AGNUS DEI

Sentient has cast Churchill and Cloverfield Blaine knows not where. 

She merges him into a reality where the MPs, Cronkite, and Nurse Reynolds are missing ...

Leaving him to face an enraged General Omar Bradley alone.

AGNUS DEI

“Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before.”

- Sentient

 

I looked at the stunned General Bradley and thought oddly enough of the haughty expression of Eisenhower.

I pictured Hell as a state where everyone was perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement,

where everyone had a grievance, and where everyone lived the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.

Was this oh so important briefing at St. Paul’s School that Bradley was missing like that?

‘Yes. Prepare yourself, little ant. When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.’

I felt my hair ruffled by invisible fingers. ‘Come, little one, let us be off to tweak self-important noses. You cannot go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.’

General Bradley suddenly noticed me. “Damn you! Where have you been?”

I held up my bandaged hands, wiggling fingers I couldn’t feel. “Getting these.”

“Hands? Where?”

“When actually … which was 413 years in the future. I got to see the travesty this world becomes if the Nazis win. Humans become animals … literally.”

“Sentient! It ….”

“Her, General. Her. I think you really do not want to anger her.”

His face clouded, and the storm burst. “That tears it, you insubordinate thorn in my side! You and your Spartan 3oo are back in the 1^st Infantry Division.”

I smiled sadly. “You’re sending the Big Red One onto Omaha Beach?”

“Yes. It’s an injustice, but they’re the best seasoned troops I have what with their, and your, time in Sicily. I have no choice.”

“There’s always a choice, General. You do recall the enormous casualties we suffered in Sicily and now, you’re sending them into the meatgrinder named Omaha. Lambs to the slaughter.”

“Major, in war there are followers and leaders. And the followers do not get the right to gainsay their orders!”

His eyes narrowed. “As I recall we had this exact same discussion New Year’s Eve. I sent you on that suicide mission as a consequence. Now, I ….”

He should have listened to my warning.

My whole body tingled as an asleep foot does when coming awake.

Copper snowfall all around us … then ….

The general and I stood as ghosts in the midst of St. Paul’s School. I smiled wearily. Bradley was going to make the meeting after all.

I could almost hear Sentient laughing. At whose discomfort? Bradley's or mine?

Or both?