Brothers Of Black Stone | Pt. 1

Sicily | July 10th | 1943

Garret shot first, hitting the man in the upper right shoulder. Bellowing in pain, the mystery man swung his rifle around as his knees buckled beneath him, and fired wildly towards Garret’s position.

Ducking and rolling hard to his left, Garret somehow managed to dodge the barrage of bullets. During his final tumble towards a wide tree trunk, which took the brunt of the attack, he heard Private Hale fire his M1 two times.

“He’s down, Mickey!”

Garret broke his head from cover and saw the limp, bloody body of the man who shot at him laying in a patch of brown grass. He sprung to his feet, and postured himself into an attack position.

“Shit. The pig pen guy’s running,” Hale said, breaking from his cover.

“Stay where you are goddamn it. There could be more out there.”

Hale struggled to accept the order, but this was real-life combat, and he was a well trained, damn good paratrooper who respected the chain of command. He stepped back behind the flat nose of the Fiat truck, then dropped to his belly. He crawled himself into the perfect position beneath the bed of the truck, and began shooting at the running man. Hale cursed as he watched the man’s black silhouette disappear into the trees.

“We need to clear this area, Private. Get on your feet.”

Timothy Hale wiggled his body in reverse, then jumped to his feet, raised his rifle, and began clearing the east side of the grounds, starting with the goddamn supply truck. Garret cleared the west side grounds, and quickly came to the satisfying conclusion that there were no more hidden soldiers.

They regrouped at the front of the house and immediately tended to the prisoners. Hale raced towards the pig pen, and dumped a large bag of feed into the far corner to distract the pigs while he saved the crying woman. As the swine frantically stampeded towards the food, he entered the pen, lifted the bloody prisoner from the dirt, and carried her to safety.

Garret cut the two naked men free from the tree with his combat knife, removed their gags, gathered sufficient clothing, then assessed and tended to their wounds. They each were inflicted with numerous small, yet precise slashes to vital parts of the body. Luckily, neither of them had any major artery cuts. If so, they would have been dead a long time ago.

One of the men however, had a bullet wound in his lower right calf. Garret hadn’t noticed it before, and the seeping blood seemed fresh. He must have gotten hit by the fourth mystery man. Upon closer inspection, and a rambling of shuddering words he could not understand, he found the exit wound. A small win, because it was not life threatening. He wiped any dirt away from the edges of the wound, then made a tourniquet from an old leather belt. He applied the tourniquet to the upper thigh, then used a smaller piece of torn fabric as a bandage for the wound.

Hale was delicately laying the middle-aged woman down beside Garret when a single shot rang out in the distance. All of their ears perked up, and Garret’s eyes locked onto the flock of black birds flee their canopy perches in the woods.

His mind quickly scrambled in panic as he remembered that Rosalie, Corrado and the priest were still waiting in the woods. He then made the connection. The shot came from their direction. The pig pen man also ran in the same direction.

Garret erupted to his feet, casting aside all of the lingering pain in his body, and swapped the makeshift medical equipment for his rifle.

“Watch over these three, Tim. I need to get the rest of the group. That shot came from their hiding position, and the pig man ran in that same damn direction. These two will be fine, but check her wounds. Some of them look pretty gnarly. Disinfect what you can, then try to find a goddamn radio.”

Garret turned towards the woods, and took two long strides before Hale called him back.

“Hold up, Mick,” Hale barked.

“What?” Garret responded with slight irritation.

Hale prodded a finger in the air in the opposite direction of where Garret was heading.

“Look.”

Garret turned one-hundred-and eighty degrees to his right, and saw four figures emerge from in-between the trunks of the dark chestnut trees. The runaway soldier was being marched across the clearing at gunpoint in a tight, security formation. Father Burgio flanked the man’s left, Beretta aimed directly at his skull, and Corrado flanked the man’s right, keeping his shotgun angled at his abdomen. Rosalie followed last, clutching Corrado’s violin in one arm, while she used her other arm to point her Beretta directly at the man’s spinal cord.

His heart beat a little bit faster at the sight of Rosalie’s thick, black curls bouncing off of her shoulders with every step, and he couldn’t hold back a smile as her unique constellation of freckles glistened in the summer sun. It was an emotion that leaned more towards admiration, rather than infatuation. He had never met anyone, let alone a young woman, who was as formidable, and brave as she was when forced to endure impossible obstacles.

Rosalie motivated Garret in a way that the US military could not. Rosalie, and her brother were fighting for their homes, towns, neighborhoods, and freedom. Garret was fighting in a foreign country, for foreign people, helping them retain their foreign land. He knew his purpose went deeper than the ignorant sentiments of some people back home believed, but seeing someone younger than him endure so much trauma, witness so much death, and yet remain unbroken, inspired him in a way that nothing, or no one else ever could.

“The son of a bitch is still whistling,” Hale said, startling Garret from his trance.

Garret was too fixated at first to realize, but then his blood began to boil once the deep tune invaded his eardrums.

With less than twenty five feet to go until Garret was able to reprimand the prisoner, a barrage of automatic gunfire erupted outside of the house.