2/19th Special Weapons Group Area
Secure Area, Alfenwehr
West Germany
30 October, 1987
0300 Hours
The group staring at me screamed as the doors crashed open and they got a good look at me in the light of their lanterns and waste-basket fires. There was a good dozen of them, all dressed in BDU's, most of them without even a field jacket. All of them had minor frostbite signs, all of them were unarmed, but three of them had hunks of roasted meat in their hands.
I didn't bother saying anything. There wasn't anything to say.
I leveled the ejector and clamped down on the trigger.
The flamethrower wasn't Vietnam Era. It was one of the few advanced weapons that had been shipped to us that hadn't been stolen. New ejector system, new pressurization system. New binary tank format. New fuel. High pressure system using thickened fuel enriched with oxygen, magnesium and thermite enrichment system. The fire was hotter, burned longer, and stuck to what it was supposed to.
Technically it was supposed to be used to incinerate bodies, destroy contaminated buildings and cattle, and to clear bunkers by rapidly consuming all the oxygen in a building.
It had a maximum effective range of 75 meters, and if you arced the jet high enough you could splash targets as far away as 100 meters. Rain down clumps and drops of fuel that could melt steel into a puddle.
I'd used flamethrowers before. On the dead. On the living.
Those who had been alive had tried to plead with me then, too. Four of the ones across from me were holding their hands out now, pleading with words and body language.
The ejector clicked home, fire gouted from the ejector, and washed over the group as I pulled the fire from left to right, washing it across them.
The screams stopped. At the corner of my vision a telltale flicked from green to amber as the suit systems detected the drop in oxygen level.
The armored J-Suits had a lot of good systems, ones that you had to know how to use. Onboard systems that would detect chemical levels, radiation hazards, oxygen levels. Keep track of my fuel status, my bottled O2 levels. To use them at full capacity required training, experience, all the things that I'd learned at MOS training.
The amber light was flickering as I washed it back across them.
They were already crumpling, already on fire, already melting. Bone doesn't melt, but the flesh it was clad in would turn to carbonized meat.
I turned slowly, watching my balance, my left knee weak, the brace still working despite the fact it was home-made.
I knew how it looked. That slow turn in an armored J-suit. Implacable. Remorseless. Inhuman. Add in a live flamethrower and I became an object of fear, of terror.
...I'm from the government, I'm not here to help...
Four were stumbling to a stop in the doorway between the Supply Room and the Storage Room. They were in BDU bottoms, boots, and brown T-shirts. Their mouths were working, but if they were saying anything I couldn't hear them over the fans in the suit and my own breathing.
There was more beyond them, more moving around. More standing up, more getting up, more realizing that something was going on.
The ejector hissed, the trigger went back, and I waved it over the ones in the door, letting off the trigger at less than a half second.
It was enough to cover them all in liquid fire.
The one on the right, who'd only got a little of it, was turned into a flaming, jittering, screaming scarecrow of fire.
...stop drop and roll ain't gonna help ya now, peaches...
I starting moving forward, my boots snuffing out the small quarter-sized droplets of fire. I should have changed out the steel storage nubbins for the brass, but I'd been pushed for time.
The storage room was big, a third of a city block long, a quarter of a city block wide. I could see all the nests made up of torn up tent liners, blankets taken from War Stocks, whatever else they could scavenge up to make themselves warm places to sleep.
That was the difference between them and us. We would have used the tent liners to cover the heavy cinderblocks, the floor, the ceiling. We'd have pooled the resources, put it all together into build an area we could have all survived in.
Here I could tell that the strongest, the more self-important, had the bigger nests of cloth. Like animals.
They weren't even people any more. Just targets.
I washed the flame across nests, across screaming bodies, across everything in my way.
...destroy the enemy, leave no ground for him to go to...
Someone at the far end of the room opened the double doors that led into the Middle Hallway and I saw them suddenly go down on their knees. Coughing, retching, clawing at their throats as the chlorine gas washed over them.
The telltale at the corner of my vision went red. Interior systems kicked on, and the fans changed speed. I could smell the dry, cold smell of the oxygen.
Yeah, yeah, I know I know. Oxygen is odorless, colorless, tasteless. But for some reason everyone I knew agreed that the suit oxy always seemed to have a smell and taste to it.
Now I realized what it was.
Fear.
Not mine.
Theirs.
One of them was standing up from behind some boxes, a pistol in his hand. I was turning, slowly, as he leveled the pistol and started pulling the trigger. An impact to my chest like a horse kicking me, but too little, too late. Another one. Again, no matter. And a third, but I stayed on my feet, not even staggering.
The flame washed over him and he crumpled.
Damn. I'd taken hits to the chest. The kevlar armor in the J-Suit and my flak vest had stopped the bullets, but the kinetic force had still hit me like a goddamn sledgehammer. I inhaled as deep as possible, hoping it would keep my lung from collapsing.
There was no where for them to run.
They were facing either me, or the gas. I'd made standard chlorine gas, dumped battery acid into the mixture, added floor wax, and then ran it to boiling with the thermite. It was nasty, not as good as mustard gas, since I was missing a vital component, but what I'd made was deadly in the concentrates and amount I'd used.
The mop buckets were four gallons each, the big industrial ones used by the military in the barracks. Two mop buckets worth per stairwell. Eight gallons of sulfuric acid enhanced chlorine gas with a wax stabilizer.
Enough to kill everything.
...burn their cities, lay waste to their crops, kill their cattle, poison the ground...
Three tried to run, into the hallway. They got two steps before they went down, on their hands and knees, and I could see them coughing.
The lizard was hammering on the panic button to no avail.
There was a small clump of them, tearing at the gas masks that had been thrown in the corner and largely ignored.
One looked up and screamed as I clomped toward them in the suit, leveling the flamethrower ejector at them. Two others looked up, one of them trying to untangle the hood straps from the mask straps, and all of them screamed as I lowered the ejector.
They burned.
Westlin stood silently in her mask, one finger stuck in the hole in her gut. She watched as I moved through the room. The O2 sensor was red. The chemical sensor was red. The radiation sensor was green.
...we're good to go, sir...
Finally, nobody moved in the area. I didn't know how many there had been, consciously. I'd kept track, counted each of them, in some part of my brain, but training made it so I didn't keep track of them in total consciously.
The ones who had made it into the hallway were twisting, the gas searing their lungs. All of them were coughing out blood, their faces blistering and red, tearing at their throats with their fingernails. They were going down slow, suffocating as their lungs blistered, peeled, ruptured inside, filling with blood, soaked in chlorine gas.
Not my problem.
I bathed them in fire. Watched as their tendons tightened from the heat, pulling them into the fetal position, before the sheer heat of the flame charred the tendons and they snapped, melted, vanished under the fire.
My brain was slightly disconnected, separating itself from the real horror of what I was doing. It was different than when the lizard was in charge. I was aware of the horror, but training kicked in, made me able to do what needed to be done.
...terminate the enemy with extreme prejudice...
The lizard was... different. Emotionless. Cold. Analytical. He only had a handful of states, a handful of imperatives.
Run. Breed. Eat. Kill. Submit. Dominate.
But times had changed. War had changed. I had changed.
I tilted my head forward and rubbed my nose against the Velcro glued to the inside of the helmet, scratching an itch that was bugging me. I let off the trigger, let the ignitor flame go out and waved the flamethrower ejector around for a moment to cool it off. After a minute or two I slung the ejector, letting it hang down at my side as I walked toward the stairwell.
The door to the Middle Stairwell was open, a body laying in the doorway and keeping it from closing. Whoever it was had opened the door, gotten a face full of sulfuric chlorine gas, and died right there. Beyond them I could see the half-melted mop buckets that were shattered, and the cracked tiles from where the thermite grenades had landed when the bursting charge I'd fashioned had thrown the mop buckets over and down the center of the stairwell.
There was no way to clear the chlorine gas from the bottom of the stairwells. There wasn't enough air flow, wasn't enough oxygen exchange, to clear the gas out of the bottom of the stairwells.
But that wasn't my problem. It would be weeks, months before anyone took the place of Rear-D, and that would give it plenty of time to dissipate.
Or not...
Still not my problem.
The lizard looked up as several of his boards lit up. Westlin, Cromwell, and Aine were all just watching from three different monitors. He tapped on the combat button switch but it still stayed depressed, the pole-switch snapped off inside the housing. My headache was getting worse. The pain from the top of my head merging with the pain at the base of my skull.
...you're drifting...
The door to the furnace room opened easily and I clomped into the darkness. Part of me wished that the suit had built-in light systems, or maybe NVG's, but that would suck down battery power needed for the environmental fans. Once those fans shut down, the air inside the suit stopped circulating, grew stale, and relied on operator movement to stir the air around inside the suit.
Cromwell and I had fired up the initial power systems to the barracks. Fired up the generators to provide heat to the 5th floor. I made my way to the back, where the emergency generators were at and checked the readouts.
Fuel was frozen, the filters full of waxy diesel far below the gelling point.
Those were a bust.
My breathing was loud, louder than the fans, as I moved toward the backup systems, making my way in steady clomping steps to the generator room.
I'd noticed that the mountain wasn't sending anything against me. It surprised me, to be honest, until I thought about it.
The mountain was cold, depended on the cold, and I was holding a weapon in my hands capable of melting a 3/4 ton truck down to slag. The axe man, the LT, maybe even Tandy would probably be susceptible to the flame measured in the thousands of degrees.
I stopped, leaning the lexan face shield against the cinderblock wall, and breathing slowly and steadily to center myself.
What in the hell was I doing?
Power. Heat. That's right. Restore the barracks systems.
I caught myself as I started to sag, started to go down to my knees.
...terminate the enemy with extreme prejudice...
The kneebrace squealed as I straightened up, pushed myself off of the wall.
You are a No-Go at this station, Private! rang out in my brain as I staggered back and the tanks on my back hit the wall behind me. I'd contaminated my suit, touched possibly contaminated surfaces with my suit.
I turned and pushed through the pain, pushed through the numb feeling, making my way into the generator room.
Cromwell's ruined uniform was still puddled in the middle of the floor.
I clomped over to the far side of the room, looking at the boards.
Only one heater was online, only one of them was getting power.
The rest of them needed power, the rest of them needed fired up so that they pushed water through the pipes. Hot water, to run the radiators, to heat the walls. To heat the barracks.
...why?...
"Ya sure ya know what you're doing, Ant?" Bomber asked me. I looked over at him, seeing he was in BDU's, no rank or patches, not even his Airborne tab.
I just nodded, checking the generator's to see if they were ready to be fired up.
"Heating the barracks. I can see why you would want to. Every other winter we'd ended up in the freezing dark," Bomber told me, watching as I moved into the middle of the room and started the difficult task of taking off the suit without assistance.
"Gotta heat it. Gotta bring everything back online," I told him. I'd closed all the doors behind me, and I couldn't smell any of the gas I'd made. When the suit helmet came off I gasped in the warm air.
Now I could hear the generators. Smell the hot metal and lubricants.
"Ya chased them outta their lair, Ant," Bomber said as I slowly stepped out of the suit and paused a moment to enjoy the feel of the weight lifted off of me. "Don't mean you got 'em all, champ."
I nodded again, standing in the middle of the room dressed in my BDU's, with my Kevlar vest and LBE and mask still on my torso.
"Ya heat up the barracks, the chlorine gas is gonna heat up, gonna rise," He told me.
I dug in my pocket, pulling out my lighter and my smokes. I lit one then offered the pack to John, who shook his head, then I put them away.
The nicotine tasted good as it eased into my bloodstream.
I moved over and sat on one of the generators.
"Yer bleeding, Ant," John said.
I frowned at him.
"Yer shoulder, Ant," John said, tapping his own right shoulder.
I looked down.
The front of my uniform was stained with blood.
I reached up, touching my shoulder, and felt the hot blood.
"Well... shit."