The Soldier - Rob Lee at Harper’s Ferry - The Clansman - The Missing Years

  I used to be a soldier in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The country was at war, and I soon found it intolerable that a fit young man should sit idly by while his homeland was invaded and ravaged, so I volunteered. I put in the greatest effort during training to become a great warrior, possibly even a hero of the nation. I graduated with honors. Soon enough me and my fellow trainees were put onto trucks and shipped to our units. Before the day was out, me and one of my new acquaintances were slotted into our new squad and given an area to defend from enemy attacks. This period was an interesting experience. Not worth talking about, unfortunately, since within two weeks of being sent to the front a drone blew me up and mangled me too badly to fight.

  Such are the fortunes of war.

  However, gaining a few extra scars didn’t make me lose my zeal, or my firm grasp of the English language, so my commanders pushed for me to become an outreach representative, which I accepted. My sense of duty compelled me to keep fighting for my country, and if that meant mid-level administrative work in San Francisco rather than hiding in a muddy trench, by God I wasn’t going to argue against that. Before I knew it, I had left behind my camouflage and rifle and re-adopted the slacks and button-ups of polite society, and the foxhole and barracks had been swapped out for an office building and an apartment. My new team’s mission: To acquire money and connections for the motherland.

  Thus began a career based on trading war stories with the uninitiated, looking stern and important, and having just the right amount of accent to be exotic without being foreign. Americans hadn’t had the same casualty rates as us in decades, so while they were used to seeing former soldiers missing body parts or wearing great scars, they tended to assume that I was a veteran of years of combat rather than days. I let them keep thinking that, since it made me sound tougher than I really was.

  With time, I grew to be frustrated. My new work seemed so much less significant, so much less heroic than when I had been a soldier. Then I was frustrated by my frustration, that I should be so miserable just because my work was important without also being exciting. Some of my peers shared the feeling. Some remained happy that they were out of the warzone.

  One day, I was told to go to an address. Our newest round of soliciting donations was about to start, and the bosses had decided that the previous ads we had run were insufficient. I agreed. They wanted something bold, something no two-bit production house would whip up, and they wanted it on a two-bit production house’s rates, or less. They wanted the man who lived in the squat, out-of-the-way house in front of me.

  I ran my hand through my hair. Inside the house someone was setting things in order. A scrawny blonde guy opened the door. “Hey! Guessing you’re Zimakov?”

  “Yeah. Robin?”

  “You got it.” We shook hands and he invited me into his house. Robin Leeuwen was a video editor with an unofficial specialty in political advertising. He lived in a “cozy” apartment, probably the nicest place I’d been in in California to not be owned by a tech or finance guy, which wasn’t saying much. We’d found Robin advertising as a freelancer and, in short, his rates were better than any of the normal production houses and so were his results, which, again, wasn’t saying much. I’d checked out his work myself and, while he was no genius to my eyes, he was no slouch either. He’d made some utter garbage look respectable in his days. Well, genius is expensive, and most great endeavors are built on the backs of a hundred reliable men. Robin poured us both a glass of orange juice and we sat down at the dining room table. Of course, he was a Californian, so his house’s most notable decoration was a shelf of communist literature underneath a black-and-white photo of Karl Marx and a reproduction of a Soviet AgitProp poster of Lenin directing Bolshevik soldiers.

  “So, a YouTube ad.” He began. “What are you trying to accomplish, exactly?”

  “Well, we’re doing another round of fundraising.” I said. “And we didn’t like the last batch of ads we got. Boss thinks they were too trite.” Sadly, we couldn’t just translate our Ukrainian ads into English since most Westerners didn’t like watching Kadyrovite Chechens get doused in white phosphorous.

  “Yeah, buddy, I know. But it helps if I have a strong emotional vision to work around. That’s why this isn’t a phone call. Or an email. I want to hear you describe what this war means to you.” Like many people, he was trying very hard to not stare at the hand that was missing two fingers.

  I looked at the Soviet memorabilia. “I don’t think you do.”

  He sighed. “Is it because you’re all ex-Azov?”

  “I am a bit worried that you have a conflict of interest here, yes,” I admitted. I was surprised he knew that. I guessed he did his research, too.

  His friendly smile faltered and I caught a glimpse of someone hard under there. The kind of person who I was fighting alongside in the trenches. The kind of person who’s killed before. “I suppose that’s fair to worry about,” He grumbled. “But I don’t really care. The Ukrainians are fighting for their existence in the face of an evil empire and the entire world’s just watching, but god forbid they act like their culture is under threat. No, I don’t approve of the neo-nazi brigade, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend like it’s an ‘incident’ that came out of nowhere. And frankly I’ve helped out worse people in my time.”

  “And the Lenin poster?” I pressed him.

  “Closest thing to actual Marxism that didn’t wind up dead in a ditch before it could do anything. And Constructivism is good shit, anyways. What about it?”

  I stretched out, pondered, and decided not to grill him on the Holodomor. There’s two kinds of political radical; the kind that does it because they had too many independent thoughts, and the kind that does it because they had too few. Robin seemed like the former. I let the idea rattle around in my head before deciding to just hope I was right. “You know, fuck it. If there’s a time for us to be picky, it’s not now. At least your ideas came from your own head and not someone else’s.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean.” He groans.

  Thus, we started talking. I decided to be as honest with him as I was with myself. I told him about my youth, my brief combat experience before I got hit by a grenade, why Azov, all that. What the war meant to me. What my country meant to me. Robin took notes, drew a few sketches of my face. He asked a question here or there, some of which I understood the purpose of. When I asked back, he just said that it all helped him to capture the ‘emotional truth’ of things, trying to use a different metaphor each time in the hopes I would get it. After an hour or so, he seemed to lose interest in studying my emotions and started asking his own questions. “So… did you do any of the magic rituals?”

  “What, like the torchlight stuff?”

  “Some people are saying that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But sure, we can start with the torchlight stuff. ‘Day of the Dead’, I think you call it. Or whatever the Ukrainian term is.”

  “Yeah, I was called out of training for the event and got to hold one of the torches.”

  He looked into my eyes intently. “Did you feel the magic?”

  My face scrunched up. I felt like he was talking about actual magic. The answer was “yes” but that answer was absurd. “Well, it’s a symbolic funeral. I didn’t know anyone who had died yet but I knew I would soon. It might even be me. I guess in that sense it was a funeral by proxy, which did stick with me.”

  He smiled. “You felt it. Actual, real magic. You felt the edge of the world.”

  “Well, you weren’t there, so you can’t actually know what I felt.”

  “Come on, tovarisch, if you really believe that, say it with conviction!” He laughed. “Think! There was something there, something that was beyond normal. What was it?”

  My jaw dropped a bit. “What, do you think I saw a demon or something?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t have seen it. You would have felt it. Entities can only be seen with the naked eye if you know to look. I have a sneaking suspicion that those rituals are more than just a game, that they actually invoke spirits. It’s a personal thing of mine.”

  “The precepts of scientific materialism do not support that belief.”

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  His gaze was piercing, and hot with passion and long-buried terror. “I’ve seen things you’d never believe could exist.” Again that hardness flashed in his eyes. For an instant, he’d been transported to some past adventure, the kind you don’t tell strangers about over drinks. I suddenly realized that his body was more lean than skinny, with muscles trained for power rather than size. I wondered what he was training for. Even in California artifacts of former military service were common enough that I noticed when they were missing.

  “Rojava?” I guessed.

  “Close. I did that for a year, but I mostly dug ditches and then left before things really fell apart.” He admitted. “Anyways, I meant what I said, you’d never believe it.”

  “I just spent an hour telling you all my war stories and you’re going to leave me hanging?” I pressed.

  He sighed. “Alright, fine. Come over here. But don’t get mad when it’s fucking weird.” He stood and I followed him to his bedroom. From a closet he pulled an old wooden box and set it on his bed and opened it. Inside was a small postcard depicting a man in a greatcoat, with a sack over his head marked in what looked like the flag of Novorossiya, but then I realized it was actually the Confederate Flag. I was impressed that my host had a hand-painted postcard in this day and age, especially one of such quality. Robin set the picture aside and underneath it, laying flat against the bottom of the box, was an ancient six-shooter. In its day it had been a utilitarian piece, bulky and worn in ways no nicer weapon would be, but it had been modified with a bizarre full-body engraving from the grips to the end of the barrel, swirling and rough-cut and somehow alien. Robin looked at me.

  “Pick it up.” He offered with a manic smile.

  “Is it loaded?” I asked.

  “No. God, what would I do with it if it was?” His eyes never left mine. He was like a puppy begging for a treat.

  I reached for the gun, then I remembered not to use my right hand and used my left instead. As soon as my fingers wrapped around the grip, something terrible made its way into my palm and up my arm. I pulled back but I didn’t think to drop the gun until the sensation reached my head and my mind was flooded with a thousand years of hate and rage.

  Next thing I knew, I was leaning against the wall, trying to catch my breath and fight down the splitting headache, and the gun was laying on the ground. White spots danced across my eyes and I was panting. “Isn’t that just the most insane shit you’ve ever seen?” Robin asked jokingly.

  “What the fuck is that?” I asked back, although I realized after I said it that I screamed the question.

  “That, my friend, is a cursed weapon.” He said. “Native Chimericans poured their blood into it until it felt the same about their loss and betrayal as they did. Now it tries to kill anyone who touches it unless you have native blood, or you fought for the Confederacy. Which I did.”

  “Native… Chimericans?” I put my hand to my forehead. I could feel the pain coming back. I never thought I’d miss being hit by a grenade.

  Not a minute later, I had a shot of vodka burning its way down my throat. “Alright,” my host said. “Let me tell you how I got a cursed gun from another dimension.”

  One morning, I woke up.

  This might not sound like much, but by this point I’d been stuck in a place called Chimerica for two months, and it was becoming obvious that waking up wasn’t guaranteed. The land was wild and untamed. A couple native tribes hadn’t yet been booted from the civilized parts of the burgeoning Chimerican empire. Tensions between the North and South of Chimerica were boiling over into actual violence anywhere where people could be found. I was out in the mountains, where bandits and hired guns battled it out on the rails. And, of course, there were sure to be lawmen stalking the hills for me personally after a recent major incident I had caused. But night had passed and I had remained undiscovered.

  I got up and cleared the moss from my clothes. Chimerica is a strange place, so while waking up covered in green fuzz was new, I had given up trying to predict what would happen next. I had been brought to this land to aid the burgeoning Confederate movement, or so I had been told. I couldn’t be sure how much of my information was accurate. They said that magic was real and, well, here I was in another dimension, so they weren’t all wrong. “Who brought me” and “why me in particular” were questions I hadn’t yet gotten the answers to.

  What was Chimerica? Well, it was a country in another world, and not a fun other world. No hot elf girls here, and while there were magic spells, they were mostly super disappointing. The only overpowered item I got was an AR-15, but with only the ammo I had been carrying. The main difference was that it was populated by bipedal animals. Most species of mammal were represented, from the smallest vole to the largest moose. The thing is, this wasn’t a minor detail. Elephants were nine-foot-tall giants, while mice were three-foot dwarves. Some animals were herbivores, some were carnivores, and the carnivores tended to be okay with killing and eating herbivores. Every species had similar tics and habits to their relatives from our world. This tinted everything that happened. Despite this, it was mostly the same nations in the same places on the same map acting out the same history. Somehow all the different species aligned to create the same trends as existed on earth, albeit in a skewed and often perverse manner. It was a true parallel dimension, and Chimerica was a parallel America.

  As an example, I was sent back to the year 1859. The world wasn’t LIKE 1859, it WAS 1859, with Chimerican versions of every major historic event happening at almost exactly the same times, and the events that should have been on the horizon or in the rear-view mirror, were. For example, the Raid on Harper’s Ferry, the aforementioned “major incident”. More on that later.

  As for my mission, on the way down the mountain I found myself wondering if they hadn’t been entirely honest with me. I’d slept a mile or so uphill from the rest of our party, and now there was no sign of the place they’d camped. It was just a flat-ish section of forested mountain with neither tent nor sleeping bag nor even marks where they would have slept. This concerned me. Whatever the case, getting the day’s water was the important thing at this moment, and while I was down by the river I might as well wash off.

  I made my way down to the nearest stream and took a chilly bath. I also partook in the local wildlife - I had a special arrangement with a local nature deity, as part of magic being real. As I stepped back onto the shore, my pelvis fuzzy, the fish in the stream bounding out to wish me goodbye, I saw my best friend in Chimerica. Akotok Luciferum was a shaggy-haired brown-furred deer of about my age. Of the co-conspirators I’d been given for my adventures, they were mostly a diverse band of animal-human-hybrid partisans led by a few pseudo-officers who were actually part of one pagan cult or another, and of the cultists, Akotok seemed to be the only one who understood what was going on on a practical level, swiftly making him my sole confidant. He instinctively turned when he saw me - I wasn’t wearing anything at the time and most of Chimerica’s species had a deep-seated fear of humans - and froze at the sight.

  Day-to-day I wore a burlap sack over my head to avoid incidents like this. For the recent battle I had made a version painted in the colors of the Confederate flag. I assume I got the number of stars right, I didn’t realize I’d need to reproduce the thing from memory. We needed a symbol and I figured that it worked for the human Confederacy so it should work for the animal one too.

  “Hey there.” I opened. “What happened? I came down and didn’t see our camp. I was getting worried you’d abandoned me.”

  Akotok stuttered something and nearly fell over backwards. I shrugged. “Dude, I’m not mad, just tell me what’s going on.”

  A voice I didn’t recognize with a faint Latin twang came from behind a bush. “Hey, Akster. Did you find who was fucking that fish- OH, JESUS!” The figure who was talking was wearing all-grey, with a sort of faux Prussian helmet made of cloth with a veil with eye-holes for him to see. He didn’t have much of a snout and I quickly realized I was standing naked in front of another human. But there were worse situations to be in, until now I had been the only human in Chimerica as far as I knew. I rushed to where I had left my clothes and started hastily putting them on as the new human laughed awkwardly to himself. “What the fuck, dude? Why aren’t you wearing pants??”

  “I didn’t realize I’d have an audience!” I explained. “None of the others gave a shit!”

  “You… you’re…” Akotok pointed at me and muttered while leaning against a tree. Normally by the time I had most of my clothes on he would have stopped flipping out.

  The other human got over himself and stared at my mask as I put it on over my head. “Hey, you’re Rob Lee, ain’t you?”

  “The one and only Robin Leeuwen, at your service. Don’t sound so surprised, I was just up the mountain.”

  “Oh, wow. What were you doing? Just hanging out up there, fucking fish and shit?”

  “No, I was sleeping.”

  “Hell of a nap. Call me Mycuze, by the way.” He held out his hand and I finished cinching my belt to shake it, getting my own hand crushed in the process. I noticed that he didn’t use his real name, but a more Chimerican-sounding version, even when talking to a fellow human. “I admit, I was a bit interested to meet the man, myth, and legend himself, even if the Akster did make you sound like kind of an asshole in person.”

  “You’re killing me, Akotok!” I yelled at the deer. “But thanks for trying to make me sound good!”

  Mycuze continued. “Yeah, that business at Harper’s Ferry, hoo-whee. When he told me about that, I thought it was just about the dumbest shit I ever heard, but no, you knew what you were doing, didn’t you?”

  I finished buttoning up my overcoat. “It helps that I’m not a Jihadist. Where’d you come from, anyways? I think I ought to have heard about another human running around, supporting the cause.”

  “Well I’ve only been here about three months, give or take.”

  “Buddy, that’s longer than I’ve been stuck here.”

  Mycuze looked at Akotok. Then they looked back at me. The birds chirped and the water chattered in the background. Akotok explained in his scratchy voice, “The raid on Harper’s Ferry was three years ago.”

  I squint my eyes. “You’re fucking me, aren’t you?”

  “Ain’t no lie, man. That shit’s ancient history.” Mycuze backed him up.

  “Well, shit.”