The boxcar rocked and the rough boards hummed beneath me like marimba bars as the train sped ... somewhere. I didn't know where then, and I'm still not sure. I had just awakened from a bad dream I couldn't remember, and I could still feel the oppressiveness and anxiety of it. I looked around and saw I wasn't alone; there was an old man stretched out on a sheet of cardboard a few feet away. The Old Man....
How had we ended up in a boxcar? I tried to remember, but the too-brief sleep I'd gotten hadn't been restful, and I was foggy. Hadn't I been on a bus, on my way south?
The bus, right. It came back to me through the fog, the high weirdness on the bus. It had gotten weird pretty quickly.
"There are two Frog Levels in the Commonwealth of Virginia," the old man had whispered loudly. That's how this thing had begun, on a south-bound bus one August afternoon and with that simple touch of madness.
"Two." I smiled dully back at him and tried to bury myself in my book. "That's ... interesting."
"Two!" he repeated, waggling two calloused fingers in my face. I noticed that his eyes didn't look in quite the same direction. "Trick is," the old man said, "trick is knowing which one is the real one." He shook his head. "If we could just manage to be in both of 'em at the same time, we'd know which one was the real one, and which one the aliens sent us for a birthday present."
I closed my book and sighed. I'd only been pretending to read, anyway.
"Birthday present?"
"Hell, yes. Always nice to get a birthday present."
"From aliens?"
He gave me a patient look. "Well, it ain't no fun if you got to give one to yourself, now, is it?"
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