Drew materialized screaming. He always did.

Dying hurt every single time he did it. In this last melee the Rev. Stockton had stepped out from behind a truncheon tree and doused him in spray from a flame thrower. The burning was fatal almost instantly, but still had been surprisingly slow in actually killing him. He had enough of one unscorched lung left to scream and scream and scream. The scream continued now as he reappeared whole-bodied in the middle of a shallow rocky brook with low overhanging branches.

His grey eyes darted quickly as his hand instinctively went to his holstered pistol. It wasn’t much but it was all he had, and he knew from experience that one could materialize anywhere. Usually you were reconstituted away from firefights, but you could never be sure. This time, it seemed, Drew was really lucky (“blessed,” he corrected himself). He had “landed” so far from any action that he could not even hear gunfire or explosions in the distance—truly a rare thing. He had better make the most of the break and stock up.

Pistol out, constantly looking for anything suspicious, Drew began to nimbly run, following in the shallow water of the brook. The water was cold on his “standard issue” boots. He had been transported from a desert and cactus zone to a late autumn/mild winter area. Here there were deciduous trees growing in thick together without many leaves and none that were green.
After only a couple of minutes he caught site of the red branches of a chaingun tree. Multibarreled, heavy rifles grew from steely thick branches and ammobelts draped as vines all across the metallic plant. In a few minutes of grunting, sweaty work Drew had pulled down a weapon and draped himself with plenty of ammunition. Each casing had “intellectual” stamped on it in small letters, but Drew had long since given up thinking about why such things were.

Instead he thought about Stockton. On earth they had been great friends. Stockton had even been his pastor for a couple of years when he was in college. And he had been a faithful correspondent over the next decades as Drew ran into a string a bad luck (I mean “providence,” he would correct himself) with regard to churches. When he had needed to get the congregation to deal with the corrupt three elders of the session, or a pastor’s preaching was deviant, Stockton had always been his mentor, his confidant, and his adviser. He had always been in touch both through private emails and several public internet bulletin boards (public to read but properly scrutinized regarding posting privileges).

And now? Away from earth on this strange planet Drew had been overjoyed to meet a familiar face. It was as if Stockton had been waiting for him. Drew almost smiled to himself, remembering the relief he felt wondering around a blasted landscape trying to make sense of a fruit tree bearing hefty pipe bombs. Stockton had been his first point of continuity, someone he knew from earth.

Of course, he thought grimly, as he picked an over-ripe hand grenade out of the shallow water from beneath an ordinance bush, that was before he discovered that he knew almost everyone who was here. If he didn’t recognize them by face, a few moments conversation (there had been much more discussion in the early days) had dredged up an email list or a chat room nickname, and he realized that he had spent hours with this one or that—either planning on how a certain preacher could be defrocked or discussing tactics to get yearly resolutions passed against something or other.

Dwelling on the past was a dangerous preoccupation. Drew almost walked into a pack of lopers. He was splashing through deeper place in the brook, wading around a curve that was overshadowed by forest thick with trees, when he saw that he was not thirty feet from them.

They were drinking noisily from the stream and this pack had no non-loper leader. Had they not been busy, or had their pastor still been in their good favor, Drew might have had to die within the hour of his first death (his record was four, three in the first fifteen minutes and one thirty-five minutes later, but normally he averaged about twice a day). Instead he was able to toss a grenade in the group and take out all but three who bounded away in panic, one bleeding profusely.

Long immune to considerations like blood and gore (which only lasted a few seconds before vanishing from sight), Drew was shocked to notice that one who ran away healthy seemed to have a small tail growing from his hindquarters. He was already running after the wounded one, a habit everyone picked up sooner or later when they began realizing that killcount was the only thing that could change. But even so he wondered almost idly, as he sprinted over a mound between two elms, if maybe people were changing after all out on this strange world. The lopers had always been the least human of the humans–vacant and missing the personality they had possessed on the home planet.

Or had they?

Drew’s own differences with Stockton had started with the lopers. He had a dozen or so that followed after him and obeyed his orders. He addressed them by their earth names, only a couple of which Drew had heard before. They were a couple he had known in college at his church. He hadn’t been in touch with them since that point, and only dimly remembered them. And now they barely spoke but grunted and simply followed whatever Stockton told them.

Drew had asked Stockton about these lopers. Apparently every one of them had been in Stockton’s congregation for years and years. Some since their childhood. He told Drew that, even though they hadn’t interacted much in the internet communities, they had been faithful and attentive at every conference he sponsored. Even if they didn’t always follow the flawless reasoning of the speakers, they always dutifully opposed the error for that year. Stockwell was not the only one on the planet with a pack of lopers. In almost every case the leader had been a pastor and the pack was a few members of his congregation on Tera

Catching up with the limping, bleeding Loper, Drew squeazed the trigger and aimed as best he could. As always with the chain gun, there were a couple seconds spent getting the gun barrels spinning around. The loper heard the noise and lurched to a stop, grabbing at the double-barreled shotgun hanging by its side. Or her side, rather. Drew could now tell the loper was an elderly woman.

Fortunately (thankfully, he corrected himself), she was also a slow woman. Before she had the barrels leveled at him, the chain gun began rattling away. With a shriek she collapsed in a spray of blood and bone fragments. Of course, he could only appreciate his handiwork momentarily before her body, with fragments and fluid, sparked golden and faded away.

But not before Drew had a good giggle. He couldn’t help it. Aside from the satisfaction of the win, he also had a shotgun.

It was odd, he thought to himself, that lopers were always older. Age was pretty meaningless on a planet that, by some strange force, kept de-materializing the dead and re-materializing them revivified. Yet, the lopers were almost always relatively elderly. Enough so that it would be easy to interpret their slowness as dementia. But he was pretty sure that wasn’t the source of their stupidity

TO BE CONTINUED