He was a typical butter bar, thinking that ROTC had taught him how to live in Hell.
I sat down, lit a cigarette, and turned the chair so I could see the door outside, the double doors to the hallway and the stairwell door, plus I could see the clocks if I just turned my head instead of turning all the way around.
I'll give them 15 minutes...
It was almost 2AM.
Somewhere four men were wandering around.
Had they gone outside? Without their cold weather gear and outside in the weather that the gauges were reporting, they would be dead within minutes. When the hypothermia kicked in, they'd get confused and who knew how far they'd wander?
If they went outside, we'd find them in the spring, if ever. Last year, a guy had wandered outside into the snow and hadn't ever been found.
My cigarette finished before the 15 minutes went by and I opened the logbook, took a piece of paper out of the drawer, and wrote that I'd be back, I was checking the barracks, and if anyone needed anything, I'd be back before 3AM. I closed the logbook and set the paper on top of it, weighing it down with the pen and a dead nine-volt battery I found in one of the drawers before standing up.
I glanced outside, through the two sets of double doors, and saw nothing but white darkness.
Whiteout. Fuck.
That meant that there was a blizzard outside, with the wind driving the snow, which was probably mixed with the tiny ice crystals that formed snow seeds. That didn't mean it was dumping snow on us, either. The wind could be sweeping it all further down the mountain, piling it up below us while dropping only the barely minimum on us.
Or it could be about to drop fifteen feet of snow on the barracks.
The little lizard snarled at the idea of a blizzard trapping me here.
I hated the barracks. I begged, bribed, and threatened to get put on Temporary Duty Assignment (TDY), stay at site Atlas, or unit support for any random unit, rather than be back in the barracks. Nagle, Bomber, and I had managed to wheedle our way into field exercises or living at Atlas for over 9 months, only returning to the unit for an afternoon or maybe a weekend, here and there. My whole squad felt the same way and were often grateful that we managed to avoid the barracks. If I wasn't at a field exercise or TDY, I preferred to stay out at the FSTS and away from the unit with my squad. Anything to avoid the barracks.
The shriek that echoed down the hallway, not even slightly muted by the double doors separating the CQ area from Titty Territory, reminded me why I'd rather be training C-DAT's how to inspect the one hundred and five milimeter APDSFSDU-T's and watching them to make sure they didn't lick the tank main gun rounds, stick them in any bodily orifices or only God knew what else.
I used my key to open up the dayroom, the rec-room, and the game room to find nobody inside. In the day room the TV was on, displaying only static, and through the windows I could see nothing but swirling white, with faint hints of something dark moving out there that I told myself was just my imagination. My hand shook a little as I turned the TV off and on, even tried turning the channels, but nothing changed. The TV stayed on and only showed static.
I hated it when it did that, but our XO had told us that it had to do with built up charge and the heavy static electricity in the air during storms.
In other words, he fed us a line of bullshit to explain something that didn't make sense.
I gave the TV the finger and left the day-room, heading for the game room. In the game room, the video games were dark and silent as I swept my light over them, the frost glittering on everything. In the rec-room I could see that the pool tables were clear of sticks or pool balls, the foosball tables, shuffleboard tables, and the air hockey tables were silent and waiting. The tile floors gleamed in the light from my flashlight, with no black marks or scuff marks on the polished wax, mutely giving evidence that nobody had been inside since the guys on CQ had polished the floors with a buffer earlier in the evening.
Once I'd made sure each room was clear, I hit the light switches to kill the lights out of long-ingrained habit and then closed and relocked the doors. I stood in the middle of the CQ area for a long moment, staring at the trophy case that took up most of one wall, not seeing the trophies the unit had earned over the last year, but steeling my courage for the last place that needed to be checked out.
Taking a few deep breaths, I went in and checked the unisex bathroom, despite the lizard's hiss of warning.
It was ice cold inside, the sinks and stalls still looking like nobody had ever used them. There was dust on the sinks, and the floor tiles were dull with no black streaks from soldier's boots on them. Nobody had been in there for weeks, months, maybe not since the building was rebuilt.
Another scream sounded out from behind me and I shivered and retreated, ashamed that I was shivering from more than the cold after being in that bathroom.
...the last place anyone had seen Tandy before ARTEP...
I half expected to see his shaving kit still open on the sink.
The double doors between the CQ area and the first half of the ground floor hallway screamed when I pushed my way through them. The scream was distinctive. I could tell the difference between the screams the doors made and the screams that echoed through the air with no known source. My flashlight beam danced around, sparkling on the frost that covered the walls. The sign next to the double doors in the CQ Area had a training bra hanging from it, with the words "You must be this big to live in Titty Territory", that some of the female soldiers had put up. Even when it was torn down by officers or NCO's who didn't appreciate the humor they put it back up. I stepped through the doorway and let the doors shriek as they closed behind me.
Just before they closed, I heard the pitter patter of a little girl's tap shoes in the hallway, behind.
I ignored the sound and so did the lizard.
My breath plumed out in front of me as I walked down the hallway of Titty Territory, my boots thudding as I watched for ice patches on the buffed tiles. SGT Swope had slipped on ice in the hallway a week ago and broken her elbow. I was an invader in Titty Territory, and my mind whispered to me that if the barracks would break Sergeant Swope's elbow when she left her room, it would do far worse to an interloper like me. The frost didn't cover the murals that some of the female soldiers had painted on the walls. On the right-hand wall, a mural of female soldiers engaged in a firefight with silhouetted enemies hadn't been finished, and the eyes staring at me from the female soldier's faces gave me the willies.
I stopped outside Nagle's room and knocked on the door. It took a few minutes and a few more knocks, but Nagle answered, wrapped in a nightgown, fuzzy robe and a blanket, with her fuzzy bunny slippers poking out from under it, wearing a look that combined irritation and sleepiness. Her sleep mussed long brown hair, slightly curly, cascaded down her back and framed her long face. She was blinking in the light from my flashlight, her brown eyes drowsy. The lizard perked up at the sight of her, his fingers caressing the 'breed' button.
"What the fuck do you want, Ant?" She part snarled, part yawned. "Go beat off, I'm sleeping." It was her typical answer whenever I knocked on her door and she wasn't expecting me. It sounded harsh, but her gentle tone robbed it of any sting.
The sight of her made a warmth spread in my chest, and the lizard purr, but I ignored it, cursing my weakness at needing her so much.
"CQ crew is gone, can't find them, power's down,” I told her. She was used to the way I spoke, having known me from when I didn't talk unless it was necessary. It hadn't been uncommon for me to go days without speaking unless I had to give orders, ask questions, or pass on information. Even though I talked more than I had when she'd first met me, I still didn't talk that much.
"Go away, don't care." She answered, yawning again, and went to slam her door, but instead bounced it off my boot. She glanced down at where I'd stuck my foot in her doorway and then looked back up, her expression surprised. I usually didn't push things.
"Get dressed, Nancy
, I'm gonna grab Bomber." I smiled and held up my keyring, "Don't make me come in there." She glared at me for a second, then nodded. "Me and Bomber will meet you in the CQ Area."
"Why me? Can't you just do a sweep by yourself?" She grumbled. "For Christ's sake, stuff your tampon in and go handle it."
I waved one hand at the dark barracks. "You know just as well as I do that this place will kill us if it gets a chance,” I told her. "I'm not doing this alone. Not here." I didn't give her a chance to reply, instead turning and walking away. "This place hates us and wants us to die." I tossed over my shoulder.
She grumbled behind me before she closed the door. I heard the lock get thrown, the metallic snap loud in the silence. I knew I could trust her to do what I'd told her to do. Yeah, I outranked her, but that didn't much matter to Nancy. Her attitude may have bothered some people, but not me. She was reliable and, despite her bitching, I knew she'd do what needed to be done. That's what mattered to me.
Through the double doors between Titty Territory and Queer Country, I take a left through the center stairwell access door, up a flight of stairs, take another left, and head toward the end of the hallway.
Ignore the screams. Ignore the sobs. Ignore the cold chill down the back.
God, I want a drink.
I didn't bother knocking on Bomber's door, I just used my key to unlock it and walked in.
When everyone else had moved into the barracks, I'd been assigned to get the vehicles and drive them back to the unit. Vehicles that were either shipped from Stateside to Bremerhaven Naval Harbor or turned over to us from other units in Germany. I'd spent the entire month and a half during that time sleeping in vehicles or in the barracks of whatever unit had turned over the vehicles to us. When I'd gotten back, for some reason, they'd handed me a key for my room which turned out to be a master key. You named it in the barracks, my key opened it, if it wasn't a secure area with a heavy security door and locks. I should have turned it in, I should have reported it, but for some reason, I kept it.
A little girl's giggle floated down the hallway from the darkness as I walked into his room.
...you're not real, go away...
The door shut behind me as I moved through the little hallway, the bathroom door and one set of wall lockers on my right, two sets of wall lockers on my left, and into the main living space of Bomber's room. There was a set of bunk beds, made up with hospital corners and with OD green wool blankets, a single bed, three three-drawer chests, two dressers, two desks, and a refrigerator in the room. On the walls were rodeo trophies, country music posters, and other knick-knacks of Bomber's life in the military.
My blond-haired, blue-eyed, bull-riding friend was asleep in his bed, his six foot two frame thick with muscle gained the same way mine had been: Hand carrying two hundred pound artillery shells, all day, for months on end. Bomber was curled up under his blankets on the single bed, so I just walked over, grabbed the edge and whipped the covers off of him.
Due to the elevation we were at in the German Alps, personnel in 2/19th were required to be extreme cold weather survival-certified by order of the Post Commander. Before you could move into the barracks, you had to attend the class. You learned how to survive in the cold, and one of the most important parts was how you slept. While a person is sleeping, they have a tendency to sweat. That sweat can create ice between the blanket layers, in the sleeping bag, or on top of your blankets or fart sack, so you had to sleep in a simple way.
Naked.
And Bomber was sucking his thumb, like always.
"Get the Hell up, you Texas retard!" I yelled at him, throwing the blankets back on top of him in order to spare my eyes any more full view of Texas.
"Huh? Wuzzup?" His Texas accent and sleep blurred his speech.
"CQ crew is missing, power's out, phones are dead,” I told him, walking over to his refrigerator and pulling out a beer.
He sat up, wrapping the blanket around him. He summed up his opinion pretty quick with a single curse word. He stretched, his back popping. "Nagle?"
"Dressing." I twisted the top off of the Tucher hefe weissen beer and tossed the cap into the garbage. "She'll meet us in the CQ Area."
"You got a bad feeling?" He asked me, as he swung his legs off the bed and his feet hit the floor. He winced as his feet touched the cold tiles, but he was like me, used to it. I lowered the beer bottle and nodded. "Got a plan?" He walked slowly toward his desk, once skidding slightly as he hit a frozen patch on the floor.
"Yup." I knew he wouldn't be looking at me, paying more attention to making it across his room without busting his ass as his body heat melted the thin layer of ice on the floor.
"How bad off are we?" He asked me, grabbing his keys out of the desk drawer and heading for his wall lockers. I moved over to the window, opening the curtains to reveal nothing but white and the hint of dark shapes in the snow.
"Bad. July bad." I told him, referring to four bloody hours one night out at Atlas that nobody who wasn't there or didn't have to cover up the incident or hide the reports would ever know or care about, except the families of the dead."
"Sitrep?" He asked me to give him a situation report, tell him what I'd observed.
I filled him in on what I had and hadn't seen in the clipped, quick, acronym-filled jargon that we were both familiar with. He cursed, both at the situation and me, but he didn't refuse to come with me, just bitched and called me a chickenshit for not doing it all by myself. It didn't bother me being called that by him, even though from anyone but him or Nancy would have started a fight. We were friends, even though he was abandoning me.
While he dressed I stood and looked out the window, enjoying the taste of the beer. It was nothing but swirling thick white snow outside the glass. If it wasn't dumping snow on main post already, it was going to smash the fuck out of them within a few hours and dump several feet of it on them. The ski resort would be thrilled with all the powder, the ski resort below us, above main post, and in between us.
We were cut off and isolated.
...again...
The last time we had been cut off, the barracks had burnt down, several people had died, and Tandy had come up missing. My brother had almost died charging back into the barracks to rescue his friend Cobb, taking a shard of glass into his knee and suffering first degree burns on his head and forearms. I'd been injured too, Hell, we'd all been injured. We'd driven two CUC-V Chevy Blazers down the mountain in a blizzard, twenty of us crammed into the vehicles, several of us burned, a couple of us bleeding. Broken glass had cut my forehead and forearms, and I had burns across my back from where my T-Shirt had caught on fire when the fire had backblasted into the room I was trying to get through to get out the door. The burns had made the drive one of pure agony as I'd nursed the CUC-V through the snow, barely able to see, and having to slow down more than once and rely on someone standing in front of the vehicle, walking along the road to make sure we didn't drive off the cliff.
Now we were cut off again.
"Ready to go?" Bomber asked me. I turned around and he was replacing the batteries in his flashlight, taking the batteries out of the tinfoil and paper they were individually wrapped in. It was a habit we'd picked up in 2/19th. He was wearing Levi jeans, his insulated heavy work boots, a flannel shirt, and his Levi jacket. He was holding up my Levi jacket that I'd left in his room a few nights before. When I nodded after tossing the beer bottle, empty except for the little residue that nobody ever drank, into the garbage can, he tossed it to me.
"The whole barracks is frozen over,” I told him, shrugging into the jacket and buttoning it up quickly. It made me a little warmer, but not much, even the heavy fleece lining was no match for the cold that had seeped into the barracks once the power went down.
"We gotta get the generators going, or we won't last a Texas minute." Bomber grunted, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his jacket. "Think we should put on our gear?" He asked, referring to our extreme cold weather gear.
"Na
w, we'll be quick and knock this shit out. We'll get the generators fired up and get the radiators pumping out heat in a Stuttgart minute." I told him. He grinned at me as he opened the door and waved me through.
We left his room, Bomber locking it behind us, and the two of us ignoring the shriek of agony that echoed down the hallway as the wind swept around us for a moment. The ice had spread on the walls, glittering now from the floors and the drop ceiling.
"How long do you think the power's been out?" Bomber asked me. I shrugged. "Make a fucking guess, man." His voice sounded irritated.
"No more than two hours. Otherwise it would have been noted in the CQ log." I told him, remembering that there was no mention of power interruptions listed in it.
"It's gotta be bad out there." Bomber commented, waving one hand at the ice that was almost visibly spreading on the walls. I nodded as we kept walking down the hallway. The emergency light was little more than a suggestion of a glow, the lamps on top of the box a dark crimson. When we pushed through the middle door, the frozen hinges screamed and the wind swirled around us for a moment before the heavy springs pulled the doors back into place with a metallic twanging.
Above us, someone shouted in German and it sounded like boots crashed as a group of people jumped out their chairs and to attention.
We ignored it and the lizard didn't even bother to open one eye.
There was nothing else we could do.
The CQ area stairwell was cold, the wind swirling around us. The sound of a woman sobbing could be heard, coming from the darkness, below, as we carefully moved down the steps. I lost my balance once, but Bomber steadied me, keeping me from going head first down the stairs. The door to the CQ area was heavy and I had to put my shoulder into it to get it to open.
Nagle was waiting for us, her flashlight in her hand, picking up the phones, listening, and slamming them down. Her expression showed me that she was angry and disgusted at the situation we'd found ourselves in.
Three Little Snowmen (Damned of the 2/19th) Page 13