After an hour of walking, Ben's stomach began to growl. He hadn't eaten since... when? Before the experiment, certainly, but how long ago had that been? Hours? Days? The hunger was getting worse, gnawing at him like a living thing.
That's when he heard it, a low, pained sound coming from the underbrush to his left. Ben pushed through the foliage and found a deer lying on its side, its breathing labored and shallow. The animal had been wounded, probably by a predator, and was slowly dying.
Ben looked at the deer, then at his hands, then back at the deer. His enhanced metabolism meant he needed more food than a normal person, and he had no idea when his next meal might come. The thought of eating raw meat made his stomach turn, but the alternative was potentially starving to death in this godforsaken forest.
"Sorry, Bambi," he said, drawing his knife.
The deer's eyes were glassy and unfocused when he knelt beside it. Ben placed one hand on its neck, feeling for the pulse, then made a quick, clean cut across its throat. The animal shuddered once and went still.
Ben had field-dressed deer before, during his time in the military, but he'd never had to eat one raw. The meat was tough and gamey, nothing like the steaks he was used to, but it filled the gnawing emptiness in his belly. He ate as much as he could stomach, then wiped his hands on his uniform and continued down the path.
The forest seemed to go on forever. Ben walked for what felt like hours, the path winding through valleys and over hills, always surrounded by those impossibly green trees. The sun, when he could see it through the canopy, seemed to be moving wrong, taking too long to cross the sky.
And then there were the hallucinations.
It started small – glimpses of movement in his peripheral vision that turned out to be nothing when he looked directly at them. Then voices, faint and distant, calling his name. He ignored them at first, chalking it up to stress and whatever chemicals Vought had pumped into his system.
But then he saw Hughie.
The kid was standing in a clearing up ahead, that same earnest expression on his face that he'd worn the day they'd first met. He was saying something, but Ben couldn't make out the words.
"Hughie?" Ben called out, but the figure didn't respond. When Ben blinked, it was gone.
Next came Butcher, leaning against a tree with that familiar smirk on his face. Then Frenchie, tinkering with some impossible device. Even Crimson Countess appeared, her red hair flowing like liquid fire, her lips moving in words Ben couldn't hear.
"This is fucked," Ben said aloud, shaking his head vigorously. "This is seriously fucked."
He kept walking, ignoring the phantoms that danced at the edge of his vision. Whatever was happening to him, whatever those bastards at Vought had done, he'd deal with it later. Right now, he needed to find civilization, needed to find a way home.
The path began to climb, winding up a steep hill that left Ben slightly winded by the time he reached the top. He paused, catching his breath, and looked back the way he'd come. The forest stretched out below him like a green ocean, broken only by the distant pillar of smoke that marked where he'd first awakened.
Then he turned and looked ahead, and his breath caught in his throat.
The valley that spread out before him was vast beyond imagining, a carpet of green that seemed to stretch to the horizon. Rivers cut through it like silver threads, and in the distance, he could just make out what might have been mountains. But it was the sky that truly stopped him in his tracks.
The stars were wrong.
Even in the fading daylight, Ben could see them, patterns of light that bore no resemblance to the constellations he'd grown up with. There was no Big Dipper, no North Star, no familiar markers to guide him home. These were alien stars, the stars of a foreign sky.
"Where the hell am I?" he whispered.
As if in answer to his question, he heard the sound of hoofbeats. Ben turned and saw them, four riders coming up the path behind him, their horses moving at a steady canter. Three men and a woman, all armed and armored, though not as heavily as the knight he'd killed.
They saw him at the same moment he saw them, and all four riders pulled their horses to a stop. For a long moment, nobody moved. Then the woman, Ben could see her clearly now, with wild dark hair and calculating eyes, urged her horse forward a few steps.
She was staring at him, and Ben realized with a start that she wasn't looking at his face. Her gaze was fixed on his body, taking in his broad shoulders and muscled chest with an expression he'd seen on plenty of women's faces before. Even in this impossible situation, even dressed in scorched and torn clothing, he was still Soldier Boy.
Ben found himself smiling despite everything. Whatever this place was, wherever he'd ended up, some things apparently remained constant.
"Guess I'm not in Pennsylvania anymore," he said.
The exhaustion hit him like a truck. All the adrenaline, all the confusion and fear and anger, suddenly drained out of him like water from a broken dam. His knees buckled, and he felt himself falling forward into darkness.
The last thing he saw was the woman's face, still staring at him with that hungry expression.
Then everything went black.