I woke up on a road. Sigh. Isn’t that how every adventure starts? I woke up on a road, or I met some dark stranger in a bar, or maybe I woke up in a cell. Still, I had just cleared a couple of dungeon rooms full of undead. If that wasn’t an adventure seed for an RPG computer game, I didn’t know what was. At least I hadn’t just gotten pasted by a semi or woke in a room surrounded by chanting cultists.
I hadn’t been a big fan of most computer games except the builder ones and first-person shooters. I always felt like they gave you a false sense of accomplishment. The dopamine rush of achieving something great without, you know, actually achieving anything, sort of like those girls who had 4 million followers but no real friends who thought they were somehow popular to anyone but creepy stalkers and spank banks.
Not that I’d been in any kind of better place after I left the service. Getting drummed out of the forces because your bones were eating you alive, and spending the next 15 years in bed getting fat until your feet fell off and your body was a twisted, paralyzed wasteland from repeated chemo didn’t give a whole lot of room for me to talk about accomplishments. What did I accomplish in my life? I killed a few drug kingpins and foreign terrorists who were almost immediately replaced by even worse shitheads whose only virtue was that they were bought and paid for by an alphabet agency, just like mine.
I wasn’t even a cool secret agent. What I was, was a clean-up man, basically a janitor to take care of bodies, or in many cases, create those bodies. My sole qualification when I was transferred from the Marines was that my dark hair, average build, and features, a little skin dye, and some local research could make me look like almost any race. With prep time I could look like a Pakistani Muslim, low-class Indian, native American, Greek revolutionary, Russian nationalist, Brazilian cartel member, or even a Singaporean or Filipino peasant with a little preparation. A gift for languages and accents allowed me to easily disappear and avoid my way-too-wealthy mother’s influence, which had been the entire point.
Did I mention that even though you are confined to a wheelchair and then a bed, after serving Uncle Sam in a job like mine, you were on every possible watch list in existence? I literally had a junk email box full of fully-sponsored terrorist organizations looking for some idiot to false flag into a terrorist bust. Just to, you know, show that the FBI and later on the HSA were doing their jobs.
Like I was an idiot. I couldn’t even get a gun because of ‘threat potential’, and they expect me to walk into some setup where I was the only guy who WAS NOT an informant? So they could get me bomb supplies or guns and send me to jail when they found ‘em to get a mention on the news? At least I had been allowed to leave the service in a way other than feet-first due to both my mother’s influence and the fact that after being diagnosed, a man who was rotting from the inside wasn’t considered much of a security threat.
I was dying, not stupid. Every empire dies eventually. I had zero interest in speeding up or slowing down the death of United States Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of those who must not be named and considered us ‘cattle’ or ‘breeders’ for the next generation of easily manipulated idiots. I was actually looking forward to being dead before it hit rock bottom.
Looks like I missed the bell, or maybe the trump and shout. I looked around as I cleared my eyes, and smelled grass, not recycled air. The sun was up, the air was clean, and I was lying propped up against a little stone cairn with a small flag or something draped over it, two dirt and gravel roads crossing under me.
Way off to the southeast, I could see what looked like the beginning of mountains. Yes, I could see mountains hundreds of miles away. No haze of polluted fog hiding them in a layer of multicolored filth, and the long mostly-dried grass I was laying in looked like it had never felt the bite of a lawnmower, just the passage of wheels.
On the plus side, I could get to my feet. My armor was replaced with some kind of cosplay leather… cuir bouilli, from the looks of it, and was a little more restrictive than I liked, and it looked like I was wearing a brown leather duster, a white cotton shirt, brown leather boots that came up to my calves, and a pair of gray wool pants that reminded me of civil war uniforms. The boots were interesting, a sort of cross between hiking boots and cowboy boots, and they were fitted, instead of the ‘medieval standard’ of making both boots identical and padding for comfort.
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Fortunately, I had kept my long knife, but the Fire Enhancer was gone only God knows where. Toilet paper, toothbrush, soap, and towel… always know where your towel is, as well as some odd-looking bundles that I unwrapped to show supplies of beef jerky, some kind of granola, dried onions, a little leather bag of salt, and a number of rough and ready food ingredients, as well as a piece of flint and a big coil of basic sisal cordage in a shoulder bag. At least my ‘rations’ were kept with me, although they had certainly changed, probably for the better.
I was also wearing a comfortable wool hat that matched the duster. It wasn’t exactly a cowboy hat, it didn’t have the pinched top or curved brim, it was more of an outback hat… I think they were called gamblers a long time ago. To top it all off, there was some kind of tin-lidded pot and a tin mug tucked into my belt, Daniel Boone style. The bracelet? It was...similar, but looked a lot rougher, more like a leather band with a brass plate instead of a technological device. Touching it did nothing, so now it was barely a piece of worthless jewelry.
And my body had changed, tremendously. Before I’d joined the forces, I’d been a slob… but I felt and looked AMAZING now. Like I’d felt at my absolute best while I was in the service, but years younger. My calves and arms were muscled, and pulling up my shirt, I could see the kind of six-pack I hadn’t developed until I was much older, like my mid-30s, when I’d learned about my cancer and tried to unsuccessfully fight it with healthy living and full-time exercising.
Was this Earth today? Was this AN Earth? Or did this planet have an entirely different name? Was it slow development, or was it some kind of post-apocalypse? I didn’t see any twisted hulks of cars or other wreckage, yet, or a half-buried statue of liberty or anything. From watching bad movies, wreckage was endemic to post-apocalyptic downfall societies.
And wherever it was, it didn’t have spaceflight. For some reason, the ‘generic human’ body I’d been before had been improved with a me that was in the best physical state I’d ever been in.
The terrain could have been any place that had rolling plains and occasional clumps of trees in middle America. I’d caught sight of what looked like lambsquarter, and possibly a creosote bush, and I thought I saw something that might have been a rabbit, as well as dark spiraling shapes in the sky off in the distance that might have been crows or vultures. The temperature was quite warm, and the grass was yellowed and dry, but finding a few plants that looked edible reassured me that if I could find water I’d probably be okay…. Assuming I could find water.
The problem was, I didn’t have my transtator anymore, and now that I was feeling more like myself, I wondered what the hell I’d been thinking. I just… did what those pirates asked for, barely thinking for myself, not questioning anything. I’d NEVER been like that. I’d lost Sergeant rank three times for accidentally thinking for myself.
The road was mostly dirt and brown local gravel, and while occasionally there were cut marks like wagon wheels, I saw a print that looked like it came from a horse with some kind of shoe, it didn’t have any kind of rubber peels or asphalt traces even a modern gravel or dirt track often had.
And I knew there was some kind of a threat.
You know that feeling you get when you KNOW someone is looking at you and contemplating doing something bad? The scientists explained it away, but in the forces, we were well aware of the phenomena, whatever it was. Maybe it was a sixth sense, but ever since I had woken up, I’d felt like something was watching me.
I was starting to get worried about water. Apparently, I had been through a lot, and how stupid would it be to have gone through all of that, only to die of dehydration? The worst part was, that the crossroads were right here. I could go any way, and I had no idea of WHICH way I should go. I assumed that the slightly fresher traces of… a hoof-print? I wasn’t thirsty yet, but right now I had nothing but a knife. Not an impossible situation, since while it was fairly cool, the sun wasn’t killing hot… yet.
The north-south road appeared to be the most traveled, but the amount of wear in the prints and the small cut of what may have been a wheel was a bit weathered… I was no native tracker, but I was pretty good, and I figured it had been a day or two since anyone had used either of these trails. I set off towards the north, because it was the most likely to veer towards the mountains, and mountains often meant water.