1 – GOING, GOING, GONE

So, this is how I die. Oh, well, maybe it’s for the best.

That was what flew through my head as the bus’s grill loomed ever larger in my sight.

Guess that whole saying about one’s life flashing before their eyes at the very end was bullshit after all. I honestly couldn’t say whether I found that to be a good thing or not. I suppose it all depended on the highlight reel. If fate was fair and showed one a proper mix of highlights and downsides that might not be too bad. But in my case I had a feeling it would’ve been a dick and forced me to relive every moment in which the universe decided to cock-punch me while I was already down.

Regardless, I was aware of only a three things: the screech of brakes applied far too late for anything save to give the driver plausible deniability, thinking how much this was going to hurt, and a distant sense of relief that while my death didn’t feel fair or deserved – at least it was finally all over.

Turns out I was dead wrong on those last two, lucky me.

But we’ll get to that soon enough.

Anyway, it was all my own damned fault. I was coming off the worst month of my life and was simply too beaten down to pay proper attention.

It had all started normally enough. I had just gotten back from ParaDocx – the largest business software convention on the East Coast. Drakkensoft, the company I worked for, hosted a booth there and as a senior software manager I was expected to attend – not exactly a hardship as it was usually four days spent hobnobbing over drinks with potential clients for our suite of finance tools.

Alas, the con itself was nothing to write home about this year. With the economy on a downswing, those daring to brave the vendor room had made it a point to keep their enthusiasm in check. It had been like a sea of unreadable poker faces.

The drive back had at least been quick. I’d managed to miss the traffic that seemed to perpetually snarl D.C. and Maryland, so I was about an hour ahead of schedule.

I had thought that a good thing at the time.

The first sign that something was amiss came from the unfamiliar car sitting in the driveway of my modest split level home in Manahawkin, New Jersey. Then I spotted my son Jeremy. He was out front playing, tooling up and down the sidewalk in one of those battery-operated Jeeps.

It was a toy I distinctly remembered vetoing this past Christmas, both due to its price and the fickleness of children and their playthings – but mostly because of its cost. I mean, call me crazy. I loved my son more than anything in this world, but spending hundreds on a single toy for a five-year-old just felt excessive.

Deb hadn’t been happy about that, but in the end she’d come around to my way of thinking, or so I had thought.

I stepped out of my aging Honda and greeted him. “Hey, Champ!”

“Hiya, Daddy!” he’d called back, puttering toward me at a solid three miles an hour. “Look what Uncle Manny bought me! I can go really fast!”

That right there was the beginning of the end of that tiny little slice of suburban happiness I’d thought was mine.

Go figure, but Jeremy didn’t have an uncle named Manny – especially one who had face-sitting privileges where my wife was concerned.

I had no idea how long this had gone on for or how long it would’ve continued had they not been caught. The only thing I was certain of was that Deb had planned for this inevitability, because the very next day divorce papers were dropped off on my desk at work.

She was even shameless enough to list the reason why as infidelity … on my part, citing my semi-frequent business trips, as if I’d ever done more than collapse in a hotel room following a long day of hawking finance software.

Talk about fucking ballsy.

It was all a lie, of course, her way of throwing her own shit back in my face. Problem was, it was her word against mine. I had no defense and she knew it. As for her dalliances, the only witness in my favor was Jeremy, and she was no doubt counting on the fact that I wasn’t about to force my own kid to go in front of a judge and proclaim his mom a whore.

The whole thing was fucking insane. It was almost like I’d come home to a completely different reality than I’d left, and it only got worse from there.

Within the space of a day the locks were changed, my stuff had been dumped on the front yard, and I discovered our joint account was now empty – all before I’d barely given a passing thought to finding a lawyer of my own.

Sure, things had occasionally been rocky for us over the course of our eight-year marriage, but I’d never once imagined it had been this bad.

Guess I was the fool here.

Oh, and as you can probably guess, she was seeking full custody of Jeremy too. Yeah, at this point the claws were out and she was fully prepared to use me as her personal scratching post.

I later learned the actual truth behind all of this, the real cause, but it wasn’t like that was of much help to me. Deb was playing it crafty, far more than I would’ve given her credit for – or at least her land shark of a lawyer was.

The downward spiral wasn’t done yet, though.

My boss Allan wasn’t entirely unsympathetic to my plight, but he treated it like all I needed was a long weekend to fix things. There was only so much leeway he was willing to give me with the company hurting for new customers.

It was the span of three weeks for me to be called into HR and threatened with a performance plan. I probably didn’t help my case by sitting there in a distracted fog for most of it.

By then that seemed to be my new normal, just going about my days barely cognizant of what was happening.

It should therefore come as no surprise when I mention it was that same brain fog that led to my untimely demise.

I was walking out of my lawyer’s office after listening to him tell me the variety of ways I could expect to be fucked in the ass in the coming months. While Deb had retained the legal services of a school of piranha wearing a human skin suit, I’d ended up with a well-meaning hack who mostly advised me to give her everything she wanted in the hope of maybe getting alternating weekends with Jeremy.

Mentally drained, I’d walked right past my car, hoping to clear my head a bit before heading back to the shitty, low-budget meth motel I now called home.

I probably should’ve tried harder because three blocks later I stepped off the curb only to realize a second too late the light was against me.

The next thing I knew, a bus was bearing down on my ass like it was a soccer mom and I was the only thing standing between it and a Black Friday clearance sale.

“Shit on toast,” I muttered.

As far as epic last words went, I probably could’ve done better.

***

The words had barely left my lips when I blinked and found the bus was now gone. It didn’t swerve or anything, it had simply vanished. One second it was there – so close I could’ve reached out and finger-flicked the headlight. The next, nothing, and I mean nothing. Turning my head, I realized the bus, the crosswalk, and even the street had disappeared.

The fuck?

I found myself standing on bare dirt in what appeared to be a forest clearing. Somehow, I was now surrounded on all sides by trees and thick vegetation. I could see maybe twenty feet in any direction before my line of sight was blocked by a literal wall of lush greenery.

The scenery wasn’t all that had changed. Seconds earlier, it had been about fifty-five degrees – relatively balmy for New Jersey in late March – but now it had to be approaching ninety. I peeled off my jacket even as I was still trying to process this inexplicable change in venue.

What the hell had happened? Was I dead? Had it simply happened so fast that I hadn’t even felt the impact? If so, then did that make this place the afterl…

“Welcome, chaser!” a cheerful voice called out, shattering the silence and seeming to come from everywhere at once.

I looked around but there was nothing to be seen save for abundant plant life. “Um, hello? Is someone there?”

“I dare say, you are one lucky man.”

The voice had a neutral pitch but was a bit too friendly, almost the sort of thing one might expect from someone trying to entice you into a windowless van with the promise of free candy.

There was something off about it even beyond that, though. It had … an artificial quality to it, like listening to a synthesized voice that was good enough to sound human but hadn’t quite mastered the nuances of inflection yet.

Unsurprisingly, this was something I was familiar with as we’d recently incorporated limited text to speech capability in the latest version of DrakkenBooks, our biggest selling software package.

I quickly pushed that thought away. Whatever was happening, I had a feeling accounting software was the least of my worries.

“What do you mean lucky?” I asked, wondering what the hell was going on. Was this the hereafter or merely some delusion created by the dying neurons within my flattened brain cells? And if the latter then why a freaking forest? I mean, it’s not like I was some wilderness junkie.

“Duh! It’s not every day that someone gets a second chance. Now, is it?”

Second chance? I hadn’t been raised particularly religious. Deb was an Episcopalian, sure, but I could’ve counted the number of times I’d seen her go to church on one hand. All the same, I found myself beginning to jump to conclusions I really wasn’t prepared to make – such as wondering whether this was the so-called good place or somewhere a bit more fire and brimstone.

I gritted my teeth, almost afraid to ask. “Are you … God?”

An angelic chorus rang out from seemingly nowhere, loud enough to cause the nearby bushes to rustle, but it quickly gave way to raucous laughter. It was coupled by a momentary vibration beneath my feet.

What the?

“Sorry about that. Couldn’t help myself. God … that’s a good one, chaser!”

Chaser? “I think you maybe have me confused with someone else. My name’s not Chaser. It’s Timothy McAvoy…”

“Oh, very well, Timothy.”

“But everyone calls me Mac…”

More laughter ensued. “Oh, you are an absolute riot. No they don’t! Not a single person alive has ever called you that, not even your mother – no matter how hard you tried to convince them to. Nice try, though.”

“How do you know…?” Holy shit. It was God.

Once again I felt a dull vibration from below.

“But to answer your question, no. I’m not God, Buddha, Odin, Vishnu, Zeus, Amaterasu, Quetzalcoatl, Osiris, Etu, Ogun, Amana…”

“Okay, I get the picture!”

“Just trying to be thorough. Jeez. Wouldn’t want anyone to feel left out, now would we? I know how your species likes to whine when someone doesn’t get their participation trophy. But enough of that. In truth, I’m actually kinda glad you interrupted me.”

“You are?”

“Yep, because I have something I’ve been meaning to say that’s a bit more important than listing moldy old sky wizards.”

“And that is?”

“Run!”

The hell? Once more, the ground vibrated beneath my feet. It made me wonder for a moment if maybe I’d fallen through a manhole cover at the last second and was now lying dazed and hallucinating in some dank subway tunnel.

The only problem with that was the distinct lack of a subway in Manahawkin.

I felt those vibrations again a second later. This time it was accompanied by a thud noise. The cycle then began to repeat itself, growing quicker by the moment.

It was almost like I was hearing the sound of … giant footsteps?

No way. That can’t be.

Nevertheless, I found myself gazing at the vegetation around me. I was no arborist, but I couldn’t help but notice they looked nothing like the oaks or birch trees that were common in my neighborhood.

In the next instant, however, I realized the plant life was the least of my worries as a massive form became visible through the tree line.

My jaw dropped as I took in a set of muscular legs, a heavy body, and two tiny front claws. At the top of it all a wicked dragon-like head glared down at me, five feet long and filled to the brim with steak knife sized teeth.

A dinosaur.

I was looking at a real life fucking dinosaur!

My first thought was, Holy shit, that’s so freaking cool!

However, my second was a bit more sobering as I realized there was nothing standing between this thing and a hot lunch – namely me.

Forget Heaven. This was more like some afterlife recreation of the T-Rex enclosure from Jurassic Park, except here I was apparently meant to play the part of the goat.