FINAL VICTORY OF BASTARDS

 Bleeding from Sentient's ire, Major Richard Blaine returns to his Spartans to an uneasy reunion.

FINAL VICTORY OF BASTARDS

“The best a Spartan can look forward to in this war is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow, and where few will consent to believe he has been.”

– Richard Blaine

 

Where once soft carpet, now hard, unyielding stone. It made for an unpleasant pillow.

“Ow!” I manly said.

Porkins cried out, “He’s back!”

Of course, it would be Nurse Reynolds to reach me first.

She kneeled over me, her tiny fists grabbing fingers-full of my blouse front.

“You lied to us!”

“I misled you. There is a difference.”

“Not to me, mister!”

She drew back her right hand, not to ladylike slap me, no, she was about to belt me.

Rachel glanced at her hand and went pale. “You’re bleeding!”

I would have been hard pressed to say who reached me first: Amos or Theo.

They both seemed to appear on either side of me at once.

“What happened?” they both asked at the same time.

I smiled. I had a new Greek Chorus.

“Sentient punished me for healing without hearing a ‘Yes’ from her.”

“Who?” Doc Tennyson asked, “Roosevelt?”

“No, she wanted me to heal him.”

“Heal?” frowned André. “You can heal people?”

I nodded. “If Sentient approves. If not ….”

I jerked my chin to my bleeding left arm. “Mommy spank.”

“Who, then?” frowned Amos.

“Marguerite Alice "Missy" LeHand.”

Cloverfield whistled, “The Gatekeeper?”

I nodded. “Private secretary to President Franklin  Roosevelt  for 21 years. She eventually functioned as White House Chief of Staff, the only woman in American history to do so.”

I sighed, “She was quietly dying without letting Roosevelt or any other of the other staff know of her pain or illness so as not to add to the President’s burdens.”

Theo shook his head. “Sentient was against you healing her?”

“No. She was against me rushing to it. But I had to.”

Reese snorted. “Let me guess. You insulted the President.”

“Nope. His uppity wife.”

Rachel groaned, “Of course. And now, you bleed.”

I shrugged with a grunt of pain. “I’ve lost count of the mornings I awakened to find my body covered with claw marks of oozing blood.”

Reese frowned. “I thought you said that orphanage of yours didn’t let you keep pets.”

“Big claw marks. New Orleans is the most haunted city in America.”

Evans gripped, “Major, this dam….”

Theo glared at him and then nodded to Rachel.

 “Ah, darn SR300 won’t stop ringing. And I have to tell you, Major, this backpack radio makes for a lousy pillow.”

I groaned, “The mule’s still alive. Flog him another mile.”

I got up with the help of Nurse Reynolds, much to my embarrassment. I walked stiffly to Pvt. Evans who had the huge blocky radio on the seared smooth stone floor of the tunnel.

He handed me the telephone-like receiver. I scowled.  Its range was approximately 3 miles, but varied considerably with terrain, location of transmitter and receiver, and antenna used.

We were in the center of a stone cliff. How was it still receiving?

Rachel wouldn’t let go of my bleeding. “Why is Sentient so cruel to you?”

I repeated what Sentient told me, “Cruelty is a mystery to her and a waste of pain. She considers it merely getting my attention as the plank to the side of the head to  that mule.”

Theo grunted, “And she’s been in your head how long, and she still doesn’t know you any better than that?”

“She is alien, Theo.”

I heard a buzzing in the receiver and snapped, “Major Richard Blaine, here.”

Major Laska’s exasperated voice shouted at me from the receiver. “That’s not proper radio etiquette, and you know it!”

But that was the sad fact: I did not know it. Sentient had piloted me through boot camp and all of Sicily. There was so much I didn’t know in how to be soldier, much less an officer.  Evans smiled wide, thinking I was outraging the supercilious officer on purpose.

“You’re supposed to say ‘Over,’ Over.”

“That’s just sounds like a bunch of round-robin nonsense to me, Laska.”

‘MAJOR Laska, over.”

“Are you truly over ‘cause I’m bleeding here, and I like to tend to it.”

“So, you are meeting resistance, then? How many Germans have you killed? Over.”

I sighed, not wanting to lie in front of the Spartans. “If you stop to count the dead bodies you’ve made, you end up becoming a dead body yourself.”

That answer appealed to Evans’ sense of humor, and he laughed out loud.

“Are you laughing at me? Over!”

“It was one of my Spartans.”

“Give me his name! Over!”

“No.” And that made Evans laugh even more.

And then, Sentient told me something that made me yell into the receiver. “Duck!”

I heard the tinny retort of a muffled ricochet. “How did you know? Don’t bother answering. You’d just lie.”

Evans snorted, “You forgot to say ‘Over,’ Over.”

“Who’s that?”

“Over,” I added for the major.

“Damn you, Blaine!”

I decided to have mercy on the man.

“Why are you and some of the soldiers not in here with me? I plowed the field for you. You had enough time to get in here before the tunnel opening collapsed. Over.”

“I didn’t trust you.  And with good reason, I would have been trapped in there with you now if I had. Over.”

Sentient murmured to me again, and I yelled, “Hit the dirt!”

Then was a sound of a body hitting the sand, and an explosion near deafened me even over the receiver.

Laska started crying, actually crying. “I’m going to die out here. Die. Die!”

“No, you won’t.”

‘He was going to murder you in your hospital bed, and you want me to show him mercy?’

‘I’m not Laska, and neither are you. Please.’

‘It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice. And even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war. The cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf.’

‘Yes, or no?’

‘Yes. But tell him to expect bodies of the Germans turned inside out raining down on him.’

‘What?’

‘Oh, never mind. It is done.’

“Oh, God, Blaine! This is a nightmare! What have you done?”

“Saved your life … over and out.”

André stormed up to me. “The others have told me what that man has tried to do to you: betrayal, lies, and even murder! Why save that man’s life?”

Amos loped to my side. “Because Rick is not Laska.”

Rachel looked like she wanted to hit me, but only said, “The final victory of bastards is that they turn you into them … if you let them.”

I looked to my Spartans and said,

“The best a Spartan can look forward to in this war is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow, and where few will consent to believe he has been.”

André shook his head at me. “You are insane.”

“I never claimed otherwise.”