Strange Company Nick Cole (best classic novels TXT) 📖

He shoulda been somewhere else, like still sleeping in. We had the rest of the week off. But he was out there in the pit putting up the most weight I’d ever seen him do on the bench in the outdoor rec area we’d had assigned to us by our paymasters. The bar was practically bending.

“Hey Gains,” I said, standing there in my bare feet. The hot afternoon sand feeling good against my feet where the blisters had been filled with chemical injections that made you scream like you were losing your mind for two seconds. And then the pain was so gone it was like it had never been there before and you were ashamed you’d cried out like a spoiled child.

Or at least you used to be when you were just new in the company and the vets laughed at you even though they were screaming too when it came their turn. After a while you stopped being ashamed and just screamed for two seconds and then went on with your life.

So, the warm sand felt good on the soles of my feet.

Gains looked up at me and came back from wherever he was. And wherever that was, it was not a good place. This was not the Gains the company saw every day. The encourager. The positive mental attitude guy who would help you get your weak war-and-liquor-ruined body into some kind of shape.

Today, this Gains, this guy was lifting against some opponent that wasn’t there anymore. Someone not around the two of us in the rec pit.

He began to lift again and that’s when he told me his story. At the end of it he told me to put it down in the company log. Just like everyone else’s story of how they ended up in the Strange. Who they were. What they’d done. Crimes committed. Loves lost. Wrongs avenged.

“The man who was my father, wasn’t,” Gains began as he racked his next set. Adding even more weight. His voice was hoarse and bitter like he hadn’t drunk enough water. Then he was back on the bench and somewhere else, while the rest of the company slept back in the barracks and tried to forget the Long Patrol from Hell.

“Real dad died six months before I was born. My mom and him were young. Teenagers from the same world. Refugees. He joined the merchant service and got slotted onto a tactical supply freighter just before Sulloowa Moon. Joined as a gunner because my mom was having me and they were on their own. Gunner on those things was the only way he could go. So he shipped out and never came home.”

His set was finished, and he lay there, panting and staring up at the sky. He closed his eyes.

No one came home from Sulloowa Moon. It was a real turkey shoot. Freighters and the supercarriers got caught six minutes before jump and were shot to pieces by an armada of Sindo fighters. No one survived Sulloowa Moon.

He stood once again and added more weight to the bar. Then he was back on the bench and pushing. Pumping out reps.

“My dad, the guy she married two years later, not my real dad, he wasn’t bad. Didn’t drink much. Didn’t physically beat us or nothin’. He was a port loader at Crispin’s World. We got fed and I got school and clothes. He did that. But you know… he wasn’t nice about it, Orion. He didn’t hit you… but he could like beat you down with words worse than bein’ in a fight. He used words like weapons. Used ’em like fists.”

He set the bar for more weight once again.

Then he began to rep, and as he did the words came out bitter and full of malice. Each one shot out like a speeding bullet on a date with grim destiny.

“You ain’t nothin’, kid.”

“Your daddy didn’t have what it took. That’s why he’s dead.”

“Why you so weak?”

“Mama’s boy. Your daddy weren’t no Ultra Marine. And you sure as damn hell won’t never be one neither.”

He stopped. Closing his eyes and being there all over again. “That’s the kinda stuff he used to say to me. Used to hit me with.”

He paused, closed his eyes, and let out a long sigh like he’d learned to long ago to deal with memories unpleasant.

Then…

“I used to tell kids in the neighborhood that my real dad was an Ultra that got killed in the Sindo. Had the battle and all memorized. Looked it up. Darshai Beachhead. A real knife-and-gun show as the First Sergeant likes to call all those old battles, know what I mean when he says that, Orion? Got the Legion of War and all, my real dead, imaginary dad, did. He was a real hero to hear me tell it.

“One of the other dads found out and told him. Told my dad who wasn’t my real dad. The one who called himself, and made me, call him Dad. He didn’t beat me or nothing. But one day we were working on this old broke-down racer he had. He’d race on the weekends out at the Barrows which was this track all the wannabe jet jockeys thought they were really something at. We’re working on the thrust inducers and I’m holding the flashlight and he’s trying to track down a leak from the coolers. I drop the light and he starts into me and loses his place in the engine. Then he tells me what he’d heard about me telling everyone about my real dad, and he’s just laughing about it. Mean laugh. Stands up out of the engine and lights the smoke he always kept behind his ear. But it ain’t a kind laughter, Sar’nt. That man could laugh and insult you at the same time. That’s how bitter and critical he was. But, and this is the part that made him right and me wrong… he was right. It was all a lie, Orion. It