BACK FROM THE DEAD?

 

 "The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths."

- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

If you have been paying attention, and shame on you if you haven't ...

“A good friend listens to your adventures. A best friend takes them with you.”

 - Sentient

Major Richard Blaine, orphan and reluctant host to an alien entity, is being hurled back into life ...

BACK FROM THE DEAD?

“Coming back from the dead is not quite the same as coming back to life.”

= Major Richard Blaine

 

‘Hurt. I hurt. Hurt!’

‘Of course, you hurt. You did not give me sufficient time to prepare a realm within me to house your body.’

‘I thought you told me you could transport a person from place to place.’

‘I can but not instantly, not upon a heartbeat’s demand, nor to satisfy an idiot’s whim. As with the entire history of Mankind, you have brought this agony upon yourself. But there is good news.’

‘It will end soon?’

‘No. Long weeks of healing induced by me from within and from my essence without will be needed.’

‘How good then?’

‘Your injuries can be logically explained by misleading the Army into thinking they were inflicted by your Nazi torturers.’

‘I don’t care what the Army thinks!’

‘But I do. I have need of you to be in your military’s good graces, considered a hero, a living legend even.’

‘I don’t care what you need of me.’

‘You should, for it is I who will heal you … or will not if you prove troublesome. Oh, speaking of living, your Major Laska is standing over your hospital bed this midnight with a poorly maintained Fairbairn–Sykes fighting knife held in his trembling right hand.’

‘What?’

‘The Fairbairn–Sykes fighting knife is a double-edged fighting knife resembling a dagger or poignard with a foil grip. It was developed by William Ewart Fairbairn and Eric Anthony Sykes in Shanghai based on ideas that the two men had while serving on the Shanghai Municipal Police in China before World War II.’

‘I don’t want its history! I want to be able to move, to pry open my eyes, to at least to see him before he kills me.’

‘Oh, I do not understand why. It will be a depressing sight. But I have been healing your eyes as we mind-spoke. Here.’

I opened my eyes with a terrible sharp stabbing pain that seemed to pierce clear to the back of my skull. It was night, yet my healed eyes saw as if it were not. Sentient was right. What I saw hadn’t been worth the strain or the pain.

If I wanted a vision of the future should the Nazis win, Laska’s face gave it to me. Imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

He had been given a handsome face. Yet, years of conniving, plotting, back-stabbing, and lying had leached all the compassion, mercy, and depth from it. It was a face you could imagine being asked, “Et tu, Brute?”

There's nothing more interesting than the landscape of the human face. Laska’s face was that of a Redwood forest sand-blasted by his cruel choices into a ravaged desert. The fiery heat of that desert burned in his dark eyes.

“I want to take that mocking light from your eyes, Blaine. Why didn’t you die?”

I nodded my head to the ceiling. The agony that burned all down my neck made me instantly regret the motion.

I managed to husk, “I have … guardian angel.”

“I do not believe in God.”

I snorted, and I immediately regretted that move as well. “It … shows.”

That much effort left me burning up inside and out.

In South Africa, the gold mines extend so deeply into the earth’s crust that they are hot. The rock walls burn the miners’ hands.

 The companies there have to air-condition the mines.  If the air conditioners break, the miners die. The elevators in the mine shafts run very slowly, down, and up, so the miners’ ears will not pop in their skulls. When the miners return to the surface, their faces are deathly pale.

I felt like one of those miners.

What do you think is the world's most recognizable container of information? It is the human face. We are constantly reading each other and responding.

Laska’s face was telling me nothing I wanted to know … except he lacked the guts to kill me now that I was looking him in the eye.

I wet my desperately dry mouth with a cracked tongue. “What’s … holding you … back, … Laska?”

The voice that should have been an ocean away sneered from the open doorway,

“Our doubts are traitors,

and make us lose the good we oft might win,

by fearing to attempt.”

Major Laska shrieked like a frightened little girl. He dropped the dagger and, pushing past the disgusted Sister Ameal, ran out the open door and down the hallway.

She gracefully bent and picked up the knife. The nun ran a thumb carefully along one edge. Her thin lips curled in distaste.

“He has let the edge grow dull.”

I blinked my blurring eyes that refused to clear. “’The good …we oft … might win?’ … Who … would win … from my … murder, sister?”

“The list is long, young sir.”

A slender nurse rushed into the room. “What is going on?”

I nodded to Sister Ameal for her to answer since my tongue was dry stone.

She was gone … as if she had never been there.

“Oh, my,” said the nurse as she bent down even more gracefully, and picked up the dagger.

“What a wicked looking blade. Did that soldier drop this? Who was he?”

Some imp was turning out the lamps in my mind, but I managed to croak. “Major … Laska … thought my … throat needed … slitting.”