Chapter 2

I woke in my bed, in my house. I could tell because light was coming in through the window, and even though the window wasn't in my bedroom, it was enough light for me to see that I was in my house.

Still dressed as I had been when I tried the "Glock shot to the head" trick, I was lying on my own bed. No doubt whoever had fucked with me had given up. I got off the bed, walked to the front door and opened it.

It was my house but I still wasn't exactly home. There was a giant pine not forty feet from my front door and it had never been there before, not while my home was anyway.

My Glock was back in the holster, so I went to the back door and out. My tent was where I'd left it and I retrieved the Buckmaster, and continued walking around. Everything seemed to be here now. My garage, my barn, my horse, mule, everything.

Then again, not quite everything. The pole for my electric service was here with the security light, but there was no line running to it. The line to the house was in place, but the other one, to the REA's service line was gone. My damned satellite dish was where it had always been but I had serious doubts about any reception.

A noise I didn't place as being kosher got my attention but after a few seconds I realized that it was my backup generator. I'd cobbled it together from a natural gas burning 3406 Cat engine I'd salvaged from a nursing home when they switched to two newer units. It hadn't been hard to convert it to propane and it worked fine. I just didn't use it much; usually for about an hour or so a month to make sure it was still working and when the power went out from a storm or something.

I walked over to check the propane and then I'd probably shut the generator down. I figured I had about three hundred and fifty gallons left and I didn't think I'd be getting any more deliveries unless I was mistaken about my situation.

The tank was full. I knew it hadn't been, but how it got full was something I just didn't want to know; I concentrated on being glad it was.

I wondered about Jack and Francis then. I'd been gone for more than a week and they weren't standing at the fence chastising me for not feeding them. Maybe they'd given up too. I went into the feed room to put out some hay and oats and got another surprise. I knew I'd had about twenty five bales of coastal for them and maybe two sacks of whole oats and a sack of bran, besides what I'd already poured into the feed barrels.

The damned feed barn was now almost completely full of coastal hay, there was more here now than there had been when I'd bought two hundred bales last year. Except for enough walk way for me to pour oats or bran through the wall into Jack's or Francis's trough or put hay in their mangers the rest of the space was piled high with whole oats and bran bags. Ok, I can live with that. I won't even try to understand.

I spent an hour walking around to see if everything I'd had was here. It was and more so, if you count the propane and the hay and the feed. Even my damned old Jersey milch cow was here, though I didn't know how in the hell I'd get her freshened up next time if that calf she was carrying now wasn't a bull.

When I checked my truck over, I saw that both side tanks that came on it and the two hundred gallon square tank I'd added later in the bed were full too. I'd put in the big tank because I bought all my gas at the wellhead. I knew where there was a casing head drip and it was inconvenient to go fill up any more than I had to, since it had to be done at night when no one was around.

At least my spirits were lifted, quite a lot in fact. I took down my tent, and packed everything away where it belonged.

Going inside to make sure the freezer and refrigerator weren't running before I shut down the generator showed me another big surprise. I now had two sixteen-foot chest type freezers instead of one, and they were both full. One with beef and pork, the other with frozen vegetables in zip lock bags. There were two refrigerators in the kitchen now too and they were both stocked to the top, including their freezer sections. And it wasn't just one new one, both were new.

They were the plainer models, without all that ice through the door shit that I hate, but they were both larger than the one I'd had and each of them had an ice-maker in the freezer section on top. Everything else in the kitchen looked about normal, except for hundreds of cans of Ranch Style Beans and Wolf Brand Chili. My pantry was completely full of them, along with canned corn, green beans, and black-eyed peas.

It looked like I was set up for a more convenient exile back in time than I had been, but I still wasn't home. It didn't seem like it mattered so much now though.

Turning off all the lights, I went back outside to shut down my generator. Walking back toward the back door I saw another modification that I hadn't noticed before.

There was a new metal frame around the outside of my door and it had a big steel door hung from it, and I do mean steel. It was one-inch plate and solid. When closed it was secured by thick pins that slid out into the new frame, a little like a bank vault but not as big and thick. A walk around the house showed me that a similar arrangement had been added to both windows and the front door too.

It sure seemed like I could feel secure at night, and that led me to wonder about Jack, Francis and Elsie. I walked out toward their pens and a stroll around them let me know that they had been taken care of too.

Their diamond pattern fencing was still there but now the wire size was six gage and the fence was ten feet tall. The wooden post were gone, replaced by what looked like three and five eights upset tubing, without the upsets. There was a stringer all around the upper circumference of the pen and also one every foot. Nothing would be climbing the fence either since it had electric fence wire mounted around the outside of every pipe stringer.

To me this was clearly overkill but since I hadn't had to do it, or pay for it, I didn't mind. The pens were much larger now and it seemed odd that there were no trees inside them. I'm sure there had been some in place before my homestead had landed here like an escapee from The Wizard of Oz. That thought made me look at my feet hoping for Ruby slippers but I still had on my cold weather boots.