But monsters, I now know, come in all shapes and sizes, and only their appetite for human flesh defines them.

And if humanity is the last war, then I am the battlefield.

I don't move. I wait behind my log, terrified. Over the past ten minutes, it's become such a dear friend, I consider naming it: Howard, my pet log.

Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another. We erect edifices in our minds about the flimsy framework of word and deed, mere totems of the true person, who, like the gods to whom the temples were built, remains hidden. We understand our own construct; we know our own theory; we love our own fabrication. Still . . . does the artifice of our affection make our love any less real?

It wasn't aliens that first made us gear up for war; it was our fellow humans.

Dr. Warthrop chopped off my finger with a butcher knife.

I was woefully ignorant in the social graces. I was being raised, after all, by Pellinore Warthrop.