Part One: Down the Rabbit Hole

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Scene One

~ The same clearing in the woods outside of Seattle, December 30th, 2020. Presumably.~

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Quickly picking himself up, Alec brought up his gun to point at potential threats. What he saw made him freeze. He cocked his head in confusion, looking at what wasn't there.

Where there should have been two beaten up vehicles used for barricades there was nothing.

Where there should have been about two dozen people fighting each other there was...nothing.

Where there should have been the van packed with the supplies Alec had bartered for there was nothing.

Nothing but grass and trees, anyway. Not even traces of the small war the transgenic had been witness to only moments before.

And that wasn't all. Alec had arrived at the meeting place on time; on a windy, cloudy, dark, freezing, wet December afternoon, at 1700 hours sharp. From what Alec could tell by the position of the sun behind the trees and the smell in the air, it was barely past dawn now. Impossible, sure. But so was the fact that it was very obviously summer. The trees were adorned with rich green leaves, there were buttercups and yarrow flowers sprinkled across the grassy floor. It was warm, for God's sake, a good twenty degrees warmer than he remembered. He was still cold from the abysmal weather he should have been standing in.

It was nothing if not irrational, but Alec turned on his heels to look at the stone formation he had fallen through in bemusement. Suspicion. Whatever. If anyone ever asked, he would deny his actions very vehemently, but he just had to know. Carefully, gun at the ready just in case, Alec walked through the gap in the rocks. Nothing happened. Not that he had expected anything else.

Slowly, he circled the stones once, looking for any clues he might have missed. Although those clues might as well have bitten him in his transgenic behind for all that he knew what to look for. If there even was anything to look for. Maybe the insanity really was genetic, and his brother's mental illness had finally caught up with him.

Just for the heck of it, he crossed through the gateway from the other side, the one he originally fell through. Again, nothing happened.

Before the panic could set in – and he would deny to his dying day that he was on the verge of a panic attack, thank you very much – he heard twigs breaking and leaves rustling, and a voice (not that far away, and how had he missed that?) spoke, upset and vaguely familiar, "Dammit, Sammy! A whole night for nothing! Tell me again, why we had to spend the night staking this place on the off chance something was going to happen, when there was a nice, comfy bed waiting for me in the motel?"

"Because there was a chance something was going to happen," another voice answered, this one rather amused and calming, although Alec noticed the same tiredness he had registered in the first voice.

Then the two men belonging to the voices stepped into the clearing and their banter stopped abruptly. Alec, too, stared in shock. Talk about talking about the devil. His own face was staring back at him, Ben's face, looking as bewildered as Alec himself felt. The .45 that had dropped to his side swung up almost of its own accord, pointing dead center at his clone's head.

His wasn't the only arm that came up, however. Suddenly, he was faced with the business ends of two guns. The man on his clone's left (Jesus, was that guy tall, almost as tall as Joshua) held a sawed-off shotgun with the ease of long practice, while his clone pointed a dull silver Colt 1911 at him. Alec could just make out the ivory handle that peeked out from under his twin's grip and some strange markings along the sled. Nice piece. Even if he was admiring it at a totally inopportune time.

"493?" he croaked. Another thing that wasn't possible. Last he knew, his twin was decidedly dead.

Ben cocked his head in a freakishly familiar way and answered, a malevolent smirk pulling up his mouth, that, were Alec to be honest, he himself had sported more than once, "I have no idea what you're talking about. Goddamn shifters, I thought we were done with that!"

He made to pull the trigger. Alec felt his muscles coil in response, anticipating a shot that never came, because suddenly, the tall one stepped in.

"Dean, wait!" he said. Had to be Sammy, that's what his clone had called him earlier, after all.

Wait, 'Dean'?

"Look at him," Sammy continued, not lowering his own gun, but halting 'Dean' from taking the shot nevertheless. Even if it didn't work in his favor, Alec could appreciate the wariness of apparent soldier training. "He's not a shifter. He's too young."

That was when Alec saw it too. That man over there who looked like him couldn't be his clone (for more than the obvious reason). He was too old. About five or six years older than Alec, if he was any judge. There were lines on his face that Alec wouldn't have for a few years yet and a five o'clock shadow that the transgenic wouldn't ever have, thanks to Manticore's scientists' tinkering.

And to top it all off: what exactly was a 'shifter', anyway?

So focused on his two adversaries was he, that Alec didn't notice the black spots, at first, that kept appearing in his vision.

"Well, I'll be damned," he heard Dean say. His voice, so much like his own, only deeper, sounded muted, kind of far away. Which was just wrong, seeing as his counterpart was standing right there. Alec shook his head like a dog, but it didn't help. It just made him dizzy. When he felt the tickling sensation of blood running down his left arm, realization came a little too late.

Crap, he thought as his knees gave way without any warning. That bullet must have nicked an artery.

Lying on the impossibly warm, earthy floor, Alec was vaguely aware of two shapes crouching over him, searching for injuries. Then there were hands on his arm, effectively stemming the blood flow.

"Hey, don't look at me!" Dean sounded affronted, in that muted quality that sound had suddenly acquired. "You were there, I didn't shoot him!" Which was nothing less than the truth.

One thing clearly stood out in his mind before darkness swept him away for good:

He didn't know who these guys were.

He didn't know why one of them looked like him, like Ben, only older.

He didn't know what the hell had happened.

It wasn't pertinent to the situation, but he knew one thing for sure:

If Max ever finds out, she is going to kill me! If only because she didn't know how to react to him any other way.

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to be continued...