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Anne Rothman Hicks & Ken Hicks Praise Her, Praise Diana (v5.0)
Colin F Barnes [Code Breakers Code Breakers Alpha (v5.0) (ep
Cheryl Ann Smith [School for The School for Brides (v5.0) (e
Carly Phillips [Lucky 01] Lucky Charm (v5.0) (epub)
Diana Palmer [Long Tall Texan Donavan [SR 843, MD 1020] (v5.0
Diana Palmer [Long Tall Texan Harden [SR 783, MD 1004] (v5.0)
Anne Perry [Thomas Pitt 01] Cater Street Hangman (v5.0) (ep
Clive Cussler [NUMA Files 08] Paul Kemprecos (v5.0) (epub) id
Colleen Gleason [Gardella Vam Bleeding Dusk (v5.0b) (epub) id
[heft] Perry Rhodan 1370 Amoklauf der Wissenden

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.This wasn’t about his mom, anyway.It was about Thad and his father, and what had to happen next.“Because we’re loving parents,” Thad would remember his dad saying, through clenched teeth, “we are giving you two months.”Thad felt the air come back into his lungs.Two months? He wasn’t even sure what that meant, but it wasn’t the barrel of a shotgun.His father wasn’t going to kill him, at least not today, and that felt like a good thing.“Two months,” his father repeated.“And these are the rules.You aren’t allowed in your old room.You aren’t allowed to have any of your old possessions.Just that duffel from your mission.”Thad nodded.So far it wasn’t so bad.He was alive, and he was home.But his dad wasn’t finished yet.“You will sleep in the basement.You are not to talk to any of your brothers or sisters.You can’t even look at them.No eye contact.No notes.No phone calls.No communication at all.Because you, Thad, are going to hell, and any communication you have with the rest of us will only make us go to hell, too.”Thad opened his mouth but couldn’t find any words.It was a hard thing to hear, so explicit and out in the open.Hell, to his father, was not some arbitrary religious concept that you learned about in church; it was physically real, fiery and violent, and forever.And that was where Thad was headed.“You will leave the house by six every morning,” his father continued, his voice even and low.“You won’t return until after ten at night.I don’t care what you do during those hours, but you will not be here.No one will know you are still living in this home.No one will talk to you, or see you, or think about you.You simply do not exist.”Without another word, his father stood and turned his back on Thad.Thad’s mother remained at the table, staring at the glass.Thad was in the room with them, but he was alone.He didn’t exist.He picked up his duffel bag and headed to the door that led to the basement.Later that evening, as he was about to take off his white shirt and climb onto the cot his father had left for him to sleep on for the next two months, he was surprised to hear footsteps on the stairs that led to the rest of the house.Even more surprising, the visitor was his mother, quietly coming down to the basement to see him.For a brief moment, he felt that maybe everything was going to be okay—that she was coming to tell him that he was still part of the family, or possibly even give him a hug.He watched as she paused on the bottom step, looking at him.There were tears rolling down her face, and the hopefulness in him grew.She was going to give him a sign that she really did love him, that although they were treating him harshly, it was out of love.And then a hardness came into her eyes, and she turned away as she spoke.“When you die, are you going to blame how you turned out on me?”With that, she headed back up the steps.Thad stood there, watching her go.…Two months later, he officially moved out of the house and married Sonya.His parents were there to witness the vows, but they didn’t stay for the cutting of the cake.They spoke barely two words to congratulate Sonya and her family, and then they were out the door, on their way back home to Syracuse.Thad was no longer their burden.It was going to be up to him to make a life for himself, whether that meant working as a gofer on a construction site—or something else entirely.Something meaningful and important.It was solely up to him.3There was nothing like a two-million-year-old rock to put things in perspective.Thad grimaced as he took the last few steps across the dimly lit storage room, the oversized plastic crate balanced precariously in his outstretched arms.The crate was much heavier than it looked; it wasn’t just one rock he was transporting through the bowels of the University of Utah Museum—the crate seemed like it was packed with a big enough collection to pave a short driveway.It was going to take hours to go through all the samples, entering the details into the computerized archive kept by the geology department—and there were two more boxes just like this one still waiting for him in the upstairs receiving closet.No doubt, he was going to be in the museum all night—which was exactly why he had volunteered for the inventory assignment.Anything to keep him from pacing the floors of his and Sonya’s living room, waiting for the sun to rise.He reached the shelving unit on the far side of the room and heaved the crate onto one of the corrugated shelves.His shoulders burned from the effort, but it was a good sort of pain; he knew he was contributing something, even if it was just a long night of physical labor.Like the anonymous people who had donated the samples in the three crates to the university museum, he was giving something of himself to the geology department; in return, whenever he walked through the brightly lit display corridors upstairs, he would feel a sense of pride.Although, he realized, these particular rocks would never actually make it into the displays upstairs.When he’d arrived at the museum earlier that evening, he’d been told that the samples he’d be cataloging were donated materials deemed not good enough for the collections upstairs.Though some of the rocks seemed pretty interesting to Thad—a handful of fossils and semiprecious minerals that told stories of deep time, ancient life-forms, maybe even evolution itself—the museum thought of it as mostly junk.These rocks would probably remain in this crate in the bowels of the museum far into the foreseeable future.But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be inventoried, cataloged, and described in detail—as soon as the life returned to Thad’s shoulders.It seemed a shame—these items hidden away in a basement—but it wasn’t his decision to make.He was a volunteer, and no matter how pointless he thought it was to hide these donated fossils in a basement, he was glad to be the one getting his hands dirty for the greater good of the museum—in no small part because every minute he was in the basement, straining his muscles, was one less minute spent agonizing over the phone call that was now only hours away.Thad felt a surge of adrenaline at the mere thought of the call, scheduled for eight A.M.He knew that if he was at home instead of in the museum basement, he really would have been burning off the soles of his shoes, circling the cordless phone on the desk in his living room.The day before, in preparation, he’d even pasted a pair of photos to the bare wall behind the desk.One showed a reasonably chiseled, crew-cutted man in his mid-thirties, smiling toward the camera, dressed in a conservative-looking suit and tie.The second photo was of a woman who appeared to be middle-aged; from the style of the picture and the discomfort in the woman’s pose, it was obvious that the shot had been culled from a college administration handbook.No doubt the photos were probably overkill, maybe even a little psychotic—but Thad wasn’t going to take any chances, because the call really was that important.Disembodied voices made him nervous, so if he had to do the interview by phone, he was going to see the people he was talking to, even if it was in two dimensions.Eight A.M [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]