Three to get ready.

Day one:

Everyone got the warning at the same time. For the people in my area, it was at eleven seventeen in the morning. It sounded like someone was standing right in front of me speaking in a neutral sounding monotone voice.

The wording of the message was a little weird, but what was clear was that we were being told that in exactly three days, seventy two hours in total, every person on Earth was going to be sent to another reality.

We had screwed up our world so badly that the only way to fix it was to first get humanity out of the way.

That was it. All the information we got as part of that initial message. Who was doing the fixing, and who sent the message I doubted that I at least, would ever learn.

Most people naturally didn’t believe it, but because some of us that took it seriously enough to ask some questions out loud everyone got answers to our top three worldwide questions.

One. Yes. Every single human on Earth and the seven in space were going to be exiled. No exceptions.

Two. Only a few hundred of us altogether would end up in the same groups at the same places. But there would be other humans there.

Three. We could take whatever we had on us or that we were carrying while standing on our own two feet with nothing else touching the ground.

Too bad for anyone in a wheelchair I guess.

And no, obviously I didn’t believe it. Not really. But as soon as I realized that everyone I could contact or see posting about it online had heard the message, I decided that I might need to treat it as real.

Just in case.

So I hastily got dressed to leave the house while making a mental plan, grabbed my emergency money, my social security card, and then headed out to get into my truck and hit the bank.

Before anything else, I needed as much cash as I could get. People might not want to take credit cards today, and it only took one person in the right position of authority who was worried about people crashing the credit system to shut it all down until it was too late to do me any good.

Eleven people seemed to have the same idea of withdrawing large amounts of cash from their accounts and had gotten to the bank ahead of me, but I was still allowed to get the maximum of twenty thousand dollars out in real money. Three people ahead of me had been unaware that there was a limit of four thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine dollars if you only had your driver’s license.

One of them got pretty upset about that and started raising a fuss, but a big old boy with a full beard and some military looking tattoos who just wanted to get his money and get out grabbed Mr. Can’t Be Wrong and frog marched him by the back of his shirt collar and waistband out the door and tossed him over the top of a bush into the next door building’s parking lot.

I had been next, but I insisted on letting Big Boy go before me. He had earned it.

Cash in hand, I headed to a store called Outdoor Gear next. I had been in there once before to look for solid black hiking boots for work instead of steel toed boots, so I knew they had a lot of useful stuff.

I already knew I wasn’t going to be able to get a modern day gun, not with a thirty day waiting period in my state. But with black powder weapons, you could buy what you wanted and walk right out of the store with it, without any laws or regulations going against the intents of the founders of the free world.

Luckily no one had shot up a school with a flintlock yet.

The Ruger Old Army pistol was not a working replica of an old time gun, but a modern day real cap and ball pistol. They weren't making them anymore, but the store had a used one. After getting it along with a shoulder holster, I also bought enough black powder and percussion caps to load and fire the gun two hundred times. Which I could only hope would be enough to keep me alive longer than the expiration date on the powder and caps.

Of course, I might end up being sent to a nice world that had all the important things like dentistry and toilet paper, but in that case, I could just throw the thing in a box and set it up on a top shelf in a closet. It wasn't as if the money I was spending on it would do me any good wherever I ended up.

Finding the gun for sale there had been pure luck, my true goal had been a good, high quality crossbow.

Something simple enough for me to fire and have a chance of hitting something. I still bought one of those too, along with two dozen bolts for it. After all, I might need something else after or between using up my two hundred gunshots.

A good knife, a machete, a folding camp shovel, a hatchet, a gun cleaning kit, tools, and replacement parts for the crossbow were the next order of business.

After that came a lightweight framed backpack, a thin sleeping bag, a two man backpackers tent, a compass, the most expensive first aid kit they had, and some freeze dried food packets along with a five piece mess kit.

Plate, pan, pot, lid, and a mug in case you were wondering.

An impulse shopper display at the checkout included some pocket pepper sprayers so I grabbed six of them.

Excessive I know, but it would be something I could hand out to other people if needed, and they were lightweight.

Second stop, a pawn shop.

There I paid cash for some old coins with some actual silver and gold content, even some old style copper pennies just in case Dungeons and Dragons were right on how coins worked. Ten rings of gold, fifteen of silver, as well a white gold ring, just in case I ended up in that particular world.

Hopefully without the leprosy.

Looking around, I ended up grabbing a violin that was in a good sturdy case. It had been years since I had played one, but I had been a decent player at one time. I just hadn’t been into it enough to buy my own instrument, simply playing my grandmother’s at family get togethers and knowing it would come down to me all too soon.

Welp, looked like Grandma Topper would have to pass it on to someone else when the time came. Unless the mysterious "they" were going to send us out in family groups.

A good quality camouflage duffel bag got added to my pile for any extra non-vital stuff that I could put together in a bag that I could just drop if I had to run from something.

My last stop was just at a normal big box store, for plastic sheeting, bug spray, toilet paper, dried fruit, roasted nuts, and jerky.

After some thought, I added a package of new socks and another of new underwear, because why not start off with brand new stuff? Then I swung by the pharmacy for some additions to my first aid stuff, as well as a big bottle of knock off brand painkillers, one a day vitamins, and a ten pack of bars of soap.

The only men's one a day vitamins were gummies. Why won't any company believe that men will take vitamins that aren't in the form of candy? The gals somehow manage to get real pills like adults dammit.

I would have to take the soap out of the boxes for space and put them in sealable plastic bags to keep them dry. Which I also remembered to grab on a roundabout trip to checkout.

While waiting in line I grabbed one of each kind of candy bar I had ever liked since I wasn’t going to get a chance to eat any of them again. With that in mind, I checked my phone and ordered an overnight delivery of chocolate and coffee seeds. I doubted anyone was going to show up for work at Amazon today, but why not try?

Once I got back home I started making calls. My parents, my sibling, some cousins, and my friends.

Not my Ex, although I did call her dad. We had always gotten along pretty good, but he had to pick a side during the divorce, and blood came first.

The calls went one of two ways, hesitant agreement to plan like this was real, and then everyone else...

“I don’t care if you believe it or not. Set up a go bag. I will even pay for everything if this turns out to be bullshit, just promise me you’ll put a bag together and hold it off the ground when the deadline runs out.”

Next was quitting my job at the warehouse. Getting baby wipes into stores over the next two days was pretty far down my list of priorities. No one answered at work, so I left a message, but I think there was a pretty good chance no one would ever show up at work again to hear it.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

It had been a dam good job for me to get right out of college, but I would only miss the people, not the work.

After staying up fairly late, going through my house, and figuring out what I was going to take with me, and what else I might need, I finally got into bed and fell asleep.

Day two:

I woke up feeling great... for a moment.

Then the urge to rush to the bathroom and take a seat became overwhelming. Rolling out of bed from my damp clinging sheets, I had to hop while trying to kick off my underwear to keep from tripping on them since they had shifted halfway down my legs in my sleep and had fallen down to my ankles when I got up.

Getting to the toilet, I spend the next few minutes distracted by the feel and stench of what was coming out of me that I didn't notice at first how bad I smelled in general.

Or to notice the greasy, grayish layer of slime on my skin. Or even the fact that I had lost a few dozen pounds overnight.

When I finally did notice everything, I hit the shower, and after a few minutes of frustrated scrubbing with my regular soap, I got out long enough to grab the half leftover bar of the gritty green stuff I used to get the oil from doing maintenance on my car off my hands.

Finally clean, I wiped the fog from the hot shower off my mirror and took a good look at myself.

“Dam, Amos. Looking good.’

Some things were still the same. The watery blue eyes, dishwater blonde hair, and the short darker beard, both with a little gray and pale skin that was a little sunburned.

What changed the most was that a lot of the flab was gone, not all of it, but in comparison to the night before I was almost in shape. Thinner, with some visible muscle tone, and looking perhaps a good five or so years younger.

My hairline even seemed to have crept down my forehead a bit.

I had a few dozen messages and texts on my phone. It turned out that I wasn’t the only one who had gotten healthier overnight, and now my parents, the rest of the family, and my more doubtful friends were ready to take the warning seriously.

I took a half hour to type out an email and mass send it out with a shopping list and some advice.

Then I looked up solar chargers and hand cranked chargers. Solar had the higher recommendations but I decided to go ahead and get both so that I had a backup for as long as they lasted. It seemed like a good idea.

With a ten year old set of expired glasses, I had thrown in my junk drawer two prescriptions ago and had never thrown out, I was able to see well enough to drive. My current prescription contacts weren't up to the job anymore.

I ended up going to the same sporting goods store for the solar chargers. The place was now packed, but the other shoppers were fighting over the basics, so I was able to get what I came for and headed out next to a computer store.

If the store hadn’t put a limit on how much you could buy of any one thing, I would have grabbed all the hand cranked chargers that had been left on the shelves for the people I cared about who lived in the same area.

At Best Buy I found the doors unlocked, there was a handmade sign saying "Everything's free." and no one but a few other shoppers wandering around. I grabbed one of the tablets from the unlocked glass cabinets, the one with the longest lasting batteries which would last me about ten years before it got down to holding a charge for less than four hours. So one of them with the extra memory add-ons, a scratch guard, and a waterproof case would do the job for awhile.

At home, I started downloading.

Survival books, basic carpentry, and plant identification, which would be handy if I ended up somewhere with the same plants. Books on hunting, dressing, and preserving meat from animals. Leatherworking, folk medicine, and anything else I thought might be useful.

I also hit the forums on some prepper sites, which sent me running for my car to head out to a plant nursery.

Others had gotten there ahead of me. So I ended up only getting a few dozen backyard garden sized packets of carrots, corn, lettuce, green beans, cucumbers, and several kinds of tomatoes from a dollar store display. I grabbed a few dozen packets of various flowers as well. It wasn't like they were going to weigh much.

While I was out I grabbed another bag of underwear. One for a size smaller than what I had worn since high school. The new socks I already had were still good, it wasn’t like my feet had gotten fat with age.

Back home, I packed and repacked my backpack and the big duffel bag. Being in better physical condition than the day before meant I could carry a bit more than I had planned, but it was still a lot less stuff than I would have liked to bring with me for the rest of my life.

I had to put fresh sheets on my bed due to the ones from that morning being in dire need of going to the washer… or on second thought, the garbage. Then I cooked up a family pack of pork chops, along with some pan fried potatoes, some garlic bread, and a can of green beans with bacon and grated parmesan cheese.

Two of the smaller potatoes went in with the seeds, I could only carry them around so long after they sprouted, but it was something else I could bring along in case they didn’t have them wherever I ended up.

Heck, if my new home didn’t have potatoes, those two Russets could make me a rich man in time.

Late that night I tried a few twenty four hour places just to see if I spotted anything else that might end up being handy. But even at that late hour the places were still packed as well as pretty much picked nearly clean.

Before I crashed for the night, I checked a few more posting sites to find out that a lot of people, including some authors, were putting up their book collections for free downloads. Even some publishers were making everything free. I thought that was damned decent of them.

Day three:

I had a moment of panic when I woke up thinking that I might have overslept and missed the chance to grab everything I had packed before I got taken away, then I was running for the bathroom again.

Today, it wasn’t so bad. The stuff on my skin only took regular soap to get it off, but whatever it was, it was coming out of me and I was glad it was gone.

This morning, even less flab, with more muscle and hair.

It was only eight in the morning by the time I hit the kitchen, and I had what was technically a fourth day before the deadline since the countdown started at eleven something in the morning and the last day would run to the same time in the next morning. I still had another twenty seven hours to work with.

I decided to use up the more than half of a package of bacon for lunch. I spread the slices of bacon out in a pan, lit up on the stovetop, and sprinkled some garlic powder on it all to start cooking while I reset my alarm clock. I was going to let myself sleep in until this same time tomorrow if that was even going to be possible. Exhaustion and a few shots had been the only way I fell asleep the last two nights.

Since I wasn’t sure if I would even get to eat bacon again, and it wouldn’t last if I tried to take it with me, I ended up really loading it up on two BLT sandwiches.

Tasty, crunchy, and probably as least one of the sources of the stuff that came out of my skin the last two days.

I also realized I should have hit a few fast food places when I had the chance. I doubted anyone was showing up for work today. My last bucket of the Colonel’s recipe was going to be my last ever.

At least the internet was still up.

I spend that morning finding a whole lot of links for free downloads of every movie and TV show that I could think of. Most of them were being offered for free without ads from both pirates and corporations or at least some of the people working for them. As well as vast collections of digital novels including some writers posting what they had written for their latest works but hadn’t edited yet. That, along with synopses of what they had planned out for the rest of those stories, but would never get to write.

At least not write anywhere which I was going to be able to get a copy.

I could only hope that the new tablet would not only last long enough for me to finish it all, but that I could figure out a way to keep it working.

Which reminded me to gather up all three sets of headphones in my house and test them on the tablet, two worked pretty well and I found space for them, one in the duffel, and one in the pack.

I collected all the photos from the frames around my house. Every one of them had been scanned and I downloaded them to the tablet as well as two big flash drives. But I wanted something physical just in case. I printed out a few pictures as well and put them in plastic sleeves.

A few more phone calls got made to say some last goodbyes and a plan for that afternoon was made. Me and my friends who lived in the area decided to have ourselves a cookout with everything we couldn't take with us.

That included a lot of good liquor for this last special occasion. We got started drinking early so we could sober up to get home that night and turn in early. No one wanted to sleep in too late the next day.

I ended up following a gal home that I never in a million years would have thought to have had an interest in me, and I stayed there pretty late. But in the end, I had to leave her there alone.

My stuff was back at home, and I didn’t want to fall asleep somewhere and not make it back in time...

The last few hours:

I didn’t even stink too bad that last morning, mostly just the smell of alcohol getting plunged out of my system, which was good because it took the hangover along with it. But then again I get any younger or get the last of my old hairline back.

Muscle wise, I wasn’t ripped or anything, but I now looked like a younger man in decent shape, with decent teeth, and twenty-twenty vision.

Considering the alternative, “I’ll take it.”

Since I was just a little stronger than yesterday, I filled up a laundry bag with some more clothes, soap, shampoo, even a few extra toothbrushes, and the partially used up roll of dental floss and tube of toothpaste.

Some extra groceries that I had considered too bulky got triple garbage bagged to keep critters away and filled up the top of the nylon drawstring bag. Spices, canned goods, a half empty jar of peanut butter. All the stuff I was going to leave behind originally, but for a bag full of stuff I could throw away, or even just bury and come back for later, why not bring it along?

The internet kept working right up to the last moment, in fact, it was working so well that I wondered if there were people with all their stuff with them at work, keeping things running for people to say their last goodbyes right up until the last minute. Same with the power company.

If there was, I hoped that somehow that earned them a good place to go too. Damn fine folk, they deserve the best.

I made one last stop that morning. With a bouquet of wildflowers for a grave.

The birth and death dates were only five years apart. What I said there I don’t think I’ll share, it was a private conversation with my daughter April.

I only hope we all go to the same place after we die, no matter what world it happens in.

A few of us came together at that last hour at the same park we had our party at. People with no attachment to their houses or where ever they had lived. We had no reason to think proximity would mean we ended up in the same place, but we figured it couldn’t hurt.

The gal from the night before didn’t show up. She had family in the area she would most like be waiting with.

Eleven seventeen came around, and some people’s phones went off as they had set their alarms for some reason.

At first, nothing seemed to happen, but then the alarms going off started to sound weird. Drawn out and deeper. The leaves swaying in the wind slowly went still and I turned my head around to try to see what all was happening, only I couldn’t turn it all that fast.

Time was slowing down, and the second announcement sounded off.

It seemed that we would get to live out the rest of our lives in some other world while our own was being repaired. Then after we died in those other realities, we would be returned to our world after giving it a thousand years to fix itself, for a second try at managing the world we needed to live on instead of wreaking it.

As before, we got our top three questions answered.

One: Not matter how long or how little we lived, five seconds or five centuries, we would all be returned at the same time and place a thousand years later.

Two: No. None of our stuff would still be here. But whatever stuff we had with us now will be replicated and with us again when we returned.

Three: If you are holding a pet or a child off of the ground, it will go with you to the same world you are going to.

Then everything around me seemed to fade away, to be replaced with something else.

The first day:

There were a lot more people around me than had been there a moment ago, and I didn't recognize any of them. Especially the four Asian kids in school uniforms standing in the middle of the rest of us who were woefully under equipped. Just one with a big sword, another with a fancy staff, the third with a scepter, and the kid with a great big light gray cloak in addition to each of them having a school bag.

I also didn’t recognize the dozen or so guys with ropes, nets, and clubs who had come to a sudden stop halfway across a field from some wagons with cages built on the backs of them.

Some manacles were hanging from their belts, and a guy back with the wagons had a portable forge full of hot coals with a stack of shiny collars ready to be bolted around people’s necks, as well as what looked like the handles of branding irons.

The slavers, which what else could they be, seemed a little alarmed at what must have been nearly a hundred people looking back at them.

All of them looked to be Americans considering how many of them had guns.

Someone shouted, "Aw, hell no!" and opened fire.

Bullets seemed to work just fine here. It was a bad day to be a slaver.

And since it looked like a whole bunch of armed, angry, and as prepared as anyone could get in three days people had gotten themselves added on to what looked to be a hero summoning…

Well, It sure seemed like a whole lot of other slavers out there might end up having some bad days ahead of them as well.

This is not a world I would have chosen to get sent to, but it's the sort of one that I was tried to prepare as best I could. I might have even ended up here just because I was prepared for it.

In any case, I am here, and ready to help some kids out with what looks like might be a big job ahead of them. Seems like a pretty good way to spend this, my second life.

"I'll take it."