I closed my eyes for a second, thinking fast, then dug my keyring out, my numb hands clumsy. I moved a couple doors down the hall and waved at Bomber to shine the light at the nametag on the door.
SPC STOKES
I jammed my key in the lock and unlocked the door, quickly opening it and waving Bomber and Nagle in, then quietly shutting the door and locking it.
Nagle grabbed a chair and dragged it over to the door, putting it under the door handle to keep someone from opening it, even if they unlocked it.
Stokes room smelled of strawberries and ice.
"Tell me this isn't happening." Bomber whispered, moving over to one of the beds and sitting down before clicking off the flashlight.
"It's happening." Nagle said from where she was sitting on the chair in front of the door.
"What the fuck did we do?" Bomber asked, his teeth chattering, "Why the Hell is he out to kill us?"
"I don't know, but I don't think it's all Tandy." I said, moving by feel over to Stokes' bed.
"Don't say his name." Nancy's voice was tight with fear in the darkness.
"Why the fuck not? You saw the goddamn footprints." Bomber swore, coming closer to me. I pulled her heavy quilt off her bed, wadded it up, and set it on the bed.
"If it was Tandy, he wouldn't have fallen for it. He would have snatched us and killed us one by one when we were outside." Nagle answered for me. "That's his world out there; we wouldn't have made it to the side of the building."
"No, it was him in the stairs. But I don't think whoever killed the guys on CQ and smashed up our rooms was Tandy." I said, moving next to Bomber so I could reach out and grab him by the jacket to pull him up. "Come're, Nancy." I heard the chair shift in the darkness. "I don't know why he didn't take us when we were outside, but it was him on the stairs."
"He likes the fear." Bomber said, his chattering teeth and Texas accent making our long friendship the only reason I could understand him.
I could hear Nancy's footsteps in the darkness, the sound making the little lizard in the back of my head jump up and hold his hand over the panic button.
"It's me, Anthony." She said when she bumped into me. Her voice kept the lizard from hammering on the panic button again. I reached down and grabbed the heavy quilt from Stokes's bed, a hand-made gift from my brother to her, and wrapped the three of us in it. Nagle's arm snaked around me and pulled me tight against her, and a second later Bomber was pulled tight against the two of us. Bomber was wiggling, and I wondered what the fuck he was doing.
"Nothing gay." Bomber said, and I felt his fingers unbuttoning my jacket and then my flannel, finally pulling up my shirt. A second later Nagle smothered a giggle and I knew he was doing the same to her. Then we pressed together, shivering and shaking in the middle of Stokes' room, naked chests pressing against each other. We pressed our faces against each other, trying desperately to warm up our faces.
"What's the plan?" I asked, shaking so hard I was sure that I was going to dislocate a hip or something.
"Your brother's room," Nagle said, her teeth chattering.
"Hey, yeah, doesn't your brother still have your dad's pistol in his wall locker?" Bomber added. He was quaking as bad as I was.
"Yeah, he does. And a shitload of knives." I answered.
"We warm up, take his cold weather gear, take his pistol, grab some knives, then go with the original plan." Nagle finished. She suddenly giggled.
"What's so funny?" Bomber asked.
"This is like one of my best masturbation fantasies, having two guys pressing against me." She whispered, and we all smothered laughter.
"I don't think now is the time to warm up that way." Bomber whispered, his voice mock serious.
"I'm so cold I don't think it would even work." I grumbled. Bomber laughed.
"Trying to shove a frozen hotdog into a frozen bagel doesn't sound like a fun time." Nancy chattered.
"Maybe next time?" Bomber offered. We all three laughed, still holding onto one another both to stay on our feet and to warm up. We stood there for a long time, shivering against one another, until I suddenly groaned in pain.
"What?" Nagle asked, sounding afraid.
"I can feel my balls again." I answered. It felt like a ball of lead in my stomach, my balls throbbed, and my cock suddenly felt like it was on fire.
"That's a good sign." Nagle whispered. "My nipples feel like someone tried to bite them off and I feel like I've got razor burn on my pussy."
"Ha, tough luck suckers, I don't feel anything like..." Bomber suddenly groaned and sagged, forcing me and Nagle to hold him up. "Oh God, someone is squeezing my balls."
Finally we were warm enough, and free of pain enough, to move around. We put Stokes' blanket back on her bed, dug out a towel from her dresser and dried our hair, then moved over by the door.
We listened closely, moved the chair, and eased the door open.
Above us a scream sounded out, but we ignored it and slipped out into the hallway.
"Lock it?" Bomber asked.
"No, leave it. We might need somewhere to run again." Nagle said.
"Good plan." I agreed.
We'd agreed to go to the end stairwell, and moved quickly and quietly to the heavy door.
It was propped open, and wind howled down the stairwell.
For once it was going to work for us.
We slipped up the stairs, being careful to watch for ice or anything else, and snuck into the second floor hallway.
My brother's room was only a few doors down.
I counted doors, and waited for Bomber to catch up with the flashlight. He shined the light on the door nameplate just to be sure.
There his name was.
I put my key in the lock and went to turn it. It started to turn and then stopped. The lizard was hissing, something bothering him, something I couldn’t see. Something my brain didn’t register.
Just Across the Street
When it's life and death, you
have to be proactive and reactive,
but quickly. It's said there's no time to
think, but you can.
Just in a split second. That's what you have.
Live or die. One second.
…he's in there... the lizard showed me, the image of a faceless entity on the other side of the door, a rifle in his hands, pointing at where my face was on the other side. He reached out and clicked one of the buttons on the dash as he let me know I was about to walk into an ambush.
"Back back back." I hissed, and Bomber led the way, Nagle following him, and me pulling drag. We hurried as fast as the frost and our boots let us move and stayed quiet, ghosting down the hallway and into the stairwell. Bomber turned off the flashlight and we moved quickly and quietly down the stairs.
The stairwell door was open still, but at least the door across from it that led outside was still chained shut. The end stairwell didn't go any further down than the ground floor, so when Bomber waved Nagle and I back, we didn't go up the steps, but instead ducked down and scooted toward the back of the stairwell, hiding under them.
Bomber knelt down, then peered around the corner slowly, careful not to move too fast. After a moment he waved us forward.
Nagle squeezed my hand for luck.
We moved as quietly as we could back to Stokes room, slipping in and checking the room thoroughly with the flashlight after we put a chair under the handle again and locked the door.
We sat down on Stokes bed and wrapped her quilt over our shoulders, snuggling up together. Nagle was shivering the worst, so once again she was between Bomber and me. The cold was getting worse, and we had six men upstairs who were counting on us to do something, one of whom was suffering from hypothermia already.
"He's one step ahead of us." Nagle whispered, her teeth chattering. "This is insane."
"I noticed." Bomber answered. He had both hands jammed down his pants and I followed suit, cupping my balls and hissing in pain at the contact of my ice cold hands on my already so
re genitals.
"We must have missed him by only a minute or two." Nancy swore, holding onto me around my waist. She slid her hands under my jacket.
"No, he was in the room." I told her.
"Goddamn it." Bomber chattered. "He's getting off on this, just like Tandy was in the stairwell."
"We've got to do something." I said. "Otherwise, we're just sitting here waiting to die."
Bomber checked his watch and cursed. "It's not even 0600."
"Are you sure?" I asked. It seemed like a lifetime had gone by.
"It's 0500." He told me, and I stifled a groan. Sunrise wouldn't be until 0800, and the whole time it was just going to get colder. And sunrise wouldn't help; all it would do is turn the entire world white. If we tried to go outside during the daylight we'd be in even worse shape.
"Put the blue lens in and hand me the flashlight, I'm gonna toss Stokes' room." I said, holding out my hand. Bomber took a moment to change the cracked clear lens for a blue lens that would mute the light, and then handed it to me. I slipped out from under the heavy quilt and began checking over everything. Nancy's arms slipped from around me reluctantly, and I suppressed the urge to move back to her.
She didn't need my protection, and I needed to stop being such a sap.
Feeling the dull burn of anger at myself fill my chest I began checking the room we'd taken shelter in.
Stokes was on leave, not at Graf or Bremerhaven. Her TA-50 would be here at least, and if we were lucky, her two roommate's stuff would be here.
I hit jackpot in a dresser drawer full of panties.
Keys. It looked like the three women had taken the spare keys for their locks and agreed to hide them in the room in case someone came home and had forgotten their keys or one of them asked another to get something out of their wall lockers and bring it to them in the field. It was a standard practice between roommates and friends who trusted one another with access to their rooms and personal stuff.
Nancy and John both had copies of my wall-locker keys.
I opened the wall lockers, shivering in the cold, and almost started crying with relief.
Their extreme cold weather gear was there. To top it off, one of Stokes' roommates worked in the motorpool, so her heavy coveralls were hanging in the locker. I brought out the coveralls, the parkas, the cold weather masks, the field jackets and liners, the parka liners, and the pants.
In Stokes' and her room mates' rucksacks was the mandatory roll of 550 cord. In Stokes' 3-drawer chest I found her Leatherman folding multi-tool, and their flashlights were on their rucksacks.
When I found the vibrators, I almost wept as I gave silent thanks for big pussied women. Three of the eight vibrators were D Cell hummers. I silently promised I'd never make any jokes about deep or wide women again. I promised that if I got out of it, I'd find a big pussied woman and worship her for an entire weekend. Any woman who used a D-Cell battery powered vibrator was my personal goddess from here on out. I promised to sacrifice a virgin to a big pussied woman. I promised to build an altar to them and dance naked around it on the full moon.
The batteries were quickly switched over to the dying flashlights, pushing back the darkness which had begun to press against us and caress us with cold fingers.
We got dressed silently, layering on the cold weather gear, everything but the boots, which didn't fit any of us. Nagle wore size 9-wide boots, and none of the women who lived in the room wore anything larger than a 6. Nagle pointed out that she was still in tennis shoes, and if we couldn't find her boots soon she was probably going to lose her toes, maybe even her feet.
We split up the flashlights and Nagle carried the extra one along with the batteries. My knife got transferred from my belt to hers.
Bomber and I were both going to carry entrenching tools.
Not because we thought we were going to do any digging, but because you can kill a man with one.
Something that had gone from drunken BSing theory to a seriously real possibility.
"What if he's in the hallway?" Bomber asked.
"Doesn't matter." Nagle said from behind the mask.
"Why not?" I asked, clenching my fists inside the cold weather trigger mittens. My fingers were burning and tingling, a good sign but a painful one.
"We're going out her window." Nagle told us, and Bomber and I nodded. The lizard quickly began running through my options, looking for anything that might increase my chances of survival.
We opened the window, and jumped out, landing in the snow outside the barracks, trying to keep our balance. The snow was only about a foot thick, with a thin crust of ice on the top, the only thing that was keeping it from being blown down the mountain and dumped on main post and the ski resort. There was a thin dusting on top of the ice that kept getting swirled around, and I knew that down the mountain was catching Hell.
We were tied together by about 5 feet of 550 cord, one end of the cord was tied to the cross brace in the center of Stokes' window, and I fed it out as Bomber led the way across the yard. We climbed over the picket fence, and I took care of something real quick.
Then we took on the first challenge.
Getting across the street.
Zero visibility. The pressure of the wind was forcing us offstep. Breathing was like a knife in the chest it was so cold: Tiny ice crystals, snow seeds, stinging the eyelids and eyeballs; Aching cold with each breath that made where my nose had been broken throb with sharp pains.
I was letting the 550 cord run between my thumb and mittened fingers, keeping tension on it. I heard Bomber curse as he ran shin first into the bumper of a car. I could tell he was moving around, checking something, and then he came bumping back, pulling Nagle into the clinch so she could hear what he had to say.
"Flat tires." He yelled.
"Roger!" I yelled back. So much for that plan. I could hotwire a car, a legacy of my Father teaching all of us how to survive a nuclear war rather than a legacy of a misspent youth.
We went past the cars and started up the short incline that led to our motorpool. It was only fifteen or twenty feet up, maybe 10 feet from the end of the car. The incline was brutal in the wind, the cold, and the snow, but working together we managed to climb it, more than once falling to our hands and knees. There were steps up on either side of the motorpool, but that meant walking almost a block in either direction, much further than we had of the thin nylon cord that was our only lifeline.
I kept tension on the 550 cord in my right hand, my hand dropping down to the D-ring I'd clipped to the parka to reassure myself it was there while I kept my shoulder against the chain link fence, which was all that stood between us and the motorpool.
Finally I felt Nagle yank on the cord that connected us, and knew that Bomber had managed to cut through the fence ties on the ground and had lifted up the fencing far enough for us to get underneath. Cutting the chain-link fence would have taken forever, climbing it would have meant contesting with the concertina wire, but just cutting the ties that connected the fencing to the stakes in the ground only took seconds and could be accomplished with one or two hard strokes with the edge of the entrenching tool.
I ducked underneath the poncho that Bomber had put down to keep the ends of the chain-link fence from tearing through our cold weather gear while we crawled under it. I gave thanks to Bomber's innovation and kept feeding out the 550 cord, keeping tension on it. Every few steps I checked the D-ring, just to be sure. I had to switch to the next braids, only a few feet remaining.
Finally the wind suddenly eased, we moved up another short hill and I bumped into someone's back. I stumbled to the side, and felt the side of the motorpool garage against my body.
We'd gone less than 500 yards, and I felt like I'd run 10 miles in full combat gear. My muscles were trembling with exhaustion, I could feel the sweat running down my back, and I couldn't seem to get enough air.
Part of that was the elevation, we were high enough up that some people got altitude sickness and had to be reassi
gned - it wasn't uncommon for someone to pass out during PT due to lack of oxygen.
If I'd been thinking, I'd have grabbed one of the emergency O2 bottles from the CQ Area.
We skirted the motorpool building, looking for the door, until I bumped into Nagle's back. I stood there, in the howling darkness, my feet freezing in my combat boots, so cold that they just painfully throbbed with shooting pains in my toes.
Finally I heard a crash over the wind, and saw light pour out of the suddenly opened door. Bomber had managed to bash the lock off of the door, or more than likely he'd worked on the hasp. Hasps and anchoring screws were usually low-grade steel, unlike the high grade tempered steel of the locks.
All three of us rushed into the building. Bomber threw down the entrenching tool, it was bent wrong, the blade twisted and buckled, but it had done its job. It clattered on the pavement and slid under one of the solvent sinks. I tied the 550 cord off onto the door, then unsnapped the D-ring and set the assembly aside. I kicked the door shut and breathed a sigh of relief.
We'd made it.
It was warm in the building, and we quickly peeled off the cold weather gear, anxious to stand underneath the vents that the huge heaters pushed hot air into the motorpool building through.
All three of us stripped naked, standing beneath the blowers. Nagle still held my knife, I still held onto my entrenching tool, and Bomber kept a lookout, the flashlight still in his hand. He kept panning it around the dark bay, lingering over the corners, deep shadowy sections, and of course, over Nagle's firm brown butt. Of course I watched Nagle out of the corner of my eye. I could tell by the smile she shot me that she knew I was watching. Once she caught me looking at her profile, glanced down at my crotch, then licked her lips and smiled.
...My Nancy...
My balls still hurt, or I'd have probably gotten hard right there.
It took a while, but we were finally warm in what felt like the first time in the history of ever, and we got dressed in the clothing we'd started with, leaving the heavy coveralls and the cold weather gear laying out on a tool bench right under a blower so it would dry and warm up. The dry part was the important bit; we didn't want ice to form too quickly on the walk back.
Three Little Snowmen (Damned of the 2/19th) Page 19