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If you asked Douglas Harper, he’d say it all went wrong on the day of the 59th Presidential Election.
November 8th, 2020.
No one was ever quite sure who won that election, not even the candidates themselves. That didn't stop either of them from claiming victory and issuing their own orders in what some called the "American Schizophrenia."
Three years later, look where that had gotten them.
A little over a million dead and climbing, and the end of the Second American Civil War was nowhere in sight. Florida had been taken over by some genocidal Satanist death cult. Neo-Nazis and radical Christian terrorists were tearing Michigan’s Lower Peninsula apart. Fascists were pushing down from New England. Commiefornia had lived up to the name the people on Fox News used to sneer about. And the Battle of Saint Louis was still raging after eight straight months of house-to-house fighting and tank duels.
In his opinion, America was a corpse that just hadn’t realized it was dead yet. He loved that corpse though, so he kept fighting for it.
If you asked Douglas Harper how he’d ended up in another universe, though, he couldn’t tell you.
One second he had been laying on a cot in a med-tent outside Harrisburg after having a bullet go straight through his knee the day prior, and the next he was lying in the middle of nowhere. The night sky above him was... wrong to say the least of it.
He had spent plenty of nights staring at the sky. Guard duty, sleepless nights, long marches when the columns stopped and the only thing to do was sit and look up. You got used to the stars after a while. You learned the patterns without even trying.
This sky didn’t have the right patterns. Or the right anything.
The stars were brighter, for one thing. Too bright. They looked sharp, like someone had punched holes in a black sheet of paper and then put floodlights behind it. And the constellations—if that’s what they were—weren’t anything he recognized.
No Big Dipper. No Orion.
Just strange clusters and crooked lines that made his head hurt if he stared too long.
And that isn't mentioning the two big problems.
There were two moons.
One was big and red and the other was white and small. Neither were his Moon.
Douglas stared at them for a long time.
At first he thought it was the morphine making him see things.
The knee was still screaming. A neat little hole in the front, another out the back, the kind of wound the medics called lucky because the bullet hadn't shattered anything important. It still hurt like hell though, and shock did funny things to a man. Hallucinations weren't exactly unheard of.
Two moons.
Sure. Why not. Why can't there be two moons?
He shut his eyes, waited a few seconds, then opened them again.
The moons were still there.
“Great,” he muttered hoarsely. “I have officially lost my damn mind.”
His voice sounded strange in the open air. Too clear. Too empty.
There were no distant artillery thumps. No generators humming. No shouted orders. No helicopters.
Just wind. Cold, freezing wind.
Douglas pushed himself up on his elbows and immediately regretted it as his knee flared with white-hot pain.
“Jesus—”
He sucked air through his teeth and forced himself to breathe slowly the way the medic had told him.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
When the stars stopped spinning, he took stock of his situation.
One: still alive.
Two: not in Pennsylvania. That much was obvious, considering... basically everything around him.
Douglas rolled onto his side and slowly pushed himself upright. His hands sank into cold grass and damp soil. Real soil. Not churned mud from a hundred pairs of boots and tank tracks.
The air smelled different too.
Clean.
No cordite. No diesel. No smoke from a dozen burn pits cooking trash and God-knows-what.
Just pine and cold stone.
That alone was enough to make the situation feel even more wrong.
He looked down at himself.
Still wearing his uniform. Dirty woodland camouflage fatigues, a plate carrier with three half-empty rifle magazines, a sidearm holstered at his hip. The medic’s quick-and-dirty bandage job was still wrapped around his knee—gauze already dark where the wound had bled through.
His rifle was gone.
That bothered him more than the teleportation and the two moons.
“Fantastic,” he muttered.
He checked his gear with the methodical habit of someone who’d been doing it every morning for years.
On his person, Doug had:
- Sidearm, standard issue SIG Sauer M17.
- Two spare mags of 9x19 Parabellum.
- One mostly crushed choclate energy bar from an MRE.
- A half-empty canteen.
- A small field medkit.
What he didn't have was:
- A radio.
- His rifle.
- Or his combat knife.
“Perfect. Just perfect”
He looked around.
He was in the middle of a rocky field scattered with scrub and twisted trees. Tall mountains loomed in the distance like jagged black teeth against the sky, snow capping their peaks.
And somewhere far away, something howled.
Not a dog. Not a wolf either, unless wolves wherever he was were twice the size and twice as angry as they should be.
Douglas rubbed his face.
“Alright,” he said to absolutely no one. “Either I’m dead, insane, or someone slipped something into the morphine.”
He considered each option carefully.
Dead seemed unlikely.
He’d always imagined the afterlife having fewer knee injuries and being more... cloudy.
Insane was possible.
Teleportation drug hallucination was another possibility, but hallucinations didn’t usually come with cold wind biting through your clothes.
He sighed. “Well,” he said, levering himself to his feet with a hiss of pain. “Only one way to find out.”
Standing hurt like hell. The bullet wound in his knee protested violently, but it held, barely. It was wobbling violently, but it was better than not standing at all.
Time to find out where the hell he was...