Chapter Text
Well I stood stone-like at midnight
Suspended in my masquerade,
And I combed my hair 'til it was just right
And commanded the night brigade;
I was open to pain and crossed by the rain
And I walked on a crooked crutch,
I strolled all alone through a fallout zone
And came out with my soul untouched.
I hid in the clouded wrath of the crowd
But when they said, "Sit down," I stood up.
Ooh, growin' up.
- Bruce Springsteen, Growin' Up
A hard jolt jerked him out of an uncomfortable sleep. Two seconds later, the sleep-gravelly voice across from him in the back seat grumbled, "Fuckin' roads."
"What roads?" Arnie asked back, scoffing and rubbing at his eyes. He was fairly secure, positioning wise -- he had learned quickly how to pack himself into the back seat of their eighty-year-old crew cab so he wouldn't be pitched anywhere when they hit a rough stretch -- but a hard enough knock still tended to wake him up. Sleeping soundly on these trips was a crash course in the nature of futility. Currently, he and Tom were tucked between their gear and the seat-back; in the middle of the seat, their ankles crossed.
At least when one or the other of them rode in the front passenger's seat, they could stretch their legs out. Or their backs. But never both at the same time.
"It's comin' up on check-in anyway. We'll sleep when we're dead," the Rev said, cheerfully, from the driver's seat.
When Arnie started chuckling at that, finding it funny for obvious personal reasons, Tom gave his foot a light kick and asked, sounding surly, "What's so funny?"
Not intending to explain, Arnie waved it off and went back to rubbing over his face, still smirking to himself. "Nothing, Tom."
I definitely slept better when I was dead.
Their forays into the States were half-recon, half-desperation. The nuclear bombardment that had ended the war and devastated the planet had plummeted global temperatures; even on the sunniest days, there was a haze in the air that seemed to blur the edges of this world. Natural shadows never had sharp edges here; the only shadows that did were those created by artificial light. The moon was always veiled, as if in mist.
More importantly than that, though, it meant the growing seasons were thrown out of whack and nothing worked quite the way it should. Famine was wide-spread. The Canadian plains were still producing, but at a vastly reduced rate and at constant threat from Colonel Green's forces. Farming in southern Ontario was on the ropes, too. British Columbia and the entire west coast was a write-off. The Maritimes were, as well.
Canada was barely hanging on, and right now especially thanks to their canola and the ability to refine biodiesel, but starvation wasn't uncommon. Even the winter wheat had taken a big hit.
According to Nance, temperatures in Toronto now were more typical to Thunder Bay; she had explained that because she thought Arnie had come from the States, having been trapped across the pond from home when the nukes had flown. She had given him a careful rundown of the situation; all stuff that most people would be able to find out publicly, but good information to have all the same.
Him being some unlucky lost Englishman was a useful excuse; he'd used that one on Enrico, too. Trying to explain that he was from an entirely different reality wasn't something he felt like going into. Trying to explain that he wasn't actually from England was even more daunting, and explaining that he wasn't even born on Earth was just out of the question.
He knew she suspected there was more to it than that, of course; fully-trained covert ops agents didn't just come from nowhere and volunteer their services, unless they happened to be spies. And it probably didn’t help that he couldn’t use the MI6 explanation here; in fact, he had broken into her main server room to prove his skills, because he didn’t have any legitimate backstory beyond the truth to explain them with, and he had no desire to start with that.
Still, she ‘hired’ him. It was only after a couple years that he realized how desperate she really was to have done so.
It took three months of doing what was, essentially, covert-ops busy work (breaking into offices to retrieve paperwork, distributing stolen supplies from the US around to different areas of the city, stuff like that) before she even started to trust him with serious missions. And even then, he'd had a handler watching him like a hawk for several more months.
(Fortunately, he'd liked said handler. Give the ShadowKnights this: even in this disaster of a reality, they were generally nice people.)
It was only when they lost six people -- two groups -- to Green's forces on their so-called foraging runs south of the border that she decided to let him work without someone breathing over his shoulder. They didn’t have so many people capable of going out into this nightmare that she could overlook someone physically sound and at least outwardly mentally so.
Arnie might have resented it more if he didn't understand it. He'd known when he crossed that border that he'd have to prove himself to whoever the ShadowKnights were in this universe. But even more than that-- he might be a trained covert ops agent, but he was brand new to the work of insurgency and rebellion. There was a learning curve, and sometimes it got pretty damned steep.
Very steep, when you had to factor in the sociology of an entirely new timeline on top of it. He’d had a hell of a time of that the first time around, too. It wasn’t hard with Enrico; things were so primitive and they were isolated enough that he hadn’t had to figure out an entire social structure, just how to teach Enrico stealth and learn wilderness survival himself.
But here, things were so smegging different.
They still used USB to charge their phones. And critical infrastructure was practically returned to the 1900s in most areas. Consumer electronics hadn’t moved much beyond the 2010s. Their most reliable, repairable vehicles were from the middle to late 20th century. The internet was about two percent of its size at its peak; Nance had tenuous control of most of it. Their group had one satellite-capable phone with them, but their main maps were all paper; the big one, and then several smaller section maps in books, with stickers marking hot zones, Colonel Green’s known bases, and their main target: Supply lines and depots.
Not the pockets of insurgency, though. Those, they each had to memorize and memorize the way to. Just in case their maps fell into the wrong hands.
It was a lot. A lot to cope with, and a lot to learn.
He still wasn't sure if he resented that or if he was grateful for it, but the more time went on, the more he was realizing it was the latter. Coping with the present always was easier than coping with what was left behind.
"MT6D, check."
Depending on which satellite Nance was connecting to, the answer could be very quick or very, very slow; often, the transmissions fell somewhere between those two extremes.
But this time, it was near instantaneous. Her 'face' popped up on the screen; Arnie wasn't quite sure how she managed to avoid skirting the uncanny valley with current technology, but the effect still unnerved him a little bit just because she did look perfectly human onscreen. She didn't look like his Nance, aside the red hair and brown eyes, but she looked like she could be related to his Nance. She usually projected herself in an office setting, which just added to that impression.
He liked interacting with her actual, physical box more than he did her onscreen because of it, but at least that was getting easier as time went on. Thank everything. She wasn't the same person as the woman he'd helped lower into the ground, even if sometimes they acted so alike that it hurt to be in the same damned city as her, let alone the same room.
"MT6D copy," she replied, "connection is secure, window of communication is eight minutes and thirty-seconds, mark. How's it going, guys?"
"About like usual," Arnie replied, quirking his eyebrows. "Bad roads, cold rain, but no need to call the autoclub for help. The worst we've had to deal with is being crammed into a tin can without showers and Tom's sterling personality." Just to illustrate, he turned the phone so that Nance could see Tom with the camera, who had clambered up and was now in the front seat, looking disgruntled.
Tom waved back with the one-finger salute, though it was followed by a more genuine grin for the camera. Just to make sure all were visually accounted for, Arnie leaned forward and held his arm out so she could see the Reverend in the driver's seat, who glanced over at the camera and rolled his eyes before chuckling, "We're fine, boss. We'll be at the rendezvous in two hours and hopefully on our way home with the goods in less than two days."
"It might end up being more," Nance said, voice turning rueful. "I'm keeping an eye on a squall pattern coming out of the west. If it hits you, you know the drill."
"Hunker down, try not get dead or get captured. Gotcha."
Tired of holding his arm at that angle, Arnie sat back again in his cave of supplies and seat-back, then wiggled until he was laying down as flat as he could get in such a cramped space. Nance was looking pensive and worried on the other side, so he asked, "What's the road report?"
"I've only been able to get a few pictures over the past several hours thanks to cloud cover, but it looks clear. No soldiers on the move on the backroads. Watch for the black ice after nightfall, it's going to get below freezing." She raised a simulated eyebrow. "Radiation check?"
"Aside the usual bombardment around Detroit, it's been standard. We're not in the red for this trip, or even close yet." There were plenty of pockets where fallout had settled, and some places that would be too lethal to even go near, but those had been mapped over the past nine years as well as they could be. Still, Nance insisted that every team that went out kept an hourly reading notation on a scratchpad, just so she could keep track of how much cumulative exposure they'd gotten.
"You're coming up on your yearly limit, though," she said back, looking serious.
"Ah, but I haven't reached it," Arnie replied, nonchalantly. "Until I do, there's nothing to worry about."
It wasn't an act; while he had no intention of coming back glowing in the dark or turning into a giant, walking tumor, he didn't care if he skirted the line of what was considered safe exposure, either. Even the most hardcore of the foraging ops usually only went out four times a years. This was his sixth trip out, but he figured it was probably the last one until spring, too; there was no department of transportation to clear the roads once the snow started really falling, and snow chains could only take you so far.
Pity, it was a lot warmer in the truck than in some of the places he slept, even if the ride was bumpier and there was no room to stretch out.
She didn't try to argue it, which was a nice bit of mercy. "Just be careful, all of you. Next check-in is in one day, six hours and seven minutes, connection 6-B."
"Catch that?" Arnie asked Tom, who nodded and then flapped the notepad with the time written on it over the back of the seat. Then Arnie looked back at the screen. "All right, they have it." He would, of course, already be either most of the way to the supply depot or maybe even in the middle of scouting it by then. There were benefits to being trained and eternally thirty in body, though none of these people knew that second thing about him yet; it meant he usually got to do the really exciting bits of these little forays. "We'll come back nice and doughy and unbaked."
"Good. Just bring home the bread, instead. And the bacon." Nance managed a small smile back. "Stay safe, ShadowKnights."
An echo across the years, and a universe, and the forever barrier of life and death; those were the same words that Mike had given him and Nance on their last field mission together, too. Stay safe, ShadowKnights.
Somehow, he managed to keep the wince off of his face.
"MT6D, out," he said, and after the connection was broken and the phone back in its protective case, he leaned his head back against the pack he was using as a pillow and failed to escape it all in sleep.