The Time Raider CH 2

A Soldier Lost in Time

Chapter Two: Into the Fire

Silence.

Then wind.

Daniel’s stomach lurched as the world snapped back into shape—black sky above, burning horizon below

Daniel hit hard, rolling down a slope until his shoulder slammed against a stone wall. The air left his lungs in a ragged gasp. For a long moment he just lay there, choking on the smell of salt and cordite, ears ringing.

When he staggered upright, the scene below clawed the breath from him. It was dawn. Omaha Beach stretched pale and wide, littered with landing craft vomiting men into the surf. German guns hammered from the bluffs, their fire stitching across the sand. Bodies floated in the shallows. Smoke drifted in ragged sheets, broken by the orange glare of naval shells hammering the cliffs.

The Authority hadn’t dropped him into a quiet backwater. They had planted him at the edge of the largest invasion in history.

The land around him wasn’t the wide, rolling fields he expected. It was chopped into pieces — narrow rectangles hemmed in by walls of earth and tangled green.

The hedgerows rose higher than a man’s head, centuries of packed soil crowned with thick roots and snarled branches. They weren’t fences so much as living ramparts, stitched with stone and thorn. From where he stood, he could see only one field at a time, the next sealed away behind another wall of leaves.

Gunfire cracked somewhere beyond the greenery, but the hedgerow swallowed the sound, made it impossible to judge distance. Each gap, each corner, might open on friend or enemy. It was a maze designed to keep him lost.

Shouts rang out nearby—German, sharp and clipped, somewhere in the hedgerows behind him. To his right came English voices, scattered, panicked, a paratrooper calling for his unit. Daniel’s gut clenched. He knew the Authority’s rules: keep your head down, interfere with nothing. Die forgotten. But here, with armies colliding all around him, anonymity was impossible.

A few yards down the slope, tangled in brush, lay a paratrooper’s body. Neck broken, chute torn in the hedgerow. His uniform was scuffed but whole. Daniel’s eyes fixed on the name stitched above the pocket: PVT. A. WILSON.

He crouched beside the corpse, pulse hammering.

The Authority’s words echoed in his skull: Do not interfere. Do not alter anchor events. Survive in the margins until history forgets you. He still had the Authority’s issue of rations — a small packet in his pocket, enough for days if he rationed carefully. He could disappear into the countryside, hide among farm ruins, let the war thunder past until disease or hunger claimed him. That was the plan. That was the rule.

But his eyes slid to the uniform, the rifle still slung across Wilson’s shoulder. Out here, alone, the gray jumpsuit marked him as nothing. Worse — as strange. German soldiers would shoot him on sight. Americans would question him, maybe worse. He would stand out when all he needed was to vanish.

He calculated the chances as coldly as he could: with the rations alone, maybe a week. Two if he stole food without being noticed. But he couldn’t hide forever. The Authority had placed him in the middle of a battlefield, not the quiet ruins of history. Survival here meant camouflage. Survival meant theft.

His hand trembled as he reached for the dead man’s jacket.

Taking the uniform meant stepping out of the shadows the Authority demanded. It meant walking into history as someone else.

But leaving it meant certain death.

Daniel drew a ragged breath, the decision burning in his chest. The Authority wanted silence. He wanted to live.

He stripped the body.

When he was done, Wilson’s name stared back at him from his own chest. His own was gone again.

Beside the fallen paratrooper lay his rifle — an M1 Garand, wood dark with moisture, sling twisted in the mud. Daniel hesitated, then picked it up. The weapon was heavier than he expected, solid and balanced, the faint scent of oil and salt clinging to the stock. He pulled back the operating handle; the mechanism snapped forward with a sharp, mechanical bite. Eight rounds sat neatly in the clip — loaded, ready.

He had never fired one in battle, but he’d handled rifles before — scavenged from the ruins and border skirmishes long before the Authority took him. Survival had been its own kind of training, the lessons written in hunger and fear rather than orders and drills. The Garand wasn’t so different in weight or purpose. He shouldered it, sighted down the barrel toward the hedgerow, testing the feel. The action was smoother, more honest somehow — no stun coils, no energy hum, just steel and powder and recoil.

For a moment, he almost smiled. The past, brutal as it was, still made sense in his hands.

By midday, he was moving cautiously through the hedgerows when he heard the voice. “Hey! Hey, you—wait up!”

Daniel froze. A figure stumbled toward him through the brush — another paratrooper, face smudged with dirt, one eye swollen nearly shut. His uniform was scuffed but intact. He carried his rifle loosely, like a man exhausted beyond measure.

“You from the 506th?” the soldier asked, panting. “Lost my goddamn unit. Haven’t seen another friendly in hours.”

Daniel’s mouth went dry. He didn’t know the unit numbers, the slang, anything. But if he hesitated, it would look wrong.

“Yeah,” he said, forcing steadiness into his voice. “Got separated, too.”

Relief washed over the man’s face. “Christ, finally. Name’s Carter. Private Joe Carter. You?”

Daniel’s breath caught. His instinct was to say Daniel Harker—but then he remembered the uniform. His eyes flicked down, just for an instant, to the stitched fabric above the breast pocket. The letters were clear even through the grime:

PVT. A. WILSON

“…Wilson,” he said, voice flat. “Private Wilson.”

Carter grinned, clapped him on the shoulder. “Well, Wilson, looks like it’s just you and me until we find the others. Stick close. We’re in Kraut country.”

Daniel managed a tight nod, but inside, a cold weight settled in his chest. His name was gone again. First stolen by The Authority, now buried under another man’s corpse.

For the first time since the jump, he wondered if there’d be anything left of Daniel Harker at all.

They could strip his name, his history, even his face. But the fire underneath — the memory of the Authority — that they hadn’t taken. Not yet.