by Lars Teeney
“Easy! Easy Clementine! How the hell are you? It’s been a while,” John H.P. Schrubb, aviator extraordinaire, replied to Nurse Wainwright’s onslaught.
“Oh, my sweet, holy boy! You sure did go out there and gave those Japs hell! How many did you kill?” Nurse Wainwright interrogated. She put one hand on his cheek and smeared it like putty.
“Well, I was just doin’ my job ma’am. But, if you have to know: I believe I claimed fifty of their planes.” Schrubb winced in slight pain at Wainwright’s weight on his core, and her rough treatment of him.
“Johnny: I’m so proud of you! Of course, if you could had killed every last one of those yellow, bastards the Christian world would be better for it!” Nurse Wainwright exclaimed. The hate in her beady eyes, behind thick-rimmed lenses, reinforced her statement.
“Now, Clementine: No need to kill ‘em all. They just needed a good, old ass kickin’ from our boys!” John Schrubb was the voice of reason in this conversation, and that was scary to Nurse Sanchez. It didn’t bode well for the future. Nurse Sanchez was aware of who the Schrubb family were, being the political dynasty that had recently risen to prominence in the last decade. They had been getting cozy with captains of industry and people of influence and were poised to rocket to the top of society.
“Johnny: you’re so modest. Hey, guess what I have for you?” Nurse Wainwright teased.
“I have no idea, ma’am. What is it?” John H.P. Schrubb was puzzled.
“Hello, my boy! Christ thanks you for your faithful service! It gladdens my heart that you have returned to us relatively unscathed!” Reverend Wilhelm Wainwright stood ever-clad in his white suit, matching wide-brimmed, white cowboy hat, and snakeskin cowboy boots.
“Reverend! Thank you so much for coming! You came all the way from Texas to see me?” John’s eyes grew wide at the sight of his childhood hero; he had grown up listening to the man’s sermons in Texas.
“Yes, my boy. I wouldn’t miss the homecoming of our local hero. You’re a true hero for our faith.” The Reverend took his hat off and patted John H.P. Schrubb on his forehead.
“How are you, mother? Good to see you looking over all these fine warriors—examples to us all!” The Reverend bent over to kiss his mother on the cheek. Nurse Wainwright embraced the Reverend with the strength of an ox. Once the Reverend replaced the air in his lungs she had squeezed of him, he turned back to John H.P. Schrubb.
“I’ve been following the headlines here at home. It seems the end of the war is at hand. I am guessing our favorite flyboy had a huge contribution to this most fortuitous turn of events,” the Reverend complimented his former pupil.
“Well, Reverend, I am just abiding by the values that you had instilled me, and did what God put me on Earth to do,” John stated in a stoic manner.
“That’s my boy: a true paragon of Virtue! You have quite the future ahead of you, yes indeed! For the Lord has ordained it!” the Reverend proclaimed with a finger in the air.
“You know, Reverend: that’s all I asked from the Lord, to give me the strength to use the influence I’ve been blessed me with to guide the lost to His light!” John confessed. Nurse Sanchez found his words endearing and troubling all at once. He truly sounded devout and pious to her, but what about the people who did not believe the way he did?
“My boy: stick with me and my Church and you will be rewarded in this life and the next for your devotion. My Church has big plans: there is a reawakening at hand—a rebirth. We will return this land to Christian roots—you just wait and see,” the Reverend said. He sounded convinced that his vision would come to pass.
“That is all I ask!” John winced in pain. Nurse Wainwright jumped to his attention.
“Oh, poor boy! How many times were you shot down out there anyway?” she inquired while giving him an infusion of methadone to ease his pain. Shortly thereafter, John Schrubb’s face slackened, and his eyes became heavy, and he grinned.
“Well...uh...I was shot down three times...but...I sure did give them hell each time. I took down nine of them for each time they got me...gosh...I’m sleepy.” John nodded off because of the drug. The Reverend turned to his mother.
“Perhaps, we should let our little hero get his rest. He’ll have a busy schedule out there on the campaign trail,” Nurse Sanchez suggested. The Reverend scratched his goatee.
“Didn’t you say Warren Wynham was here somewhere? I would like to make my rounds to him as well,” the Reverend informed her.
“Yes, my dear! Right this way. I’ll take you to him. In the Marines, that one. Took some shrapnel while storming the beaches at Okinawa. Killed two of them yellow devils with his bare hands before he succumbed.” Nurse Wainwright delighted in the macabre details of the story while she led the Reverend away. The Reverend smiled and nodded with pleasure as she went on.
Nurse Sanchez went on with her duties, checking on patients and assigning duties. She had found the conversation troubling. Nurse Sanchez tried to imagine living in a country where a fundamentalist religion installed puppets within the government and attempted to usurp power. She was thankful to have lived through the F.D.R. years and to live under a government, which took the separation of Church and State seriously. But...what if?
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Private Alexander Burke awoke to the feeling of life: shooting pains pierced the right side of his body and face. His vision was blurry and he couldn’t focus. Only one eye was receiving light. He seemed to be having trouble thinking coherently: it took him several minutes to realize. He seemed to be under the influence of morphine. He lifted a hand to his face and felt that it was wrapped in gauze: that was why he couldn’t see out of one eye. Burke tried to remember what had happened to him. Everything was hazy. He had no idea where he was currently. He deduced that he must have been wounded badly to experience this much pain on morphine.
Burke willed himself to focus. What had happened to him? He had been on the Iowa: that much he remembered. He was part of a gunnery crew, and a battle had taken place. He recalled that the battle went on for hours, and that they had fired so many times he had lost count. Everything had been going according to routine, when suddenly he remembered an explosion, and a fire had broken out. Then the details had come rushing back to him, like a slap to the face. Burke remembered struggling below deck to find his friend, Private Jones, who was beyond saving. Burke remembered feeling great sorrow at that moment, but then he had struggled to save himself; to get away from the raging inferno. Then he remembered nothing after that. Here he was: in a hospital bed somewhere; alone. He surmised that his parents probably had no idea where he was or what happened to him. His friend Jones was dead and he was truly alone.
Burke, found himself thinking about the nature of his injuries. He did not know the extent. What if he was crippled or horribly disfigured? The rest of his life would be spent alone and scared. He looked to the stand on the side of his bed: there was a bottle of something; pills. All he would need to do is reach for the bottle, and consume all of its contents. He would be put out of his misery, and would not need to face the bleak future in store for him. Burke tried to summon the strength to reach for the bottle. But, when he actually did move an inch or so, the shooting pain raged into a torrent, and he groaned in agony.
“Whoa there, soldier! You were wounded pretty bad. You’ll hurt yourself if you try to move!” the voice sounded familiar to him, but he couldn’t quite place it. It was a voice that he had taken pleasure in hearing, and a voice that he had dreamed of that had kept him company in dark days when solitude drained his morale. He felt a gentle touch lower him back to a comfortable position. Then those same hands adjusted his sheets, tucking him back in. It was the way he would want to be helped into bed for the rest of his life.
“Well, soldier, there you are. All set. You can go back to sleep now. A nurse will be near if you need them,” the nurse instructed him. Burke had her name on the tip of his tongue, and he struggled to force the words out of his mouth.
/> “So, sleep tight there,” the nurse began to walk away.
“Nurse...” he managed to say.
“Oh? Something else?” the nurse turned back to him.
“Nurse Greta...Sanchez!” he forced out with some strain. Greta looked at him intently.
“You know my name?” Greta attempted to get a better look at the man’s face.
“Old...Ebbit...Grill...D.C. You told me...to return to you,” Burke fought and won the battle to finish his sentence. Greta looked at the patient card. It read: “Private Alexander Burke”.
“Alexander Burke, welcome home. It appears I owe you a promise.” Greta held out a soothing hand on the exposed side of his face. He cracked a half-smile and focused his eye upon her face.
She reached over and picked up a newspaper, laying on the bed stand, “Well, Private. You won the war for me, didn’t you?” Greta held the newspaper in front of his face. He grimaced, and attempted to focus in on the headline and photograph. The newspaper was the San Francisco Chronicle. He surmised that he must be in the Presidio. The date of this edition was August Fifteenth, 1945. The header at the top read: “Victory Extra”. The image, which he first thought was a photograph, was actually the headline, which read: “PEACE!”, in an oversized font, that took up half the front page. She flipped the paper over. There was another headline about atomic weapons dropped on Japan, being the most destructive force in history. It was accompanied by an aerial photograph depicting a towering cloud: an explosion, miles high...a mushroom cloud. Burke was suddenly overcome with emotion. He could do nothing else but weep. He wept for his fallen comrades, but also for what he realized could only be the death of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians. And, he also wept for the end of this ghastly, apocalyptic conflict. Greta held him, being caught off guard by his burst of emotion.
That V-J Day, she came back to him in the evening, to celebrate victory with a shot of whiskey, watered down for him, of course. Greta sat and listened to Burke’s stories: the exotic locales he had visited while on his voyages, and the horrific experiences he had witnessed. She was transfixed by the level of detail that he had retained. It seemed he had an encyclopedic knowledge of many subjects. Greta had reciprocated by filling him in on her own experiences as being part of the Cadet Nurse Core. She gave him the nasty details on her boss: the wretched Nurse Wainwright, and the humiliation she had suffered at the hands of her hatred for other ethnicities. Hearing about her treatment enraged Private Burke, but she had calmed him by also telling her how Doctor Hornsby had recognized her talent and rescued her from the torture.
Greta filled him in on the extent of his injuries: she told him his right eye was undamaged, but he would carry the scarring from his injuries for the rest of his days. His other injuries, shrapnel to his core, had missed major organs and arteries. He thanked her for easing his worry.
In the weeks to come, he would steadily recover. Each day she would come and spend time with him, even going for meals with him to the hospital cafe, when he was finally able to leave his bed. On the day he was scheduled to be discharged, he called in the promise she issued to him for winning the war. He proposed to her, providing that he would purchase the ring with his benefits.
Greta Sanchez accepted his proposal and gave him a kiss: a familiar one that brought memories flooding back from the night in Washington D.C. He went home a happy man that night, despite the massive scar across the right side of his face. Greta Sanchez would still be stationed at the Presidio for some time longer because the casualties had only begun to reach the hospital. The job prospects in San Francisco seemed fairly numerous, and Private Burke had given thought to remaining in the Navy, in an administrative capacity for a few more years.
It seemed obvious that the best place to settle would be San Francisco. Eventually Greta Sanchez and Alexander Burke wed, and they purchased a house in San Francisco’s Sunset District, where recently, the last of the sand dunes around the area were leveled to give way to new construction. The expansion of the Sunset District completed San Francisco’s conquest of the peninsula. Greta would insist upon retaining her last name, instead of taking Alexander’s, which in time, he came to understand. Greta soon finished her service in the Cadet Nurse Core, and received a discharge with honors. She continued her career in medicine, working at Saint Mary’s Medical Center. Alexander retired from the Navy and began a career as a history teacher at Lowell High School, not far from his house in the Sunset District. The couple would eventually settle into a fairly comfortable and standard American, middle-class lifestyle. They would purchase two Chevy model cars in the Fifties and Greta would become pregnant soon thereafter. Nine months later they would have a baby girl. With the family now established they would find their routine, and would live through, and enjoy American hegemony that the war had ushered in, as the last two superpowers in the world, fought a series of proxy wars to fight for the scraps of the European empires that had crumbled in World War Two.
Burke would read the headlines about these wars and watch news reports on television about the rise to prominence of John H.P. Schrubb and his ilk: first in a fairly uneventful, but influential congressional career, then a Senate run, for his state of Texas. Burke would also catch the farewell address of President Dwight D. Eisenhower: warning the public of the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex, and its undue influence on government policy, an address that would haunt him for some time, especially after reading articles about all the exclusive contracts that Wynham Industries was winning to provide the government with state-of-the-art weapon systems. But, then the grind of daily life robbed him of the energy required to raise awareness for these sorts of issues, and time waits for no one. So, after several years the concern receded to the back of Burke’s mind and he continued to live his middle-class life.
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
ARMAGEDDON
Gale-Whirlwind’s force was now mobile. On their march north, after bypassing the capital they had come upon a Regime armory in Baltimore. Gale-Whirlwind and Angel-Seraphim drew up plans to overrun the armory. After a brief skirmish, the lightly-defended armory fell to the Apostate attack. From there on out they had free access to Regime A.P.C.s and weapons. Gale put the transportation to good use. She ordered the troops to load up in the captured vehicles and thus cut the time it would take to reach New York City. Gale rode in a separate A.P.C. from Angel-Seraphim for security purposes to make sure that one of them would survive if something happened to the other.
The column of A.P.C.s had reached the outskirts of Philadelphia, with no plan to stop. They needed to find the other Apostate force and link-up as soon as possible. Gale also knew that the Apostate fleet had withdrawn from the Chesapeake Bay and now sailed up the coast to rendezvous in New York with her force. She did not know what sort of defenses the largest city in New Megiddo had in place. Gale hoped that the combined Apostate forces would be enough to overcome whatever opposition they came up against.
And what of Hades-Perdition? Running off on his grand personal errand: who did he think he was? He was also convinced that Ravine would somehow, magically, stop whatever doom scenario the Church and Regime had cooked up for their followers. What if he conned them like the drug-addicted liar she thought him to be? For being a resistance movement against theocracy and superstition, they seemed to be relying on faith quite a bit for success. This bothered Gale to no end. Most of all she was mad at herself; mad for giving Ravine another chance. She was mad because she believed that he had reformed, and she fell for it. All he ended up doing was abandoning her again. In her mind, he was beyond redemption and he would cost them all dearly.
“Angel, how goes your progress?” Gale messaged her via her neural implant.
“The column is making good time: no resistance so far,” Angel reported in.
“Okay thank you,” Gale replied.
In the adjacent column Angel-Seraphim rode, where she sat silently and fiddled with the contracted plasma spear. She desired an end to this
adventure in New Megiddo. It was not her home and if it wasn’t for her sense of honor, and the need to avenge her friend, Pale-Silence, she would have abandoned this quest long ago. After all, the supposedly committed Ravine-Gulch just disappeared without a trace. Did staying around to finish the battle make her a fool? Angel yearned to return home to defend her family and her homeland of Nicaragua. Angel wondered what Friar Francis was planning in Central America if she was still alive, and, Angel was fairly certain that she was still alive. It was too late now, though, the only thing she could do was see this crisis out to the end.
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
Inquisitor Rodrigo had no time to perform any careful surgery: he had gone through too much trouble to gather this trophy. She had put up a good fight, but the Inquisitor knew that it would only be a matter of time before she succumbed. Now, Kate Schrubb’s lifeless body lay ripe for the harvesting; he would need to collect her neural implant. Inquisitor Rodrigo moved about the ruin of the foyer of Kate Schrubb’s mansion. After a few moments of searching around, he located his lion-head cane, which had laid under broken shards of a vase. Inquisitor Rodrigo checked himself over and found he had several cuts that Kate had delivered to him with her combat knife. He deemed his wounds superficial.
So, the Inquisitor prepared to collect his grisly trophy: Kate Schrubb’s head. He extended the blade of his sword, and pulled Kate’s body up by her blonde hair, then, he brought the sword blade up to her throat to sever it.
“Of all the things I thought I would live to see you do, murdering your boss was not among them,” a voice called out from the other side of the trashed foyer. Inquisitor Rodrigo paused from his grisly task to look up, then he smirked at the sight of Hades-Perdition standing there. He let Kate Schrubb’s body fall to the floor once more and retracted his blade back into his cane. The Inquisitor noticed Hades-Perdition held two Ranger patches in his hand.