Terry leaned back in the perpetually uncomfortable desk chair and rubbed at his eyes. A quick glance around the other cubicles revealed that there were only two other people left. There was Mark, who everyone but their project manager hated. It wasn’t that the guy was bad at his job. He was actually a pretty good programmer. No, there was just an air of smug self-satisfaction to his face that made everyone who saw him want to punch the guy. The only other person was Sheila, a bottle blonde who everyone liked a little too much. As the only woman in the pool of rank-and-file programmers, she got a lot of attention and seemed to like it just fine. She’d made her rounds through the guys and had recently seemed to decide that he would be her next… Terry pondered. Was conquest the right word? Whether it was or not, he wasn’t interested, which only seemed to make things worse.
He glared at the flatscreen monitor and the code he had been trying to debug. Then, he tapped the screen of his smartphone. It was already after six, and it was Friday. Enough, he decided. Whatever bug was screwing up that function was clearly something he wasn’t going to track down if he stayed for another fifteen minutes. It certainly wasn’t like he was getting overtime for staying late. Saving his progress, such as it was, to a new git branch, he logged out of his computer. He grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair and headed for the elevator. He caught sight of Sheila hurrying to gather her things. Passing briefly out of sight, he made the heroic choice to run for the stairs. Bursting into the stairwell, he took the steps two at a time, even if made him feel like he would lose his balance the entire way. He was out the door, in his car, and pulling away before Sheila trotted out the front door. He pretended not to see her trying to wave him down. He was sure that she was going to suggest going out for a drink or some other date-like activity.
Hard pass. He’d been person-ing all week and his slim reserves had run dry. He needed to get away from people and glowing screens. He needed to be outside and, the gods willing, alone. He steered his car through the thinning traffic. The post-work people were mostly home and the lets-go-get-drunk-and-stupid people weren’t quite out yet. He gauged how much sunlight he had left before heading to an out-of-the-way park he’d found a while back. He felt almost immediately better when he parked his car and stepped into the park. It was tended, but not overly manicured like some kind of golf course. Terry didn’t understand golf. In fact, he didn’t really understand sports. He had a t-shirt somewhere that read:
Baseball…that’s where you kick the puck at the hoop, right?
It was only half a joke for him. He’d been skinny and small in high school, not really reaping the full benefits of puberty until the summer after he graduated. By then, he’d missed the window to become interested in the whole sports culture. He’d also missed the window to become comfortable with members of the opposite sex. College had seemed like a golden opportunity to remedy that, but it turned out that having zero social skills was pretty much lethal to one’s social life in college. While sports held no appeal, he did find that he enjoyed being outside. He’d taken to hiking. First, it had been easy trails nearby, and then more difficult trails as his fitness improved. Falling in love with that solo activity hadn’t helped him connect with his fellow human beings either. He knew he’d gotten his job on the strength of his skills, not his personality, and was grateful to have survived the staff purge that followed some screw up well above his pay grade that cost the company a lot of money.
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For the next hour, though, he could put all of that behind him. He even turned off his phone before he changed out of the work shoes that some magazine had said were fashionable and into comfortable hiking boots. He could almost feel the tension sliding off his shoulders as he stepped into the park proper and started down one of the trails. It was really more of a walk than a hike. The ground was a bit too level and free of encumbrances, but Terry didn’t care. He didn’t care at all. The trees and bushes muted the city noise and the air even seemed a bit cleaner than what he got in his apartment or at the office. He found himself smiling for the first time all day. He might not have a girlfriend, or like the people he worked with, or even particularly like his job, but he still had this. For a few hours each week, he was free from social expectations, free from obligation, free from the anxieties that hobbled him most of the time.
It took a few seconds for Terry to realize that he was hearing automobile noises. As someone who had been living in a city for a while, he’d learned to tune out all but the most obnoxious car and truck noises. It was that or never sleep again. Still, these noises were too close. He stopped and turned around. Sitting no more than fifty feet away from him, in a place where it had no business being, in a place it could never have possibly reached, sat what looked like a delivery truck. Terry tilted his head back and forth as he tried in vain to make the sight of that truck fit into a rational world. Something that would have been easier if the front of the truck hadn’t looked so much like a face and a face that seemed almost apologetic. Terry and the truck stared each other down for five seconds before the engine revved. Terry’s eyes shot up to where the driver should be, only to find the seat empty. As the truck lurched toward him, Terry turned and ran.
As wild panic sent him racing down the trail as fast as he could go, the delivery truck closing on him with each second, the sheer absurdity of the situation gave the whole experience a quality of unreality. That reality gap gave the part of Terry’s brain that had spent countless hours reading and wasting time online the space it needed to throw one more little bit of surreal nonsense at him. He thought of a meme he had seen and laughed at. One of some poor Asian teenager getting run down by a truck and hurled into an alternate universe. Even as the roar of the engine filled Terry’s ears, the name of that meme came back to him. Truck-kun. One last thought passed through Terry’s head before everything exploded into pain and stars and dislocation.
“This is some Grade-A bullshit.”