Kilo-29 (Damned of the 2/19th, Book 15)

Part 21

"Hea..." I didn't finish her name.

The world vanished.

------------------------------

"Goddamn it, hold him down!" Kincaid was yelling, but it sounded far away and tinny, my ears ringing and my vision blurred. My whole arm burned from the shoulder down, and the asshole had his foot in my armpit, my wrist held tightly in a cravat he'd wrapped around it, the ends of the cravat in his hands.

"He won't hold still!" Meyers yelled.

"Sergeant, you've got to hold still, can you hear me, Sergeant?" Shads' face was above mine, and my head was held between his knees.

"Goddamn it, he's strong." Wilkins bitched. "Why is he fighting us?"

"He doesn't know where he is, the blast knocked him goofy." Donaldson said, "Now hold him."

"Just do it, Kincaid, you pussy." Nancy said, standing behind Kincaid. "He won't stop fighting, he's a boy."

"Fuck it." Kincaid snarled, and suddenly leaned backwards, dragging my wrist with him.

My shoulder gave a loud POP and I screamed, both in pain and sudden, almost orgasmic, release from the agony. He yanked again and there was another pop, and another when he yanked the third time.

I screamed through all three pulls.

"He's awake!" Shads said.

"Heather?" I asked, trying to look around. I could smell the soft smell of her hair and a faint whiff of breakfree. "Where's the baby?"

"He's a little confused." Shads finished.

"Someone married him?" Meyers sounded like he didn't believe it.

"Nancy, I'm coming, hold on, babe, hold on." I said, tears running out of my eyes.

"Sergeant Ant, it's Kincaid, are you all right?"

"Kincaid?" My mouth felt weirdly disjointed. My tongue hurt from where I'd bitten it again.

"He'll be fine." Kincaid said, unwrapping the cravat from my wrist.

"The Suits, where's the fucking Suits?" I said, trying to sit up. Shads put his hand on my head. "Did we get everyone out?"

"Don't worry about them, Sergeant." Shads told me. "We're in one of the lower levels, that was awhile ago."

"What happened?" I asked.

"Here, give him his glasses." Donaldson said.

"A mine went off, it dislocated your shoulder." Shads reached down and I tried to flinch back, but he was only putting my glasses on me. "It was bent behind you when we found you under the table."

"You're lucky you're alive, Sergeant." Wilkins said. His voice sounded different.

Shads stood up and I looked to the side. The top edge of the table was ragged, a large chunk torn out of it. The concrete walls around us were scarred and pitted. It was face down on the floor, the damaged edge facing me.

"Luck, hell." I said, trying to sit up. This time nobody was holding me down, so I managed after the third try.

"It knocked you cold, I thought you were dead." Donaldson told me.

"I hate mines." I groaned, trying to stand up. "Where's my rifle?"

"Here, Sergeant." Donaldson said, handing it to me. "We had to pull it off your back so we could set your shoulder."

I looked over, and Kincaid was replacing the FM in the SF aid bag. I tried lifting my arm, and except for the soreness I usually had after it dislocated, it felt better than it had since the fight in the hallway. It must have been partly dislocated and I hadn't noticed through the swelling.

Chronic dislocated joints can be weird like that.

"You did a good job, Kincaid." I complimented him, flexing my arm and wincing as the abused and over-stretched muscles protested.

"Glad the manual was in there." Kincaid answered.

"Let's not stand around, we need to keep moving. The enemy might know where we are now." I told them, rolling my shoulders to set my gear properly. "We still have a mission."

"Are you sure you're all right?" Wilkins asked. I looked at him, and his face was pale, his eyes a little wider than normal.

"I've been hurt worse fucking." I grinned.

"You're face is fucked up." Wilkins told me. "I think you broke your nose."

That would be from the blast slamming my face into the concrete.

"He's a dude, he's supposed to be ugly. If God had wanted him pretty, He would have made him a girl." Kincaid quoted and I gave him a thumbs up. Donaldson and Shads chuckled. Natchez laughed, and Wilkins cracked a smile. Meyers looked offended.

I moved around the table. Down the hallway a little ways was the outer steel shell and I kicked it down the hallway.

Two passages later the camera was pointed left. The hallway in front of us was dark, same with the one on the right, but the right hand hallway was lit up.

"Deeper into the rabbit hole." I quoted, remembering the site's name.

"Who do you think set the mine?" Wilkins asked.

"Someone prudent." I answered.

"No shit. It would have killed one of those things." Kincaid said.

"Does that mean they're trying to kill us?" Natchez asked.

"No, it means that they're afraid of the other things." Shads said.

The tunnel suddenly ended in a heavy steel door. Someone behind me whistled, long and low, as we stared at it.

"Is that a submarine door?" Meyers asked.

"Same design." I told them. There was no keypad and I stared at the door a long time.

"Well, are you going to open it?" Meyers asked.

"In a sec." I said.

"Want to see a mine go off up close and personal like Sergeant Ant did?" Donaldson asked.

It looked clear, but that didn't mean shit.

...the dark figure who had been standing by the stairwell door stepped around and swung an axe.

And hit John in the stomach...

"Well, luck favors the bold." I said, stepping up and grabbing two of the spokes off the wheel. I tensed up, then hauled on it as hard as I could, expecting the door to be stiff with neglect and age.

The wheel spun, throwing me off balance, and I lost my grip and staggered against the wall. The wheel stopped suddenly with a loud THUMP. I straightened up, reached out, and pushed on the door with two fingers.

It swung out silently, the counterweights functioning perfectly.

Beyond the door a massive cave stretched in front of us. It was full of construction equipment, pallets of bags, pallets of plywood, stacks of windows and drywall. I could see temporary buildings in there, huge tanks that had to contain diesel fuel, and crates and crates of God knew what. To our left and right there were sandbags piled up higher than we were tall. The bags were ripped and torn in places, and sand had dribbled out. Above us was plywood, scarred and torn where shrapnel had done to the plywood what it had done to the sandbags. The little tunnel was about ten feet deep, and looked like it had been built recently.

"Don't fucking move." A woman's voice called out. She was nowhere to be seen, but I had that crawling feeling between my shoulderblades that told me she had me in the sights of a weapon.

Or I was standing next to a mine.

"Is that Sergeant Ant?" The woman called out.

"Debby?" I asked, suddenly matching the face with a person.

"If you're Ant, then you'll know the answer to the next question." She paused a second. "If you're wrong, I'll kill all of you and figure out who you were later."

"I can't see her, Sergeant." Kincaid said.

"I can hear you assholes." She shouted.

"Then ask, bitch!" I yelled back.

"Close the door first, you one eyed bastard." She shouted back.

"Shads, close the door." I told him. We stood there silently until we heard the wheel stop with another "CHUNK".

"Where did we first have sex?" She yelled out after the echo of the door locking died away.

"In a cornfield in Nebraska." I shouted back. "The scarecrow fell on us and scared the shit out of us."

"What did I wear to your wedding?"

"Your Air Force dress uniform. The baby spit up on you."

"What did Heather say to me when you got out of the hospital last summer and I came over to your house to see you?"

"Thank you for bringing her husband back alive, and that she loved you."

"Ant, oh thank God, Ant." She called out, and came around from behind what I'd thought was a pile of sandbags. She ran straight at me, her rifle still held tightly, and when she got close enough, she threw herself into my arms and started kissing my face, crying.

I held her tight, kissing her back. Her eyes were sunken and haunted looking, and she didn't close them when she kissed me, her eyes still darting around, watching the men behind me.

Someone cleared their throat, and Kincaid hissed for them to "shut the fuck up" when Deb began to sob in my arms, crumpling against me.

She was wearing OD green, not BDU's, and they were baggy on her, either because she hadn't been eating well or because they weren't hers. Her brown hair was hidden under an OD green cravat. She had bruises on her neck, her left cheek, and her bottom lip was split.

Debby suddenly straightened, stepping back from me, and hefted her rifle.

"Follow me, I want to grab my gear before we go." She said, and I nodded. She turned around and began walking into the cavern and I lengthened my stride to catch up with her.

"Debby, what the hell are you doing here?" I asked her. "I thought you were involved in that mess in North Dakota."

"No, I came with the reclaimation team. What happened in North Dakota?" She asked.

"A team clearing a site hit a bioweapon storage that was breached, casualties are pretty bad and their talking about just pouring concrete down the access shaft and sealing it up." I told her.

"I knew that shit was going to happen sooner or later." She said, her voice grim.

The slightly chubby faced Air Force woman I'd known was gone, in her place was a lean hard woman who moved furtively and who's eyes constantly darted around. Her rifle was an old M16A1 like mine, not the A2 she usually carried.

"What happened?" I asked again.

"I'll tell you when we get to where I've been hiding." She told me.

I noticed she was leading us on a meandering path, and there were prepared fighting positions. I saw extra weapons, ammunition, land mines ready for use, food, and coffee cans in each of the positions. Once she led us in the front door of a temporary building and then through a hole that had been torn in the side. A chainsaw was sitting on the ground outside the hole that she warned us not to touch.

I'd seen the wire attached to the handle.

"What the hell is all of this?" Meyers asked.

"Are they cleared to know?" Debby asked me.

"No. Just Kincaid and Donaldson." I answered.

"How long have you been down here, Ma'am?" Donaldson asked.

"You tell them who I am, Ant?" She asked. I noticed she looked angry at the thought.

"You aren't wearing rank." I reminded her. Her face softened.

"I don't know, soldier." She answered. "Forever?"

"Which team were you with?" I asked. "Before or after the engineers?"

"What engineers?" She asked.

That answered that.

She stopped suddenly in front of a small temporary building surrounded by plywood on top of pallets and turned to face my troops. I could see "RECOVERY OPERATIONS CONTROL" on a plate beside the door.

"Walk where I do." She warned. "Don't step on any other pieces of plywood or you'll kill yourself and anyone around you."

She carefully stepped on a piece and I followed her.

"You mined all of this?" Natchez asked.

"And I replaced the ones that went off three days ago." Her voice was hard.

It was a weaving pattern, and I saw she was counting to herself, keeping track of the route, and it took us a couple of minutes before we reached the door to the building. Debby reached under the edge of the door and I heard a switch click.

"Welcome to my humble abode." Debby said, opening the door and stepping up and inside.

Inside was divided into four rooms. The doorways were open, the doors missing. A cot and a small table with a single chair was in the middle of the main room we'd walked into. There were FM's, TM's, notebooks, and what looked like a map on the table. There was a the lower part of a porta-john along with several empty white plastic bottles and some bottles full of blue liquid in one room off to the side. I could see some 5-gallon steel gas cans and the edge of a generator through the same door. The other had stacks of MRE boxes and OD green 5-gallon cans with "POTABLE" stenciled on them visible. The doorway on the left showed me a security station setup with cables strung along the floor, a chair, and some computers.

Sandbags covered the walls, all the way to the ceiling, droplights were strung up, rifles were by each firing slit, all that was visible of the windows, plywood was nailed to the ceiling, and black trash bags were in front of the back door. A steel plate with a handle on it was off to the side of the far wall, and a welder sat nearby. I saw four cardboard boxes, one marked "Medium/Small Tops", one marked "Medium/Small Bottoms", one marked "BRASSERIES, ASST." and the last marked "PANTIES, ASST." I knew where she'd gotten her clothes from now.

"Been busy, Deb?" I asked, looking around.

"Might say that, Ant." She said. "It isn't much, but it's home."

"How many times have they come at you?" Kincaid asked, walking around and peering out of the firing slits.

"At least twice a day until about two days ago." She said.

"About when we got here." Donaldson said. "Mind if we sit?"

"Mi casa es su casa." She waved her hand at the room. "Relax, gentlemen."

"Natchez, Meyers, Wilkins, Shads, pick a firing slot and keep your eyes out." I ordered. "Let's not get overconfident."

"The mines will warn us first." Debby told me.

"Like the one in the hallway?" Meyers voice sounded a little nasty.

"Don't make me smack you, Meyers." Kincaid said.

"You didn't lose anyone, did you?" Debby looked suddenly worried.

"No, everyone's fine." I told her. I waved her over to the room where the food and water was. Meyers was in there.

"If you sit on the toilet, you can see out the firing slit." Debby told him. He opened his mouth and I raised my hand.

"Confidential discussion, you aren't cleared." I growled at him, frowning.

He left.

"God, Ant, I couldn't believe it when I saw you sitting there with those other two in the Living Quarters." She told me. I sat down on a stack of MRE boxes and she sat next to me. "I'd just finished patching my cludged together system into the main system and was checking the cameras, looking for those things, when I saw you sitting there."

"We thought you were the CIA assholes we had with us." I told her.

"Had?"

"We had a... falling out. So that was you in the Civilian Operations Center?"

"Yeah, I left behind my Walkman." She glared at me suddenly. "Did you steal my tape?"

"Yeah, sorry about that." She smiled and leaned against me. I put an arm around her. "What happened, Deb?"

"Fuck, Ant, it was all normal at first, you know? A normal sweep." She shuddered against me. "We had a double strength reclaimation team, my guys and the Army guys, plus a couple of Army Corps of Engineers surveyors.

"We managed to access the site, and moved in, checking the areas. I'd found a map in the hallway, and we'd cut through the living areas to get at Operations quicker, and that's when shit got weird."

I felt goosebumps rise on my skin. "Weird, how?"

"The guy in charge of the Army side saw that big picture of the building, the one with some guy named Tandy..."

"What?" Everyone turned to look at me, and I realized I'd spoken a lot more harshly than I'd meant.

"There's this big picture of a Lima site in the hallway. There was a guy I was told is named Tandy standing out front of it." She told me. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing. Go on." I lied.

"Anyway, Lieutenant Colonel Bishop got kind of freaked out."

"Black guy, buff, southern accent, smokes Kools after tearing off the filter?" I asked.

"That's him. You know him?" Deb asked me.

"Yeah." Deb kind of stiffened for a second, then relaxed. "He was my first CO."

"Anyway, over the next couple days Colonel Bishop got kind of weird. He called me Stokes a few times. Some of our crew told me they saw him standing in front of that big picture just staring at it." She shivered again. "On the sixth day, when we'd finally managed to unlock the sites security on the elevators and found out about this place, we got attacked."

She sobbed, and I hugged her tight.

"Ant, they killed three of my people, including LT Rolands, remember her?"

I nodded. She'd been an Air Force technician, specializing in computer security. A cute little bubbly blonde woman with a fat ugly girlfriend that she'd call when she had the chance.

"One of them bit her fucking throat out while four others held her down, chewing on her. She was screaming at me to save her right until that happened." Her sobs got stronger and I hugged her tighter. "She was only 24 years old."

"That's when everything went to hell?" I asked when her sobs died down.

"Kind of. We got the motorpool, but the system had locked us in here." I nodded, it had done the same thing to us. "But Colonel Bishop had a plan."

"He's smart like that." I said.

"Well, a small group of us went for one of the secondary access tunnels. Colonel Bishop, two of his guys, Tech Sergeant Blanchard, and me." She shuddered again. "One of Bishop's guys got killed on the third level, took what looked like a little arrow through the eye."

"Crossbow bolt." I told her. She nodded.

I could see Kincaid and Donaldson standing by the door, leaning slightly inward.

"We blew open the access point and Sergeant Blanchard started setting up the satellite radio." She shivered again. "It was dark and snowing, we were in the trees, and Bishop was really agitated. He told his guy, Sergeant Richardson I think, to check the perimeter and the guy went into the bushes."

My balls tightened. Richardson.

...I thought I'd never PCS from this shithole, Ant...

...Good luck at Fort Lewis, Richardson...

...Only a couple of us First Twenty left, Ant. Don't worry, you'll PCS soon, and this place will be nothing but a shitty memory and stories to tell at the NCO Club...

"A couple minutes later, while Blanchard was trying to align the dish, we heard Bishop's guy start screaming." She shivered and pressed close. "He sounded like poor Rolands did when they were biting her, and Bishop went into the woods with his rifle, yelling for him."

She looked at me, her face shiny where the tears had made clean streaks on her face.

"You have to believe me. The next part sounds crazy, but I'm not lying. I didn't imagine it." She shuddered and more tears came from her eyes. "I'm not mistaken, I see it every time I try to sleep."

"Tell me, Debs."

"I heard Bishop or the other guy fire his rifle, then there was silence. It was snowing, it was dark, but the light from the access tunnel provided enough light for me to see everything." She shook her head. "You're not going to believe me, Ant."

"Trust me, Debs, you'd be surprised what I'm willing to believe."

She was silent for a moment, and I was aware that none of the other soldiers were saying a word.

"Bishop came out of the trees, walking all stiff, I thought maybe he was hurt and he didn't have his weapon. He was walking toward us when Blanchard finally got tone. I was looking right at Blanchard when Bishop just reached out killed him." She looked sick for a second. "He just grabbed Blanchard's head with one hand, reached in Blanchard's mouth and grabbed the bottom of his jaw with the other hand, and... and..."

"Tore his jaw off." I finished.

Deb sobbed against me for a moment.

"You ran." I said.

"Fuck you, Ant." She pushed at me, but I pulled her back in. "You don't know what I saw, Ant, it was horrible, he just stared at me while he grabbed Blanchard's tongue and started pulling it out. Blanchard was making these horrible gobbling noises. Such horrible noises..."

I held her while she cried.

...Deep, sunken eyes, nothing but black pits full of hatred and dark mirth. Gaping open jaws, full of broken and jagged teeth that were too long for the mouth. White skin, with the edges of the mouth pulled up in a horrific grin.

Grimy, dirty, tattered BDU's, covered with frozen mud and a rind of frost.

A hand held in front of my face, at the end of a too long arm, the wrist and forearm protruding from a ragged torn BDU sleeve. The fingers were blackened, long, and twisted, with the fingerbones thrust through the blackened flesh...

"It's OK, Debs." I told her, holding her close. "It'll be OK."

"No, it won't." Deb sobbed. "You don't understand."

"What?" I asked, knowing the answer.

"He's in here too. He followed me in here and helped those things kill the rest of the team." My balls shrunk and my head started to pound. "I've even seen Bishop kill those things. He grabs them from out of the darkness and drags them away."

"We'll get out of here, Debs, you watch." I told her.

"No, we're all going to die in here." Deb sobbed, holding tight to me. "You don't understand." She shuddered and shivered in my arms. "A week ago there was four of us left."

"Bishop took Tech Sergeant Wreath last night."

She started crying again.

"I could hear Wreath screaming for hours." Debs wailed.

"Sergeant Ant, the lights all just went out!" Shads yelled, the loudest I'd heard him.

An icicle slid into my shoulder.

A bubbling chuckle floated through the air and Debs went still like a rabbit with a hawk swooping down on it.

"Oh, God, he's back." Air Force Colonel Debra Killain whispered.