Over the next hour, the signal came and went. He kept scanning the area, searching for its source. As far as he could tell, nothing but unspoiled marshland surrounded them. As the fog gave way to the thin warmth of a cloud-smeared sun, the foot of a mountain stepped into sight. Thick green tufts of trees, growing darker the higher they rose, interrupted by bald-faced rocky cliffs and occasional skips of mountain that made the scene look vaguely mangy.

Nothing to indicate the presence of a relay.

Then again, relays didn’t have to be large. And all of them were skinny.

It’d be easy to miss one hidden in the trees. Even easier if it was, for some reason, in the marsh itself.

He kept looking upward. Height worked better for relays. Made more sense to have it on an incline or a ridge.

He couldn’t see the ridge. Maybe he could convince the others he needed to search it? Catrin ran very fast, and she had that weird connection with forests. If she helped him—if they all helped him—they could probably find it within a day.

The intermittent signal, however, made his current progress like the universe’s worst game of Hot and Cold.

I’ll find it. It just might take a while.

Probably better to see what Karel was leading them to first.

Trusting his horse to follow the others—with Doneil behind him, he’d alert Matteo before he completely fell off the trail—he turned his attention to the HUD. The signal interruptions had decimated its ability to download the large packet, but the third failure triggered the GF network’s data protocol. The automation sliced it up and fed it to his HUD in pieces for it to assemble later.

As it worked, he took a look at some of them.

There was an emergency alert, but he didn’t know why. High alert, though. What little he could assemble made him think of a natural disaster, like when a flood or hurricane rolled in. Another fragment came with details of aid stations and medical relief. Supplies. Protocol for teams with MIA.

A whole bunch of messages came over his personal comms—Staff Sergeant Kim, his commanding officer, wondering where he was after ordering him to base. Members of his team and squad asking after him. Kay and McMaster. Oda. Dunstall, who he’d trained with.

Nothing from his family.

Unease prickled through him. Why the silence?

Don’t panic just yet. Military comms take priority. The alert mentioned power outages, right? None of them have a sat phone and mobile networks are probably down. There was food in the house. The neighbor has wood. Jo knows how to cook. They’ll be all right.

It had been a month, though. What if they’d gotten sucked into another world like he had? What if they’d been attacked?

“Matteo?” Doneil asked. “Are you okay?”

With a start, he re-centered himself, checking back into reality. His breathing had grown shallow. Below him, his horse had noticed. Tima was walking more tensely, head lifted as he flitted his attention between Matteo and their surroundings.

He took a deep breath and pushed the worries out.

Worrying wouldn’t help. Whatever had happened—whatever was happening—he couldn’t do anything about it until he got back home.

Focus. One step at a time.

“Yes,” he said. “Reading something.”

“Reading?” Doneil asked. “In your… brain machine?”

Good guess. Then again, he and Doneil had talked a lot, and he’d explained a fair amount about his ‘Brain Machine.’

By the elf’s tone, he hadn’t pictured Matteo reading at length in the HUD.

The others had glanced back, their gazes lingering.

Karel was the first to look forward again.

“We’re close,” the man said. “It will change soon.”

It will change? Had he understood that right?

Guess I’m going to find out.

The signal came back, downloading another three fragments. Useless files, unopenable. He switched back to poking through the rest of what he had, trying to piece it together.

Five minutes later, lost in another skim of the messages he’d received—messages which still did not include any from his family—he almost missed Nales’ horse stopping ahead of him. Tima pulled up short, the jerk different enough from his normal gait to pull Matteo’s attention back to his surroundings. He glanced around and let out a breath.

The marsh had changed. Flooded. Bits of the waters’ lazy currents slipping over the road. An old rowboat bobbed at the end of its mooring, sliding over the remains of the dock it had been attached to. When he lifted his gaze, the glassy ripples of muddy water seemed far more prevalent than they had before. The sedge and grasses looked as drowned as the dock. It poured shallowly over the road, the small sound of trickling water constant.

And beyond…

Well. That is certainly a change.

It looked like a forgotten piece of America had landed smack-dab in the midst of the marsh, backing up against another of the mountain’s feet. He stared. It was half a street—one side of it—the concrete patched and bumpy, then smooth and strong with a recent resurfacing farther in. It looked torn at the edge, as if something had just pulled this piece of it away until it ripped free, then stuck it here like a mixed puzzle piece jammed into the wrong puzzle and hammered until it stuck. Parts of that edge had sunk into the swamp. Others stuck out like overhanging cliffs, with rebar, pipes, and other subsurface bits bristling underneath.

By some gross irony, the concrete road met with part of their own. Just a little step up and he’d be walking on American soil again.

Well, American concrete, anyway.

The first building was a house. One of those small, older types that had been converted into a business—a massage parlor, it looked like. It sat, worn and silent and ethereal, the white paint worn by the elements. Another sat next to it—duplex, maybe triplex. Then a cross street. Then—

A strip mall. A goddamned strip mall. Plunked down in the middle of fantasy land and as silent and dark as the rest. It made a vague L-shape, with parking out front. A second, standalone building sat opposite the bottom of the L to hem it into more of a U-shape. A restaurant, it looked like. Along with a—

Was that a damned pawn shop?

Holy shit. There might be something useful in there. And—were there people around?

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

“Matteo?” Catrin said. She was watching him, doing that close-reading of body language she did. “Do you know?”

He looked back up at the piece of Earth across the partially flooded road, and an idle thought came to him.

There’s no place like home.

Maybe he’d find a pair of ruby slippers at the pawn shop. Or maybe the massage parlor.

Hell, maybe he’d find Dorothy herself. Or the wizard.

A wizard would be nice.

He gave Catrin a nod, then gestured for them to continue.

“Yes. Let’s go.”

***

His life over the past month had been an exercise in surrealism. He’d entered this fantasy world in a baptism of firefighting, but the lull of the past weeks hadn’t made his new circumstances any easier to believe.

For some reason, riding into this ripped out piece of America drove every single ounce of that surrealism home.

It was the horses that did it. The sound of metal shoes clopping on pavement, echoing faintly off the buildings. God, it was so quiet here. So still. Nothing but hoofbeats, the creak of leather tack, and the low background chatter of birds, frogs, insects, and trickling water in the marsh.

The marsh seemed like a distant background now. All his attention was on the road and buildings around him.

Everything was quiet. Still.

Was there anyone here?

If there was, he’d find them.

His gaze kept scanning the yards, the windows, the horizon of the street, looking for signs of life.

So far, all he’d found were plants and a pigeon.

As Tima carried him along, he organized priorities. He gave the house-turned-massage parlor a cursory glance, but otherwise ignored it. Its posted hours indicated it had been closed when the world-ripping event had taken place, so the proprietors likely hadn’t been inside. The triplex next door was worn down and boarded up with a redevelopment sign in the front yard, so he skipped that, too. He’d check them both later, of course, but they weren’t his first priority.

He peeked down the intersection as they passed. The cross street ended abruptly less than a hundred yards down. Front yards bristled with neglected grass, nearly two feet tall. Two other buildings sat in lots on either side of the street, one a restaurant and the other a garage. The remains of two other buildings appeared to border the cut-off zone of the world rip. They slumped awkwardly, as if they had also been cut.

God. How had this happened? What could do this?

He made a mental note to check those out later—he really wanted to see the edges on that side—and nudged Tima straight over the curb and sidewalk, leading the others into the parking lot of the strip mall. A quick scan showed him a pharmacy, a pawnshop, a post office, and a hair stylist occupying the L-shape of the main building. A second building had a dentist, a legal clinic, and a yoga studio.

No apartments, at least, and most, if not all, of these businesses would have been closed during the Event. He’d have to double-check the hours, though.

Heck. He’d double-check the places, anyway.

He was a survivor’s best chance at getting some form of knowledgeable rescue in this world. He’d damn well make sure he was thorough.

He paused Tima near the middle of the lot, took a big breath, and called out: “Hello! Is anyone here? If you can hear me, come find me! I am Sergeant Matteo Rossel of Guardian Force.”

The others had been talking quietly amongst themselves, but stopped at his yell.

For several long beats, they all went quiet, listening hard for a reply. As he waited, Matteo scanned the darkened windows of the storefronts for movement.

Only his reflection stared back.

He studied it a moment. It seemed so strange, seeing himself on a horse in the middle of a parking lot, wearing strange clothes, accompanied by people from another world.

He gave himself a mental shake and dismounted. The mall had an old bicycle rack on the sidewalk. He led Tima to it and looped the reins through in an easy quick release, then turned his attention back to the storefronts.

In his HUD, the connection flickered out.

Fifteen fragments downloaded so far. He’d get the whole thing, eventually.

He hoped.

I really need to figure out where that signal is coming from.

He also really needed to figure out where Maybe Friend was.

They still hadn’t responded to his messages. He was starting to think they were clinically unresponsive rather than just rude.

Were they injured somewhere?

He needed to find out.

But first, he needed to find out if anyone was around this place and grab any useful items.

He turned to the other four. They’d started talking amongst themselves again, mostly ignoring him while they waited for him to come to a decision, but they quieted when he caught their attention.

Now… how to word this?

“Have you seen anyone?” he asked them, looking at Catrin and Karel in particular. Of the four of them, he figured they had the better senses. “Any humans?”

“No.” Catrin gave her head a curt shake, her golden-yellow eyes watching him. “Did Brain Machine give news?”

“A little. Still… coming.” He’d tried to explain the problem to them, but both the technological gap and the language gap were making it difficult. “If people are here, we need to find. They be scared. Never see elf. Or Fey.”

The four of them exchanged a look. Nales suggested something, speaking too quickly for him to follow. The other three nodded in agreement, then Karel pointed at Matteo and said something more.

More nods. Then, they dismounted and tied their horses next to his.

“Me, Nales, and Doneil go look for humans. Karel go with you,” Catrin explained to him. “If we find, we yell.”

Excellent.

“Be careful.” He mimed a gun with his hand. “People maybe have guns. Maybe dangerous.”

She nodded, then made to take Nales and head out.

As they started to walk away, an idea struck him.

God. Why didn’t he think of this before? He was an idiot.

“Wait!”

Using a rock, he broke into the post office, looted a pen and a pad of paper, then wrote out three identical notes.

Hello, I am Sergeant Matteo Rossel of the Nashville Guardian Force detachment. The person with this note is a friend, even if they look weird. I have information about what happened. Please, follow them and they will bring you to me. They are safe and will keep you safe.

There. That should do it.

Unless the person didn’t speak English. Or was too young to read.

Oh well. They’d cross that bridge if it came.

He handed the notes to them and thanked them. As they left, ha and Karel walked the short distance to the pawn shop. The door swung open easily, its glass broken where Karel must have broken it the last time he was here. Most of it had been swept up—likely Karel’s doing, again. The man was a shopkeeper, after all. Matteo stepped inside and looked around.

“Hello? Anyone here?”

He waited a beat, listening hard. The place was eerily quiet. Even more so than outside. Like the quiet had closed in. The air felt still, the slight must of the shop overridden by the cool dampness of the foggy marsh. Without power, half the interior sat in shade, the only light filtering through the front windows, most of which had been covered by a large advertisement.

When no one answered, he signaled Karel to wait and moved farther in, giving the shop’s aisles a quick check before he slipped behind the counter and headed for the staff door.

Like the front, it opened when he tried it. He poked his head into a short hallway. “Hello?”

Again, nothing.

One end of the hallway led to a bathroom and an office which seemed to double as both a workshop and overflow storage. The other side led to more storage and the back door.

When he opened it, he found an old autodrone on blocks in the back alley. A vintage jetbike stood next to it.

More pawn items, he assumed. By the looks of the unlocked gate and path leading to the garage next door, the place had an informal partnership with the mechanics.

He’d have to check in the garage, too. There’d probably be something useful there, too.

“Hello?” he called out again. “Is anyone here?”

He listened for a few seconds, waiting.

Only the call of some bird answered him. Not the screaming one, thankfully.

He closed the door, went back to the front, and started looting.

He grabbed the radios first. Three of them, short range, running on batteries with a solar charger. Those would be useful. Next was the multi-tool from the knife case. He grabbed three other knives, two utility and one fighting. The KA-BAR had nothing on Catrin’s kukri-looking blades, but it was carbon steel and came with a good sheath.

Besides, it’s what the Marines used, back when they’d been around. His great-uncle had been in one of the last US Marine detachments.

By the USMC inscription on this one, it was old enough to have seen service.

Flashlights came next, along with a camp light. Pawn shops didn’t buy cheap crap, so they all had solid craftsmanship and solar chargers. One even had a hand crank.

An inordinately ornate compass caught his eye. He hesitation, the old camping instincts kicking in, but remembered his HUD already gave him directions.

In the meantime, Karel let him be, occupying himself by browsing the shelves and walls.

When Matteo caught up with him, he was studying an old, framed photograph of one of the first atomic bomb tests.

Beside it was a framed map of the United States.

“Your home?” the man asked as he came alongside, gesturing to the map.

Matteo nodded. Then, squinting, he lifted a finger and touched it to their approximate location. Or, rather, where this particular shop had been before it had gotten shoved into the middle of a fantasy-land marsh.

He’d found the shop’s address on some business cards by the register. Millerville, a little ways northeast of Nashville.

Come to think of it, given the direction they’d been traveling—and where they’d picked him out of a farmhouse somewhat south… they could very well be where Millerville was on Earth. Respectively.

Nales’ theory of overlapping worlds might be right.

He chewed his tongue, considering.

He should get this map for Nales. No, he should find a better map for Nales. This one was apparently from 1935.

Maybe the post office had one.

He’d look.

But first things first.

The HUD’s connection reappeared and began downloading again. He sent another poke to Maybe Friend, then he and Karel got to work.