Activity

“YULENNA! MOTHER!”

Klein snapped awake. Gripping his rifle, he jerked his head around. Niarok was near yet another newcomer. He was bleeding bad from a slash in his leg. Nearby was a six legged camel? Its apparent handler was calming it. Everyone else wasn’t acting like something was too dreadfully wrong. Sitting up, Klein rubbed the back of his head. His helmet really wasn’t a good pillow. Too round and hard. But he had been able to catch about an hour of sleep. He’d be able to operate for a bit. The camel rider pulled a banjo out of his saddle bag and began to sing. It was slow, full of passion. A passion that moved the singer as much as the audience.

Klein never knew his mother. Or his father. He had been abandoned outside a church orphanage. His parents had been the padre and sisters. The other orphans had been his siblings. It wasn’t the common family but it had worked for him. He stayed on the strait and narrow where others fell off the path.

Then the Berge Stahl fell. The cargo vessel was on its way back from Mars, loaded up with heavy metals. The jihads that captured it knew what they were doing. At 2,600 feet, they detonated the ship, blasting Huntsville with a few thousand tons of death. The target was clear. The Space Command Center was hit multiple times. Klein helped on Ground Zero during those few opening hours. In the days that followed, his path became clear and he enlisted in the Marine Corps. And now, nine years later, he still wondered. Why? Why had he been abandoned? What would his life have been like if his mother had kept him? Would he still have enlisted?

As the song ended, Klein nodded. A broken man fixing himself. Or was it a man building himself. The perspective of one who didn’t know for himself.

“That one ’bout your mom?” Asked Klein.

@wingiby-iggiby