Chapter 2

I woke up to brightness and the sound of birds chirping, and the barking of dogs off in the distance. I opened my eyes and looked around. Yes, I was in a tent. To my right I saw a cargo bag and a back pack. They both had a camouflage pattern, though the cargo bag was a heavy canvas material and the pack was a lighter material – ripstop nylon, it looked like to me – parachute cloth with a liner on the inside. They looked like the ones I remembered seeing the soldiers carrying on TV coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Along with the sound of birds and dogs, I realized after a moment, I could hear laughter – little kid's laughing, actually. "Well, good then," I said to no one in particular. "At least I'm not completely off in the wilderness somewhere."

Unzipping the sleeping bag was much easier than it had been the night before. I slid out of the bag and sat cross-legged on it and reached for the cargo bag. It was at this point that some things finally occurred to me. I was Harold Lee Scoville. I was 93 years old. The last I remembered before last night had been laying in bed waiting to die of old age and generally crappy health. There should be no way I could be sitting in a tent somewhere by a lake, let alone sitting cross-legged. I was far too old for that shit.

So I looked at myself for the first time, and damn it, I wasn't me!

After 93 years, you know yourself pretty well. 93 years of staring at your own face in the mirror every day makes you pretty good at knowing the nooks and crannies of what makes you, YOU. This didn't even take that much familiarity. I was looking at the legs and hands of someone much younger. Much younger. I was naked of course, having stripped off the clothes I'd been wearing, so I had all of me to examine, except my face. This person looked to be long and lean. I'd been pretty fit in my younger days, off and on, but long and lean would never have described me. I had also had black, straight hair. This person had reddish-brown hair. I raised a hand up and rubbed my head. There was hair there, where I hadn't had much at all for years, but it was closely cropped, and dense. Definitely not the thin limp strands I knew.

"What the hell is going on?" I said to myself. Nobody answered.

Having heard laughing kids somewhere outside while waking up, I figured it wouldn't do to open the tent flaps until I had something on, so I finished reaching for the cargo bag and pulled it open, as it wasn't zipped. The bag was full of neatly folded clothes, but atop the mix of military surplus and casual clothing there was a small stack of other things, a small leatherette document bag, a wallet, a watch and a ring.

The ring looked like a class ring of some kind, and the watch was an expensive looking dive watch. I set the two of them back on the document bag as I grabbed the wallet and opened it. I found a military ID or driver's license, and my name was Cooper Jackson James. The date of birth said April 23rd, 1984. I grabbed the watch again from where I'd set it – it had a calendar that gave the date as Wednesday, May 25th.

It had been May 22nd, 2011 when I had last looked at the date at the Sherman House, but how many days ago had that been? I couldn't remember.

Cooper James, huh? The ID said I had blue eyes, brown hair, was 6 feet four inches tall and weighed 186 pounds. Long and lean indeed. I looked at the document bag, but something inside of me didn't want to know what was in it yet, so I set it aside. I put the watch on my left wrist and the ring on the ring finger of my right hand. Both seemed comfortable there. I sat the wallet on the sleeping bag beside me and rummaged through the bag until I found a pair of boxers, a long sleeved pullover shirt and a pair of blue jeans, faded, but in that way that told the eye they'd probably come from the store that way.

Back at the tent flap leading out, I saw what was probably the reason I'd found myself barefoot the night before. A pair of leather and mesh low-top boots with a pair of white socks stuffed into the top of them. The boots were those new, expensive hiking shoes. Waterproof, lightweight and comfortable. I slipped them on and they too felt comfortable. I might not be Cooper James, but this was certainly his body.

"What the hell has happened to me," I muttered as I zipped up the tent flap and stepped out.