With Envious Eyes

By Matt L. Holmes

In his seventh novel author Matt L. Holmes takes his readers on a thrilling journey of survival as the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

With Envious Eyes was inspired by the 19th century classic, War of the Worlds. More than a century after H. G. Wells' groundbreaking invasion tale, Mr. Holmes provides his own unique take on what the end of the world might look like. When three-legged metal monsters drop from the sky and begin wreaking havoc upon the Earth, even the most powerful weaponry of 2018 may not be enough to defeat them. What hope is left for mankind, in our darkest hour?

Previous works by Matt L. Holmes include such favourites as No Brother of Mine, Leap of Faith and More Than Good Enough.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matt L. Holmes
• Release date: Apr 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781989095034

Matt L. Holmes

Hi. My name is Matt Holmes, and I'm a retired computer guy in his mid-50s who enjoys writing fiction and non-fiction. I've self-published nine books so far, with more on the way. Six of those books have been novels, almost all of which are available here on Smashwords. My latest book is called More Than Good Enough. It's by far my longest novel yet, weighing in at a little over 200,000 words. It chronicles the 20-year journey of its main character, Miles Galloway, as he matures from a naive 10-year-old boy into a hardened journalist trying to shed light on the issue of sexual predators.

Book preview

With

Envious

Eyes

By Matt L. Holmes

With Envious Eyes

Copyright © 2019 by Matthew Linton Holmes

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction, and as such, is the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced or re-transmitted without the express written consent of the author.

Nathan Scheyen created the front cover image, based on suggestions and sketches provided by his sister Gabrielle Scheyen and the author. It is used here with permission from Mr. Scheyen, who retains all rights to the image.

The back cover sketch of the author was commissioned by the author from Gene Ha, artist on such comic books as Justice League of America and Top Ten. It is used here with permission from the artist. The author retains all rights to the image.

ISBN – 978-1-989095-01-0 (softcover),

978-1-989095-02-7 (electronic).

Print versions of this book and other works by this author are available via Amazon. Kindle versions of all of this author’s works are available at the Amazon Kindle store. Other eBook formats can be purchased directly from the author.

Correspondences to the author can be directed, via e-mail, to:

[e-mail]

Other books by Matt L. Holmes

Game Over

No Brother of Mine

Old Wounds

Leap of Faith

Hour of the Wolf

More Than Good Enough

... intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic [...] regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

– The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

1: The Falling Star

My version of the story begins, like all the rest, on the night of the storm.

_________________

I woke from a deep sleep to brilliant flashes of light dancing across the top of my tent. It was so bright that for a moment I thought it had to be morning. Except that didn’t seem right, as it felt like I’d barely slept at all. A few seconds later there was a pause in the light show, a momentary return to total darkness, and I wondered if I’d imagined it. Then the pyrotechnics resumed with even greater intensity.

Has to be a thunderstorm, I thought to myself drowsily, and yet I couldn’t hear any rain hitting the canvas. Or thunder, either, I realized as I began waking up enough to clear my head. I was struck by how weirdly quiet it was, just a faint breeze rustling one corner of the tent to prove I hadn’t woken up deaf.

Unzipping my sleeping bag, I crawled out and across it, toward the entrance at the foot of it. The inside flap was tied at the top and bottom so I had to deal with that, struggling to focus on what I was doing through sleep-encrusted eyes. I still couldn’t get over how much light there was to see by. It could’ve been mid-morning already, except that I somehow instinctively knew it wasn’t.

Half a minute later I was outside, standing in my gym shorts and t-shirt while I squinted up at the night sky. I couldn’t see any stars. Instead, there were thin white streaks running in every direction, covering the entire space visible between the treetops. Some of them could’ve been lightning but others looked like... I didn’t know what. And there were more of them than I could ever have hoped to count, each one zigzagging across the sky for a split-second before disappearing. The afterimages they left on my retinas were lasting almost as long as the jagged lines that caused them, making for a dizzying, almost-3D effect. I’d never seen anything like it before. Even the most extreme weather on the Discovery Channel was nothing compared to what was playing out above my head.

I noticed again how quiet the woods around me were – no crickets, no owls, not even a far-off coyote howling at the moon like I’d heard before turning in for the night. It was as if we were all holding our breath in unison, some gut-level, irrational response to an event that even millions of years of evolution hadn’t prepared us for.

Finally a deep and distant rumble of thunder broke the silence, followed almost immediately by a second, louder one. I’d been awake for over a minute, I figured, and yet those were the first sounds I’d heard.

There were a few more of those far-off drumbeats before suddenly the air began shaking, like someone had turned their amp up to 11 and then just kept going. I couldn’t even pick out what I was hearing – there were too many different sounds jumbled together. Deep, booming thunderclaps, sizzling electrical discharges and some kind of white noise were stepping all over each other, competing for air time.

Before long I had to clap my hands up over my ears, bent double at the waist and staring down at the dark nail polish on my bare toes. It was getting hard to think, the volume going up and up until I began to feel the pressure building between my temples. In a panic, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to will the noise to stop before my head exploded. I’d stood in front of 4-metre-high concert speakers and never experienced anything nearly that loud.

It seemed to go on forever, though realistically it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. Somewhere in there the light show must’ve tapered off, though I didn’t notice it right away. The pain behind my eyes was worse than any migraine I’d ever had and I sank down to my knees, a tight little ball of agony bent over on the forest floor.

Finally, the throbbing eased up and I realized my ears were ringing. The cacophony above the trees had stopped, though I couldn’t have said when, exactly. I mumbled a few words out loud, tentatively, and could barely hear them. The constant humming in my ears was drowning out everything else.

I opened my eyes. It was almost pitch-black, the only light coming from the stars overhead and the three-quarters gibbous moon that was partly hidden behind the trees. I could barely pick out the triangular outline of my tent a couple metres away.

After getting back to my feet slowly, I stood there for a moment. My heart was racing as I waited for something else to happen. Or maybe for someone to come along and explain what the hell I’d just experienced.

Not very likely, I reminded myself, considering that I’d picked this spot for how isolated it was. The last thing I’d wanted, when I stopped for the day, was company around the campfire over dinner. Otherwise I’d never have planned a four-day solo camping trip in upstate Pennsylvania in the first place.

When I could finally hear clearly again, I decided there was probably no encore planned, and so I climbed back into my tent.

After sealing things up once more, I fumbled around in the dark until I located my phone, tucked into one of my shoes. I wanted to at least find out what time it was and check the radar, see just how big the storm had been. And if I was really lucky, maybe the meteorological event of the century had already hit social media. Then I’d be able to see what everyone else was saying about it and possibly get some answers.

Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me, I muttered when the device in my hand refused to turn on. I tried three times, holding the power button down and getting nothing in response.

I was sure there’d been at least 40% battery left when I went to bed, so what the hell? And as if it wasn’t bad enough that I couldn’t check the time or get online, my phone was also the only flashlight I’d brought. Like I don’t already hate my fucking phone.

I rummaged around in my backpack until I located the small vial of Extra-Strength Tylenol I’d stuffed in there before I left Toronto on Friday. My head was still throbbing enough that I knew I’d never get back to sleep if I didn’t take something for it. I tapped a caplet into my hand and then dry-gulped it, making a face as it went down. At least no one was there to see it.

Sliding back into my sleeping bag, I kept expecting to hear rain. With that much thunder and lightning, there has to be rain, right? Except I didn’t really have a clue, I had to admit finally. I was no meteorologist, and without a working phone all I could do was hope I didn’t wake up in an inch of water.

_________________

Some time later I was jolted awake by a high-pitched shrieking.

I immediately covered my ears again, this time trying to use my sleeping bag as ear plugs, without much luck. While it wasn’t as loud as the storm had been the higher frequency was doing a real number on me. I had to force myself to stop my teeth from grinding.

As I lay there it dawned on me that what I was hearing was something tearing through the air – something really large, moving really fast. The pitch of the noise was getting higher, too, and the words ‘Doppler shift’ popped into my head from high school science class.

Oh shit, that’s a plane coming down! And it’s getting closer!

I practically ripped my way through the tent flap this time, terrified I was about to be obliterated by a 767 wide body at any moment. I knew it was ridiculous to think I could outrun it and yet at the same time I was determined to try.

Outside, it was still dark but off to my right, high above the treetops, I spotted the source of the ear-splitting scream: a yellowish-red blob of light, encased in flames. It was coming down quickly as I watched it disappear behind the trees a second or two later. It had been a lot farther away than I’d imagined, a huge relief as I stood there shaking. Plus it seemed too spherical to be a plane, another bit of good news.

A meteor, then? Or meteorite? What the hell’s the difference? I used to know.

Then the noise abruptly stopped, and I had just enough time to think, It must’ve burned up in the air, before the ground under my feet gave a sudden little shake. Not quite like an earthquake, though... more like a big truck tipping over nearby. That rumble was immediately followed by the sound of an explosion, slightly muffled as if it came from quite a ways away.

It had to be the falling star, crashing to the ground. What else could it be?

During my brief glimpse of it up in the sky, whatever-it-was had looked pretty big. Meaning it likely took out some trees on its way down. I hoped that was all it took out... Oh crap, what if there were campers where it hit? People could be hurt, or worse.

Okay, but... what could I do about it? If my phone hadn’t picked the worst possible time to die, I could at least call the park service and tell them what I’d witnessed. No chance of that, though, thanks to my stupid battery. And I wasn’t about to go wandering around through the woods in the dark, with no flashlight.

As I thought about it more I remembered there were lots of other people in the park besides me. You’d have to be dead to have slept through the storm and then the meteor coming down. So somebody had to have called it in already. Probably everybody except me, I thought wryly.

I stood outside my tent for a long time, wishing I could do something and frustrated that I couldn’t. I desperately wanted to get online, even if just to text my family and tell them I was okay. If that meteor came down anywhere near the park, it was possible they might hear about it on the news in the morning and be worried sick about me.

Stupid phone.

I went back inside the tent and sat down, deciding to check the thing one more time – ever the optimist. It was still deader than dead, though. I knew I should’ve brought a watch, or better yet one of those chargers you can power up with a hand crank. Should’ve known my flaky battery would let me down again. Oh well, there wasn’t anything I could do about it until daylight.

As I pulled back the top of my sleeping bag I noticed that while my headache wasn’t gone entirely at least it wasn’t nearly as bad as it’d been. A dull throbbing had replaced the percussion session that I’d had earlier. Remember what Mom always says: be thankful for small mercies.

I laid down and tried to sleep some more, but it wasn’t happening. I’d already been woken up twice, very rudely, so did I really want to risk going back to sleep again? The next wake-up call might be an 8.2 earthquake, in which case I’d rather be awake when it hit, thank you very much.

I thought about the odds of me being where I was, on a hiking trip all by myself through Northwest Pennsylvania of all places. It was the first solo vacation I’d ever done, which felt like a weird thing to admit in my late-30s. Though was it, really? Do single women usually travel alone, or do they always find friends or family to tag along with? What’s the proper etiquette, where such things are concerned? Before the break-up, I’d never even considered that question. Almost 20 years in the same relationship will have that effect on you, I guess.

A while later my thoughts went back to the events of the past few hours.

I’d been so stunned by it all that I hadn’t really taken any time to consider what any of it meant. Was it really likely that two such bizarre events would happen in the same place on the same night, without some connection between them? And yet it was hard to see how they could possibly be connected. What does a meteor have to do with a freak electrical storm?

Then I recalled how the light show had been silent at first, eerily so, before the big booms had started raining down onto me. I had no idea how long it’d been like that, since I didn’t know if I’d woken up right away or not. So just how high up must the storm have been for there to be that noticeable a gap between the light and the sound arriving? There was also that second delay at the end, while I still had my eyes and ears clamped shut and didn’t notice when it got dark again.

I tried to dredge up what the speed of sound was. I knew it was less than a kilometre per second but was it 0.5? 0.3? At least I could thank all those physics assignments in high school for getting me into the ballpark. So how many kilometres high was the storm, if the sound of it had taken several minutes to reach the ground? A hundred, as a rough guess? Maybe even two or three times that? That puts it in the upper atmosphere! How big must the bolts have been for me to be able to see them all the way down here? And does that mean the falling star was actually a satellite, knocked out of orbit by whatever was going on up there?

It seemed like a long shot, since I’d never heard of that happening before. So maybe it really was just a coincidence, the storm and the meteor happening so close together? And what did it matter, since I had no way of answering the question until I got my phone charged, anyway?

After a bit more tossing and turning I caught a faint whiff of smoke and remembered the big yellow-and-red plume of the meteor. How could I have forgotten about that? Just how out of it am I? A big, flaming ball of fire crashing down in a heavily-wooded state park in late July... yeah, dummy, what could possibly go wrong?

For the third time that night, I got up and left my warm bed behind. I glanced around the barely-visible interior of my tent, mentally calculating how quickly I could strike it if I needed to take off in a hurry. Considering that I didn’t want to get caught in a forest fire I figured I could probably pack up pretty damn quick.

Then I recalled all the rain the area had gotten the week before, while I was at home checking the forecast to see what my weather was going to be like. It has to be too damp out there for a forest fire to really get going... doesn’t it? Or does that even factor into it? How the hell am I supposed to know? Yet another thing I could’ve used my phone to look up.

Stepping outside the tent, I could see that it was beginning to get light out. I peered off in the direction where I thought the meteor had come down, half-expecting to see a red glow or maybe even smoke, but it was just trees and more trees as far as I could see in the faint, pre-dawn light. There was definitely something burning, though. It was unmistakable now that I was outside.

The only thing I could think to do was get dressed, throw on my pack so I didn’t leave anything valuable behind, and head out a little ways to see if I could figure out what was going on. Though I couldn’t spot any smoke in the air, I already knew roughly which way to go. The trail I’d been following the day before was well-marked and seemed to lead in roughly the right direction. All I had to do was make sure I didn’t get too close to anything burning, and... oh yeah, don’t get lost, idiot.

_________________

I passed several campsites over the next few minutes, most of them empty and unused. The few that had tents set up on them were deserted, or at least no one responded to my calls at either of them. I figured the occupants might be early risers who’d headed back to the shower facilities I’d passed the afternoon before. Or possibly they were up ahead of me somewhere, doing the same thing I was. Either way, I was on my own for the time being. I hadn’t been this disconnected since I was a kid.

Several minutes later I noticed I was on a slight incline, though I couldn’t have said when it started. The trail I was following continued on for as far as I could see, but off to my left there was a steeper rise that I thought might provide a better vantage point. I could see the peak in that direction, a point about 20 metres away with nothing but sky beyond it.

As I covered that distance I hoped I’d be able to spot where the meteor had come down, off in the distance somewhere. If so, then I could head back to my campsite and make breakfast, confident that I wasn’t about to be engulfed in a forest fire.

I discovered I couldn’t quite reach the peak itself. There was a thin, metre-high wire fence running along the edge in both directions. Something the park service must’ve put up to keep drunken idiots from falling off, by the looks of it.

As soon as I reached the fence I could see there was a fair drop, just beyond it, down to another ledge that was still well above ground level. I couldn’t tell if this staggered formation was the result of recent erosion or had always been like that.

Before I could give it much thought, I heard voices. They were faint, coming from somewhere down below and to my right. I slipped my pack off, glad to be free of it for a moment. I squatted there, pressing my face against the cool metal and scanning in the direction of the voices.

It wasn’t long before I spotted a group of people quite a ways away, at a much lower elevation – 20 metres or more below me. There were maybe a couple dozen of them congregated in a loose semi-circle, all facing slightly away from me.

I couldn’t tell what they were staring at as my view was blocked by an outcropping similar to the ledge beneath me. There was something wrong with the scene down there that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I slowly shifted along the fence to my right until I could see past the plateau that was in the way.

Holy shit, I muttered as the brownish-black, pockmarked sphere came into view. It was the size of a small house, dwarfing the people gathered in front of it. I could only make out the top half of it. The rest was buried in the wide trough it had gouged into the earth when it came down. There was a long, shallower track visible behind it, running for metres.

How did a rock that big not do more damage? I wondered as I struggled to find a position that would give me a better view. I mean, yeah, it dug a nasty hole in the ground and started a few small brush fires, but shouldn’t the impact have knocked down some of the trees in this area at least? I mentally calculated that it had to weigh tons if it was solid iron. Isn’t that what meteors are usually made of, or am I completely making that up?

I scooched a little closer along the fence, the wire digging slightly into my fingers as I gripped it for support. My left cheek was pressed tight up against it as I strained to understand what was going on.

I could almost hear what the gawkers down below were saying, but not quite. I was only catching the odd word, not enough to make sense of it. There were 11 men and 9 women, I counted off silently as I inched my way forward. Two of the men, I noticed, were wearing some sort of uniform... probably park service, I realized as I got a better look at it.

One of the girls, who couldn’t have been much more than a teenager, was wearing yellow-and-black full-length SpongeBob PJs, complete with booties. I smiled, picturing her leaving her tent like that. I couldn’t help admiring her complete lack of giving-a-shit.

No one had gotten very near the meteor yet. Maybe because it’s still too hot? I couldn’t tell from where I was crouched. I watched as a few of the men stamped out small bits of flames around where they were standing, while SpongeBob girl and the rest kept their distance. I was glad to see that the forest fire threat appeared to be a non-starter.

Then I realized what was weird about the way they were acting – no one was taking any selfies! I couldn’t spy a single phone or camera anywhere among them, an impossible situation in 2018 whenever anything interesting was going down. As far as I could tell from my perch high above them, not a single person had anything in their hands. What the hell’s up with that?

I crouched there for a while, shifting my position whenever I got stiff. It was like I’d been channel surfing and had landed on some bizarre reality show I’d never heard of and didn’t understand the point of, and yet now I couldn’t take my eyes off it. What a crazy way to spend my Sunday morning!

The group below was all wound up about the meteor, that much was obvious. Voices were being raised sporadically, providing frustratingly-brief glimpses into their conversations. It sounded like a bunch had come to the park together, maybe seven or eight of them. I wondered if they’d arrived from the sites I’d passed. Every time some half-wit got it into his or her head to venture closer to the edge of the pit, the two park guys kept insisting everyone stay back. No wonder they had to put this fence up!

Then, right around the time I was beginning to grow bored of nothing happening and thinking about making the trek back to my campsite, the air was filled with a muffled, hissing sound. It was like a power washer being used on the inside of a metal shed. The crowd down below was clearly freaked out by this development, several of them cursing loudly and one of the men even taking a half dozen quick steps backward, his hands out in front of him. Exclamations were being fired back and forth though they were mostly drowned out by the sound coming from the meteor.

For about a minute nothing else happened besides the hissing. I could only imagine the thing must be cooling, as what else could cause that much racket? Was that something meteors did? It was starting to bug me how little I knew about rocks that fall out of the sky. Had I just slept through Mr. Tyson’s space science class in Grade 12?

Then the hissing stopped and the black crust began to fall off, first in one spot, then in a bunch more. It was tumbling off like ash from the end of a cigarette. As it fell to the ground it began to form a dark ring around the meteor. More and more of it came off, a giant, burnt phoenix egg slowly cracking open its shell in front of my eyes.

Small holes began appearing in the portion of the shell that was visible above the pit. I didn’t have a hope of seeing inside it from so far away, I quickly realized. It was clearly hollow, though – that much I could tell. Explaining why it hadn’t made a bigger impact, at least.

I silently wished I could hear what the front row folks were saying while I was stuck up in the cheap seats. For a second or two I considered trying to find a way down, except I was afraid it’d take me too long to get there and I didn’t want to miss whatever was going to happen next. Better off where I am, I told myself. Even nosebleed seats are better than no seats at all.

Both of the park rangers, along with one of the other guys, began edging in closer, while the rest kept their distance. There was almost nothing left of the shell as they approached it – a few jagged pieces sticking up out of the hole, along with the thick, black halo of dust encircling it. From where I was I still couldn’t see anything beneath the edges of the crater. The egg could have been empty for all I knew.

More of the onlookers began crowding in then, almost completely silent as they inched forward. One of the park service guys reached behind him without turning, giving a quick stop sign that mostly got ignored. He was too busy to notice, though – he kept peering down into the pit, transfixed by whatever was going on there.

Suddenly there was motion that even I couldn’t miss: a large, rounded metal surface was slowly coming up out of the hole!

It was greenish-grey in the morning light, and I estimated it to be at least 5 or 6 metres across. As it continued to rise I could make out more of its shape. It was a machine of some sort, curved at the top with a squat body above a flat base. At first I thought it must be floating up, like a hot air balloon, but then I noticed the three... legs?... sticking down out of the base. That’s what they appeared to be, anyway. They were pushing it up, telescoping out gradually. They had to be planted on the bottom of the pit, down where I couldn’t possibly see them.

What the fuck am I looking at? I wondered in a panic, as the mechanical legs continued to extend upward, lifting the machine higher. Was this some new type of drone, something dreamed up by one of those terrorist nations? North Korea, maybe? Or Russia?

It wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before, that much was clear. Its shape was almost organic, with rounded contours like a giant bug, or maybe something from the deepest parts of the ocean. Even the silvery-green hue of the metal was unearthly, somehow, in the way it reflected bits of sunlight that touched it.

Just then the thing in the pit stopped moving.

All of the people around it had backed off, something I’d missed while I was fixated on its slow-but-steady rise. They were all clustered together about 10 or 15 metres from the edge of the hole, lots of wild gestures and shouted questions flying between them.

My eyes were still on them when a bright blue light began crawling across their faces. What the hell?

I stole a quick glance back at the machine to confirm that was where the beam was coming from. Sure enough, it hadn’t moved except now there was a matching indigo glow visible just below its top, on the side facing the crowd.

Flipping my gaze back to the campers, I saw a swath of stunned expressions contorting their blue-tinted faces. Most of them were frozen in place. When the light completed its path and snapped off, all of them were left blinking and probably as confused as I was. No one was saying a word.

What just happened?

I wanted to scream down at them to get out of there. I wanted to tell them that this wasn’t normal. That the hair on the back of my neck was standing up. That the skin on my arms was crawling and my stomach felt like it was full of bad sushi. I wanted to do all of that and more but I couldn’t get a sound out. My throat was constricted tight with fear.

Then the silence was broken by screams, none of them mine.

The people below me were thrashing about, sparks flying everywhere. A second later, some were bursting into flame! It was spreading across them faster than I could follow: their clothes burning off like tissue paper and their flesh turning black before I could even look away! It was the most horrible thing I’d ever seen!

I couldn’t move.

I couldn’t breathe.

I felt like I was going to throw up.

My heart was trying to hammer its way out of my chest. The 20 men and women I’d been spying on were... gone. Just like that. There was nothing left to show they’d ever been there except little mounds of black charcoal. Not even SpongeBob girl had made it out alive.

I was too stunned to think straight. Nothing that had just happened made any sense.

Numbly turning back toward the machine as my breath finally came out ragged and gasping, I watched as it began climbing out of its hole, one metal leg at a time. It was moving awkwardly, like a baby learning to walk for the first time, slipping and sliding a little in the dewy grass and dirt.

My paralysis finally ended and I was on my feet at last. I slipped and slid around, too, mirroring the monstrous device even as that thought disgusted me. I pushed violently away from the fence, still unable to catch my breath. I was on my feet, though for a moment it was like I was floating high above, staring down at myself.

Then I was running blindly, eyes delivering random images of trees and ground to a brain that flatly refused to process them. I tripped and fell, hard, several times, oblivious to everything except the immediate need to be on my feet and running!

_________________

The next time I was aware of my surroundings, it was the sensation of cold, running water against my bare legs.

I was wading into a river, or maybe just a big stream. I couldn’t tell, as I’d never seen it before and had no clue where I was. I also had no sense of how long I’d been running – the sun was higher in the sky, I could tell that much – or if I was even in the state park anymore. All I knew for sure was that I had no intention of ending up burned to a cinder like those poor souls I’d left behind.

When the water got up to my waist, I started swimming.

I went with the flow, satisfied that it was taking me away, away, away from that horrible thing. Nothing else mattered or even penetrated my raw, animal brain.

2: Never Give Your Real Name

When my arms eventually began to ache, I swam over to the far shore and grabbed a hold of a log that was wedged into a thick patch of water lilies.

It was nearly as long as I was so I wrapped both arms around it and hugged it like a lover. Though the water was shallow enough that my feet could touch the bottom, I let my legs slowly rise to the surface until they were floating on either side of the log. The bark was rough against my face and bare legs, maybe even scratching the skin in spots, but I didn’t care... in fact I was glad for the contact, for the sense of reality it provided.

After a few minutes like that, I got to my feet again. I worked the log free from the lilies and steered it into the current. Circling my right arm around it again, I hung on as we began drifting down the river. Just me and