Happy Snaps

Happy Snaps

The car ambled slowly down Petunia Avenue. The pleasant, quiet little street was disturbed by the heavy rhythmic pulses of Tim’s electronic music. Sometimes residents gave him strange looks but on this particular street there were only a handful of birds who promptly took off to find a quieter space for their afternoon.

Tim had been working for a couple of weeks now driving the Google Street View car down every street in his patch of town. His friends were so jealous when they found out that he was working for Google. He didn’t have the heart to tell them that he was just working part time for a company that was contracted to Google. The work was fine, but slow. He spent hours driving up and down every street, slowly colouring them in on his paper map, making sure he didn’t miss any hidden alleys. After 6 hours of driving, he returned home each day to work through his photos, ensuring that they were in focus and to start the process of blurring out faces and license plates.

Tim thought he had the job figured out in the first few days- he raced up each street, planning to complete his day’s route in a few hours and to take the afternoon off. He quickly discovered that this resulted in horribly blurry photos, he spent the next week working extra hours to catch up for the day that he ruined. He now drove at a snail’s pace, refusing to traverse any street more than once ever again. The days were slow, but the loud music helped.

Today was a pleasant drive. Tim’s patch of town for the week had been on the outskirts of suburbia. There was a lake, parks and wooded areas. He had found a nice, quiet, shaded area to stop for his lunch break, and hadn’t felt the need to blast his music too loudly for most of the morning.

The last hour had started to drag on though, so the music was loud and he was determined to finish the route. Tim reached the end of Petunia Avenue, turned around and sped off back towards the highway.

Even though he had a few more hours work to do, it was good to get home. Tim rolled the car into his garage and climbed out. He reached into the back to collect the hard drive from the camera. He was so keen to get home he had left the camera on the whole drive back.

“That evidence will easily be deleted,” Tim smiled to himself. Quickly switching the camera off he locked the car and made his way inside.

Tim helped himself to a beer as he fired up his laptop and plugged the hard drive into the USB slot. Tim found that this part of the job could be dull, and he was working out the precise amount of beer needed to keep it interesting, without dropping the quality of his work. The odd missed license plate here or there was acceptable, but he needed this job so wanted to present quality work.

It was a painstakingly slow job, involving all the excitement of driving slowly down a street, compounded by the fact he had just completed the same trip a few hours ago, and he had to click through frame by frame. He had driven around mostly quiet streets today though, so he was able to work through the photos in a pretty short time. After about an hour, and two beers, he had already reached his lunch break in the quiet wooded area. It seems he had made a habit of leaving that camera on. He clicked forward quickly and found the point where he had gotten back to work.

Click – new photo, scan for faces or license plates, drag the mouse over and blur – Click – new photo…

Tim always thought it was strange that there were patterns in some neighbourhoods. In some areas there were a lot of the same cars, or dogs in yards, in some streets it seemed the residents even dressed similarly. He remembered a week ago where in a group of three parallel streets nearly half of the houses seemed to have old broken-down cars that appeared to be projects.

In this particular area it seemed there were quite a few vans. On two or three streets in a row he had spotted vans, weirdly they were all the same olive-green colour. Tim clicked onto the next street. There was another green van. He looked closer; it was an ugly beast of a vehicle. It looked as though it hadn’t been washed in a while, and it had a crack on the back window. Tim was surprised he didn’t notice it when he was driving, it was a stark contrast to the big white houses on this street. He thought it was strange how you can drive almost on autopilot at times and not notice the little details.

Click – new photo. Tim completed the next two streets, re-experiencing his morning drive. He tried to find interesting things in the photos, occasionally he would spot something strange, he had driven past a house the previous week that had a pet alpaca. It took longer than he cared to admit to realise what those big eyes had been watching him over a fence.

Click – new photo. Tim put his beer down and stared closer at the screen. There was another green van. He zoomed in, and realized it was the same olive green. Tim suddenly shivered. It was the same van. Same dirty exterior and same crack on the rear window. It had to be a coincidence, why would the same van be on two streets?

Tim went back to the previous photo and pulled it up next to the new one. They certainly looked the same.

“What the hell?” Tim quietly said to himself. He worked back through the previous photos, and found another green van a few streets earlier. It was the same van again! He looked closer again, he couldn’t make out whether anyone was in the van. Tim had to find the original photo, before he had blurred the license plate, he compared it to the other photos. The license plate was the same on each of the photos. Tim felt like he had been dowsed with icy water, the sudden realisation that he was being followed.

Tim’s heart started racing. He worked backwards through his photos. Why would someone be following him? How long had this been going on for? It didn’t make any sense. He clicked backwards, and noticed the van on a few more streets. In some of the clearer photos he could even make out a silhouette of a driver. Tim looked closer he couldn’t make the details of the face out but it appeared that the face was staring straight into the camera.

Tim jumped up from his seat, heart thumping. What was going on? He started pacing around his living room, trying to slow his heavy breathing and remember back to his morning. He couldn’t think of anything that happened that would encourage someone to follow him. After a few deep breathes, he realised that the Google vehicles were pretty well known nowadays, it was probably just someone wanting to get his photo on the internet. He laughed at himself, freaking out over what was probably nothing. Just the same, Tim got up and locked the doors of his house.

After one more beer to settle his nerves he returned to the laptop to see just how long this joker had been following him. He clicked right back to before his lunch break in the quiet shaded area. He couldn’t see the van at all in the morning, he must have picked up his follower after his break. He quickly clicked back through the lunch break and then stopped, noticing something that he had missed before.

Tim had left the camera on during his break, it seems it had continued taking regular photos of him while he sat under a tree eating.

Click – photo of Tim unwrapping his sandwich.

Click – photo of Tim pulling out his thermos.

Click - Photo of Tim picking his nose.

Click – Tim noticed something in the background of the photo. It was a large dark green shape, the van! Working through the photos Tim observed with horror the scene that laid itself out before him.

The van pulled up in the depths of this wooded area, it was hard to make out the details in the photos. A few photos later someone appeared to have exited the van. He was dressed in all black, dark hat, sunglasses. Obviously someone that didn’t want to be recognised. The character opened the back of the van and pulled out what appeared to be a shovel, he then stalked off deeper into the wooded area. A short while later he returned, reached into the van again and pulled out a heavy looking object wrapped up in canvas. A body! Tim had seen enough movies to piece this together. While he was eating his lunch someone had been burying a body just metres away from him.

Tim watched, heart thumping in his chest. The van stood still for quite a while as the character was off in the woods. After what seemed like an eternity of clicking, the character returned. He threw the shovel into the van, had one last look around and climbed into the drivers seat.

Click- The next photo sent a chill down Tim’s entire body. The grisly character had climbed back out of the van, and was staring straight at the camera. Tim froze, paralysed with fear. It took all of his will power to click to the next image.

Click – the character returned to his van, and had his shovel again. In the foreground of this image, Tim appeared to have finished his lunch and was packing his things up.

Click-The character was approaching where Tim was sitting, and Tim had been climbing back into the car.

Click- The car had started driving off, but in the distance a black clad man wielding a shovel could be seen.

Tim was nauseous. Had he taken another 5 minutes for lunch…he shuddered to think what might have happened. He knew he was supposed to call the police, but he couldn’t get out of his chair. Paralysed with fear, he kept clicking faster and faster. The photos started to look like an old horror movie. He watched as the van stalked him up and down each street. Always there. Always watching him. Tim watched as he completed his route, the van ominously hovering just behind him.

The photo tour reached the end of Petunia Street and made its way onto the highway. The Google camera took photos in a 360 degree circle, to ensure that all details were captured. This allowed Tim to watch the most frightening car chase of his life. The van had followed him onto the highway, and held Tim’s speed, staying just behind and one lane over.

Then something amazing happened. Tim remembered back to his afternoon. There had been a convoy of construction vehicles working their way up the highway excruciatingly slowly. Tim had enjoyed the sport of zipping between the convoy and speedily making his way home. The photos showed that the van tried to keep up but seemed to be cut off more than once by the trucks. By the time Tim had made his way off the highway, the van was nowhere to be seen in his photos.

Tim checked and rechecked the photos, making sure he had not missed the bestial vehicle in the background of any of the photos. It seemed Tim had lost it. He jumped up, and slinked to his front window, scanning the street in front of his house. There was no sign of the van, or any shovel-wielding, black-clad lunatics. For the first time in what seemed like an eternity, Tim took a breath.

The police arrived within the half hour, there had been a patrol vehicle in the area and the woman on the other end of the line had heard the panic in Tim’s shaky voice. The two officers looked over the photos. After ensuring that Tim was okay, they told him just how lucky he was to have finished his lunch when he did. They actually laughed about it!

The following Monday Tim resigned from his job. His supervisor still scarcely believed what he had been told, and it wasn’t until he had seen the story on the news that he realised the severity of the incident.

The police had been in touch with Tim over the weekend. They explained that they searched for the van’s number plate, but it appeared to be a fake – it belonged to a red Volkswagen beetle that had been stolen a few months earlier. They police had swept the area that Tim had stopped for lunch, and after a short search had in fact found a body. They didn’t go into the details any further, as the investigation was still ongoing.

Some genius reported dubbed the maniac as the ‘Yahoo Killer’ – someone who wanted to take out Google. Yahoo’s legal team promptly reached out to the news company who were forced to retract this, but it stuck. The Yahoo killer was never apprehended. Tim’s heart still skips a beat whenever he turns a corner and sees a van. It seems unlikely that the killer would ever find Tim, when he resigned he returned the Google vehicle. But to this day, if you look carefully in the background of Google Street View images, every now and then you can still see an olive-green van lurking in the background.