Page 1 of In the Nick of Time
ONE
NICK
In which Nick arrives for his first day at the new job. Late.
Nick circled the block—again—ina futile search for a parking place. Why were there no parking spots on the one day he needed one? He always got parking; it was like his personal superpower, only not very useful. And obviously didn’t work one hundred percent of the time.
Today, nothing. Nada. Nil. Bupkis.
Zilch. Zero. Zip.
Huh. He’d never realized how many zero words started with the letterZ.
An honest-to-goodness tumbleweed…tumbledacross the street in front of him. What the actual fuck? Was he in the Wild West now? Had he accidentally crossed into another dimension?
“Look, universe—or whoever is fucking with me—I need this job, okay? It’s time for a parking place. And no more tumbleweeds.”
There was no answer, of course. Nick pressed on the gas, intending to circle the block a third time.
At the last imaginable second, just before disaster of a magnitude even Nick couldn’t fathom—and he was pretty good at fathoming disaster—he spotted a huge turtle edging out into the street in front of him.
Tumbleweeds. Turtles. Was there going to be anotherTthing now?
He slowed. It slowed. Then it slowed more. Nick stopped his car and the turtle’s head turned toward Nick.
It was staring right at him.
Nick blinked.
“A fucking reptile now?”
The creature was on the big side; if somebody hit it, there would definitely be a mess to clean up.
“Thanks, universe,” Nick snarled, jamming his finger against the Hazard button. He also set the parking brake. It’d be just his luck if he ran over himself and the turtle and never got to his first day of work.
He imagined the headline: LOCAL MAN RUNS OVER SELF IN BIZARRE AUTOMOBILE ACCIDENT.
He’d be fired before he arrived. If he ran over himself, he’d be seriously injured or dead, yes, but possibly also fired.
“What are you doing out here?” Nick asked the reptile as he bent down to pick it up.
Weighing maybe fifty pounds or more, it was even bigger and heavier than he’d first thought. Heavier than a bag of Costco rice, that was for sure. Nick knew this because he’d splurged on an industrial-sized bag several months ago and had lifted it with his back instead of his knees. Every once in a while, he still felt a twinge in his lower spine. Was this what getting old was going to be like? Unexpected twinges?
He’d first intended to move the turtle back over to the sidewalk where—presumably—it had come from. But something stopped him.
“You have a death wish, don’t you?” he said to the reptile. “You’ll just head back out into traffic again if I leave you here. Where are you trying to go anyway? There’s nothing around here.”
Luckily for both Nick and the turtle, the street was currently vacant, even if all the parking spots were unaccountably occupied. There was no one around to hear him talking to a turtle. There was nothing but For Lease office spaces and inexplicable tumbleweeds. The neighborhood looked like it could be part of the set for Westworld instead of the local headquarters for a new-to-Nick organization called SPAM.
“Fine,” Nick huffed at the reptile. “You can wait in my car and when I’m done getting fired for being late, we’ll sort out where the hell you need to be. Did you escape from a zoo?”
Again, no answer.
After snapping a picture with his phone—he’d find out just what kind of turtle it was using one of those handy phone apps—Nick hefted it up and set it carefully on the back seat of his car. It took up most of the cushion.
Piled with old mail and fast food wrappers, the back seat was already a mess. A turtle wasn’t going to make it any worse. He was even later now, but it didn’t matter. If he’d left it in the street, he would’ve worried about it and wouldn’t have been able to concentrate while they were telling him to turn around and leave again.
Besides, he just couldn’t bring himself to leave it there.
