tucker Shandry book, and would just assume that he was dumb enough to be writing a sequel. Or so he hoped.
The gun guys were a more problematic lot. Most of them wouldn’t take it serious, and the noise to signal ratio would be somewhere north of epic. But some of them would play it straight, and he’d probably get more out of those few guys than all of the writing guilders together.
Many of those gun guys were combat vets and deep woods trekkers who’d done many of the things he’d be needing to do, and much more recently than he’d done them. The way manufacturing and science were progressing these days, there might be gear that could potentially shave pounds of weight from his loadout compared to anything he’d ever used back when he was still... how the hell long had it actually been since he’d climbed anything higher than a kitchen chair to change a lightbulb?
Damn. Ten years? Had it really been ten years? He leaned back in the chair and let his eyes go unfocused. Meg had gotten sick in the spring of ‘08. He’d dropped everything. By the end, he hadn’t even been going to work anymore. She’d been so frail. So drained of everything that had made her Meg. She hadn’t even known him, there at the end....
He felt something shaking his shoulder, and jerked back to reality, staring owl-eyed up into the nervous-looking face of his companion.
“Are you alright, Sam?” Bob demanded, his voice tense.
Sam shook himself and wiped tears from his cheeks with the palms of his hands. “I’m okay, Bob,” he said, his voice breaking slightly. “I... I get like this sometimes. It’s nothing.”
“That’s not what it looked like,” Bob observed seriously. “This isn’t going to get in your way, is it, Sam?”
Sam breathed in a great, shuddering breath and let it out slowly. Get in his way? Hell, it was his way. Had been for the last five years. The struggle to remember her the way she’d been through much of their lives together that seemed greater as the days drew on. The battle to forget those last, terrible days as the ghost of what she’d become slowly slipped that last bit away. The knowledge that, as each day passed, the ghost gained that little bit more ground, and the old Meg drew farther away.
This was the point where he hauled out his phone and ticked morosely through the pictures on the memory card for a couple of hours. But the bastards had taken his phone. Not the aliens, the cops. He squeezed his eyes closed and fought to bring the pictures into focus behind his eyelids. He’d spent enough time looking into them, he ought to have them memorized by now, surely.
“Sam!”
His eyes popped open, and they were wet again. He sighed, not quite so deeply as before, and smiled wanly. “Sorry, Bob,” he shrugged, ignoring his leaking eyes. “I figured you knew about this like you knew about all the rest.”
He looked down at his hands... young hands... resting on the table, and consciously considered what he’d done to himself with this wild-assed stunt he’d agreed to.
“I’m really nineteen again, ain’t I, Bob?” he asked without looking up. I really have to do it all over again.” and now he did look up, his eyes haunted.
“I’m not suicidal, Bob,” he insisted. “I wasn’t trying to die on that road that night. I don’t care what that fucking hospital shrink says. I’d never do that to her. I’d never take the coward’s way out.” He snuffled and brought a hand up to scrub at his nose. “She wouldn’t want that. She told me so right out before it got too bad. I promised her....”
He took the kerchief Bob handed to him without seeming to realize he was doing it. He pressed it to his eyes and his chest moved as with silent sobbing. “I won’t deliberately go,” he insisted once he’d got some control back. “But I wonder if she really understood how goddamned hard it would be to go on without her?
“And now I’m a kid again, Bob,” he looked up. “A fucking kid! And instead of ten or fifteen more years without her, I’m looking at fifty.... Goddamn you, Bob,” he said flatly.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Bob stayed quiet throughout the breakdown. This was a facet of the man he hadn’t taken into account. It didn’t match the personality profile he’d drawn up, based on Sam’s history, his actions, or his work. This was despair of a sort he rarely encountered, and the thought crept into his mind that the man might have accepted the challenge as a way to do himself in without having to admit the act to himself or the ghost of his dead wife. That could be a serious liability, and he’d need to take steps to avoid it. To bring the man out of his funk.
The one ray of light that he could see was that this was the man who’d written The Long Road West. While Sam had been correct in that it hadn’t been all that good a book, there had been things in it that promised hope. Well, hope for Sam, if not for the calm of the Grand Council of the Game. They were probably not going to be particularly happy about it. But that promised to be entertaining in its own right. The tabloids were going to have a field day. And the audience was going to love it once he got them reeled in.
“Sam?” he asked after some time had passed. “She wanted you to live, didn’t she?”
Sam looked up at him, his face twisting into a snarl. “And what would you know about her?” he demanded hotly. “You read her books too?”
Bob took a step back from the sudden anger. “I know that you loved her, Sam,” he said. “And I know that the two of you lived very happily together for twenty-five years before she became ill.”
Sam shook his head as though to clear it. He wasn’t... Meg wouldn’t be happy at his being such an asshole about this. She’d always been after him to take things as they came and make the best of them. She’d tamed him like some sort of feral dog who’d wandered bloody and injured into her yard one day, and she’d never put up with any backtracking nonsense.
“How far back did you study me, Bob?” he asked then, in a surprisingly calm voice. “You ever study nineteen year old me while you were doing all of your research? How about seventeen year old me?”
Bob nodded, his smile creeping back out from hiding. “You were quite the hellion before you met Meg, weren’t you?”
Sam smiled in his turn. “Still can’t believe she fell for me,” he said. “But she did. And I never missed any of it. None of that garbage from before. Not once. Not ever.”
He sighed again. “I was a good man for her, Bob,” he said in that calm voice. Then he looked up into Bob’s eyes and his voice got hard. “For her. But I wasn’t ever a particularly good man on my own.”
Bob sturdied up his borrowed spine and smiled his best used starship salesman smile, shaking his head as he stared into those hard eyes. “Nonsense, Sam!” he laughed. “How can you say such a thing? Are you telling me that your darling Meg was wrong about you all those years?”
Sam shifted his gaze out the window. Had she been? He’d like to think not, but who was he to say?
“How about this,” Bob said into the silence. “I’ll go and get us something to eat, and you get working on your preparations, alright?”
“Can you bring me back to any time, Bob?” Sam murmured. “When this is all over? Could you maybe bring me back to ‘89 instead?”
“That would be a very bad idea, Sam,” Bob admonished. “Even if I could.”
“I wouldn’t interact with her, Bob,” Sam insisted. “Hell, her or me. I just... I just want to see her again. When she was young and healthy. I mean, if this time travel shit really is real, I should be able too—”
“You know, I like you, Sam,” Bob cautioned. “That wasn’t hyperbole. I really do. You’re the sort of man I admire, and always have. So I want you to listen to me very carefully now. That would be a horrible idea. You’d be torturing yourself to no good end, and you’d end up torturing her as well.”
Sam sighed again and nodded, not turning from the window. “Roast beef sounds good. One of those things with the cheddar cheese melted on it. Here,” he tossed the card on the table.
“No ice in the coke.”
He was still sitting at the table when Bob returned, although his hair was wet and his face reddened as though he’d scrubbed it. He was hard at work on the tablet.
The package of Sam’s personal items arrived by express just before ten the next morning. He went through the packaging like a five year old on Christmas morning until he struck the old laptop. He spent the next ten minutes staring at picture albums before bothering to finish going through the rest of the shipment.
They hit a snag with the remaining firearms. Sam was now three states away from where acquiring them would be legal with handguns, and Saint Louis apparently had some sort of local ordinance against out of state long gun purchases.
“Well,” Sam shrugged. “I can’t go home, but can I at least visit my home state?”
Arrangements were made for the weapons to be shipped to a federal firearms dealer where Sam would pick them up, fill out the paperwork, and presumably sight them in. There was a large sporting goods chain with a store on the way, so they’d pick up the ammunition and some of the camping supplies there.
Much of the rest would be ordered online as they found sites that offered reasonable prices and express shipping.
The system mod from one of his writing forums PMed Sam asking about the other offers. Apparently he also belonged to several of the other forums, and had noticed the dupe postings. Sam assured him that he’d be paying out prizes to members of each site, and that was that.
As the timer drew down and the pile of gear grew, Bob began to wonder whether Sam would be able to lift it all, let alone carry it five miles. He asked as much.
“It’s not a race, right?” Sam asked.
“No,” Bob confirmed. “There’s no speed component. I’m only concerned that your legs will compress and seize before you reach the halfway point.”
“Let’s hope not.”
“It looks more like you’re trying to equip three people than one,” Bob pressed.
Sam only shrugged. What Bob didn’t know, and etc.... Tucker had made the majority of the trek on his own, but Sam wasn’t really Tucker.
A quick trip to Chicago took care of much of the clothing and the footwear that had to be absolutely certain to fit. It was never a good idea to order footwear through the mail, particularly if you were running against a deadline.
Sam suffered no more breakdowns. He seemed to have come to grips with the situation and moved past the despair. The arrival of the laptop and his wife’s jewelry had helped. He began wearing the ring on his pinkie finger, and he looped her crucifix onto the chain his own depended from. They seemed to stabilize him.
And then it was the twenty-second. The last two pieces of equipment had arrived. The rifles and pistol had all been received, reconfigured where necessary, sighted, cleaned, and packed. The tablets and memory cards were stuffed with mountains of data Sam would sort through on the far side, and then packed into the innermost recesses of the big ALICE pack that Sam had chosen as his main piece of load bearing gear. It was heavier than many modern offerings, but was far more versatile, and he’d chosen to put up with the extra weight in exchange for that versatility. Just one example of several where he’d made that decision.
They’d rolled up what could be rolled and every item or bundle of gear or clothing was shrink wrapped and waterproofed, from guns to socks. He’d keep out a base layer, underwear, a single pair of boots, and a single filled quart canteen. The rest would make the initial stage of his journey empty. Water is heavy.
Such gear as he would don before being transported to Stage Three was packed close to the outside, if not strapped to the outer pack.
The Army surplus parka that would provide insurance against a northern landing was pressed into service as a makeshift belly pack, both to balance the weight and to keep as much of that weight as possible as low as possible.
The only other thing he’d be leaving unpacked would be the walking stick.
Bob was surveying the massive pile of plunder with some dismay. “And you really think that you’re going to carry that for five miles?”
Sam shrugged. “I’ve humped nearly as much before,” he said. “Well, within about fifty pounds or so of this anyway. And that was over terrain that was significantly neither the flat nor the level that you’ve promised me I’ll be traversing, and in thinner air. Also without this blood doping shit that’s supposed to either up my strength for a bit or kill me dead on the spot, depending on how reliable the crook you got it from might be. I’ll dose with Ibuprofen before and after, and I should be fine.
“Now, you wanna help me get this thing up?” he struggled to get the main pack up onto a chair. “I don’t want to have to finish rigging this on its maiden voyage.”
It took half an hour to rig the pack so that none of the straps bound or shifted, and so that it would ride at the proper height. Then they had to re-rig it when they discovered that the makeshift belly pack couldn’t be rigged without creating potential hot spots. Looking into the room’s full length mirror, Sam had to admit to himself that he looked comical. Like a cartoon version of a traveling tinker.
“Am I going to have to load and rig this after I arrive,” Sam wondered, “or can we do it before I leave?”
“I’d wait,” Bob cautioned. “The transport science is pretty good, but it’s not that good. There’s no way they can calibrate for your internal balance, so there’s a significant chance that you’ll have to adjust. That won’t be easy with all of this wrapped around you. And remember... once it’s on, if any of it touches the ground, you’re done before you start.”
“Right,” Sam frowned. “That’s going to make it harder. And I don’t suppose you’ll be there to help me either?”
Bob shook his head.
“well, damn. Then we need to change some of this around.”
The twenty-third arrived on jet black wings. It was oh-dark-thirty, and both Sam and Bob had been up for over an hour. Bob was swilling coffee like it was his job. Sam was swilling it because it was his job, although he was refraining from using anything to lighten it.
He’d spent the past week eating like a linebacker. Steaks, bacon, even vegetables, though he wasn’t a fan. Lots of coffee, lots of water. He wanted his muscles and joints fully hydrated, his muscles pumped, and his blood flowing.
He’d shaved showered, had a light breakfast, and unloaded, so he was ready. He’d stuffed his pockets with energy bars just in case he needed a calorie surge towards the end. The single canteen he’d be carrying loaded was full.
He tried not to look at either pack. They’d been weighing the stuff as it came in, and even removing the handles from such tools as they could, and removing any sort of packaging from everything that had it, he was still looking at transporting in the neighborhood of two hundred, ninety eight pounds, exclusive of his base layer of clothing. It was bad enough that he’d opted to spend money on a kidney belt, knee braces, and compression socks lest he blow a knee or shoot his left nut across the floor before he started. Win or lose, he was going to be sore tomorrow. Always assuming he lived.
“Let’s see the timer,” Bob requested.
Sam held it up. Ten minutes to go.
“You’d better finish that and grab a quick drink of water,” Bob suggested. “Better to carry it inside than outside, and it’s early enough to give you a buffer.”
Sam knew what he meant. He wasn’t at all ready to believe they’d postpone anything because he had to pee.
Bob was placing the beacons on the two packs as he was returning. “Remember,” he was saying. “You can do all the moving around you want before you start your run with no adverse effects. You can run, sit, or lay down and nap, and it’s all good. But once you hoist that first pack, you’re on your way. Anything you pick up after that has to stay picked up. So be careful. Just like you practiced and you should be fine.”
“Don’t worry, Bob,” Sam laughed a little too high. “It’ll give you wrinkles.”
“Wrinkles are dignified,” Bob shot back a little too stiffly. Then he straightened from the packs and turned full on to Sam. “You’re going to make it, Sam,” he said seriously. “I have faith. Just don’t forget who you are, and you’ll be fine. Regardless of whatever else happens, remember who you are. That’ll see you through.”
“It’s been real, Centauri,” Sam smiled wide. “And I have to say, after all of this, I like you too.”
The beaming alien clasped his hand in a firm grip just as everything went dark.