We don't choose our birth
We don't choose our death
-Anonymous
The Army lets you! We've got dozens!
-Recruiters

War Fighter Tunnels
2/19th Special Weapons Group Area
Alfenwehr, West Germany
Second Long Night
Hour Four
Second Incident

"Well, this was a good idea," Bomber grumbled as he followed me into the dark tunnels, shaking a chemlight in his hand like everyone else. I had light, the ignition flame creating enough light for me to see the brushed steel walls to either side of me.

"You said that last time when we left the tunnels," I said. "Make up your fucking mind."

"Yeah, what are you, a woman?" Nagle asked.

I snickered as I walked forward, keeping up the shuffle they trained us to do during Mad House, making us run in the suits for miles at a time to build up our strength, build up our endurance, and get us used to moving in the suits for hours at a time.

three miles, soldiers, in under thirty minutes, or you have failed this course and will be dropped back to your worthless units like the trash you are...

I kept clicking the ignitor trigger, clicking it with my thumb while keeping my finger off the ejector trigger. The sound kept echoing around us, sharp, metallic, threatening in the darkness.

"Think anything's gonna come at us?" Tucker asked. "It got ugly last time."

"No," I grunted.

"Why not?" The Blackbriar Bitch asked, her words tumbling over each other. The shot of Turbo had been a mixture of painkiller, Vitamin B Complex, amphetamines, and some other stuff to jack her up and keep her running.

Red had commented he's seen snake-eaters with four bullet in their guts jump to their feet and run ten miles after being jacked up on it.

They'd all died afterwards, but that was the name of the game.

"Because Ant's packing the flamethrower," Nagle said. "He used it downstairs, on those dead Ruskies, on that thing that attacked Red, on the wolves. The mountain knows what it is, knows what it can do now. He used enhanced fuel then and on the records, so the mountain knows that not even case hardened steel, much less frozen flesh and bone, can withstand the kind of heat that a hellfire pack can put out."

"Oh," Tucker said. He was silent as I shuffled through a couple more steps. "That makes sense."

"Ayut," I answered, still shuffling. A steady, distance eating shuffle that I knew I could keep up for several hours.

Out at Atlas I'd once ran ten miles in an armored J-Suit to see if I could. It had taken me almost three hours, but I'd done it.

Of course, I'd been wiped out afterwards.

"So it's thinking up new tricks?" Tucker asked. He grunted. "It probably takes stone a little while to think."

"That's what we're gambling on," Stokes admitted. "He pulls that trigger, we're all going to suffocate until we turn on the environmentals."

"That's some risk," Ross muttered. "Do you think they'll be able to hear the radio when I signal we reached it?"

"No, but they'll get a signal anyway," Nagle said softly. "Even if you don't transmit it."

shuffle  shuffle shuffle

"What? How?" Ross asked.

"Because it will want us all together," Tucker mumbled. I could barely hear him over the fans in my suit picking up as my temperature raised. The sensor on my chest was itching, sweat making the adhesive prickle.

"Why?" Ross asked.

Jesus, do you ever shut up? I thought Marines were the stoic silent types...

"Because that way it can kill us all at once," Tucker said.

"At ease that," I snarled, pitching my voice high enough to be heard over the fans. "It feeds off our fear."

"Pardon me for being nervous," Ross shot back.

I clicked the ignitor twice, irritated, and the dry hiss of the ignition gas filled my reality for a second, calming me down.

we are the Heralds of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, world burners...

"Be nervous some other time," Nagle snapped. "In the meantime, Marine, stuff your fucking tampon in."

It sounded like giggling further on in the tunnels.

"Maintain noise discipline," I snapped, raising my voice again. "It's starting."

"Shit," Bomber breathed, but I didn't rebuke him, just lengthened my stride a few steps to get a little more distance ahead of them. "Little girls. Shh."

We kept moving, picking up the pace slightly.

Giggles again, this time behind us, and clearly audible.

"Shit," someone said.

The darkness thickened and I was no longer able to see the ignition flame on the walls. I slowed to a stop.

"I need light," I said.

"Gotcha, brother," Bomber said. He stepped up, his chemlight hanging from one of his LBE buckles by a rubber band. He stripped the foil off of five chemlights and cracked them, shaking them up. They all lit, a statistical anomaly that the lizard filed away, and he stared at them.

"Huh," he said before sliding them into the loops of the front of the J-Suit. "Thought you'd have to go to your lights."

"Bad battery," I told him.

"You're ready," he said, slapping the top of the fuel pack. The little girls answered with a giggle in front of us.

I didn't say anything, just started shuffling forward again.

"Go to NVG's," Bomber snapped as the darkness thickened even further.

"Shit, my lamp's out," Clarke swore. I heard him smack on his NVG's. "Nope, light's out and I've got static across my lens."

"Tough it out," Nagle snapped.

"I'll stuff in my tampon," Clarke chuckled.

"Shut up," I snapped.

Footsteps, ahead of us, and receding. Something keeping ahead of us? Keeping watch on us? Preparing an ambush?

That got the lizard's attention. I felt a cool trickle down my spine as he warmed up my adrenals and my joints moved smoother as cortisol trickled into my system. He counted the steps, running it at two-thirds of a meter per step, and came up with we were just under a hundred fifty feet into the tunnels.

Seventy-five steps.

The lizard threw the maps up on his monitors, looking at them. Up ahead was the first curve. It was designed to allow us to hold off any enemy soldiers who had penetrated the War Fighter Tunnels, giving us cover, a slight bend to keep them from being able to see reinforcements brought up, and allow us to hold out till we could push them from the tunnels.

"Get on the stick, keep quiet," I growled over my fans. My boots were thudding against the floor, the steel cleats clanking the rubber cleats squeaking as I shuffled forward.

Eighty steps.

The lizard lifted the Plexiglass cover over the big red button and lightly pressed it down till it hit the first click and locked in. A chill ran down my spine as more adrenaline was dumped into my system, my muscles thrummed with power and my senses sharpened as combat chemicals flooded my system.

Ninety steps. Into the curve.

The lizard twisted the dials, flicked the switches, and I felt alive again, like I hadn't since the fight in my room. Since I had woken up in the hospital full of wires and tubes with a butterbar talking about sending me out to Graf to heal up. I'd come close when facing Henley, but close only counted in horse shoes, hand grenades, cum shots and nuclear weapons.

The taste of rage filled my mouth as my systems came online.

"Twisting," Aine whispered. "The Ant is coming."

"What does..." Ross started to ask.

"Shhh," Stokes hissed.

Ninety-five. I chinned off my fans and shifted my grip.

I heard giggling behind us, dancing and echoing through the dark air, scampering around us, and moving up the tunnel ahead of us to doppler back twisted and evil sounding.

One hundred.  Giggles behind us again.

I heard the sound of weapons being taken off safe slowly. The grind of stamped steel rubbing on cheap steel, the click of worn trigger mechanisms, the shuffle of a boot, the scrape of ice on steel against the floor.

We rounded the corner and the lizard hissed in pleasure, his fangs unfolding from the roof of his mouth, his ears unfolding into fans, his claws coming out and raking at the steel flooring in his control room, his clawed hand coming up...

...and slapping the button.

"CONTACT!" I bellowed out, triggering the ejector.

Flame, this time only thickened napalm, spewed from the end of the ejector, arcing up in a blazing rope of pure fury, sliding in midair across the tunnel as the lead extended out and I pulled the ejector to my left, my finger still clamped on the trigger.

Orange flame with a yellow core and sooty black edges lit up the tunnel, exposing what had relied on darkness to ambush us in the tunnel.

Six frozen bodies, all in old OD Green khaki uniforms, their faces rotted and frozen, their weapons the old M14, their eyes covered in frost, their uniforms muddy and tattered. Steel pots over their heads with khaki covering and hexagonal netting on the helmet.

All pointing weapons at us. Kneeling in the half-arrowhead fighting positions, all prepared to hit us without taking much risk to themselves.

All drenched in fire in less than second.

Unlike the living, they didn't scream. Two even got off shots or maybe just the flame cooked off the bullet in the chamber. One hit me in the chest, the other howled off the wall next to me and vanished behind us. I snapped the trigger again, bathing the left-hand group in a glob of fire that stayed in mid-air for a moment, propelled by tank and ejector pressure, hitting as I snapped the trigger again and hit the right hand position again.

"Clear!" I yanked the ejector up, waving it back and forth, the brass tip smoking.

"Nice try, suckasses," Bomber chuckled, moving up next to me. I felt him touch the tank, shifting my balance. "You're at ninety-five percent. Huh."

I felt him tap the tank. "OK, bounced back up."

"What?" I asked.

"Dropped to forty-eight," he said. "Back now. Probably the gauge."

"Keep an eye on it," I told him. "You're my eyes."

"Roger," he said. He waited a second while we watched the fire burn, sliding down the steel barricade that normally the defenders would hide behind. Ammunition cooked off, howling around the tunnel until the kinetic energy was spent.

"How far do you think William is?" Bomber asked.

"He probably forgot about us, ran all the way to the Frankfurt Red Light District, and is halfway through his fifth hooker," I said.

Bomber and a couple others laughed as we watched the fire burn. I could hear flesh sizzling and fat popping as well as the distinct sound of overheated marrow cracking bone.

"You're panting, trigger your fans," Bomber told me. I chinned the switch. "Good boy. You need O2?" For shits and giggles I nudged the red button at the bottom of the tempered glass shield with my nose and I knew a red LED up by my temples lit up.

"Cute, real cute," Bomber chuckled.

"Thanks," I said, grinning. The fire made it so I could faintly see my reflection in the treated glass, a weakness in these older suits that the newer ones were supposed to beat.

The fire went out and we all stood silently, waiting for the steel plate to cool.

"The sprinklers didn't kick on," Stokes noted.

"She's asleep or dead," Nagle said, referring to the computer systems that normally were on standby while the War Fighter Tunnels were in storage mode.

"She should have woken up," Nagle pointed out. "When we opened the door maybe, but when you just cooked some dudes from the Korean War, definitely."

"Who?" Ross asked.

"Mindy," Stokes answered. "She's cute, you'd like her."

"There's a woman down here?" Tucker asked. "I didn't see her the last time we came through here."

"It's the decision tree dog-brain," Parker said. "Someone named her Mindy."

"Guilty," I said. "I was bored."

"Oh, like you..." Ross started.

"Corporal Stillwater did indeed," The Blackbriar Bitch said. "And I'm the reason that Mindy hasn't woken up."

"You? How?" Bomber asked, turning toward her.

"The EPROM chip I swapped out when you were rescued. It put it in to force Mindy to call home to Blackbriar and dump her memories," She said, her words tumbling over each other. "It's a fairly simple protocol, using cutting edge 64-bit compression and DES encryption," she giggled.

"DES is unsecure. I read the paper," I told her. The floor was no longer glowing red.

She giggled again. "We have a variant, developed for Blackbriar. Mindy called home, sent us her memories, take the Soviet Union a million years to break it even with a supercomputer," She said.

"How's the floor?" I asked Bomber.

"Still bright green, give it a minute or two," He told me.

"Ross, Tucker, watch our six, you too, Clarke," I snapped.

"EPROM chip jumped to Mindy, shut her down, compressed her memories, waited for a clear line to phone home," The Blackbriar Bitch giggled.

"Put a nigger behind the trigger, baby," Clarke said, his voice tight but full of satisfaction.

I ignored both. The Blackbriar Bitch wasn't telling the whole story, I could sense it and the lizard knew it. She was after something else. Something in the tunnels. Something to do with Mindy.

"Floor's cooled," Bomber said.

"Let's move out," I growled.

We had eight hundred feet to go, two more curves, two more defensive spots.

The negligent way I'd burned away Alfenwehr's first trick meant it would try something different next.

I just hoped it was something I'd seen before.