I reached in the pocket of my trousers and fumbled around blindly for some loose change. I knew I had at least a bucks worth of nickels, quarters, and dimes floating around in there. I tried to discern the largest of the coins, groping the edges to distinguish the beveled quarters from the smooth nickels.

I pulled out a handful of shiny silver, and a quick site check let me know I was wielding a mighty eighty-five cents – more than enough to get the job done. But now I had the tough decision to contend with. Should I go for a Coke? A Sprite? A Minute-Maid lemonade? I was thirsty for sure – that’s what brought me out of office and down the hall to the break room. But more than that, I was hungry and tired. These late-nights at work were starting to take their toll.

It was hours past five and the building was all but abandoned. After-hours at the office is a weird time indeed. The same halls you travel dozens of times a day seem completely foreign and unfamiliar after 5pm. The lights are dim. The ordinarily cacophonous corridors are silent. And that white-noise electric hum of the fluorescents and computer monitors is gone, leaving only a strange, suffocating quiet that just makes everything feel a bit eerie.

So there I stood, mulling over my vending options, trying desperately to decide which unhealthy cola would most effectively jolt my system into surviving the last stretch of yet another twelve hour day.

And then I jumped. I had heard nothing – or no one – approaching until he was right upon me.

“Whoah, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you, Dave,” I heard a voice I recognized distinctly as Jared’s. Jared was our building services guy. The big, burly buck of a man who kept the bathrooms the cleaned, the light bulbs burning, and the hedges trimmed.

“Oh, I just didn’t expect anyone else to be around at this hour. Caught me by surprise,” I muttered back at him, gripping my change in my fist and letting the upright hairs relax back down my neck.

“Same here. Burnin’ the midnight oil, eh?”

I shakily worked the first of my coins into the slot. “Something like that,” I mumbled back, still settling from the mild scare. I had pretty much set my mind on the lemonade. But I still had a few moments to plan-B it before I hit the button.

I didn’t see Jared approach so much as I ‘felt’ him. He was a hulking man, well over six feet tall and nearly half as broad across the shoulders. When he came within proximity of you, you could just sense him. As if he had his own gravitational pull.

My fingers bumbled at the buttons. I missed the lemonade and ended up with a Sprite instead. The bottle came rattling down the shoot and echoed with a resounding thud as it came to a forceful rest in the little tray at the bottom of the slot in the front of the machine.

For some reason, I felt my heart racing. I was still facing the machine. I hadn’t yet turned to see Jared, but I could feel him right behind me. No, not behind me – he was right over me. I leaned down to pluck my drink from the tray. And then I really felt Jared’s presence.

It was one of those