Death prowls the Basque town of Guernica, besieged by a civil war, and it falls on the shoulders of one cowardly but romantic soldier to save it...if he can overcome his anxiety first.
***
Set in the Spanish Civil War, the town of Guernica has rema...
"Anyways, I'm going to sleep and see if this goes away," said Torito as he laid in a ball on his bed.
I didn't want to break it to him that we had a double shift that night. I just let him sleep that extra hour before we headed out.
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Our shift began around 1800 hours or so. Torito fell asleep almost as soon as we relieved the previous squad, leaving me and Camarada alone. Now, I said before that he didn't tend to talk much, but that night he was particularly chatty about a certain theory of his.
"I'm telling you," he said as he leaned towards the bonfire that kept us warm. "he deserted."
"I sincerely doubt it," I said. And I meant it. Tuerto was a gentle soul, but he was not a coward. Cowards didn't have scars on their bodies but on their souls. "You heard Father Maximino. He was just helping the skinny father, is all."
"Look, he's dull, but not dumb. For all we know, he asked them for help to escape. He's one of the few around here that is still a devotee."
"And I'm telling you that he didn't!" I said, entirely too loudly. "His devotion is what makes him so reliable. A sense of duty of gold, I tell you. He won't desert us, or his dear Fatima."
Camarada spat into the fire, and I will never forget what he told me.
"God doesn't love him. God doesn't love any of us. We burned churches, killed priests, and insulted his image. God even tried to kill him once, but only took out his eye. If I were him, I wouldn't risk the chance of God coming back to finish the job. We are an army of heathens, Sebas."
And indeed, we were. But not all of us.
"But, that would make God anti-freedom," I said.
Camarada clapped like a walrus and took a sip out of his water cup. "Bingo. Now you get it. God is against freedom."
"God gave us free will to choose. That is freedom."
"No," said a voice behind us. A voice we often connected with drunken joy or furious anger. Torito was awake, but still laying down. "God only gave us the illusion of freedom. 'Choose Me or choose Death'. That's why we were cast out of the garden of Eden: we stopped being slaves when we gained wisdom and knowledge. God is a jailer."
Camarada and I were dumbstruck at the seriousness of his words. Each of them was delivered with the utmost conviction. Even his expression was of retched solemnity as if God had personally wronged him at some point in his life. But it quickly changed to his smirking aloofness and followed by some dumb joke.
"And hell will freeze over before Fatima notices that cyclops baboon," he said.
"What about Fatima?" said Lula's voice, seemingly out of nowhere.
We all jumped on our seats, and even Torito sat upright when we saw her figure approach us with black bags under her eyes.
"Lula!" I exclaimed, "what are you doing here at this hour?"
