Brothers Of Black Stone | Pt. 2

Sicily | July 10th | 1943

Bodies and blood went scattering across the grass as chaos ensued around them. The three civilians who Garret and Hale had moments ago saved, tried to run back inside of the house, but they each fell to the ground in seeping piles of their own blood in the order in which they ran.

Garret and Hale both dropped to the dirt, and rolled on their sides until they were able to find decent cover behind a couple of splintering tree stumps. Garret swung up his rifle, and aimed the barrel towards the source of the shooting.

The fourth mystery man, who Garret and Hale both shot, was sitting upright against the front passenger side wheel, squeezing the trigger of his submachine gun at anything that moved. His head was severely slumped to the right, dark blood aggressively seeped from his mouth as he cursed his enemies, and his red shirt was nearly soaked black from the three bullet wounds.

A loud hiss bit whistling man in the ear as a bullet shot past his head. A guttural grunt filled his ears next, so he used his moment wisely and pounced on Corrado with blinding speed. He kneed the boy in the gut, yanked the shotgun from his crouched shoulder, then used the butt of the stock to knock the boy unconscious. He quickly turned to shoot the priest, but the big man was already laying limp in the grass. So he focused on Rosalie, who was scrambling around in the unkempt grass for the pistol she dropped when she ducked for cover from the shooting.

Stalking his prey with a vile smile carved across his face, he whistled a deep tune while passionately stroking the shotgun’s trigger.

“Your betrayal cannot go unpunished,” he said in Sicilian in-between whistle notes.

“You are no true Sicilian. You are no true Italian. You spit in the face of the Roman Spirit.”

Rosalie was scurrying on her backside in reverse, trying to figure out a way to survive her downward spiraling predicament. Corrado was laying face down in the grass a few feet away from her, not moving. Father Burgio was bleeding out in the grass to her left, and the slumped over shooter was still firing off random shots in all directions. She couldn’t see Garret, or private Hale, so she had no idea if they were dead or alive. All she could see, and hear, was whistling man’s swelling black eyes, and his ominous baritone.

Rosalie had to think quickly. She couldn’t get to her pistol, nor the violin, both which she dropped when initially ducking to avoid the gunfire. But there was something that she did have. Something she could use in the defense of her life. She could feel it pressing into the flesh of her upper thigh as she continued to crawl in reverse, yet slowing her retreat.

Just as the whistle man was close enough to mount her, she kicked out her right foot as hard as she could. The man’s knee shattered upon impact, and his whistling swiftly cascaded into agonizing screaming. Collapsing under his weight onto his other knee, he swung the shotgun up and pulled the trigger.

The shock wave of the blast rippled through his body, but it was the sharp, pressurized sting in the side of his neck that unhinged his nerves, and severed his brain neurons. His fingers released the shotgun, letting it splash into a puddle of heavily pooling blood between his knees. His head slumped to his chest, then the shifting weight of his dying body pulled him down into the grass.

Rosalie stood hunched over the body, catching her breath while the man took his last. She thought about removing the flat knife that Corrado used to pop off the violin panels from the dead man’s neck, but the faint moaning of her brother waking up from his daze allowed her to leave the blade where it was.

Garret struggled to get a decent shot off because the man had his position dialed in. His best option was to wait until the gun was empty, then return fire while the man tried to reload. He called out to private Hale, who’s moaning had quieted.

“You good private?”

His only response was another shot from the slumped over soldier.

“Damn it, Tim. Answer me.”

Private Hale finally answered his sergeant. But it was a confirmation of bad news, and his voice sounded weak, and draining.

“I’m fucking hit, Mickey.”

Garret couldn’t wait any longer for the shooter to empty his clip, so used the inspiration he obtained from Rosalie, denied his fears of their desperate consumption, sprung to his feet, and charged the shooter.

Garret fired as he ran, dodging the final two bullets in the slumped soldier’s magazine. Garret’s fourth shot drilled a hole directly into the man’s skull, just above the left eye. His face erupted with blood, flesh and bone, and his face swelled to a red plump of ruptured veins and vessels.

There was no need to check for a pulse, but Garret did himself the favor of removing the machine gun from the dead man’s hands. With the threat neutralized, he turned towards the field, where moments ago a shotgun had fired, and grinned at the satisfying sight of the whistling man’s limp body resting face down in a small plot of darkened grass. His smile grew again as he watched Rosalie intensively tend to the wounds of her brother and the unorthodox priest. Confident that she could handle things on her own, he ran towards Private Hale.

The young paratrooper from Boston, and Garret’s childhood best friend, was half-slumped against a bombed oak trunk, bleeding out from the upper thigh.

“Jesus Christ,” Garret said while hustling himself into medic mode, “Keep your eyes open, Tim. I need you to stay awake.”