FAMILY NEVER MET

 

(Image created by my friend, Michael Deveau)

It is 2 months before D-Day in England. For as long as he can remember, Major Richard Blaine has been the unwilling host to what he calls the "Small, Still Voice" who sometimes usurps control of his body.

His friend, Rabbi Lt. Amos Stein, calls it Rick's Dark Passenger. 

Both Blaine and Stein have been ordered to return to their barracks which houses their commando unit, the Spartan 3oo.

There they will await the outcome of the investigation of the death of their immediate commander, Captain Victor Sturges.

FAMILY NEVER MET

“Strangers, woven together by fate, strengthened together by choice, tested by everything, become uniquely family.”

– Richard Blaine

 

I looked at these twenty men, some whose lives I’d saved without even remembering doing it.

‘You are welcome.’

‘I didn’t thank you.’

‘You should, but you are too self-absorbed to realize that.’

As so often with Sentient, there was nothing to say to that. So, I said that … nothing.

It was unnerving. As my eyes swept the faces in front of me, flashes of who they were flickered inside my head. 

But at the speed of lightning across a dark sky. 

Names, secrets only they and I knew, secrets they did not know that I knew, names both assumed and real.

For over a year, they had been with me. Foolishly, they thought they knew me. Yet, we were strangers to each other.

Sentient couldn’t resist my confusion: ‘Maturity, you will discover, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing’.’

‘Except for you, of course. You know everything.’

‘That is the child in you speaking. I am not your parent. I am another form of life entirely.’

‘Thank you, Captain Obvious.’

The most important lesson I had learned at St. Marok’s Orphanage came to my rescue: 

Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.

I looked at “my men.”  Deep inside me, I knew. I knew. These rough men were my family.

My family.

St. Marok’s was merely an orphanage – an arena where I survived or died. Not a home. Its magical library, whose center for me had been Helen Mayfair, had not been home. 

It had been part dream, part nightmare.

While in the midst of the nightmare, the dream that was Helen had been the only thing to sustain me. But she was safer far from me … as I was lonelier, colder … sadder.

‘You have me.’

‘I rest my case.’

I raised my voice, “Gentlemen, we have trouble.”

“Gentlemen?” snorted the wiry Pvt. Carson, a flash of a lost soul hiding his aloneness with humor flickering in my mind. “You sure you got the right group?”

“Old story, Major,” laughed Pvt. Porkins, whose weight struggle made him a bunt of stinging jokes on his name.

Cpl. Reese was about to slug him, but I interrupted, “No more of that, Reese. We band together, or we fall separately. Every hand is against us right now.”

He glared at me. “And whose fault is that?”

A flash of a savage, ruthless prison fight in Bombay swept through my mind, and I said hard, “Remember where we first met and ask me that again.”

He went leper-white.

I turned to the others and said, “Reese is right, I am the magnet that is drawing the fire this time.”

Jason Tennyson, who was a discredited physician unknown to all but Sentient … and now me. 

“This time? All the time. But I have no gripes. You hauled our asses out of messes of our own making the first time you met each of us.”

Cpl. Wilson, who always kept his collar buttoned tight to hide the rope burns on his neck, said, “I figure each day after the first day we all met the Major is a gift.”

Wentworth sneered, “Well, Darkie, I figure you say that ‘cuz ….”

I could never tell afterwards whether it was Sentient or me that got my body inches away from him so fast. My fist was heading to his big mouth when Reese hit the man in the solar plexus.

Reese barked, “Get your things and haul your ass out that door. And don’t come back.”

He flicked uncertain eyes to me, and I nodded. “You heard the man, Wentworth. Forget your things. Get out now. And the door won’t open for you again.”

“But they’ll arrest me. T-They’ll hang me! Y-You told everyone you’d never turn your back on a Spartan.”

I took a wild guess and said, “I never officially welcomed you to our ranks, remember? You were too busy trying to kill me the same night Eisenhower was trying the same thing.”

Sgt. Savalas said low, “I would have killed you for what you did that night, but I waited until the Major was well and back before I asked permission. Now, get out!”

He got out, glaring at us all the way.

Pvt. Dee Stevens, who wanted to work in comics one day, shook his head. “I know that guy. He’s going to try and make trouble for us.”

I stiffened as Sentient murmured to me, and I shook my head. “He never made it off the front porch.”

“What happened to him?” asked the Rabbi softly.

I sighed, “The ‘Still, Small Voice’ didn’t like that he tired to kill me when I was ill and weak. She …removed him from the board so to speak.”

“Was it fast?” asked Sgt. Savalas.

“I didn’t ask. Didn’t want to know.”

“Kit” Carson grumbled, “I don’t know how I feel about this.”

Cloverfield snorted, “You planning on killing the Major?”

Carson pulled up straight. “Hell, no. Not even before this. We sleep, eat better here than we ever did in civilian or Army life.”

“Then, what are you moaning about?” Tennyson scoffed.

I said, “You know what Eisenhower wants to with the lot of you, right?”

Pvt. Eric Evans, our boisterous electronic whiz, nodded. “Yeah. He wants to scatter us to hell and gone all over this base.”

“You might want to consider agreeing to that before following me to where I aim to go.”

Pvt. Anthony “Ant” Vincent, running from a hated father in the Mafia, frowned. “You aiming to die?”

 That’s not Plan A. Actually, I aim to misbehave.”

That got a round of laughter and a scattering of “Count me in’s”.

“Not so fast, gentlemen. I have a … ‘souped up’ Higgins boat.”

“All right!” came more than a few laughs.

“Which I aim to use to battle the nine Nazi E-Boats tonight that will attack the ships of Exercise Tiger.”

“Ant” Vincent held up a right palm. “Whoa! Wait. Nine? With just one souped up Higgins boat?”

“I’m in,” calmly said Theo Savalas.

“Me, too,” nodded the Rabbi as Cpl. Sam Wilson echoed him.

There was a chorus of protests from most of the other Spartans when Agent Cloverfield snapped, “Have all of you followed Major Blaine for so long without realizing he always has a plan?”

Reese scowled at me. “What the hell kind of plan could you have to fight off nine E-Boats?”

Sentient murmured, ‘Snap the fingers of your right hand.’

I did.

You might want to listen to this music while reading my excerpt.