Terry was standing in line at the DMV, listening to some woman try to passive-aggressively get the clerk behind the counter—a hard-faced man who was probably around when God made the earth and also clearly wasn’t moved by the woman’s complaining—to do some damn thing or other. What Terry couldn’t figure out was why he was so happy to be stuck at the very end of that line. He was overjoyed by the fluorescent lighting, the vaguely off smell in the air, and the knowledge that no one was trying to make him march north to face an army of evil. Army of evil? I wonder where the hell that idea came from, thought Terry. Then, he woke up to the lingering scent of woodsmoke and morning light peeking through the forest canopy. It all came rushing back to him. Truck-kun. The stupidly pretty people. The sack full of heads. Oh, and the girl, Mira, who tried to cuddle up with him in the middle of the night. He’d shut that shit down as hard as he could. The farmer might feel friendly toward him, but nothing good would come of the man waking up to his daughter cozied up to some stranger. Murders started that way. I never thought I’d feel homesick for the goddamn DMV, but here we are. What I wouldn’t give to have some Karen holding up the line be my biggest problem. At least those farmers had an extra blanket to share.

Knowing he wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep, Terry got up and folded the blanket. He made sure he didn’t put it down too close to the sack of heads. It wasn’t leaking constantly anymore, thank the gods, but it still looked sort of damp to him. No reason to get bandit blood on their blanket. He walked over to where the fire had been cheerfully crackling away the night before and stared at it helplessly. He’d gone camping exactly one time in his before life and tending the fire had not been part of his duties. If I’d known some homicidal delivery truck was going to hurl me into another world where I’d need these kinds of skills, I’d have learned them, thought Terry before he sighed. No. No, I wouldn’t have. I’d have read about them online. Of course, he reasoned that even theoretical knowledge would have been better than no knowledge in this situation. He was still glaring at the charred remainders of the campfire when Mira came over, gave him a questioning look, then picked up a stick and stirred the ashes. What had looked like a patch of scorched, lifeless remains suddenly revealed itself to be a bed of red coals. She dropped a couple of small pieces of wood on the coals.

I’m so helpless at this stuff, bemoaned Terry. It was almost enough to make him poke at the other-knowledge to see if had some useful information. Almost. Terry had, like most sci-fi and fantasy geeks, fantasized about how awesome it would be if he really could download skills and info into his brain, Matrix-style. The actual experience was not at all like he imagined it would be. He’d just assumed that it would seamlessly integrate into his existing knowledge. Instead, it felt like someone had dropped the world’s heaviest fucking anchor into the center of his consciousness. It just sat there, no, it loomed there. He couldn’t shake the feeling that if he tried to access it on purpose, Terry, as he understood himself, would simply cease to exist. The Terry who wandered away after would be a fully-fledged denizen of Chinese Period Drama Hell, no doubt equipped with sociopathy and a murder hard-on. Not things that Terry had ever aspired to, even if they might make life easier here.

“Is there something I can do to help?” he asked Mira.

She paused from her flurry of morning activities, squinted in thought, and then shrugged.

“Not really.”

“Oh. Well, okay,” said a dejected Terry.

He’d rarely felt quite so useless. He’d never been one of those annoyingly competent guys who seemed to pick up useful skills at the drop of a hat. On a good day, he could put together one of the big box store bookcases without injuring himself too badly. Hang a shelf? Install a garbage disposal? Fix a car? There were people for that, and he’d been supremely grateful that there were people for that. His world had been dominated by code and apps. Roughing it meant a long weekend without a Wi-Fi connection. His version of picking up useful skills meant figuring out the basics of another programming language or this week’s most popular framework. Now he was in a place where debugging would literally mean killing bugs. And they’re probably all the size of a car, he thought. He immediately pictured wasps with stingers as long as his leg and shuddered at the thought. Accepting that he brought zero utility value to the morning routine, he mostly just stayed out of the way. He wandered out to the road and looked for other travelers or signs of bandits, but it was still early in the morning. Finding signs of neither, he went back to the campsite.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

Remdell was cooking something at the reborn campfire that smelled… Terry wouldn’t say it smelled good, but it didn’t smell poisonous. That was good enough. Unfortunately, Harena was also up. She was brushing out her hair but made a point to stop and meet the sight of his return with her usual expression of loathing and disdain. He honestly couldn’t wait to get clear of her but there was so much he didn’t know about this world. Things he couldn’t ask outright without exposing himself as someone who clearly didn’t come from this world. So, he was forced to engage the farm family in conversation and try to glean things like social customs and a basic sense of the surrounding area from context clues. He had at least managed to shut down any deep questioning about his past by saying that he came from the north. It was technically true. It gave the impression that he was fleeing from the war, which was also technically true. Just not true in the way that they assumed. It was pretty clear from the way they all awkwardly traded glances that they thought he’d lost his home or family or something like that to the invading army. When he thought about it, Terry realized that was also true, just not the way they thought it was. He’d lost a whole damn planet with no obvious way to return.

Fuck. I bet they all think I’m dead back home. Some poor person had probably found his mangled remains in that park. The cops probably had no clue what to make of it. He’d seen enough police procedurals to know that the medical examiner would probably say he had injuries consistent with being struck by a vehicle. The cops would insist that wasn’t possible. It seemed all too likely that the magic of Truck-kun wouldn’t leave any forensic evidence behind. He would become one more case that never got solved. One swiftly forgotten as newer cases, higher profile cases, and cases with some, you know, actual evidence took precedence. His mother had passed away a few years early, which had been horrible at the time but was now a source of relief. At least she’d been spared the misery of his unsolved death. He probably still had a father out there, somewhere. Of course, that bag of dicks had checked out so early that Terry had no memories of him, save for one random postcard the guy had sent from Bali. Bali! The prick had actually possessed the nerve to send a postcard from a goddamn tropical paradise while Terry’s mother was working two jobs. If he could have struck someone dead just by wishing for it, his father would have died that day.

That just left his sister, Lindsey. Yeah, she would be sad and probably confused. For all that, though, she was probably the best equipped to deal with it. They had never been that close. He’d been younger, introverted, obsessed with video games and all the other things that turned socially inept teenage boys into socially inept computer programmers. She had been more interested in living life as a functional human being, with friends, relationships, and a family of her own. A family that lived far away on the other side of the country. They spoke infrequently, saw each other rarely, and she usually did most of the talking. She talked about her kids, their activities, her husband, her job, going to therapy, and the twenty-seven things she did in her spare time. She was like the poster child for over-scheduling. Then, he’d talk for five minutes. Same job. Same apartment. No girlfriend. Good talk! Let’s do it again in six months.

Terry had never really known what people were talking about when they said crap about living their “best life,” but reflecting on what he’d left in his wake convinced him that he had not been living his best life. For all that, though, it had still been his life and those damned stupidly pretty people had stolen it from him. Not to give him a better life, but to fight a war for them. It firmly pushed the whole absentee dad thing into second place for the whole bag of dicks award. Screw those people, and their fancy robes, and their ridiculous good looks. They can fight their own war. I’m going to keep going south. He didn’t know what he was going to do there, but almost anything had to be better than following the hero’s journey. Maybe I’ll work in a shop. I’m good with numbers. Do they have bookkeepers in Chinese Period Drama Hell? If not, he could invent the job.

Terry was so engrossed in his own thoughts that he barely registered it when they had packed up the little campsite. He’d just sort of trudged along by the cart, eyes on the ground, sack of heads swinging by his side, thinking about what he could do that did not involve fighting. It wasn’t until one of the girls screamed that he realized anything was wrong. There was an almost nihilistic resignation in Terry when he looked up. He wanted to be surprised, or horrified, or anything really, but he mostly just felt dead inside.

Reaching up to rub at his eyes, Terry said, “Of course, there’s a monster.”