Chapter 2.

I felt a passing sense of despair when I woke up on the restaurant booth several hours later. The fact that my predicament was real had started really sinking in, and my worries had progressed from trying to survive to wondering if I'd ever get home. I felt a little silly, standing in the middle of a huge metropolis and wondering if I'd ever see another person again, but that thought occurred to me too. The shadows outside still hadn't moved by the time I woke up; I was sure of that now. Even in the arctic, the sun moves a little in the sky during the day. Here the sun simply didn't move. I couldn't possibly be on Earth. Still, I wasn't quite ready to accept the idea that I'd somehow fallen through a wormhole connecting an alley in Kansas with an apartment building on another planet.

I couldn't stay in the restaurant for long. I needed more food, and I couldn't find any more here. I wasn't going to eat frozen mutant horseshoe crabs for breakfast, either. I went outside and started walking down the street again after awhile, waiting to run across another place with food of some kind. I found two more restaurants on that street within half an hour, but both of them had been looted and cleaned out. The freezers were completely empty, and everything was in disarray. I moved on, walking for another hour before finding a cluster of shops with what looked like packaged foods. Almost all of them were marked with the same symbols I'd seen everywhere else. Then, I found a small cluster of packages in one shop with English labels. It was snack food of some kind, but none of it was familiar. I decided to take whatever it was and keep moving. I found a wire shopping basket in a corner, which clearly had taken some abuse, and loaded as much of the snack food in it as I could. I ate some there, and walked for awhile after, but I didn't see anything useful for several miles.

I sat down on another bench and rested for awhile. It was in front of a big water fountain, about thirty feet wide with a broad path going around it and some smaller skyscrapers ringing it. The water had started to get scummy around the edges from being left derelict. In the middle of the fountain was a stone statue of something-- it looked like it could have been one of the creatures from the cantina in Star Wars. The smaller skyscrapers were equivalent in size, at the smallest, to the Empire State Building. They were dwarfed by the mile-high spires of the fantastic city around them. I got a good look at the sun for the first time from there. It was definitely red, not yellow. It filled up a little more of the sky than it should have, and it certainly never moved. Considering how big it was, it didn't seem to put off much light. It still hurt to look directly at it, but the afterimage didn't last as long. Wherever I was, it clearly was not Earth.

I thought about how I was going to get in touch with someone. I suddenly felt a pang of stupidity when I realized I'd had my cellphone with me all this time. I pulled it out and flipped it open, but there was no signal. I felt another pang of stupidity when I realized that I wasn't going to get cell signal on an alien planet. I shut it off to save the battery, and put it back in my pocket. I tried figuring out where I was again. The evidence didn't add up for anything. If I was really on an alien planet, then why were some of the snack bags, which were in my basket now, labeled in English? I went back to my theory that I was on a future Earth. Perhaps thousands of years had passed, huge cities had been built, and aliens had been found (which explained the statue in the fountain). But that wouldn't make the sun just stop moving. Something cataclysmic would have to happen to do that, and this place was certainly not uninhabitable. Besides, it looked like it had just been evacuated a few days ago. Maybe I was on another planet, then, also in the future, and inhabited by humans. That would explain most of the things I saw. It still left the question of why the city had been evacuated, but at least I had a theory that made some sense, despite being far-fetched. It was as good as any other explanation. Fate, however, was about to throw me yet another monkey wrench, and every theory I'd made would vanish when it hit them. I was standing up, about to continue with my new routine of walking and looting, when I saw something moving down a street in the distance, coming towards me.

At first I couldn't tell what it was. I thought it was about the size of a big dog, but the massive buildings were tricking my eye and making everything look smaller than it was. When it got closer, I realized it was a human. He was wearing gray clothing of some kind, and what looked like a white armband on his left arm, though from that distance I wasn't sure. I didn't call out to him, though. I had no way of knowing if, perhaps, he'd been starving in this city for weeks, and another human was just competition he didn't want around. But the city seemed to have plenty of food, and it looked like it had only been abandoned for a few days. It occurred to me that whoever it was might know where I was, and what had happened. I started walking towards him, but I was still cautious. He didn't notice me for a long while, but when he did, he shouted something. I couldn't tell what it was, but I shouted "hello" in response. He picked up his pace and started walking towards me, and for awhile I did the same. Then, when we got a few hundred yards apart, I looked at his clothing a little more closely. I quickly realized that what I really wanted to do was head in the opposite direction, but it was a bit late now. He did indeed have a white armband. It was emblazoned with a big, black swastika. The rest of him was covered in ragged, gray World War II-style fatigues. The only thing missing was the black-lacquered helmet.

I stopped dead in my tracks, but I didn't turn around. I was once again in a mild state of shock. The Nazi soldier ran the last twenty feet or so to get to me, then stopped. He had cold blue eyes and blonde hair greased back in '40s style, and his hands seemed thin and oddly grimy; the tendons stuck out unusually and attached themselves to large, calloused knuckles, like a gargoyle. They seemed strangely dark, like whatever dirt he'd touched had sunk into the crevasses of his skin and become indelible. I remembered seeing the same thing in war tapes from the time-- a lot of the Germans seemed to look like this, but none of the Americans did. His hands matched the ruddy edges of his uniform more than his pale face. What I wanted most right then was to slowly back away, as if from an angry hippo.

He looked at me silently for a few seconds, and blinked like he'd been hit in the face with something. "Sprechen sie Deutsche?" he asked. "Konnen Sie mich verstehen?"

I really didn't know what to say. I didn't really know if I should say anything-- and if he only spoke German, then I couldn't talk to him anyway. At first I just shook my head. He glanced to the side, biting his lip. I was not in luck.

"English?" he asked. "Do you understand English?" He spoke perfectly, though he had a strong accent.

"Yes," I said quietly, after awhile. I felt very tempted to say no. Later I realized it would have been funny to say "oui," and start speaking French. I'd been taking French, and I was terrible at it. I wonder how he would have reacted to that.

"You speak English?" he said, his eyes brightening instantly. "Where am I? What is this place?" He gestured around at the city.

I shook my head. "I dunno." If he didn't know what this place was, then I really had little reason to talk to him. He didn't seem to agree on that point, however.

He looked off to the sides, pursing his lips. "Is there anyone else here?"

"No." Unfortunately.

"How did you get here?" he asked slowly.

That's funny; I was wondering the same thing about you, I thought. "I don't know. How did you get here?" I felt the strain in my voice from being forced into a conversation I really didn't want. My fight-or-flight instinct was kicking in, and I was leaning towards fight.

He shook his head. "I don't know," he mumbled. "How long have you been here? Two days?"

I had to think about it more than I should have. "Yes."

"So have I. Where were you from?"

"America," I said.

He nodded solemnly, and looked around at the skyscrapers. He settled his gaze on me, and blinked again, like he'd been hit. "Your clothing is different," he said.

I didn't know what to say to that. As far as I know, the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook doesn't have a section titled, "Nazis."

"Even in America, no one has clothing like that," he continued. I was wearing a yellow t-shirt and a pair of jeans, plus some polka-dotted flip-flops.

He gazed off in space silently for awhile. I thought very seriously about walking off while he was distracted. Then he looked back at me with an odd expression.

"When are you from?" he asked.

"2009."

"2009?" he asked.

I nodded. A mischievous look crossed his face.

"Who won?" he asked.

It took me a few seconds, but I realized he meant World War II. "The Allies," I said. "We took Berlin in 1945. Hitler and Rommel committed suicide. America nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, and they surrendered. Italy surrendered. Your war criminals went on trial in Nuremburg, and a lot of them were guilty. The Holocaust ended. End of story."

"The what ended?"

"The Holocaust," I said. I was starting to grit my teeth a little now. "The part where the Nazis slaughtered eleven million innocent civilians. Systematically."

"What?" He looked at me like I was nuts. I stared right back. I was probably scowling. "Who… told you that?"

"The history books," I hissed.

His expression changed a little. He didn't bring the subject up again, but at least he may have been taking me seriously then. "So… what did you do to Japan?"

"We nuked two of their cities." He just furrowed his brows. "We dropped atomic bombs on them."

His eyes went wide. "Amerika entwickelte es zuerst," he said. He was silent for awhile. I tried to figure out what I should do. My primary instinct right then was to put a few extra yards between me and him and then look for a weapon, but what little of my brain was functioning reminded me that he might be the only other human I saw for a good while. He clearly didn't have a problem with me, which in this case was irritating, because it meant he was probably going to try and stick around wherever I was; and this was really not the kind of person I wanted hanging around. I had the feeling I was going to have about as much choice in the matter as I'd had in whether or not I stayed in Kansas.

"Is this place familiar at all?" he finally asked. "Do you know any of these buildings?"

"No," I grumbled.

"Hmm." He put his hands on his hips and glanced back towards the street he'd come down. "Have you found any food here? I haven't found anything since yesterday."

"There's food in some of the stores," I said.

"Where?"

I was very tempted to point him in the wrong direction. I didn't want him foraging anywhere near me, but I'd already cleaned out most of the labeled food from those stores, and I wasn't planning on going back. "That way," I said, pointing towards the street I'd come from.

He nodded. Then something behind me caught his attention. "There's something on that bench," he said.

I looked behind me. Back near the waterfall, my basket of food glimmered in the sun. "That's mine," I said.

"What is it?"

"A basket." A basket from which I had no intention of letting him take anything. He glared at it, then back at me. I'm almost sure he knew exactly what was in that basket just by how I was acting. It occurred to me that I should probably go back and get it so I could move on. I noticed he was gazing at it with an expression I couldn't quite place, but didn't like. I just had an image appear in my head of him deciding to grab the basket and run. After a few seconds he stopped looking at it, and I relaxed a little. Food was valuable.

He wasn't making eye contact anymore, and with men that usually means they don't want to talk anymore. It occurred to me that if he was done talking, he was probably planning his next move, which meant that I had to act now if I wanted any say in whatever happened next. The problem was, I wasn't sure what to do.

"Perhaps you would be safer if we traveled together?" he suddenly suggested.

Over my dead body, I thought. "I seem to be doing fine on my own," I growled.

"But you're a woman. You shouldn't be on your own."

I had never in my life been spoken to like that. It didn't even make me mad; it just surprised me. People in modern times just didn't say things like that. "Back off," I said, after I got my head back together.

Now he looked perplexed. "But there's no one else here. Not that are alive."

"Too bad." I stared him down for awhile, but he still just looked confused. "Alright," I said, "How about this. The fountain is no-man's land. That"-- I pointed towards the street I'd come from-- "is my half of the city, and this"-- I pointed down the street we were standing at the edge of-- "is your half of the city. I stay in my half, you stay in yours, and we don't talk to each other. Is that good enough?"

"What happens when you run out of food?" he asked, still looking puzzled.

"How do you figure I'll run out of food?" Each building was about a mile high. Odds were, they all had food somewhere.

He didn't answer, but seemed to settle for not understanding why I acted the way I did. "Okay," he said, shrugging. He turned and started walking away sluggishly, glancing back briefly over his shoulder at me. I turned around and went to get my basket. It was when I set my fingers on the basket's handle to pick it up that the absurdity of what had just happened hit me full force.

I was on either another planet, or the future Earth. I was in an empty city with huge buildings, with a big red sun that never moved, and I had just run into a bona fide Nazi. At this point I completely gave up on trying to explain how I'd gotten there, where I was, or what had happened. I found myself shaking a little again. Things like this were not supposed to happen. I wondered if maybe I'd been drugged and was experiencing some kind of bizarre drug-induced world. But it seemed so real-- the sunlight, feeling hungry and tired after walking, the hard ground under my feet. My thoughts seemed clear enough. But I couldn't let myself think I was insane. I knew if I gave in to that idea, I would give up on trying to live here. I picked up the basket and started walking back to my half of the city, feeling a little shaken. My mind started trolling the conversation with the German soldier, as though I might find something out by going over it again. He said he'd been here two days, like me. So whatever happened to me, also happened to him, and at the same time. Of course, that didn't tell me anything. He didn't know who won the war, so he must have come from before 1945. I'd given up on classifying things as possible or impossible at this point, so I let the information be what it was. He spoke English very well. And, he'd mentioned that he hadn't eaten since yesterday. I wondered if he'd just had a stroke of bad luck, or if he really was that pathetic. It would explain why he wanted to have me along, anyway. I almost smiled.