Chapter 1

I woke up laying face down in the mud. It was dark and I was cold and shivering.

As I became more aware, I realized that I was laying half in a pond or pool of some kind, and in the dark and the confusion, I struggled up and out of the water. The darkness was not so complete that I couldn't see at all, but the mud and brush in front of my face was the only thing I could see clearly. Everything else was just dim shapes in the darkness. I made it up onto my hands and knees, and turned my head. I could see stars, and the moon must be up, though I couldn't see it, for there was enough silvery light reflecting off of the horizon to let me get the feeling that I'd come awake at the edge of a small lake.

I struggled to stand, and I was beginning to shiver, or else I was just finally self-aware enough to notice it for the first time. This wasn't good. A man my age, and with my poor health, would die of hypothermia pretty quickly. I took a few shaky steps away from the lake's edge and saw the hard edges of something dark about as tall as I was angling down and to my right. I reached out with my hand as I took another step and felt the once familiar feel of a tent. Thank god! I needed to get out of my wet clothes and get warmed up pretty quick.

I began to feel my way around the edges of the tent, though now that my brain knew what it was, the little light available had resolved it into something resembling familiarity. Three shuffling steps to my left found the flaps of the entrance. It was zippered shut, which I'd feel grateful for later, but right now it was excruciating torture trying to work the zipper with my cold, trembling fingers. Thank god for the large, over-sized zipper tab.

There was a small tarp set beneath the tent and the edges of it stuck out past the door by several feet. With the flaps unzipped, I finally realized that my feet were bare. No shoes or socks. I struggled out of the shirt and pants, leaving them piled where they fell and stepped into the tent, bending a little to manage the tent's low ceiling. In the darkness of the tent my feet found a sleeping bag, perched atop a small pad of some type. I sighed with some relief at that, but followed that with a grimace in the dark as I once again began to force shivering fingers to work a much smaller zipper in the dark. It took many long minutes to work the zipper down enough to let me slide in. I tried to dry my lower half off as much as I could with the outside of the bag. I had the presence of mind to zip the front flaps of the tent shut again before I slid at last into the bag.

The bag had a synthetic shell, but a flannel liner, and I enjoyed the immediate sense of warmth that gave me. I didn't appreciate the length of time it took for zipping the bag back up once I was in it, but once I had, I relaxed and let myself calm down a little from the semi-panicky survival mode I'd been in.

It didn't take long for the shivering to transform into a warm, fuzzy feeling, and for that to quickly evolve into a hard sleep. Just as things were blacking out again, I thought I heard that voice once again, offering me a cheerful, 'Good job Harley!'.

'Fuck you, ' I thought back just before sleep took me.