Chapter 1

What a rotten fucking day. I had a flat on my way to work and was damned nearly killed while putting on the spare. Fuckheads whizzing along too close to the shoulder nearly collected me twice. If I'd had sense enough to break out my Glock before I even opened the trunk I could at least have shot their asses.

Oh well, this wasn't the old west and now a days you would likely go to jail for killing people. I already knew from a few one-night stands that I didn't like jail. I sure as hell didn't want to go for anything more meaningful than skipping out on a traffic ticket.

When I had the spare on I climbed back into my truck and drove it directly to Brown's Tire Shop. The tire shop guy laughed like hell when I came driving up with a rinky-dink spare on one corner and the 36-inch Monster Mudders on all the others.

I went inside first to see if they had the 12 inch wide Aluminum wheels I'd ordered yet and they did, so I went ahead and bought four new Monster Mudders for them and had them put on instead of getting the flat one repaired and put back on. I still got it repaired, but at least when I left I'd have four spares in my pickup bed instead of the one little pissant regular tire on an equally pissantish normal stamped steel wheel.

Yeh, I knew the Monster Mudders wouldn't last over twenty thousand miles on the road, but I didn't really give a shit. When I wanted to go through a mud hole I wanted to make sure I came out on the other side without having to get out and tie my winch line to a tree on up the road to pull me out.

People who didn't know shit about it thought all you needed was four wheel drive, but when you liked to go through the woods whether there was a road or not four wheel drive was just enough to get you good and stuck in the mud.

"Oh, why don't you just buy a jeep?" an acquaintance had asked me once.

"Oh, I just don't feel like swapping the shiny side for the greasy side when going around a curve," I'd told the dumb bastard and just like normal he hadn't understood.

A short wheelbase Jeep was prone to running on it's canvas top if you got it very far out of shape, and that was a lot bigger pissoff than changing a flat tire.

Of course it always pissed me off anyway when someone who didn't know shit about what they were talking about tried to give me advice too. Here was a son-of-a-bitch driving around in a Toyota Corolla trying to tell me how to get around in the woods. Hell, it was a wonder he could get his rice burner out of the driveway when it rained.

Shit. I paid the tab for the new tires and wheels and carried my ass home to down a few Lone Star Longnecks and wait for tomorrow to get my truck muddy. I might have had a couple too many before I went to bed. Naw, couldn't have.

When the dream started I thought I was drunk for real. In fact I was sure I'd been hit by a case of the DTs.

There I was sitting on the shitass side of a desk with a spaceman talking to me.

"So, you want to see what it was like back in the cowboy days, huh. Have I got a deal for you. Load your truck up with everything want to take and we'll put you back there." the spaceman said.

"Hell, I won't get any use out of my truck, even after filling up the hundred and fifty gallon extra tank I'll be out of gas in no time." I said.

"Then you'd better be sure to have your horse trailer hooked to the back and have your horses loaded in it," he said, and he had a point there.

"Be ready in one month and we'll take you at midnight the last Sunday of the month." he said, and then he was gone.

As soon as he left me I shot up fully awake in my bed. It couldn't have been real, could it?

It damned sure felt real and I wasn't going to miss this chance for anything. I called in to work and took an emergency vacation. When they asked me what for I told them I had to have another procedure for my heart. Hell, it would sound good enough since I'd just got back from eight weeks off over a quadruple bypass.

The next day I went and bought a brand new winch for my front bumper. Hell, the one I had on it was good enough, but I'd gotten a hard on for the new radio controlled model lately and I might as well get it.

After the winch was changed out I went home and did a little thinking. If I was going back to cowboy days I'd better think about what I was taking. I decided I needed new firearms too. The ones I had were ok for now, but there were a few I really wanted.

I had to drive to Dallas to get a Barrett .50 BMG and especially to buy ammunition for one. I got a good deal on one from the dealer Barrett had clued me into. He'd had it sitting in his window for nine months and he was anxious as hell to sell it. While I was at his place I picked up three Ruger Super Blackhawks too. Two with six inch barrels and one with a ten and a half inch barrel. I asked him where I could get a custom holster and gun belt made and he told me about a leather man nearby who could do it for me. I was on my way.

The leather shop was just down the block and the guy was a little nervous when I came in dragging the BMG. I told him I wanted a saddle scabbard for it and pulled one of the Rugers and asked him to make me a regular two gun Pete type gun belt for them. I also showed him the long barrel one and asked for a holster for it.

He said it would be about two months to get them made and I told him he had two weeks if he wanted to make the sales. He said it would be fine so I paid him and told him I'd be back with the revolvers loaded in two weeks and the stuff had damned sure better be ready.

I took off and headed to another gun shop where I bought two Marlin 336Cs in .35 Remington. I also bought a 4x30 day/night scope for the Barrett and a pair of day/night binoculars. I also bought two pair of powerful regular binoculars.

It was really one of those madhouse trips. I was tool lazy to sit down and figure out everything I'd need and so I roamed around in stores and shops and just bought what I thought of.

I went to a Wal-Mart for more roaming since if they didn't have exactly what I wanted they would at least have something that reminded me of what I'd probably want.

I loaded up on clothes, mostly Wrangler jeans and plain work shirts. Plenty of boots and lots of athletic socks and then decided on some shoes. After loading up on these things I made a pass through the tools and bought some post hole diggers, a round point and a square point shovel and just for the hell of it a couple of yard brooms, three different types of hoes, a couple of sling blades and three brush hooks. Hell, you never could tell I might need to do a little yard work wherever I ended up.

Towels I thought of at the last. I'd need plenty of towels and washrags. I pretty much fucked around in Wal-Mart all afternoon and damned nearly filled up the bed of my pickup.

The next day I went horse shopping. I bought a nice reining and cutting trained Quarter horse stallion and then looked around and found a Western Pleasure trained mare. She was a Quarter horse too and I figured I could get a few foals out of her. It made me think that I could get more than one mare and get more foals per year. I bought the mares full sister one year later model too. Naturally, with three horses I had to buy a four-horse trailer to replace my two-horse model and this one with a gooseneck hitch. I had to have a ball installed into my pickup bed to even be able to pull it.

It made me think. Why settle for one trailer? So I had a welding shop graft a trailer ball onto the rear of my new trailer to pull my old one. It didn't really make a shit whether it was legal for going down the road with since when I got to where ever I was going there wouldn't be any traffic cops at all.

The no cops thought made me remember I'd probably be responsible for my own protection completely so I went revolver shopping again. The Super Blackhawks would be nice but I liked Colt Pistols too so I bought a couple of Pythons, two Diamondbacks and just for grins I bought a matched pair of Anacondas. At least I didn't fuck with custom made gun belts for all these, I just settled for holsters I could put on a regular leather belt.

Ammunition for all my new firearms was a bother since loading up in one place would bring questions. I bought a thousand rounds for each and then a reloading press and a set of dies for all. I bought powder for the reloading too, but decided I needed to look over the reloading manuals to pick out some good powders and I knew I had another buying spree to make later when I was better informed.

At least I could use the same dies for the .357 and .38 Special reloads just like I could use the .44 magnum dies to reload .44 Specials too and so I bought a couple of thousand rounds of .44 Special ammunition too.

Hell, it seemed like I went shopping for something every damned day for the rest of the month. Then it was on me and I spent the last two days packing the shit up. At the last I had my hundred and fifty gallon aux fuel tank swapped out for a two hundred and ten gallon model and then I had the hundred and fifty gallon model moved back a few feet and had it bolted down too. My last fillup here would be the last fillup at all after all.

I did make a concession for fuel later though. I put an Edelbrock aluminum manifold on my pickup's 350 Chevy engine and a Holley 650 cfm carb put on it and bought another Holley that had been modified to use alcohol. I also bought plenty of replacement jets just to be sure I could get it right when I arrived.

About a week before go time I was looking around in a pawnshop and ran across something I'd never seen before. It was a custom rifle and it was something special.

It started life as an M1 Garand, but it had been modified to use a replaceable magazine instead of being loaded by the chicken shit thumb buster clips down through the action. It also had a synthetic stock similar to the one for an M16 and at casual glance it looked like an M16 only with a lot bigger hole in the end of the barrel.

I bought it and a 6x24 day night scope for it and drove it directly home with two thousand rounds of ammunition. I spent four hours getting it sighted in and I was amazed with the results.

Sighting it in for one hundred and fifty yards left it only about half an inch high at a hundred yards and about the same low at two hundred and fifty yards. Shit, I wished I had found two or three of them.

After packing every thing up, including every weapon I'd bought or had already, I took a shower and then got in bed. I doubted I'd be able to sleep and it turned out I didn't even need to.

The space man had told me they'd get me at midnight but they came around nine PM. I didn't give a shit, but I was surprised when they loaded me on board. Hell, they had something like the Star Trek transporter and they just zapped me and my stuff onto the ship.

My first job when on board was going over all the things I had with an engineer, but mostly it was telling him about it, as he looked it over. When he found out I'd have rather had more of the M1 custom rifles he sent the one I had off to have it duplicated. When I asked he said "Hell yeh" they could duplicate the ammunition so I sent samples of each off to have more cobbled up.

This was a good thing since I hadn't even thought about rounds for my Browning shotgun and he sent off a sample of 00 buckshot and had a couple of thousand of those made too, in three inch Magnum no less. They also duplicated all the extra powder I'd brought along and he furnished plenty of bullets and shot and primers for reloading after I'd made some empties. He even furnished several thousand new brass and shells that could be loaded later.

"You are going to be there from now on and re-supply missions will be a year apart. After the first re-supply you'll have a better idea of what you'll need for a year's supply, but for this first time you need to have more than plenty.

We don't need to go to all this trouble to see you killed because of a lack of ammunition. We also don't want to see you starve to death and I noticed you didn't gather much food and as far as I can tell nothing to cook food with.

After a while he told me to forget that since he knew of several cooking utensils he could make for me and he said he'd grab up some utility food as he called it.

"It won't be extra special, but it will keep you alive for a few weeks anyway until you get on your feet enough to hunt," he said.

"One thing that's bothering me though is your lack of shelter. You didn't even get a tent," he said, accusingly, if you asked me.

"Well, that should be easy enough. Can't you just zap me up a travel trailer?" I asked.

"I'm glad you thought of it here at the last, but it is just what I'll do. I might as well get you a couple of tents too," he said.

The next day, or I guess it was day; I'd just finished sleeping anyway. The engineer asked me about a computer, as in, had I ever used one.

"Well, I have, but I didn't see how I could use one without electricity and as far as I know the Internet wasn't built yet back where I'm going."

"We can furnish you a fuel cell to run a computer for years and we have thousands of gigabytes of Internet pages saved we can put on your computer. I'll whip you one up. Which operating system are you familiar with?" he asked.

"Lately I've been using Windows XP," I said.

"Oh good. We have spent a lot of time repairing most of XP to work like it was supposed to. I think you'll like what I give you."

Right at the last he asked me if I could think of anything else I needed.

"Hey, can you duplicate my horses like you did my other stuff?" I asked, and he said he'd have to check.

He must have needed to do a hell of a lot of checking because he was gone several hours. He finally came back.

"We don't usually allow anything like this, but we have a proposition for you if you agree. We will duplicate all your horses and make another trailer so you can hook the together and haul them all at once, but we'll also ask you to allow us to duplicate you at the same time.

"We have been having trouble finding suitable subjects for our experiments and we think you could do well in several of them. The duplicate of you we'll make will know everything you know now and he will seem like an identical twin to you. What do you say?" he asked me.

I thought about it and asked a few questions. He said my twin would be put down in roughly the same time period I'd be put down, but he would be several hundred miles from me.

I didn't give a shit really so I said fine and he had me sign some type of release allowing it. He even had one of their lawyers come in and explain the release to me completely.

They could have done it with or without my permission but at least the asked first. They even let me meet my twin after he was done. He had picked his own name as Johnny. We couldn't really shoot much bullshit at each other since what he knew now was exactly the same as what I knew.

When they set me down I did like what they gave me, and I'm not talking about their repaired version of XP. It was repaired significantly though and it never gave me one ration of shit like the normal one would from time to time.

What I liked most about what they provided was the travel trailer they picked up, literally, for me. It was a two-bedroom model, or at least it had two beds. It was all set up and everything in the side of a damned hill that was out in the middle of nowhere Texas. Actually it was a little south of where my hometown had been but of course since it was back in time fifteen or so decades nothing looked very familiar.