Once outside, Josie walked two careful blocks, checking over his shoulder until he was certain no one had followed him from the pawnshop. Only then did he allow himself to relax. He ducked into a decent-looking restaurant on the corner.
He'd been in this world for a week now, and the best thing he'd eaten was a twenty-cent hamburger. With four hundred dollars in his pocket, he figured he'd earned a proper meal.
Yes—Josie was a transmigrator.
In his previous life, he'd been an ordinary white-collar worker in his early thirties. Nothing special. Had a car, a small apartment, a comfortable enough existence. He'd been in the prime of his life, really.
Then he'd gone drinking with his college roommate—the poor bastard had just been dumped by his girlfriend of eight years after his business went under. They'd knocked back one too many, and when Josie woke up, he was in 1943 Chicago, trapped in the body of a fifteen-year-old street kid.
Shouldn't my friend have been the one to transmigrate? Josie had thought more than once. Failed business, broken heart, life in shambles—that was the classic protagonist template from all those novels he used to read. Instead, God had apparently grabbed the wrong soul.
Now here he was, a proud member of the "struggling orphan" club, scraping by on the streets of Chicago.
The only silver lining? He'd gained over fifteen years of lifespan. Though in this era, with war raging across half the globe, who knew how long anyone would live.
At least he wasn't completely destitute. The original Josie's parents had died in an accident about three months back—food poisoning from bad sausage, of all things. Tragic, but they'd been legitimate American citizens, not undocumented immigrants. And while they hadn't left much behind, there was a small apartment. At least he had a roof over his head.
Inside the restaurant, Josie didn't go overboard with his order.
A large hamburger patty. A side of fries. Macaroni and cheese. A salad. And a tall glass of Coca-Cola.
Standard American fare. Generous portions.
The taste? Decent enough. What surprised him was the Coca-Cola—the flavor hit different than what he remembered from the future. Stronger, somehow. More... real.
Being a growing teenager apparently came with a growing teenager's appetite. Josie cleaned his plate in record time.
The bill came to seventy-five cents.
Cheap? Not really. If you calculated it against the official gold exchange rate, this meal was equivalent to thirty-some dollars in the twenty-first century. A few years back during the Depression, this same spread would've cost fifty cents at most.
Wartime inflation was a bitch.
The United States had implemented nationwide rationing starting May of last year. Everyone got a ration book with colored tokens—forty-eight blue dots for canned and processed foods, sixty-four red dots for meat, fish, and dairy. Ordinary folks could only buy what their rations allowed. Restaurants got larger allotments, sure, but everything else went to the front lines. A soldier's rations ran three to four times what a civilian received.
Everything in service of the war.
Of course, just like the bootlegging days of Prohibition, money could buy you more if you knew where to look.
After his meal, Josie stepped outside, made sure the coast was clear, and hailed a taxi. He gave the driver an address, and they were off.
A used car lot.
The United States was the world's leading industrial power, and nowhere was that more obvious than in car ownership. By 1937, the country had hit twenty-five percent—one in four Americans owned a car. Most of them concentrated in major cities.
And Chicago? One of the top industrial centers in the nation.
A brand-new basic Ford ran five or six hundred dollars. Not outrageous. But with the war on, civilian car production had been halted entirely. Factories churned out military vehicles now, nothing else. New cars required special permits—basically only doctors, priests, and other essential workers could get them.
Gasoline and tires were rationed too.
A driver's license, though? That was easy. Traffic laws existed, sure, but they were still new and loosely enforced. Even though Josie was technically a bit young, a little extra cash smoothed that over nicely.
He didn't need anything fancy anyway. A working used car would do.
After browsing the lot, Josie settled on a 1934 Ford in decent condition—full tank of gas included—for two hundred dollars.
That cut his assets nearly in half. Worth it for the mobility.
He wobbled onto the road, getting a feel for the vehicle. Having driven automatic transmission his whole previous life, this old manual took some adjustment. But the roads were simpler back then. No highways packed with aggressive drivers, no complex interchanges. He managed.
Soon enough, Josie pulled up to a gun shop on a quieter side street.
Inside, an impressive array of firearms lined the walls.
Don't let the era fool you—this was 1943 America. No automatic weapons ban existed yet; that wouldn't come until 1986. Gun shops carried everything from Thompson submachine guns to M1918 Browning Automatic Rifles to heavy Colt machine guns. It was incredible.
Josie could only window-shop the expensive stuff, though.
A Thompson ran over a hundred dollars retail these days—way out of his price range. The M1 Garand? One hundred fifty. Forget it.
His target was something older. Cheaper.
The M1917.
A supplementary rifle from the Great War, mass-produced due to its simple construction. After the armistice, most had been mothballed—over a million of them gathering dust in warehouses. Even with World War II in full swing, they were mainly used for training or lend-lease, rarely seeing actual combat. That meant surplus. That meant cheap.
Forty-five dollars got you a rifle and a thousand rounds of ammunition.
"What'll it be?" the portly shop owner asked. A similarly round young man stood beside him—probably his son, around Josie's age.
"Four M1917s," Josie said. "And an M1911 pistol."
The rifles were for trade. The pistol was for himself.
The owner raised an eyebrow at the quantity but didn't ask questions. He'd lived through the Depression. He'd seen plenty. Hell, Dillinger himself had probably bought guns here back in the day.
As long as the money was good, what customers did afterward was their own business.