Even in my sleep, even in the dream, the hatred filled me, thrummed in my veins, and heated me up.
When the light shined in my eyes again and someone was calling my name I managed to roll over on my side and push myself up into a sitting position.
"Easy, Stillwater, easy." A voice said.
Jacobs...
"I'm good." I said. My head was ringing, but my vision wasn't as blurred as it was. My brain felt like it was working again. The little lizard yawned as he woke up and starting running a system's check. I knew I'd gotten my ass kicked by someone on the stairwell pretty good because I'd charged into an ambush. That was nothing new; I'd had my ass kicked before. Hell, my own mother had almost caved in my skull when I was 10 by slamming a cast iron skillet against the back of my head.
"The Hell you are." Jacobs answered. "Your face is one big fucking bruise and you weren't too good a little bit ago. Your face is kind of fucked, dude."
"Bah, I'm a guy. If God had wanted me to be pretty, he'd have made me a girl." I quoted. Jacobs grinned.
I looked up, and noticed that the room was lit up, the curtains open to reveal nothing but swirling white outside that was glowing with proof that the sun had risen while I was sleeping.
"You were crying in your sleep." Hernandez added. I looked over at him, the pain in my face telling me that I was snarling. He saw my look and raised a hand. "I'm not calling you a pussy, dude, just telling you."
"Yeah. I've been told that." I sighed, and went to rub my eyes. My head exploded in pain and I jerked my hands away with a hiss. "Hewitt back?"
"No." Hernandez shrugged. "Think he's gone?"
"He's fucking toast." Jacobs answered, and I nodded. I looked around, and noticed that a few people were missing.
"Where's Nagle?" I asked.
"Her, Lewis, and Carter went down to refill the generator." Jacobs told me.
"How long have they been gone?" I asked. There was a thump outside.
Jacobs went to answer when there was a banging on the door and we heard Nagle yell for us to open the fuck up. By the time I got to my feet Jacobs had the door open so that the others could get in. Jacobs slammed the door and locked it behind them.
"How's it look?" I asked, moving over to Nagle and grabbing her in a hug. She was ice cold, and I held her for a moment while she shivered.
"Bad. There's not much snow on the ground out there, but the wind is awful." She told me, stripping off the parka she was wearing and dropping it on the floor. "I looked outside; we've got zero visibility out there. Temperature's up, but not by much." She folded the parka up and rubbed her hands together. "And I've got good news."
"What?" I asked, pausing on my way to the bathroom. Lewis was waiting outside the bathroom door, and I figured Carter was in there.
"We grabbed some MRE's out of the motorpool platoon's war stocks." She said, and my stomach rumbled. "How's your mouth?"
"Hurts." I admitted, stepping forward when Carter came out of the bathroom carrying his parka and Lewis went in.
"I'm gonna check on Bomber." She told me, and I waved to her. I heard another thump, and started to turn around when Lewis came back out, buttoning up his pants.
I took a leak, noticing it looked like my dick was peeling, and came back out after drinking out of the sink. Everyone but Nagle and Bomber were tearing into the MRE's, Lewis and Carter arguing over the ham slices. I looked over and Nagle was waving me over.
"He's in trouble." Nagle told me when I bent down to her. "Feel." She took my hand and pressed it to his forehead.
He was burning up.
When I took my hand away he muttered and went to roll over, crying out from pain. His eyes opened for a moment, rolled back in his head, and he went limp again. Outside, the thump sounded again.
"I think the hit with the axe ruptured something inside of him." She whispered.
"We gotta do something." I told her, sitting next to her. Nagle smiled sadly and wiped the bottom of my lip. Speaking had split open my lip and I could taste blood.
"What are you going to do, carry him on your back to main post?" She asked, wiping my chin again. "Damn, Ant, he really did a number on your face."
"Could have been worse, he could have stabbed..." My voice trailed off and I looked around the room, pausing from where I was picking up my clothing from the night before. "Where's the knife I was carrying when I came in?"
"On the desk, next to the one Nagle was carrying." Jacobs told me through a mouthful of food. I stood up, ignoring the dizziness, and moved over to where Jacobs was pointing. I heard that thump again, but was concentrating on the knife I'd taken from whoever attacked me in the stairs.
The knife was a bayonet, standard issue for the unit, and the number was engraved on the back. The bayonet was someone's standard issue, and I wondered if whoever's it was could have been the one who was roaming around the barracks.
Still, it told me more than a little, and concentrating on it helped clear the cobwebs still clogging my brain. I grabbed my Gerber then walked over to where my clothing had been hung on the back of a chair. I got dressed quickly, putting my Gerber behind my back before putting on and buttoning up my black and red checkered flannel.
It wasn't who we were all afraid of. If it had been, he wouldn't have used a knife, he would have ripped my guts out in the stairwell with his bare hands, and he would have taken us one at a time in the snow.
Whoever it was, I knew the following: They were male. They were injured. They were a member of the unit. They weren't about to take us on more than one at a time. They had already killed one person. And they had a place to lair up where they weren't worried about freezing to death. After each piece of evidence the little lizard highlighted it and began worrying over it, trying to put the pieces together, to find anything that might help me.
I bent down and pulled on my socks and boots, feeling the pain in my toes and there was a weird feeling that I knew was my pinkie toenail peeling off. My boots were at least dry, and I was glad they were the leather and canvas combination that made up jungle boots rather than being wholly made of leather. I stomped my feet twice to set my boots right after blousing my pant legs and moved back over to the desk where the bayonet was.
I jumped when Nagle slid up next to me, worming under my arm. I hugged her and kept staring at the bayonet while there was another thump outside, which the lizard noticed and hissed at. It was pretty rhythmic, so I figured something had torn free and was banging against the side of the building and ignored the lizard.
"What?" Nagle asked, reaching down and flicking the bayonet with a fingernail. I noticed that the skin under her fingernails was black, just like mine. Frostbite.
"Nothing. How long was I out?" I dimly remembered asking that before.
"A couple hours. You should be resting, you look like Hell."
"I'm fine." I answered.
Jacobs laughed from behind me, and I noticed his laugh had kind of a braying nasal sound, almost horse like.
That crossed him off the list. The way that guy in the stairwell had laughed didn't have the nasal tone that Jacobs' laugh had.
"You're just like your fucking brother." He laughed. I smiled more at the knowledge that Jacobs wasn't the one I'd fought in the stairwell than the comparison.
I turned from the bayonet, trying to smile and feeling pain in my mouth when I did.
I looked at Bomber, who was moving around on the bed, moaning in delirium, his cheeks flushed. Then at the others, who were all eating, then down at Nagle, who was in the crook of my arm.
I opened my mouth to speak when there was the sound of shattering glass, the curtains billowed out, and Jacobs fell out of his chair with a shout. Cold air billowed into the room, with snow following, and the temperature dropped suddenly.
A hammer was lying on the floor, and Jacobs was holding onto his head, cursing, the MRE scattered around the tile. Hernandez was yelling, and so was Lewis, both of them moving over to the window. Nagle had bent down next to Jac
obs, trying to pull his hand away to get a good look at the wound.
Carter had run over to Bomber, making sure he was tucked in, and I almost tripped over the chair running over to the window.
I couldn't see shit outside but howling snow that was blowing into the formerly warm room. The temperature had instantly dropped to sub-zero temperatures.
Lewis turned and ran for the door, and Nagle jumped up and grabbed at him.
"Don't, Lewis!" Nagle yelled, right as Lewis reached for the lock.
Hernandez was next to me, looking into the snow, squinting his eyes.
Behind us, Lewis was arguing with Nagle. He wanted to go after whoever had just thrown a fucking hammer through the window. I realized that while you couldn't see too far from the windows, that didn't mean anything. I opened the broken window, ignoring the glass that fell onto the floor, and leaned out to look.
I could faintly see the first floor window below.
Visibility was around 10 to 20 feet. Not far, but...
"We're going to have to find somewhere else!" Nagle yelled over the howl of the wind whipping into the room. "We gotta get Bomber somewhere warm, and I need to check Jacobs' head!"
"Roger!" I yelled back, grabbing the coveralls I'd worn the night before and pulling them on. They were dry and they were warm, and I grinned when I felt the stiffness of the Kevlar in between the sets of coveralls once I was dressed.
Whoever was doing this may have been able to outmaneuver us so far, but he hadn't realized we might protect ourselves with body armor. That actually gave me more encouragement than anything else that had happened.
Lewis had grabbed his rucksack and was busy unlocking his roommates TA-50 lockers and grabbing down the rucksacks. Our unit insisted that everyone have their shit packed for an alert, and it had been winter long enough that the rucks should have been packed for cold weather. At least all 3 had the waterproof bags at the bottom that I knew would have the cold weather sleeping bags stuffed into them.
There was the banging of metal on metal that made me spin around.
The radio on the desk.
"Nagle!" I called out, quickly zipping up the last coverall.
"I hear it." She answered. "You guys head down to the platoon offices on the second floor, Stillwater and I have to hurry!" she called out, her hands busy zipping up the cold weather gear she'd just taken off. "Be careful with Bomber, try not to jog him too much, I think something's busted inside of him."
I grabbed the bayonet and the knit ski cap that was on the desk while the others reassured Nagle that they'd be careful with Bomber. Lewis and Hernandez planned on carrying him using the sheet he was laying on as a makeshift stretcher. Jacobs pulled on one of the rucksacks, bleeding down the side of his head from a pressure cut and opened the door for Nagle and me to head out into the hallway.
The door opened up into a pitch black and freezing hallway. There was about a half inch of snow on the tiles, which the wind blew around as the currents changed from the door being opened up and letting the wind blow in from the room. My ears and nose started to ache, and pulling the air over my broken teeth made my eyes tear up.
"We've got to hurry." Nagle said, leading the way. She knew I was hurt, that I was slower than her, all the injuries I'd taken stiffening up while I had slept. But she also knew me well enough to know I bounced back pretty quickly and had a high pain tolerance. Moving around helped my muscles loosen up, the pain pushed endorphins, dopamine, and adrenaline into my body, and the steady thread of pent up anger warmed me slightly. The wind began trying to slice through the layers of clothing we had on as we moved down the hallway. The middle doors were held open, the doors held in place by the chocks.
We took the end stairwell to the first floor since we knew it was more than likely safe, and I led the way, my stomach muscles tightening involuntarily at the thought of an axe coming out of the darkness, despite the little lizard's stillness and silence. Nothing happened, and we quickly headed down the hallway to the middle stairwell. I'd been right, the middle hallway doors were wedged open, and the wind blew down the hallway. Pulling the stairwell door open, the wind snatched it out of my tingling burning hand and slammed it against the wall with a boom.
From the darkness below we could hear the impact of metal on metal.
Leaning forward, I put my mouth near Nagle's ear. "Keep back from me; don't come in unless you have a clear shot." I told her softly, and she nodded. I led the way, aware of the blood that had run down off the second floor landing and then down the wall next to me before it froze.
Too much blood for someone to lose and survive.
I could hear the banging below, knew it was echoing through the stairwell, and I smiled in the darkness. Down below I could see light, and knew that whoever was down there had opened the door to the end of the loading dock, either to give themselves light, or that's the way they'd come in.
Round two, asshole...
I moved silently down the stairs, Nagle keeping a little ways back, and I stopped when I could see the doorway at the bottom.
Someone had wedged it open, dropping the chock, and snow covered the floor, ice on the steps. Whoever had done it was beyond the doorway, and I could hear them banging on the locks to the basement. I could also faintly hear the roaring of the little 1.5K generator. So far it had held up like a champ.
I tightened my grip on the bayonet and went down the last of the stairs, pausing at the bottom, unwilling to blindly charge again.
A parka with the hood up, stained with something dark, Mickey Mouse boots, heavy gloves, and an axe being swung with both hands at the last two locks on the four Bomber had installed onto the heavy security door.
Beyond him the door to the loading dock was wide open, revealing the swirling white of the snow, and I saw a length of 550 cord on the end of a D-ring swinging from the push bar of the door.
Something clued him in. The crunch of snow or my boots squeaking on the waxed tile, maybe, or perhaps some sixth sense that only the batshit crazy get.
Whatever it was, he spun in place, the axe held in both hands.
He was wearing a cold weather mask, completely hiding who he was, only the strip across the mouth unsnapped and showing bared teeth, the even white teeth marred by the fact he was missing his left canine. One eye was closed and purple behind the slit and I knew I was grinning at the sight.
I hefted the bayonet, feeling warmth on my chin as I raised the naked blade. His one good eye widened as he saw me. The little lizard purred and pressed solidly on the combat button, flooding my system with even more combat chemicals and bringing me fully alive again.
"Miss me, pumpkin?" I grinned, watching his axe, his feet, his whole body. To use the axe he'd have to get his feet under him right, or he'd overextend.
I fully intended on killing him.
From Bad to Worse
Do I admit it?
That my mother was right?
That the Army was right?
That deep inside, I was nothing more
than a killer, plain and simple?
Do I embrace it and go full throttle?
Or do I deny it, and let my friends die?
Keep the blade low, other hand in front, just below throat level, knees bent, feet apart, be ready for a thrust or slash. Watch his axe, watch his body movement, and watch his eyes. My Father's voice, low and soothing, ran through my brain as I dropped my knife hand back down by my side and brought my other hand up.
I didn't bother wasting breath on anymore talking, I had nothing else to say, all my attention was focused on him. I'd come in low; go for the inner thigh or a thrust near the belly button. He'd be too guarded for a straight under the breastbone thrust; the parka was thick enough that a side thrust might not work.
I'm going to make you scream... I want to hear you scream...
For a long, endless split second he just stared at me, standing in front of him with the bayonet in my hand and blood in my eyes.
I saw his eye f
licker a second before he moved. I tensed to avoid the axe blow, ready to move out of the way. I planned on moving across the swing, coming in behind it while he still needed to recover, and gutting him with the bayonet he'd tried to use on me.
I knew I could take him as soon as he swung. The lizard and training had shown me every possible way he could come at me, and my body was thrumming with the need to evade, counter, and kill. I was almost panting, waiting for him to swing.
Instead, he threw it at me.
Not overhand, not like a lumberjack, but just thrust it away from him so it flew at me.
I dodged it for the most part, but the end of the axe handle popped me in the mouth, sending it spinning behind me as blood and tooth chips flooded into my mouth. I heard Nagle curse, but didn't pay any attention, everything locked down on the man in front of me.
He whirled and ran, heading toward the outside and the loading dock. I knew better than to try to throw the knife. Even during practice when I was a kid, I usually missed the target or the knife hit hilt first, usually to my sibling's laughter and my Father's frustration.
His hand snaked out and he grabbed the D-ring right before he plunged into the whiteout.
"Ant, No!" Nagle yelled out, thinking I was about to plunge after him.
"Fuck that' he's mine!" I bellowed, sliding to a stop next to the door. I made a "keep going" motion at Nagle, who hurried up to me.
"Stillwater! Come back!" she shouted out the door.
"Where are you?" I yelled, leaning slightly outside the door.
"Stillwater! Wait, I'm coming for you!" She called out, then turned and looked at me. She reached up and wiped my chin. 'You're bleeding again." She kissed my lower lip quickly and when she pulled back I saw her lips were bloody. We shouted a few more times, to convince him that once again we'd ran out into the snow, and Nagle gave a pretty convincing scream that she let trail off.
Three Little Snowmen (Damned of the 2/19th) Page 24