Aliens, Tequila & Us: The complete series by Michael Herman

Author:Michael Herman [Herman, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: aliens, Alien Invasion
Publisher: michael herman
Published: 2018-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Soliloquy’s Sacrifice Chapter 18

One Year Earlier

The brotherly combat between Forbes and Messenger never ends. Yesterday, Forbes, who is down from the Northern California wine country with his mom and dad, felt compelled to send Messenger a picture of himself clad in a wetsuit, wearing sunglasses, drinking a soda, holding a surfboard, with the ocean as backdrop—just to rub it in that while we freeze in sub-zero temperatures up here in the mountains in Julian, he is little more than an hour away at the beach in San Diego, enjoying his Christmas break, surfing in 59-degree water and 64-degree air.

“Hope he gets an earache,” Messenger said dryly as he padded out the kitchen door to shovel snow from the driveway so he could get to work at the diner.

The snows this year have been particularly heavy, especially this month, burying everything under thick layers of downy-soft crystal flakes. The surrounding naked oak trees are coated high with snow. Pine and cedar boughs bend under a deep snowy load. Leafless shrubs disappeared beneath several feet of snow give the ground a bumpy, virginal, wedding-cake look.

That was yesterday; today is Messenger’s day off. He stays home with two-month-old Sonnet (Zed has yet to be born) while I open the diner and run things in his absence. After I leave the heated warmth of my SUV in the lot behind the diner, I endure the chilly walk down B Street to Main where I see a crew of two young men in thick red parkas shoveling snow from the freshly covered sidewalk. Puffs of vapor trail their heads as they labor and talk with each other. A lumpy waist-high mound of plowed snow runs down the center of Main separating both lanes. Traffic is almost nonexistent this early in the morning. A few lonely parked cars on the opposite side of the street are almost completely buried under separate mounds of snow. White ghostly fog hugs the ground, obscuring everything beyond the distance of a city block. A red pickup truck with a plow attached to its front crawls past the men at work.

I round the corner of Main and B and see two more young men in thickly padded ski coats. Using snow shovels, they clean the concrete sidewalks that front the nearly empty street. Passing them, I notice a large, worn, old-fashioned thermometer hanging from a porch column. The red line indicates minus five degrees. Not a record low, but close to it. Add wind chill and you have painfully cold weather, the kind that keeps customers away from the diner—meaning it’s going to be a slow Wednesday.

Looking down the sidewalk, I see Molly, wearing a grey knit cap, scarf, blue down jacket, and brown gloves. She’s huddled and waiting for me at the entry stairs in front of the restaurant. She waves and smiles and then wraps her arms in front of her for warmth. Behind her is our chef, Kara, sporting a long dark coat with a knit cap pulled low over her ears.

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