All Things Nice » Band of Brothers

15: Contraband

It appeared they'd had a surprise contraband check, and whoever had done it - likely Sobel - had made sure to leave no stone unturned - or, in this case, mattress.

"My letters!" cried Ed Tipper from behind her, barrelling past her towards the scatter of paper at the foot of his bunk.

Posey's eyes were set firmly on her pillow, which had been thrown onto the floor. She could only pray that it'd been thrown onto the floor in the process of her mattress being upturned and not with human hands. As she approached it she prayed that what she'd hidden there remained inside.

"Oh, thank God," she murmured the moment she'd crouched down and picked the pillow up. In true army-issue fashion, the pillow was thin and the pillow case even more so. She'd had to take increased precaution and hide her contraband not only inside the pillow case but inside the pillow - it hadn't even been terribly difficult to tear it open. But even so, nestled inside and entirely undisturbed was Teddy, her miniature childhood teddy bear stowaway. If anyone had found him, she knew she'd never hear the end of it.

Everything she'd had stowed in her footlocker lay haphazardly scattered about the floor but she knew her feminine cloth had gone unnoticed in her shower kit, for when she checked they'd not even bothered to open it. And, by some miracle, her underwear was still tucked into the pockets of her ODs. Perhaps she was better at hiding things than she thought. She didn't care about the other things - she was allowed a book, even if the message written inside was a bit strange, and they'd left her most recent letter to Mrs. Daniels on the floor beside her pillow.

The gloves Mrs. Daniels had sent her with had disappeared, however. But that was inconsequential now, overshadowed entirely by her relief that her dead-giveaway items hadn't been discovered. Posey didn't know who to thank for that stroke of luck but promised whichever God came to mind first that she'd repay them tenfold.

Posey got to work trying to repatriate everything that had been thrown astray immediately, starting with her overturned mattress. It was heavier than she'd anticipated but she managed to hoist it up and onto the bed frame with little fuss - something she owed entirely to bootcamp, she was sure, because there was no way she'd have been able to do that before.

Everything else was shoved haphazardly back into her footlocker before she started to remake her bed; regardless of who had made the mess, Sobel would be in there ready to chew them out if their bunks weren't made to perfection whenever he felt like it, and Posey had no desire to give him an excuse to tear her to shreds, even immune to his shouting as she had become.

Meanwhile, the barracks was filled with the shouting of angry men.

"God fucking damn it!"

"My shit's all everywhere!"

"Fuckin' Sobel. One of these days I'll shoot him, I tell ya."

"No you wont, Guarno," Toye spoke up in his usual blank tone. He didn't even glance up from where he, too, had begun to remake his bed.

"I will, Joe," Guarnere promised, his Philadelphian accent only growing thicker with his rage. "Throwin' all our shit everywhere, makin' us run Currahee three times a day in full fuckin' pack while he watches wearin' his fuckin' leather jacket. One 'a these days I'll fuckin' shoot him, I swear it."

"Anyone wanna bet?" Luz piped up with his signature grin.

Posey giggled and continued attempting to smooth all of the wrinkles out of her bedsheets. Then she paused a moment, and looked up from her work only to address the group at large, "Hey, did anyone lose anything?"

Even over the noise of complaining and the screeching of bed frames being moved against the floor, a few people turned around.

"Yeah," Skip replied. "White."