through the crowd, down the side of the pyramid, until finally
escaping back into the wilderness. His heart had never felt so heavy,
weighing down each footstep as he fled. For a brief moment, he had
been a god and now he was no more than a coward.
“But what could I do?” he cried up to the sky. “There was nothing
I could do.”
He tripped, stumbled and lay face down in the mud. An
enormous hairy spider sat inches from his nose, unmoving and
apparently sizing him up. Was it waiting to bite? Muchoman’s first
reaction was to smash it but he checked himself and waited instead.
Eventually the tiny monster scuttled away and left him alone in the
filth.
In this case, doing nothing was a course of action. And
sometimes it was the best course of action. And choosing the best
course of action was what being a hero was all about. For the first
time in his life, Muchoman allowed himself to be satisfied doing
absolutely nothing. He continued to lay in the muck and took a long,
deep and humble breath. A cleansing relief and joy poured down
upon him like rain shower.
He turned over, opened his eyes and found that he was in fact in
a giant bathtub, back on stage, having the mud washed off him by the
Gods. They welcomed him home from a harrowing experience and a
mission well done.
CHAPTER 38
“I don’t believe it,” Don Wong said to Gareth.
“Well, just turn on the television, then,” he replied.
“We don’t have a television. There’s nothing but crap on it
anyway.”
“Yeah?” said the former television executive. “You guys are so
intent on uniting the world, but you eschew modern communications
and build your headquarters in the middle of fucking nowhere. It’s
no wonder you don’t have a clue what’s been going on.”
“We’ve got a radio in the car, but its busted. But what makes you
think that these guys are for real? It sounds like a stunt.”
“It’s not a stunt,” Gareth insisted, “These guys may not be who
they say they are, but they’re definitely something more than normal
and they’re definitely not kidding around. They showed me things
H O L Y S H I T !
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