Aliens, Tequila & Us: The complete series

by Michael Herman

  When Maggie transmits a sarcastic “thank you” to Messenger, I wonder if she and Bob were in similar throes as Messenger and me. I make no effort to communicate my thoughts which apparently are my own and not open to the others.

  Then a voice comes into in my head that shocks me to the core. It’s my mother’s voice calling my name.

  “Mom?”

  “I’m here with Theodore, reunited by Gi,” my mom’s voice says.

  I sense equal surprise from Bob, Maggie, and Messenger. They heard her, too.

  I think to myself, “This is not possible. She’s dead.”

  “No, Soliloquy. I was always alive within you. Now that Gi has brought us all together, I’m with Ted and he is with me.”

  Stunned silence is my answer.

  “Soliloquy, I thought you would have known. The clues were there for you. Don’t be dismayed. You’ve experienced reconstructive Gi powers yourself in the past. I’m the essence of myself, provided here for Theodore.”

  Sensing Uncle Ted’s embarrassment, I reply with political correctness, “I hope you find joy in each other’s company, Mom. I think it was meant to be.”

  Uncle Ted is, for once, silent. I sense he is very taken with the arrangement.

  Messenger takes the lead and moves on from the discovery of my mother’s presence. He launches me and him out to Forbes and Twizzle where we envelop them in our cloud. Forbes laughs and Twizzle giggles as she passes her hand through our vapor. When Messenger and I swirl back to hover over our orb, Bob and Maggie float out to smother Forbes and Twizzle in a last goodbye that brings tears, once more, to Twizzle. Ted and my mom whorl away from their orb and join in with Bob and Maggie until both Forbes and Twizzle are laughing and crying in equal measure.

  The long goodbye is eventually broken up by David’s words. “It’s time,” he announces and lets me know that I’m to lead the way. I make the first move and pull Messenger over and past Forbes and Twizzle. Behind us, Bob and Maggie follow, with Ted and my mom trailing. David shoots off and splits himself up into our clouds so that he is with all of us at once. Twizzle and Forbes watch for a few moments then begin to retrace their steps back to the mine entrance. I can’t tell if they ever look back at the orbs that still contain our bodies since I’m no longer in touch with them.

  Once we make our way to the mine entrance, Messenger and I swirl over to the SUV that carries Zed and Sonnet and pass through the air vents to flood the car with our presence. We both give them a final goodbye. Zed giggles as we touch him all over for the last time. A sleeping Sonnet smiles in her slumber. I hear Don Juan and his son “ooh” and “ahh” at our presence since this is as new to them as it is to us. Exercising remarkable control, we exit the SUV for the last time and then start to lead the others up the mountainside where I notice that a contingent of Gi light things, floating among some snow-covered pines, is waiting to join us.

  As a group, we are ghostly blue-green clouds swirling through the air, slowly winding our way up the mountainside, dancing in and out of the snow-laden treetops, hopping over some and simply plowing through others. When we reach the mountain crest, we quietly head off through the air, making a slow and steady beeline to the alien infestation site. Within the hour, we are there and whirling about what appears to be the recently uncovered hole. We look for Forbes’ tiny deceased avatars, but they’re gone, presumably taken by the aliens. Only their signature remains. We gather ourselves over the hole for the assault and then Messenger and I lead the way down the hole and into the cavern into...utter darkness.

  Where before, the cavern glowed with alien signature, it’s now bleak and empty of any signs of life. David communicates that this unexpected development must be fraud and brings himself to a glow that fills the cavern. There is still no evidence of aliens nor is there any trace of my disconnected avatars that should be dead and decaying. In this last detail, we know the aliens have made a mistake. We are being blinded by an alien entity that lets us see only what it wants us to see. It forgot about the avatars. Even with my avatars removed, there would be telltale signs of them here for us to see.

  Intent on foiling the masquerade, David casts off a small part of his cloud and dissembles it, energizing it to heat up and expand and force itself out and down one of the tunnels that connect with the cavern. In moments, he forces it to critical mass and then beyond, making it explode and blow out with deadly force. Instantly, we sense alien lives in crisis that we are still unable to see. Their screams of silent pain and anger wash over us. This is our signal.

  Gi pushes us to strike NOW.

  We agitate and disseminate ourselves, energizing and heating up, expanding and breaking apart, and swelling and dividing, shooting off into every direction; spreading and dispersing, taking the paths of least resistance, filling every nook, cranny, crevice, and air gap. We flood tunnels with our growth, occupying every small open area beneath the ground all the way back to the farm and all the way to where our bodies rest inside of Gi. Nothing escapes our expansion. It is spontaneous and with enough explosive force that it lifts every speck of matter, every rock, pebble and grain of dirt, high into the air in one earth-shattering fiery explosion. In only a matter of moments, everything above us—plants, animals, rock, vehicles, buildings, roads, earth, the ancient abandoned mine including Gi and our bodies inside of Gi—is fractured and torn apart, disintegrated and thrown into the atmosphere, higher and higher, gaining steady velocity from our angry voluminous force.

  As the debris flies up and into the cloudless sky, we follow with the violence of our expansion until we marshal our outspread selves around it and then compress, swallowing and digesting every last grain of earth and alien alike, squeezing and melding everything until all is reduced to the size of a small car of immense mass hurtling out into space almost beyond the pull of earth’s gravity.

  Like a blazing comet, it streaks upward, leaving only a brief trail of its memory behind. Then, at a preordained point, we assemble our combined powers and, like magnets controlling a train on invisible magnetic rails, we swing it, using the remainder of gravity available at this distance from Earth, to slingshot it out and into an arc that will intersect with the sun. Like a meteor shooting across the sky, it sails on in its new path of destruction. Nothing within that mass will survive. All life, alien and otherwise, will be snuffed out forever. Gone is Gi’s Alien body. Gone are our human bodies. Gone is life as we knew it.

  After our object is disposed of, we expand again, enlarging and increasing to fan out and follow the earth’s gravity field until, much like the aurora borealis—those sun-charged particles trapped in earth’s magnetosphere—we are trapped within the earth’s magnetic draw to ride out into the Van Allen Radiation belts—zones of energetic charged particles held by the earth’s magnetic field; zones extending from an altitude of 1,000 to 60,000 kilometers above the surface of the earth. On arrival, we start the process of layering ourselves over the entire planet, increasing our size all the way down to the ocean’s surface and the lowest deserts.

  By the time we finish, we are everywhere. There is no place on earth or within the inner magnetosphere we do not touch. And here is where we must reside and learn to eventually control the magnetosphere. Here is where we will abide and wait for mankind to catch up to us. Here is where we will begin our new life as a new form of Gi that will oversee the future Chosen. Here is where the past catches up with the future.

  We are a new Gi and have remade ourselves from the death of our selves. Our former selves are gone, as is the former Gi. As a collective, we are a new protector and guiding hand for the evolution of the human species. And as humans and aliens evolve, so shall we. There can be no other way. To evolve is to live. To evolve is to adapt. To evolve is to survive.

  We are a new Gi, as it was always meant to be and as it shall always be. We answer to the life force that made us and we answer to ourselves.

  End of Book 2

  Sonnet’s Legacy Chapter 1

  21 Years
after the Death/Transformation of Messenger and Soliloquy

  500 Miles South of the Equator, at the Eastern Rural Edge of Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, near the Kwango River

  By noon, the troposphere—heavy, simmering, and steamy—folds in on our skin, making sweat seem almost pointless. The mercifully cool 60-degree air that greeted us at dawn is gone. In the clear sky above, a flock of green red-headed lovebirds flies overhead twittering and trilling. Panting in the heat, two side-striped jackals looking like lost dogs wander into our unfenced compound sniffing for food. A small mongoose disappears down a hole at the base of a tall termite mound. An adult bonobo eyes them warily. In a tree a tree at the edge of the compound, a company of African grey parrots watch—singing, calling and whistling—like hecklers at a show.

  Beneath them, Zed and I toil.

  Thirty-foot Moringa trees with their delicate, feathery branches and small, deep green, oval leaves, form our compound’s western edge. A wall of eighty-foot-tall African rosewood trees with heavy undergrowth below form the remaining edges. Cleared of trees and shrubs, our compound area feels temporary—likely to be swallowed up by the encroaching wild fauna and flora any year now.

  Zed leans his shovel against the block wall next to him. Nearly six feet tall, he’s a good eight inches smaller than me. Tan, fit, and shirtless with friendly boyish eyes that belie the rugged week-old stubble on his unshaved jaw, he yawns and stretches. Sweat running down his temples cuts paths through the dust on his skin. He glances at a large rock python we’ve been keeping an eye on coiled in among a nearby stand of giant lemongrass. Its brown, chestnut, olive, and yellow markings make it nearly invisible against the litter of leaves and dirt. Looking off into the distance, he squints against the sunlight than lifts his cap off his head and drags his hand through short walnut-colored hair.

  “Mundélé Elombé, Mundélé Elombé,” a child’s voice calls out behind me.

  Turning, I see Boboto, the young African boy who’s been following me around for weeks. It’s me he’s calling. My Lingala nickname is Mundélé Elombé which means White Giant. Growing through my teens and early adulthood, I attained the unenviable height of 6’8”. I duck when passing through most doorways.

  Forbes is my given American name.

  Zed pulls a rag from his baggy shorts, mops his forehead and says sarcastically, “Your slave calls, Massa White Giant. You must save the day once again for him. What do you think it’s this time? Swallowed motor oil? (Already did that and had to induce vomiting.) Lit his hair on fire? (Good thing there was a bucket of water near at hand that time.) Bit by a monkey? (Nasty wound, that was.) Or is it just that his true love, the performance artist known as Simone Djikey, has coated him in ashes and motor oil again? (Took forever to clean him.)

  The boy runs out of the surrounding dense bush holding something over his head that’s about three feet long and wrapped in cloth. When the cloth falls away, revealing an M-16 assault rifle, I curse under my breath. A bullet magazine protruding from the gun’s magazine well means it’s likely loaded.

  “Jeezuz!” Zed exclaims.

  Speaking Lingala, I tell my young friend to stop right there and lay the rifle down and I’ll come to him. The last thing I want is him to trip, fall, and have the gun accidentally discharge. Remarkably, he stops, sets it on a clump of grass and then stands over it—beaming—proud of his trophy. I go to him and kneel to look at it. The gun is clean and in good shape, meaning it’s a new arrival to our small rural village. This is disappointing. Better that it was rusted and useful only as a toy.

  The boy chatters about how he found it wrapped in cloth at the roadside about a kilometer from our compound. His hands wave expressively, his legs dance, his belly twists about, and his sleeveless tattered shirt bounces with each body movement. His shoeless feet kick up small clouds of powdery dirt. He’s a marionette controlled by multiple puppeteers. In defiance of all his motion, the little green cloth cap on his head remains in place.

  He says there are two boxes beside the road that are too heavy for him to carry and can I come and help him claim his newfound booty?

  I ask if I might hold his gun for a closer inspection. With a huge radiant smile that could blind the blind, he announces, like a game show host to a winning contestant, “It’s a present from me to you.”

  Touched and honored by his generosity, I smile graciously, pick up the gun and stand to examine it. Fortunately, the safety is on, because the gun feels heavy and loaded.

  Zed is silent and slowly shaking his head. The ramifications of finding this gun could be serious. Someone, with most likely bad intent, accidentally lost it and will be looking for it. When that happens, we do not want to have it in our possession. They could turn it on us just for finding it. That’s how it is sometimes.

  I slide the magazine out of the gun with a click and find it filled with ammunition. I put it back in the well, walk over to the cloth a few feet away, lift it from the ground and wrap it around the gun.

  “Wait here,” I say and walk it to the structure we house the bathrooms in. When I return, Zed makes a face of disgust and says, “You didn’t hide it where I think you did?”

  “Would you go looking for it there?” I ask him.

  He shakes his head. “Smart man.”

  I quiz my young friend about whether anyone saw him with the gun. He assures me he was alone and no one saw him.

  “At least no one that he noticed,” Zed adds.

  “You need to come with me, Zed. If our little man found what I think he’s found, I’ll need your help.”

  “Sure. Let’s go.” Outwardly, he’s cool and passive. The brim of his brown San Diego Padres baseball cap almost covers his dark brown eyes that look towards the road the child came from. I hope the boy’s story about not being seen is correct.

  “Lead the way, my young friend,” I say and we start off towards the road.

  “Another wonderful day in the neighborhood,” Zed says sarcastically, a hallmark and an inherited feature from his dad, my older brother, the deceased Messenger.

  Yards ahead of us—not even glancing in our direction—a resident mother bonobo and her child saunter across our path. Overhead, green rose-ringed parrots fly overhead in loose formation. Further along, we scatter a group of black-and-white-striped hoopoes foraging in the grass. Moments later, disturbed by our presence, a family of warthogs plows away from us through the underbrush. Continuing along, we skirt the edges of a large stand of forty-foot-tall Raffia palms. We are almost there.

  Finally, we break through the brush to arrive at a rutted dirt road where we find, off to the side and down in a soft depression, two good-size wood boxes that have apparently bounced out of a truck driving down the road. My young friend runs up to the biggest and pounds out a rhythm like it’s a drum, chattering away about what might be inside. Gold? Money? Candy?

  Zed walks to the closest, pulls on one of the metal bands wrapped around the box and then lets it go with a snap. “Might be more guns,” he remarks.

  There are no markings on the boxes indicating ownership or content. The first one that I try to lift feels to be 80 to 100 pounds in weight.

  The dilemma is what to do with them. If we leave them here to be reclaimed by their owners, we risk a local person finding them. That could be worse. If we remove them and are seen carrying them and the owners come back, it might put us in hot water.

  My little friend hops over to the other box and pounds its sides like a kid checking a wrapped present under a Christmas tree.

  I look around us, doing a 360. The road is vacant in both directions. We’re alone. I lift the biggest box to stomach level and then Zed hoists the other to his chest. With a grunt, I climb up the small embankment to the road. Zed gets a small running start and trots up the embankment after me. He looks at the ground. “We’re leaving tracks.” Then he smiles that hallmark Zed mischievous smile and gives our little friend a sideways glance. “Boboto, make our footprints disappear.
Make like a python if you have to. Use your whole body if that’s what it takes.”

  My little helper, always one to find joy in getting himself as filthy as possible, gleefully launches into the task. By the time we’re away from the road and deep into the bush, our little trail demolisher is covered from head to toe in dirt and happy as can be. No trail is left behind.

  On arrival at the compound, we drop the boxes, cut the metal bands and look inside. Happily, neither box has weapons or ammunition, but what they do contain is interesting. The heaviest holds communication equipment with a satellite uplink. The second contains a very sophisticated compact telescope. Both give me pause. They would not belong to one of the local crime groups or military. Most likely they are the property of a scientific or geological expedition. This makes them worth quite a bit when returned to their rightful owners. My little man will be the king of his hill with his share of any reward money.

  But first things first, the kid needs to get cleaned up. I haul him over to an outdoor shower and have him rinse off, which for him is just as much fun as the act of getting dirty. I guess this is why I don’t mind having him around. He’s like a puppy, always getting himself into a mess and coming out with a smile in the end. Cheap entertainment for me—although the gun was a bit much this time.

  Next, I impress upon him the absolute necessity of silence about the gun and the boxes. I explain that the objects in the boxes may bring money if we find the owners, but he should say nothing to anyone if he doesn’t want to split the money with them. This hits home. That fact alone will guarantee sealed lips.