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

Part 48

Gunfire sounded in the distance, but I ignored it. Sometimes we could hear the units on main post using the training areas.

"He makes it here, and gets his star. Great." I handed the bottle back. Bomber nodded sagely and took another drink.

Outside boots ran by, and we heard the little girl giggle.

She was probably dancing out in the hallway. She'd been doing that more and more frequently. Two days ago Corporal Shieldings had found blood smears frozen on the walls, but by the time we'd gotten to where he'd sworn he'd seen it there had been nothing but ice on the wall.

Yesterday Specialist Lanks had sworn up and down she'd seen a puddle of frozen blood at the bottom of the middle stairwell.

I'd gone up to my room at her description of the bloodstain, the way the back door was open to the outside, and the frozen muddy bootsteps leading into the hallway and to the frozen puddle.

And promptly drank myself into obliteration.

I'd woken up to Nancy cuddled up next to me, gloriously naked beneath the blankets, her arms around me and facing me. I'd lain there for a long time, staring at her sleeping face, memorizing every little part of it. From her long lashes, to the scar down the side of her face, to the tiny little scar on the angle of her jaw.

I loved her.

We left at least one light on during the night, Bomber and I. We didn't like the room being completely dark, and it wasn't uncommon for one of us to wake the other up screaming during the night.

We refused to see Mental Health about it.

"When's he supposed to get here?" I asked. I glanced up at the sound of grinding teeth, and saw Nancy's face, her eyes squeezed shut, the muscles of her jaw knotted, her back arched slightly, and her hand busy underneath her shorts.

"Today." Bomber told me, holding out the booze. I took it as Nancy let out a series of sharp gasps and collapsed, writhing slowly on the bed. I took a long drink, then handed the bottle back.

"It's supposed to start snowing tonight." I told him. He shook his head. "Yeah, we're going to be trapped up here for God knows how long with that asshole."

"Let's just hope it doesn't start happening again." Bomber said. "Speaking of fucked up shit, how's your head?"

I grinned at him, pulling my attention away from where Nancy had gone still on the bed, smiling that slight smile she got when she was enjoying the afterglow. "Not too bad. The headaches aren't too bad any more."

"How's the eyes?" He asked, grinning at what he knew had gone on behind him.

"Still pretty bad. The doctors said it's probably permanent." I told him.

"Could be worse, from Nancy said you're lucky you aren't blind." He smiled. I reached forward and punched him lightly in the shoulder. "Come get some, bitches." he finished.

"You're lucky you aren't dead." I told him. His smile got wider.

"Your girl saved us both." He said.

"I'm right fucking here, you inbred morons." Nancy said, her soft voice and the warmth in her tone robbing the words of their sting.

"Oh, are you with us again?" Bomber said, turning around.

"Maybe." Nancy answered, lifting up two fingers shining wetly in the light. She put them in her mouth, sucking on them, and staring at us challengingly.

I opened my mouth to answer her, the image of her with her ass raised up in the air appearing in my mind and my crotch reacting to the image and her stare when there was a sudden banging on my door. We all turned to look at it, waiting.

The banging came again, this time finishing up with a voice. "Bomber, Ant, Nagle, LT James wants everyone to form up in the CQ Area." It was Lanks, who was on CQ.

A glance at the clock showed me it was 1900 hours, which meant that either he'd just gotten there and he wanted a headcount to make sure we were all still alive, to change the schedule we'd come up with and hand out shit for us to do, or to prove his authority over us.

I was betting on the latter.

"Full uniforms?" I shouted, motioning at Bomber to hand me bottle. Nancy was getting up with a disgusted look on her face, moving to the bathroom so she could rinse off real quick.

"Yeah. He says for everyone to hurry up and not mess around." Lanks yelled back.

"We'll be there ASAP." I told her, then took a long pull off the bottle before handing it back to Bomber.

Bomber and I got dressed quickly, almost finished by the time Nancy got out of the shower, walking through the room naked and beautiful. The scar on her breast where the LT had stabbed her an angry red. While she was dressing I grabbed my boot knife off the shelf, putting the retaining loop around the heel and starting to buckle it down.

"Ant, wait." She said, pausing in the middle of buttoning up her BDU pants.

"What?" I asked, looking up from where I was still bent over.

"Hide that." She said. She shivered and looked around. "Bomber, hide the knives, all but the cheap shit."

"Why?" Bomber asked, clipping his mask on.

Standard uniform. BDU's, boots bloused (never tucked in), belt, earplugs in case on first right hand loop from buckle, green notebook and pen in left hand breast pocket, cap folded and in back right pocket, gas mask, and the ever present dogtags.

"Just... please, humor me." She said and shivered, glancing at the plywood.

"All right." Bomber said. I handed him my knife, and we got to hiding the knives where we could. Some of the cheap-ass ones we hid in the usual places, knowing they'd be easily found, some we left in plain sight, usually the useless decorative ones, others went into the hiding spots that had never been found even when CID tossed our rooms on their quarterly inspections of the barracks. I put a cheap ass knife that was more for show than anything else into my boot, and together we tromped out, leaving the lights on in the room.

The hallway was ice cold, ice glimmering on the walls and ceiling.

"Fuck, the elevators are out. We'll have to blow open the stairwell." Bomber said.

"WELCOME TO HELL" was still scratched into the paint above the tiled section of the wall, underneath the emergency light that was torn open. The team replacing all the batteries on the emergency lights had run into trouble when over half of the lights turned out to have battery packs that weren't compatible with the new replacements.

Some shit called lithium. It was supposed to last like five times longer and provide more wattage for the lights. It was also supposed to function better in the extreme cold we lived in.

Together, drawn up into a little group, we trudged down to the middle stairwell and headed down a floor. I paused for a moment, staring down below us at the darkness where the stairwell ended for the bottom floor.

Tandy had pushed his finger inside the wound in my shoulder and then pulled it free so he could suck the blood from his finger.

My shoulder throbbbed and I ignored it.

They'd taken out the staples at Darnell Army Medical Center on Fort Hood. Bomber's dad had driven us there, then driven us back. He'd been a friendly guy, tall, lanky, and balding. He'd liked Nancy and me, and when Bomber had told him about how he'd been dying on the table but Nancy saved him, he'd unashamedly wept and embraced Nancy, thanking her for saving his son.

Nancy had looked like she wanted to cry.

"Ant, come on, honey." Nancy said, pulling me into the downstairs hallway of Queer Country.

I shook off the dark thoughts and followed them as we went through the doorway and tromped down the hallway of Titty Territory after calling out "MALES COMING THROUGH!" in a loud voice. It was just common courtesy, even though they didn't have to call that out coming through our section of the barracks.

It had been explained to us, and despite a lot of other guys grumbling about "special treatment" and "EO bullshit" I understood why. Seeing some dude in his boxers walking to the laundry room wasn't usually something enticing and sexually titillating to a female soldier. It wasn't much different than seeing us just wearing cutoffs or workout shorts to them. But for us to see them in bra and panties automatically put them on the defensive, was sexual to most men, and gave them a vulnerability, real or not, that they didn't deserve to have put on them just because we were walking through their hallway instead of Hammerhead Hall up on the second floor.

It was the same reason the wire-reenforced glass on the doors leading to Titty Territory was painted black and ours wasn't.

Stokes was coming out of her room. She was wearing her BDUs, her mask carrier clearing the doorway with an unconscious hip-swivel. She smiled at us and fell into step with us, and we smiled back. Her brown hair was pulled back into a pony tail and she'd taken the time to put on muted red lipstick. She liked to look nice. Almost as tall as me, thick bodied, with a chubby face and a hickey on her neck.

Probably my brother's work. He'd gotten divorced while I was on convalescent leave. His wife, the miserable bitch, divorcing him after draining the bank accounts and getting a restraining order against him, citing "I'm afraid of him" to the judge. He couldn't see his kid, she'd taken his house and car and all of his shit that he'd "abandoned" Stateside, and got half of his military pay.

It was a typical story, nothing surprising in it to anyone who'd ever been overseas.

"How's the head, Ant?" Stokes asked, leaning toward me to bump me with her shoulder.

"All right today, sis." I told her truthfully. Two days ago I'd had a migraine so bad her and Bomber had had to carry me to the room and put me in bed. I'd been blind and unable to function. She'd sat with me, silent in the dark room, and replaced the cool cloths without saying a word. I'd woken up from nightmare filled sleep to find her holding my hand. I'd called her "sis" experimentally, laying in the darkness, when I asked her for some water, and she'd made a pleased sound. Since then I'd taken to calling her sis, big sister, and referring to her as my sister.

"Glad to hear it." She said, patting my shoulder. She smiled, brightening the hallway. "How are the two of you?"

"Fine." Bomber said. Stokes made him nervous. He'd walked in on her and my brother when my brother had been in the barracks a few days back, dropping off glass, doors, and furniture. My brother scared the shit out of him for some reason, and he was worried that at any seconds Stokes or Monkey were going to call him out for walking in on them.

Stokes chuckled, almost as if she knew what made him so nervous, and Nancy answered.

"Wondering what the hell is going to happen next." She said, the anger in her voice evident. "I'd just finished rubbing one out and was trying to decide which one I was going to take a ride on when this shit happened."

Stokes laughed. "Oh man, I hate that shit."

"How's Cobb doing?" Nancy finished.

"He's... doing OK." Stokes' good humor vanished.

Cobb had been sent to Track-Three to dry out. After last winter he'd seemed to be getting better, but in October the CUC-V he'd been driving had been slammed into by a 5-ton, shattered, and thrown in a ditch. The dashboard had pinned him inside the wreckage, the LT he was driving for had taken three hours to die, the young female private in the back seat had died just before dawn, and Cobb had been trapped in the wreckage till late the next morning when some tankers heading out to the range had seen the wreck.

He'd dove into the bottle hard, worse than after the barracks fire. If he wasn't drunk, he was trying to get drunk, and Stokes had turned him in. Monkey had requested Track-Three for him, pleading with the then-CO to put Cobb in alcohol rehab instead of chaptering him out. So Cobb had been sent to Track-Three.

"You visit him?" Bomber asked. "Crap, the stairwell is blocked. Set him down, help me clear it."

"Every weekend." Stokes said. "He told me last time he doesn't want me to come and see him because he feels like I dimed him out."

"You did the right thing, Stokes." I reassured her. Two weeks ago Cobb had said some things that had scared Stokes, and she'd told the people running the rehab, and Cobb had been put on suicide watch.

They caught him making a noose out of his sheets.

"He'll come around, just give him time." Bomber said. "He upset about you and Monkey?"

"No." Her tone changed to defiant. "We were over last summer. It's just that... well... I wish he wasn't mad at me."

"You did the right thing." Nancy told her.

"Doesn't feel that way." She said as we pushed open the door to the CQ area.

LT James was standing there in front of four ragged lines of troops. There were thirty of us on the rebuilding team, but it looked like we weren't the last ones to arrive.

I took my place at the back, at the far right of the fourth squad, Bomber shouldered in next to me, with Nancy beside him. Stokes moved up the second place in second squad, her Corporal rank putting her as assistant squad leader. Her team was in charge of taking inventories, replacing the war stocks we'd used, and replacing the bloodstained tile. My team was in charge of replacing all the damaged doors and door frames.

We'd kicked the all of out of the frames, sometimes breaking the frame itself, to deny whoever it had been with the axe any safe haven there at then.

LT James stood there, dressed in his winter BDU's, with a field jacket on, silently watching us stand at parade rest in front of him. He oozed smug satisfaction as we all waited on him to give the order to come to attention.

There was also the faint feeling of malevolence from him that I could sense.

"Corporal Ant, come here please." He said. His voice was a pleasant tenor, smooth and rolling. We all had guessed that he had been a choir singer in high school or maybe in church.

"Yes, sir." I said, coming to attention. I took a single step backwards, then looped around the right side of the formation and stopped in front of him, coming to attention.

"Your boot knife, Corporal." He stated. I waited silently, a small power game, and he knew it. The corner of his mouth twitched and I could feel his amusement as he waited a moment. "Give it to me, Corporal."

"Yes, sir." I said, bending down and pulling it out of my boot. It was a clip-on knife, not the full blown sheathe like my Gerber had. I straightened up, coming to attention, and held out the knife by the sheathe toward him.

"Very good, Corporal." He took the blade from me. "Return to your post."

"Yes, sir." I said, moving quickly back. The squad hadn't moved over, they would have if I'd been sent on an errand. When I got back and entered formation properly, I could see he had set my knife on the CQ counter.

We waited silently as the last of the work crew got there, all of them getting into formation. The whole time I watched LT James, taking into account his body language, who his eyes lingered on, and the slight smile on his face as if he had a secret.

Above us boots crashed and voices shouted in German, or at least it sounded vaguely like German. When Sergeant Butcher came down the stairwell and opened the door the wind screamed like the damned and he had been forced to push the stairwell door shut.

Something flickered through the LT's eyes and I wondered what it was.

"Group, attention." The LT finally said. We silently went to attention. "Squad Leaders, report."

"First Squad, all members present and accounted for." Corporal Lancer said, his eyes staring above the LT.

"Second Squad, all members present and accounted for." Sergeant White stated.

"Third Squad, all members present and accounted for." Sergeant Butcher said. "Get ready, they're about to come at us again."

"Fourth Squad, all members present and accounted for." I stated.

"At ease." The LT said, and we all slid our feet shoulder length apart, putting our hands behind our backs, our palms crossing at the middle of our back with our knuckles against our belts. I left my right arm at my side like I had when we were standing at parade rest, putting my left hand behind my back.

"Corporal Ant, is there a reason your right hand is not in the correct position?" The LT asked.

"Injury, sir." I told him. "I have a profile that puts me on limited duty."

He smiled, a small thing, that did nothing to reassure me. "Very well, I'll examine your profile after this formation."

"Yes, sir." I said. He turned his attention to the rest of the group.

"Colonel Reed, before his resignation as Group Commander, put me in charge of this repair platoon." The LT started.

The Colonel had resigned? That wasn't right. If he was that worried about getting his star, resigning his post would damage his chances of being chosen for promotion.

"As we are currently without a Group Commander, I saw no reason to shirk performance of my duty and traveled up here after informing my Platoon Leader that I had been assigned up here." he continued, not bothering to explain the news that Colonel Reed had quit. "Having reviewed the documentation, I have come to a decision about the performance of this work group."

here it comes

"I am more than satisfied of the progress so far." He said.

wait, what?

"You have been working in an extreme environment, working quickly with the tools and manpower available to you, and those of you acting as squad leaders had been more than adequate at preventing cold weather or work injuries, have managed to keep your squads together and prevent any serious failings." He continued. "Having compared my briefing to the actual conditions of the barracks, the weather, and the supplies, I have come to the conclusion that Colonel Reed was suffering an intelligence failure based on the fact he had never personally viewed these barracks."

I did my best to keep my face blank.

"I believe you should all be commended for your hard work in a difficult situation." he said, smiling. Although it was supposed to put us all at ease, something about it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. "I have revised everything from caloric intake to authorized rest periods, to estimated time of completion on the project."

here it comes, the ass fucking

"I am hereby authorizing the use of A-Rats instead of MREs, you will all work 10 hours on fourteen off, with a 24 hour rest period after every forty-eight hour work period." He paused, his smile growing broader. "That's right, we'll be doing this two days on one day off."

something isn't right

"Additionally, I don't want any of you working for too long each day, so I have informed our acting commander that the time estimates for the work projects were unreasonable and ordered them revised." He looked at everyone, smiling, but to me it looked like he was smiling about a joke that only he knew about. "With that in mind, I warned the acting commander that things might not be done until the end of March or the beginning of April."

"Those of you on profile, please see me after formation so that we can discuss whether or not you are fit to work up here. I understand that some of you were pulled from medical leave." He said, then came to attention.

"Group, attention." We all snapped into attention. "Next formation is at zero nine-hundred. Fall out."

Everyone broke up, but about eight of us waited, moving over to the LT and forming a semi-circle around him.

"We cut through here. Sergeant Ant and I went through here the first time and it was booby trapped, watch out for tripwires and shit like that." Bomber said as I passed him.

"Profiles, please." He smiled. I handed him the folded over profile sheet I carried in my pocket.

He took them, moving around the CQ desk and standing behind him. He removed his green notebook and a pen, and reviewed the profiles, jotting down notes about each of them.

"Corporal Ant, why are you not in Wurzburg or somewhere that your injuries can be properly treated?" He asked me.

"Mission essential." I quoted. "I'm the only one here with QASI authorization and access in case someone needs records pulled."

He nodded and gave my a sympathetic glance.

Alarm bells started ringing in the back of my head.

"Understandable." He said. "The Army doesn't care, a sad but true fact, but I do. I'm hereby placing you on light duty. No more construction, I want you to heal up and not risk your career or your health. From here on out your place of duty is your office. Go over the paperwork for your site, and any paperwork I send you, answer the phones, but other than that, I don't want you lifting anything heavy."

I opened my mouth to protest and he stopped me with a wave. "Don't try to tell me you aren't breaking your profile, Corporal, I reviewed your Smith File, you refuse to ride a profile and aren't above breaking it if it helps accomplish a mission. That's an admirable trait, soldier." I flushed with the unexpected praise. "But I won't lose the Army a valuable asset, a man with millions of dollars of training under his belt, and something the taxpayers of the United States have invested a significant amount in, just to accomplish a mission that is not that time critical."

"Specialist Nagle." He said, moving his attention to Nancy.

"Yes, sir?" She asked.

"While your injuries don't place you at risk for further damage, I can't help but notice that if it wasn't for your actions both Corporal Ant and Specialist Bomber would be dead."

"Yes, sir."

"With that in mind, your new duty is to make sure people with profiles are healing properly, abiding by their profiles, and one additional duty I have for you if you are up to it." He smiled.

"Sir?" Nancy was obviously thrown off.

"I will be drawing FM's for you to read. I took the liberty of drawing medical correspondence courses from the post library on the way up here, ones more advanced than the correspondence courses you've previously taken and scored so high on." The smile was gentle, fatherly, but made my balls try to crawl up into my stomach. "You'll be in the office with Corporal Ant, studying when you are not doing medical examinations. Additionally, at the beginning of every 24 hour rest period, I want you to examine everyone for cold related injuries, stress injuries, or anything else you feel might endanger a member of this work crew."

"Yes, sir." Nancy was obviously confused. Nobody had ever taken her medical interests seriously.

"You'll also be interested to know that I was able to draw Special Forces medical training manuals for your use on my authority, thanks to a friend I have in the local Ranger unit."

"Umm, thank you, sir." Nancy blushed.

"Finally, I want you to supervise, in the evenings, proper physical rehabilitation for all of these soldiers on profile, if physical therapy is called for. After we are done here, I will give you the keys to the gym areas."

"Thank you, sir." Nancy sounded as confused as I felt.

"Specialist Bomber?" The LT looked at him.

"Sir?" Bomber looked as if he expected the other shoe to drop and crush us all. "Set him down, we'll divvy up his ammo. Damn, I wish he'd snap out of it."

"You suffered an extremely dangerous abdominal injury that almost proved fatal, Specialist." LT James said.

"Yes, sir."

"You will assist Corporal Ant, who will train you in his job, additionally you will begin studying for the E-5 board. I intend on putting you in for the E-5 board as soon as this mission is complete." The LT told him. "I want you to stick to your profile."

"Yes, sir." Bomber said.

"Very good. The three of you are dismissed. Private First Class Johnson?" he turned to Johnson, one of the guy's who had a profile from a dislocated elbow the month before.

We started walking back to the room, and it wasn't till we were in the stairwell that I stopped.

"Ant, what?" Nancy asked, turning to look at me. She had one hand on the bannister, and was in the middle of taking the steps two at a time.

"I just realized something." I told them.

"What?" Bomber asked. "That the whole fucking thing was surreal?"

"No." I told them. I grimaced. "I didn't even remember to ask him why he took my knife."

"Shit, you're right." Bomber said, continuing up the stairs. I followed. We exited the stairwell into Hammerhead hall and trudged down to the door of the room. A low breeze moaned through the hallway, cold around our ankles but unfelt above the knees. Bomber jammed his key into the door and unlocked the door, putting the key back into his pocket as the door swung open.

The room was dark.

"Hold up." Bomber said, stopping Nancy from going in. "We'll cut through the living quarters, hopefully we can get to the motorpool that way. Goddamn it, this sucks so bad."

"What?" She snapped.

"We left the lights on." I said, lifting up on my tiptoes to look over Bomber's shoulder.

"So? The lights in this place are fucked." She said, but Bomber kept his arm in front of her, reaching inside with his other hand to flip on the light switch.

The light in the main room and the other one in the small hallway came on. The polished tile gleamed, not many scuff marks on the floor, but no hint as to whether or not anyone had stepped on the floor aside from us.

"Check the stuff." I said, pushing by them and walking carefully, looking for trip-wires or anything else.

Call it paranoid, but I'd learned my lesson.

We tossed the room quickly, knowing what we were looking for.

All of the knives in the easy to find places, and two of the carefully hidden spots, were gone. So was the pistol I kept taped to the bottom of the top drawer of the dresser, and the pistol John kept hidden in the desk.

"Someone tossed our fucking room." Nancy snarled. I glanced at Bomber and he grinned.

our room? he mouthed. I just shrugged.

"It's starting again." Nancy said, sitting down on John's bed.

"God, I hope not." I said, hopping up and sitting on the dresser. Bomber sat down on the chair and grabbed the bottle while I grabbed the pack of smokes we'd left on the dresser. I lit one and handed it to him, taking the bottle and taking a long pull off of it before handing it to Nagle, who'd grabbed the only other chair and drug it over next to Bomber. I lit a smoke, handed it to her, then lit myself one before setting the mostly empty pack and the lighter back on the dresser.

"You're forgetting something." She said softly, leaning forward.

"What are we forgetting?" Bomber asked.

It clicked right before she said it.

"Everyone was accounted for at the formation, right?" She said.

"Then who went through our room?" I asked.

She nodded.

"Oh, shit." Bomber said.

"I need break, he's really heavy." Nancy said, taking a drag off the cigarette.

"I watched him pretty close when he opened that access panel. We'll try opening the door that way." Bomber said. My headache came back in a rush.

I cocked my head and looked at him. "What did you say?" The throbbing in my shoulder got worse, almost to the point of how it had felt when I woke up after Nancy had gotten me out of the stairwell.

"I said that we need to watch out if I think that's got it. Help me with this, Kincaid. Shads, keep watch." Bomber said, then took another pull off of the bottle.

"Ant." Nancy said. I looked at her.

"Wake up, Ant. Open your eyes." She said. I looked at her in confusion and she leaned forward, putting her hands on my knees. "Ant, wake up! Those boys are going to die if you don't. Please, trust me, close your eyes."

Bomber put his hands on top of hers. "Don't leave them in the dark and cold, brother."

I closed my eyes, more to humor her than anything else.

"Open your eyes, Ant." Nancy's voice was far away.

I opened my eyes, and the barracks were gone.

The dark and cold were not.

"Shit." I said.